The final member of the group was a stocky, African-American woman named Mildred Wyeth, who, like Doc, was born in another era, but who had traveled through time in a rather more conventional manner. She had been born in 1964, and eventually became a physician, specializing in cryogenic research.
While in her mid-thirties, Mildred suffered complications during abdominal surgery. In an attempt to save her life, the decision had been made to cryogenically preserve her—just a few days before the nuclear conflict erupted. She had been freed from her frozen capsule by Ryan’s crew. She had remained with them ever since, forming a romantic bond with J.B. and providing the ongoing field medicine necessary to the group.
“Don’t tease the kid, Doc,” Mildred warned, an undercurrent to her tone. She liked Ricky—in some ways he reminded her of her brother, Josh, when he had been that age.
“I am not teasing,” Doc replied. “I am just setting the lad straight lest he ignore the warnings of his elders.”
Mildred shook her head. “‘Elders.’ I never did like that term.”
Mildred and Doc’s bickering was a constant, but it was good-natured. On this occasion, Doc let the point go—they needed to be alert right now, ready at the drop of a hat to face potential dangers in this new environment.
The companions made their way through the knee-deep foliage that had all but overtaken the interior of the control room.
It was unusual to see a redoubt this close to the surface. Most of them were located deep underground, and all had been designed to repel direct bombardment by weaponry up to and including a nuclear bomb. Whether they could survive a nuke was not certain, but anything short of that would struggle to make a dent. However, what the redoubts had not been built to withstand were the vast tectonic and environmental shifts that had racked the Earth since the nukecaust. What weapons had failed to do, Mother Nature had done with aplomb, mashing the plates of the earth together beneath the redoubt and opening up a great fissure in the foundations. It was this shift that had caused chunks of the redoubt to break open, creating the vast hole in the redoubt’s ceiling.
Doc followed the group past the channel of pouring rain, passing his sword stick through it and taking a moment to examine the results. The sword stick was jet-black with a silver lion’s head handle. Few knew that a sword was hidden within the walking cane.
The rain clung to the sword stick, glistening there with a wisp of vapor. “The lad is correct,” Doc agreed as he sniffed at the rain. “There is a definite tang to this downpour. We must be careful.”
“We always are,” Ryan responded, pushing his way through the room to a sliding door of vanadium steel that would grant them access to the corridor outside. A keypad, stained brown where its metal casing had rusted, was located beside the door set in the concrete wall to the right. Ryan punched in the usual 3-5-2 code which would open the door. He detected a hiss coming from his left, but the metal door refused to move aside.
Standing at Ryan’s side, J.B. eyed the door and sucked thoughtfully at his teeth.
“Jammed tight,” Ryan confirmed. While doors, like the lighting in the redoubt, would have been automatically reengaged with the activation of the mat-trans the dense vegetation or the humidity had obviously infiltrated and corrupted the mechanics.
“Want me to blast it open?” J.B. asked. The Armorer was adept with explosives as well as firearms—it would be little effort for him to obliterate the door.
“No,” Ryan said after a few seconds’ consideration. “We’ll go up instead,” he said, indicating the hole in the ceiling. “It’s the path of least resistance.”
J.B. nodded, and the two men joined the other companions in contemplating the easiest route to the opening above them.
“Jak? Do you reckon you can get up there and drop a line to us?”
Jak grinned, looking somehow sinister in the ghostly light that ebbed through the gap above, and holstered his blaster.
“Just watch out for the acid rain. If it gets worse, you could get burned,” J.B. reminded as Jak scrambled up the sturdy-looking trunk of a creeper and worked his way farther into the canopy.
In a few seconds, Jak was balancing upright as he made his way along a length of thick branch to the hole above. The albino was catlike in his movements, displaying a sense of balance that bordered on superhuman. As he reached the gap in the roof, Jak shrugged the sleeves of his jacket down his arms, using them to cover his hands as much as he could. The mild acid rain wouldn’t chill him, but it would eat away at his skin if it the acid content became stronger. Once the companions were outside, they would have to rig some kind of temporary canopy or umbrella-type system to keep the worst of the downpour off until it abated.
Jak reached up and slipped through the hole in the roof and onto the ground outside the redoubt. Grayish sunlight pushed through the cloud cover from the masked white orb that sat low on the horizon.
Jak looked around, scenting the air. He was in a forest with plants of the tropical variety, lush and green, slick with droplets of rainwater on their waxy leaves. The mild acid rain seemed not to bother them in any way. The ground was soft, sodden with water. The area smelled of soil mingled with the acidic tang of the polluted rainwater.
As Jak looked around, Ryan’s voice echoed from twenty feet below him. “Everything okay up there, Jak?” Ryan asked.
“Look okay,” Jak called, peering around at the thick foliage. As he did, he spotted a face nearly hidden in the tangled vines and other vegetation. It was a human face, dark-skinned and almost camouflaged amid the lush greenery, the top of the man’s head rose about six feet from the ground. But there was something not quite right about it, Jak felt, even as he took a step closer.
He parted a web of overhanging fronds with his left hand, slipping his Colt Python from its holster at his hip with his right and seeing the man fully for the first time. Only it wasn’t a man—not entirely. Beneath the head was a stub of neck that ended in a pair of lungs, caged not by ribs but by a clawlike arrangement branches that surrounded the spongy sacks as they inflated and deflated. There was no body, only branches of pallid green, as thick as a man’s arm and dotted with spiny thorns their full lengths. Automatically, Jak did a swift count of the spiny-covered branches—eight in all—saw that three of them reached above the head, entwining with the taller cover of the looming trees.
This was new, Jak realized. He had seen muties before; the Deathlands was populated by a variety of abominations. But this thing, part man, part plant—it reminded him of a vine master.
Warily, the albino took another step closer, his eyes fixed on the monstrosity before him. He couldn’t work out if the man was a part of the plant, or if he had been partially consumed by it. His skin was dark with a greenish hue, the veins showing thickly along the forehead and neck like fingers under the skin. His eyes were open but glazed, and Jak realized that he had not yet seen the man blink.
“Jak?” Ryan called from the redoubt. “Everything okay?”
Jak turned his head to call back, and as he did so the mutie plant started to writhe, spiny branches undulating as they rose from the ground.
“Am—” Jak began, then turned back as he spotted the thing reaching for him.
Instinctively, Jak ducked as the plant-man reached for him with a writhing tentacle-like branch. The branch struck Jak across his flank, hitting with such force that he tumbled to the ground. Then the writhing limb was dancing in the air above him like a snake. Jak blinked back his momentarily blurred vision, and he heard a popping noise like cracking ice as a fleet of three-inch-long, spiny thorns launched from the branch toward him, racing through the air like bullets.
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