James Axler - Hell Road Warriors

Ryan nodded. He’d read old books about the cold war in his youth. Having a library of books was just one perk of being the son of an East Coast baron when he was growing up. Mildred was confirming his suspicions.

“Reactivated,” he said. “Probably added that mat-trans at the last minute.”

Jak shrugged. None of that meant much to the young man from the bayous of Louisiana. He had more immediate questions. “Where?”

Everyone turned at the sound of Doc tapping his cane on the wall. He tapped a painted flag over the door to the mat-trans chamber. It had two red stripes, one on each side and a white center. A stylized red maple leaf dominated the middle. A second smaller flag was painted beneath it. Ryan recognized the Union Jack in one corner of the flag and some shield off to the side.

Doc cocked his head. “I am confused.”

That was news to nobody.

Mildred shook her head. “We’re in the Great White North.”

“A Mari Usque Ad Mare.” Everyone stared at Doc. When it came down to being predark obscure, he had Mildred beat hands down. Doc sighed in defeat and translated from the Latin. “From Sea to Sea.”

“So where are we?” Ryan asked.

“Canada,” Doc concluded.

Ryan grimaced. He had been north of the Deathlands a few times, usually against his will and mostly in what had once been Alaska or Siberia. What little he knew about Canada was that it was vast and bastard cold.

“Where?” Jak repeated.

Doc tapped the smaller flag painted beneath the maple leaf. “That is what confuses me. At first glance the flag below is the Canadian Red Ensign, but upon consideration I believe the coat of arms is incorrect.”

“It’s the flag of Ontario,” Mildred said. This garnered her more uncomprehending stares. The physician shrugged. “I dated a radiologist from Toronto once.”

Ryan and his friends walked through the redoubt, clearing it room by room. They found a dormitory, an infirmary and a lavatory all in order. They looted supplies from every room. Mildred found a treasure trove of medical supplies, but it was the sight of toilet paper still in its packaging that nearly made her burst into tears.

Jak raised his head and sniffed the air. “Food.”

“Damn!” Mildred swore. “No freakin’ way! I smell pizza!” Blaster out in front of her, she made a beeline toward the smell of pepperoni and cheese. Ryan didn’t know what pizza was, but he found himself salivating at the scent.

“Triple alert, people!” He kicked open a set of double doors. His longblaster pointed at an empty kitchen. Beyond it lay an equally empty cafeteria.

“Just missed whoever was here,” J.B. observed. “We better take a look around here. Bastards might creep up and attack.”

A recce of the immediate area revealed nothing. The companions went back to the kitchen.

“We just missed pizza!” Mildred was agitated at the loss. Ryan took in several receptacles stuffed to the gills with plastic packaging. A sea of plastic eating utensils lay in the sink. Whoever they had just missed, there were a lot of them. Other people were using this place.

Mildred scoured the kitchen. “Look at this!” Ryan looked. It was a freezer unit. A wall full of them, and walk-in size. It was more than a freezer. It was literally a kitchen cryogenic unit. Mildred picked up a white binder with the Canadian flag on it and began flipping through it. “Jeez! This thing is more sophisticated than the unit I came out of.” She scanned pages of inventory. “Look at this, hams, venison, sides of beef, vegetables, fruit juice concentrate… Man, they even managed to freeze wine and beer!” Mildred closed the binder. “Someone went to one whole hell of a lot of trouble to stock this place, and not just with those crappy MRE packs in the redoubts, but with real food that would be as tasty as the day as it was frozen, even if that was a hundred years ago.”

“Just like you?” J.B. observed.

Mildred’s lips quirked. J.B. was a man of few words but every once in a while he said something sweet. “Something like that.”

Ryan looked at the food vaults and then Mildred. “Can you unfreeze something?”

The physician tapped the binder. “The thawing process seems to take four-to-six hours, depending on the foodstuff, and that’s not counting actual cooking time.”

Ryan wasn’t sure they had four-to-six hours. No one would leave a treasure trove like this unguarded for long. He was starting to get an itchy feeling. “See if they got ration packs or anything quicker.”

Doc opened a regular refrigerator and pulled out four, fourteen-inch-diameter disks shrink-wrapped in military olive-drab packaging. “These seem merely cold. Mayhap like dear Dr. Wyeth, they are thawed and ready for the oven of this brave new world.”

Mildred lunged. Her eyes lit up at what Doc found. “Damn, Doc.” She shuffled the pizza pies. “Pepperoni and cheese…pepperoni and cheese…veggie… Oooh! Yeah! Hawaiian!”

Jak peered at the Canadian military pizza packages. “What Hawaiian?”

“Canadian bacon and pineapple.” Mildred scanned the control panel on one of the large ovens and punched buttons. Instantly heating coils blazed orange. “It says just five minutes to brown the cheese …” Mildred slid in the pies on their packaged plates and set the timer. “What else have we got in there, Doc?”

Doc pulled out two six-packs of olive-drab cans emblazoned with maple leafs. He peered at the fine print. “Lager.”

Jak’s chin lifted. “Beer?”

Beer was at premium in the Deathlands. Only the most prosperous villes could devote any arable land or grain to produce it. Most just distilled shine out of whatever agricultural scraps were left over. Doc looked at the cans suspiciously. “One-hundred-year-old-resuscitated lager—it is hard to lend it credence. Perhaps one of us should test it first and—”

Jak snatched a can. The tab cracked with a decisive pop and hiss and suds spilled over his fingers. He blew off the froth and his ruby-red eyes closed as he tilted the can back. Everyone watched Jak’s snowy white Adam’s apple move up and down as he poured back about half the can. His eyebrows pulled down in consideration as he regarded the can. Jak let forth a belch longer than most sentences he uttered. “Good,” he proclaimed.

“A most potent eructation,” Doc declared. “And a good portent that the lager has lost none of its luster.” He passed out cans to the rest of his friends. He fumbled with the tab for a moment but it cracked and he held up his foaming can. “To good friends!”

“To good friends.” They clicked the cans together and raised their beers to their lips.

Ryan’s shoulders relaxed and his eye nearly closed as he drank. Jak was right. It was good. It was real good.

Mildred sighed and squinted at the fine print on the can. “Diefenbunker? Hey, wait.”

No one waited. Mildred ran back to the inventory binder and pulled up a pizza wrapping from the trash. “Everything around here says Diefenbunker.”

“’Facturer?” Jak suggested.

“No, the places with the mat-trans are called redoubts, but in my day, a place like this was called a bunker or a bomb shelter.” Mildred began flipping through the kitchen inventory binder. “Allotments, Central Diefenbunker.” Mildred stabbed her finger onto the page. “Borden, Borden, Ontario! There was a map on the wall back in the last room!”

Mildred ran off. The team followed clutching their beers and blasters. The woman stood in front of a wall-size map of Canada. Her finger traced a line up from Lake Ontario. “Borden! We’re right here! About, oh, an hour’s drive north of Toronto!”

Ryan scanned the map. There was little red star just east of someplace called Angus. Mildred’s fingers began leaping from province to province locating little red stars. “Look, Nanaimo, British Columbia. Penhold, Alberta. Shilo, Manitoba. Valcartier and Val-d’Or, Quebec. Debert, Nova Scotia. Bunkers, all out in the sticks, but not far from each provincial capital.”