Siren Song

The redoubt door had been propped open using a web of sawed-down tree limbs and pieces of metal, Jak noted as he stepped through the opening. The construction was well planned and solid, raised on a scaffold-type arrangement. In addition, attention had been paid to the meeting point where the door slid into the wall. There was no exposed hinge or mechanism there, but someone had gone to a lot of trouble to bend the thick titanium door so that it would not snap back. Someone who wanted to get in and get out again.

There were trees all around, and it took a moment for Jak to zone out the noises of the local fauna and locate the sound of shuffling feet he had first noted from inside the redoubt. There. To the left.

A dirt track led to the redoubt entrance with a scrubby grass border to either side, wide enough to carry a wag. The scarred remains of a tarmac road had all but disintegrated, leaving black chunks of broken tarmac dotted amid the dirt. Jak stepped over the path and onto the grass, where he could ensure his passage would remain silent. The grass shone with dew, catching the morning sunlight in sparkling spots like glitter.

The sounds of marching feet were getting closer, and they were moving fast. Jak guessed at least three people were among the group, but it was hard to tell from the way the footsteps echoed. There could be three or three hundred moving in step.

Crouching, his blaster held in one hand, Jak scrambled across the scrub, weaving swiftly between stubby trees. His keen eyes spotted the figure crouching behind a bush, tiny red berries arrayed across it like beads of blood. It was a man, mid-thirties with a little gray clouding his dark beard, wearing cotton clothes, light and simple and remarkably clean. His hands were dirty, though, and there was a streak of what looked like either oil or dirt on his face. He was breathing heavy, fearful. Jak slowed as he spotted the blaster in the man’s hand. It was a Smith & Wesson, not much more than seven inches in length, its once-gleaming surface pitted and blackened with age.

The man turned at the albino youth’s approach, as much sensing him as hearing him. Jak was still twenty feet from the man. Even from that distance, Jak could see the man’s blue eyes were wide with anxiousness, and he brought the Smith & Wesson around to target Jak at the same time as he turned. But when he saw Jak, something seemed to change in his expression—first surprise, then relief.

“Thank heaven,” the man said in a breathless whisper. “I thought you were...”

He stopped, alert like a dog, his head turning to locate the sound of the marching feet.

Jak spotted the figures moving through the trees for the first time. Dressed in white robes, they were easy to see. They didn’t walk together but had spread out, taking different routes down the slope, but still marching in time. Jak counted five of them wending through the trees above, fluid and almost mist-like in their movements. It wasn’t like watching soldiers, it was like watching dancers.

Crouched by the bush, the bearded man glanced back at Jak, his eyes pleading. “Did the bomb go off?” he whispered. “You can’t let them—”

His words were cut short by a woman’s voice coming from upslope. “William! Will? What are you doing?”

The man—presumably William—turned back, raised his blaster and fired. The discharge sounded loud in the stillness of the woods, its thundering echo accompanied by the frightened cries of birds taking flight in its wake.

Jak ducked back, dipping behind the nearest tree and using its trunk for cover. It was a birch, and the trunk was too narrow to give adequate protection, even for Jak’s small frame. But there was no time to find better, not now that bullets were flying.

William had clearly missed his target, and he blasted again, firing another shot into the trees. Upslope, one of the figures in white moved, stepping swiftly behind a tree as the bullet struck a branch.

Jak watched the figure slip out from cover and he could discern that it was a woman—perhaps the same one who had called to William.

“Help me,” the man called, his voice raised now in panic. He glanced back to where Jak was hiding, his brow furrowing as he saw that Jak had disappeared. “Please, you know what they’ll do...”

Jak almost gasped as the white-clad figures emerged from the trees, converging on the armed man in a flurry of fluttering robes. All five were women, young and tall and svelte with long limbs and long hair styled atop their heads in some kind of elaborate braid or plait. The robes were made of a light, gauzy material, pure white like predark summer clouds, covering each woman from her neck all the way down to her ankles. There were wide pleats within the design of the robes that made the skirts and sleeves billow around them like mist, making it hard to determine where their bodies ended and the robes began. They were beautiful, angelic.

Jak watched as the women converged on the lone man. William rose from his crouch and shouted, “Die! Damn you all!” before blasting wildly at the women, again and again, shifting his aim to shoot the next and the next and the next.

Still gliding toward the man, the women moved gracefully but swiftly, sidestepping the shots with breathtaking ease. Jak watched, incredulous, as one of the women, honey-red hair piled on her head, leaped from the ground and kicked out at a tree, using it to lever herself higher as a bullet whizzed beneath her. It was an exceptional move, both in terms of speed and agility, and the timing was nothing less than perfect.

The woman landed back on the ground in a swish of billowing robes, now just three feet from the man with the blaster. He depressed the trigger again, sending another .45 slug at the woman’s face from almost point-blank range. The woman darted aside at the same time, and a combination of her speed and the man’s fear sent the bullet wide.

Then the woman grabbed the barrel of the man’s blaster in her right hand, yanking it aside as he fired again. All around them, the other figures had converged on this spot and stood just a few feet away, surrounding the two combatants as the unarmed woman overpowered her blaster-wielding foe.

Jak winced as the weapon blasted again, sending another bullet toward the woman’s shoulder. It missed her but it was close, and Jak saw the wide shoulder strap of her dress shred as the bullet breezed past, a trace of red kicking into the air as the bullet clipped her skin.

The man was shouting in nonsensical sentence fragments now. Something about stopping them... Something about love... Jak could see the man’s trigger finger squeezing again and again, but there was no ammo left in his blaster.

The white-robed women converged on him. What happened next, Jak couldn’t see. All he saw was the billowing robes circling the spot where the man had gone down, fluttering there like waves.

* * *

MILDREDAND RICKYwaited in the redoubt monitoring room as the explosion shook the walls. Dust escaped from the ceiling fixtures and a great cloud tumbled down from the bank of television screens that dominated one wall.

“You think...” Ricky began.

But Mildred was too focused on her task to respond. She was crouched beside him, her face close to the bloody mess that dominated the left side of Ricky’s shirt. “Ready?” she asked, and Ricky nodded. She lifted his shirt in a single, swift gesture and Ricky yelped in pain. “Okay,” Mildred soothed. “You’re okay.”

The blood made it look worse than it was, the way it had spread across Ricky’s skin. But it had started clotting and had dried with Ricky’s shirt, sticking flesh to material. That was why it had hurt so much when Mildred had ripped his shirt away.

Mildred prodded at the wound. You had to move quickly in the Deathlands, and field medicine like this was often the only option. Keeping the companions patched up was Mildred’s job, and she was damn good at it, too. “How does it look?” Ricky asked, breathing through clenched teeth.

“Nasty,” Mildred told him, taking an inch-high bottle of ammonia from her supplies. “You’ve lost a lot of skin, but we’ll clean that out and get you bandaged up. You’ll live.”

Ricky winced, holding back the tears. “Hurts bastard bad,” he said as Mildred knelt to clean the wound.

The physician arched a brow. “Boy, you listen too closely to J.B. and Ryan’s turns of phrase.”

* * *

DEBRISLITTEREDTHEfloor of the corridor and a coating of dust covered the two figures that lay inside the door.

Ryan moved first, pulling himself up to a sitting position and brushing plaster dust from his dark hair. Beside him, J.B. stirred and flinched at the movement, turning to Ryan with a coating of dust on the lenses of his spectacles.

Ryan looked at him and smiled. “You still alive?” he said.

“Hundred percent,” J.B. confirmed, rubbing at one ear to stop the ringing. “Let’s go check on the damage.”

Warily, the two men entered corridor. It was a mess, but just surface mess—nothing a dustpan and brush couldn’t smarten up in a few minutes. There was a hairline crack running up the wall beside the door to the control room, as thin as a spider’s web. Ryan gestured to it as he passed. “Could have been your skull,” he said.

J.B. laughed and rapped his knuckles on the wall. “Nah, my skull’s thicker than this,” he responded.

Moving quietly, Ryan and J.B. returned to the control room and surveyed the damage. The control area itself had barely sustained any damage other than a coating of plaster dust, but the mat-trans chamber was billowing with dark smoke and two-thirds of the toughened-glass walls that surrounded it had shattered, leaving a carpet of twinkling shards that spread out from the chamber like projectile vomit.

The chamber’s fans were whirring loudly as they worked to clear the smoke while ancient, ceiling-mounted water sprinklers made a hissing, fizzing sound though nothing came out of their pipes. Presumably, in the hundred years since this facility had been built, the contents of their supply tanks had either leaked or evaporated, leaving just the sound of the taps as they opened and closed, opened and closed.

When Ryan and J.B. entered the anteroom, they could see fire within the hexagonal chamber of the mat-trans itself, spots of flame licking at what was left of the walls and burning in patches on the tiled floor. Black smoke poured from the smeared remains of the crate-like device that had once abutted the back wall, but almost nothing remained of the device itself other than the basic shape of the box that had held it, now seared into the floor in a black rectangle.

Ryan shook his head, waving smoke out of his eye. “We won’t be using this again in a hurry,” he said grimly.

J.B. nodded solemnly. He left the anteroom and peered around the control room before spying the fire extinguishers. He strode over to them and reached for the boxy cabinet that clung to the wall above them, removing the fire blanket that was strapped there. The fire blanket had waited a century for someone to use it, and it smelled of mildew.

The Armorer strode back to the mat-trans and shook the blanket, throwing it across the flaming scar of the explosive, his feet tramping in the shattered armaglass. “Could be our only way out,” he reminded Ryan as they watched the blanket smother the flames. “Best do what we can to contain the damage.”

Ryan eyed the damaged floor tiles and the missing armaglass with concern. “You think this is repairable?”

“If it has to be,” J.B. told him. “Mebbe it won’t come to that.”

They waited a moment for the flames to stop burning and watched the smoke ease to a wispy trail in the air like a squirrel’s tail.

Ryan watched the smoke dissipate, voicing the question that neither of them could answer. “Who did this and why?”