Judas Strike

“Greenhouse effect,” Mildred muttered, a bead of sweat trickling down her cheek. “Sunlight comes in and the heat gets trapped.”

“Like a magnifying glass?”

“Sort of, yes.”

Screwing the cap back on his canteen, Ryan wiped his mouth on a sleeve. He knew that explanation wasn’t quite right, but let it pass.

Taking a sip from his canteen, Doc wandered closer to the huge prism and lens assembly that dominated the middle of the room. The intricately carved glass lens stood six feet high, with concentric circles cut in short arcs on the thick glass, the reflective prisms spaced evenly around a central bull’s-eye-style magnifying glass. Behind the lens was some sort of a mechanism with a silvery reflecting dish.

“A first-order Fresnel lens,” Doc said, sounding impressed. “This must have been some very bad water. These are extremely powerful.”

“Yeah? How far?” Dean asked, fingering the pattern on the thick glass.

“Twenty miles, or so I have been told,” Doc replied. “And since the horizon is only seven miles away, that gives it quite a decent range.”

Jak scowled at the information. After night fell, they could see far, but the beam itself would broadcast their presence to the world. No good. He had no wish to face another of the baron’s PT boats until they had more blasters. Maybe even some of those Firebird rockets, too.

“Fresnel?” Mildred asked curiously, rubbing her neck with a damp cloth.

Leaning on his ebony swordstick, Doc pursed his lips. “A Frenchman, I believe. I have a cousin who retired from the Navy and became a lighthouse keeper. He used to regale my dear Emily and I at every opportunity with stories about the new types of lenses, and such. Poor man was always afraid the Confederate Army would smash his beacon to make Union Army supply ships crash on the shore. Odd fellow.”

His smile fading, Doc blinked several times. “Why, even after the Civil War was over…” The gentleman paused, his voice taking on a soft quality. “Is the war over? Only last week, we heard about Lee crossing the Potomac. Or was it last month?”

As he wandered off, the others paid the man no attention. Doc often slipped into the past, but always returned if there was trouble. Privately, Mildred envied the man slightly. At least for a few brief minutes, he was back among his family and friends, a land without radiation or muties. As time passed, she found it ever harder to recall her life before awakening in the cryo unit and joining Ryan. Sometimes, she even imagined that this had always been her life and the past was but a dream from childhood. On impulse, she reached out and took J.B. by the hand, giving it a gentle squeeze. The man turned and smiled at her, maintaining the intimate contact.

“Something wrong, Millie?” J.B. asked softly.

Only he called her that. She had always been Mildred to her family and associates. The past had many pleasures: clean sheets, pizza, air-conditioning, cable TV, but there had never been a man in her life like John. He was worth the violence and horrors of the Deathlands. To be with him was worth any price.

“Not a thing, John,” she said with a smile. “Just thinking.”

Giving her a hug, J.B. released her hand and continued his examination of the huge lens.

“What’s the light source for the beacon?” Ryan asked, grabbing hold of a ceiling to rest his leg.

“Electric,” J.B. replied, then grinned. “Which means generators and juice in the basement.”

“Emergency jenny, if nothing else,” Ryan agreed. The generator was old, but still serviceable. “If the baron’s sec men haven’t located the gateway, we might find enough juice here to operate the generators and still leave these islands. Dean, show us the way.”

“Yes, sir!” The boy started down the steep stairs with the immortal assurance of youth.

Taking Doc by the elbow, Krysty guided the mumbling old man down the stairs along with the others. The wealth of light reflecting off the lenses and prisms of the beacon cast bizarre shadows down the circular staircase, and the companions had to light candles before even reaching halfway down.

“This is the spot,” Dean said, playing the beam of the flashlight over a bare section of the stairs. “The rope was tied here, and he was hanging over there.”

“Suicide,” Jak said, frowning. “Easier throw somebody off top. Let grav chill.”

Ryan looked down and could see nothing below. “Better check the corpse,” he said, drawing his blaster. He could get a lot of info from the corpse, suicide or not.

The yellowish cone of the flashlight bobbing about, the companions proceeded carefully down the angled steps and spread out when they reached the bottom level of the tower. Mildred took the flashlight from Dean and pumped the charging handle several times, but the beam stayed as dim as before. The battery was dying again. Turning it off, she pocketed the device to save for medical emergencies.

Now in the flickering light of the candles, the companions did a quick recce of the tower. This area was twice as wide as the beacon room, and it was much cooler, probably because they were now twenty feet under the sand. There were several large wooden lockers full of tackle, and assorted equipment for rescuing drowning people and maintaining the beacon. A heavy-gauge power switch was set on the granite block wall between a couple of windows, each showing only a smooth expanse of compacted sand against the other side of the glass.

A tangle of bones and cloth stood in the middle of the floor. Ryan and Mildred knelt alongside the mess to pull out a human skeleton. There was a terrible crack yawning wide in the skull, but the breakage was fresh, obviously caused by the fall and not from a blow to the temple while the man was alive.

“I found him hanging halfway down the circular stairs,” Dean reported, setting the candle on a wall shelf. “The rope was in fine shape, so I cut him loose and took it.”

As Ryan started to go through the pockets of the ragged clothing, Mildred lifted the skull and turned it.

“Well, he’s definitely from the predark days,” she stated, opening the jaw wide as it could reach. “Look at those ceramic fillings! That’s prime dentistry.”

“How die?” Jak asked bluntly.

“Tell you in a minute,” Mildred replied. Carefully, she laid out the bones, placing them in order. Then she ran her trained hands over the skeleton, checking for damage, and found nothing.

“Okay, he died of strangulation,” Mildred announced, rocking back on her heels. “Damn fool must have tied the noose wrong and it didn’t snap his neck when he jumped off the stairs. Poor bastard just hung there until his air ran out. Might have been a couple of minutes, or a whole day if he was particularly strong.”

“A bad way to die,” Krysty stated.

“There’s no good way to get aced,” J.B. said with conviction. “Some are just worse than others.”

For some reason, that made Mildred feel incredibly sad. Maybe it was because, while they often found dead folks, few were from predark. It made her feel a sort of kinship with the nameless man. “Ashes to ashes,” she whispered, making the sign of the cross, “dust to dust. And may God have mercy on your soul.”

“Soul,” Jak snorted in disdain. “Right.”

Holding a small leather journal in his hand, Ryan stood and tried to force open the lock, but the ancient mechanism was strong. He stopped when the leather cover started to give instead of the lock. Shit, he’d have to open this later or risk tearing it apart.

“Okay, let’s finish our sweep,” Ryan said, tucking the journal into a shirt pocket.

A big door closed with heavy bolts seemed to lead outside from the trickles of sand that rained down along the jamb every time they touched the handle. A second door led to a hallway that opened directly to the cottage, and the third was locked tight.

“This should be the basement,” Ryan decided. “Mebbe storage area, or even a bomb shelter, if we’re lucky. Could be useful stuff down there.”

“On it,” J.B. said, removing tools from his shoulder bag.

But just then, a clang sounded from the second doorway, the noise echoing slightly in the darkness.

Quickly leading the way, Ryan found a set of double doors standing open, and strode into the kitchen of the subterranean cottage. Nothing seemed amiss there, and he waited for the sound to ring out again.

Ryan stood guard while the others swept the kitchen. The range and refrigerator were both electric, there was a dishwasher under the counter and a full assortment of fancy cooking machines, each totally useless without electric power. The cabinets yielded some herbal tea, which Mildred appropriated, and a small amount of exotic spices, but no real food. Checking under the sink, J.B. took some of the cleaning solutions to tuck into his munitions bag, and left the others.

Moving on, they found a small laundry room behind a pantry, the shelves starkly empty. Past the kitchen was the main room of the cottage. It was a big place. The living room had a small eating table with some chairs. In the far corner was a big-screen television and DVD player, stacks of rainbow disks piled high. Near the sand-filled windows was a large desk with a complex military radio and stacks of nautical charts showing the tides, deep currents and shipping schedules. Two side doors led to small bedrooms, one disheveled, the other neat. Everything was coated with a thin layer of dust, but otherwise seemed in good condition.

Holding their candles high, the companions stood in the flickering blackness, straining to hear anything. Then Doc shook off Krysty’s arm and walked over to a sideboard, where he lifted a lantern from amid the items on the table. There was still a small residue of oil in the reservoir, and soon he had the wick going, bright white light filling the subterranean cottage.

Now they could see the recliners and sofa placed before the television, and a gun rack on the wall with several longblasters and several sagging cardboard boxes of ammunition. On the far wall was a large bookcases full of paperbacks that crumbled into dust as they approached, producing an amazingly large acrid cloud. The fresh air from the open door in the lighthouse was seeping into the cottage, finishing the job of destruction started by the sheer passage of time.

Then everybody froze as a soft metallic patter sounded. It came again as a faint spot of light appeared on the bricks of the hearth and with a loud clang the flue moved aside and a blue crab dropped into view.