End Day. James Axler

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      ENTRANTS SUBJECT TO CAVITY SEARCH

      As he read the sign, Ryan could feel the vibration of the generators through the soles of his boots. His skin crawled with static electricity. To send that kind of charge through hundreds of thousands of tons of concrete required an unimaginable amount of power.

      An unpleasant thought occurred to him. If Magus knew they were in pursuit, this could be a trap. If a nuclear bomb was involved, if its countdown mechanism had already been activated, there was no escaping back the way they’d come. If Magus intended to jump away at the last second before detonation, their only hope was to do the same.

      With Jak ahead of him and Krysty close behind, Ryan moved past a pair of elevator doors in the wall on the left. As Ricky, Mildred and Doc followed, a cheerful chime rang out: ding-ding. The sound stopped all the companions in their tracks. The elevator doors rolled back smoothly.

      Backlit by the car’s ceiling bulb was a lone enforcer. It was so wide it seemed to fill the entire doorway. The surface of its skin was covered with an array of ridges and knobs, like a crocodile’s. Sweat beaded and then oozed down its wide belly and dripped steadily off the underside of its pot roast–size scrotum, pooling on the floor between massive, bandy legs.

      Throwing back its head, it let loose an earsplitting roar of outrage.

      The cry was answered a fraction of a second later by tens of thousands of foot-pounds of concentrated blasterfire. Five different calibers of bullets and shotgun rounds knocked the creature onto its heels and slammed it into the back of the car. Wild ricochets pocked the floor and sidewalls with holes and slashes, as the din of firing continued. Chunks of the enforcer’s thick hide were blown away, revealing shiny blue bone beneath. The point-blank volley seemingly had no other effect. The slugs weren’t through and through; there was no blood—red, blue, green or yellow.

      One by one, their blasters came up empty; the shooting dwindled. Before they could all reload and resume fire, the enforcer had recovered. As the elevator doors began to slide closed, it lunged through the haze of trapped blaster smoke. The four-inch-long amber talons on its thumbs held the doors’ leading edges apart, and it stuck its lumpy head through the gap. Yellow eyes slitted, wide, toothy maw grinning in anticipation, it took in seven defenseless victims, all within easy reach.

      Mildred yanked the pin from a red canister, paused, then gently rolled the cylinder underhand onto the elevator floor. Fountaining white sparks, like a roman candle, the thermite gren sputtered between the enforcer’s thighs, directly under its prominent gonads.

      A very different kind of howl erupted from its throat when a second later the gren fully ignited and took the puddled chemical sweat with it. The resulting blast of four-thousand-degree heat sent Ryan and the others staggering away, shielding their faces with their forearms. Even though the enforcer was engulfed in fire, head to foot, it crumpled the edges of the elevator doors trying to pull itself free.

      There was no escape.

      In seconds the car’s thin steels walls began to melt around it. The enforcer reeled back from the doorway, arms thrashing. Flames roared upward, burning through the roof of the car, as though it was made of candle wax, and sucking the air in the corridor into the elevator shaft, as if it were a giant chimney. As the enforcer collapsed, the car broke free of its cables and plummeted downward.

      Ricky’s dark eyes widened in disbelief. During the brief, one-sided firefight, his De Lisle carbine had been stuck firmly at port arms. “Were you shooting it in the head?”

      “Shit, yeah,” Jak said, dumping six smoking hulls from his Python.

      J.B. clapped a hand on the youth’s shoulder and said, “Those knobby, sweaty bastards die triple hard. Don’t worry, kid. You’ll get used to it—mebbe you’ll even get a shot off next time.”

      Ricky shrugged. “Next time I’ll know where to aim.”

      The muffled crash of the elevator car rolled up the shaft. It was a long fall to the bottom.

      Ryan heard more bellows of fury—seemingly coming from all directions at once. It sounded like three hours past feeding time in a mutie zoo.

      Retreat was definitely no longer an option.

      “We’ve got to reach the mat-trans,” he said. “Don’t waste ammo. Use the grens to clear a path. Let’s go!”

      With that, he and Jak led the full-out charge down the corridor. One hundred feet ahead was an intersection with another corridor. As they neared it, Ryan waved for Jak to slow down. They stopped and peered around the corners as the others stormed past. In the dim overhead light, way down the corridor on the right, he could see lumpy heads bobbing toward them. It was the same story when he looked in the opposite direction.

      He and Jak rolled incendies both ways, then without waiting to see the effect, chased after the others. Ryan knew the thermite grens would keep the enforcers back, but only the first wave, and only temporarily.

      In front of them, Krysty, Mildred, J.B., Doc and Ricky disappeared into a doorway on the left. Then the floor jolted violently under Ryan’s boots, sending him slamming shoulder first into the wall. Concrete dust rained down from the ceiling. Dozens of levels below, the generator’s whine died away, like a falling artillery shell, and the corridor lights winked out.

      For an instant it was so dark Ryan couldn’t see the end of his nose. Pitch-black, but not quiet. Over the pounding of his heart, he heard what sounded like dozens of bare feet slapping the floor. The generator recovered after only a second or two, starting the climb to peak power, and then the lights came back on.

      When Ryan looked behind them, he saw a corridor filled wall to wall with wide bodies, and they were bearing down fast. “Run, Jak! Run!” he shouted.

      The entrance to the mat-trans unit’s control room stood open. Ryan was the last across the threshold. He spun around, located the keypad and, desperately hoping that the usual codes worked in this redoubt, punched in the one that would close the door. It worked. Breathing a sigh of relief, he quickly entered another to lock out access.

      “We’re too late,” Krysty said as he turned. “We just missed them.”

      He’d already guessed that. In a single go, something had drained the tremendous power load to zero.

      Ryan rushed past panels of blinking, multicolored lights and the madly chattering, predark machinery, into the anteroom. The door to this mat-trans had a porthole, and he could see the tendrils of jump fog slowly lifting. Though his view was obscured, there were no feet below the mist and no slumped bodies on the floorplates near the door—just shiny smears of sweat.

      There was no way to tell where or how many of their quarry had gone. Or even if Magus had jumped with them.

      A resounding boom from a foot or fist against the outside of the control room’s door put an end to that train of thought. More banging followed, and under the rain of blows, the barrier began to bulge inward. Amber thumb hooks poked between the edge of the door and its frame, bending back the double-walled steel as if it was pot metal.

      It wasn’t going to hold.

      Krysty pulled out a red canister.

      “No!” he said, catching her hand by the wrist. “If we use incendies in here, we’ll end up cooking ourselves and the СКАЧАТЬ