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cascade flexed freely once more. "Thank Gaia that's over," she exhaled. "My
hair was in agony!"
"Nobody stop until we reach the redoubt!" Mildred countered, still hunched
over the handlebars. "And watch the clouds! The Kite might be skipping ahead
of us, so we race straight into its beams."
Maneuvering his bike closer, Ryan shouted, "What was that?"
The open spaces allowing her to relax a notch, Mildred bit a lip and tried to
figure a way to explain what they had just faced. "In the kitchens of the
redoubts," she replied, "you've used the microwave oven to boil water, and
once we baked a potato. Same thing."
Ryan frowned as the engine of his bike sputtered, and he revved the throttle.
The
Harley was dangerously low on fuel. "You called it a Kite," he called out.
"That a war satellite?"
She shrugged. "Not originally, but I guess it is now." The quivering needle of
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the fuel gauge stopped moving as it reached the empty mark, and Ryan
concentrated on squeezing a few more miles out of the gas vapors in the tank.
Silas had found a microwave satellite and gotten control with an old SETI
dish. Good thing he had aced the old bastard on sight. But if Silas was
chilled, then who was operating the
Kite?
The landscape began to take on a familiar shape, and Ryan began to remember
details of the last visit there, the fights, desperate running, a bloody
ambush and the endless chilling. It had been one of their worst jumps, and the
redoubt itself was as bare as a spent round. There wasn't a can of beans, or
anything useful inside just an armored vault filled with predark works of
art bronzes statues and antique oil paintings. Why would the Pentagon waste
valuable space storing those
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Axler,_James_-_Deathlands_47_-_Gaia's_Demise things away from the ravages of a
nuke storm? That was just another of the endless mysteries about the redoubts,
and one he had no desire to solve.
Just then a familiar shape rose from the ground in the glare of the
headlights. The front of the redoubt was as Ryan remembered, battered and
charred from the nuke blasts of skydark. But the armored door was as sturdy as
ever, and the companions would be safe once they got inside.
"The redoubt!" Krysty shouted, slowing her speed.
Taking the lead, Ryan rolled his bike around the outcropping until reaching
the front of the underground base. Massive black doors stood untarnished and
immutable in a small recess, an armored keypad set into the burnished jamb of
the portal.
Braking to a halt, the companions turned off the engines and set the
kickstands.
Silence greeted them, a soft wind blowing from the direction of the distant
forest.
"Thermal currents from the Kite," Mildred said to the unasked question, as she
stiffly climbed from the cage. For a second, she looked for her med kit, then
memory flared, and she grimly walked toward the redoubt. They physician could
assemble another kit over time. More important, safety was only a few yards
away.
Ryan was already standing at the door, tapping the entry code onto the keypad
when the ground underneath the man heaved and he was thrown sprawling yards
away.
Spitting curses, the companions drew their blasters as a nightmare crawled out
of the soil directly in front of the door. It was a twisted mutie unlike
anything they had ever seen before. The grotesque creature possessed a
misshapen head covered with different-sized eyes and multiple ears. Its
drooling mouth was filled with fangs, and a forked tongue lolled over pale
leathery lips. The long serpentine body was covered with spotty fur as if it
suffered from mange or rad poisoning.
However, massive muscles rolled beneath the leathery skin as the mutie
shambled closer on four powerful legs, two tiny shriveled limbs dangling
impotently from its hideous chest. Sharp claws ripped apart the hard soil as
the slavering beast
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Axler,_James_-_Deathlands_47_-_Gaia's_Demise started to crawl catlike toward
the companions.
"Silas!" J.B. cursed, working the bolt on his Uzi. "He knew we'd try for the
redoubt and left one of his DNA experiments for us!"
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Rising to one knee, Ryan leveled the Steyr SSG-70. He was down to only a few
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