"Rail gun does," Doc said simply.

He also told them what Dr. Avian had stammered out to him about some of their germ and drug research. Most of their testing had been on their own breeding stock of muties. One drug, based on an animal anesthetic, had made the victims begin to devour their own bodies. They'd start with their fingers, then pluck their own eyes from the sockets and tear strips of flesh from their own chests and stomachs.

Ryan asked Doc why he wasn't surprised about the success of the scientists with projects like the rail gun.

"They've built on foundations before the long chill. Way back over a hundred years ago, round 1986, the people hereabouts spent a hundred million dollars on rail guns."

The catalog of megadeath and horror went on, voiced in Doc's calm, well-rounded tones. Things that would travel in the air. Some in the water. Some that would come with fire and noise. Some that would come with silent invisibility to coat the skins and eyes of sleeping innocents. The products of one hundred years of the most concentrated work by the scientists — for their beloved Project Eurydice, for the Central they worshipped, blind to the fact that it no longer existed.

"And they aim to release all this? Soon?" Krysty asked when Doc Tanner finished his recital and lay back on his bed with a sigh of exhaustion.

"Next week. That is their plan."

"We'll stop them, won't we, Doc?" Lori asked.

"Indeed we will, light of my life, fire of my loins, sweetness of my heart."

Lori smiled and blushed.

"Just how the fuck do we stop 'em, Doc?" Finn asked, standing up and stretching, moaning as his muscles locked from kneeling on the floor by the old man's bunk bed for too long.

Doc Tanner opened his eyes again. "Kindly allow me to make myself quite clear, ladies and gentlemen. From the drunken mumblings of poor Dr. Avian, who is madder than the craziest of hatters, I have no doubt whatsoever that within the week Dr. Tardy and her comrades will have put their toys out to play. The result will be the end, within less than six months, of all life, not only in Deathlands but throughout the planet."

"You mean people, Doc?" J.B. asked.

"I mean life. Animal and vegetable. There will not even be a speck of bacteria. Earth will be utterly, eternally barren. And that must not happen, even if our own poor lives are pawns in the great game."

"Talk's cheap," Ryan said thoughtfully.

"I am aware of that, my friend. I am also aware that the saying goes on about the price of action being quite colossal."

Ryan glanced at the Armorer. "What d'you think, J.B.? Can we take this place out? It's the strongest redoubt I ever saw."

"May just be the weakest as well," J.B. replied, his glasses reflecting the dim light from the far end of the room.

"How, when and where?" Ryan asked. "That's what the Trader used to say about making a war plan. Not much else matters."

"When is the easiest. Has to be in the next couple of days. We have to spring the kid first."

Ryan nodded his agreement. "Sure, J.B., sure. And where couldn't be simpler. Here. Problem linked to that is how the flying fuck we get out of here after we've done it."

"Got to blow her up," Doc said. The old man looked exhausted, blinking away his tiredness. "Set charges and get out. Way that stammering sot put it, there's enough stuff down here to blow the planet in half. Most's fission, so we won't trigger it in a fire or explosion."

"This place's fucking deep enough to bury anything, isn't it?" Finnegan asked.

"Sure. Only problem is..." Doc Tanner hesitated. "You know this used to be an old volcano. Mount Mazama? When it went up, it left Crater Lake. These scientists— how I hate that word now! — they've dug so deep they must be damnably close to tapping into the old magma chamber under the caldera. Big bang down here and the force hasn't anywhere to go. Except down, mebbe."

"Mountain might go bang," Lori said.

"As usual, my dearest child, in your simple way you have placed your cunning digit upon the core of the question. It might indeed, 'go bang,' as you put it."

Doc fell asleep shortly afterward, with Lori at his side. The other four went to another part of the dormitory to formulate a plan that would enable them to overcome forty or so heavily armed mutie guards and destroy the most sophisticated weapons complex in the history of civilization.

It took them all of twenty minutes.

Finnegan was the most confident. "Those fucking toy blasters they have. Blasters! Couldn't blast their way through a gaudy house blanket."

J.B. was more cautious. "They must work some of the time, Finn."

"One in a fucking hundred, that's all. You won't get better fucking odds in any firefight, I tell you. Easy as hitting a fucking war wag with a Sharps fifty."

Ryan laughed. "Hope you're right. You're too big a target, Finn. That's your trouble." He glanced at the big chron on the wall. "Look. It'll soon be in the red. Let's get some sleep. Big day tomorrow."

Chapter Twenty

Jak Lauren had slept well.

He often dreamed of the old days of childhood, back in the humid swamps of Louisiana. His night phantoms were mutie alligators or swampies with blind eyes that floated over the sucking mud, webbed fingers grasping for him as he danced from them with an elusive ease. The albino always relished such dreams, never dreading the demons that rose in them.

This night it had been different.

A couple of times Jak's father had taken him, as a child, into the outskirts of the ruined urban spread that had once been the proud city of New Orleans. It had become a featureless waste, with an occasional spire of twisted metal where a water tower or aerial had stood. There had been great fires, Jak's father had heard from his father's grandfather. Fires that had ravaged anything that had remained after the nuking. Fires that had gone on burning for years, drawing on gases and liquids far beneath the crust of the earth.

The dream had been a little like that.

He had been walking briskly along what was left of an old blacktop highway, its surface cracked and seamed with ridges like waves where the shocks of the missiles had turned stone into a corrugated ribbon. Plants burst in profusion through the ravaged road, but they weren't from Louisiana, though the dream somehow seemed set there.

There was alpine fireweed, stonecrop, bog orchids and purple asters, goldenrod and brown-eyed Susan, all flourishing and bright in a landscape that was predominantly gray and leprous white.

Near Lafayette Jak had known of an age-old cemetery, with angels and graceful ministers of moss-stained stone weeping mournful tears in the damp air.

There they were, all about him, his feet sinking silently into long, cropped turf. Graves, each with its own memorial tablet, bore witness to the name and dates and virtues of the persons who lay buried there. Jak paused to stoop and peer at the nearest stone.

"Jak Lauren," it read. "He died in agony and sleeps forever waking."

The next grave said the same.

And the next.

Next.

A pallid sun cast watery shadows among the tombs, but Jak himself threw no shadow at all. There was a mist weaving about some stunted yew trees, their boles and knobbed branches draped in long fronds of Spanish moss. It was impossible to see more than twenty or thirty yards in any direction, and Jak began to feel he was not alone.

He began to walk faster, picking his way among the graves. Now he was in an older part of the cemetery, where some of the stones had fallen, their jagged edges ready to trip the unwary.

The ground rose and fell, making it difficult to maintain a steady pace. Jak paused several times, staring into the roiling banks of fog seeping all around him. He laid his head to one side, straining to catch any noise. There was a faint rumbling, like a well-laden wag laboring up an incline. And water. The sullen sound of water dropping over cold rock from a great height.