Labyrinth. James Axler

lived here for years,” he said.

      The alcove they found on the far side of the room confirmed that.

      Once a lounge for computer operators, its row of vending machines were torn open and gutted, spilling waterfalls of multicolored wire. Shredded candy wrappers and crushed aluminum cans littered the floor. Along the alcove’s opposite wall were eight, molded plastic and tubular steel arm chairs. A large hole had been cut in each of the seats. Though the wastebaskets positioned beneath the chairs contained heaped evidence of their function, it had been so long since anyone had used the communal toilet that no odor remained.

      Among the cartoons of sexual organs and acts defacing the alcove’s enameled walls were scattered bits of writing. In addition to the names and erotic interests of people long gone, if not long dead, were some familiar commentaries.

      “Science Blows.”

      “Jolt Is God.”

      “So many muties, so little rope.”

      And across the wall in a banner of rusty ink that was most likely blood: “I want to eat your liver.” To Ryan the letters looked like they had been applied with a mop. Or perhaps a neck stump.

      Below the graffiti was a postscript so tiny and cramped that he had to lean close to the wall to make it out. It said, “I’m right behind you.”

      He didn’t turn and look, of course, but for an instant he thought about it, just as the writer had intended.

      With a resounding clunk all the lights went out, plunging the companions into pitch darkness.

      From Ryan’s left came the scrape of a chair and shit bucket being kicked over. “By the Three Kennedys!” Doc moaned in dismay.

      Heart pounding, Ryan cleared his SIG-Sauer pistol from shoulder leather. If the blackout was a prelude to an ambush, at least they were in a good defensive position, with the closed end of the alcove at their backs. Dropping into a fighting crouch, he let his eye adjust.

      After a few seconds he could see the fire’s faint orange glow at the doorway on the other side of the room. He smelled caustic smoke. Then a turbine started to whine on a floor far below them, and the lights came back on, only this time much weaker and with a more pronounced, almost strobelike flicker.

      There was no ambush; they were alone.

      “There’s no point in our searching the storage levels,” Ryan said as he reholstered his side arm. “This bird’s been picked clean.”

      Successful looting of predark caches boiled down to two things: luck and timing. The luck was in finding them, as the redoubts were well-hidden, usually deep underground, often in remote areas. Though the companions’ access to the mat-trans system gave them a big advantage over the competition, it didn’t guarantee piles of booty at the end of the day. Booty required timing; in other words, getting there first. They had faced this disappointment many times before, and they took it in stride, now. Coming up empty-handed was part of the game.

      To locate their position in the complex, and find the quickest way out, the companions started searching the adjoining rooms for a copy of the redoubt’s floorplan. They found it in a ransacked office, behind a sheet of Plexiglas screwed into wall. J.B. shattered the plate with his shotgun’s steel butt plate, and Krysty freed the paper map, which laid out and labeled the stronghold’s levels, and all the exits.

      From the other side of the room, Mildred called out to the others, “Hey, take a look at this.” She stood before a three-dimensional, injection-molded, plastic relief map that covered a section of wall, almost floor-to-ceiling. Though the map had been defaced and damaged, it was still readable.

      “From the lat-lon grid, that must be us,” she said, indicating a small red circle nestled between a pair of desert mesas at the upper left corner. Halfway down the map was the start of a long, diagonal stripe of blue, a stripe that grew wider and wider until it necked down and abruptly stopped, blocked by a narrow white barrier.

      The label on the barrier read: Pueblo Canyon Dam and Reservoir.

      “I was there on vacation once, about a hundred years ago,” Mildred said.

      “A boating holiday?” Doc asked.

      “No, it was before the dam was put in,” she said. “I remember there was a big stink over its getting built. The reservoir flooded a small town on the canyon floor, and Native American prehistoric sites along the cliffs were lost. For the right to build the dam, the federal government paid reparations to the Hopi tribe, and there was a land swap, too.

      “Not everyone was happy with the amount of money that changed hands, or with the relocation site. Supposedly because of the number of threats, during construction the area for hundreds of square miles was turned into a top security, no-fly zone. Military ground and air units kept out protesters and potential saboteurs. A lot of questions about the Pueblo Canyon project never got answered, such as, why it was necessary in the first place. And why approval for the funding and land trade was rushed through Congress. Once the dam was completed and the reservoir filled up, the fences came down, the military left and the controversy fell off the media radar.”

      “What do you make of this?” J.B. asked. He pointed at another red symbol, though smaller, in the middle of the swathe of blue, a short distance from the dam.

      “Could be another redoubt,” Ryan said.

      “In the middle of the reservoir?” Krysty said.

      “Mebbe an island?” Dix suggested.

      “Then it’d have to be man-made,” Mildred said. “The canyon is five hundred feet deep at that point.”

      “Whatever it is, it’s got a name,” Dix said, leaning closer to read the scratched lettering. “It looks like ‘M-i-n-o-t-a-u-r.’”

      “Does that mean anything to anybody?” Krysty asked the others.

      A beaming Doc provided the answer, delighted at the opportunity to put his classical education to use. “The name refers to a mythical monster of ancient Greece,” he said. “According to legend, it was the half-human offspring of a great bull and Pasiphae, wife of Minos, the king of Crete. The bull was a gift to the king from the sea god, Poseidon, who wanted Minos to sacrifice it to him. When the king didn’t kill the animal as directed, Poseidon punished him by making his wife fall in love with it. Minos kept the monstrous product of their union, known as the minotaur, and built a maze to contain it. The king exacted tribute from conquered lands in the form of human victims, which he sacrificed to the minotaur. Ultimately, the murderous beast was defeated by the hero Theseus, with the help of Minos’s daughter, Ariadne.”

      “Humans can’t make babies with other kinds of animals,” Krysty said.

      “Not in the usual way,” Mildred said. “And not in ancient Crete. But in a test tube, late twentieth century, with gene-splicing techniques…”

      With another loud clunk the light banks failed again, and again the companions found themselves surrounded by blackness.

      Two minutes passed, then five, while they waited with weapons drawn. This time the lights didn’t come back on.

      After igniting the torches they pulled from their packs, the companions followed the predark map, which turned out to be full of blind alleys. Most of the exit stairwells were blocked by floor-to-ceiling avalanches of concrete and steel. From the structural damage to the floors above, it was clear something disastrous had happened. The higher they climbed, the greater the destruction. Though they were only eight levels underground, it took them close to an hour to reach the surface. And in the end, they had to track the looters’ route through the air ducts.

      Standing outside in daylight, they could see why they had been beaten to the treasure trove. The redoubt’s secret entrance had been uncovered by a massive landslide, which had tumbled house-sized blocks of sandstone onto the desert valley. There was no way of telling if the earthquake had been natural, or caused by the shock wave of a distant nuclear strike.