"Axler, James - Deathlands 021 - Twilight Children - Laurence James 1.1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Axler James)

The door wasn't even locked.

The boy simply turned the handle and pushed, and it opened, revealing a dark, constricting passage.

"Wait," Ryan snapped. "Don't go rushing into that like a double stupe, Dean. Could be anything out there."

"A most maleficent odor," Doc commented, applying his swallow's-eye kerchief to his protuberant nose. "Like touching your tongue to tarnished brass."

Mildred laughed. "Nice one, Doc. Know what you mean. It isn't that deathly medical smell from the other redoubt in Kansas, but it isn't normal."

Ryan went to the door, pushing past Dean. The place was so small and cramped that there hardly seemed to be enough room for the seven of them.

Once again, the contrast with other complexes they'd visited was stark. Instead of the wide corridors, with antiseptically clean concrete walls and high curved ceilings, this was more like the mouth of a tunnel built by gnomes. There were no lights and not a sign of the usual ob-vid cameras.

The passage was around ten feet at its widest, so low that Ryan felt he had to stoop, oddly aware of the enormous weight of rock and earth hanging over him.

As his eye became accustomed to the gloom outside the control area, Ryan realized that there was a very faint glow visible away to his right.

"I think this place is totally open," he said, holding the SIG-Sauer at the ready. "Doesn't look like artificial light, and the smell of the air is stronger."

Doc's description hung in his mind. The taste was definitely metallic in origin.

One by one they followed him, all stooping, though the ceiling was just high enough for Doc, tallest at six feet three, to stand straight without bumping his head.

"Hi, ho," Mildred sang quietly. "Looks like we're all going off to work."

They didn't have far to go.

The light ahead grew steadily brighter, showing that the whole place had been hacked out of living rocks, also showing that the gateway seemed to be on its own, without the usual surrounding redoubt.

Ryan held up his hand as the rough-floored passage curved sharply to the right, almost in dogleg. "Hold it just a minute. Krysty?"

"Yeah."

"Feel anything?"

"No."

"Nothing? Must be some sort of life around."

Krysty pressed the tips of her fingers to her forehead. While she concentrated hard, Ryan became aware that the fiery sentient hair was curled tight around her head and neck, often a sign of potential danger.

"No." Krysty bit her lip. "Can't pick up anything at all. Not close by, anyway."

He nodded. "Best go see."

The tunnel simply ended in a roughly circular opening, with daylight beyond.

One of the oddities about jumping was that it screwed up time in a way that Ryan had never been able to work out. Sometimes you might jump in the middle of the night and you'd find that you'd arrived at the next redoubt in the middle of the afternoon.