by James Axler
Ryan stared at the glass. The thing was bigger than he'd thought, maybe as big as a human thumb, streamlined. He saw a black and shiny carapaced back, and four horned antennae quivering at the front. The insect scrabbled around in the glass, its six legs slipping on the smooth surface. It stopped suddenly, facing him. He peered closer, aware that the nearest guard had thrust the barrel of his M-16 almost to his left temple. He saw that the labrum flap over the insect's mouth hardly concealed mandibles that seemed grotesquely out of proportion to its size: huge sickle-shaped tusks, almost like horns. The compound eyes, small though they were, seemed to glitter in the light, their honeycomb of lenses directed at him.
The insect was quivering gently. Ryan couldn't get it out of his mind that he was being studied, noted, categorized. It turned suddenly, rushed at the opposite side of the glass, launched itself at the transparent walls of its prison. And fell back, its legs waving wildly. It landed on its shiny back, rolled on the instant, and became mobile once more.
"Ugly little brute," murmured Strasser, taking the glass away and staring at it affectionately. "But... fascinating. Doesn't like wood at all. Meat eater. But it doesn't like dead meat, Ryan. Fastidious. Likes its food in the hoof, you might say. But the really curious thing is it seems to have a positive yen for human flesh. We discovered this quite by chance when we popped one into the mouth of someone who had... displeased me. The insect ate its way out of the stomach. Right through the entrails. You probably noted its somewhat overlarge mandibles. Remarkable, don't you think?"
With a yell Ryan flung himself at the gaunt man, his hands outstretched to claw and tear and rend at whatever he could grasp.
And the world blazed up in a brilliant flash of light that seared his eye, exploded through his head, fierce agony lancing through his brain. He reeled, smashed to the concrete floor by the M-16 barrel rammed into the side of his head.
Something heavy landed on him. He sought to fling it off but a booted foot slammed into his head and more pain flooded through him, slashing at his nerve ends. He found that his arms were suddenly twisted behind him, his legs held to the floor under some heavy weight. Through a haze of pain and fury and disgust he heard Strasser's voice.
"Take the gag out of her mouth and stuff it into Ryan's."
His head was wrenched back by the hair and he tried to grit his teeth together but someone pinched his nostrils tight and involuntarily he gasped open his mouth. The gag filled it and he dry-heaved, his senses screaming that he had to have air. He could hear snorted squealing sounds and could only suppose they emanated from him. The fingers unclasped.
His head throbbed agonizingly. It was as if someone plunged a knife rhythmically and repeatedly into the soft core of his brain. Suddenly he was lurching forward, being shoved and dragged toward the wooden block until he was staring wildly, frantically, up into the rear of the girl.
Strasser was standing near him, beside the girl, one hand holding the glass, the other pushing one of the smooth white globes of her buttocks.
He said thoughtfully, "Now which shall it be, anal or vaginal passage? Difficult to choose. If the former it will at least mean that Kelber's animal lusts will not remain entirely unsatisfied, if for only a short time. Kelber has often been known to make the best of a bad job, Ryan. He is, I fear, not very discriminating in his tastes. If the latter, of course, I doubt that even Kelber would care to try his luck where something as voracious as this little brute has already been." He inclined his head, looked down at Ryan. "What d'you say, Ryan? Back or front, hmm? No answer? How very churlish." He licked his lips. "Front, I think."
He placed the lip of the glass against the broad full cheeks, and began to push it under the girl toward the dark cleft, tipping it gently upward as he did so.
Ryan struggled like one possessed of many devils. His head jerked back, his chest bulged. He could feel the tendons and veins on his arms spring out like corded cables. He was screaming, shrieking, but no sound came out of his mouth.
Strasser glanced down at him, smiling with his mouth but not his eyes, and tipped the glass up some more. It was now almost horizontal. The beetle began to scurry along the smooth curved path until it had about reached its goal. It stopped, antennae quivering. Then it scurried on remorselessly, at last reaching flesh, a portion of buttock fringed by coarse red hair, short and curly, just glimpsed. The antennae extended toward the white skin as though testing the air. Presumably satisfied with the intelligence it had gathered, the insect began to move slowly, inexorably, out of Ryan's sight.
Squealing, frantically nodding his head, adrenaline flooding through him like liquid fire, Ryan managed to inch himself forward, heaving those guards atop along by the sheer strength of his frenzy.
Strasser looked down at him again, regarded him thoughtfully, coolly, gauging his surrender — then rammed the glass hard into the girl's rear, at the same time flipping its mouth slightly upward, the sudden movement catching the beetle, the lip of the glass tossing it into the air. It curved high, legs scrabbling at nothing, and for a split second seemed to hang, weightless, at the peak of its parabola. Then gravity took over and it dropped. Strasser neatly caught it in the glass and beamed in triumph, as though he had just performed a particularly knotty conjuring trick. He gave the glass and the box to Kelber.
He said, "Excellent. Take him out to one of the trucks. The girl, too. Dress her. These..." He waved an arm at J.B. and the others, then frowned in thought. "I was going to say, kill them. But no. Take them downstairs. One of the cells. I'll deal with them personally when we return."
Ryan felt himself gripped under the armpits and dragged to his feet. He needed that. Right now he felt incapable of supporting himself on his own. Strasser caught up with them. The gaunt man with the skull face reached out and grasped at the gag in his mouth and tore it out. Ryan gasped, swallowed, grunted, spat out bits of rag that still clung to his teeth and his tongue and his lips. He gazed up at Strasser, his chest heaving, his eyes blurred.
He cracked, "You're dead, Strasser... dead..."
"No, no, no," said Strasser, leaning forward and tapping him lightly on the chest with a bony finger, his tone mildly amused as though he were speaking to a fractious child, "you're dead."
* * *
The heavy steel door thudded into place. The face of the man Krysty Wroth had booted, still blood-smeared around the mouth, appeared in the barred opening, another of the guards behind him.
"Think I'll have me the slinky black bitch, Ferd," said the man with the bloody mouth. "Ain't had black meat in awhile."
"Y'know," said Hunaker to Samantha, "I bet that dick's prick when it's hard is about as big as my pinkie. I betcha."
The gloating expression vanished from the sec man's face as though wiped off with a rag.
He screamed, "You'll find out how big it is, bitch! Get the fuckin' prod! Time I'm finished with ya, yer cunt'll be green as well as yer hair!"
"Cute," said Hunaker. She said to Sam, "Hey, you think he knows where a girl's whoopee actually is?"
J.B. muttered out of the corner of his mouth, "Shut it."
Hunaker shut it, and shrugged. She turned away from the door with an exaggerated yawn. The man, his face suffused with rage, disappeared from the opening, clattering off up the passageway with the other guard.
"Too mouthy," said J.B.
"Fuck it. The wimp got up my nose."
"You just pray he doesn't stick the prod up your nose," advised Koll.
Hunaker snorted with laughter. She was irrepressible. She started gurgling and shaking and had to lean up against Koll to keep her balance. J.B. shot her a stony look.
"Aw, come on, J.B. Ain't the end of the world. We'll get outta this one."
"If we're lucky. Doesn't help when you feel the spike of that guy. You're gonna have to make up to him, or one of them."
"Oh, crap," said Hunaker. "Does that mean I have to promise 'em all they can manage? Like that?"
"I want at least two in the corridor."
"Why does it have to be me?"
"Preferably both of you."
"Well, okay, but it's bad theater, J.B.," said Hunaker. "I mean, I like ol' Kollinsen here, but I don't fancyhim. Something about that mustache of his. You won't get a performance from the heart, know what I mean?"
"Thanks for nothing," muttered Koll.
J.B. said, "I didn't mean Koll."
"Oh, yeah? Me and Sam?" She turned on the black girl, nudged her in the ribs. "Hey-y-y! How did you know, J.B.? Been trying for a date for a hog's age."
"Jesus." Samantha the Panther's voice was a husky plaint. "Look, J.B., I got no intention of showing off my box to those bastards."
J.B. stared at her through his steel-rimmed spectacles, his face expressionless.
"Sure. Let's hope the situation doesn't arise."
His voice was as toneless as his face.
The room went quiet. Into both young women's an image of the bloodstained block slid like a poisonous snake.
J.B. sat down on the concrete floor and began to unlace his right combat boot.
"Just put on a show is all. Ain't worth shit. You know it, I know it."
"Fuck it," complained Hunaker. "Just 'cause we got tits and all. I mean, why don't you guys stand there, wave your dongs around?"
"Ain't gonna do much to these guys," J.B. pointed out.
Koll said, "You speak for yourself, buster," in hurt tones.
Hunaker said, her voice low-key, harsher in tone, "You really think... the train? Gone?"
J.B. tugged his boot, pulled it off.
"You were there. You heard what Cohn said, what the other guy said."
He put a hand inside his boot and began working at the inner sole with his fingers.
"You think we got a chance?"
J.B. stopped working at his boot, sat back and frowned slightly.
He said, "Maybe sixty-forty."
"Yeah?" Hunaker's eyes widened. The odds were better than she'd imagined.
"To them," J.B. said.
"Fireblasted nukeshit!"
A bleak smile flickered across J.B.'s sallow face.
"Just wave those tits around. I'll give you better odds."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. Fifty-five-forty-five. Still to them."
"Thanks a bunch, big boy," said Hunaker. She suddenly spat out, her voice squeezed tight with fury, "Just as long as some of 'em die nasty."
Sam was now beside the door, peering out through the bars at the empty corridor. Koll had joined J.B. on the floor and was pulling his own boots off. Hunaker unfastened the belt she was wearing and began to rip out the false bottoms of all her empty ammo pouches. She unhooked her water bottle, uncapped it, wiped it with her sleeve and took a swig. Then she eased the webbing around it, slid the flask out, began peeling off wafer-thin strips of a grayish and doughy-looking substance wound around it.
Plastique. Some things just never change.
She said, "How we gonna do it?"
J.B. nodded at the door.
"Blow it. Door doesn't quite fit. Opens outward, too. Makes it easier."
"Old Eagle-eye," said Hunaker to Koll.
J.B. smiled faintly. He did not mind being teased by people he trusted, and he trusted these people and knew that they trusted him and relied on him. That was all that mattered.
He stopped what he was doing — which was peeling back the inner sole of her boot to reveal a hollow cavity, long and narrow, carved out of the specially built-up thick-soled footwear — and gazed around the room.
As he understood it, this lower level of the bank building had once contained the main vault and safe-deposit rooms. In their stead, thick-walled cells had been erected, all with steel doors containing glassless but steel-barred viewing windows. The doors were not as thick as the walls but were solid enough, although the whole construction had been done by builders who had clearly skimped and saved, probably in a hurry, probably with Jordan Teague's goons cracking the whip over them.
This cell was an end room, one of a number in a long corridor that led back to the stairway. That was useful, being at the end of the passage, the farthest from the stairs. Nevertheless, sound carried. J.B. was going to have to be careful, was going to have to judge this one to a nicety, as accurately as possible.
The room was bare walled and bare floored, an oblong roughly one and a half times square. There was no furniture of any kind, no bunks, tables, chairs, anything. It was a cold concrete box, lit by a low-watt bulb high out of reach in the ceiling. The door was at one end of a long wall. That, too, was useful. It meant that when J.B. blew the door, none of them need be directly opposite it. It was good that the door opened outward, though lousy planning for what was supposed to be a secure cell. With a door that opened outward there was always the chance, during that brief time when the door was being opened and the opener was not sighting the entire cell, that the occupant might be able to jump his warder. But then, J.B. suspected, most of the prisoners held down here by Strasser's sec men would probably be in no fit state to jump a mouse.
He began picking out from his boot equipment what looked like tools for a dollhouse: match-stick detonators, plastic wafers no bigger than a fingernail, miniscule screws, a tiny screwdriver. He sat cross-legged and began humming softly and tunelessly to himself as he opened his brown leather jacket and slid down the lining with his thumbnail beside the zipper tracks on the left. Sewn inside the lining was a long leather pouch, very slightly fatter than the average cheroot. J.B. extracted and emptied it. The contents were long rods of cobweb-thin wire. He selected more bits and pieces from his other boot and settled down to work.
Hunaker stepped over to the door and peered at it.
"Hmm. See what you mean. We can stuff a hell of a lot of explosive down along here. Shit, in some places the door doesn't even touch the frame. Great workmanship!"
"Not too much explosive," said J.B., not looking up, his lean fingers dexterously coiling wire, fitting the tiny screws to the power pack he was creating. "Too much plastique, we get too much noise. Could damage us, too."
"Yeah," said Koll dryly, "and too little and all we get's a big spark and a fart and the door stays put."
Hunaker began to roll the plastic explosive into stringy tails between her hands. She held one piece up.
"Too fat?"
J.B. stared at it critically, looked at the door, made some mental calculations.
"Roll it some more, then slap it in."
When Hunaker started to stuff the material down the right-hand side of the door, thumbing it down, then along the lintel at the top, J.B. got up and jabbed a finger at a spot about halfway down the door.
"More in there. Three times what you have already. That's where the locking device is."
He went back to the center of the room, sat down cross-legged again and continued his construction work. There was a long silence while Koll tossed plastique from his own boots to Hunaker and Hunaker molded the doughy substance around the match-stick detonators, squashing the strips into cracks and crevices, lacing it around the doorframe, all the time trying to avoid Sam's sight line to the corridor outside.
"What d'you reckon about Ryan?" she said suddenly.
J.B. bit a filament of wire in two. He didn't look up.
"What about him?"
"He blew out up there."
"It happens." The wiry little man's tone was unconcerned.
"You think he's got the hots for the Wroth woman?"
"Probably."
"You think we'll see him again?"
"Knowing Ryan, yeah."
"He's been in a few tight ones, hasn't he? I mean, with you and all."
"That he has."
"Y'know where he came from originally?"
"Out east, I think."
Hunaker said, "I think'? How long have you known Ryan? Must be ten years at least. And you don't even know where his kin are? I bet you don't even know his other name."
"Is this some kind of precombat intelligen
ce test?" Koll said with a frown. He was replacing strips of unwanted plastique in his boots.
"Well?" said Hunaker. "Do you?"
"No."
"Does anyone?"
"Trader, maybe."
"Rumor is, he was a Runner from somewhere."
"Only muties are Runners," said Koll knowledgeably. "Muties and blacks and yallers and a few other colors, depending on where they're running from. If Ryan's a mutie, he keeps it close to his chest."
"I didn't say he was a mutie. I don't believe he is a mutie."
"Can't tell these days," said Koll. "What's the big interest in Ryan all of a sudden, anyhow?"
"I felt sorry for him."
"Feel sorry for Strasser," said J.B. "Otherwise, shut it."
In front of him, as though magicked there, was a tiny sliver of plastique on which was a spiderweb cross-hatching of fine wire connected to a couple of chip housings, plus a keying device about the size of a quarter thumbnail. J.B. stared at it, his thin lips very slightly curved.
"Christ, J.B.," said Koll, lacing up his boots, "you look almost cheerful."
"The miracles of pre-Nuke science," said J.B.
"You sure it'll work?"
J.B. stared at him blankly, then wrinkled his brow.
"Is that a joke?" He sounded genuinely puzzled.
"Uh... no, J.B." Then Koll said hurriedly, "I mean, yeah." He tittered nervously.
"They were very sophisticated in the 1990s," said J.B. seriously. "This is a neat little number. The detonators are tuned to it. All I have to do is build it, key it, blow it." He coughed, said vaguely, "I did throw in a couple of extras..."
He began packing away his bits and pieces, pulled on and laced up his boots and got to his feet. He said, suddenly brisk, "Here it is. I want two guys down here, at least. That gives us two auto-rifles plus any handguns they have. Could make do with one, but pray for two. They gotta be looking through the window. Doesn't matter if they don't come in. Don't want 'em in. Just need 'em looking for a couple of sec men and we got 'em. After that we move fast. If we can reach street level we've got a chance." He pointed at Hunaker. "You and me first. Grab the pieces and go." He turned to the other two. "Pick over the bodies. Spare mags, grenades, knives — anything."
