talk about for a hundred years.”
“We’ll win it for you and the general, sir,” said one of the boys.
The major went over to the ruins of the launch control facility, and plucked a telephone off one of the standing walls.
The general answered.
“Sir, no sign yet of an assault. I expect it within the hour, however. They’ve brought in helicopters and a fleet of trucks. But we’ll be ready for them.”
“Good, Alex. I’m counting on you.”
“How are things down there, sir.”
“Oh, we’re making progress. It goes slowly, but it goes. The flame is bright and hot.”
“We’ll hold until they have us all.”
“You buy me the time I need, Alex. And I’ll buy you the future you want.”
1200
Walls stared at the door. The door was the worst part of it. There had been other doors, of course, and maybe were still doors to come for him. But this was the motherfucker of all doors. Massive, green, and iron, it looked about a million years old. Its hinges were rusty, and scabby little patches stood out where the years had beaten against it. And someone had scratched two words that Walls recognized onto it in crude, desperate letters a foot high: FUCK NIGGERS it said, and as Walls saw it, that’s just what the door did.
Walls lay back. He’d go crazy in here soon enough, and then they’d let him go, and he’d get killed.
Yeah: FUCK NIGGERS, that was it all right.
He tried to think of nothingness to rush the time along. It didn’t work. He and the door, they were all that was. He had faced that, because he was by nature a specialist in reality. And his of the moment happened to consist of green walls close around him, and the pot for him to piss in, and the scungy collection of dried snot under his cot, and some faggot’s suggestions carved into the walls. And the door. That was it, really, the mighty iron door, with its pins and bolts and massive hinges that sealed him off, and said FUCK NIGGERS.
“Hey, boy.”
It was the Pig Watson, calling in from the peephole.
“Hey, boy, get your black ass up, or I give you over to the Aryans, and they turn you into a bone harmonica.”
The Pig Watson unlocked the door with the clank of metal on metal, hauled the sucker back, and entered. It was such an easy thing to do if you had a key. Watson was about six four, with acne, his white gut hanging over his wide black belt like a pillowcase full of lead shot. He was basic cracker white, with an art museum of tattoos cut into the skin of his fat arms and his knuckles saying LOVE and HATE. He had two pig eyes and a little pig nose. He carried a nightstick and could expertly dial long distance information on your skull.
“What you doin, boy?”
“I was praying,” lied Walls, a gifted liar.
“Don’t make me laugh, boy. Yer fuckin’ prayers already been answered when you got an extra six weeks solitary before the Aryans get their paws on you.”
And so they had been. An Aryan named Hard Papa Pinkham had taken an intense liking to the contours of Walls’s rear end and one night in the showers with three of his biker pals had decided to possess it. It was a short- lived triumph, however; Walls caught him in the corridor between wings with a straight razor and made certain Hard Papa would never again have his way in the showers. So much blood. Who would have thought there was so much blood in a dick?
The Aryans were not pleased and had sworn to make Walls sing an equally high falsetto.
“Some shot wants to see you, boy,” said the Pig Watson. “Now, you go and be quick or you answer to me. This way.”
And so they took Walls from his solitary cell in the B Wing and marched him through the main hall to the cells of the Aryans, the best-organized gang in the Maryland penitentiary. The Aryans had heroin and porn and barbs; they had murder and protection and laundry; they had shivs and thumpers and knuckles. They ran the place.
“Hey, mo-fo, your ass gonna be fuckin’ worms for sure,” one of them informed him.
“Nigger, you one dead piece of Spam,” another decreed.
“Jive, you on the hook,” said another.
“You a real popular little songun,” said the Pig with a gleeful laugh on his face. “You know, they got a pool going how long your ass going to last once you sprung from the tomb.”
“Be round long time,” said Walls insolently. “Longer than your fat white ass.”
The Pig thought this was hysterical.
“Dead guys with smart mouths, I love it,” he chuckled.
They checked through Processing — Walls was roughly searched, but his knife had been lodged elsewhere for safekeeping — and he was removed from the main cell block to the warden’s office, where he was ushered by the Pig Watson into a roomful of suits. And there were also two soldier boys. The warden signaled Watson out of the office and he closed the door behind him.
“And here he is,” said the warden, “our favorite parishioner, House Guest No. 45667. How are you, Nathan?”
Walls just looked at the white faces which always had for him the look of balloons, smooth and fat and full of gas.
“Specialist four Nathan Walls, goddamn,” said the soldier boy, some kind of super sergeant with all kinds of stripes running up and down his arm. “Jesus, what a crime, a guy like you ending up in a place like this. I checked the records. Man, you were a
Walls just put his sullen face on and didn’t say anything. He made his eyes see infinity.
“This hero,” explained the warden, “was known on the streets as Dr. P. P for, excuse my French, pussy. He had nine girls working for him, all of them beauties. He also specialized in angel dust, uppers, downers, grass, Mexican mud, and just about everything chemical designed to screw up the inside of the human head. To say nothing of two or three assaults with intent, and no end of muggings, breaking and enterings, and felonious assaults various and sundry. But none of it was Nate’s fault. It was Vietnam’s fault, right, Nate?”
Walls flexed his strong hands and made his face as empty as a bucket with a hole in it. He would not let them get into his head. He was done with that.
“You were also,” said soldier boy, “the best tunnel rat 25th Infantry ever had. Let’s see, three Hearts, Silver Star, two bronzes. Jesus, you had yourself quite a war down in those holes.”
Walls’s military exploits had very little meaning to him. He’d put all that far away in the deepest part of his head, and anyhow, a tunnel was just a street with a roof on it.
“Mr. Walls, we’re in a mess,” said the officer, some kind of stern bird colonel. “And we need a man to help us out of it. At 0700 today, some kind of military unit seized a national security installation out in western Maryland. A very crucial installation. Now, it happens that the only way into this installation may involve a long, dangerous passage in a tunnel. Very scary work. We need a man who’s fought in tunnels before to take a team through that tunnel. A tunnel rat. And we need him fast. You’re the only one we could find in our timeframe. What do you say?”
Walls didn’t even have to think about it. His laugh was rich and merry. “It don’t have nothing to do with me. I’m all done with that shit,” he said. “I just want to be left alone.”
“Oh, I see,” said the suit. “Now, Mr. Walls, may I tell you that I believe you’re not going to be left alone. In about twenty hours from now the idea of being ‘left alone’ is going to lose its meaning.”
Walls just looked at him.
“Yes, well, what you’re going to notice is the warhead of a Soviet SS-18 detonating at about four thousand feet over downtown Baltimore in a fused airburst for maximum destructive potential. That is, about four thousand feet over our heads as we speak today. We figure the throw weight of an 18 to be about fifteen megatons. Now,
