suppress what would have been paralyzing agony as the bones of his foot and leg splintered and ground against one another.
It took fifteen minutes for Sidewalk Steve to kick down the door, which was in fact made of steel, but was fortunately hollow. When, finally, it buckled on its hinges, Sidewalk Steve’s leg also buckled—or, rather, snapped just below the knee—but as he fell to the floor Chandler managed to switch the image in the vagrant’s brain: he was a werewolf now. The full moon was shining down on him through a skylight, causing him to transform into his half-human, half-lupine state.
On all fours, Sidewalk Steve crawled from his cell. He sniffed at the locked door next to his, smelled the imprisoned damsel on the far side of the wall. He hoped his strange appearance wouldn’t frighten the poor maiden out of her wits.
He didn’t want to admit it, but his leg hurt. Well, heroes felt pain too, but they kept going anyway. That’s what made them heroes.
Nevertheless, he trotted down the hall in the opposite direction. No need to kick down a second door if he could find a key.
The hall spilled onto a large open space crowded with tables piled high with lab equipment. He went from table to table until he found a set of keys that he picked up in his mouth, then galloped back to the other locked cell. Once there, he realized he needed a hand again, to open the door. As he transitioned back to his human shape the pain in his leg hit him. He wobbled, spots danced in front of his eyes, his spasming fingers dropped the keys.
It took both hands to lift the key chain, and they were shaking so badly that it took a dozen tries before he managed to slip the right key into the lock. It turned. He pushed.
The door fell open and Sidewalk Steve collapsed on the floor. Chandler could just see the man’s ruined right leg, the foot trailing off the ankle like a fish on a line.
The LSD was almost completely out of his system now, but he was still strapped to the table. If he couldn’t get Steve to free him, all of the pain he’d inflicted on the vagrant would have been for nothing.
“Steve, please. You have to get up. You have to untie me.”
On the floor, Steve moaned.
Chandler gathered his energy. He had seen the damsel in Steve’s mind—a gypsy-looking girl with ridiculously large breasts bursting from her ludicrously low-cut blouse—but he didn’t have the energy to sift for something more believable. He pushed. The walls melted into a mountainous vista, the hospital bed faded away, replaced by railroad tracks.
“Hurry, Steve!” the gypsy girl pleaded. “The train is coming!”
Steve lifted his head. When he’d pushed open the door, an image of the fire demon who’d attacked him earlier had floated before his eyes, but it was gone now. The damsel—a very masculine-looking damsel, with a jaw like Steve McQueen’s—lay trussed on a pair of gleaming railroad tracks. He couldn’t see the train but felt its rumble in the ground. He didn’t have the strength to move, but he had to find it. Had to save her, even if she wasn’t quite as pretty as he’d first thought. It was still his duty. His purpose in life.
He pulled himself up with his hands. Each moment was an agony. Spastic fingers pulled ineffectually at the ropes.
“Hurry, Steve!” the damsel called in her curiously deep voice. “Don’t give up!”
But he could only free one of her hands. He looked up to see the train barreling down on them, then slumped atop the damsel’s unfortunately flat chest. At least she wouldn’t die alone.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered, just as the train ripped through their bodies.
It took another ten minutes for Chandler to work himself free from the table. In the course of searching the factory-turned-laboratory, he found a bottle of morphine, and he shot ten ccs into Sidewalk Steve’s arm in the hopes that it would keep him unconscious. He also found an ampoule of LSD, which he pocketed.
Melchior and the doctor might well kill Steve if Chandler left him here, so he hitched his hands under the unconscious man’s arms and dragged him toward the door. For a big guy, he didn’t weigh nearly as much as Chandler expected—and, as well, he, Chandler, wasn’t nearly as tired as he thought he’d be after four days on his back. He suspected his freshness was somehow related to the changes LSD had wrought in him, but he wasn’t sure how. After all, increased physical constitution and the ability to project images into other people’s minds didn’t seem to be related, unless there was some kind of physiological connection he didn’t know about. It would have been fascinating to investigate, if it wasn’t his own mind he was contemplating, his own body.
He lowered Sidewalk Steve to the floor to unlock the outer door and push it open. He’d just bent over again when something caught him in the small of the back. He heard it, actually, just before it struck, but couldn’t dodge fast enough to avoid the blow. A sharp pain erupted in his lumbar spine, needles of pain strobed up and down his legs, and he fell head-to-feet on top of Sidewalk Steve. He had the presence of mind to roll, though, and the next blow—a baseball bat, he saw now—slammed into Sidewalk Steve’s stomach. The homeless man was so drugged up that he barely flinched, but Chandler didn’t have time to worry about him. His legs, still tingling from the blow to his spine, were sluggish as he pushed himself backward, but with each inch he felt the pain recede. The whole time his eyes never wavered from his batwielding assailant. A short Spanish fellow, with shoulders like softballs beneath his tight jacket. Chandler pushed at the guard’s mind, but there was nothing: his reserves had been depleted, and, as well, he guessed that the guard had been dosed with Thorazine like the doctor, because Chandler didn’t even sense the man’s mind. This would have to be a physical fight. One on one—no, one on two, he saw, as a second guard, armed with a length of iron pipe, stepped into the door behind the first.
All this had taken a second, perhaps two. Now, as the thugs advanced toward him, Chandler held up his hands.
“I don’t want to hurt you.”
He was still sitting on the floor when he spoke, and all the two men did was look at each other and laugh.
“We was told that if you managed to get out, we could do everything short of killing you,” the guard with the bat said.
“Three days we been hanging around,” the second guard threw in, smacking his pipe against his palm, “just waiting to have a little fun.”
“Please,” Chandler said, looking around for something to use as a weapon. “You know this isn’t right.”
The room was filled with broken-down factory machinery too big to move, let alone use as a weapon, but here
