Pilgrimage to Hell

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