becoming bored.' His voice suddenly chilled. 'Stand up! You have yet to finish your-ah-course of instruction.'
'Course? Instruction?' Pitts words came blurred, semi-intelligibly through his bloated, broken lips. 'I don't get what you mean-' Rondheim answered by lifting his heel and jamming it in Pitts groin. Pitts whole body shuddered and he groaned, the agony tearing him apart.
Rondheim spat on him. 'I said stand up!'
'I. I can't.'
And then Rondheim leaned down and struck Pitt with a shuto blow to the back of the neck. There was no fighting it, no faking it this time: Pitt blacked out for real.
'Bring him around again!' Rondheim yelled insanely. 'I want him on his feet.'
The guards stared uncomprehendingly; even they were beginning to tire of Rondheim's bloody game. But they had little choice except to work over Pitt like a couple of trainers over a punchdrunk boxer until he emitted the barest signs of consciousness. It didn't take a medical specialist to determine that Pitt could have never stood unaided. So the guards, each with one arm, held Pitt up, his body sagging between them with the dead weight of a wet bag of Portland cement.
Rondheim pounded the defenseless battered body until his gi was soaked through with sweat, the front splotched with blood.
Pitt, in those tortured moments between light and darkness, found himself losing his grip of any emotion, of all intelligence; even the pain was beginning to fade into one massive dull throb. Thank God for the brandy, he thought. He'd never have been able to survive up to this point, taking so much brutality from Rondheim's hands without reacting, if it hadn't been for the alcohol's numbing effects. Now he didn't need it. His physical resources were nearly gone, his mind was slipping from control, losing contact with reality, and the most terrible part was that he could do nothing about it.
Rondheim threw a particularly vicious and accurately aimed kick to Pitts stomach. As the light passed from Pitts eyes for the sixth time and the guards released their grip, letting his limp body drop to the mat, the sadistic lust on Rondheim's face slowly faded. He stared vacantly at his bloody and swollen knuckles, his chest heaving as his breath came in quick pants from the exertion. He dropped to his knees, grabbed Pitt by the hair, turning the head so that the throat was exposed, and then he lifted his right hand, palm open, in preparation to deliver the finishing stroke, the coup de grdce, a killing judo chop that would snap Pitts head backward, breaking his neck.
'No!'
Rondheim kept the hand poised, and slowly turned. Kirsti Fyrie stood in the doorway, a look of fear and horror on her face. 'No,' she said, 'please… no! You can't!'
Rondheim kept the hand poised. 'What does he mean to you?'
'Nothing; but he is a human being and deserves better. You are cruel and ruthless, Oskar. Not altogether unbecoming qualities in a man. But they should be tempered with courage. Beating a defenseless and half-dead man is little different from torturing a helpless child. There is no courage in that. You disappoint me.'
Rondheim's hand slowly dropped. He rose, swaying tiredly, and staggered to Kirsti. Tearing the clothing from the upper part of her body, he slapped her viciously across the breasts. 'You warped whore, 9 he grasped. 'I warned you never to interfere. You who have no right to criticize me or anyone else. It's easy for you to sit by on your pretty ass and watch while I do the dirty work.'
She lifted a hand to strike him, her beautiful features contorted in hatred and anger. He caught her wrist and held it, twisting until she uttered a cry.
'The basic difference between a man and a woman, my dove, is physical strength.' He laughed at her helplessness. 'You seem to have forgotten that.'
Rondheim roughly pushed her out the door and turned to the guards. 'Throw that queer bastard in with the others,' he ordered. 'if he is fortunate and opens his eyes once more, he can have the satisfaction of knowing he died among friends.'
Chapter 16
Somewhere in the black pit of unconsciousness Pitt began to see light. It was vague, dim like the bulb of a flashlight whose batteries were gasping out their last breath of energy. He struggled toward it. Desperately he reached out, once, twice, making several agonizing attempts to touch the yellow glow he knew was his window to the conscious world outside his mind. But each time he thought it was within his grasp, it moved further away and he knew he was slipping backward into the void of nothingness once more. Dead, he thought vaguely, I'm dead.
Then he became aware of another force, a sensation that shouldn't have been there. It was coming through the void, becoming stronger, more intensified with each passing moment. Then he had it, and he knew he was still among the living. Pain, glorious, tormenting pain. It burst upon him in one crushing, agonizing wave, and he moaned.
'Oh, thank you, God! Thank you for bringing him back!' The voice, it sounded miles away. He pushed his mind into second gear and then it came again.
'Dirk! It's Tidi!' There was a second's silence, a second in which Pitt became increasingly aware of the brightening light and the stinging smell of pure, fresh air and a soft arm tenderly cradled around his head. His vision was blurred and distorted; he could vaguely distinguish a dim form leaning over him. He tried to speak but could do no more than groan, mumble a few incoherent words and stare at the shadowy figure above.
'It seems our Major Pitt is about to be reborn.'
Pitt could barely make out the words. The voice wasn't from Tidi's lips, that much he was certain; the tone was too deep, too masculine.
'They worked him over pretty thoroughly,' said the unidentified voice. 'Better he'd died without rezonaining consciousness. Judging from the looks of things, none of us will live to see-'
'He'll make it.' It was Tidi again. 'He's got to he's just got to. Dirk is our only hope.'
'Hope… Hope?' Pitt whispered. 'Dated a girl named Hope once.'
The agony in his side stabbed and twisted like white-hot iron, but strangely his face felt nothing; the tortured flesh was numb. Then he knew why, knew why he saw only shadows. His sight, or at least thirty percent of it, returned as Tidi lifted a piece of thin damp fabric, the nylon of her pantyhose, from his face. Pitts torn and swollen features felt nothing because Tidi had been constantly soaking the cuts and bruises in ice water from a nearby mud puddle to relieve the intense swelling.
The mere fact that Pitt could see anything at all through the tiny slits around his bloated eyes attested to her successful efforts.
Pitt focused his eyes with difficulty. Tidi was gazing down at him, her long fawn-colored hair framing a pale and anxious face. Then the other voice spoke and the tone was no longer strange.
'Did you get the license number of the truck, Major: Or was it a bulldozer that mashed your already ugly profile?'
Pitt turned his head and looked into the smiling, but tight-muscled face of Jerome P. Lillie. 'Would you believe a giant with muscles like tree trunks?'
'I suppose,' Lillie said expectantly, 'your next words will be-if you think I look bad, you should see the other guy.'
'You'd be disappointed. I didn't lay so much as a fingertip on him.'
'You didn't fight back?'
'I didn't fight back.'
Lillie showed pure astonishment. 'You stood there and took… took this terrible beating and did nothing?'
'Oh, will you two shut up!' Tidi's voice held a mixture of irritation and distress. 'If any of us are to survive, we must get Dirk on his feet. We can't just sit here and gossip.'
Pitt pulled himself to a sitting position and gazed in agony through a red haze of pain as his broken rib cried in protest. The unthinking sudden movement made his side feel as if someone had squeezed his chest between a giant pair of pliers and twisted. Carefully, gently, he eased himself forward until he could see around him.
The sight that met his eyes looked like something out of a nightmare. For a long moment he stared at the
