Klein knew Abbott was down.
In his mind’s eye he saw the Bloods, ten to one, swarming over Abbott, puncturing him with screwdrivers and shanks. Down below he heard a scuffling and panting and the sounds of combat grew muffled.
There was someone in the tube with him.
Klein’s first thought was to shit in his face. That would have been easy. His weight was braced across the narrow walls between his back and arms, his soles against the bricks lower down. He pulled one hand free and pulled out the torch. He yelled as a sharp pain pierced his ankle. Another, jagging agonisingly into the bone. He snapped the light on. Beyond his feet a young black face screwed itself up in the dazzling beam. The guy had a shiv and was sticking it into Klein’s left leg. Klein thought: the gun. Blow his fucking face off. But with the torch in one hand he couldn’t let go with the other. The guy raised the shiv to stab him again. Klein pulled the foot away. His heel bumped into the cement bag. On an impulse he pushed the bag with the flashlight, rotating it to face downwards. The guy below opened his eyes and squinted for a target. Klein got his foot to the bag and stomped downwards. The bag shot down the tube and exploded a cloud of grey powder into the guy’s eyes and mouth and nostrils. The face disappeared. A bank of dust drifted towards Klein. He coughed, wheezed. The guy beneath him was squirming and choking in panic. Suddenly the guy was yanked down with a strangled wail, his fingertips clawing the bricks. The bore of the tube opened again. The guy clung to the edge, his face ghostly with dust, blinded and terrified. A ball-peen hammer clenched in a huge blood-stained fist rose and fell.
‘Four!’
The young guy lay slumped motionless over the rim of the tube. After a moment a red web trickled down the powdered cheeks from the shattered vault of his skull.
Klein shoved the head of the torch, still lit, into his pants. Through the cheap cotton the beam cast a faint, comforting light. Klein went back to his shunting ascent of the tube. The sounds of combat grew dim and as Klein got into a rhythm his technique got better. With each shove of hands and feet he reckoned he made nine inches. His mind flitted to the Robbie Burns poem ‘Nine Inch Will Please A Lady’. Even in that stinking tunnel he couldn’t help smiling. Devlin would have to be happy with somewhat less than that. Especially after he’d taken all this trouble to deliver it. He killed time calculating nine inches into ninety feet. There was ninety times nine, then ninety times three inches left which was thirty times nine, a total of one hundred and twenty shoves. He couldn’t help cross-referencing the implications of this statistic to Robbie Burns’s lady. A hundred and twenty full-blooded strokes, call it a hundred and thirty, and the lady would have enjoyed ninety feet of cock. Klein chortled to himself with a touch of hysteria. Better than submitting to the panic-stricken claustrophobia that he knew simmered in his gut. He kept on pushing. So this is how a spermatozoon feels, he thought, fighting its way along the fallopian tube. And that bastard Galindez was there before him. And if this was a fallopian tube the prison was a cunt and uterus. Someone had to have been fucked for him to get here. He thought of his ex-lover, now dead, and the amusing metaphor turned sour on him. He noticed that the heels of his palms were bleeding. He stopped and rubbed them with cement dust from the heap on his belly. The palms didn’t hurt, nor the punctures in his ankle and calf. Too much adrenaline zipping round his system. He carried on shoving. His shirt tore open and the skin started to come off his back over the spine. His breathing got raw and laboured. The sounds of the fight, if it were still in progress, were now far below him. All he could hear was the splutter and wheeze of his own panting bouncing back from the walls into his ears. He realised he had a raging thirst and with that realisation it promptly got worse. He hadn’t had a drink since leaving D and had been sweating his balls off ever since. Cramps started in his calves, his forearms, his ribs. His triceps and pecs burned with fatigue. He began taking five-second rests between each lift. It helped. If he lost his footing and started to slide down he couldn’t see how he’d be able to stop himself. Think about the lady instead, he told himself, think about the lady.
Klein felt a breeze on the back of his neck.
Breeze was perhaps too strong a word. He felt a brush of air slightly less foetid than that he had become used to breathing. He stopped, braced himself and bent his head backwards.
‘Galindez!’
A few seconds later a hollow, distorted voice reached him, surprisingly loud – maybe even close.
‘Where the fuck you been, Klein? You been giving Abbott a blow job while I wasn’t watchin’?’
‘You spic cocksucker,’ bellowed Klein. He experienced a sudden elation. ‘I’ve been savin’ my jissom for you.’
He laughed crazily and his foot slipped off the wall. His ass started to move. His other foot juddered down the bricks. His guts were already back at the bottom of the tube. His fingernails popped off as he clawed for a hold. Suddenly he was enraged.
‘Fuck,’ he roared.
With all his strength he crammed his shoulder and back into the wall, pushing with one raw hand. He slowed and stopped. He got the soles of his feet back in place. When he felt secure he took some deep breaths.
‘You okay, Klein?’
‘Fuck you.’
He dusted his hands a last time and started again with angry shoves. A dozen shoves later he felt Galindez’s hand grabbing his sodden shirt collar. Klein got his hands over the edge of the hole and hauled himself up and out, and sat on the edge with his head on his chest, eyes closed, gasping. A tremor of intense weakness swept through him and then was gone, leaving him merely exhausted. He clambered to his feet and pulled out the flashlight. They were in a brick-lined culvert. The floor sloped from all sides into the tube they’d just crawled up. From the walls a number of pipes at different heights opened out onto the sloping gully, ready to gush forth a torrent of infected waste the next time someone flushed a toilet. A series of steel rungs bolted to one wall led up to a manhole cover.
Klein glanced back down at the tube then looked at Galindez. ‘Glad that bit’s over,’ he said.
‘Me too, but I’ve seen worse.’
‘Oh yeah?’ Klein ground his teeth into a who-the-fuck-doyou-think-you-are-type smile. ‘How come everyone I meet in this fucking place has always had a worse time of things than I have? Every fucking one. This is the worst day of my fucking life. No one I ever knew in the world had a day this bad. But no, I got to end up in a fucking toilet with a guy – a fucking screw, mind you – who’s seen worse. Goddamn if that doesn’t make me feel like an asshole.’
The speech somehow made Klein feel like a million dollars. He smiled again.
‘I’m sorry you feel that way,’ said Galindez. ‘What about Crawford, or Bialmann? They’re not doing hard time.’
‘Bialmann is dead and Crawford, if he survives, is going to lose his leg.’
‘Hmm. Can’t think of nobody else. That must make you the most fortunate guy in the whole joint. You even got your parole.’
‘Yeah,’ said Klein. ‘I even got my parole.’
He shone the torch onto the rungs of the ladder.
‘After you,’ said Klein.
Galindez climbed up towards the manhole. At the top he pushed off the iron cover. Blackness gaped beyond. He crawled into the blackness and disappeared. Klein looked back at the tube and sent a prayer down for Abbott. Then he climbed the ladder and stuck his head through the manhole. And it occurred to Klein for the first time that they’d made it.
They were in the infirmary.
TWENTY-EIGHT
REUBEN WILSON TURNED from the peep slot in the steel plate door and called over his shoulder to Devlin.
‘They’re through the gate,’ he said.
Devlin was rolling an oxygen cylinder on its end through the wooden doorway. As she manoeuvred it down the corridor she looked up and saw a giggling, one-eyed face dart up to the peep slot.
‘Look out!’ she said.
A shower of corrosive liquid scattered
through the slot. Wilson’s reflexes were quick enough to protect his eyes but the liquid drenched the side of his face and neck. He slammed the slot shut, cutting off the giggles on the other side.
‘Shit, man,’ said Wilson. He looked around for something to wipe his skin.
‘Go and run water over it, lots of it, now,’ she said. ‘The dispensary.’
Wilson rushed past her as the pain began to bite him. Devlin lowered the cylinder to the floor a few feet from the steel door. As she watched a grey-blue spot appeared in the steel plate a couple of inches from the lock. Grauerholz and his men had cut their way through the gate and were starting in on this the last really solid barrier left between them and the besieged inhabitants of the hospital. After this there was only the wooden door to protect them. Devlin put the thought behind her. The grey-blue spot expanded and grew paler. At the centre it started to glow red. A black, sputtering hole appeared, dripping blobs of molten metal that solidified in lumps as it cooled. She heard the high-pitched hiss of the oxyacetylene flame. Coley appeared behind her with a second oxygen cylinder. This one had a gauge screwed into the neck.
‘This one’s only half full,’ he said.
He started to unscrew the gauge. From the ward came a shattering of glass and a chorus of fearful shouts. She looked at him.
‘They using that girder shit to smash the windows in, keep us busy both ends.’
There was another crash from the ward. Coley threw the gauge on the floor and placed the cylinder alongside the first one. From his pocket he took a spanner key and fitted it to the neck of the cylinder.
‘You sure this’ll work?’ he said.
‘It’ll work,’ replied Devlin. ‘We might kill ourselves in the process but it will work. I need the key to your cupboard.’
Coley took out his ring of keys and unhooked one. He looked at it wistfully for a beat then handed it to Devlin. She could smell burning steel now. The hole in the door was an inch long.
‘Wait till I get back,’ she said.
On the way to the dispensary she made sure all the doors in the corridor, to the TV room, the bathrooms and the storerooms, were shut tight. In the dispensary Wilson was standing over the sink. His head dripped water but the tap wasn’t running.
‘I said lots of water,’ said Devlin.
‘We been cut off, remember? Only a pint left in there.’
‘Any idea what he threw?’ she said.
‘Smelt like battery acid. Feels like it too.’
Devlin found a bottle of sodium bicarb solution in a cupboard and broke the seal. There was a rash of blebs and vesicles down Wilson’s cheek, neck and shoulder. She sat him down and poured the solution over the affected area to neutralise the acid.
‘Painful?’ she said.
Wilson shrugged, ‘I’m okay.’
More sounds of destruction echoed from the ward. Vinnie Lopez staggered through the dispensary doorway. His eyes fell on the scalpels on the bench. He walked over and grabbed one. His eyes were bright with excitement.
‘How you doin’ man?’ he said to Wilson.
‘Pretty good,’ said Wilson.
Lopez raised the scalpel. ‘I jus’ want one, man. One of them big-bearded fuckers. They stick their fucken head through that window, fuck, it’s gone, man.’
‘I always told you go for more than you think you can get, Vinnie.’
Lopez hitched up his pants around his skeletal waist. ‘Both them bearded fuckers dead then.’
Lopez walked out. Devlin went over to the padlocked cupboard and opened it. She carefully took down Coley’s big bottle of ether and checked the label. (C2H5)2O. She carried it to the door. Wilson stood up and joined her.
‘Chemical warfare, eh, Doc?
‘You want to throw toilet rolls at them instead, go ahead.’
‘What is that shit?’
‘Ether. It’s an anaesthetic, distilled from sulphuric acid and alcohol if I remember.’
‘We gonna put ’em to sleep then?’
‘No. It’s very volatile, turns to gas on contact with air. Mixed with pure oxygen it makes an explosive combination.’
She looked down at the bottle again. She realised what an appalling thing it was that she was contemplating. When she’d learnt this stuff in med school it hadn’t been with this end in mind.
Wilson, reading her expression, said, ‘They could be throwin’ toilet rolls at us too, they wanted too. But they ain’t.’
Devlin nodded and said, ‘Let’s do it.’
In the corridor the flame of the cutting torch had two inches to go before it separated the lock from the door.
Devlin said to Coley, ‘Go ahead.’
At the far end Coley crouched down by the cylinders and twisted the spanner key, opening wide the neck of the first cylinder. A loud hissing drowned out the sound of the cutting torch. The burning metal at the door glowed a brighter orange. He fixed the spanner to the second bottle.
Devlin said, ‘They open the door away from us, right?’
‘Right,’ said Coley. He opened the second cylinder. Pure oxygen blasted out into the enclosed corridor.
Devlin said, ‘Go and wait for me. When I come out slam the door as fast as you can.’
‘Here they come,’ said Coley.
It was happening. The door was juddering as impatient hands heaved on the handle on the other side. The last half inch of steel spluttered and flared. Coley walked past Devlin and pushed the wooden door almost shut behind her. She was alone with the hissing cylinders and the juddering steel door. On the other side were men who would rape her and kill her friends. Remember that, she told herself. No one invited them. She hefted the bottle of ether above her head in both hands. It didn’t feel right. She changed to a shot-putter’s stance, the base of the bottle in her right palm against her shoulder. Better. Her stomach was knotted so tight she could hardly breathe. She glanced at the wooden door behind her which kept in the oxygen. It was still open a crack.
The steel door was wrenched open.
Devlin threw all her weight into the bottle, tossing it the length of the corridor, then blasted her ass and shoulder backwards into the wooden door. As the door swung open she lost her balance and started to fall.
Crouching in the open doorway at the other end a man holding a roaring welder’s torch stared at the brown glass bottle arcing towards him.
Arms grabbed Devlin from behind as she fell and dragged her across the threshold. As Wilson slammed the wooden door shut in front of her she caught a last glimpse of the ether bottle shattering against the oxygen cylinders.
There was a tremendous double explosion, one blurring into the other, the first a great thumping roar, the second higher pitched and sharper. The stout wooden door shuddered against its hinges with the shock wave. The blast was followed by a deafening silence. Coley hefted Devlin to her feet. She fought down a bolt of nausea.
‘Okay?’ said Coley.
She nodded, staring at the door. After a moment she said to Wilson, ‘Open it.’ Her voice was hoarse. Wilson pulled the door open.
The corridor between them and the far steel gate appeared scoured of life. The first explosion, of ether and oxygen, had detonated the oxyacetylene equipment and caused the second. Four corpses, scorched in an instant by combusting gases and torn apart by flying fragments of metal, lay in tangled heaps. A fifth man had been crushed against the cage door by the trolley which had carried the gas bottles, propelled into him by the blast.
Devlin felt her lips trembling. She put the back of her hand to her mouth. She felt the eyes of Coley and Wilson on her but didn’t look back. She was glad that Grauerholz and his crackers were dead. She was glad she’d slaughtered the bastards. And she didn’t want Wilson and Coley to see that in her face. She suddenly felt disgusted with herself and the gladness vanished. At least it was over, she thought. Now, without Grauerholz to egg them on, maybe the rest would give up. The steel door with its missing lock creaked forward a few inches. After a moment a ragged fig
ure crawled out from behind it into the corridor.
It was Grauerholz.
His skull was coated with frazzled tufts of burnt hair. His clothes were scorched against his skin. His right hand was missing. He stumbled to his feet and fell against the wall, smearing it with blood.
‘Hec!’
Horace and Bubba Tolson appeared at the far end of the hallway and gaped at the damage. They stepped cautiously through the gate and stepped over the bodies towards Grauerholz.
Wilson stepped up beside Devlin. ‘You crackers want some more we got plenty,’ he said.
Grauerholz slowly raised his head to look at them. His one eye seemed as bright as ever. He opened his mouth but no sound came out from his blistered lips. He tottered back a pace from the wall. Then he raised the bloody stump of his arm and pointed it straight at Devlin, staring obsessively into her eyes, and she knew that it wasn’t over after all and that he wouldn’t let the others give up until he was dead. The Tolsons took hold of Grauerholz with as much gentleness as they had between them and carried him away down the corridor.
‘That sucker’ll be back,’ said Wilson.
Devlin nodded. She walked down the corridor towards the bodies.
‘Where you going?’ said Wilson.
Coley already understood and was following her. Together they checked the five bodies. The man crushed at the gate and one of the others were unconscious but still alive. They dragged them back and Wilson locked the wooden door.
‘How long you reckon ’fore they come again?’ he said.
‘You oughta know these fuckers better ’n I do,’ growled Coley. ‘You tell me.’
‘Grauerholz is in shock,’ said Devlin, ‘and he’s burned and bleeding. Even he will need fixing up, something for the pain. Maybe he won’t be fit to come back at all.’