“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 hero. There’s a hundred men alive today because of you, Mr. Walls.”
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, what you’ll sense, Mr. Walls, is one second of incredible light. In the next nanosecond, Mr. Walls, your body will be vaporized into sheer energy. As will the bodies of everybody in the first circle of destruction, which will extend in a circumference of about three miles from the point of detonation. What’s that, warden, would you say, about a million and a half people?”
“Yes.”
“Yes, and in a wider circle — say, ten miles in diameter — there will be extraordinary blast damage and your usual run-of-the-mill trauma associated with high explosive. You know, Mr. Walls, you saw enough of it in Vietnam: third degree burns, severed limbs, blindness, deep lacerations and contusions, multiple fractures and concussions. I expect it will be worst on the kids trapped in the schools. There won’t be any parents around to do much good for them, so they’ll just have to do the best they can, and pray for an early death. Now, in a circle out to twenty miles you’ll have much less actual damage, but the deaths from radiation poisoning will begin within forty-eight hours. Horrible deaths. Deaths by vomiting, by dehydration, by nausea. Not a pretty picture. I’d say in this immediate area no less than three million dead by the end of the week. Now, Mr. Walls, you project that onto every major city in America and the Soviet Union and you’ll see that we’re talking about some severe consequences. A full nuclear exchange would involve the deaths of no less than five hundred million people. And, Mr. Walls, if we don’t get into that installation, that’s what’s going to happen.”
“If the white man blow his ass up, that’s his problem,” said Nathan Walls.