“Delta Six, this is Halfback, I’m taking heavy fire from the front.”
“Halfback, get your second assault team up to the initial point.”
“Ready to go, sir. Shit, the gunships are both down, that one guy, he’s still burning. The fire is heavy.”
“Are your people still advancing?”
“We’ve got a lot of fire going out, sir.”
“But your team, is it still advancing or is it hung up?”
“I don’t see much movement out there, but there’s a lot of fire. There’s smoke, dust, snow, whatever, I can’t see through it. Should I send my backup yet?”
“Not unless you’re convinced your first wave has completely lost it.”
“Well, there’s fire. Where’s that stuff on the left? Where’s Bravo? Where the hell is Bravo? Jesus, Bravo, if you don’t help us, we’re going to get butchered and nobody’s getting any closer to that hole than they are now.”
The blade touched his throat; he felt it begin to cut then halt.
He felt the sinewy muscles so tight against him ease just a notch; then, swift and silent as his stalker had pounced on him, he was gone. The weight left Walls’s back; rolling over, his fingers flying involuntarily to the break in his skin where the blade had begun to slice open his throat, he found himself staring into the mad eyes of his own death, which this time had by luck decided not to occur.
“Jesus, lady, you scared the shit out of me.”
The Vietnamese woman looked at him sullenly. God, how could such a scrawny creature be so strong? Baby, you had my ass cold. Fifteen years ago you get me like that and my ticket be punched forever and ever.
He rubbed his neck, which was wet with a trickle of blood.
“I figure you come up the tunnels same as me. Then you run into one of them pipes for the rocket blast, right? You follow it, and you end up in here with me, is that right, girl? Sure it is. No other way it could be. Then, when you hear me coming, you crawl up inside there—” He pointed to the big cupola of the rocket exhaust port. He shivered, thinking of her curled up in there, like a cat actually inside the thing. “Shit, you look like you been through worse hell than me.”
She was smeared with mud and blood; her face was filthy. She had a crazed look in her dark eyes and her hand kept tightening and loosening on the haft of the big knife. One of her trouser legs was ripped out. A terrible gash had left a cascade of dried blood down one arm; the cut itself had turned black and glistening. Whoever said their faces were blank? He was wrong, whoever he was, because Walls now looked hard at the thing he had all those years ago taught himself was flat and dull and yellow and saw the same play of emotions he’d seen on any face: fear, anger, pride, a big charge of guts, maybe more than a little grief.
“They jump you? Where your partner be at? You know, Stretch. That tall white dude. Where he be at?”
She shook her head.
He laughed. “He didn’t make it? My boy Witherspoon didn’t make it neither. Well, sugar, just you and me, we’s all there is, us old-time rats. Nobody else coming.” He stood, picking up his shotgun.
“Okay, lady,” he said. “Now, I figure on climbing up this ladder to that little door. You see it? Way up there? Then, maybe somehow we get through the door. ’Cause the one thing I know, we don’t want to be sitting next to this big cocksucker”—he looked at the missile—“in case it gets lit off. Burn us to shit. You coming or you staying? Best if you come.”
She looked at him, her dark eyes crazily boring into his.
Shit, she don’t even understand what this is. This is just another tunnel to her, except that now it’s some shit with a rocketship.
“Come on,” he crooned. “Take it from me, you don’t want to be down here if this sucker go. Fire come out of the hole, burn you all up like napalm.”
He began to climb up the rungs. He climbed, looking up, watching the manhole cover of the silo hatch. He wouldn’t look down because it was too far, and Walls, the tunnel champion, was afraid of heights. He climbed and climbed until he was woozy. Seven fucking stories. It was high!
He finally reached the door. It was blank and solid. Hanging groggily on the rungs, he touched it, and it had no spring or give. It was another door, the door of his life.
FUCK NIGGERS wasn’t scratched into it, but it could have been, for that was its message. Like any door he’d ever faced, it only said, You ain’t going nowhere. You ain’t invited.
His hand made a fist and he smashed it, stupidly. His hand crunched in pain.
So this was it, huh? This was the cocksucker. Another door.
Walls thought he might laugh. All this way, and he just run up against FUC—
He heard a noise, looked down to see the little Vietnamese woman beneath him a few rungs.
“That’s good, mama-san,” he said. “Good you came along, but there’s no place to go.”
She reached up and tapped his foot, then pointed.
Well, well, hello yourself. Yes, it was another small door or hatch or something, maybe two feet by two feet, covered with metal gridwork. The thing was about five feet farther around the curve of the silo wall. It looked like the entrance to a duct or a vent or the air-conditioning. But it didn’t matter.
“It’s too far,” he yelled. “I can’t reach that far.”
But with her gestures she made him see that she wanted to come up.
The bitch going to try. Don’t she know? Can’t get in. Nothing to it now. All she wrote, end of story, the man he had them beat.
But up she came, like a cat, Jesus, she was so strong. He slid over on the rungs, and up she scrambled, until they shared the same precarious upper rung. She pointed and made interesting facial explanations and ultimately it occurred to him that she was proposing to go over to the little door.
He saw now what she meant. He was strong, she was light. If he could just hold her, somehow, maybe she ought to be able to bridge the gap.
Dumb bitch, don’t know when the man got you beat.
“Sure, hon. You just go on. Nathan hold you.”
He tried to turn sideways on the rung beneath, planting one foot real solid; with his arm he embraced the top rung.
Backward, she mounted him, feeling back with one strong supple foot, planting it on his thigh, then with her arm hoisting herself, and planting her other foot while he embraced her around the waist with his arm.
She was light, just bones and strings and skin and short black hair, but she wasn’t that light either, and there was a terrible instant when he couldn’t get set just right as her weight threw him off, and he thought he was losing her. He could feel her tighten, shriek a little, and scream or curse in her language, but in just a second he had her back under control.
“Okay, okay, we be okay, just cool on down, just chill it on down, sugar baby, now,” he moaned through his own pounding breath. He knew whatever he did he couldn’t look down: it was delicate, their position, the two of them supported on the slippery purchase of his one boot on the rung, his other out to balance them, her whole body leaning on his thighbone and the slipperiness of his muscle there.
It wasn’t going to work, goddammit!
But out she strained, out, so far, Jesus, she had guts, and he clung desperately to her waist, feeling it slide against his grip as she leaned ever out for the grid on the little door.
He could hardly see what was going on, just her back ahead of him, inching away from him, and he could feel the great pressure against his forearm, holding her in, and also the great pressure in his other arm, keeping them moored to the top rung. He could feel the sweat pop out of his hairline and begin to trace little patterns down his face. He thought his muscles would cramp; his heart was thudding; he couldn’t get breath and his limbs began to shiver and tremble against the strength that threatened to desert them totally. He heard what sounded like pinging or chipping and realized that she’d gotten her knife out and into the frame of the little door and was trying somehow to jimmy the goddamned thing open and—