Morley laughed.
16.
It was dark out. That did not help.
Neither did the fact that I didn"t see them coming. I had no chance to get ready.
I put up a fight, though. I dented some heads good with the weighted oak head-buster I carry when I go out. I tossed one guy through the only gla.s.s window in the street. But I just never got rolling. I had no chance to use the tricks I had stashed up my sleeves.
Somebody whapped me up side the head with a house. I think it was a house. Had to be a house. No mere man could hit me that hard. The lights went out-with me still trying to figure out who and why.
Ordinarily, I come around slowly if I"ve had my conk bopped. Not so this time. One minute I was in dreamland, the next I was bouncing along face downward, wrapped in something soggy, staring at a floor sliding past inches from my nose. Four guys were carrying me. I was leaking red stuff. I couldn"t recall drinking any wine. I had the worst headache anyone ever had since the dawn of time.
A fine pair of female legs strode along practically in nibbling range. I really wanted to appreciate those. In other circ.u.mstances, I would have devoted hours to those legs. But a guy does have to keep some perspective.
Things were not going well. This sort of thing was not a normal part of my life. I tried to shove the pain away long enough to think.
Aha! They had me wrapped in a wet blanket. I didn"t want to p.o.o.p somebody"s party, but that didn"t make me happy. I roared and twisted and flopped and wriggled and bellowed. I failed to make any impression. I did get a gander at what went with the gorgeous gams. The wealth was piled on all the way to the top. I could have fallen in love. But this was not the time or place. Beside a fire, maybe on a bearskin rug, maybe just her and me and some TunFaire Gold wine...
I didn"t like the looks of the guys. They weren"t the brunos I danced with earlier. Those had been standard lowlife, out for the price of a drink. These clowns wore dirty, ragged uniforms.
That failed to cheer me up.
They were unreasonable. They wouldn"t answer questions. n.o.body responded at all, except Miss Legs. She just seemed sad. I hollered and flopped some more. They kept on lugging me down a long hall.
Long hall, huh? And what was that smell?
Everybody stopped but me. I thrashed some more. I was serious about it now. I knew where I was. This was the crazy floor of the Bledsoe, the imperial charity hospital.
The empire is long gone, but its works and the imperial family linger, the latter hoping for a recall. They sustain the hospital, which serves the indigent poorly.
The cackle factory is a bad place. They stick you in there you could be gone forever. Wouldn"t matter that somebody made a mistake.
"Hey! Put me down! What the h.e.l.l is this? What am I doing in here? Do I look like I"m crazy?"
That was the wrong question. I had to look like a prime specimen. And the way things work, they would a.s.sume that they wouldn"t have me if I didn"t belong.
Man, this was the dirtiest trick anybody ever played on me.
A door crashed open. It was oak and iron and about nine inches thick. I glimpsed my destiny.
One of my guides bellowed. Somebody scuttled away. The boys tossed me through the doorway without missing the frame. I landed hard. The Legs gazed at me pityingly. The door closed before I convinced her this was all a horrible mistake.
I unwrapped myself by rolling around, stumbled over and wasted energy pounding on the door. I exercised the full range of situationally specialized vocabulary, but without the enthusiasm I might have managed had my head not hurt so much. You do these things even when you"re wasting your time. The rituals must be observed.
I heard noises behind me. I spun around.
At least a dozen men stood staring at me. I checked the ward beyond them. There were lots more men back there. Plenty were wondering about the new guy. Some studied my outfit. Plainly, there had been no general clothing issued in years. Nor had anyone taken a bath during the modern era. Here was the source of the odor I"d caught in the hall. A glance told me the welcoming committee all belonged inside. It was obvious in their eyes.
I pounded and yelled some more. Service did not improve.
At least they hadn"t dumped me into the violent ward. Maybe I stood a chance.
An old character who looked like he weighed about fifty pounds stumbled toward me. "How are you doing? I"m Ivy."
"I was doing great till about five minutes ago, Ivy."
"How are you doing? I"m Ivy."
"He don"t say nothing else, Ace."
Right. I"m a quick study. Ivy never even looked at me. "Gotcha."
A guy about nine feet tall guffawed. "You don"t pay Ivy no nevermind, boy. He"s crazy."
"How are you doing? I"m Ivy."
This was the tip of the iceberg. The part that would be easy. It was sure to get weird.
After thinking a while, somebody yelled at the big guy, "You got so much room to talk, muddlebrain?"
"Yeah? What do you know? I don"t belong in here. I was set up. Somebody drugged me or something. I woke up in here."
Oh, my. A fellow traveler as bad off as I. I had a lot of sympathy for him-till some grinning idiot shrieked, "Powziffle! Powziffle pheez!" Or something like that.
The big guy hunched up, stooped, made gurgling noises, and started running around the ward like a gorilla, howling. His howls would have chilled the spine of a banshee.
"How are you doing? I"m Ivy."
The big man"s racket started some other guy screaming. His cries were a species I"d heard in the islands, coming from a guy caught out in no-man"s land with a bad gut wound, begging for somebody to kill him. Soldiers from both sides would have done so gladly after a while. But n.o.body was dumb enough to go out there and let the other side snipe. So we"d all just laid low and listened, ground our teeth, and maybe thanked our personal G.o.ds it wasn"t us.
I glared at that door. Maybe I could chew my way through.
Or maybe...My pockets hadn"t been cleaned. They must"ve been in an awful hurry to get me put away. A real bunch of screwup Charlies.
Patients came to check me out-those who still had a foot in our world. Many were timid as mice. A look sent them scurrying. Others...Some might have been there as accidentally as I, only instead they belonged in the ward for the dangerous.
I wished everybody would back off.
Any doubts I had about the irregularity of my commitment disappeared when I discovered that they hadn"t cleaned my pockets. Had I been brought in legitimately, all my possessions would have been taken from me and would never have surfaced again.
I was encouraged. About a roach-weight worth.
The physical plant wasn"t encouraging. The ward was a hundred feet wide, three hundred feet long, and two storys high. There were rows and rows and rows of sleeping pallets but not nearly enough to go around.
The ceiling was way up there, a good twenty feet. Windows peeked through the wall opposite the door, way high, too small for a man to get out even after he cut the bars. I supposed they pa.s.sed light during the day. What little light was available now leaked through windows high on the door side wall, there so the ward could be observed by hospital staff.
"How are you doing? I"m Ivy."
"I"m doing just fine, Ivy. What say you and me bust out of this toilet?"
Ivy looked at me directly, startled, then scampered away.
"Anybody want to break out?" want to break out?"
17.
My suggestion drew an underwhelming response. I gathered that half the patients could not be dragged out and the other half thought I was crazy. There? Forsooth!
The big man who had cautioned me about Ivy"s lack of capacity recapacitated himself. He came over. "Ain"t no way out, Slick. They was, half these guys would be long gone."
I glanced around again. The prospects seemed ever less promising. "They feed us?"
The big guy grinned that grin the old salts put on when they see a chance to teach a greenhorn. "Twice a day, you"re hungry or not. Through them bars down there."
I looked. I shrugged. Them bars was hopeless. "Things are that bad I might as well get me some shut-eye before I start my serious worrying." I looked for an empty pallet. I had some thinking to do. Especially about why I found myself in such straits.
I wanted to scream as loud as any of the whacks in there with me.
"You get in line for a bed," the big guy cautioned me. "You make friends, maybe somebody will share. Otherwise, you just wait till enough guys die to leave you your own." His casual manner told me this was one of the capital laws of the ward. Amazing. You"d expect it to be total total survival of the strongest. survival of the strongest.
"My kind of flophouse." I settled near the door. That didn"t seem to be a popular area. Plenty of elbow room there. I pretended to fall asleep.
There were no corpses in the ward and no smell of death. That suggested that staff removed the dead quickly. So, how to use that in a scam the staff hadn"t seen before?
I gave the notion of a riot a look. Feeble. If I was the Bledsoe staff, I"d just let everybody starve till the fuss stopped.
"How are you doing? I"m Ivy."
My act wasn"t fooling Ivy. I considered putting him out of his misery.
Which gave me an idea. A twist on the riot scheme. I went looking for the big guy. I found him seated against the far wall. I planted the reverse side of my lap on the hardwood, grunted. "I got about enough splinters."
"Send out for a chair."
A wise guy. "How come it"s so quiet?"
"Maybe on account of it"s the middle of the G.o.dd.a.m.n night." Eloquent verbal stylings, too.
"I mean, we only had one screamer." Not counting him. n.o.body was yelling at the moment. "I heard there was lots of screamers. Mostly guys who can"t handle what they remember about the Cantard."
His face darkened. "Yeah. There"s some of them. They get drugged if they get too bad. Like they get each other going."
Interesting. "Know any way to set one of them off now?"
He studied me narrowly. "What you up to, Slick?" He thought there had better be a d.a.m.ned good reason for pulling a stunt like that.
"Up to getting out of here."
"Can"t do that."
"Maybe not. But they didn"t empty out my pockets before they dumped me in here. You game to try?"
He thought about that. His face grew darker. "Yeah. Yeah! I got business out there. Yeah. You get the d.a.m.ned door open, I"ll go."
"You figure any of these guys would help?"
"Plenty would go if the walls fell down. I don"t know how many would help make them fall."
"So could you get some guy screaming as the first step?"
"Sure." He got up, strolled to the far end, messed with somebody a minute, headed back. Plenty of inmates watched him. The man he"d visited started screaming. Chills slithered all over me. He was one of the lost souls.
The big man asked, "Good enough?"
"Perfect. Now try to round up some guys willing to help out."
He went away again.
I went into my act. "Shut up down there! I"m trying to sleep."
The guy didn"t stop screaming. I"d been afraid he would. I glanced at the observation windows. Someone was up there, but the racket didn"t interest him. Were they that indifferent? I needed to be seen.
I yelled at the screamer. Somebody yelled back at me. I yelled at him. Some genius yelled at both of us like that would shut us up. The racket picked up. We were like a troop of monkeys. Some of the men started moving around, just shuffling numbly, without purpose.
The uproar finally caught the ear of whoever was on duty. He looked down but didn"t seem concerned.
I screamed louder than the screamer, threatening mayhem if he didn"t shut it up.
"How are you doing? I"m Ivy."
"Pack your trunk, Ivy. We"re checking out of this cuckoo inn."