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Show Acting Alone Page 341 One of the postulants held back a cheap batik wall-hanging that opened the way into a black, cold-breathing passage. Spikey paused in his backward hobbling long enough to allow the calm, deep-voiced Mother Superior to pass first. Sam yelled over his newly-felt gut-muscles, "C'mon Wamsutter! Be a nice guy on your own time!" Sam could actually feel a few ribs caving in over his spleenhole. He was ready to set her down any time now. There was a brief hiatus of relative quiet as people filed down into the vestibule of the tunnels, during which those peculiar, distant firecracker and cherrybomb noises could be heard echoing down Cheyenne Mountain again. Spikey cocked an ear, and his little red reptile eyes lit up brighter than Sam had ever seen in all the months of their association. "That's the sound of commies like you bein fragged," he sizzled across at Sam. "You're unattractive enough without babbling, foot-sweetie," swished Sam right back in his face, not bothering to wonder what the moron might have been driving at with that cryptic comment. Candles were lit, the batik was allowed to drop, and everybody ventured down deep into cold, crawling granite. "Abandon all hope ye who - " Simone started laughing again and couldn't finish. She was strange and floppy, a living dead weight, like a waterbed filled with hot bean curd. The force of gravity seemed to intensify with each downhill step, as though the sweating walls of this great orifice in the earth had begun their contractions and were sucking everything irrevocably down deeper and deeper |