When Ryan didn’t answer, the sec chief used the muzzle of his Uzi carbine like a cattle prod to urge them in the direction of the elevator. They rounded the dogleg in the hall and came face-to-face with the open elevator car.
To their left, Johnson Lester was standing in front of a closed door labeled Power Plant. Not only had he been stripped of his rank, but everything else he owned. Lester was bare-assed naked. While he tried to cover himself with his hands, three mutie overseers
squabbled over the division of his clothes and personal effects. The squat, hairy-backed bastards weren’t satisfied with the pickings.
“This all you got?” one of them shouted into Les-ter’s face. He shook the sec man’s worn jungle boots in his face. “It ain’t enough!”
“Not near enough,” said another.
The third overseer opened the power-plant door, and for an instant Ryan and the others could see inside. The wide room was lit by torches in the walls. Its central feature was an enormous steel turnstile with spokes that nearly touched the sides of the room. Each spoke had four or five naked men chained to its rings. In the middle of the turnstile was a large gear, which was connected by a pinion the size of a man to other massive gears just overhead. The floor under the turnstile had ribs on it, to give the slaves better traction as they pushed the wheel around. They needed all the help they could get. Grease from the gears was smeared over the slaves, over the floor, over everything.
As Ryan and the others neared the elevator, the overseers shoved Lester toward the open doorway. He twisted to glare over his shoulder at them.
J.B. couldn’t help himself. He shot the sec man a huge grin.
“What’re you smiling at, stupe?” Lester hissed. “You think you’re not as dead as me?”
The overseers slammed the door behind him.
Murchisson used the sole of his boot to push Ryan
into the elevator. “Don’t touch anything,” he warned all of them, “till we get you washed down.”
It took a few extra minutes for the elevator to start up. Probably, Ryan thought, because the slave drivers first had to chain Lester to the spoke. When they reached the lobby level, Murchisson and the other sec men marched them outside, under the building’s awning, then across the parking lot to where a makeshift water tower had been erected.
“Cawdor, step over here,” Murchisson said, pointing at a mound of dirt that had once been a decorative plant bed. He picked up the end of a hose that hung down the side of the rusting metal tank. “The rest of you stay back.”
When Murchisson opened the hose’s nozzle, a powerful stream of coffee-colored water rushed out and onto Ryan’s chest At Mure his son’s direction, Ryan turned around and around so he could wash the muck off his clothes. This done, the sec man said, “Now, get those duds off. You don’t just have stink on the outside. You got it everywhere.”
Ryan peeled off his shirt and set it aside. When he started to untie his boots, Murchisson stopped him. “Just drop your pants and roll them down over your boot tops. That’ll do just fine.”
As Ryan unbuckled his belt and unbuttoned his fly, Mildred looked the other way,
“Yoo-hoo!” called a high-pitched voice from above and behind them. “Yoo-hoo!”
Ryan looked back at the hotel while Murchisson sprayed his bare backside with the hose.
“Yoo-hoo!”
A pair of pale white asses had teen stuck over the rail to the penthouse patio. While her sisters exposed themselves, Willie Elijah’s other granddaughter-wife was checking out Ryan through the telescope.
“Yoo-hoo,” she called, waving.
Her sisters waggled their asses at him.
“If they don’t watch it, they’re going to fall off there,” Mildred observed.
“Aw, hell, they do that all the time,” Murchisson said. “Ain’t nobody for twenty miles around who hasn’t seen everything they’ve got.”
“Not bright,” Ryan said. “Considering what Elijah did to their mothers.”
“Oh, he don’t ever get mad,’* the sec chief said. “He likes for everybody to see what he’s getting-and what they can’t have none of. Mebbe he even put the gals up to it the first time. They sure took a liking to it, though. Hang their asses out like that every day, weather permitting.”