The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 3

Coke entered clean locked beds, the building’s fifth level. The salvaged staircase rose another two meters, but there was no doorway opening onto it from the level above.

The end of a counter protected by a hundred-millimeter mesh of barbed wire narrowed the doorway to half its designed width. A bar with a barbed wire apron closed the other half to prevent anyone from bursting into or out of the flophouse, though Coke wasn’t sure why either should have been a problem.

No one was behind the counter; the gate into the flophouse proper stood open. The sign on the back wall read:

SPACE 5 BUNK 10 SOLO BUNK 25 LOCK 25

A board from which hung a dozen cheap keyed padlocks indicated the protection you got for the extra twenty-five pesos. Sten Moden could probably have twisted the barrels off their hasps …but men as fit and strong as Sten Moden didn’t spend the night in a flop like this.

Coke raised the bar carefully and walked into the establishment. He’d had full immunization treatments before he left Nieuw Friesland, but there was no point in testing Frisian medical science against the filth that lurked on those rusty barbs.

The flophouse filled the entire level, an area of about ten meters by twenty. It was lighted by glow-strips, scraped and speckled but still able to provide a reasonable amount of yellow-green illumination. The good lighting was probably a safety feature—for the building’s owners as much as for the staff and clientele.

A narrow aisle separated two banks of cubicles. Each contained a filthy mattress. Instead of solid panels, the cubicles had walls of coarse barbed wire netting.

The remainder of the flophouse was bare floor on which the lower grade of derelict sprawled and shivered and moaned. Twenty-odd were present tonight; varied in age and sex, but uniform in their utter degradation.

Something was going on toward the back of the big room. Men clustered around one of the cages, shouting and laughing in cracked voices.

Coke’s face became still. He slid the shock rod from his waistband with his left hand and strode quietly down the aisle.

About half the cubicles he passed were occupied. Some of the men—few were women—in them were lost in their own worlds. Empty stim cones or cruder injectors lay on the mattresses with them.

One man was bent in a tetanic arch. His eyes bulged and his face was purple. Coke was pretty sure the fellow was dead, broken in convulsions by the wrong dose of gage tailings, but the fact impressed him as little as it did the flop’s ordinary denizens.

Other caged occupants called or even tried to grab Coke as he strode by. None of them was coordinated enough to actually touch the Frisian. They didn’t necessarily see him. The drugs and drug impurities with which they’d injected themselves were capable of turning any movement into a wild hallucination.

Pilar Ortega was in an end stall. She stood erect with her arms clamping her overwrap to her, as if by squeezing hard enough she could make herself vanish. Her eyes were wide open, but she didn’t see Coke coming down the aisle toward her.

Seven or eight men gripped the mesh of the cubicle. One of them was the clerk who should have been behind the counter. They had all dropped their pants. They waved their penises at the woman as they jeered.

The clerk was a fat man, completely hairless. He wore a sleeveless black pullover, his overalls pooled around his ankles. As Coke approached, unnoticed in the drug-fueled hilarity, the clerk reached down into his trousers and came up with a key.

“Lookie what I got, Miz Fancypants!” he cried in a voice pitched higher than the size of his gross body suggested. “You think you rented the only key to your lock, did you?”

“Yeah, I wanna see them pants!” the man beside him cried. “I’ll bite them—”

Coke whipped his shock rod across the bare buttocks of the four men directly before him.

The men screamed as they leaped convulsively into the wire. The cubicle swayed, but its steel-tube frame was strong enough to withstand the impacts. The men at either end of the cage, untouched by Coke’s quick sweep, looked around in surprise, all but one fellow crooning and drooling in his own private dreamworld.

The clerk turned. He bled from a score of fresh punctures and gashes scattered from forehead to mid-thigh. “You—” he shouted.

Coke flicked the clerk with the baton, this time on the lower belly just above his genitals. Flailing limbs hurled the clerk against Pilar’s cage a second time. The structure’s resilience threw him facedown on the floor. Coke stepped aside to let him fall.

A derelict raised the jagged top of a bottle. Coke held his right arm crooked to the side. His hand hovered over the butt of his holstered pistol. To draw, he would shift his hips left while his hand swept aside the tail of his jacket. He wasn’t Johann Vierziger, but it was a maneuver he’d made many times before….

“Try me,” he offered in a trembling voice.

The derelict dropped the bottle. He backed into the wall and pushed himself flat against it.