Programmed for Peril

me you’ll leave PC-Pros.”
    She stared, said nothing.
    “Ever get a lot of dirt in your mouth and up that shapely Bose, Samantha? You’d probably want to get it out right away. Only you wouldn’t be able to, because your arms would be weighed down by dirt. You’d heave and strain, but your hands wouldn’t be able to help you.... But then you’re a woman of intelligence and imagination. You see your final reward for stubbornness.”
    She cocked her head. “Maybe you’re making your point.”
    “And if I am?”
    “Then you should let me go. I’ll go back to Trish and offer my resignation.”
    Champ swung his shovel to the ready. “No Academy Award for that acting job, my sweet! The bell-like peal of sincerity was absent.” He threw the next shovelful of dirt directly into her face. “Shame! For the attempted practice of deceit.”
    Samantha squealed and clawed at her eyes. Tears poured forth to sluice the grit and ease the emotions. Yes, she wept in pain and distress.
    Good to hear!
    He slapped at her raised hands with the shovel edge. “Hands down!” He shoveled on. When her hands, then arms disappeared under reddish heaps her face seemed to drag down, stretching toward panic. He shoveled busily. The dirt embraced her elbows, then her shoulders.
    “Please... don’t cover my head!”
    “How can you properly be buried alive unless I do your head, too? You’re being stupid. Doubly stupid. A sincere Promise from you and you’re out of there. You got a taste of soil. Only a plant could love it. What do you say, Sam? Ha    Her face was a smear of tears and thin, gritty mud. a stone had nicked her cheek, drawing a small red ooze Beneath blood, sweat, and tears ran the hard metal 0f determination. She had cracked but not broken.
    Shovel artist Champ, the True Temper Toulouse-Lautrec stylishly edged dirt in all around her neck, patted it in placé with blade bottom. Her head stood like John the Baptist’s on a platter of dirt. He squatted at the edge of the hole and looked down at his living masterpiece. He reached down and flicked crumbs of soil from the pink curve of her left ear. By hand he finished packing in the soil. He left maybe an inch beneath her jaw so she could still speak.
    He leaned back on his haunches. “Decision time, my sweet.”
    She stared at him. “Do you leave me for the varmints, like in the westerns? Or do you have the guts to finish the job?”
    Extraordinary! What a woman! Defiance at the edge of the Dark Land. Here he had the potential mother of master industrialists, heavyweight champs, the likes of T. E. Lawrence, Burton of Africa. Nonetheless... the faintest demi-quaver in her tone told inner secrets. He didn’t answer her.
    He knew he could break her.
    Time for the rubber hose.
    Her eyes darted like minnows after his every move. He offered her the length of flexible tubing. Her eyes hooded themselves as she comprehended further adventures in dirt. Her teeth were white and even. They gripped the reddish rubber, lips folding around it. Eros’s muted howls rose from his desire’s closet, closed now by the will to serve his master. Her eyes shuttered against the lewdness of her situation.
    Time’s a-wastin’! A dozen energetic shovelfuls covered the crown of Samantha’s head. Now her eyes would be closed. Her outer ears would be dampened, but the inner would still function. Surely her mouth gripped the rubber tightly now, sharp enamel edges her only hold on the air of life. Shovel, shovel, shovel! Now only the hose rose from the earth, like a short shoot set out to sprout to sapling.
    He leaned over the mounded dirt, put his ear to the hose. Hear the rush of her breath! Like the ocean in a seaside shell.
    “Earth to the underworld!” Champ shouted. “Orpheus to Eurydice- Do you read me, Samantha?”
    “I want you to dig me out. You madman!”
    “I want you to resign from PC-Pros, you madwoman. You must be mad, because I ask so little in exchange for your life. Which I believe anyone at this point would agree I hold in my hand.” By way of example he pressed the pad of his gloved, spade-wide thumb to the hose hole, closing it. Suction gripped the fabric. He could imagine her diaphragm heaving. And with it a surge of panic rising up like a tsunami. To smother. What a horrid way to exit this life! Who knew better than Champ, the smotherer of three?
    Grass-cutting time at last.
    After a suitably terrifying string of seconds he slid his thumb away. From