Tunnels 05 - Spiral

end,” he said, as he made sure the glasses were securely over Mrs. Rawls’s eyes. “I nearly forgot — don’t want her biting her tongue. Anyone got a handkerchief?”
    “Here,” Sweeney offered, producing a rather dirty rag from his combat jacket, which Drake folded over several times.
    “Open wide,” he directed Mrs. Rawls. Still groggy, she obediently did what she was told, allowing Drake to place it in her mouth. “Now just try to relax. This shouldn’t take long.” He flicked another switch on the cylinder, and purple light leaked from around the sides of the glasses.
    Will winced as Mrs. Rawls’s guttural cry reverberated through the forest.

    The Second Officer was buckling up his Sam Browne belt as he shuffled out into the corridor. Rather than go home, he’d just spent his second night in one of the cells in the interrogation wing of the police station, sleeping on a pile of prison blankets heaped on the cold flagstones. He still hadn’t forgiven his mother and sister. Not after they’d killed his little dog and served it up to him in a stew. As he came to the end of the whitewashed corridor and entered the reception area, he was swinging his arms in an attempt to de-kink his muscles.
    “Hello,” he called out as he arrived to find it deserted. “Sir? Hello? Anyone?”
    There was no response, so the Second Officer raised the flap in the counter and went to the doorway of the First Officer’s room. “Oh, you are here,” he said to his superior, who was bent over his desk, his head in his hands. “Is it the gut rot, sir?” the Second Officer asked sympathetically.
    “No,” the First Officer replied after a moment, then straightened up.
    The Second Officer recoiled as he saw the man’s battered face, his eye so swollen that it had almost closed up. “What happened? Who did this to you? How many were there?”
    “It was in the Hold.” The First Officer sighed. “I was squaring the prisoners away for the night when that bloody Mulligan started on me.”
    “Mulligan?” the Second Officer asked. “Bill Mulligan — the cabinetmaker?”
    The First Officer glanced down sheepishly. “No, his mother.”
    “Not
Gappy
Mulligan,” the Second Officer burst out. “But she’s ninety if she’s a day! How did she —?”
    “I know,” the First Officer grunted, shaking his head as if he’d never live this one down. “She was mouthing off about the Styx and — with no warning at all — she let fly at me. Got a vicious right hook, too.”
    “Gappy Mulligan,” the Second Officer repeated. He was so flabbergasted that he flopped down in the chair in front of the First Officer’s desk. He hadn’t been invited to sit, and when he realized what he’d done, he found that his superior was squinting at him through his good eye. “Oh, sorry, sir, I didn’t mean to —”
    “You stay right there,” the First Officer said. “You know, Patrick, I think we’ve reached the point that we can do away with the usual decorum.”
    The Second Officer was astonished for a second time. His superior officer had never —
never
— before addressed him by his first name. Indeed, even the Second Officer’s own family referred to him as the Second Officer, rather than by his real name, because the laws of the Colony demanded it.
    “I . . . I . . . ,” the Second Officer stuttered.
    “This is no time to be a stuffed shirt, Patrick,” the First Officer said, taking his pipe from a desk drawer and opening a tobacco pouch. It was also absolutely forbidden to smoke in the station. “Face up to it. Half the Colony is slowly but surely starving to death in their homes, while the other half is missing God knows where,” the First Officer continued, as he filled the pipe bowl with tobacco. “And the half that’s starving to death will probably end up killing each other as they fight over whatever scraps they can plunder from the food stores, and” — the First Officer used his flint lighter to ignite the tobacco before he went on — “and you and I, we’ll be stuck bang smack in the middle of it all. Some toothless hag — just like Mulligan — is going to bludgeon us to death with her handbag, and all for a mouthful of salted toadstrip.” He took several large puffs. “The joke is, Patrick,
we’re
all that’s left. A thin blue line holding back a tide of total and absolute anarchy. We’re caught between the devil and a cold, dark sea.” He shook his head stoically. “No, the