Harlan Ellison - Web of the City

“Well, hell, I mean yeah, sure!”

“Okay, daddy, tell you what. You come on out to the chickie-run tonight, and we’ll see you got gut enough to be a Prince. You dig?”

“I dig.”

And here he was, close to midnight, with the great empty field stretching off before him, rippled with shadows where the lights of the cars did not penetrate.

It had been good bottom land, this field, in the days when the old city reservoir had used water deflected from the now-dry creek. Water deflected through the huge steel culvert pipe that rose up in the center of the field. The culvert was in a ditch ten feet deep, and the pipe still rose up several feet above the flat of the field. The ditch just before the pipe was still a good ten feet deep.

The cars were revving, readying for the chickie-run.

“Hey, you, Frenchie! Hey, c’mon over here!”

It was Monkey, and Frenchie climbed from his Stude, pulling at his chinos, wanting to look cool for the debs clustered around the many cars in the field. This was a big chickie-run, and his chance to become one of the Princes.

He walked into the group of young hot-rodders clustered off to one side, near a stunted grove of trees. He could feel everyone’s eyes on him. There were perhaps fifteen of them.

“Now here’s the rules,” Monkey said. “Frenchie and Pooch and Jimmy get out there on either side of the road that runs over the cul. On the road is where I’ll be, pacin’ ya. And when Gloria”—he indicated a full-chested girl with a blonde ponytail—“gives the signal, you race out, and head for that ditch, an’ the cul. The last one who turns is the winner, the others are chickie. You dig?”

They all nodded, and Frenchie started to turn, to leave. To get back in his Stude and win this drag.

But the blonde girl stopped him, and with a hand on his arm, came over close, saying, “They promised me to the man who wins this run, Frenchie. I’d like to see you bug them other two. Win for me, will ya, baby?”

It sounded oddly brassy coming from such a young girl, but she was very close, and obviously wanted to be kissed, so Frenchie pulled her in close, and put his mouth to hers. Her lips opened and she kissed him with the hunger and ferocity of adolescent carnality.

Then he broke away, winking at her, and throwing over his shoulder, “Watch my dust, sweetheart,” as he headed for the Stude.

A bunch of boys were milling about the car as he ran up.

“Good luck,” one of them said, and a queer grin was stuck to his face. Frenchie shrugged. There were some oddballs in this batch, but he could avoid them when he was a full member.

He got in and revved the engine. It sounded good. He knew he could take them. His brakes were fine. He had them checked and tightened that afternoon.

Then Monkey was driving out on to the road that ran down the center of the old field, over the grade atop the culvert pipe. His Ford stopped, and he leaned out the window to yell at Gloria. “Okay, baby. Any time!”

The girl ran into the middle of the road as the three racers gunned their motors, inching at the start mark. They were like hungry beasts waiting to be unleashed.

Then she leaped in the air, came down waving a yellow bandana, and they were away, with great gusts of dirt and grass showing behind.

Frenchie slapped gears as though they were all one, and the Studelac jumped ahead. He decked the gas pedal and fed all the power he had to the engine.

On either side of him, the wind gibbering past their ears, the other two hunched over their wheels and plunged straight down the field toward the huge steel pipe and the deep trench before it.

Whoever turned was a chicken, that was the rule, and Frenchie was no coward. He knew that. Yet—

A guy could get killed. If he didn’t stop in time, he’d rip right into that pipe, smash up completely at the speed they were doing.

The speedometer said eighty-five, and still he held it to the floor. They weren’t going to turn. They weren’t going… to… turn… damn… you… turn!

Then, abruptly, as the pipe grew huge in the windshield, on either side of him the other cars swerved, as though on a signal.

Frenchie knew he had won.

He slapped his foot on to the brake.

Nothing happened.

The speedometer read past ninety, and he wasn’t stopping. He beat at it frantically, and then, when he saw there was no time to jump, no place to go, as the Studelac leaped the ditch and plunged out into nothingness, he threw one hand out the window, and his scream followed it.

The car hit with a gigantic whump and smash, and struck the pipe with such drive the entire front end was rammed through the driver’s seat. Then it exploded.

It had been most disconcerting. That hand coming out the window. And the noise.

A man stepped out of the banked shadows at the base of the grove of trees. The fire from the culvert, licking toward the sky, lit his face in a mask of serene but satisfied crimson.

Monkey drove to the edge of the shadows, and walked up to the man standing there half-concealed.

“That was fine, son,” said the tall man, reaching into his jacket for something. “That was fine.

“Here you are,” he said, handing a sheaf of bills to the boy. “I think you will find that according to our agreement. And,” he added, withdrawing another bill from the leather billfold, “here is an extra five dollars for that boy who took care of the brakes. You’ll see that he gets it, won’t you?”

Monkey took the money, saluted sloppily, and went back to his Ford. A roar and he was gone, back into the horde of hotrods tearing away from the field, and the blazing furnace thrust down in the culvert ditch.

But for a long time, till he heard the wail of sirens far off but getting nearer, the most brilliant student of Elizabethan drama in the country, perhaps the world, stood in the shadows and watched fire eat at the sky.

It certainly was not—not at all—a game for children.

Originally published in the September, 1956 issue of Guilty Detective Story Magazine

It wasn’t pretty, the way they were beating him to death. They were using bricks.

I’ve been driving a hack in New York ever since I picked up a hunk of shrapnel in my elbow, on the backwash of the Yalu. I’d seen some pretty rough things in Korea, and I’ve seen some even rougher behind the wheel of that cab, but the way they were working that guy over—cool, smooth and without a wasted movement—made my throat dry out.

I turned my cab into 25th Street, off Second Avenue, a few blocks from the East River—I’d just taken an old-maid schoolteacher home and was cutting back to the main drag—when my headlights caught the six of them.

There were five kids, all in black leather jackets, and a guy with a briefcase handcuffed to his wrist. The kids had him up against the wall of a clothing factory, and they were clipping him in the head and belly with those bricks. I roared down the street at them, going over the sidewalk to keep them in the beams, and honking my horn like mad.

When they heard me, they backed off, and the guy fell on his face. They thought that was a good deal, thought they could finish him quicker that way, and went back at him.

The kids started stomping him in the groin when he tried to struggle to his knees, then they kicked his head. They were wearing heavy army boots, and the guy on the sidewalk started bleeding. I could see it all as clearly as if it were daylight.

They must have figured they’d done all they could to the guy, because they bent down trying to get the briefcase off him. I saw one of the kids bring his foot down full on the guy’s wrist.

I screeched the cab to a stop right beside them and hauled my Stillson wrench off the floor.