Корнелл Вулрич - A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

The cop pitched the watch lightly back into the car. “Just coming home from a party, folks?”

“No, we’re going to one.”

“Have fun.”

“That’s what we intend.”

As they picked up speed, and the white tiles flashed blindingly by, the driver gave her a savage backhand swipe with his knuckles across her mouth.

She cried out piercingly, but it was lost in the roar of the onrushing tunnel. The man who called himself her husband made some sort of spasmodic move on the back seat, but the two guns pressing into his intestines from opposite sides almost met inside him, they dug in so far.

They came out into the open, and it was the grimy backwaters of Jersey City now. Tall factory stacks, and fires burning, and spreads of stagnant stinking water.

On and on the ride went. On and on and on.

They turned north soon and left the big city and all its little satellites behind them, and after a while even the rusty glow on the horizon died down and was gone. Then trees began, and little lumpy hills, and there was nothing but the darkness and the night and the fear.

“Don,” she shuddered, and suddenly flung one hand up over her shoulder and back, trying to find his.

“Please let me hold her hand,” he begged. “She’s frightened.”

“Let ’em hold hands,” one of them snickered.

They held onto each other like that, in a hand-link of fear, two against the night.

“Don, she called me,” he said. “Didn’t you hear her? Don, that’s my name. Don Ackerman.”

“Yeah, and I’m Ricardo Cortez,” countered one of them, with the flipness so characteristic of the period that it even came into play on a death ride.

On went the ride.

At one point his control slipped away from him for a minute. “God,” he burst out, “how far are you taking us?”

“Don’t be in a hurry to get there,” the one on his left advised him dryly. “I wouldn’t, if I was you.”

And then again, a little later, “Won’t you tell me the name of the fellow you think I am? Can’t I convince you—”

“What’s the matter, you don’t know your own name?”

“Well, what’ve I done?”

“We don’t know from nothing. You were just marked lousy, that’s all. We only carry out the orders.”

“Yes, but what orders?” he exclaimed in his innocence.

And the answer, grim, foreboding, was: “Oh, broth-urr!”

Then without any warning the car stopped. They were there.

“The ride’s over,” someone said. “End of the ride.”

For a moment nobody got out. They just sat there. The driver cut the ignition, and after that there was silence. Complete, uncanny silence, more frightening than the most threatening noise or violence could have been. Night silence. A silence that had death in it.

Then one of them opened the door, got out and started to walk slowly away from the car, through ankle-high grass that hissed and spit as he toiled through it. The others just stayed where they were.

There was some sort of an old dilapidated farm building with a slanted roof in the middle distance. It was obviously abandoned, because its windows were black glassless gaps. Behind it was a smaller shanty looking like a tool shed or lean-to, so close to collapse it was almost down flat. He didn’t approach either one of them, he went around to the rear in a big wide circle.

They sat in silence, the four of them that were left. One of them was smoking a cigarette. But that didn’t make any noise, just a red blink whenever he drew on it.

Finally the driver reached out and tapped the button. A single, lonely, guttural horn-blat sounded. Briefer than a question mark in the air, staccato as the span of a second split in two, yet unfolding into a streamer of meaning through the night air: Come on, what’s taking you so long, we’re getting tired of waiting.

The walker-in-the-grass came back to the car again.

“Yeah, it’s there,” he said briefly.

“He told us it would be,” was the sardonic answer. “Didn’t you believe him?”

There was a general stir of activity as the other two got out, each with a prisoner.

“All right, you and me go this way,” the one with the girl said.

“No! Don!” she started to scream harrowingly. “Don-n-n-n!”

His smile was thin as a knife-cut across his face. “Don’ll be taken care. Don’t worry about Don.”

He grasped her brutally by the upper arms, tightened his hold to a crushing vise and drew his lips back whitely, as though the constrictive force came from them and not his hands. He thrust her drunkenly lurching form from side to side before him. Her hair swayed and danced with the struggle, as though it were something alive in its own right. The darkness swallowed them soon enough, but not the sounds they made.

Now Don began to shout himself, frightened, crazed, straining forward like a thing possessed. “Let her go! Let her go! Oh, if there’s a God above, why doesn’t He look down and stop this!” His voice was willowy with too much vibrancy. The movements of weeping appeared upon his face, the distortion without the delivery. Skin-weeping, without tears.

When the man who had been with her came back he was brushing twigs and leaves off his clothing, almost casually.

“Where is she?” they asked him.

“Where I left her.” Then he added, “Wanna take a look?”

“I think I will take a look,” the other assented, grinning with suggestive meaning.

But he turned up again almost at once, and his manner had changed. He acted disgruntled, like someone who’s been given a false scent and gone on a fool’s errand.

“Where is she now?”

“Still there.”

“What’s up?”

He said something low-voiced that the man she’d called Don wasn’t able to catch. His fright-soaked senses let it float past on the tide of terror submerging him.

“A kid!” the other one brayed outright in his surprise. His face flicked around for an instant toward the prisoner, then back again. “Say, maybe he was telling the truth. Maybe she was his—”

“Couldn’t you tell?” the third man demanded of the girl’s original escort, a trace of contempt in his voice.

“Whaddya expect me to do, feel her pulse in the dark?”

“She gone or ain’t she?” he wanted to know bluntly, unmoved by any thought of sparing the prisoner’s sensibilities.

“Sure. What do I know about those things? I only know her eyes are wide open and she ain’t looking.”

The man who was being held thrashed rabidly until he almost seemed to oscillate like the bent wing of an electric fan when its spin is dwindling. “Let me go to her! Let me go to her!”

“Pipe down, Jack,” one of them admonished, giving him a perfunctory slantwise clip along the jawline, but without any real heave behind it. “Nothing there to go to any more.”

He threw his head back, stared unseeingly straight up overhead, and from the furrowed scalp, the ridged pate that his face had thus become, emitted a full-fledged scream, high-pitched as a woman’s, unreasoning as a crushed animal’s.

Then his hands rose, fingers hooked wide, and scissored in from opposite sides, clawing at his own cheeks, digging into them, as if trying to tear them off, pull them out by their very ligaments.

“No!” he shrieked, then “No!” he cried, then “No!” he moaned, on a descending tonal scale.

They had taken their hands off him, knowing he was no longer capable of much movement.

His head fell forward again, like something trying to loosen itself from his shoulders, and now he blindly, snufflingly faced the ground as if he were looking closely for something he’d dropped there. His feet carried him around in an intoxicated, reeling little half-circle, and he collapsed breast-first against the fender of the car, head burrowed down against its hood, clasped hands clamped tight across the back of it as if to keep his skull from exploding. His legs, stretched inertly outward along the ground behind him, twitched spasmodically now and then, as if trying to draw themselves in after the rest of him, and always slipped back again each time.