Harlan Ellison: No Doors, No Windows

They sped toward the state police station five miles away, and beside Ormond in the back seat, the faceless police officer had decided to be clever.

“She came to the surface this morning … spotted by some kids fishing, Ormond.”

The fat little man clung to the car strap, silently watching the lines of houses and fir nurseries flit by.

And I’ve always been so good about paying my bills on time.

“Your big mistake.” the trooper said, with a grin, “was using your own cement. You should know that much sand don’t hold together.”

He took the hairpin curve at sixty-five, and the big truck-and-cab reeled drunkenly toward the edge of the road, toward the dark lip that pouted above nothingness. He pumped the air brakes and the rig squealed like a whale with a harpoon in its blowhole. Two baby-fat tires left the road and pawed air for a moment, then fell back, and the dynamite truck was around the bend. On the left, the rock wall of a nameless North Carolina hill rose up to an invisible peak, lost in darkness. To the right, unfenced, unprotected, the road fell off in a sheer drop, three hundred and eighty feet to the valley below; to tarpaper shacks huddled in cold and poverty. And on that thin strip of tarmac, room for two cars to pass ever so carefully (and one truck to pray no one was coming up, while it was coming down), Harry Fischer hunched over the big steering wheel, eyes squinting into the night, half-smoked butt wedged in a corner of his mouth, sweat chilling his neck and back …

Behind him in the truck section, the cases of nitro were murmuring in their gelatin straitjackets, and a harsh word would convince them they should forget their manners.

Beside him in the cab, the half-naked girl huddled against the other door, her gold-flecked eyes wide with terror, the whip scars still welling blood across her back, and her mouth open, dragging in air raggedly.

Back of him, and closing fast on the treacherous, twisting mountain road, was a caravan of four cars, holding a small army of pistoleros stinking of hate who didn’t give a damn how he went down the hole: in flames, over the edge of the road, like a shooting star … or from a shotgun blast that would turn him into one hundred and eighty pounds of dogmeat. It was all the same to them.

“Look out!” the girl shrieked, and Harry realized his eyes had been locked in road hypnosis, that the tarmac was twirling off to the left again. He walked the wheel between his hands, fast, and the truck careened around the bend, punched holes in the darkness with the beams of its two big heads, and roared away down a short slope. He flicked his eyes up without moving his head, and caught sight of the four pairs of lights behind him, in the rear-view; two single sets, and two sets of doubles, brights; bounding around the bend and down the slope in charge pursuit; they were gaining on him.

“Oh, yeahhh …” He drew the words out in whispered undertones, ruefully. “Are you ready for them!” He stomped the accelerator and the big rig cleared its throat, dug in at the tarmac and pulled away. He felt pain at his lips, and ripped the roach of the cigarette out of his mouth. He dropped it and ground it against the rubber floormat.

“We’ll die! We’re never going to make it!” The girl was babbling. Harry didn’t even look over. If he’d been where she was, with some crazy asshole driving the way he was, he’d have been puking already.

There had to be a pull-off along the way … there had to be, or he wasn’t going to be hauling much freight in the future. His mouth was dry, now that the cigarette was gone, but there wasn’t a thing he could do about it; he couldn’t spare the effort or thought to light a fresh one; nor was there anything he could do about the four carloads of clowns behind him. The rear-view mirror sparkled and he tossed a glance into it. They were still back there, and coming in faster, it seemed. Harry’s foot refused to go any farther to the floor; more speed would be like taking an enema with a thermite bomb. Like spreading himself out across half a mile of scenic North Carolina like peanut butter; like an uncomplicated suicide. And Harry was convinced he still had a couple of good hours left in him.

“Reach into my shirt pocket,” he said to the girl. “Light me a cigarette.”

His tone frightened her, on an entirely different level than the gut-wrenching fear of the men behind them, the road over which they hurtled, the death all around them. He was an ominous, cruel figure, beside her in the cab, his craggy features limned by the dash lights. She reached across his barrel chest and fingered the crumpled pack of cigarettes out of the pocket. “Matches on the seat somewhere,” he said, in a matter-of-fact way, screaming around a curve, missing the rock wall by inches.

She found them, lit the cigarette, coughed twice at their acrid brittle taste, and put it between his lips. “The pack,” he said. “Put it back where you got it, please.” She was amazed at his surface calm, but reached across once more, put the crumpled pack into his shirt pocket.

He drew deeply, threw smoke against the windshield, and made his decision. “When I stop, I want you out that door and down the road as fast as you can go. Do you understand?”

She looked at him with renewed fear. “I don’t have any shoes.”

His tone became softer, coping with the crazily appropriate remark as if it made sense, rather than as an indication of her nervousness. “That’s all right, the road is smooth, and it won’t be too far. Just try to get around a bend or under cover if you can. There might be an explosion.” Her eyes grew wide.

“But —”

“Do you understand?” he asked again, tightly. His patience was running thin. “Yes or no?” She nodded yes, but he was watching the road; he asked her again, and she answered with the one syllable, softly, timorously.

“Okay then,” he said, “open your door now. Don’t let it fly open, just slip the latch. Hold it ready to jump when I tell you.” He caught sight of the four cars pulling in like hunting falcons, above him in the rear view, behind him in the all-too-real world.

He took an S-curve right, then left, then right again, and for several beats was out of sight of the pursuers. The wheel seemed to flow like licorice in his hands as he slewed the rig sidewise, and amid the banshee-shriek of air brakes and peeling rubber, he jackknifed the cab left, right, left again, and wedged it between the rock-wall and the end-on bulk of the truck that lay across the road, its right rear wheels on the lip of the precipice. He had effectively blocked the road by turning the rig into an L-shaped barricade. “ Now jump! ” he howled at her, shoving her against the open door as hard as he could.

The girl tumbled out of the cab, hit the ground, rolled like a jellybean, and came up with slim legs pistoning, flashing white as her torn dress flapped about her thighs. She was running running and down the road … the sound of heavy boots running behind her, and she tossed a quick glance around; it was Harry Fischer, broken-field sprinting as though time was running out. They gained the safety of a bend, and Harry caught up with her.

“Here, take my hand!” He started climbing the raggedy face of the rock-wall. They were more than fifty feet up, moving like mountain goats, quickly, effortlessly on the ledged rock-wall, when they saw the lights of the first car slithering around the bend. They could not see what happened, but there was a squeal of brakes, a sound of something tearing, and then the car smashed full into the rig. There was an electric moment of waiting, and then the second car hit, the third, the fourth, and then came the explosion. It caught the night and tore it up the middle viciously. The sound was incredible, like a thousand rifles going off inside the semicircular canal of the ear. A whanging, metallic report that ratcheted back and forth through the mountains, building, building, phasing itself up like a dynamo gaining momentum. Harry threw himself across the girl as they hung there on the rock wall and the girl clapped her hands against her ears, a scream tearing from her mouth. The explosion seemed to go on forever, and then bits of metal and rock and dirt and foliage and — other things, cascaded down on them.