Harlan Ellison - No Doors, No Windows

Harry started to move, flattening himself protectively against the girl, when something huge and black and heavy came down out of the night sky and clipped him solidly across the top of his skull. He sagged without a sound, and started to slip away. The girl grabbed for him, they lost their footing and tumbled in a welter of rock and dirt down the rock wall. He hit first and lay crumpled, and an instant later she crashed down on top of him. She tried to rise, the debris continued to pelt them, and she was caught by a bit of tree stump that took her high above the right eye; and with a tiny murmur of pain she sagged across Harry Fischer’s body.

They lay there, unmoving, while the faraway hills echoed the dying gasps of the explosion, farther and farther away, till only the stars shied back and hid from the sound.

When he swam up through the ebony pain. Harry knew he was where he was, but superimposed over the watery image of the returning scene around him was another scene, not too far back in the past. He had been coming through the mountains, had stopped in the little town for a cup of joe, a couple of sinkers and a goofball to keep him awake the rest of the run to the excavations. There had been a carnival in the town. One of those balk-line jobs with a freak tent and half a dozen rube games rigged to pay once in ten thousand tries, a couple of animals, maybe a geek, a cotton candy bowl, and a nautch tent with half a dozen worn-over hags.

Harry had wandered down the midway and bought a suety hot dog, and a twist-cup of pink lemonade that tasted as though a boar had urinated in it. As he had come to the darker end of the midway he had heard the scream, and the girl pleading not to be hit again. Then the crack of a whip — that sound unlike any other sound in the world, when thong leather strikes flesh and draws blood — and another scream.

He had dropped the wienie and the pee-juice, and plunged into the darkness at the end of the midway. Behind the road trucks used to haul canvas and booths, there had been a dozen men in white sheet hoods, and one of them was beating the crap out of a blonde, her dress ripped in half a dozen places, and the whip lash-marks already thick and dark across her back and breasts. The man with the whip yelled “Whore!” and pulled his arm back to let her have it again.

Harry had barely realized what he was doing. A sharp remembered image of his mother being struck across the face by his father when he had been a child — it came and went — and he was on his way already. He hadn’t even thought of the ridiculous odds. A dozen big men who could tear his arms from their sockets and shillelagh him to death with the bloody ends.

He had caught the leader low in the back, like a pile-driver, and the man shot forward into the crowd like a cannonball. The whip had flown from his hand, and Harry quickly retrieved it. “Back, you buncha bastards!” he screamed shrilly, and cracked the whip around his head like a cowboy. They had fallen back, the circle of pain he created with the whip keeping them at bay. He grabbed the girl under one arm and started dragging her away.

They were moving in and he flicked the whip toward their faces with vicious determination. They had fallen back, and in one quick movement he picked the slight girl up in his arms and ran like a madman. He gained the cab of the truck just as they burst out from between the carny tents, and in a second he was inside, the doors locked, and the motor kicking.

The mob had grown by two or three men, unmasked, and one of them had a shotgun. He leveled it, ready to blow a hole through the cab, but one of the others had pointed in panic to the legend on the door of Harry’s cab: DANGER DYNAMITE EXPLOSIVES DANGER and the shotgun had gone down off point fast. Then Harry had kicked the heap, and gunned it forward. The big hulk had jumped as though goosed, and the hooded men had leaped out of the way.

A turn out into the town, a short run to the highway, and then out, climbing. And then the headlights behind him. The death-chase, the jackknifed rig, climbing the rock wall with the girl, the explosion and he had Had It. . . .

The scene flashed in an instant, re-told everything, and he came back to consciousness lying at the side of the road with the girl on top of him. His head ached as though someone had steam-driven a tenpenny spike in behind each eye, with a third shard of steel into his medulla oblongata, just for a fail-safe. He groaned, and the girl squirmed on his body. It was a disconcerting combination of feelings. The pain, and the pleasure.

Harry slid out from under her.

He staggered around the roadway for a few moments, trying to convince his synaptic relays they weren’t sending out orders for spaghetti. When he had mastered the trick of walking without falling down, he went back to the girl, and lifted her by the waist. She sat up, groaned in a fine alto, and opened her eyes blearily.

“Let’s get out of here,” he said. “Some of them may have made it through little Hiroshima down the road.”

He helped her to her feet, and supported her as they stumbled down the road. They did not talk for quite a while, until she seemed able to carry her own weight, and then they moved at a regular pace, casting weary, threadbare smiles at each other from time to time. Harry was impressed with the girl’s recovery, and the uncomplaining way she jogged along beside him.

When they reached the bottom of the steep incline, they found a fire-gutted shack, and part of a barn. There was hay in the barn, and they climbed into it, burrowing deeply inside, at the back of the mow, and Harry kept an eye out for travelers down the road.

“Who the hell were those men?”

“The local enforcers. They were kicked out of the Klan ten years ago for unnecessary brutality, or something, and they’ve been surly ever since.”

Harry grinned. She was all right. “That’s a very funny line. How true is it?”

“Every word.”

“So who was the big stud with the whip? He didn’t seem to like you very much.”

She tried to adjust the ripped bodice of her dress, but it only exposed more flesh, and Harry caught a brief flash of dark aureole and pink nipple before she covered herself with a dirt-smeared hand. “That was my father. He has a tendency toward crankiness.”

“What does he do for entertainment, let babies play with plastic clothing bags?”

She grinned youthfully. “He was angry at me.”

“For what?”

“For wanting to run away. I hired on at the carnival, in the girl tent; to try and get out of town. I was desperate; I’d have tried anything.”

“What’s wrong with the bus?”

“Daddy runs the town. He has a fellow, Routener; he does dirty things for him. Routener would have stopped me, sent me back into town. I tried everything: bus, train, even hitching a ride on the highway. They always brought me back. I figured if I could slip out of town with the carnival, I might make it.”

Harry scratched at his stubbled jaw. “You must be a pretty popular girl, them wanting to keep you handy like that.”

She snapped out a sweet, deadly laugh. “Popular! Ha, that’s a good one. They’d like me dead, but Daddy won’t let them do it; he says I look too much like my mother to put me in cement and sink me in the lake.” She paused, and a cloud passed across her expression. “I don’t know why my looking like mother should keep the dirty bastard from killing me … he drove mother to her grave.”

She pulled her full mouth tight, and Harry noted that she had dimples. “And besides, I know too much,” she said. “He knows all I have to do is get out of town, and I’ll tell everyone about why the new hospital collapsed. He stole close to eighty thousand dollars from that job!”

“Your father’s a big man in construction, I gather.” A horrible realization was dawning on him.