Harlan Ellison - No Doors, No Windows

She nodded. “Everything from the new school library to the mine excavations about ten miles from here.”

“Bingo,” he said, and lay back in the hay, wishing he had taken a nice quiet job tending cobras. “I was hauling that juice to the excavations for him.”

“Oh,” she said softly, looking at Harry with fear.

“Bonded driver,” Harry reassured her. “No connection with your old man’s outfit.” He lay back for a long time in silence.

“I’ll fuck you if you’ll get me out of town,” she said, and removed her hand from her breast. Harry closed his eyes very slowly, then opened them, and what he had seen was still there, breathing heavily at him. Oh boy , he thought.

“Well, that’s very nice,” he said, “but what makes you think we can get out of town without your Daddy’s group stopping us … hey!” She had her hand on his leg, and was moving it in slow circles.

“Maybe Daddy was killed in the explosion,” she said gently, moving nearer to him. “I think so, you know?”

“When that juice wagon went up,” Harry said, moving closer to her , “almost anything could have happened. I heard all four cars hit, but whether they were just piled up and the first car caught most of it, I don’t know. Or even if your old man was in the damned car, it’s simply a shuck, baby, we could be in real trubb —”

She came at him mouth first, and he caught her on the fly.

It was a long, twisting time before he got his mouth free enough to say, “You must want out of here pretty bad …”

“Very bad,” she answered, pulling up her skirt. “Daddy was whipping me because I was working the girl show after the regular show ended. That’s how bad I wanted out.”

“You mean the ‘blow-off,’ in the raw?”

She nodded, and did something interesting with her underpants. “What’s your name?” she asked him, just before their bodies ran together like lava.

After the third time, they lay in the hay, and she lit a cigarette for him. Her name was Angela; she told him to call her Angie.

“You’re going to be a problem if your old man didn’t buy it in the crash back there,” Harry said. She grinned and took a deep drag from his cigarette. He grinned in mock ferocity and yelped, “ Wowch! ” as she handed the cigarette back, and it burned his fingers.

He dropped the butt, and it disappeared in the hay, and she started giggling at him. “I think good fucking really shakes you up, doesn’t it, Harry?”

“Stop clowning!” he yelled. “This hay’s drier than hell, and that cigarette’s in there.” He started scrabbling through the debris, trying to hitch up his pants at the same time. He began throwing hay like a dog burying a bone.

“Oh Harry, don’t be such a jerk! It’ll put itself out.” She tried to drag him back down to her, just as the first wisp of smoke floated up out of the mass. An instant later a thin tongue of flame leaped past their faces.

“Run!” Harry yelled, and dragged her to her feet. They struggled hip-deep out of the hay, and by the time they had reached the open door of the ruined barn, there was a wall of thick, acrid smoke and yellow-crimson flame behind them.

They stumbled out into the weed-overgrown yard between the stump of the tarpaper shack and the furiously blazing barn. They stood there choking, trying to rub the smoke from their eyes, trying to empty their lungs of smoke.

“Good show,” Harry said resignedly, just as the first bullet cracked across the hillside, and whanged past his head, losing itself somewhere in the woods behind the burning barn. The second and third shots were wilder, far wide of the mark, but Harry got the message. His head came up and he saw the bunch clambering down the roadside toward them.

“Shoot by the light of the barn!” one of the men was shouting, and even across that great a distance, Harry could recognize the voice of the girl’s hooded Daddy. “But watch Angela! Don’t hit Angela!”

Angie’s hands went to her face in terror, as though on puppet strings, and Harry spun around in confusion. “I don’t know how they came out of it alive, but we’ve got trouble, little lady.”

He grabbed her by the wrist and turned, looking for an avenue of escape. “C’mon, the woods!” He plunged forward, dragging her along behind.

They hit the woods at a gallop, and lost themselves in the twisted shadow mass among the trees. They ran on through the twisting stands of short-leaf pines, oak, poplar and hickory trees that seemed to converge on them, mass against them, send them deeper into the murky undergrowth, blot out the sky overhead, trip them, send them sprawling.

They were on their feet again, plunging through a clump of dogwood, and suddenly, they were out on the other side. Against the night sky, now just lightening into dawn with a gray, zombie-flesh paleness, they could see the huge grotesque bulk of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

They were in a field of ripe tobacco.

“Run, for chrissakes!” Harry gasped. They ran, hurling themselves forward through the great leafy plants, the flat green fronds slapping their faces. They did not hear the chopper till it was almost overhead, and spinning down on them. “Harry!” Angie shrieked, looking up into the whirling rotors.

“Jeezus, Christ, Awmiddy!” Harry bellowed, and tried to run in another direction. The eggbeater followed his progress. They tried hiding in the tobacco, but the backwash of the rotors cleared them out like maggots from under a piece of fetid meat.

“A chopper! Where the hell did that come from?”

Harry was running as hard as he could. Angie dragged hard on the end of his hand, and her words came as gasps: “He has a … radiophone in his … car … he uses the heli, heli … cop … ter for surveying construction sites … he must … must have called it from the c-car …”

The chopper swooped at them, and they fled before it.

They were trapped.

The ’copter drove them forward, coming at them field-level high and hovering, sending them out of the tobacco, toward the road: the road that curved around the forest, that now carried the group of men in white hoods and sheets. The sheets were dirty and torn and some of the men were without cover, but when they saw Harry and the girl they yelled like rebel troops at Missionary Ridge and pounded down the road toward them.

The first one to reach Harry caught a fist high in the face. It spun him like a dervish and his legs twisted like vines. He went down in an untidy heap; and then the rest of them were on Harry. He kicked out, and swung his locked hands like a mace, but there were too many, and when they grabbed him from behind he kicked off with both feet and jacked his heavy boots into someone’s crotch. There was a scream, and a moan, and Angie yelled something obscene, and then they hit Harry very hard with something very very hard, and he sagged in their grasp. Suddenly, the dawn (that had been coming up like thunder) went out like the light when you close the refrigerator door.

And Harry was in cold storage.

Angie’s Daddy was a cartoon impression of Little Orphan Annie’s Daddy. He was a huge phallus of a man, bald and glistening, with a pair of slitted eyes that looked as though they’d been cut in the yellow papyrus of his thick face with a serrated-edge bread knife. His mouth was almost entirely lipless; and aside from the resemblances to Daddy Warbucks, Mr. Clean and Disraeli, there was a salamander air about him. Harry expected Daddy to hiss, rather than shout.

But Daddy shouted. For a long time!

“If it hadn’t of been for that goddamned fire we never woulda seen your goddamned bodies standin’ out against the light. Thought you had old Daddy, din’tcha, you goddamned snotty punk! Thought you put old goddamned Daddy down for the long count, din’tcha? Well, old Daddy got nineteen lives an’ then some, like a mass ’a cats!”