The Top of the Volcano: The Award-Winning Stories of Harlan Ellison Read online

  Suddenly, she didn’t look scared any more. She was watching me very close, and I could see her eyes were blue now. Now this is the really weird thing…

  I couldn’t do it. I mean, not exactly. I mean, I wanted to fuck her, see, but she was all soft and pretty and she kept looking at me, and no solo I ever met would believe me, but I heard myself talking to her, still standing there like some kind of wetbrain, one sneaker off and jeans down around my ankles. “What’s your name?”

  “Quilla June Holmes.”

  “That’s a weird name.”

  “My mother says it’s not that uncommon, back in Oklahoma.”

  “That where your folks come from?”

  She nodded. “Before the Third War.”

  “They must be pretty old by now.”

  “They are, but they’re okay. I guess.”

  We were just frozen there, talking to each other. I could tell she was cold, because she was shivering. “Well,” I said, sort of getting ready to drop down beside her, “I guess we better—”

  Damn it! That damned Blood! Right at that moment he came crashing in from outside. Came skidding through the lath, and plaster, raising dust, slid along on his ass till he got to us. “Now what?” I demanded.

  “Who’re you talking to?” the girl asked.

  “Him. Blood.”

  “The dog!?!”

  Blood stared at her and then ignored her. He started to say something but the girl interrupted him. “Then it’s true what they say…you can all talk to animals…”

  “You going to listen to her all night, or do you want to hear why I came in?”

  “Okay, why’re you here?”

  “You’re in trouble, Albert.”

  “Come on, forget the mickeymouse. What’s up?”

  Blood twisted his head toward the front door of the YMCA. “Roverpak. Got the building surrounded. I make it fifteen or twenty, maybe more.”

  “How the hell’d they know we was here?”

  Blood looked chagrined. He dropped his head.

  “Well?”

  “Some other mutt must’ve smelled her in the theater.”

  “Great.”

  “Now what?”

  “Now we stand ’em off, that’s what. You got any better suggestions?”

  “Just one.”

  I waited. He grinned.

  “Pull your pants up.”

  IV

  The girl, this Quilla June, was pretty safe. I made her a kind of a shelter out of wrestling mats, maybe a dozen of them. She wouldn’t get hit by a stray bullet, and if they didn’t go right for her, they wouldn’t find her. I climbed one of the ropes hanging down from the girders and laid out up there with the Browning and a couple of handfuls of reloads. I wished to God I’d had an automatic, a Bren or a Thompson. I checked the .45, made sure it was full, with one in the chamber, and set the extra clips down on the girder. I had a clear line-of-fire all around the gym.

  Blood was lying in shadow right near the front door. He’d suggested I try and pick off any dogs with the roverpak first, if I could. That would allow him to operate freely.

  That was the least of my worries.

  I’d wanted to hole up in another room, one with only a single entrance, but I had no way of knowing if the rovers were already in the building, so I did the best I could with what I had.

  Everything was quiet. Even that Quilla June. It’d taken me valuable minutes to convince her she’d damned well better hole up and not make any noise; she was better off with me than with twenty of them. “If you ever wanna see your mommy and daddy again,” I warned her. After that she didn’t give me no trouble, packing her in with mats.

  Quiet.

  Then I heard two things, both at the same time. From back in the swimming pool, I heard boots crunching plaster. Very soft. And from one side of the front door, I heard a tinkle of metal striking wood. So they were going to try a yoke. Well, I was ready.

  Quiet again.

  I sighted the Browning on the door to the pool room. It was still open from when I’d come through. Figure him at maybe five-ten, and drop the sights a foot and a half, and I’d catch him in the chest. I’d learned long ago you don’t try for the head. Go for the widest part of the body: the chest and stomach. The trunk.

  Suddenly, outside, I heard a dog bark, and part of the darkness near the front door detached itself and moved inside the gym. Directly opposite Blood. I didn’t move the Browning.

  The rover at the front door moved a step along the wall, away from Blood. Then he cocked back his arm and threw something—a rock, a piece of metal, something—across the room to draw fire. I didn’t move the Browning.

  When the thing he’d thrown hit the floor, two rovers jumped out of the swimming pool door, one on either side of it, rifles down, ready to spray. Before they could open up, I’d squeezed off the first shot, tracked across and put a second shot into the other one. They both went down. Dead hits, right in the heart. Bang, they were down, neither one moved.

  The mother by the door turned to split, and Blood was on him. Just like that, out of the darkness, riiiip!

  Blood leaped, right over the crossbar of the guy’s rifle held at ready, and sank his fangs into the rover’s throat. The guy screamed, and Blood dropped, carrying a piece of the guy with him. The guy was making awful bubbling sounds and went down on one knee. I put a slug into his head, and he fell forward.

  It went quiet again.

  Not bad. Not bad atall atall. Three takeouts and they still didn’t know our positions. Blood had fallen back into the murk by the entrance. He didn’t say a thing, but I knew what he was thinking: maybe that was three out of seventeen, or three out of twenty, or twenty-two. No way of knowing; we could be faced-off in here for a week and never know if we’d gotten them all, or some, or none. They could go and get poured full again, and I’d find myself run out of slugs and no food and that girl, that Quilla June, crying and making me divide my attention, and daylight—and they’d still be laying out there, waiting till we got hungry enough to do something dumb, or till we ran out of slugs; and then they’d cloud up and rain all over us.

  A rover came dashing straight through the front door at top speed, took a leap, hit on his shoulders, rolled, came up going in a different direction, and snapped off three rounds into different corners of the room before I could track him with the Browning. By that time he was close enough under me where I didn’t have to waste a .22 slug. I picked up the .45 without a sound and blew the back off his head. Slug went in neat, came out and took most of his hair with it. He fell right down.

  “Blood! The rifle!”

  Came out of the shadows, grabbed it up in his mouth and dragged it over to the pile of wrestling mats in the far corner. I saw an arm poke out from the mass of mats, and a hand grabbed the rifle, dragged it inside. Well, it was at least safe there, till I needed it. Brave little bastard: he scuttled over to the dead rover and started worrying the ammo bandolier off his body. It took him a while; he could have been picked off from the doorway or outside one of the windows, but he did it. Brave little bastard. I had to remember to get him something good to eat when we got out of this. I smiled, up there in the darkness: if we got out of this, I wouldn’t have to worry about getting him something tender. It was lying all over the floor of that gymnasium.

  Just as Blood was dragging the bandolier back into the shadows, two of them tried it with their dogs. They came through a ground floor window, one after another, hitting and rolling and going in opposite directions, as the dogs—a mother-ugly Akita, big as a house, and a Doberman bitch the color of a turd—shot through the front door and split in the unoccupied two directions. I caught one of the dogs, the Akita, with the .45, and it went down thrashing. The Doberman was all over Blood.

  But firing, I’d given away my position. One of the rovers fired from the hip and .30-06 soft-nosed slugs spanged off the girders around me. I dropped the automatic, and it started to slip off the girder as I reached for the Browning.
I made a grab for the .45 and that was the only thing saved me. I fell forward to clutch at it, it slipped away and hit the gym floor with a crash, and the rover fired at where I’d been. But I was flat on the girder, arm dangling, and the crash startled him. He fired at the sound, and right at that instant I heard another shot from a Winchester, and the other rover, who’d made it safe into the shadows, fell forward holding a big pumping hole in his chest. That Quilla June had shot him, from behind the mats.

  I didn’t even have time to figure out what the fuck was happening…Blood was rolling around with the Doberman and the sounds they were making were awful…the rover with the .30-06 chipped off another shot and hit the muzzle of the Browning, protruding over the side of the girder, and wham it was gone, falling down. I was naked up there without clout, and the sonofabitch was hanging back in shadow waiting for me.

  Another shot from the Winchester, and the rover fired right into the mats. She ducked back behind, and I knew I couldn’t count on her for anything more. But I didn’t need it; in that second, while he was focused on her, I grabbed the climbing rope, flipped myself over the girder, and howling like a burnpit-screamer, went sliding down, feeling the rope cutting my palms. I got down far enough to swing, and kicked off. I swung back and forth, whipping my body three different ways each time, swinging out and over, way over, each time. The sonofabitch kept firing, trying to track a trajectory, but I kept spinning out of his line of fire. Then he was empty, and I kicked back as hard as I could, and came zooming in toward his corner of shadows, and let loose all at once and went ass-over-end into the corner, and there he was, and I went right into him and he spanged off the wall, and I was on top of him, digging my thumbs into his eyesockets. He was screaming and the dogs were screaming and that girl was screaming and I pounded the motherfucker’s head against the floor till he stopped moving, then I grabbed up the empty .30-06 and whipped his head till I knew he wasn’t gonna give me no more aggravation.

  Then I found the .45 and shot the Doberman.

  Blood got up and shook himself off. He was cut up bad. “Thanks,” he mumbled, and went over to lie down in the shadows, to lick himself off.

  I went and found that Quilla June, and she was crying. About all the guys we’d killed. Mostly about the one she’d killed. I couldn’t get her to stop bawling so I cracked her across the face and told her she’d saved my life, and that helped some.

  Blood came dragassing over. “How’re we going to get out of this, Albert?”

  “Let me think.”

  I thought and knew it was hopeless. No matter how many we got, there’d be more. And it was a matter of macho now. Their honor.

  “How about a fire?” Blood suggested.

  “Get away while it’s burning?” I shook my head. “They’ll have the place staked-out all around. No good.”

  “What if we don’t leave? What if we burn up with it?”

  I looked at him. Brave…and smart as hell.

  V

  We gathered all the lumber and mats and scaling ladders and vaulting boxes and benches and anything else that would burn, and piled the garbage against a wooden divider at one end of the gym. Quilla June found a can of kerosene in a storeroom, and we set fire to the whole damn pile. Then we followed Blood to the place he’d found for us. The boiler room way down under the YMCA. We all climbed into the empty boiler, and dogged down the door, leaving a release vent open for air. We had one mat in there with us, and all the ammo we could carry, and the extra rifles and sidearms the rovers’d had on them.

  “Can you catch anything?” I asked Blood.

  “A little. Not much. I’m reading one guy. The building’s burning good.”

  “You be able to tell when they split?”

  “Maybe. If they split.”

  I settled back. Quilla June was shaking from all that had happened. “Just take it easy,” I told her. “By morning the place’ll be down around our ears, and they’ll go through the rubble and find a lot of dead meat, and maybe they won’t look too hard for a chick’s body. And everything’ll be all right…if we don’t get choked off in here.”

  She smiled, very thin, and tried to look brave. She was okay, that one. She closed her eyes and settled back on the mat and tried to sleep. I was beat. I closed my eyes, too.

  “Can you handle it?” I asked Blood.

  “I suppose. You better sleep.”

  I nodded, eyes still closed, and fell on my side. I was out before I could think about it.

  When I came back, I found the girl, that Quilla June, snuggled up under my armpit, her arm around my waist, dead asleep. I could hardly breathe. It was like a furnace; hell, it was a furnace. I reached out a hand, and the ouch of the plating of the boiler was so damned hot I couldn’t touch it. Blood was up on the mattress with us. That mat had been the only thing’d kept us from being singed good. He was asleep, head buried in his paws. She was asleep, still naked.

  I put a hand on her tit. It was warm. She stirred and cuddled into me closer. I got a hard-on.

  Managed to get my pants off, and rolled on top of her. She woke up fast when she felt me pry her legs apart, but it was too late by then. “Don’t…stop…what are you doing…no, don’t…”

  But she was half-asleep, and weak, and I don’t think she really wanted to fight me anyhow.

  She cried when I broke her, of course, but after that it was okay. There was blood all over the wrestling mat. And Blood just kept sleeping.

  It was really different. Usually, when I’d get Blood to track something down for me, it’d be grab it and punch it and pork it and get away fast before something bad could happen. But when she came, she rose up off the mat, and hugged me around the back so hard I thought she’d crack my ribs, and then she settled back down slow slow slow, like I do when I’m doing leg-lifts in the makeshift gym I rigged in the auto wrecking yard. And her eyes were closed, and she was relaxed-looking. And happy. I could tell.

  We did it a lot of times, and after a while it was her idea, but I didn’t say no. And then we lay out side-by-side and talked.

  She asked me about how it was with Blood, and I told her how the skirmisher dogs had gotten telepathic, and how they’d lost the ability to hunt food for themselves, so the solos and roverpaks had to do it for them, and how dogs like Blood were good at finding chicks for solos like me. She didn’t say anything to that.

  I asked her about what it was like where she lived, in one of the downunders.

  “It’s nice. But it’s always very quiet. Everyone is very polite to everyone else. It’s just a small town.”

  “Which one you live in?”

  “Topeka. It’s real close to here.”

  “Yeah, I know. The access dropshaft is only about half a mile from here. I went out there once, to take a look around.”

  “Have you ever been in a downunder?”

  “No. But I don’t guess I want to be, either.”

  “Why? It’s very nice. You’d like it.”

  “Shit.”

  “That’s very crude.”

  “I’m very crude.”

  “Not all the time.”

  I was getting mad. “Listen, you ass, what’s the matter with you? I grabbed you and pushed you around, I raped you half a dozen times, so what’s so good about me, huh? What’s the matter with you, don’t you even have enough smarts to know when somebody’s—”

  She was smiling at me. “I didn’t mind. I liked doing it. Want to do it again?”

  I was really shocked. I moved away from her. “What the hell is wrong with you? Don’t you know that a chick from a downunder like you can be really mauled by solos? Don’t you know chicks get warnings from their parents in the downunders, ‘Don’t cumup, you’ll get snagged by them dirty, hairy, slobbering solos!’ Don’t you know that?”

  She put her hand on my leg and started moving it up, the fingertips just brushing my thigh. I got another hard-on. “My parents never said that about solos,” she said. Then she pulled me over her again, and ki
ssed me, and I couldn’t stop from getting in her again.

  God, it just went on like that for hours. After a while Blood turned around and said, “I’m not going to keep pretending I’m asleep. I’m hungry. And I’m hurt.”

  I tossed her off me—she was on top by this time—and examined him. The Doberman had taken a good chunk out of his right ear, and there was a rip right down his muzzle, and blood-matted fur on one side. He was a mess. “Jesus, man, you’re a mess,” I said.

  “You’re no fucking rose garden yourself, Albert!” he snapped. I pulled my hand back.

  “Can we get out of here?” I asked him.

  He cast around, and then shook his head. “I can’t get any readings. Must be a pile of rubble on top of this boiler. I’ll have to go out and scout.”

  We kicked that around for a while, and finally decided if the building was razed, and had cooled a little, the roverpak would have gone through the ashes by now. The fact that they hadn’t tried the boiler indicated that we were probably buried pretty good. Either that, or the building was still smoldering overhead. In which case, they’d still be out there, waiting to sift the remains.

  “Think you can handle it, the condition you’re in?”

  “I guess I’ll have to, won’t I?” Blood said. He was really surly. “I mean, what with you busy coitusing your brains out, there won’t be much left for staying alive, will there?”

  I sensed real trouble with him. He didn’t like Quilla June. I moved around him and undogged the boiler hatch. It wouldn’t open. So I braced my back against the side, and jacked my legs up, and gave it a slow, steady shove.

  Whatever had fallen against it from outside resisted for a minute, then started to give, then tumbled away with a crash. I pushed the door open all the way, and looked out. The upper floors had fallen in on the basement, but by the time they’d given, they’d been mostly cinder and lightweight rubble. Everything was smoking out there. I could see daylight through the smoke.

  I slipped out, burning my hands on the outside lip of the hatch. Blood followed. He started to pick his way through the debris. I could see that the boiler had been almost completely covered by the gunk that had dropped from above. Chances were good the roverpak had taken a fast look, figured we’d been fried, and moved on. But I wanted Blood to run a recon anyway. He started off, but I called him back. He came.