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Vic and Blood
by Harlan Ellison
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/Science Fiction

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Copyright ©2003 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation

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CONTENTS

VIC AND BLOOD

Contents

LATEST BREAKING NEWS: THE KID AND THE POOCH

FROM: THE WIT AND WISDOM OF BLOOD

EGGSUCKER

FROM: THE WIT AND WISDOM OF BLOOD

A BOY AND HIS DOG

FROM: THE WIT AND WISDOM OF BLOOD

RUN, SPOT, RUN

FROM: THE WIT AND WISDOM OF BLOOD

* * * *

WORLD WAR III. 1 LASTED FROM 25 JUNE 1950 WHEN THE REPUBLIC OF KOREA WAS INVADED BY 60,000 SCREAMING NORTH KOREAN TROOPS SPEARHEADED BY SOMETHING IN EXCESS OF ONE HUNDRED RUSSIAN-BUILT TANKS ... TILL 9 NOVEMBER 1989 WITH THE COLLAPSE OF COMMUNISM IN RUSSIA AND THE OPENING OF THE BERLIN WALL. WORLD WAR III.2 BEGAN EITHER IN 1987 WITH THE ISLAMIC INTIFADA OR IN DECEMBER OF 1994 WHEN THE MUSLIM REPUBLIC OF CHECHNYA DECLARED ITS INDEPENDENCE FROM THE OTHER FIFTEEN GIMCRACK STATES THAT HAD ONCE BEEN THE USSR, AND WAS INVADED BY RUSSIAN TROOPS ... TILL WORLD WAR III.3 OVERLAPPED WORLD WAR III.2 AND BEGAN ON 11 SEPTEMBER 2001 WITH THE FALL OF MANHATTAN'S WORLD TRADE CENTER. WORLD WAR III—COLD AND HOT—LASTED TILL TWO WEEKS AFTER RAMADAN IN THE YEAR 2021, WHEN THE SIXTY-FIVE RECOGNIZED STATE GOVERNMENTS, ALONG WITH THE 128 ROGUE AND “LIBERATION” ARMIES, MET TO SIGN THE VATICAN'S PROPOSED ENTENTE CORDIALE IN THE COURTYARD OF THE GREAT MOSQUE AT MECCA, AMID THE STILL-SMOLDERING SHARDS OF WHAT HAD BEEN THE SACRED KABA. WORLD WAR III—HOT AND COLD—LASTED SEVENTY-ONE YEARS (THOUGH NOBODY SEEMED SMART ENOUGH TO REALIZE IT HAD ALL BEEN ALL ONE CONTINUING CONFLICT).

BUT AS THE NEW YEAR DAWNED IN 2022 IT WAS ALL OVER. PEACE IN OUR TIME. PEACE AND TRANQUILITY AND BROTHERLY LOVE REIGNED IN FULL, LA-DE-DAH.

FOR TWO YEARS AND SIX MONTHS AND THREE DAYS.

WORLD WAR IV BROKE OUT ON THE 215TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE BIRTH OF EDGAR ALLAN POE—19 JANUARY 2024. WORLD WAR IV LASTED FIVE DAYS; UNTIL THE FEW REMAINING MISSILES THAT HAD JAMMED IN THEIR FIRST-STRIKE RELEASE PHASE CLEARED THEIR FULLY COMPUTERIZED SILOS BENEATH THE PAINTED DESERT, THE SAHARAN AHAGGARS, THE RUB AL KHALI, THE SIBERIAN PLATEAU AND PYONGYANG; BUT BY THEN THERE WASN'T MUCH OF ANYTHING LEFT TO FIGHT OVER. FIVE DAYS.

THEN WHAT WAS LEFT BELONGED TO ANYBODY WHO WANTED IT, ANYBODY WITH A TASTE FOR RADIATION AND RUBBLE. BUT IT WAS A VERY DIFFERENT WORLD THE SURVIVORS CLAIMED. THE “GOOD FOLKS” SANK THEIR CAISSON CITIES, THEIR STERILE DOWNUNDERS, DEEP IN THE EARTH. AND THE SNAGGLE-TOOTHED REMNANTS OF THE ABOVEGROUND WERE ABANDONED TO THE NEW MASTERS OF DESOLATION: VICIOUS ROVERPAKS OF PARENTLESS YOUNG BOYS ... AND THEIR TELEPATHIC DOGS.

FROM: THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD, AS BLOOD TELLS IT.

VIC AND BLOOD

the continuing stories of A BOY AND HIS DOG

by Harlan Ellison ®

Copyright © 1987, 2003 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation.

[Back to Table of Contents]

VIC AND BLOOD

is an Edgeworks Abbey Offering in association with ereads.com. Published by arrangement with the Author and The Kilimanjaro Corporation.

Harlan Ellison and Edgeworks Abbey are registered trademarks of The Kilimanjaro Corporation.

This edition is copyright © 2008 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation. All rights reserved.

Front Cover Illustration by Leo & Diane Dillon. Copyright © 1966 by Leo & Diane Dillon. Renewed, © 1994 by Leo & Diane Dillon.

First e-reads publication: 2009

www.ereads.com

Harlan Ellison website:

www.harlanellison.com

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical-including photocopy, recording, Internet posting, electronic bulletin board-or any other information storage and retrieval system, or by any other method, means or process of embodying and/or transmitting information, text or the spoken word now known or hereafter devised without permission in writing from The Kilimanjaro Corporation, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a critical article or review to be printed in a magazine or newspaper, or electronically transmitted on radio, television or in a recognized on-line journal. For information address Author's agent: Richard Curtis Associates, Inc., 171 East 74th Street, New York, New York 10021, USA.

All persons, places and organizations in this book-except those clearly in the public domain-are fictitious and any resemblance that may seem to exist to actual persons, places or organizations living, dead or defunct is purely coincidental. These are works of fiction.

Introduction: “Latest Breaking News: The Kid and the Pooch,” copyright © 2003 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation.

“Eggsucker,” copyright © 1977 by Harlan Ellison. Renewed, 2005 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation.

“A Boy and His Dog,” copyright © 1969 by Harlan Ellison. Renewed, 1997 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation.

“Run, Spot, Run,” copyright © 1980 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation.

[Back to Table of Contents]

Contents

LATEST BREAKING NEWS: THE KID AND THE POOCH

EGGSUCKER

A BOY AND HIS DOG

RUN, SPOT, RUN

[Back to Table of Contents]

LATEST BREAKING NEWS: THE KID AND THE POOCH

FROM: THE WIT AND WISDOM OF BLOOD

“It's probably not productive to codify civilization in terms of how many fire hydrants it has.”

“Into each life a little Vic must fall.”

I am nuts about “buddy” movies. And that's what Vic & Blood is.

This is the first-time publication for the prose versions of this material as linked with the graphic interpretations. The stories (the tiniest sections of the full novel, BLOOD'S A ROVER) have all seen print since Michael Moorcock asked me for a contribution to his magazine New Worlds, in England, April 1969. I was writing the novel at the time, and what I thought was the first section, “A Boy and His Dog,” had just come off my typewriter. It read well as a stand-alone, so I sent the slightly abbreviated version (15,600 words) to Mike, without the vaguest idea that its appearance would mean more than the modest fee New Worlds was than paying.

The novella appeared in general circulation in America in July of 1969, in my story collection THE BEAST THAT SHOUTED LOVE AT THE HEART OF THE WORLD. It was published at its full length, as it appears here, 18,000 words.

I could not have been more wrong, what the response would be to that partial section of an intended 150,000-word novel. If, in fifty years as a professional writer, I have had anything approaching a “universal hit,” among the four or five contenders would have to be “A Boy and His Dog,” It won me a Nebula for Best Novella from the Science Fiction Writers of America; it has been reprinted endlessly; it has been translated into nineteen languages; it was bought for a TV series, though never produced; it has been pirated repeatedly in Russia; and in 1975 that madcap director L.Q. Jones made a movie of it, starring a young Don Johnson, Jason Robards, Jr., and a nifty little dog named Tiger. Blood's telepathic voice was the late Tim McIntire, whom you would know best as the actor who portrayed deejay Alan Freed in American Hot Wax.

The problem for me has been this.

The film version of “A Boy and His Dog” had a more than slightly misogynistic tone. Not the story, the movie. I have no trouble placing the blame on that sexist loon Jones (see: “Huck and Tom, The Bizarre Liaison of Ellison and Jones” in Outré magazine, issue #309, Fall 2002). He was brung up in Texas, and as a good ole boy he is pretty much beyond retraining.

But I catch the flak. I've had to go to universities where they've screened the movie (it being one of the most popular campus films perennially, and constantly available in one of another unauthorized knock-off video version) and I've had to try to explain to Politically Correct nitwits that I didn't write the damned film-which I happen to like a lot, except for that idiotic last line, which I despise-I wrote the original story; so I won't accept the blame for what they perceive as a “woman-hating tone” in the film.

And I say to them READ THE DAMNED STORY! In the story (not to give too much away for those few of you who don't know this material), as in the film...

VIC NEVER TOUCHES THE MEAT!

There is a very nice college professor (whose name escapes me for the moment) who uses A Boy and His Dog, the film, to teach some cinema class or other, and he shows them the movie and then tells them to go to my website (www.harlanellison.com) and ask for clarification of any questions their viewing of the film might have raised.

And, oh gawd, do they ever! They ask the dumbest questions you can imagine, and they make assumptions about me you wouldn't believe. They do not perceive that I am not a misogynist, that I am a misanthrope ... I treat male and female with equal monstrousness in this work. They also seem blissfully unaware of history (well, duh) and what happens after a decimating war in which food, weapons, shelter and women become valuable chattel. Clearly, I am showing in these stories that it's a brutal, amoral way of living; not a Good Thing. But the nitwits are products of the American Educational System, and looking beyond the surface of a work of fiction seems anathema to them since it requires ratiocination and cannot be abetted by binge-drinking.

I show my real attitude toward these matters by making Vic little more than a beast, while Blood represents culture, wit, intellect, savvy, and civilization at its best. By reversing the roles, I hope to uplift the intellectual level of the entire population of the United States. And Guam. Or at least those who can properly pronounce the word nuclear.

So here we are, Vic, Blood, you, me, 34 years after I wrote that first section (which turned out to be the second section, actually). Twenty-eight years after the film of “A Boy and His Dog” won me a Hugo at the 34th World Science Fiction Convention. And I've written the rest of the book, BLOOD'S A ROVER. The final, longest section is in screenplay form-and they're bidding here in Hollywood, once again, for the feature film aand tv rights-and one of these days before I go through that final door, I'll translate it into elegant prose, and the full novel will appear.

But till that time, THIS, what you done got in your present paws, this is the most complete Vic & Blood oeuvre ever done. I suggest-and it's only a suggestion-that for optimum pleasure and clarity, you read the work as here presented. Read the story, then look at the pitchers. Do it that way with all three of the sections. And enjoy the new stuff here, such as From the Wit and Wisdom of Blood, which I wrote just for this edition.

And remember, whatever else you forget, you must remember:

VIC NEVER TOUCHES THE MEAT!

And after you get done reading all of this, if you want to go to the chatroom at Ellison Wonderland (www.harlanellison.com), you'll find an archive of the dopey questions the nitwits have asked, plus snotty answers from yr. faithful author, and we'll all be the richer for your participation.

That's as close to being Politically Correct as I can get.

There is much of Blood in me.

Harlan Ellison Sherman Oaks, California 25 March 2003

[Back to Table of Contents]

FROM: THE WIT AND WISDOM OF BLOOD

“Don't fret about it, kid; nobody gets out of childhood alive.”

“When I listen to what you have to say, I can tell you weren't born yesterday. Nobody could get that bone/stick/stone stupid in just 24 hours.”

“Bad bedfellows will always come back to bite you; like bad bedbugs.”

“I never met a man I didn't like. I don't get out much.”

[Back to Table of Contents]

EGGSUCKER

A PREQUEL TO “A BOY AND HIS DOG"

UNLESS I'VE DROPPED A STITCH at some point and have messed up the chronology, I met Vic—whom I permit to wallow in the delusion that he is my “master"-in 2021. The year of what they once knew as their Lord, 2021. As solos go, Vic is okay. He'll never be Bertrand Russell in the cerebration department, their Lord knows, but he's steadfast, responsible and game as they come. A bit too game, occasionally. The kid takes too many chances to suit my highly-attuned sense of survival.

The way Vic tells it, he found me.

Having long-since learned the twists and turns of the labyrinth that is the human ego, I permit him to batten on this monstrous inaccuracy.

A little self-delusion goes a long way to keeping one's pet human in line.

It also permits them a rat hole of dignity-preservation into which they can scurry, when they're put in their place. To be specific, I remember an evening.

We had found a case of bottles in what was left of a Mayfair Market. Half a dozen were still intact with the contents unevaporated. (When I discovered what the contents were composed of, I realized the liquid was probably nonbiodegradable unto the hundredth generation.) Six bottles of a virulent jet fuel substitute labeled Sweet Betsy Pike fruit wine, 92 proof, distilled from grain, rare earths and unnameable trace metals, helium, argon, rutabaga and Necco wafers. I would sooner have swilled my own piss.

But good old Albert, aka Vic, whooped and howled like a Belgian wolfhound getting a glucose enema. “This booze is worth its weight in ammo!” he yowled, capering around the dirt-banked pit, all that remained of the basement of the Mayfair Market. As he danced, he did a little sidestep so he wouldn't trip over the bodies of the two rovers he'd had to waste to gain possession of the Sweet Betsy Pike fruit wine. One of them wasn't quite dead, kept jerking his right leg the way I do when I'm sleeping and having a bad dream. The other one was spread out a bit; really a messy shot; way below Vic's standard between-the-eyes.

So we took the six bottles in a wrap-up and went looking for Skipper and Walter, who were the ramrods of a loverpak called The 82nd Airborne. They called themselves that for who knows what reason, maybe they'd seen that old movie, I think it was a Van Johnson flick, maybe it was “Geronimo” or “Gung Ho,” or something like that. Vic is the movie bulf, not me. Mostly I'm bored by flicks, unless they're about food.

The 82nd Airborne was the armorer for most of the loverpaks, except for Fellini and that bunch of teen-aged pederastees he uses for slaves. Freaky as Fellini is, he's smart; and he'd found his own secret cache of ammunition, which was one of the things that made him the single strongest roverpak in the area. They're kidnappers and mean shitty killers—they do it for chuckles, not because they have to—so nobody crosses him. He's also dead chill on solos who might get to some excavatable food before his gang does, so nobody goes near him. So except for that creep Fellini, The 82nd Airborne kept everyone in slugs. That was their barter. But you had to bring Skipper and Walter something valuable—not to mention your empty brass which they used for making reloads—before they'd fill you up again.

Vic seemed to think that a few bottles of diabetically sweet poison was heavy bartering coin. He was right, of course. He has a good sense about that kind of thing. Not me. I can never figure out what makes humans go for one kind of awful tasting slop over some other equally noxious crap. I once brought Vic a dead sparrow and suggested he use it to get us fresh water. He looked at me as if I was crazy. “People don't eat dead birds, Blood,” he said. He was trying to be patient.

“And why is that, Albert,” I said, being cranky.

“Stop calling me Albert!” I love to hear Vic scream. And since he's never quite understood why I get such a kick out of calling him Albert—after Albert Payson Terhune, who wrote all those stupid dog books in which we noble creatures were pets, always being saved by some sappy human—it is my best gambit to make him scream.

“Okay, so why, master Vic?”

“Because dead bird is lousy tasting, that's why.”

“But you eat sheep, and cow, and snake. I've even seen some of you eat French-fried rat.”

“Yeah?” he said, nastily. “Well, there are even low scumbags who think parboiled dog is a delicacy. Keep fucking with me and I'll trade you for fresh water.”

And he walked away, leaving the dead sparrow on the sidewalk. So did I. Yecchhh.

Anyhow, we took the Sweet Betsy Pike fruit wine over near what used to be the docks, and Vic yelled out across the harbor, “Hey! Skipper! Walter!”

And after a while a light went on, over there on the big barge in the middle of the harbor, this barge that used to be a garbage scow, but which Skipper and Walter and The 82nd Airborne had taken over for their home turf, where they had all the lathes and the reloading presses and the die sets for reloading brass set up. And somebody, maybe Skipper, but I couldn't tell across the water, used a megaphone and yelled back, “Yeah, who is it? Whaddaya want?”

And Vic yelled back that it was him and Blood, and he had barter, and the voice asked across the water what kind of ammo Vic needed, and Vic said .22 longs and .45's, and the voice asked what he had to trade, and Vic yelled back that he had booze, and the megaphone voice took a beat as if he was asking someone else if it was cool, and then hollered over that they'd send the skiff. So we waited in the dark, sitting on the edge of the jetty, looking out across the harbor, all that inky water, and I passed the time by trying to run Vic through his lessons.

“Name the Presidents of the United States after Franklin D. Roosevelt,” I said.

Vic kicked at the water. He didn't answer.

“After Roosevelt,” I insisted.

“Don't want to,” he said, fishing around in his left-to-right bandolier for a cigarette butt.

“What's the matter, brain in repose at this time?”

“Get off me.” There was a miserable tone in his voice.

“Come on, take a crack at it. I'll get you started: Truman, Eisenhower...”

He filched up a butt from one of the bandolier pockets, along with his flint and steel, and sparked himself a light. “Truman, Eisenhower...” I said again, a little tougher.

He turned on me sharply and looked down where I was sitting in the dark. “God damn you, Blood! Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Carter, Brown, Kennedy, Kennedy, Kennedy, I told you I didn't want to do it!”

He was yelling.

“You forgot Ford,” I said. Quietly.

“Oh, piss off!” And he got up and walked away.

I didn't know what was lumbering him. We hadn't had a bad day; it had been a pretty good one, in fact. A couple of cans of salt beef and some canned cherries from that Mayfair Market, we had a pretty secure flop for the night, a janitor's apartment tucked back at the rear of an alley under a blasted apartment building, with only one channel of attack in case someone came after us. Not a bad day.

I got up and followed him.

“Hey,” I said, finding him easily in the dark. “What's on your mind, kiddo?”

He pulled on the cigarette butt till it was so short I wondered if it was singeing the little hairs in his nose. I plopped my tail down and waited. After a second he snapped the butt off his thumb and forefinger, it went spiraling off into the ink and made a pssss in the harbor. When he spoke, I knew he was thinking about other places, other times. “Hell, I don't know, Blood. Just feeling very crummy. One of those rovers this afternoon, the one kept saying please please please when I shot him. No women for almost a month. All this history and crap you keep whipping on me till my head hurts. Every day's just like every other day, just hustling for food.”

My pet boy was suffering from battle fatigue.

“Come on down here so we can talk face to face.” He crouched down, started scratching the fur behind my right ear automatically. I had him trained to a fine edge.

“Look, Vic: this is only temporary. One day very soon, as I keep telling you, something's going to start happening in this country. Someone's going to settle down and start a farm, start planting things right in the ground, put up a stout guard wall around the homestead to keep out creeps like Fellini, and then after a while someone else will join him, and then there'll be two, and then a third, and after a while it'll be a real settlement. They may have started doing it already ... the war's been over for forty years already. Unless I've dropped a stitch somewhere. But I think I'm sure it's forty years, give or take a couple. So maybe they've already started.”

Vic snorted a half-chuckle, as if it was all bullshit.

“Come on now, kiddo,” I said, keeping at it, “you've heard enough rumors from solos who've passed through, and that minstrel last year...”

“It's all ramadoola.”

“Maybe not.”

“Rumors. Bullshit. About over the hill—right?”

“Perhaps. That's as good a name for Valhalla as any.”

“Where's that?”

“No place. It's just a word out of mythology.”

“And what's that?!” he snarled, getting angry at my using a word he didn't know. “Is that some more useless bullshit you're gonna try and teach me?”

“No. You have no need for mythology, old friend.” It made me sad. “You'll make your own.”

We sat quietly for a few minutes, waiting for the skiff. “But there's got to be an ‘over the hill,’ kiddo. Take my word for it.”

“Trust me ... right?”

“That's right. Trust me.”

He looked off across the harbor, where the light on the skiff had detached itself from the dark bulk of the barge, and he murmured. “Yeah, well, we ain't never gonna see it, dog.” I didn't correct his grammar. He was just feeling down, feeling low; he'd get over it. A decent firefight, some sex, he'd be okay again. I didn't even object when he called me dog. But I'd get him later: call him “boy.”

Then I'd tell him about Tarzan.

And after that I'd teach him about mythology.

The skiff slid in at the jetty and there were three skinny rovers leveling pump guns at us. We walked back and they braced us. “Spread,” said the one in the prow. Vic didn't lie down and spread. He stood there with the .22 in the crook of his arm, the flap of the .45's holster unbuttoned. He just stared back at them. The one in the middle had a lantern. It didn't give much light, but they could see he wasn't about to let them frisk him. “Spread,” the skinny pump gun in the prow said again.

“You're here, so that means Skipper and Walter sent you over, and that means they know me, and they know I'm okay, so stop playing Clint Eastwood and move your ass so we can get in.”

They faced each other that way for a couple of long moments and I thought, oh shit, they always have to do their machismo number. And I calculated how far and how high I'd have to jump to get at the throat of the skinny in the middle with the lantern. But the pump gun in the plow nodded, and backed off, so we got in the skiff.

And they took us over the water to the barge.

Everybody forgot Ford.

I'm still telling about this evening I remember.

We got over to the barge, and it was the first time I ever saw the tiniest sign that humans could be friendly to one another. Vic actually shook hands with Skipper and Walter.

Skipper was a short kid, perhaps seventeen, with straight brown hair that he greased back flat to his head. He had a nice pair of blue eyes that watched everything. His hands were small but they were fast. I could see where he would have decided to play it safe, running a roverpak, rather than going solo. He had the kind of hands I've come to recognize on humans who like to make things.

Walter was funny. He was pudgy and didn't say anything that made sense. He whistled a lot and sometimes sang bits and snatches of old songs. Every once in a while he'd come over and hug or kiss Skipper. They were friends, and it rubbed off on the rest of The 82nd Airborne. And Vic.

They took the four bottles of wine Vic offered and all the brass Vic had policed up, and the deal was made. Then Skipper suggested Vic hang out and get ripped with some of them, and Vic said he'd put up the other two bottles, and they proceeded to get themselves so crosseyed, so quickly, that it only reaffirmed my opinion of people. I was sorry to see Vic in that state however. He is a very sloppy drunk.

Which was when he made his mistake with me, which was when I had to put him in his place, which was where I began with this anecdote.

One of Skipper and Walter's workmen came out of the factory area at the rear of the barge and gave Vic a boot full of loads, and Vic dumped them into his sack, and kissed Walter, and said to me, “Hey, Blood, have a drink.”

I just looked at him. He had said it aloud, not with his mind, silent, the way we talk most of the time. He'd said it aloud so all the rest of them could hear it. I just looked at him. There are times when Vic is in really tacky taste.

“Whassa matter?” Skipper said. “He don't wanna drink with us? Too good to drink with us? Dogs ain't s'possed to drink with us? Somethin’ wrong he don't wanna drink with us?”

He wasn't a surly lush, he was just rambling. But Vic knew better. I don't drink. I don't use dope. I have sworn a vow of sexual abstinence. One of us has to be pure, so we can hope to stay alive. Also, I am a noble creature.

I thought at Vic, “That was a stupid move.”

He thought back, “Oh, take it easy, fer crissakes. Have a bite of this stuff. Good for you.”

Between solos and their dogs, as between selected members of roverpaks and their dogs, the mind-to-mind is a closed channel. No one can eavesdrop. It's partially genetic, partially empathic, partially chemically-induced. At least it was that way during the War, when my ancestors were first altered for skirmisher duty. I suppose the solos and rovers who can ‘path are the children of those troopers who were trained and innoculated to work with the skirmishers. All I know for certain is that there have only been one or two other humans with whom I've had mind-to-mind communication.

So no one else was listening to our bickering.

“I'm going for a walk,” I ‘pathed. “When I get back. I'd like to see you on your feet, if that's possible. I'd like to see us get off this barge and back to our flop for the night. I'd like to see you assuming a little of the responsibility for this partnership.”

“You just hate to see me happy.”

“I just hate to see you stinko.”

“I'm not stinko.”

“Well, you're sure as hell not pro-survival at the moment, Albert, dear chum.”

Walter said, “Havin’ a fight with your mutt?”

Vic looked at him. “He ain't a mutt.”

“Isn't a mutt,” I ‘pathed.

“Isn't a mutt,” Vic said.

“I wouldn't take no shit from no eggsucker,” one of Skipper's men said. It was the pump gun from the skiff.

I got up and walked out of the room.

I don't have to take that kind of crap.

And if my alleged master can't protect my honor, well, perhaps a talented sniffer ought to find a new relationship. That's what I was thinking as I wandered into the factory section of the barge.

I was just killing time. I wandered around, looking at the Lyman reloading press and the primer seater and the powder scale and the Saeco sizing die they used for making new slugs. There were a couple of rovers working in there. One of them was bent over a G-H Tool & Die Corp. bullet swaging die set and another one was using a canneluring tool that knurls a groove around the slug for crimping. They looked up as I came in and sat down. I like watching people work at their craft. One of the things I miss most these days is seeing a good carpenter or boot-maker practicing his art.

“G'wan, get the hell out of here, you eggsucker!” one of them snarled. He threw a fistfull of shavings at me; and missed. But I got up and ambled away. Metal shavings in the paw pad can be a nuisance.

That was the second time in ten minutes I'd been called an eggsucker. My mood was definitely not benevolent. The next dipshit who insulted me was, I swore, destined to go to his grave with my fangs in his throat.

I wandered around for a while, then back into the exquisite, sumptuous, palatial saloon of the elegant garbage scow. For rovers who lived like pigs, they sure had a high-assed opinion of themselves. Give slobs a lathe and some turning equipment and they think they're the chosen people.

Vic was still lying on his back.

Walter was asking, “What's it like out there?”

Vic looked up at him blearily. “Whaddaya mean: what's it like out there? Out where?”

“Being solo.”

“Oh.” He hiccuped. “Okay, I suppose.”

“Bullshit,” I said, mind-to-mind. Vic shrugged.

“Things're getting tighter. Most of the fast easy food you can dig up is gone. Found a Mayfair Market today ... where I got the wine ... had to fight to get it. Fellini's organizing fast. He's got that big slave wagon of his. About two dozen good shots hanging around all the time. Won't be long.”

“What won't be long?” Skipper asked.

“Till he takes over the city.”

They seemed startled. I realized they had very little sense of history, of the passage or progression of events. What was now, was now; and anything beyond that required imagination, of which their pointy little heads had never known a taste.

Vic was different. I'd taught Vic.

“Stands to reason,” Vic said, playing the big man, the teacher, slurring his words over the wine. Idiot savant. “He can't let any solos run loose because they might find the ammo and food he needs to keep feeding his people. And it's those troops of his that keep solos from putting a slug in his fat head. He loses them, if he can't feed ‘em, and he's not in charge any more ... he's just another fat old man.”

“Yeah, but what's that got to do with us?” Skipper asked. “We're not solos. We're organized. We've got our own thing here, our own turf. Everybody needs us to reload their brass.”

Vic laughed. “Dream on, Skipper. Fellini doesn't need you. At least he doesn't think he does, which is the same thing.”

Walter said, “Yeah, but the other roverpaks need us.”

“For how long, man? As soon as Fellini cleans out or scares off the solos in the area, then he'll start taking over the roverpaks, one by one. He has to. Only way he can control the situation.”

Skipper looked interested. “How do you know all this? Somebody lay it all on you...?”

“Hell, no,” Vic said. “Blood told me a lot of it, and I just figured out the rest. As George Santayana said in The Life of Reason, ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’ I've studied history. I know that's what'll happen.”

They were staring at him as if he was crazy. I'd warned Vic never to flaunt his education. It made people nervous.

The pump gun skinny said, “Where the hell'd you get all that shit?”

Vic suddenly realized, through his drunken haze, that he'd made himself look different, set himself apart. “Uh...”

They were all staring at us now. Skipper looked very twitchy. Vic licked his lips nervously.

“Uh ... I got it all from Blood,” he said, the miserable sonofabitch fink. Direct lineal descendant of Senator Joseph McCarthy.

The pump gun skinny bared yellow teeth, snickered, and said, “I wouldn't take all that stupid shit from no eggsucker.”

That was number three.

That was it!

Take that, you asshole! And I went for the mammy-jammer.

Oh, I was lovely. A furry blur of light, a death-dealing instrument of destruction, a lone noble beast defending his honor against the Philistines, a juggernaut of power and pain, up and arching out in a smooth leap that took me over Skipper's head, right past the loudmouth and into the wall of the barge. I fell down and lay there twitching. How fleeting is grandeur.

Pump gun skinny raised his weapon and threw down on me. Through blurred eyes I saw the creep curling around the trigger to blow me away. And then his head exploded and spattered all over me.

I heard Vic say, “Freeze, piss-ants!”

Then he was shuffling among them, pointing that big .45 at Skipper's skull, and he kneeled down smoothly, and he was kind of manhandling me up into his free arm, and I crawled around over his shoulder and got into the rucksack ... upside-down. Then I guess I fainted.

Next thing I knew, we were on the dock and I was being jangled around like crazy, because Vic was running for our lives in the dark. I assumed all this, because I was wedged down with the tin cans and the rest of the crap in Vic's rucksack. But he'd gotten us out of there ... alive ... I was at least sure of that much.

After a while, he slowed down, and I could hear him panting like crazy. And cursing at me.

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“Stupid, goddamn, short-tempered, imbecile, moron dog! Damned near got us killed. Spoilt my night! Lost us the only armorer in the territory, goddam stupid lousy ignorant fucking eggsucker!”

That was number four, but I was upside-down. And half conscious. But I felt bad.

Finally, he stopped, shucked out of the knapsack, turned it over and dumped me out. We were in an alley.

It was dark. But I could feel the heat coming off him. Oh, boy, was he pissed off at me.

I staggered around for a minute, trying to get my left front leg to work in unison with my right rear, and finally I circled around him and sat down on some rubble. He was sitting there with his head in his hands, looking miserable.

“I was getting tired of this town, anyway.” I said, hoping to cheer him up a little. It was obvious: we'd have to get out now. Nowhere to get fresh ammo, marked lousy by The 82nd Airborne, which would make us persona non grata with the other roverpaks who might otherwise tolerate a reliable solo and his dog.

Vic peered up at me from between his hands. It was dark but I could read him even in the dark. He didn't say anything. He just stared at me. I didn't feel too terrific.

“I hear there's some activity out around Duluth,” I said.

That was a lie. I'd heard the taconite creatures that came up out of Lake Superior would eat your ass off.

He didn't say anything. And he had his mind blocked off; but the seepage was awful. Like blood oozing out under a door jamb.

“We could try for ‘over the hill’ in the direction of Vermont,” I said. I didn't even know if Vermont was there anymore.

Then we sat and stared at each other for a while.

Finally, I just decided it was better to blow off steam than to squat on my tail feeling guilty.

“Look, kiddo, it wasn't all my fault! If you hadn't gotten bagged, or if you hadn't let them insult me without saying anything, I wouldn't have run amuck! It's your responsibility, too.”

“That's it,” he said, quietly, and he got up. His being quiet scared the hell out of me.

Then he just walked out of the alley, right out into the middle of the street, and kept going. No cover, no checking out the turf, nothing. He just walked away from me.

I sat there for a second, and then padded to the mouth of the alley and watched him go. Just like that. We'd been together close on two years, and here was this ingrate fourteen-year-old clown thinking he could just up and walk away like that. Without even a bye-your-leave or a thank you for all I'd done for him. The silly sonofabitch!

Well, let him go, I thought. Let the moron get himself chewed up by Fellini or some back-shooting solo. Let him try sniffing out females, see how good he was at it. Might not matter so much at age fourteen, but wait till he hit fifteen, sixteen ... ha! Seventeen! At seventeen, like every other weird human boy, he'd start running around on all fours looking for sex. And some female solo with as much muscle as him would stick a bayonet in his chest just when he was about to get on her. Serve him right, too, the asshole.

Let him go! An educated nose like mine came high these days. There were solos just crying for a good dog. And I worked cheap. It didn't take that much to feed me; not as much as an Akita or a Doberman. There were even roverpaks that needed a good lead dog. Even if I started at the bottom of the pile, with my talent I'd be lead dog in no time.

It wouldn't be easy. A new dog always had to eat some shit for a while before his excellence was recognized. But I could do it. Maybe a year. Maybe two. In a roverpak. Eating shit.

I decided to follow him, to tell him he was on his own. To tell him I could make it just very well thank you without a stupid boy like him running the show.

I trotted out of the alley and kept to the shadows. Even if he was going to be stupid about survival, I still had my wits about me. The trouble on the barge hadn't been all my fault. He'd let them call me an eggsucker. He knew I didn't like that. And besides, the clown with the pump gun had given him trouble earlier. I knew he'd blown him away halfway because of that, not just on my account.

I was maybe a block behind him, and there he was, just staggering half-drunk down the center of the avenue.

What a schmuck!

Then I saw the glowing green haze that meant there was a screamer in a crater in the middle of the road. Vic was too juiced to even see it. But then, humans can't see the greenish-blue radiation haze as well as we noble creatures can. Go ahead you dip, I thought, just walk down the street and in another ten steps your going to be hugging a screamer. Go on, walk away from me; you're not five minutes without me and already about to get burned. You toad.

Bumble, bumble, bumble, he just went careening toward the crater, and the green haze got brighter, which meant the screamer was aware my valiant ex-master was on the way. So long, turkey, I thought. That's it for you, screwloose!

And then I thought of eating shit at the bottom of a roverpak for a year or two, and the next thing I knew I was running full out toward him, howling my brave little heart out. “Albert, you nincompoop! Look out! Screamer crater right in front of you! Look out dummy! Jump it, dodge it, get away from there you simple shit!”

But he was too drunk to know what he was doing. And there, right on schedule, coming up like something from an old Japanese horror flick ... there was the king awful ugliest screamer I've ever seen, oozing green slime and his parts falling off like some medieval drawing of a rotting flagellant or a leper, nothing but bitten fingernails all the way back to the knuckles, and eyelashes as long as spider legs, and big whirling eyes without eyelids, his mouth open and yelling with the pain of his burns, groping and clutching trying to climb out of the pit.

And stupid Vic just sashaying up to him as if he were a chorus girl looking for a good time.

“Look out, you asshole!” I screamed mind to mind, and sailed past him on the rise, just looming up in that screamer's face and baring my fangs and barking like crazy...

And the poor devil fell back into the pit and I didn't have to touch him, which would have been the end of me, and I fell into the pit and didn't even stop to look around, just came up running and scrabbled down the street in terror just the way that poor devil screamer had screamed, which is rotten syntax, but I was terrified!

The next time I stopped for breath. I was two miles up the road and way back there somewhere good old Vic was running so hard his knees were hitting him in the chin. I stopped and fell down and lay on my side in the gutter and just breathed in and out as best I could and prayed for a better life.

Vic came running up, went fifty yards past me, realized the heap in the gutter had been me, and came back. He fell down on the curb and panted for ten minutes.

When the lights stopped flashing and my chest stopped hurting and I stopped sounding like an asthmatic, I flipped over, got my legs under me, and sat down properly.

He was staring at me.

“You hungry?” he asked.

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FROM: THE WIT AND WISDOM OF BLOOD

“I look upon those who assure me they had a ‘happy childhood’ as either pathological liars, or pariahs.”

“The most taxing problem faced by those of us of the intellectual elite is that, unfortunately, telepathy takes two minds.”

“I could eat.”

“There's some of those canned cherries left.”

“That would be all right.”

He pulled a can of cherries out of the rucksack, and the can opener. “Green, wasn't he?” I said, offhandedly.

“Oh, he was okay.”

“You looked as if you didn't know whether to shit or wind your watch.”

“Eggsucker,” he said. He was grinning.

So we just sat there and ate the canned cherries.

“Name the Presidents after Roosevelt,” I said. “Franklin, not Teddy.”

And he did. But he forgot Ford again. There's only so much you can do with a human. But it's a living.

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A BOY AND HIS DOG

I

I WAS OUT WITH BLOOD, my dog. It was his week for annoying me; he kept calling me Albert. He thought that was pretty damned funny. Payson Terhune: ha ha.

I'd caught a couple of water rats for him, the big green and ocher ones, and someone's manicured poodle, lost off a leash in one of the downunders.

He'd eaten pretty good, but he was cranky. “Come on, son of a bitch,” I demanded, “find me a piece of ass.”

Blood just chuckled, deep in his dog-throat. “You're funny when you get horny,” he said.

Maybe funny enough to kick him upside his asshole sphincter, that refugee from a dingoheap.

“Find! I ain't kidding!”

“For shame, Albert. After all I've taught you. Not ‘I ain't kidding.’ I'm not kidding.”

He knew I'd reached the edge of my patience. Sullenly, he started casting. He sat down on the crumbled remains of the curb, and his eyelids flickered and closed, and his hairy body tensed. After a while he settled down on his front paws, and scraped them forward till he was lying flat, his shaggy head on the outstretched paws. The tenseness left him and he began trembling, almost the way he trembled just preparatory to scratching a flea. It went on that way for almost a quarter of an hour, and finally he rolled over and lay on his back, his naked belly toward the night sky, his front paws folded mantislike, his hind legs extended and open. “I'm sorry,” he said. “There's nothing.”

I could have gotten mad and booted him; but I knew he had tried. I wasn't happy about it, I really wanted to get laid, but what could I do? “Okay,” I said, with resignation, “forget it.”

He kicked himself onto his side and quickly got up.

“What do you want to do?” he asked.

“Not much we can do, is there?” I was more than a little sarcastic. He sat down again, at my feet, insolently humble.

I leaned against the melted stub of a lamppost, and thought about girls. It was painful. “We can always go to a show,” I said. Blood looked around the street, at the pools of shadow lying in the weed-overgrown craters, and didn't say anything. The whelp was waiting for me to say okay, let's go. He liked movies as much as I did.

“Okay, let's go.”

He got up and followed me, his tongue hanging, panting with happiness. Go ahead and laugh, you eggsucker. No popcorn for you!

Our Gang was a roverpak that had never been able to cut it simply foraging, so they'd opted for comfort and gone a smart way to getting it. They were movie-oriented kids, and they'd taken over the turf where the Metropole Theater was located. No one tried to bust their turf, because we all needed the movies, and as long as Our Gang had access to films, and did a better job of keeping the films going, they provided a service, even for solos like me and Blood. Especially for solos like us.

They made me check my .45 and the Browning .22 long at the door. There was a little alcove right beside the ticket booth. I bought my tickets first; it cost me a can of Oscar Mayer Philadelphia Scrapple for me, and a tin of sardines for Blood. Then the Our Gang guards with the bren guns motioned me over to the alcove and I checked my heat. I saw water leaking from a broken pipe in the ceiling and I told the checker, a kid with big leathery warts all over his face and lips, to move my weapons where it was dry. He ignored me. “Hey you! Motherfuckin’ toad, move my stuff over the other side ... it goes to rust fast ... an’ it picks up any spots, man, I'll break your bones!”

He started to give me jaw about it, looked at the guards with the brens, knew if they tossed me out I'd lose my price of admission whether I went in or not, but they weren't looking for any action, probably understrength, and gave him the nod to let it pass, to do what I said. So the toad moved my Browning to the other end of the gun rack, and pegged my .45 under it.

Blood and me went into the theater.

“I want popcorn.”

“Forget it.”

“Come on, Albert. Buy me popcorn.”

“I'm tapped out. You can live without popcorn.”

“You're just being a shit.”

I shrugged: sue me.

We went in. The place was jammed. I was glad the guards hadn't tried to take anything but guns. My spike and knife felt reassuring, lying-up in their oiled sheaths at the back of my neck. Blood found two together, and we moved into the row, stepping on feet. Someone cursed and I ignored him. A Doberman growled. Blood's fur stirred, but he let it pass. There was always some hardcase on the muscle, even on neutral ground like the Metropole.

(I heard once about a get-it-on they'd had at the old Loew's Granada, on the South Side. Wound up with ten or twelve rovers and their mutts dead, the theater burned down and a couple of good Cagney films lost in the fire. After that was when the roverpaks had got up the agreement that movie houses were sanctuaries. It was better now, but there was always somebody too messed in the mind to come soft.)

It was a triple feature. Raw Deal with Dennis O'Keefe, Claire Trevor, Raymond Burr and Marsha Hunt was the oldest of the three. It'd been made in 1948, eighty-six years ago; god only knows how the damn thing'd hung together all that time; it slipped sprockets and they had to stop the movie all the time to re-thread it. But it was a good movie. About this solo who'd been japped by his roverpak and was out to get revenge. Gangsters, mobs, a lot of punching and fighting. Real good.

The middle flick was a thing made during the Third War, in ‘92, twenty-seven years before I was even born, thing called Smell of a Chink. It was mostly gut-spilling and some nice hand-to-hand. Beautiful scene of skirmisher greyhounds equipped with napalm throwers, jellyburning a Chink town. Blood dug it, even though we'd seen this flick before. He had some kind of phony shuck going that these were ancestors of his, and he knew and I knew he was making it up.

“Wanna burn a baby, hero?” I whispered to him. He got the barb and just shifted in his seat, didn't say a thing, kept looking pleased as the dogs worked their way through the town. I was bored stiff.

I was waiting for the main feature.

Finally it came on. It was a beauty, a beaver flick made in the late 1970s. It was called Big Black Leather Splits. Started right out very good. These two blondes in black leather corsets and boots laced all the way up to their crotches, with whips and masks, got this skinny guy down and one of the chicks sat on his face while the other one went down on him. It got really hairy after that.

All around me there were solos playing with themselves. I was about to jog it a little myself when Blood leaned across and said, real soft, the way he does when he's onto something unusually smelly, “There's a chick in here.”

“You're nuts,” I said.

“I tell you I smell her. She's in here, man.”

Without being conspicuous, I looked around. Almost every seat in the theater was taken with solos or their dogs. If a chick had slipped in there'd have been a riot. She'd have been ripped to pieces before any single guy could have gotten into her. “Where?” I asked, softly. All around me, the solos were beating-off, moaning as the blondes took off their masks and one of them worked the skinny guy with a big wooden ram strapped around her hips.

“Give me a minute,” Blood said. He was really concentrating. His body was tense as a wire. His eyes were closed, his muzzle quivering. I let him work.

It was possible. Just maybe possible. I knew that they made really dumb flicks in the downunders, the kind of crap they'd made back in the 1930s and ‘40s, real clean stuff with even married people sleeping in twin beds. Myrna Loy and George Brent kind of flicks. And I knew that, once in a while, a chick from one of the really strict middle-class downunders would cumup, to see what a hairy flick was like. I'd heard about it, but it'd never happened in any theater I'd ever been in.

And the chances of it happening in the Metropole, particularly, were slim. There was a lot of twisty trade came to the Metropole. Now, understand, I'm not specially prejudiced against guys corning one another ... hell, I can understand it. There just aren't enough chicks anywhere. But I can't cut the jockey-and-boxer scene because it gets some weak little boxer hanging on you, getting jealous, you have to hunt for him and all he thinks he has to do is bare his ass to get all the work done for him. It's as bad as having a chick dragging along behind. Made for a lot of bad blood and fights in the bigger roverpaks, too. So I just never swung that way. Well, not never, but not for a long time.

So with all the twisties in the Metropole, I didn't think a chick would chance it. Be a toss-up who'd tear her apart first: the boxers or the straights.

And if she was here, why couldn't any of the other dogs smell her...?

“Third row in front of us,” Blood said. “Aisle seat. Dressed like a solo.”

“How's come you can whiff her and no other dog's caught her?”

“You forget who I am, Albert.”

“I didn't forget, I just don't believe it.”

Actually, bottom-line, I guess I did believe it. When you'd been as dumb as I'd been and a dog like Blood'd taught me so much, a guy came to believe everything he said. You don't argue with your teacher.

Not when he'd taught you how to read and write and add and subtract and everything else they used to know that meant you were smart (but doesn't mean much of anything now, except it's good to know it, I guess).

(The reading's a pretty good thing. It comes in handy when you can find some canned goods someplace, like in a bombed-out supermarket; makes it easier to pick out stuff you like when the pictures are gone off the labels. Couple of times the reading stopped me from taking canned beets. Shit, I hate beets!)

So I guess I did believe why he could maybe whiff a chick in there, and no other mutt could. He'd told me all about that a million times. It was his favorite story. History he called it. Christ, I'm not that dumb! I knew what history was. That was all the stuff that happened before now.

But I liked hearing history straight from Blood, instead of him making me read one of those crummy books he was always dragging in. And that particular history was all about him, so he laid it on me over and over, till I knew it by heart ... no, the word was rote. Not wrote, like writing, that was something else. I knew it by rote, means you got it word-for-word.

And when a mutt teaches you everything you know, and he tells you something rote, I guess finally you do believe it. Except I'd never let that leg-lifter know it.

II

What he'd told me rote was:

Over sixty-five years ago, in Los Angeles, before the Third War even got going completely, there was a man named Buesing who lived in Cerritos. He raised dogs as watchmen and sentries and attackers. Dobermans, Danes, schnauzers and Japanese akitas. He had one four-year-old German shepherd bitch named Ginger. She worked for the Los Angeles Police Department's narcotics division. She could smell out marijuana. No matter how well it was hidden. They ran a test on her: there were 25,000 boxes in an auto parts warehouse. Five of them had been planted with marijuana sealed in cellophane, wrapped in tin foil and heavy brown paper, and finally hidden in three separate sealed cartons. Within seven minutes Ginger found all five packages. At the same time that Ginger was working, ninety-two miles farther north, in Santa Barbara, cetologists had drawn and amplified dolphin spinal fluid and injected it into Chacma baboons and dogs. Altering surgery and grafting had been done. The first successful product of this cetacean experimentation had been a two-year-old male Puli named Ahbhu, who had communicated sense-impressions telepathically. Cross-breeding and continued experimentation had produced the first skirmisher dogs, just in time for the Third War. Telepathic over short distances, easily trained, able to track gasoline or troops or poison gas or radiation when linked with their human controllers, they had become the shock commandos of a new kind of war. The selective traits had bred true. Dobermans, greyhounds, akitas, pulis and schnauzers had become steadily more telepathic.

Ginger and Ahbhu had been Blood's ancestors.

He had told me so, a thousand times. Had told me the story just that way, in just those words, a thousand times, as it had been told to him. I'd never believed him till now.

Maybe the little bastard was special.

I checked out the solo scrunched down in the aisle seat three rows ahead of me. I couldn't tell a damned thing. The solo had his (her?) cap pulled way down, fleece jacket pulled way up.

“Are you sure?”

“As sure as I can be. It's a girl.”

“If it is, she's playing with herself just like a guy.”

Blood snickered. “Surprise,” he said sarcastically.

The mystery solo sat through Raw Deal again. It made sense, if that was a girl. Most of the solos and all of the members of roverpaks left after the beaver flick. The theater didn't fill up much more, it gave the streets time to empty, he/she could make his/her way back to wherever he/she had come from. I sat through Raw Deal again myself. Blood went to sleep.

When the mystery solo got up, I gave him/her time to get weapons if any'd been checked, and start away. Then I pulled Blood's big shaggy ear and said, “Let's do it.” He slouched after me, up the aisle.

I got my guns and checked the street. Empty.

“Okay, nose,” I said, “where'd he go?”

“Her. To the right.”

I started off, loading the Browning from my bandolier. I still didn't see anyone moving among the bombed-out shells of the buildings. This section of the city was crummy, really bad shape. But then, with Our Gang running the Metropole, they didn't have to repair anything else to get their livelihood. It was ironic; the Dragons had to keep an entire power plant going to get tribute from the other roverpaks; Ted's Bunch had to mind the reservoir; the Bastinados worked like fieldhands in the marijuana gardens; the Barbados Blacks lost a couple of dozen members every year cleaning out the radiation pits all over the city; and Our Gang only had to run that movie house.

Whoever their leader had been, however many years ago it had been that the roverpaks had started forming out of foraging solos, I had to give it to him: he'd been a flinty sharp mother. He knew what services to deal in.

“She turned off here,” Blood said.

I followed him as he began loping toward the edge of the city and the bluish-green radiation that still flickered from the hills. I knew he was right, then. The only things out here were screamers and the access dropshaft to the downunder. It was a girl, all right.

The cheeks of my ass tightened as I thought about it. I was going to get laid. It had been almost a month, since Blood had whiffed that solo chick in the basement of the Market Basket. She'd been filthy, and I'd gotten the crabs from her, but she'd been a woman, all right, and once I'd tied her down and clubbed her a couple of times she'd been pretty good. She'd liked it, too, even if she did spit on me and tell me she'd kill me if she ever got loose. I left her tied up, just to be sure. She wasn't there when I went back to look, week before last.

“Watch out,” Blood said, dodging around a crater almost invisible against the surrounding shadows. Something stirred in the crater.

Trekking across the nomansland, I realized why it was that all but a handful of solos or members of roverpaks were guys. The War had killed off most of the girls, and that was the way it always was in wars ... at least that's what Blood told me. The things getting born were seldom male or female, and had to be smashed against a wall as soon as they were pulled out of the mother.

The few chicks who hadn't gone downunder with the middle-classers were hard, solitary bitches like the one in the Market Basket; tough and stringy and just as likely to cut off your meat with a razor blade once they let you get in. Scuffling for a piece of ass had gotten harder and harder, the older I'd gotten.

But every once in a while a chick got tired of being roverpak property, or a raid was got-up by five or six roverpaks and some unsuspecting downunder was taken, or—like this time, yeah-some middle—class chick from a downunder got hot pants to find out what a beaver flick looked like, and cumup.

I was going to get laid. Oh boy, I couldn't wait!

III

Out here it was nothing but empty corpses of blasted buildings. One entire block had been stomped flat, like a steel press had come down from Heaven and given one solid wham! and everything was powder under it. The chick was scared and skittish, I could see that. She moved erratically, looking back over her shoulder and to either side. She knew she was in dangerous country. Man, if she'd only known how dangerous.

There was one building standing all alone at the end of the smashflat block, like it had been missed and chance let it stay. She ducked inside and a minute later I saw a bobbing light. Flashlight? Maybe.

Blood and I crossed the street and came up into the blackness surrounding the building. It was what was left of a YMCA.

That meant “Young Men's Christian Association.” Blood had taught me to read.

So what the hell was a young men's christian association? Sometimes being able to read makes more questions than if you were stupid.

I didn't want her getting out; inside there was as good a place to screw her as any, so I put Blood on guard right beside the steps leading up into the shell, and I went around the back. All the doors and windows had been blown out, of course. It wasn't no big trick getting in. I pulled myself up to the ledge of a window, and dropped down inside. Dark inside. No noise, except the sound of her, moving around on the other side of the old YMCA. I didn't know if she was heeled or not, and I wasn't about to take any chances. I bowslung the Browning and took out the .45 automatic. I didn't have to snap back the action—there was always a slug in the chamber.

I started moving carefully through the room. It was a locker room of some kind. There was glass and debris all over the floor, and one entire row of metal lockers had the paint blistered off their surfaces; the flash blast had caught them through the windows, a lot of years ago. My sneakers didn't make a sound coming through the room.

The door was hanging on one hinge, and I stepped over—through the inverted triangle. I was in the swimming pool area. The big pool was empty, with tiles buckled down at the shallow end. It stunk bad in there; no wonder, there were dead guys, or what was left of them, along one wall. Some lousy cleaner-up had stacked them, but hadn't buried them. I pulled my bandanna up around my nose and mouth and kept moving.

Out the other side of the pool place, and through a little passage with popped light bulbs in the ceiling. I didn't have any trouble seeing. There was moonlight coming through busted windows and a chunk was out of the ceiling. I could hear her real plain now, just on the other side of the door at the end of the passage. I hung close to the wall, and stepped down to the door. It was open a crack, but blocked by a fall of lath and plaster from the wall. It would make noise when I went to pull it open, that was for certain. I had to wait for the right moment.

Flattened against the wall, I checked out what she was doing in there. It was a gymnasium, big one, with climbing ropes hanging down from the ceiling. She had a squat, square, eight-cell flashlight sitting up on the croup of a vaulting horse. There were parallel bars and a horizontal bar about eight feet high, the tempered steel all rusty now. There were swinging rings and a trampoline and a big wooden balancing beam. Over to one side there were wall-bars and balancing benches, horizontal and oblique ladders, and a couple of stacks of vaulting boxes. I made a note to remember this joint. It was better for working out than the jerry-rigged gym I'd set up in an old auto wrecking yard. A guy has to keep in shape, if he's going to be a solo.

She was out of her disguise. Standing there in the skin, shivering. Yeah, it was chilly, and I could see a pattern of chicken-skin all over her. She was maybe five-six or -seven, with nice tits and kind of skinny legs. She was brushing out her hair. It hung way down the back. The flashlight didn't make it clear enough to tell if she had red hair or chestnut, but it wasn't blonde, which was good, and that was because I dug redheads. She had nice tits, though. I couldn't see her face, the hair was hanging down all smooth and wavy and cut off her profile.

The crap she'd been wearing was thrown around on the floor, and what she was going to put on was up on the vaulting horse. She was standing in little shoes with a kind of funny heel on them.

I couldn't move. I suddenly realized I couldn't move. She was nice, really nice. I was getting a real big kick out of just standing there and seeing the way her waist fell inward and her hips fell outward, the way the muscles at the side of her tits pulled up when she reached to the top of her head to brush all that hair down. It was really weird the kick I was getting out of standing and just staring at a chick do that. Kind of very, well, woman stuff. I liked it a lot.

I'd never ever stopped and just looked at a chick like that. All the ones I'd ever seen had been scumbags that Blood had smelled out for me, and I'd snatch ‘n’ grabbed them. Or the big chicks in the beaver flicks. Not like this one, kind of soft and very smooth, even with the goose bumps. I could have watched her all night.

She put down the brush, and reached over and took a pair of panties off the pile of clothes and wriggled into them. Then she got her bra and put it on. I never knew the way chicks did it. She put it on backwards around her waist, and it had a hook on it. Then she slid it around till the cups were in front, and kind of pulled it up under and scooped herself into it, first one, then the other; then she pulled the straps over her shoulder. She reached for her dress, and I nudged some of the lath and plaster aside, and grabbed the door to give it a yank.

She had the dress up over her head, and her arms up inside the material, and when she stuck her head in, and was all tangled there for a second, I yanked the door and there was a crash as chunks of wood and plaster fell out of the way, and a heavy scraping, and I jumped inside and was on her before she could get out of the dress.

She started to scream, and I pulled the dress off her with a ripping sound, and it all happened for her before she knew what that crash and scrape was all about.

Her face was wild. Just wild. Big eyes: I couldn't tell what color they were because they were in shadow. Real fine features, a wide mouth, little nose, cheekbones just like mine, real high and prominent, and a dimple in her right cheek. She stared at me really scared.

And then ... and this is really weird ... I felt like I should say something to her. I don't know what. Just something. It made me uncomfortable, to see her scared, but what the hell could I do about that, I mean, I was going to rape her, after all, and I couldn't very well tell her not to be shrinky about it. She was the one cumup, after all. But even so, I wanted to say hey, don't be scared, I just want to lay you. (That never happened before. I never wanted to say anything to a chick, just get in, and that was that.)

But it passed, and I put my leg behind hers and tripped her back, and she went down in a pile. I leveled the .45 at her, and her mouth kind of opened in a little o shape. “Now I'm gonna go over there and get one of them wrestling mats, so it'll be better, comfortable, uh-huh? You make a move off that floor and I shoot a leg out from under you, and you'll get screwed just the same, except you'll be without a leg.” I waited for her to let me know she was onto what I was saying, and she finally nodded real slow, so I kept the automatic on her, and went over to the big dusty stack of mats, and pulled one off.

I dragged it over to her, and flipped it so the cleaner side was up, and used the muzzle of the .45 to maneuver her onto it. She just sat there on the mat, with her hands behind her, and her knees bent, and stared at me.

I unzipped my pants and started pulling them down off one side, when I caught her looking at me real funny. I stopped with the jeans. “What're you lookin’ at?”

I was mad. I didn't know why I was mad, but I was.

“What's your name?” she asked. Her voice was very soft, and kind of furry, like it came up through her throat that was all lined with fur or something.

She kept looking at me, waiting for me to answer.

“Vic,” I said. She looked like she was waiting for more.

“Vic what?”

I didn't know what she meant for a minute, then I did. “Vic. Just Vic. That's all.”

“Well, what're your mother's and father's names?”

Then I started laughing, and working my jeans down again. “Boy, are you a dumb bitch,” I said, and laughed some more. She looked hurt. It made me mad again. “Stop lookin’ like that, or I'll bust out your teeth!”

She folded her hands in her lap.

I got the pants around my ankles. They wouldn't come off over the sneakers. I had to balance on one foot and scuff the sneaker off the other foot. It was tricky, keeping the .45 on her and getting the sneaker off at the same time. But I did it.

I was standing there buck-naked from the waist down and she had sat forward a little, her legs crossed, hands still in her lap. “Get that stuff off,” I said.

She didn't move for a second, and I thought she was going to give me trouble. But then she reached around behind and undid the bra. Then she tipped back and slipped the panties off her ass.

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 wall 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 kissed 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.

“What is it?”

I looked down at him. “I'll tell you what it is, man. You're acting very shitty.”

“Sue me.”

“Goddammit, dog, what's got your ass up?”

“Her. That nit chick you've got in there.”

“So what? Big deal ... I've had chicks before.”

“Yeah, but never any that hung on like this one. I warn you, Albert, she's going to make trouble.”

“Don't be dumb!” He didn't reply. Just looked at me with anger and then limped off to check out the scene. I crawled back inside and dogged the hatch. She wanted to make it again. I said I didn't want to; Blood had brought me down. I was bugged. And I didn't know which one to be pissed off at.

But God she was pretty.

She kind of pouted and settled back with her arms wrapped around her. “Tell me some more about the downunder,” I said.

At first she was cranky, wouldn't say much, but after a while she opened up and started talking freely. I was learning a lot. I figured I could use it some time, maybe.

There were only a couple of hundred downunders in what was left of the United States and Canada. They'd been sunk on the sites of wells or mines or other kinds of deep holes. Some of them, out in the west, were in natural cave formations. They went way down, maybe two to five miles. They were like big caissons, stood on end. And the people who'd settled them were squares of the worst kind. Southern Baptists, Fundamentalists, lawanorder goofs, real middle-class squares with no taste for the wild life. And they'd gone back to a kind of life that hadn't existed for a hundred and fifty years. They'd gotten the last of the scientists to do the work, invent the how and why, and then they'd run them out. They didn't want any progress, they didn't want any dissent, they didn't want anything that would make waves. They'd had enough of that. The best time in the world had been just before the First War, and they figured if they could keep it like that, they could live quiet lives and survive. Shit! I'd go nuts in one of the downunders.

Quilla June smiled, and snuggled up again, and this time I didn't turn her off. She started touching me again, down there and all over, and then she said, “Vic?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Have you ever been in love?”

“What?”

“In love? Have you ever been in love with a girl?”

“Well, I damn well guess I haven't!”

“Do you know what love is?”

“Sure. I guess I do.”

“But if you've never been in love...?”

“Don't be dumb. I mean, I've never had a bullet in the head, and I know I wouldn't like it.”

“You don't know what love is, I'll bet.”

“Well, if it means living in a downunder, I guess I just don't wanna find out.” We didn't go on with the conversation much after that. She pulled me down and we did it again. And when it was over, I heard Blood scratching at the boiler. I opened the hatch, and he was standing out there.

All clear,” he said.

“You sure?”

“Yeah, yeah, I'm sure. Put your pants on,” he said it with a sneer in the tone, “and come on out here. We have to talk some stuff.”

I looked at him, and he wasn't kidding. I got my jeans and sneakers on, and climbed down out of the boiler.

He trotted ahead of me, away from the boiler over some blacksoot beams, and outside the gym. It was down. Looked like a rotted tooth stump.

“Now what's lumbering you?” I asked him.

He scampered up on a chunk of concrete till he was almost nose level with me.

“You're going dumb on me, Vic.”

I knew he was serious. No Albert shit, straight Vic. “How so?”

“Last night, man. We could have cut out of there and left her for them. That would have been smart.”

“I wanted her.”

“Yeah, I know. That's what I'm talking about. It's today now, not last night. You've had her about a half a hundred times. Why're we hanging around?”

“I want some more.”

Then he got angry. “Yeah, well, listen, chum ... I want a few things myself. I want something to eat, and I want to get rid of this pain in my side, and I want away from this turf. Maybe they don't give up this easy.”

“Take it easy. We can handle all that. Don't mean she can't go with us.”

“Doesn't mean,” he corrected me. “And so that's the new story. Now we travel three, is that right?”

I was getting really uptight myself. “You're starting to sound like a damn poodle!”

“And you're starting to sound like a boxer.”

I hauled back to crack him one. He didn't move. I dropped the hand. I'd never hit Blood. I didn't want to start now.

“Sorry,” he said, softly.

“That's okay.”

But we weren't looking at each other.

“Vic, man, you've got a responsibility to me, you know.”

“You don't have to tell me that.”

“Well, I guess maybe I do. Maybe I have to remind you of some stuff. Like the time that burnpit-screamer came up out of the street and made a grab for you.”

I shuddered. The motherfucker'd been green. Righteous stone green, glowing like fungus. My gut heaved, just thinking.

“And I went for him, right?”

I nodded. Right, mutt, right.

“And I could have been burned bad, and died, and that would've been all of it for me, right or wrong, isn't that true?” I nodded again. I was getting pissed off proper. I didn't like being made to feel guilty. It was a fifty-fifty with Blood and me. He knew that. “But I did it, right?” I remembered the way the green thing had screamed. Christ, it was all ooze and eyelashes.

“Okay, okay, don't hanger me.”

“Harangue, not hanger.”

“Well, WHATEVER!” I shouted. “Just knock off the crap, or we can forget the whole fucking arrangement!”

Then Blood blew. “Well, maybe we should, you simple dumb putz!”

“What's a putz, you little turd ... is that something bad ... yeah, it must be ... you watch your fucking mouth, son of a bitch; or I'll kick your ass!”

We sat there and didn't talk for fifteen minutes. Neither one of us knew which way to go.

Finally, I backed off a little. I talked soft and I talked slow. I was about up to here with him, but told him I was going to do right by him, like I always had, and he threatened me, saying I'd damned well better because there were a couple of very hip solos making it around the city, and they'd be delighted to have a sharp tail-scent like him. I told him I didn't like being threatened, and he'd better watch his fucking step or I'd break his leg. He got furious and stalked off. I said screw you and went back to the boiler to take it out on that Quilla June again.

But when I stuck my head inside the boiler, she was waiting, with a pistol one of the dead rovers had supplied. She hit me good and solid over the right eye with it, and I fell straight forward across the hatch, and was out cold.

VI

“I told you she was no good.” He watched me as I swabbed out the cut with disinfectant from my kit, and painted the gash with iodine. He smirked when I flinched.

I put away the stuff, and rummaged around in the boiler, gathering up all the spare ammo I could carry, and ditching the Browning in favor of the heavier .30-06. Then I found something that must've slipped out of her clothes.

It was a little metal plate, about three inches long and an inch-and-a-half high. It had a whole string of numbers on it, and there were holes in it, in random patterns. “What's this?” I asked Blood.

He looked at it, sniffed it.

“Must be an identity card of some kind. Maybe it's what she used to get out of the downunder.”

That made my mind up.

I jammed it in a pocket and started out. Toward the access dropshaft.

“Where the hell are you going?” Blood yelled after me.

“Come on back, you'll get killed out there!

“I'm hungry, dammit! I'm wounded!

“Albert, you sonofabitch! Come back here!”

I kept right on walking. I was gonna find that bitch and brain her. Even if I had to go downunder to find her.

It took me an hour to walk to the access dropshaft leading down to Topeka. I thought I saw Blood following, but hanging back a ways. I didn't give a damn. I was mad.

Then, there it was. A tall, straight, featureless pillar of shining black metal. It was maybe twenty feet in diameter, perfectly flat on top, disappearing straight into the ground. It was a cap, that was all. I walked straight up to it, and fished around in my pocket for that metal card. Then something was tugging at my right pants leg.

“Listen, you moron, you can't go down there!”

I kicked him off, but he came right back.

“Listen to me!”

I turned around and stared at him.

Blood sat down; the powder puffed up around him. “Albert...”

“My name is Vic, you little eggsucker.”

“Okay, okay, no fooling around. Vic.” His tone softened. “Vic. Come on, man.” He was trying to get through to me. I was really boiling, but he was trying to make sense. I shrugged, and crouched down beside him.

“Listen, man,” Blood said, “this chick has bent you way out of shape. You know you can't go down there. It's all square and settled, and they know everyone; they hate solos. Enough roverpaks have raided downunder, and raped their women, and stolen their food, they'll have defenses set up. They'll kill you, Vic!”

“What the hell do you care? You're always saying you'd be better off without me.” He sagged at that.

“Vic, we've been together almost three years. Good and bad. But this can be the worst. I'm scared, man. Scared you won't come back. And I'm hungry, and I'll have to go find some dude who'll take me on ... and you know most solos are in paks now, I'll be low mutt. I'm not that young any more. And I'm hurt pretty bad.”

I could dig it. He was talking sense. But all I could think of was how that bitch, that Quilla June, had rapped me. And then there were images of her soft tits, and the way she made little sounds when I was in her, and I shook my head, and knew I had to go get even.

“I got to do it, Blood. I got to.”

He breathed deep and sagged a little more. He knew it was useless. “You don't even see what she's done to you, Vic. That metal card, it's too easy, as if she wanted you to follow.”

I got up. “I'll try to get back quick. Will you wait...?”

He was silent a long while, and I waited. Finally, he said, “For a while. Maybe I'll be here, maybe not.”

I understood. I turned around and started walking around the pillar of black metal. Finally I found a slot in the pillar, and slipped the metal card into it. There was a soft humming sound, then a section of the pillar dilated. I hadn't even seen the lines of the sections. A circle opened and I took a step through. I turned and there was Blood, watching me. We looked at each other, all the while that pillar was humming.

“So long, Vic.”

“Take care of yourself, Blood.”

“Hurry back.”

“Do my best.”

“Yeah. Right.”

Then I turned around and stepped inside. The access portal irised closed behind me.

VII

I should have known. I should have suspected. Sure, every once in a while a chick came up to see what it was like on the surface, what had happened to the cities; sure, it happened. Why, I'd believed her when she'd told me, cuddled up beside me in that steaming boiler, that she'd wanted to see what it was like when a girl did it with a guy, that all the flicks she'd seen in Topeka were sweet and solid and dull, and the girls in her school'd talked about beaver flicks, and one of them had a little eight-page comic book and she'd read it with wide eyes ... sure, I'd believed her. It was logical. I should have suspected something when she left that metal I.D. plate behind. It was too easy. Blood'd tried to tell me. Dumb? Yeah!

The second that access iris swirled closed behind me, the humming got louder, and some cool light grew in the walls. Wall. It was a circular compartment with only two sides to the wall: inside and outside. The wall pulsed up light and the humming got louder, and the deckplate I was standing on dilated just the way the outside port had done. But I was standing there, like a mouse in a cartoon, and as long as I didn't look down I was cool, I wouldn't fall.

Then I started settling. Dropped through the floor, the iris closed overhead, I was dropping down the tube, picking up speed but not too much, just dropping steadily. Now I knew what a dropshaft was.

Down and down I went and every once in a while I'd see something like 10 LEV or ANTIPOLL 55 or BREEDER-CON or PUMP SE 6 on the wall; faintly I could make out the sectioning of an iris ... but I never stopped dropping.

Finally, I dropped all the way to the bottom, and there was TOPEKA CITY LIMITS POP. 22,860 on the wall, and I settled down without any strain, bending a little from the knees to cushion the impact, but even that wasn't much.

I used the metal plate again, and the iris—a much bigger one this time—swirled open, and I got my first look at a downunder.

It stretched away in front of me, twenty miles to the dim shining horizon of tin can metal where the wall behind me curved and curved and curved till it made one smooth, encircling circuit and came back around around around to where I stood, staring at it. I was down at the bottom of a big metal tube that stretched up to a ceiling an eighth of a mile overhead, twenty miles across. And in the bottom of that tin can, someone had built a town that looked for all the world like a photo out of one of the water-logged books in the library on the surface. I'd seen a town like this in the books. Just like this. Neat little houses, and curvy little streets, and trimmed lawns, and a business section and everything else that a Topeka would have.

Except a sun, except birds, except clouds, except rain, except snow, except cold, except wind, except ants, except dirt, except mountains, except oceans, except big fields of grain, except stars, except the moon, except forests, except animals running wild, except...

Except freedom.

They were canned down here, like dead fish. Canned.

I felt my throat tighten up. I wanted to get out. Out! I started to tremble, my hands were cold and there was sweat on my forehead. This had been insane, coming down here. I had to get out. Out!

I turned around to get back in the dropshaft, and then it grabbed me. That bitch Quilla June! I shoulda suspected!

The thing was low, and green, and boxlike, and had cables with mittens on the ends instead of arms, and it rolled on tracks, and it grabbed me.

It hoisted me up on its square flat top, holding me with them mittens on the cables, and I couldn't move, except to try kicking at the big glass eye in the front, but it didn't do any good. It didn't bust. The thing was only about four feet high, and my sneakers almost reached the ground, but not quite, and it started moving off into Topeka, hauling me along with it.

People were all over the place. Sitting in rockers on their front porches, raking their lawns, hanging around the gas station, sticking pennies in gumball machines, painting a white stripe down the middle of the road, selling newspapers on a corner, listening to an oompah band in a shell in a park, playing hopscotch and pussy-in-the-corner, polishing a fire engine, sitting on benches reading, washing windows, pruning bushes, tipping hats to ladies, collecting milk bottles in wire carrying-racks, grooming horses, throwing a stick for a dog to retrieve, diving into a communal swimming pool, chalking vegetable prices on a slate outside a grocery, walking hand-in-hand with a girl, all of them watching me go past on that metal motherfucker.

I could hear Blood speaking, saying just what he'd said before I'd entered the dropshaft: It's all square and settled and they know everyone; they hate solos. Enough roverpaks have raided downunders, and raped their women and stolen their food, they'll have defenses set up. They'll kill you, Vic!

Thanks, mutt.

Goodbye.

VIII

The green box tracked through the business section and turned in at a shopfront with the words BETTER BUSINESS BUREAU on the window. It rolled right inside the open door, and there were half a dozen men and old men and very old men in there, waiting for me. Also a couple of women. The green box stopped.

One of them came over and took the metal plate out of my hand. He looked at it, then turned around and gave it to the oldest of the old men, a withered toad wearing baggy pants and a green eyeshade and garters that held up the sleeves of his striped shirt. “Quilla June, Lew,” the guy said to the old man. Lew took the metal plate and put it in the top left drawer of a rolltop desk. “Better take his guns, Aaron,” the old coot said. And the guy who'd taken the plate cleaned me.

“Let him loose, Aaron,” Lew said.

Aaron stepped around the back of the green box and something clicked, and the cable-mittens sucked back inside the box, and I got down off the thing. My arms were numb where the box had held me. I rubbed one, then the other, and I glared at them.

“Now, boy...” Lew started.

“Suck wind, asshole!”

The women blanched. The men tightened their faces.

“I told you it wouldn't work,” another of the old men said to Lew.

“Bad business, this,” said one of the younger ones.

Lew leaned forward in his straight-back chair and pointed a crumbled finger at me. “Boy, you better be nice.”

“I hope all your fuckin’ children are hare-lipped!”

“This is no good, Lew!” another man said.

“Guttersnipe,” a woman with a beak snapped.

Lew stared at me. His mouth was a nasty little black line. I knew the sonofabitch didn't have a tooth in his crummy head that wasn't rotten and smelly. He stared at me with vicious little eyes. God, he was ugly, like a toad ready to snaffle a fly off the wall with his tongue. He was getting set to say something I wouldn't like. “Aaron, maybe you'd better put the sentry back on him.” Aaron moved to the green box.

“Okay, hold it,” I said, holding up my hand.

Aaron stopped, looked at Lew, who nodded. Then Lew leaned real far forward again, and aimed that bird-claw at me. “You ready to behave yourself, son?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“You'd better be dang sure.”

“Okay. I'm dang sure. Also fuckin’ sure!”

“And you'll watch your mouth.”

I didn't reply. Old coot.

“You're a bit of an experiment for us, boy. We tried to get one of you down here other ways. Sent up some good folks to capture one of you little scuts, but they never came back. Figgered it was best to lure you down to us.”

I sneered. That Quilla June. I'd take care of her!

One of the women, a little younger than Bird-Beak, came forward and looked into my face. “Lew, you'll never get this one to kowtow. He's a filthy little killer. Look at those eyes.”

“How'd you like the barrel of a rifle jammed up your ass, bitch?” She jumped back. Lew was angry again. “Sorry,” I said real quickly, “I don't like bein’ called names. Macho, y'know?”

He settled back and snapped at the woman. “Mez, leave him alone. I'm tryin’ to talk a bit of sense here. You're only making it worse.”

Mez went back and sat with the others. Some Better Business Bureau these creeps were!

“As I was saying, boy: you're an experiment for us. We've been down here in Topeka close to thirty years. It's nice down here. Quiet, orderly, nice people who respect each other, no crime, respect for the elders, and just all around a good place to live. We're growin’ and we're prosperin'.”

I waited.

“But, well, we find now that some of our folks can't have no more babies, and the women that do, they have mostly girls. We need some men. Certain special kind of men.”

I started laughing. This was too good to be true. They wanted me for stud service. I couldn't stop laughing.

“Crude!” one of the women said, scowling.

“This's awkward enough for us, boy, don't make it no harder.” Lew was embarrassed.

Here I'd spent most of Blood's and my time aboveground hunting up tail, and down here they wanted me to service the local ladyfolk. I sat down on the floor and laughed till tears ran down my cheeks.

Finally, I got up and said, “Sure. Okay. But if I do, there's a couple of things I want.”

Lew looked at me close.

“The first thing I want is that Quilla June. I'm gonna fuck her blind, and then I'm gonna bang her on the head the way she did me!”

They huddled for a while, then came out and Lew said, “We can't tolerate any violence down here, but I s'pose Quilla June's as good a place to start as any. She's capable, isn't she, Ira?”

A skinny, yellow-skinned man nodded. He didn't look happy about it. Quilla June's old man, I bet.

“Well, let's get started,” I said. “Line ‘em up.” I started to unzip my jeans.

The women screamed, the men grabbed me, and they hustled me off to a boarding house where they gave me a room, and they said I should get to know Topeka a little bit before I went to work because it was, uh, er, well, awkward, and they had to get the folks in town to accept what was going to have to be done ... on the assumption, I suppose, that if I worked out okay they'd import a few more young bulls from aboveground and turn us loose.

So I spent some time in Topeka, getting to know the folks, seeing what they did, how they lived.

It was nice, real nice.

They rocked in rockers on the front porches, they raked their lawns, they hung around the gas station, they stuck pennies in gumball machines, they painted white stripes down the middle of the road, they sold newspapers on the corners, they listened to oompah bands in a shell in the park, they played hopscotch and pussy-in-the-corner, they polished fire engines, they sat on benches reading, they washed windows and pruned bushes, they tipped their hats to ladies, they collected milk bottles in wire carrying-racks, they groomed horses and threw sticks for their dogs to retrieve, they dove into the communal swimming pool, they chalked vegetable prices on a slate outside the grocery, they walked hand-in-hand with some of the ugliest chicks I've ever seen, and they bored the ass offa me.

Inside a week I was ready to scream.

I could feel that tin can closing in on me.

I could feel the weight of the earth over me.

They ate artificial shit: artificial peas and fake meat and make-believe chicken and ersatz corn and bogus bread, and it all tasted like chalk and dust to me.

Polite? Christ, you could puke from the lying, hypocritical crap they called civility. Hello Mr. This and Hello Mrs. That. And how are you? And how is little Janie? And how is business? Are you going to the sodality meeting Thursday? And I started gibbering in my room at the boarding house.

The clean, sweet, neat, lovely way they lived was enough to kill a guy. No wonder the men couldn't get it up and make babies that had balls instead of slots.

The first few days, everyone watched me like I was about to explode and cover their nice white-washed fences with shit. But after a while, they got used to seeing me. Lew took me over to the Mercantile, and got me fitted out with a pair of bib overalls and a shirt that any solo could've spotted a mile away. That Mez, that dippy bitch who'd called me a killer, she started hanging around, finally said she wanted to cut my hair, make me look civilized. But I was hip to where she was at. Wasn't a bit of the mother in her.

“What'sa'matter, cunt,” I pinned her. “Your old man isn't taking care of you?”

She tried to stick her fist in her mouth, and I laughed like a loon. “Go chop off his balls, baby. My hair stays the way it is.” She cut and run. Gone like she had a diesel tail-pipe.

It went on like that for a while. Me just walking around, them coming and feeding me, keeping all their young meat out of my way till they got the town stacked-away for what was coming with me.

Jugged like that, my mind wasn't right for a while. I got all claustrophobed, clutched, went and sat under the porch in the dark at the rooming house. Then that passed, and I got piss-mean, snapped at them, then surly, then quiet, then just mud dull. Quiet.

Finally, I started getting hip to the possibilities of getting out of there. It began with me remembering the poodle I'd fed Blood one time. It had to come from a downunder. And it couldn't have got up through the dropshaft. So that meant there were other ways out.

They gave me pretty much the run of the town, as long as I kept my manners around me and didn't try anything sudden. That green sentry box was always somewhere nearby.

So I found the way out. Nothing so spectacular; it just had to be there, and I found it.

Then I found out where they kept my weapons, and I was ready. Almost.

IX

It was a week to the day when Aaron and Lew and Ira came to get me. I was pretty goofy by that time. I was sitting out on the back porch of the boarding house, smoking a corncob pipe with my shirt off, catching some sun. Except there wasn't no sun. Goofy.

They came around the house. “Morning, Vic,” Lew greeted me. He was hobbling along with a cane, the old fart. Aaron gave me a big smile. The kind you'd give a big black bull about to stuff his meat into a good breed cow. Ira had a look that you could chip off and use in your furnace.

“Well, howdy, Lew. Mornin', Aaron, Ira.”

Lew seemed right pleased by that.

Oh, you lousy bastards, just you wait!

“You ‘bout ready to go meet your first lady?”

“Ready as I'll ever be, Lew,” I said, and got up.

“Cool smoke, ain't it?” Aaron said.

I took the corncob out of my mouth. “Pure dee-light.” I smiled. I hadn't even lit the fucking thing.

They walked me over to Marigold Street and, as we came up on a little house with yellow shutters and a white picket fence, Lew said, “This's Ira's house. Quilla June is his daughter.”

“Well, land sakes,” I said, wide-eyed.

Ira's lean jaw muscles jumped.

We went inside.

Quilla June was sitting on the settee with her mother, an older version of her, pulled thin as a withered muscle. “Miz Holmes,” I said and made a little curtsey. She smiled. Strained, but smiled.

Quilla June sat with her feet right together, and her hands folded in her lap. There was a ribbon in her hair. It was blue.

Matched her eyes.

Something went thump in my gut.

“Quilla June,” I said.

She looked up. “Mornin', Vic.”

Then everyone sort of stood around looking awkward, and finally Ira began yapping and yipping about get in the bedroom and get this unnatural filth over with so they could go to Church and pray the Good Lord wouldn't Strike All Of Them Dead with a bolt of lightning in the ass, or some crap like that.

So I put out my hand, and Quilla June reached for it without looking up, and we went in the back, into a small bedroom, and she stood there with her head down.

“You didn't tell ‘em, did you?” I asked.

She shook her head.

And suddenly, I didn't want to kill her at all. I wanted to hold her. Very tight. So I did. And she was crying into my chest, and making little fists beating on my back, and then she was looking up at me and running her words all together: “Oh, Vic, I'm sorry, so sorry, I didn't mean to, I had to, I was sent out to, I was so scared, and I love you, and now they've got you down here, and it isn't dirty, is it, it isn't the way my Poppa says it is, is it?”

I held her and kissed her and told her it was okay, and then I asked her if she wanted to come away with me, and she said yes yes yes she really did. So I told her I might have to hurt her Poppa to get away, and she got a look in her eyes that I knew real well.

For all her propriety, Quilla June Holmes didn't much like her prayer-shouting Poppa.

I asked her if she had anything heavy, like a candlestick or a club, and she said no. So I went rummaging around in that back bedroom and found a pair of her Poppa's socks in a bureau drawer. I pulled the big brass balls off the headboard of the bed and dropped them into the sock. I hefted it. Oh. Yeah.

She stared at me with big eyes. “What're you going to do?”

“You want to get out of here?”

She nodded.

“Then just stand back behind the door. No, wait a minute. I got a better idea. Get on the bed.”

She lay down on the bed. “Okay,” I said, “now pull up your skirt, pull off your pants, and spread out.” She gave me a look of pure horror. “Do it,” I said. “If you want out.”

So she did it, and I rearranged her so her knees were bent and her legs open at the thighs, and I stood to one side of the door, and whispered to her, “Call your Poppa. Just him.”

She hesitated a long moment, then she called out in a voice she didn't have to fake, “Poppa! Poppa, come here, please!” Then she clamped her eyes shut tight.

Ira Holmes came through the door, took one look at his secret desire, his mouth dropped open, I kicked the door closed behind him and walloped him as hard as I could. He squished a little, and spattered the bedspread, and went very down.

She opened her eyes when she heard the thunk! and when the stuff spattered her legs, she leaned over and puked on the floor. I knew she wouldn't be much good to me in getting Aaron into the room, so I opened the door, stuck my head around, looked worried, and said, “Aaron, would you come here a minute, please?” He looked at Lew, who was rapping with Mrs. Holmes about what was going on in the back bedroom, and when Lew nodded him on, he came into the room. He took a look at Quilla June's naked bush, at the blood on the wall and bedspread, at Ira on the floor, and opened his mouth to yell just as I whacked him. It took two more to get him down, and then I had to kick him in the chest to put him away. Quilla June was still puking.

I grabbed her by the arm and swung her up off the bed. At least she was being quiet about it, but man, did she stink.

“Come on!”

She tried to pull back, but I held on and opened the bedroom door. As I pulled her out, Lew stood up, leaning on his cane. I kicked the cane out from under the old fart and down he went in a heap. Mrs. Holmes was staring at us, wondering where her old man was. “He's back in there,” I said, heading for the front door. “The Good Lord got him in the head.”

Then we were out in the street, Quilla June stinking along behind me, dry-heaving and bawling and probably wondering what had happened to her underpants.

They kept my weapons in a locked case at the Better Business Bureau, and we detoured around by my boarding house where I pulled the crowbar I'd swiped from the gas station out from under the back porch. Then we cut across behind the Grange and into the business section, and straight into the BBB. There was a clerk who tried to stop me, and I split his gourd with the crowbar. Then I pried the latch off the cabinet in Lew's office and got the .30-06 and my .45 and all the ammo, and my spike and my knife and my kit, and loaded up. By that time Quilla June was able to make some sense.

“Where we gonna go, where we gonna go, oh Poppa Poppa Popp...!”

“Hey, listen, Quilla June, Poppa me no Poppas. You said you wanted to be with me ... well, I'm goin'! Up, baby, and if you wanna go with me, you better stick close.”

She was too scared to object.

I stepped out the front of the shop, and there was that green box sentry, coming on like a whippet. It had its cables out, and the mittens were gone. It had hooks.

I dropped to one knee, wrapped the sling of the .30-06 around my forearm, sighted clean, and fired dead at the big eye in the front. One shot, spang!

Hit that eye, the thing exploded in a shower of sparks, and the green box swerved and went through the front window of The Mill End Shoppe, screeching and crying and showering the place with flames and sparks. Nice.

I turned around to grab Quilla June, but she was gone. I looked off down the street, and here came all the vigilantes, Lew hobbling along with his cane like some kind of weird grasshopper.

And right then the shots started. Big, booming sounds. The .45 I'd given Quilla June. I looked up, and on the porch around the second floor, there she was, the automatic down on the railing like a pro, sighting into that mob and snapping off shots like maybe Wild Bill Elliott in a ‘40s Republic flick.

But dumb! Mother dumb! Wasting time on that, when we had to get away.

I found the outside staircase going up there, and took it three steps at a time. She was smiling and laughing, and every time she'd pick one of those boobs out of the pack her little tonguetip would peek out of the corner of her mouth, and her eyes would get all slick and wet and wham! down the boob would go.

She was really into it.

Just as I reached her, she sighted down on her scrawny mother. I slammed the back of her head, and she missed the shot, and the old lady did a little dance-step and kept coming. Quilla June whipped her head around at me, and there was kill in her eyes. “You made me miss.” The voice gave me a chill.

I took the .45 away from her. Dumb. Wasting ammunition like that.

Dragging her behind me, I circled the building, found a shed out back, dropped down onto it, and had her follow. She was scared at first, but I said, “Chick can shoot her old lady as easy as you do shouldn't be worried about a drop this small.” She got out on the ledge, other side of the railing and held on. “Don't worry,” I said, “you won't wet your pants. You haven't got any.”

She laughed, like a bird, and dropped. I caught her, we slid down the shed door, and took a second to see if that mob was hard on us. Nowhere in sight.

I grabbed Quilla June by the arm and started off toward the south end of Topeka. It was the closest exit I'd found in my wandering, and we made it in about fifteen minutes, panting and weak as kittens.

And there it was.

A big air-intake duct.

I pried off the clamps with the crowbar, and we climbed up inside. There were ladders going up. There had to be. It figured. Repairs. Keep it clean. Had to be. We started climbing.

It took a long, long time.

Quilla June kept asking me, from down behind me, whenever she got too tired to climb, “Vic, do you love me?” I kept saying yes. Not only because I meant it. It helped her keep climbing.

X

We came up a mile from the access dropshaft. I shot off the filter covers and the hatch bolts, and we climbed out. They should have known better down there. You don't fuck around with Jimmy Cagney.

They never had a chance.

Quilla June was exhausted. I didn't blame her. But I didn't want to spend the night out in the open; there were things out there I didn't like to think about meeting even in daylight. It was getting on toward dusk.

We walked toward the access dropshaft.

Blood was waiting.

He looked weak. But he'd waited.

I stooped down and lifted his head. He opened his eyes, and very softly he said, “Hey.”

I smiled at him. Jesus, it was good to see him. “We made it back, man.”

He tried to get up, but he couldn't. The wounds on him were in ugly shape. “Have you eaten?” I asked.

“No. Grabbed a lizard yesterday ... or maybe it was day before. I'm hungry, Vic.”

Quilla June came up then, and Blood saw her. He closed his eyes. “We'd better hurry, Vic,” she said. “Please. They might come up from the dropshaft.”

I tried to lift Blood. He was dead weight. “Listen, Blood, I'll leg it into the city and get some food. I'll come back quick. You just wait here.”

“Don't go in there, Vic,” he said. “I did a recon the day after you went down. They found out we weren't fried in that gym. I don't know how. Maybe mutts smelled our track. I've been keeping watch, and they haven't tried to come out after us. I don't blame them. You don't know what it's like out here at night, man ... you don't know...”

He shivered.

“Take it easy, Blood.”

“But they've got us marked lousy in the city, Vic. We can't go back there. We'll have to make it someplace else.”

That put it on a different stick. We couldn't go back, and with Blood in that condition we couldn't go forward. And I knew, good as I was solo, I couldn't make it without him. And there wasn't anything out here to eat. He had to have food at once, and some medical care. I had to do something. Something good, something fast.

[Back to Table of Contents]

FROM: THE WIT AND WISDOM OF BLOOD

“In terms of labor relations, the basic problem with living your life is that it's on the-job training and by the time you get some skill at it, you're permanently laid off.”

“The truest thing ever said about the human condition is this: The surest test of who's an intellectual is ... anyone who can hear the 'William Tell Overture' and not think of The Lone Ranger

“Vic!” Quilla June's voice was high and whining. “Come on! He'll be all right. We have to hurry!”

I looked up at her. The sun was sinking into the darkness. Blood trembled in my arms.

She got a pouty look on her face. “If you love me, you'll come on!”

I couldn't make it alone out there without him. I knew it. If I loved her. She asked me, in the boiler, do you know what love is?

It was a small fire, not nearly big enough for any roverpak to spot from the outskirts of the city. No smoke. And after Blood had eaten his fill, I carried him to the air-duct a mile away, and we spent the night inside on a little ledge. I held him all night. He slept good. In the morning, I fixed him up pretty good. He'd make it; he was strong.

He ate again. There was plenty left from the night before. I didn't eat. I wasn't hungry.

We started off across the blasted wasteland that morning. We'd find another city, and make it.

We had to move slow because Blood was still limping. It took a long time before I stopped hearing her calling in my head. Asking me, asking me: do you know what love is?

Sure I know.

A boy loves his dog.

The Treehouse—Los Angeles—1964

Harlan, with Ahbhu; for whom he wrote “A Boy and His Dog.”

[Back to Table of Contents]

RUN, SPOT, RUN

EXCERPT FROM THE SEQUEL TO “A BOY AND HIS DOG"

(This section of the forthcoming novel Blood's A Rover follows immediately in time and location the ending of the previously-published novella “A Boy and His Dog.” In the preceding section Vic and Blood, after escaping the city where Fellini's roverpak holds sway, have been separated when Vic follows Quilla June into the downunder city of Topeka. Finally escaping with her, Vic returns to find Blood—his chief link with survival—starving and wounded. Making the only decision he can, Vic kills the girl and uses the meat to save Blood's life.)

WE KEPT GOING WEST and I'd have tried to use Freud to cheer him up, but it doesn't pay to be too cerebral with a fifteen-year-old boy who has done something he can't live with.

“It's mostly my fault,” I said one day, about a week later. He looked miserable. He wasn't sleeping much, and when he did sleep he hummed and moaned. I didn't mind the moaning as much as the humming: an eerie, continuous tone without apparent break for breathing. How he did it I don't know. It worried me. He was losing his edge.

He didn't stop walking, and he didn't even look at me.

“It is not unappreciated,” I said.

Answer came there none.

I hustled to keep up with him, even though he wasn't going at that trail pace he can adopt for an hour or two at a time when we're trying to get past some long danger zone. He was doing a zombie walk, actually; without any spring, without any bounce. But it was exhausting, just one foot in front of the other: through mud, through ash, sometimes through rubble. Just one foot in front of the other, hour after hour.

I was afraid to say anything about food.

He was still remembering that special meal I'd had. And the leftovers.

I never said I was hungry. I wasn't worried that he'd get rankled. I was worried he wouldn't answer.

Maybe more than an edge had been dulled by my special meal.

I caught a purple and pink lizard and ate it. My head ached and my stomach bubbled all the next day, but it kept me going. Whatever it had been before the Third War, whatever normal species it had taken three hundred million years from the Pennsylvanian Period to become, that vile purple and pink thing had gone through an inordinate amount of mutation in just thirty-nine years. It gave me hallucinations.

Like the night of the day after I ate it, when we were still on a stretch of what a rusty sign said had been the Ohio Turnpike, when I started seeing ghosts ... and they were all wearing frilly pink dresses.

It had been incredibly hot all day, humid under a low, thick, mean-looking cover of thunder-head clouds that packed in the air and sent up waves of shimmer from the unruptured slabs of roadway. Just before sunset the storm broke and it didn't bring any relief from the clutching heat. It was a boiling rain that hit the Turnpike and just sizzled. The pads of my paws were raw, but I didn't ask Vic to slow down or stop.

He just kept pacing off the miles, heading west.

The storm stopped after darkness fell, but the clouds outdistanced us and kept building up behind. If there was a moon riding above them, I couldn't see it.

There were sounds from the woods that flanked the Turnpike. Some of the sounds were words, but they weren't from throats I recognized.

Vic didn't seem to hear. He stared straight ahead, seeing nothing; and we kept moving. I didn't like traveling at night in this kind of country. My head ached, my stomach bubbled.

And then I saw the ghost.

It oozed up through a fissure in the roadway, the first one in a pink dress. It came up like a fog, like the smoke of a genie from a bottle. Vaporous, transparent, it skimmed out of the fractured Turnpike and hung there before me, swaying.

Vic walked right through it.

I could see him going away beyond the swaying shape. I drew back and the fur bristled all along my back. My lips skinned back over my muzzle and I heard myself beginning that growl deep in my throat that was a combination of terror and murder. My hindquarters trembled with contained energy, the preparation to spring or bolt.

Because it was making the most terrible sound I'd ever heard. A pitiful, pleading sound that held in its undertones the vision of painful death and loneliness. The sound cut straight through my brain.

It was a girl in a pink dress, a frilly pink dress; a dress that had been ripped and torn, as if to make bandages. There were pieces missing from the dress. There were pieces missing from her face.

And it swayed there like some hideous underwater growth, anchored deep in the broken roadway, its stalk a softly hissing vapor, its stem a moist pink fall of torn cloth, its flower only part of a face, one cheek torn away as if by fangs, as if by a wild beast. And the eyes...

It swayed toward me, and away, toward me, and away...

I howled.

I was getting the vision from Vic's subconscious!

Then I ran. I dodged sidewise and around it as it swayed toward me, the eyes, those awful eyes filled with anguish and death, rolling in the sockets to track me as I dodged past.

Then I ran. Scampering sloppily as I turned my head to look behind me. It had revolved; it was facing toward me, still anchored in the macadam, still floating like a plume of seaweed. My claws made little ratcheting sounds on the pike as my feet went out from under me and I slid on my belly.

Then I ran. Up again and howling like my ancestors, chasing Vic and trying to get his mind out of that pit!

As bad as it had ever been for us, this could be the worst; because there wasn't any way to fight it. Something had happened to him with that girl, that Quilla June Holmes, that frilly pink dress. Something different from what he knew of women out here in the deadlands where it was make it or die, that simply, survival first and last and all the crannies in-between. No time for soft and sweet and Tom Sawyer walking Becky Thatcher's picket fence. He'd had a demonstration of what wetbrain could do: she'd coshed him over the head and lured him downunder. But something had been born in him, some human emotion like love. And I couldn't resist it or pillory him for it because I'd been trying to instill something like that in him since we'd come together.

But not like this. Not in a way that would collapse his grip on reality. That I couldn't permit. He was my boy and each of us was the only thing that stood between the other and getting wasted.

But now he hated me. Inside him, way down in his little kid's brain—because that's all he was, a fifteen-year-old kid—he had done something he thought was awful, and he'd got his guilt all twisted up in there and he blamed me. What the hell, why not? Wasn't it good old Blood who'd eaten his fill?

Another ghost came out of the roadway.

Right in front of me.

I could barely stop.

I put my ass down and skidded, trying to scrabble my claws into the blacktop, but that was a waste of time. I slid along tearing up good meat and tried to get my feet under me, and went around and around like a crab on ice...

...and I went right through it!

Another little girl in a pink dress. With more rips and more parts missing and a bloody stub hanging off the left shoulder where an arm should have been. And this time it reached for me. And this time I felt it. An icicle right through my hind-quarters. The chill steel of it reaching into my skin and trying to pull me out of myself. I screamed with pain and howled with fear and kept right on going.

And Vic was still walking. Still heading west and hating me deep inside himself for killing his love and then eating it. And I couldn't even catch up with him.

“Vic! Vic, for the love of God, Vic, stop!”

Nothing. Didn't even turn around to see what was making me deranged. He'd settled into some awful fugue state, self-hypnotized, just walking because it was automatic action, one foot in front of the other. How long he'd been like that, and me not doing anything about it because I wanted to let him work it out himself, not realizing he was paralyzing himself, I don't know. Maybe it had been a day, or two days. And I was half-insane myself from eating that lizard and there must have been something in its bloodstream, maybe some crazy psychedelic or psilocybin fraction that reacted with the chains of amino acids forming the peptide molecules in my brain that stimulated the telepathic ability in me—stimulated what the Third War neurophysiologists who mutated my ancestors called “psychoendorphins"—so I was picking up not just Vic's thoughts, but his buried fears and fantasies, his unconscious guilt and hatred. And that lizard meat had fucked up my psychoendorphins so I was seeing and feeling and maybe dying from fright of nothing but phantoms from Vic's mind swamp.

Three chewed ghosts, ectoplasmic blood oozing from rips and tears in their flesh, slithered out of the Turnpike around me. They had me surrounded. I felt my eyeballs popping out of my head and my skin crawling and I went straight through the one directly in front of me.

My heart stopped.

The stuff in my veins and arteries just quit flowing to my heart, it froze solid, turned to rime, and everything went dead white and I crashed onto my face and died. I lay there. Ghosts came for me.

It was raining again. It was still dark. I was dead and it was raining on me. Pretty ratty, I thought. Least he could've done was get my carcass out of the wet. After all, it's been over three years, and it's not as if we were strangers. When I wanted to be left alone, to relieve myself against some salubrious standpipe or nifty bush, there he always was, just staring at me. “Do I gawk at you when you're squatting and grunting?” I used to say. So what happens when I need him to schlep me into the dry? He's gone and left me.

I called him an ingrate a few times, and then I opened my eyes.

Well, imagine my surprise to find I wasn't dead!

I had rolled over, apparently, and I was still alive. The ghosts of shredded little girls were gone.

It was, no doubt, something I ate ... I thought. Like a purple and pink yecchhh that I'll never again so help me never masticate. Plays unquestioned hell with my psychoendorphins.

I turned my head and there was Vic, sitting all crouched up at the side of the pike, hunkered down on his haunches with his arms wrapped around his knees, just staring off across nothing with unblinking eyes. I had a cataleptic boy on my paws. The warrior solo who would defend my sensitive self had gone all the way around the bend and down the road. Eyes wide open, he was stunned and silent, soaking wet and shivering even in the warm, sticky rain.

Every inch of my body hurt. Whatever energy pool had been tapped by radioactive or psychedelically altered psychoendorphins, it had unleashed enough power not only to conjure up those demons from Vic's unconscious, but had freighted them with actual killing ability. I was hurt. Every nerve in my body had been shorted and fused. And I hadn't recovered from the wounds I'd sustained in the YMCA fight or the deprivation I'd suffered waiting for lovesick Vic to come back from the downunder. Sometimes I marvel at my stamina in the face of adversity. A noble nature is the answer, of course.

Thinking just that ... and also wondering how the hell I was going to jolt my nearly catatonic buddy Vic out of his potentially suicidal fugue state ... I tried to get up. It was beyond my not inconsiderable abilities. I lay there whimpering.

The Noble Canine's Burden—A.K.A. Vic A.K.A. Albert—paid no attention. Hey, dipstick! I yelled, mind-to-mind.

Which brought his unconscious back to an awareness that I was still in the world. And the programmer of hate in there got right back on the job. Another ghost started to ooze out of the crumbled Turnpike about six feet in front of me. It had one eye and its lower jaw was ripped away; blood was pumping out of the neck, all over the sweet little pink dress.

I knew it was curtains this time. I couldn't move.

And then, when everything was as black as it could get, when troubles were greater than any one poor dog ought to have to contend with, when the darkness before the dawn was so utterly ebony that one could vomit at the thought of how shitty it all was ... things got much worse.

That ratbastard killer Fellini and his slave-wagon came thundering down the Ohio Turnpike straight for us.

I started picking up random bits of thought formations long before I saw that batch of cuties in the flesh. Flesh is the operative term when speaking about Fellini. Loves his widdle boys, him does! Catamite is the exact word. Finds the poor little beggars starving in the ruins, coddles and squeezes them, pinches their cheeks and feeds them canned peaches to fill out their little butts and then turns them hind-end-to.

It is with difficulty that I think about Fellini and his gigantic roverpak of disgustos. My lunch repeats on me when I can't sweep the image out of my head.

And as for love of Vic and me, Fellini has about as much as I have for screamers. We'd managed to steal enough food from him that he had us on his list as A#1 removables.

Vic out of it. Miserable rain. Mean things in the woods. Darkness. Out in the open. No protection. A ghost coming for me. And Fellini's bunch hurtling down on us.

Death, where is thy sting?

I'm coming, Blood, just be patient.

Then it dawned on me: what the hell was Fellini doing way out here? He practically owned the city. He'd whipped every other roverpak into subjugation; he wouldn't have left the city unless something catastrophic had happened back there.

It was logical they'd be on this route: it was the only main trail west we'd been able to discover, the lane of least resistance. So I understood that. But what was behind Fellini, what was back in the city that drove him away ... that had to be something neither Vic nor I could cope with.

I had to get Vic out of the way. Off the road. Into the woods. If Fellini saw him or me it would be a long and less-than-classy death he'd program for us.

I willed myself to move. Not much, and not very well, but I moved. A little bit to the side ... and the ghost swayed in my direction. A little bit to the other side ... and the ghost followed my lead.

Come on, lady, I thought, I'm sorry about dining alfresco but, like right now, I was dying. So give me a break here.

Bur break came there none.

So okay, so no more Mr. Compromise, no more Mr. Rational, no more Mr. Sweet Personality. Now we do what we do best—which is purely, simply staying alive!

And I found it in me somewhere, don't ask where, and I was up like the sprinter of old, and I ran! Hyaah! Eat confusion, noncorporeal wraith! Left, right, left again, and I was past her, empty eyesocket, shredded jaw, pumping carotid and all ... past her like a shot, skidding forward and hitting Vic so damned hard he went over on his back.

Then I jumped on his goddam chest and I bit him in the ear!

And let me tell you, that woke him up.

“Fellini!” I said, mind-to-mind.

He did a terrific huh-what? And I said again, very slowly (noticing the ghost had vanished when the psychotic glaze left his eyes), “We are about to be run down by Fellini's slave-wagon, massuh. We are about to be found by the warm and wonderful Fellini who will cut your balls off and stuff them in your teen-aged mouth. What say we get in the wind. Albert?”

“You bit my ear off.”

“Not off. Just nibbled it a little.”

“Why'd you do that, you little asshole?”

“Fit of pique. Imminent death does that to me.”

“Jesus Christ, dog, I'm bleeding all over the place.”

“Couldn't happen to a nicer place.”

He kept putting his filthy hand up to his chewed ear and then taking it away to see the blood. Wasn't that much blood. Couldn't see it without moonlight, anyhow. Just making a big thing of nothing. I didn't even clamp my jaws. Just gummed him a trifle.

“I'll probably get tetanus and die.”

“Not before Fellini throws some meat to your ass, I'll betcha.”

That caught his attention. That, and the sound of the drivers cracking their whips over the slaves harnessed into Fellini's cart. You could hear it now. I could hear it now.

Vic could hear it now. “Jesus,” he whispered.

“The same,” I said. “Shall we go?”

And he was up off his butt, and we were running.

Naturally, that was a stretch of Turnpike where the fence flanking the road hadn't gone down. So we had to run straight ahead down the blacktop. And then there he was, coming down the straightaway behind us...

Fellini, that king sleazo, and about a hundred rovers, all slavering and screaming and spotting us in the dark.

How?

Well, I'm not the only pooch who can read minds, if the truth be known. Call it bad luck. Call it caprice. Stick it in your hat and call it macaroni, for all I care; the point was that we were seen. And one of those little punk-stickers yelled, “It's that solo and the dog!” and I heard the whiskey voice of Fellini bellow, “Git'm! Git me thet boy!”

And a wave of skirmishers detached itself from the pak and came after us full-buck and slavering.

“You just seem to make friends wherever you go,” I said to Vic, running, running, running.

Somebody got off a shot that may have outraged a tree back in the woods, but didn't even come close to the blurs we had become vamoosing outta there. Trouble was, it gave the other rovers an idea and, unaccustomed as they were to actually thinking, they began plinking at us. Now if one crosseyed sonofabitch is shooting at you, only random chance can cause you angst, but when it's about fifty loonies all firing at once, the air gets filled with bad luck.

“Over here!” Vic yelled out loud.

He cut right toward the fence, but I didn't know how he was going to go over it, with or without me. As it turned out he didn't. We went under. Storms had washed away a gully under a stretch of the chain-link and we slid under in the mud and came up on the other side and broke for the woods as fast as we could, our feet sucking up slop at every step. Ten seconds more and we'd made it. Right into the trees and thick underbrush, my coat full of nasty little foxtails that worked their way in and would have to be removed one by one later by Vic. If we lived that long.

The rain was getting heavier, and that was good. It would slow our pursuers. Nothing could slow us ... not even the thick spiderwebs that hung like festoons from every tree. They clung and tore as we smashed through them. A sudden break in the swollen storm clouds overhead revealed the waning moon skidding along high above the overcast; and in that fleeting moment of aluminum light the forest was lit like a carnival midway.

Spiderwebs, as big as the topsails of frigates hung necklaced with raindrops, silver and exquisite, everywhere. Incredibly complex territorial imperatives of master spinners, bough to bough, bole to bole, vanishing into the topmost branches; orb-webs and safety lines hung everywhere, thick as snowflakes and intricate beyond belief. We ran deeper into the forest, smashing through the veils of silk, destroying the ornate fretwork like barbarians in a cathedral.

Behind us we could hear the fifty rovers of Fellini's pak slamming through; the sound of their boots slapping against the carpet of slippery leaves and mud, spread out behind us, made it seem we were being chased by a legion of angry ducks.

We ran up a mudbank and Vic slipped, sliding back down on his stomach. As he floundered to his feet he caught his right foot in the protruding root of a rotted-out stump. I saw him catch it, started to teep a caution, but he moved before I could get the thought off. I heard the pop of ligaments and he screamed.

The ducks stopped slapping and listened.

“This way!” one of them yelled, and then they altered course and were right on our trail again.

Vic had sat down again. His face was a withered potato of pain. “Oh, Jesus Jesus Jesus, oh, Christ that hurts!”

There are no atheists in foxholes.

“How bad is it?” I said.

“Can't tell. Heard something rip. Oh shit it hurts!”

He was nursing the foot, holding the muddy boot with both hands. I started thinking very fast. Doing what I do best.

“Can you pull yourself up a little bit?”

He nodded, knowing I had something in mind.

“The stump. It's hollow. Crawl up in there, in the side. There's a big hole.”

“They'll see it, too. They'll find us.”

“Do it.”

He did it. He sculled backward on hands and buttocks and managed to slip inside the short pillar of the tree stump. I turned my ass to him and began scrabbling, throwing mud in a thick spatter. I dug in and worked fast, not even stopping when the pain in my hind legs made me feel as if everything inside, so recently frozen, was on fire. I covered him with mud and leaves and bits of mulch until the hole was packed and he was safe inside. Then I limped off to a low depression between two thick bushes, burrowed under the foliage and into a cover of leaves packed solid with rain.

It was dark, it was wet, it was tough going through this stretch of the forest with the spiderwebs and the branches sweeping the ground. With a little luck they'd get up that mudbank and keep going. With a dash of decency on the part of the uncaring universe, we'd make it.

Three hours later they'd gone, and we were safe.

For a long time I didn't think they'd give up. Fellini was obviously completely crazy with hatred for me and Vic by this time. But finally, long before sunrise, they gave up, the last straggling skirmisher beat his way back to the pak, and though I couldn't hear the slave-wagon rolling west on the Turnpike, I knew they were gone. The air was clear of thoughts.

But I stayed put for another hour, just to be sure.

Lying in the cold like that, with the rain that had turned very cold at last when it would do the most harm, after having been speared by ghosts, after having opened wounds only minimally healed, weary and frightened, with foxtails that had worked their way through my matted fur into my skin ... I was barely able to drag myself out of the covering protection of the moldy leaves.

I slipped in the downspill runoff of mud from the high bank, and in the emerging light of day I could just barely make out the stump where Vic had been immured with mud.

There was movement around the stump.

The light wasn't good enough to see what it was...

Not ants...

No, it was something bigger. Black. Big and black and moving. I moved forward slowly...

My teeth clacked together as my lips skinned back over my muzzle. I heard the growl of fear and loathing.

The spiders had him.

Not many people ever knew this, in the time before the Third War, when the dogs were altered for telepathy, but we hate spiders worse than humans. No matter how much Aunt Tillie shrieked and hid in the toilet from the baby spider on the draperies, it didn't approach by one one-millionth the natural disgust and fear dogs felt for the stinking slimy things. All hairy little legs and nasty pincers and staring eyes.

And those fuckers weren't three feet wide around the body, with unshaved legs as tough as hawser ropes, with jaws that could snap a pup's back. And they didn't spin cocoons as strong and white and fast-setting as concrete.

But that was before the Third War, when nature went insane and lizards grew in pink and purple and their blood carried madness and water rats pullulated like maggots and came in green and ochre with eyes that glowed in the dark and they traveled in killer packs that could bring down a horse or a man, not to mention a low-slung dog, without even pausing to find out what they were ripping apart. Big, everything got big these days. Like spiders that lived in forests and waited for food to come to them.

I leaped. I scrabbled up the mudbank and barked as mean as I could, and some of them scattered, swinging away on their escape lines. But the biggest of them was still squatting on the open top of the stump, spitting out its cocoon, swaddling the helpless meat inside, trapped by hardened mud.

One spider leg was dangling off the side, and I bit it with all my strength, feeling the nausea rising up in me merely at the touch of the foul thing. I clamped my jaws and locked them and then ripped up. Something snapped and the scream of the spider went through me like needles through an eyeball. The thing swung around and with silk still dripping, it thrust down, snapping.

I went for the eyes.

My claws sank in, slime spattered all over me, and the thing shrieked again like fingernails down a blackboard. Then it broke off and crutched away into the forest.

I sat on top of the stump and looked down inside.

All that showed of Vic was part of his head and face.

His eyes were open, but he was off in that hellish place where the ghosts of dinners in pink dresses hobbled across the landscape.

“Vic!” I yelled, pouring all my power into the thought. “Vic, wake up, man! Come on! Get out of there!”

[Back to Table of Contents]

FROM: THE WIT AND WISDOM OF BLOOD

“We are all waiting for Fate to send us our orders.”

“Humor should not be dissected because nothing lives through dissection.”

I tried to lower my forequarters into the rotted opening, but he was too far beneath me; and I knew if I fell in there I wouldn't be able to get out. The mud, the narrowness of the hollow, the stickiness of the cocoon silk...

And then a spider dropped on my back. I howled with horror and arched up and snapped at it. It drew back up on its line, a line as thick as bridge cable, and it shot out a stream of slimy white fluid that slopped into my eyes and stung, very nearly blinding me. Then more, and it drew out fine and tight and the thing was dragging me into its jaws.

I snapped the line with my fangs and skipped off the stump. I drew back waiting for it to attack, but it settled like a disgusting carrion bird over the mouth of the stump and took up where its brother or sister had left off, winding Vic up in a shroud that would never be parted till what lay wrapped within had died and rotted and could be taken out bit by bit for a later meal.

Everything was dining! Everything in the world!

And I stood there thinking at Vic as hard as I could, “Vic, please please buddy, hear me! Come back from in there, come out and fight it. You can get loose. Please, please, Vic! I'm all alone out here! Come on partner, come on out!!”

And I kept screaming until the thing had finished and it looked around, and it saw me; and its work done, it looked for new pleasures.

So I ran.

I ran as hard and as fast as pain would let me. I ran away and left him there with whatever air was still in his lungs. I left him off somewhere in a land where his first love held him prisoner.

And I ran and ran. Until I was gone from the forest, and I continued west, foraging as best I could.

And I was never again troubled by the ghosts of little girls in shredded frilly pink dresses.

No ghosts of little girls: just one ghost ... a fifteen-year-old ghost that stared up at me from a hollow stump with eyes that no longer cared what happened to Man's Best Friend.

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