They were moving in and he flicked the whip toward their faces with vicious determination. They had fallen back, and in one quick movement he picked the slight girl up in his arms and ran like a madman. He gained the cab of the truck just as they burst out from between the carny tents, and in a second he was inside, the doors locked, and the motor kicking.
The mob had grown by two or three men, unmasked, and one of them had a shotgun. He leveled it, ready to blow a hole through the cab, but one of the others had pointed in panic to the legend on the door of Harry’s cab: DANGER DYNAMITE EXPLOSIVES DANGER and the shotgun had gone down off point fast. Then Harry had kicked the heap, and gunned it forward. The big hulk had jumped as though goosed, and the hooded men had leaped out of the way.
A turn out into the town, a short run to the highway, and then out, climbing. And then the headlights behind him. The death-chase, the jackknifed rig, climbing the rock wall with the girl, the explosion and he had Had It. . . .
The scene flashed in an instant, re-told everything, and he came back to consciousness lying at the side of the road with the girl on top of him. His head ached as though someone had steam-driven a tenpenny spike in behind each eye, with a third shard of steel into his medulla oblongata, just for a fail-safe. He groaned, and the girl squirmed on his body. It was a disconcerting combination of feelings. The pain, and the pleasure.
Harry slid out from under her.
He staggered around the roadway for a few moments, trying to convince his synaptic relays they weren’t sending out orders for spaghetti. When he had mastered the trick of walking without falling down, he went back to the girl, and lifted her by the waist. She sat up, groaned in a fine alto, and opened her eyes blearily.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said. “Some of them may have made it through little Hiroshima down the road.”
He helped her to her feet, and supported her as they stumbled down the road. They did not talk for quite a while, until she seemed able to carry her own weight, and then they moved at a regular pace, casting weary, threadbare smiles at each other from time to time. Harry was impressed with the girl’s recovery, and the uncomplaining way she jogged along beside him.
When they reached the bottom of the steep incline, they found a fire-gutted shack, and part of a barn. There was hay in the barn, and they climbed into it, burrowing deeply inside, at the back of the mow, and Harry kept an eye out for travelers down the road.
“Who the hell were those men?”
“The local enforcers. They were kicked out of the Klan ten years ago for unnecessary brutality, or something, and they’ve been surly ever since.”
Harry grinned. She was all right. “That’s a very funny line. How true is it?”
“Every word.”
“So who was the big stud with the whip? He didn’t seem to like you very much.”
She tried to adjust the ripped bodice of her dress, but it only exposed more flesh, and Harry caught a brief flash of dark aureole and pink nipple before she covered herself with a dirt-smeared hand. “That was my father. He has a tendency toward crankiness.”
“What does he do for entertainment, let babies play with plastic clothing bags?”
She grinned youthfully. “He was angry at me.”
“For what?”
“For wanting to run away. I hired on at the carnival, in the girl tent; to try and get out of town. I was desperate; I’d have tried anything.”
“What’s wrong with the bus?”
“Daddy runs the town. He has a fellow, Routener; he does dirty things for him. Routener would have stopped me, sent me back into town. I tried everything: bus, train, even hitching a ride on the highway. They always brought me back. I figured if I could slip out of town with the carnival, I might make it.”
Harry scratched at his stubbled jaw. “You must be a pretty popular girl, them wanting to keep you handy like that.”
She snapped out a sweet, deadly laugh. “Popular! Ha, that’s a good one. They’d like me dead, but Daddy won’t let them do it; he says I look too much like my mother to put me in cement and sink me in the lake.” She paused, and a cloud passed across her expression. “I don’t know why my looking like mother should keep the dirty bastard from killing me … he drove mother to her grave.”
She pulled her full mouth tight, and Harry noted that she had dimples. “And besides, I know too much,” she said. “He knows all I have to do is get out of town, and I’ll tell everyone about why the new hospital collapsed. He stole close to eighty thousand dollars from that job!”
“Your father’s a big man in construction, I gather.” A horrible realization was dawning on him.
She nodded. “Everything from the new school library to the mine excavations about ten miles from here.”
“Bingo,” he said, and lay back in the hay, wishing he had taken a nice quiet job tending cobras. “I was hauling that juice to the excavations for him.”
“Oh,” she said softly, looking at Harry with fear.
“Bonded driver,” Harry reassured her. “No connection with your old man’s outfit.” He lay back for a long time in silence.
“I’ll fuck you if you’ll get me out of town,” she said, and removed her hand from her breast. Harry closed his eyes very slowly, then opened them, and what he had seen was still there, breathing heavily at him. Oh boy , he thought.
“Well, that’s very nice,” he said, “but what makes you think we can get out of town without your Daddy’s group stopping us … hey!” She had her hand on his leg, and was moving it in slow circles.
“Maybe Daddy was killed in the explosion,” she said gently, moving nearer to him. “I think so, you know?”
“When that juice wagon went up,” Harry said, moving closer to her , “almost anything could have happened. I heard all four cars hit, but whether they were just piled up and the first car caught most of it, I don’t know. Or even if your old man was in the damned car, it’s simply a shuck, baby, we could be in real trubb —”
She came at him mouth first, and he caught her on the fly.
It was a long, twisting time before he got his mouth free enough to say, “You must want out of here pretty bad …”
“Very bad,” she answered, pulling up her skirt. “Daddy was whipping me because I was working the girl show after the regular show ended. That’s how bad I wanted out.”
“You mean the ‘blow-off,’ in the raw?”
She nodded, and did something interesting with her underpants. “What’s your name?” she asked him, just before their bodies ran together like lava.
After the third time, they lay in the hay, and she lit a cigarette for him. Her name was Angela; she told him to call her Angie.
“You’re going to be a problem if your old man didn’t buy it in the crash back there,” Harry said. She grinned and took a deep drag from his cigarette. He grinned in mock ferocity and yelped, “ Wowch! ” as she handed the cigarette back, and it burned his fingers.
He dropped the butt, and it disappeared in the hay, and she started giggling at him. “I think good fucking really shakes you up, doesn’t it, Harry?”
“Stop clowning!” he yelled. “This hay’s drier than hell, and that cigarette’s in there.” He started scrabbling through the debris, trying to hitch up his pants at the same time. He began throwing hay like a dog burying a bone.
“Oh Harry, don’t be such a jerk! It’ll put itself out.” She tried to drag him back down to her, just as the first wisp of smoke floated up out of the mass. An instant later a thin tongue of flame leaped past their faces.