“Run!” Harry yelled, and dragged her to her feet. They struggled hip-deep out of the hay, and by the time they had reached the open door of the ruined barn, there was a wall of thick, acrid smoke and yellow-crimson flame behind them.
They stumbled out into the weed-overgrown yard between the stump of the tarpaper shack and the furiously blazing barn. They stood there choking, trying to rub the smoke from their eyes, trying to empty their lungs of smoke.
“Good show,” Harry said resignedly, just as the first bullet cracked across the hillside, and whanged past his head, losing itself somewhere in the woods behind the burning barn. The second and third shots were wilder, far wide of the mark, but Harry got the message. His head came up and he saw the bunch clambering down the roadside toward them.
“Shoot by the light of the barn!” one of the men was shouting, and even across that great a distance, Harry could recognize the voice of the girl’s hooded Daddy. “But watch Angela! Don’t hit Angela!”
Angie’s hands went to her face in terror, as though on puppet strings, and Harry spun around in confusion. “I don’t know how they came out of it alive, but we’ve got trouble, little lady.”
He grabbed her by the wrist and turned, looking for an avenue of escape. “C’mon, the woods!” He plunged forward, dragging her along behind.
They hit the woods at a gallop, and lost themselves in the twisted shadow mass among the trees. They ran on through the twisting stands of short-leaf pines, oak, poplar and hickory trees that seemed to converge on them, mass against them, send them deeper into the murky undergrowth, blot out the sky overhead, trip them, send them sprawling.
They were on their feet again, plunging through a clump of dogwood, and suddenly, they were out on the other side. Against the night sky, now just lightening into dawn with a gray, zombie-flesh paleness, they could see the huge grotesque bulk of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
They were in a field of ripe tobacco.
“Run, for chrissakes!” Harry gasped. They ran, hurling themselves forward through the great leafy plants, the flat green fronds slapping their faces. They did not hear the chopper till it was almost overhead, and spinning down on them. “Harry!” Angie shrieked, looking up into the whirling rotors.
“Jeezus, Christ, Awmiddy!” Harry bellowed, and tried to run in another direction. The eggbeater followed his progress. They tried hiding in the tobacco, but the backwash of the rotors cleared them out like maggots from under a piece of fetid meat.
“A chopper! Where the hell did that come from?”
Harry was running as hard as he could. Angie dragged hard on the end of his hand, and her words came as gasps: “He has a … radiophone in his … car … he uses the heli, heli … cop … ter for surveying construction sites … he must … must have called it from the c-car …”
The chopper swooped at them, and they fled before it.
They were trapped.
The ’copter drove them forward, coming at them field-level high and hovering, sending them out of the tobacco, toward the road: the road that curved around the forest, that now carried the group of men in white hoods and sheets. The sheets were dirty and torn and some of the men were without cover, but when they saw Harry and the girl they yelled like rebel troops at Missionary Ridge and pounded down the road toward them.
The first one to reach Harry caught a fist high in the face. It spun him like a dervish and his legs twisted like vines. He went down in an untidy heap; and then the rest of them were on Harry. He kicked out, and swung his locked hands like a mace, but there were too many, and when they grabbed him from behind he kicked off with both feet and jacked his heavy boots into someone’s crotch. There was a scream, and a moan, and Angie yelled something obscene, and then they hit Harry very hard with something very very hard, and he sagged in their grasp. Suddenly, the dawn (that had been coming up like thunder) went out like the light when you close the refrigerator door.
And Harry was in cold storage.
Angie’s Daddy was a cartoon impression of Little Orphan Annie’s Daddy. He was a huge phallus of a man, bald and glistening, with a pair of slitted eyes that looked as though they’d been cut in the yellow papyrus of his thick face with a serrated-edge bread knife. His mouth was almost entirely lipless; and aside from the resemblances to Daddy Warbucks, Mr. Clean and Disraeli, there was a salamander air about him. Harry expected Daddy to hiss, rather than shout.
But Daddy shouted. For a long time!
“If it hadn’t of been for that goddamned fire we never woulda seen your goddamned bodies standin’ out against the light. Thought you had old Daddy, din’tcha, you goddamned snotty punk! Thought you put old goddamned Daddy down for the long count, din’tcha? Well, old Daddy got nineteen lives an’ then some, like a mass ’a cats!”
“Daddy’s got a dirty mouth,” Harry said. And received a gloveful of nickels across the back of the head for his trouble. He slumped forward in the chair, arms tied behind him to the slats. His eyes fluttered closed, open, closed again. The man with the five-fingered blackjack was a short, extremely surly, box-shaped individual named Routener. His face was oily and his hair was very curly.
Harry came up from the pit again, and stared unfocused at Daddy.
“Boy, you know what old Daddy’s gonna goddam well do for you? He’s gonna introduce you to some of the finest goddam concrete that you ever saw. He’s gonna make your acquaintance all the way from your goddam feet to your gaah dam head. And then he’s gonna have a li’l heart-to-heart and mouth-to-hand talktalk with his goddam daughter. In’t that right, Angela girl?” Angie shivered. There was such loathing in her eyes as she stood against the wall of the construction shed, that it burned from her face like the inferno the barn had become.
“Is that the sandy concrete you used on the hospital?” Harry asked. “I hear tell it’s groovy goods; how many people got buried when the building collapsed and fell into the valley?”
“Shut your goddamned mouth!”
“Better use somebody else’s concrete, Daddy. I might be able to chew my way out of your product.” The gloveful of nickels again. Wham! Across the temple. He went away for a while. When his eyes opened again, he was lying on the ground outside the shed, and Routener was standing over him, a big .45 packed in his mitt, and that oily face saying something. After a few minutes and several kicks in the ribs, he understood that Routener wanted him to get up.
“Where’s the rest of the group?” It was a toss-off question; Harry was merely glad the other hooded men were nowhere in sight. There was always a better chance of getting away without holes in untidy places if there were less cooks ready to stir the pot.
“Rggll,” said Routener.
“Thanks,” Harry answered, and moved forward as Routener shoved the .45 into his ribs, hard.
They walked toward the excavations and Harry found himself looking down into what must have been set-pits for three big buildings. The drop was easily a hundred feet, and at the bottom of all three was quagmire. It was suckmud of the worst sort. Harry had been around enough to know what Daddy was going to have to do, if he was going to build there: fill in that muck till it settled. And it looked as though they had started the fill already. With garbage. Soft sand. Rubbish.
The buildings would get erected, and then, slowly, begin to sink. If the residents were lucky they would find out in time and third-floor occupants could step out of their windows onto the surrounding ground. First- and second-floor tenants would have to take the elevators upstairs to free themselves. Harry wondered how much graft was attached to this little goodie. He didn’t wonder for very long; at that point Routener indicated the mixing trough of wet cement standing by the edge of the pit.