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

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 whitewashed 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?”

&n
bsp; “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 shopfront, 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…”