Pulling A Train

by Harlan Ellison

  His palm came out and cracked across her face. Then back. Then again and again and again, till she begged him for more, and worse, and he doubled his fist, driving it into her stomach. She writhed against the blow, and fell toward him, blessing him, damning him, loving him.

  Deek was repulsed by her, and insane with the fury of what he was doing. He could not see reason, had no idea what havoc he was wreaking on the girl’s face and body, till finally, in a final fit of brutal torment, he laid both hands locked-together, and brought them around in such a roundhouse blow that it lifted her from the floor and dumped her at his feet, unconscious.

  Deek Cullen stood back, his body a torrent of sweat. Around him in the room the three women lay spent in their own particular hells of passion.

  Pootzie, satisfied by the driving urgency of his sex. Terri, obviously sex-starved and anguished for a man, empty and satiated on the floor where he had thrown her. And Thumb, beaten senseless, ecstasy upon ecstasy from the rain of his fists on her body.

  Only Fabia was left. Fabia DeLuca who now stared at him, the zip gun held tensed in her hands.

  “I don’t know how good I’ll be, but it’s your time now, Satch.” His words were hollow with fatigue. He felt he might lie down and sleep for a month. Yet she was staring at him in mixed wonder and—something else.

  “The first time,” she said, and the zip gun lowered a trifle. “The first goddam time a guy has been able to take it. They usually tear ’em apart. You’re good bait, daddy, you’re somethin’ else. I think we might get together real good.”

  Yellow lights flashed on and off in Deek Cullen’s head. The zip gun lowered a trifle more. It was aimed at the floor now. He walked toward her. This was a woman. The others, they had been bodies, sick inside, one way or another. But this was a woman with a full, lush, ready body, and if there was anything left in him, Deek would have her.

  The zip gun dropped to the floor as he met her in the center of the room. His hand crept between their bodies and instinctively cupped her breast. She gasped, and her great dark eyes closed.

  There was no room on the floor, so they made love on the sofa, and she was better, much better than all three of the others combined. Her body was a live flame, and her lips found his almost magnetically.

  Once and twice, and almost three times, till Deek Cullen fell into a slumber of spent passion that included a dream. Of a girl with ebony hair and a hungry mouth.

  Good dreams, but crimson.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  A Dose of Terror

  IT HAD BEEN VERY EASY. Joining the Cats was a cinch after a demonstration such as he had given. They were a strong bunch…ruthless…unyielding…self-sufficient…but they needed their sex from time to time, and it was better for them to have a man they trusted, one who could service them all, one who could run with them, as one of them.

  Deek liked the idea. He had always been alone, always avoided joining up with a bunch of studs, because they sapped his strength with their own weaknesses, but the Cats were different. They were a hungry bunch, and they were like him—taking what they wanted from anyone that happened to get in their way.

  It was enough for Deek. He had killed and now he was with a group that could also kill.

  They went out on their first job the next night. It was a warm, maybe too warm, summer evening, and Deek took Fabia by the arm as though they were high school kids out for an evening walk to the movie. The other three followed a block behind them.

  Fabia and Deek turned into the Park.

  The other three took the other entrance, and came at him—right angle. Deek and Fabia walked arm in arm, talking softly, the perfect picture of young love.

  A picture that seemed to be mirrored by other couples in the dusky verdancy. They walked on, penetrating deeper among the hushed couples necking on the grass or leaning against the boles of trees, till finally Fabia nudged him in the side.

  One couple, well-dressed and lost in each other’s smiles, were walking down a side trail, further and further from the park lights that cast such feeble circles of light. “Let’s go,” she said, and urged him on faster.

  “Where are the girls?” Deek asked, casting about in the gloom for their shapes. He could see nothing. There was no sound of snapping twigs or crunching leaves from beside the trail.

  “They’re where they’re supposed to be,” she answered tightly. The boy and girl ahead of them had paused and stepped slightly off the path, to share an embrace. “Now!” Fabia snarled in Deek’s ear.

  They moved in on the couple, and Fabia went for the girl like a panther. She dragged her bodily from her lover’s grasp, and threw her to the ground. Deek came up beside the boy, startling him as he watched his girl beaten by Fabia. Deek grabbed, whipped the kid around by the collar. Fabia was methodically beating the girl senseless, and now stooping to remove her watch, purse, earrings and bracelet, as Deek’s fist chopped solidly into the boy’s belly.

  The boy doubled slightly, and though he tried to swing in a killing uppercut to finish the job, Deek missed as the boy turned slightly with the punch. It grazed off his neck instead of solidly connecting, and did more to shudder Deek’s arm than incapacitate the boy.

  Then Deek’s opponent did a peculiar thing. He sidestepped, reached out and grasped Deek’s wrist. Deek was more amused than alarmed, for he mistakenly assumed the boy was hanging on for support. He was even more surprised when the boy, obviously schooled in judo, whipped Deek across the hip, and threw him with a crash into the bushes.

  Deek fell heavily, rolling twice and coming up groggy.

  The boy was trying to peel Fabia from the body of his girlfriend, when the Cats came out of the woods. Terri carried a white glove, loaded with half dollars. She brought it up and back and down in one fluid movement that carried the home-made blackjack to its target with all the punch of a howitzer. The boy caught it across the skull, just above and behind his right ear, and he staggered as though pole-axed.

  Terri spun him with her hand, and whipped the coin-filled glove, a deadly blackjack, sidewise. It took the boy across the eye, and he fell without a sound, his face shattered from eyebrow to the bridge of his nose.

  Deek dragged himself from the bushes, and stood trembling from the force of his fall. “Jeezus,” he murmured at the fullback, “you took your goddam good time about getting here.”

  Terri grinned her orangutan grin. “We usually handle it ourselves. We don’t usually have a big strong guy to help us.” Thumb snickered obscenely.

  Deek said nothing, but he was burned; wise broads. He bent to the task of stripping the guy. There was a watch, a class ring, a wallet with sixty-two dollars in it, and a fountain pen. He also took the belt and tie. That was another five dollars saved.

  They passed the haul to the girls, who disappeared with it into the woods, and they continued walking…looking for another strike.

  If the looted couple awoke and found Deek or Fabia, they could prove nothing, for the evidence had gone with one of the girls, while the other two followed along in the darkness off the trails. That way they could make four strikes a night, sending the evidence off with each of the three Cats, and finally taking their last haul themselves.

  It went off well. It was a foolproof plan. They soon grew to be experts at it.

  A craftsman in any trade soon draws attention, too.

  She came to him in his room, and there was concern on her face. “I heard you were the boy they were after, at the Settlement House,” she said. “They haven’t made a definite identification, but I knew it was you. I’d like to help.”

  She still had the beauty mark above her lip, just the same as the day she saved him from Fabia and Pootzie in the assassinating car. The broad from the Kilgore Street Settlement House.

  “Help me? I ain’t done nothing.”

  “They say you and some girl are behind all the muggings in the Park.”

  “Who’s they?”

  “The police. They came down to check our records.
They have half a dozen suspects. You’re one of them.”

  “They got the wrong stud. So do you. Beat it, I wanna sleep.”

  “I helped you once, perhaps I could do it again.”

  “Hey, like you don’t hear too good, do you? I mean like cut out, willya, kiddo. I gotta get some sleep.”

  She sat down on the edge of the bed, and looked at him carefully. “Listen to me Deek. I can help you. I can get them to give you a suspended sentence, if you’ll turn yourself in, and tell who the girls in the gang are?”

  Deek leaned up on one elbow, and was very close to the sweet smell of her, clean and soap and some unnamed perfume that made his head swim. “I tell you, you don’t know who the hell you’re buggin’. I ain’t done nothin’!”

  She stared at him levelly, and he remembered the fire he had seen smoldering subtly in her eyes, that day in the street. Now she was here, was it only because she thought he was in trouble, and she could help? Or was there something more, something more darkly primal Deek could recognize, something he could understand only in his genetic awakening?

  He reached up, and traced the line of her high cheekbone with one finger, and felt her stiffen at his touch. So it was something else.

  His hand came down onto her shoulder and gently, almost reverently, he bent her toward him. Her eyes began to close as she neared him, and then, as though she had been waiting for her face to reach that point in space since she had come into this room, they slid to slivers and closed entirely, and she gave him her mouth hungrily.

  He pulled her down, rolling atop her, grinding down between her legs with his hot body. His hand locked with hers, and he spread her arms symbolically, pressing tighter to her, and finding her tongue with his own.

  He probed the moist wetness of her mouth, stirring her to small sounds, and then pulled away, burying his face in the sweet-smell of her hair. He worked his mouth down and found her ear. It was always a gamble, but when it worked, it saved time.

  She responded. The warmth of his breath and the hot spear of his tongue at her ear stirred her more than even his kisses, and her torso writhed under him.

  “Uh, uh, oh, there, there, that’s it, that’s where it is, do it there…” she murmured.

  Then his hands slipped down and grasped her skirt. She arched up off the bed so he could slip it over her hips, and her panties came down equally as swiftly. Her tender lower areas were revealed, and he used his hands to drive her into a frenzy of passion.

  “Take me…you filthy bastard…you OH! you good, so good, solo goood…” she was raving and rolling her hips back and forth as he took her.

  She was good, because she had been pent up, and he had released her.

  When it was over, she lay there with her eyes closed. After a while she arranged her clothing as though she had done something shameful. And when she left, it was more with shame than sorrow. There was an unspoken something in her manner that bothered Deek.

  The woman—he suddenly realized he had never known her name—might just be rocky enough to give him trouble.

  The trouble came later that day. He was walking down the hall from the bathroom when he saw them. Two of them, and they had fuzz written all over them. “Hey! You!” the one with the wart on his cheek yelled.

  Deek bolted. He spun on his heel, dropping the towel he had used to dry his hands, and ran back down the corridor, to the window facing the fire escape.

  He didn’t wait to open it, but shattered it with one booted foot. Then he was out on the fire escape, and hesitating only for an instant.

  Animal cunning told him he had time enough to get out of the cop’s sight, and he climbed up the fire escape, rather than down. They would automatically assume he had raced down and lost himself in the alley. They would spend their time searching the streets for him, while he used the secret pathways of the rooftops.

  In a moment he was on the roof, across it, and leaping through space to the building adjacent.

  It took him only a matter of minutes to move five blocks away, down through another tenement, out onto the street, into the subway, and away.

  He knew he must get to Fabia and the Cats.

  They would be planning another job, and it was getting on toward evening… they might move out at any moment. He must stop them. If they got caught, they’d rat on him, and he had to protect himself.

  He found the factory deserted, and waited in the cool dimness of the basement for the girls to return. Thumb was the first to make the scene. She came down the steps and lit up greedily when she saw him alone.

  “C’mon, honey Deek,” she invited, pulling her skirt up to expose her legs. She wore no underpants. Deek looked away in disgust.

  “What’s the matter, I ain’t good enough for ya now?” she snarled, and dropped her skirt back over her legs.

  “The fuzz are lookin’ for us,” he said. “I don’t know how far behind me they are. I gotta get outta town. Fabia’s got the dough stashed away. I want my share. I need it to blow this town. Things are too hot for me. I want to split the scene.”

  Fabia’s voice spoke from the stairway: “What’s the matter? You turning chickie on us, Deek?”

  He stood up and walked toward her. “The nabs. They came to my pad. The broad from the Settlement House must of told them I was the guy who’se been pulling off these Park capers. They came after me. I had to cut. I want my share of the bundle, and I’m splitting this town.”

  “We aren’t ready to break up the partnership, yet, Deek.”

  “Screw that noise. I said I want out, and out is where I’m goin’. Now either you give me my share or I take the whole boodle.”

  Fabia smiled nastily. “Find it.”

  Deek reached up, she stood two steps above him, and grasped the neck of her dress. He gave a tug, and she came tumbling down to him, her breasts flattening against his chest. The knife was in his free hand. He let it come up into view slowly, and then pressed the button.

  It clicked open, and she stared at it with her black eyes, a tingle of fear in her veins. “Now listen, you filthy whore. You take me to that dough, or I’ll cut you to pieces.”

  He meant it, and she was suddenly terrified.

  Thumb said something dim and threatening behind Deek, and he felt a rush of air as she came toward him. He spun, still clutching Fabia’s dress, and lowered the point of the long Italian stiletto, like a lance. Thumb had a broken bottle they had used as a lamp, and she was coming for Deek’s face. The knife took her just below the neck, in the hollow where her collarbone broke. It went clear through, and she spouted like a geyser as she went down, gurgling; the white, dead centers of her eyes rolling out of sight.

  Deek wanted to vomit. It was horrible. But he had to tough it out. He was in it now, all screwed up, and he had to beat it out of town, and fast.

  “Now. You gonna take me, or do I feed you some of that like the punk?”

  Fabia’s face was so white, her black hair had a domino contrast to it. She nodded dumbly. She would take him to the cache.

  They left the basement, and she moved off before him…the stained knife still extended in his hand. He followed her down the back streets and through the alleys, till they came to the junkyard where the great wrecking machines stood empty sentinel duty for no one.

  Fabia moved down the line until she had come to one of the wreckers with a giant magnet hanging dead still in the air above them. “I buried it there,” she said, indicating a spot among the rubble.

  Deek broke the knife, closed it and shoved it into his jacket pocket, and fell to his knees, digging. He scrambled among the bits and pieces of broken and smashed metal, the old beer cans, the debris, trying to find the black metal box they had seen Fabia put the money into. For safekeeping, she had said. And when we get enough, we cut out and find a new turf, or have ourselves a ball somewhere, or maybe even go down to Mexico for a few weeks. It had been a good idea, then. But not now.

  Deek was spreading the hole, throwing rubble and dirt back
like a dog on the dig for a bone. He scrabbled frantically, and almost did not hear the clatter of the gears shifting.

  But he did hear, and the machine was rusty from disuse, and he was able to leap up and away as the great magnet dropped with a hiss and a roar, ratcheting down its chain.

  It struck the earth directly where he had been, and sank to half its own depth in the ground. He looked up into the cab of the machine, and Fabia DeLuca looked back down on him with a hunted, frenzied expression distorting her features.

  “I’ll kill you for that!” he screamed, coming after her.

  She leaped out the other side of the machine, and sprinted agilely across the junkyard. Deek whipped the knife free from his pocket, snicked it open and took off after her. She was like a rabbit, seeming to find paths through which she could wiggle, without looking for them.

  Deek had difficulty negotiating the twisted stacks of scrap metal, lumber, lathe and old auto bodies. In a few moments she had disappeared through a break in the fence surrounding the junkyard, and Deek Cullen stood alone.

  He cursed her violently. He had to find her. He had to get the money. He had to get out of town before the nabs were onto him.

  Where would she go?

  There could only be one place. Back to that damned factory. It had to be there, because she had no home, and it was probably where she had really hidden the boodle. He picked his way out of the junkyard and stuck back for the factory. When he got there, it looked deserted.

  Yet he could not take a chance. He crept around to one of the first floor windows and pulled himself up to the widely-protruding ledge. It wasn’t difficult to force the old and rotted lock open, and he slipped inside, into the empty building proper. There had to be an entrance leading to the basement rooms. He could surprise her, come down on her from above, and beat the hell out of her till she told where the money was.

  Then he could shank her, and cut before anyone ever knew she was dead. It’d be years before anyone checked that basement. He had it made.