Red Orc's Rage

by Philip José Farmer

  They began rocking it again. Just as they finally heaved and the wooden shack toppled over, they heard a yell. They started to whirl to see who was making the noise. Then a shotgun boomed, and they heard pellets cutting through the leaves of a nearby tree. Steve, yelling, ran away. Pellegrino grabbed Jim when he fell backward. They screamed as, locked together, they hurtled into the hole and bounced off the slimy dirt wall and into the godawful excrement. They hit feet first and were quickly up to their necks in the loathsome stuff.

  The shotgun boomed again. Faintly, Jim could hear the shrieks of the girls. Steve Larsen was no longer yelling. Jim and Bob screamed for help. For a second afterward, there was silence. Then he heard a growling. The next he knew, the dog was in the hole. It came down like a vengeance from the gods, landed right in front of Jim and Bob, splashed their heads and open mouths, came up like a cork, and began struggling.

  Jim's toes touched the bottom or what he hoped was the bottom. Bob, who was taller, had his whole head sticking out from the muck. Jim was up to his chin. But the crazed dog knocked him back, and he went under again.

  Later, Jim knew that the rottweiler had recovered somewhat from the drugs and run, or maybe walked, since it was still weak and dazed, to the hole. Not very alert yet, it had fallen, or maybe jumped, into the hole.

  Now, he and Bob had to keep from being bitten by the dog -- those powerful jaws had a 600-pound pressure -- or being scratched by its flailing forefeet or being thrust under by its weight. They could see only very dimly because the moonlight did not reach to the bottom and their eyes were covered by the slime. Then Bob got sick and was vomiting, and that caused Jim to throw up also. The puke didn't make things any worse -- nothing could -- but it certainly did not help their situation. Moreover, it was very difficult to avoid the dog while heaving their guts out.

  Finally, though weak from his efforts, Jim reached out and grabbed the dog by its ears. Frenzied, he shoved its head under the surface.

  At that moment, a flashlight shone from above, and a cracked old voice yelled at him.

  "Leave the dog alone, or I'll shoot you! Don't touch him, you. . .!"

  Jim did not understand the following words. Dumski had switched to Polish.

  "Don't shoot, for God's sake!" Jim cried. He released the dog. It emerged, sputtering and growling, but it no longer tried to attack him. It had occurred to the dog that it had better save its strength to keep from drowning. Or to keep from choking to death. It dog-paddled furiously just to stay above the surface.

  "Yeah, you damn fool!" Bob yelled. "You'll kill the dog, too!"

  Pellegrino was not worried about the rottweiler, but he had wits enough to know that Dumski was in a terrible rage, out of his mind, if he did not think about what a shotgun blast in that narrow shaft would do to its occupants.

  "Oh!" Dumski said. "Don't go away! I'll be gone for a minute."

  "Sure. We'll just leave," Bob said. He groaned. "Oh, God, what a mess!"

  It seemed like a long time before Dumski returned, though it must have been only two minutes. Puffing and panting, the old man kneeled at the edge of the hole. Then something struck Jim, not hard, across his face. He did not know what it was until Dumski shone the flashlight down on the rope he had dropped.

  From far away but still loud enough to be heard over the screams of the girls came the wail of a siren. The cops were coming.

  "Tie the rope around the dog!" Dumski said.

  "How about us?" Bob shrieked.

  "The dog comes up first!"

  "Are you out of your mind?" Jim screamed. "How are we going to do that? It'll bite our hands off!"

  "Get us out of here!" Pellegrino shouted. "I can't breathe! This stuff's choking me to death! I tell you, I'll die if I don't get out of here soon!"

  "Serves you assholes right," Dumski said. "Tie the rope around the dog, then maybe I'll think about getting you out."

  "We're gonna die!" Bob bellowed, then choked as a wave of excrement caused by the animal's struggles slapped him in the mouth.

  "Get the rope around the dog!" Dumski shrieked. "Quick about it, or I'll leave you to die!"

  That just could not be done without getting bitten. But the siren, which had been getting nearer, died. A door slammed. A man yelled something. Dumski muttered something and then was gone. Jim thought about shoving the dog under again. If it was dead, it would be easy to tie the rope around it. But Dumski would shoot them if the dog died.

  Another stretch of seeming-forever passed. Then Jim heard voices approaching. Dumski had unlocked the gate and let the cops through it. Jim had never been glad to see the police before this; now, he was very happy. Never mind what was going to happen to him after he got out of the hole.

  A flashlight held by a cop illuminated the hole. The cop laughed loudly for a while, then said, "For God's sake, Pete, look at this! You ever see such a sight!"

  Pete looked down and laughed. "Man, you boys're in deep shit, and that's a fact!"

  They went away with Dumski. After another long time, they came back with a ladder. They let it down and told Jim and Bob to climb up it. But the dog was between them and the ladder, and it would not allow them to get on it. Meanwhile, Dumski complained that the dog had to be gotten out, and, if the boys came out first, who'd tie the rope around it?

  "We're not getting down there," a cop said. "You can go down and tie him up. But the kids gotta be got out first."

  Dumski argued without success. The ladder was moved to the other side of the hole. Jim went up first. He was so weak and his hands were so slippery on the rungs that he had a hard time getting up. He had to drag himself out of the hole and onto the ground. The cops would not help him. Bob came up then and lay down, breathing hard, by his side. Old man Dumski, grumbling, went down the ladder after it had been moved back to the wall near the dog. Then the cops hauled up the rottweiler. When it tried to bite one of them before it was halfway out of the hole, it was dropped back into the mess. Dumski screamed at them that the splash had gotten him even filthier. Finally, the dog was hauled up again, the cops hitching about how disgustingly slimy the rope was. Dumski came up at the same time and pulled the dog off to the barn, where he hosed it off. The dog howled as the cold water struck it.

  "You two better go over there and get hosed off, too," the cop called Pete said. "No way are you going to get into the squad car stinking like you do now."

  Jim by now really did not care about anybody except himself. Sam was still in a trance, enthralled by the barn, the glittering Emerald City of Oz in his mind. The squad car had driven through the gate to a place near the barn. Its headlights shone on the huddled-together and forlorn-looking girls. Evidently Steve had escaped, and Gizzy had stayed in the woods.

  Pete went to the squad car and called for backup. His partner. Bill, started Bob and Jim toward the barn so that they could be hosed off. Before they got there, the dog attacked its owner. The events of the night, plus its drug-dazed condition and its resentment of the cold water, had confused it. Or perhaps it knew that it was attacking Dumski. It may never have liked the old man.

  The dog knocked Dumski over and fastened its teeth into his left arm. Dumski screamed as the jaws clamped down and its teeth struck bone and blood soaked through the sleeve of his jacket. The cops could not get the dog to let loose. They shot it dead. That made Dumski furious. He attacked the cops, who had to handcuff him before arresting him. Then Pete called for an ambulance.

  Afterward, Bill hosed off Jim and Bob. They yelled with the shock and danced around, begging for mercy. None was given. Then Pete went inside the barn and got some towels for the boys so they could try to dry themselves off.

  "We'll get pneumonia!" Pellegrino cried.

  "You're lucky if that's all you get," Pete said.

  Chapter 12

  "A HELL OF a mess you got us into," Eric Grimson said.

  His mother murmured, "Jim, how could you?"

  He restrained his desire to say, "It was easy."

 
; He was wrapped in a blanket and on the back seat of their 1968 Chevy. He had not stopped shivering since the cop had doused him with cold water. His father, out of pure meanness, had refused to turn the car heater on. Though Jim had sloshed water around in his mouth in the courthouse and had spit it out a dozen times, his mouth tasted of human excrement. Well, why not? He'd eaten shit all his life.

  "It's a lucky thing for you that Sam's uncle is the night judge," Eric growled. "Otherwise, you'd be in jail."

  "Juvenile hall," Jim said.

  "What the hell's the difference?" Eric said loudly, gripping the steering wheel as if he wanted to tear it off the column. "It's just a station on the way to prison, anyway! I've known since you was twelve years old you was hell-bound for prison!"

  "Please, Eric," Eva Grimson said softly. "Don't say that."

  The car traveled through deserted streets and by dark houses. Halloween had long been over, and everybody had gone to bed even though, in this area, very few had work to go to in the morning. The time from when the cops had appeared at Dumski's to his release in his parents' custody had been long. After being frisked, he and his friends had had to walk a line to test their sobriety. Afterward, they were tested with a breath analyzer. All flunked. Two more tests which I couldn't pass, Jim had thought. Their rights were read, and they were handcuffed, jammed into two squad cars, and driven downtown. They had been in a holding cell for an hour before being marched to a room where blood and urine samples were taken. Jim's brain was fogbound but not so much that he did not realize that traces of the drugs would still be in his bloodstream.

  An hour later, they were again taken to a holding room, and a half hour after that, they were in night court. The culprits' parents were also there, except for Sandy Melton's father, who was out of town. Jim's mother was weeping; tears dripped on her rosary beads as she told them. Eric looked hung over and very furious.

  Sam's uncle was an old shriveled-up bald man with a long face and a big beaked nose with many broken veins. Those features and his long skinny neck, his whiskey-shot red eyes, his bald head, the black gown, and his bunched-over shoulders made him look like a vulture. However, Jim thought, the judge must have felt more like a canary who sees a cat. His nephew Sam was facing some serious charges: trespassing, destruction of private property, drunk and disorderly, under the influence of drugs, and breaking the curfew law. He was possibly involved in injury causing loss of a limb and, if Dumski died, aiding and abetting manslaughter. He could be charged with contributing to the dog's death. Dumski was in the hospital, and he might lose his arm.

  These were not issues to take lightly. Judge Wyzak couldn't let his nephew and the other long-haired freaks off easy. But if he dealt with them as they really deserved, his sister-in-law, Mrs. Wyzak, would wring his neck. Not figuratively but literally.

  The alleged culprits were minors, and that gave the judge a way out for the time being. He lectured them severely and then released them into the custody of their parents.

  At least, Jim thought, possession of drugs and alcohol was not one of the charges. The girls had gotten rid of the bottles and capsules as soon as they heard the siren in the far distance. Sandy Melton had frisked Sam Wyzak, removed his pills, and tossed them into the woods. Jim had never had any drugs in his pockets, and Bob Pellegrino had dropped his while he was still in the outhouse hole.

  After the judge dismissed them, Sam's mother had grabbed him by his ear and pulled him along behind her while he whined and windmilled one arm. Jim thought that she must think she was Aunt Polly and Sam was Tom Sawyer, for God's sake!

  The car pulled up into the oil-stained gravel driveway by the house. "Home, sweet home," Eric Grimson said. "Ain't it something? An out-of-work crane operator, a Holy Roller Catholic cleaning houses for rich people, and a hippie loser who's stupid and crazy. I could stand the stupid if he wasn't crazy, and I could stand the crazy if he wasn't stupid. Now he's gonna be a jailbird. His bimbo sister's got two bastard kids whose father she can't name, and she's living in sin with a man old enough to be her father, a nut who makes a living reading palms and tea leaves and doing astrology charts! We're living in a shack that's gonna drop all the way to China one of these days, not that I give a damn! Where did I go wrong, God?"

  "God doesn't care for us pissants," Jim said as he got out of the car. He slammed the door hard.

  His mother said, "Jim! Don't blaspheme. Things are bad enough."

  "He's got a big foul stupid mouth, your son has!" Eric yelled. "Why in hell couldn't he have been one of your miscarriages?"

  "Please, Eric," Eva said softly, "you'll wake up the neighbors."

  Eric howled like a wolf. Then he said, "Wake 'em up? Who cares? They're gonna read about your son in the papers anyway, know all about us, as if they didn't already know! Who cares?"

  Jim opened the side door. His father began chewing out Eva because she was supposed to have made sure that all the windows and doors were shut and locked. Jim turned in the doorway and said, "What's the difference? What do we have that's worth stealing?"

  He went into the house, but his father stormed in after him and grabbed him by the shoulder. Jim lunged ahead and ran up the stairway to the hallway, leaving the blanket in his father's hand.

  Eric shouted after him, "I might have something worth stealing if it wasn't for you and your mother!"

  Jim ran into the bathroom, closed the door, and locked it. He brushed his teeth with the salt and baking powder from the rusty cabinet above the bowl. Then he cleaned his fingernails and shucked off his clothes, which were still wet. While his father stood in the hall by the door and yelled, now and then thumping his fist on the door, Jim showered. It took a long time for him to feel clean.

  He did not turn off the water until it suddenly became cold. That would anger his father even more. He was always stressing the need to conserve on water and gas. At the same time, of course, he was always yelling at Jim to take a bath.

  Despite the cooling-off effects of the shower, Jim still felt hot inside himself. If his anger could be seen, he'd be glowing in the dark. Everything had gone wrong today, like it did most days. Gone wrong? That was an understatement. It had been one humiliation after another. Shame after shame, failure after failure.

  He stood in the fog-filled and warm room for a minute or so. As soon as he left it, he'd have his father on his neck. And, sure as cause and effect, he'd hit his father whether or not his father struck him first. The red cloud building up in him made that certain.

  Reluctantly, he unlocked and opened the door. Eric Grimson was not there. Voices came from the kitchen along with the odor of coffee. His father's tones were subdued, and his mother's were barely audible. Maybe the old man had quieted down, though that did not seem likely. The furnace came on, its fans drowning out the kitchen noises. The heat struck Jim's legs. He was grateful for that since he had started shivering again as soon as he had left the muggy bathroom.

  Naked, his damp clothes draped over his arm, he walked quickly to his room. He closed the door behind him, dropped the clothes on the floor, and went to the closet. Just as he reached into it to take his pajamas from a hook, he was startled by a loud bang. Whirling, he saw his father charging through the doorway. Eric's face was red, and his hands were clenched. Whatever had gone on in the kitchen, it had not pacified him.

  "Get your clothes on!" he howled. "Don't you have no decency!"

  The unfairness of the insult -- after all, his father had burst in without asking permission -- squeezed the anger in Jim down to a tiny hot ball. A little more heat, a little more pressure, and it would go up, out, and away. But it would take Eric Grimson with it.

  "From now on, things're gonna be different!" his father yelled. "You'll either shape up or ship out, that's for sure! First thing. . .!"

  He looked wildly around, then reached into his back pocket and brought out a jackknife. He opened the blade and began slashing at the posters of the rock groups and stars. Before Jim could yell in protest, he s
aw the Hot Water Eskimos being cut into strips. Then Eric attacked the poster of Keith Moon.

  "All this shit's gotta go!" Eric screamed.

  The red-hot ball exploded in white flame.

  Shrieking, Jim jumped at his father, clamped a hand on his left shoulder, spun him around, and struck him in the nose. Eric Grimson staggered back against the poster, blood running from his nostrils. Jim hit him in the shoulder with his fist though he had meant to strike his chin. Eric dropped the knife and closed with his son. Face to face, wrapped in each other's arms, grunting, wheezing, they swayed back and forth.

  "I'll kill you!" Eric screeched.

  Jim screamed and tore himself loose. He leaped back. He was panting, his heart beating so hard that it seemed to him that it would tear itself apart. Then, piercing the drumming of blood in his ears, came the clicking of a lock. So loud was the sound, the lock had to be huge. The key turning in it also had to be gigantic. A groaning followed the clicking. It sounded like a very heavy door with rusty hinges being opened.

  The floor dropped, the walls tilted, and books tumbled out from the shelves. Jim and his father fell on the floor. They got up quickly, looking at each other with wide eyes. Plaster dust fell on them along with chunks. Jim saw them bounce off his father. The white dust covered Eric's head and shoulders and powdered the two streams of blood trickling down from his nose.

  Eva Grimson screamed in the kitchen.

  "Oh, my god!" Eric howled. "This is it!"

  The house lurched again.

  "Get out! Get out!" Eric shouted. He whirled and ran out of the room. He had to lean to one side to compensate for the slope of the floor. Even so, his shoulder struck the side of the doorway.

  Jim began to laugh, and he kept on laughing. The house was going to fall deep into the earth. Maybe his parents would get out in time, maybe not. Whatever happened, it would come from fate, from the Noms. Justice and fairness had nothing to do with it. And he would stay here and go down with the ship. Let the earth gulp him down. It was better so, and it was also laughable.