Memos from Purgatory by Harlan Ellison

Author:Harlan Ellison
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 1975-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

When I did, the first thing that shot through my head was Why am I still alive?

I was a ball of pain, lying under a bush where someone had kicked me and not taken the time to finish me off. There must have been too many things shaking to worry about one downed Baron. I lay there, with the howling and swearing and screeching floating over my head, and the blood running down the side of my face, and my right arm useless. But I was still alive.

I could see, though I was crying from the pain and there was stickiness in them, mostly blood, and my sockets were burning, but I watched the rumble from the safety of that bush. Gone to ground, all the fight out of me, so call me chicken if you will, but I wouldn’t, couldn’t move.

They were like wild animals. All over the place. They had been turned loose, with no one to check them, and it was Jeezus, slaughter!

I tried to get to my knees. I don’t know why, I suppose I wanted to run away. I managed to hunker up onto one knee, and then POW! the Very pistol went off almost in front of me. The Barons were coming back the other way. They’d been routed, or were mopping up, or the damned fight was just getting sloppy, I don’t know.

But that red glow lived in the sky for a minute and I saw terrified faces turned toward it. It died after a time and the trampling went on unabated. It seemed as though this thing had been going on for hours, but I knew it couldn’t be. The police would have been there before that much time had elapsed. My thoughts were crazy, devoid of rationality. That socking-around I’d gotten had jazzed my brains completely.

All I could do was stare, like a nut, as they fought back and forth around me. I saw a bunch of girls, tight jeans somehow concealing vicious knives and straight-edge razors, fighting like wildcats. One girl smashed another in the breasts with a lead pipe, and kept beating her with it even after the other had fallen moaning among the leaves.

No one abroad in the Park that night would have been safe.

A body tumbled through the bushes and went sprawling, its arms and legs at funny angles, and tried to get up. It was a Flyer. He couldn’t make it. He just lay there, down.

Fence was shouting something to Samson, yelling, “Hey, Sams’, hey, man, hey Sams’n, help willya!”

I couldn’t see them, but then the flare gun went off again, except this time it didn’t explode into the sky. I saw a pulsing crimson light in among the bushes and a second later a boy came shrieking through the brush, his arms going in all directions, and his shirt-front blazing. Fence had shot him squarely in the chest with the thermite flare. Oh, God, it was unbelievable. The kid went crashing past me, still burning,

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