Read Ebook: Race Riot by Williams Ralph Orban Paul Illustrator

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 146 lines and 10355 words, and 3 pages

"Oh, yes, sir! Yes, indeed, sir! I often walk five miles to play a while with one. None of the mothers around Mottville Corners'll let their girls be with me. You see, this house has a bad name."

A deep crimson dyed the man's ashen skin. He made as if to speak, but Jinnie went on.

"Over in the Willow Creek settlement the kids are awful bad,vehicles in Port Knakvik, or indeed anywhere on Centaurus II; but Tallant, who was an electrician, had a company panel which he drove to and from the job. Though it was chemically powered--the new inductor station was the first nuclear installation on the planet--it had the same cybernetic controls as any Earthside vehicle. They worked fine on paved roads. On Knakvik streets, however--

"I don't know," McCullough said dubiously, "You think you can make it on auto? Suppose you get stalled?"

Port Knakvik lay on a silty alluvial plain. In the downtown area, the streets were stabilized, but back along the river where the shanties of the construction workers sprawled, they were simply ruts punctuated at frequent intervals by chuckholes where churning wheels had ripped off the overburden, exposing the bottomless muck beneath.

"I'd go with you," McCullough said, "except I kind of hate to leave Mary and the kids right now--I tell you, maybe I could find somebody else. You lay down for a minute, take it easy, I'll look around."

Tallant seemed to have guessed right about the riot, there were people running by outside toward a commotion at the lower end of the street where the native shanties clustered. McCullough saw a man he knew from the job. "Hey, George," he called, "you got time to do a little favor?" He explained about Tallant.

The man had not yet been in any fighting, he was simply curious about what was going on, and this was part of it. "Sure, John," he said. "Be glad to."

They helped Tallant into the truck. George backed it out into the street on manual. "What's the dispensary coordinates?" he asked.

"Three-two-three, oh-one-five, local," Tallant told him.

George pushed the keys and they started off toward town.

McCullough turned to see what he could make out of the excitement at the other end of the street. There were two columns of smoke billowing up now, and scattered shots. Two men came back up the street helping another with his trouser leg split away and a bloody bandage about his thigh.

"What's it all about, John?" A man called across the street to him.

"Don't know. Fighting with the natives, I guess. Henry Watts and some other fellows chased a couple of them down there. Looks like they mean to clean the whole bunch out."

"Dammit, that's not right," the man across the street said. "The natives got a right to live too, they had a village here before we came. Somebody ought to do something about it."

"Pete Tallant just went into town to tell the marshal."

"Yeah, well, I wouldn't holler copper on my neighbors myself, but I won't have anything to do with killing those poor natives either. They can get along without me." The man went back in his house and closed the door.

McCullough walked a few steps out into the street to get a better view. The riot was none of his business, and he had no intention of getting mixed up in it, but the idea of the fighting excited him and made him nervous. He could not see much, except that there was a lot of activity.

He shook his head helplessly. My God, he thought, all this from two men with nothing to do on a Sunday afternoon but get half-drunk and start arguing....

Someone screamed--Mary's scream, suddenly choked off!

McCullough ran back across the yard and up the steps, raging at himself for having left Mary and the children alone in the house. There was no one in the front room, but through the kitchen door he could see a native with his back turned, peering out the kitchen window.

There were two natives in the kitchen; one with a roughed-up look who might have been the one Watts had kicked, watching Mary as she huddled in a corner by the stove with her arms about the two children; the other still looking out the window. Both spun around to face him as McCullough burst into the room.

For a moment they eyed each other in silence, the two Centaurans and the Earthman.

"You hurt, Mary?" McCullough asked.

She was frightened almost speechless, but she managed a squeak and a negative shake of her head.

McCullough took his eyes from the natives for a moment and studied her searchingly. "You sure?" he asked. She nodded. Some of the color was coming back in her face again now, and she looked all right.

He looked back at the two natives. He should have them arrested, he supposed, but to file a complaint meant going to court and losing a day's work. It did not even occur to him to hold them for the mob.

He gestured with the gun muzzle. "OK," he said roughly. "Get out of here, now. Get!"

The natives looked at each other. Outside, there was a rattle of shots in the alley, and several high-pitched screams. The native by the window wet his lips and shook his head, and the other turned back toward McCullough. He had a knife in his hand, which he swung menacingly.

"No," he said. "No go outside. Kill."

It was not clear if he meant the verb passively or actively, but with the knife not six feet from Mary and the children, it did not seem a proper time to discuss fine points of grammar. McCullough shot him in the belly. At that range, the charge almost tore the slight native in half.

The other Centauran turned and came lunging toward him, and McCullough fired again. The native stumbled and fell in a heap in the middle of the floor, half across the body of the first.

McCullough stepped over them to the back door and glanced out, dropping fresh charges in the gun as he did so. There were no natives in sight but several white men were in the alley, looking around, trying to decide where the shots had come from. Henry Watts was with them. He saw McCullough at the door and called out to him: "You hear those shots? Two of 'em ran back up this alley. You see them?"

"They came in my house," McCullough said. "I shot both of them."

"Good, by God," Watts yelled. "That's two we don't have to worry about."

"There's one more left," another man called from up the alley. "He ducked around through Gordon's lot."

The men ran off up the alley on the new scent, and McCullough turned back into the kitchen. Mary had collapsed into a chair and was sobbing with her head in her arms. The two children clung to her, staring wide-eyed at the bodies of the natives.

McCullough walked over and patted her on the back. "It's OK now, Mary," he said. "It's OK, nothing to worry about now." His wife went on crying, and he stood there awkwardly, not quite knowing what to do.

He noticed that the dark purplish blood of the natives, almost black, was spreading in little rivulets and pools over the kitchen floor. The floor was of sanded white wood, and stained easily. There were some folded tarps in the lean-to where McCullough kept his tools. He got one and rolled the bodies over onto it. As he did so, he saw that one of them, the second one he had shot, was still alive. The shot had gone low and mangled the native's upper leg. He stared up at McCullough with opaque expressionless eyes, slowly bleeding to death.

It was an embarrassing situation. McCullough was not any more callous than the next man, but he found himself wishing his aim had been better. He could hardly allow the Centauran to lie there and bleed to death while he watched, but neither did he feel any particular responsibility in the matter. The native had got what he was asking for, and that was that.

Finally he took the native's leather belt and tightened it around the leg for a tourniquet, got another tarp and spread it on the cot, and laid the native on it. The corpse he rolled in the first tarp and pushed under the cot. Throughout the injured Centauran said nothing, either in thanks or protest, although the leg must have been painful.

He had just finished when he heard voices in the front yard.

Henry Watts was there with half a dozen other men carrying guns and clubs, all looking the worse for wear. Two were dragging a Centauran corpse by the pants legs.

Watts mopped at his sweaty, blood-stained face with his shirt-tail. "You still got those two grayskins in there?" he asked.

McCullough nodded.

"Fine, we'll take 'em off your hands now." Watts half-turned to the men behind him. "Come on, give me a hand to drag 'em out." He started up the steps.

"Wait a minute," McCullough said. He did not move out of the door, he was not quite sure why, a moment ago he had been wondering what to do with the natives, and here was Watts offering to take them. It may have been the way they were dragging the Centauran, face down in the mud, that bothered him. "What you going to do with them?" he asked.

"We got a use for 'em," Watts said with relish. "We're going to drag all the bodies up in front of Dubois' place and string 'em up to poles there, for a warning. We'll learn those grayskins what to expect, they come messing around here any more. Come on, toss 'em out, we'll take these two along with the rest."

"Well, I don't know," McCullough said. "One of these is still alive, I didn't kill him, just crippled him."

Watts showed his teeth. "That won't be a problem," he said.

McCullough shook his head slowly. He had counted Henry Watts as his friend, but he was not so sure now that he liked him. "No," he said. "I think we better just leave them till the cops come."

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet