Web of the City by Harlan Ellison Read Free Book Online

was a sick thing, all caught up with brass knucks and swiped candy and fights in the gutters.
    As he crouched there, without his even knowing it, he was reliving all the times he had stood with a knife or a broken bottle or a zip in his hand, and faced another boy. At times like that, just as this time, he felt like speaking some other language than English. Was it his native Spanish, a tongue he had never really spoken—never really appreciated—a third-generation Puerto Rican seemed so irretrievably lost to that slim heritage, or was it some other language? Some more guttural, more distant, more deeply buried language? Perhaps it was the growl and scream of the beast. Did the jungle call to him at those times? After all, wasn’t that what he was reduced to, when he fought?
    With nothing left to him but the fang and the claw?
    He pulled the drawer open slowly, and stared at it.
    He hadn’t used the machine-steel, razor-honed, six-inch blade in over three months. Closed, the knife was dangerous-looking, but when he pressed that button on its side, out sprang six deadly inches of gutting metal. It had reach, that knife. It was sharp enough to slice through three layers of clothing and bite deep into flesh.
    It was a kill, that knife.
    He had laid it away when Carl Pancoast had gotten him free from the fuzz. He had promised he would never use it again, that he would stop running with the pack, that he would start to build a future, instead of building a sin.
    He chuckled in his mind. His ma had been right. He did talk too gutter-way. “Building a sin.” Getting ready to commit an immoral act. That was the way he talked. Flip, hard, cryptic, so no one would really know what went on inside his head.
    He took the knife out and slid the drawer shut with his knee. He stood up, holding the plastic length of it closed in his hand. It felt wrong there, not like it had felt so often in the past.
    Then, it had been right. But now he felt more at home with a compass and T-square. Was he actually outgrowing this thing, through the help of the teacher, or was it all an illusion?
    He still knew what he had to do.
    He bent over and stuck the knife into the top of his desert boot. The gang all wore these shoes, with high, soft tops, in case they had to pack a blade. But he knew Candle carried his knife in his sleeve. So when Candle rose high to let the knife slide out, Rusty would scoop low, and come up with the knife open—gutting.
    A full-body swing, straight up from the groin. Slicing heavy and cutting from crotch to navel in one movement...
    He stopped himself with a mental wrenching.
    Wrong, wrong, wrong! All wrong. He had to stop this. He couldn’t let himself get involved again. It was more than just disappointing Pancoast. It was more than keeping Weezee out of trouble. He suddenly realized he owed a debt to himself. If he threw himself away, he was a waste to everything. He could not get it any clearer in his mind—he knew it was all wrong to be nothing, to get nowhere—but he sensed deeply that he must try to get this stand canceled. He would even back down. Let Candle think he was a punk. It didn’t matter, just as long as he didn’t have to fight, didn’t have to kill.
    For he knew in his heart that if he fought today, only one boy would come out of the rumble alive. He was determined to be that one, if they fought—but he wasn’t going to fight.
    He had to see Candle. Had to stop the argument now, cold, dead, final. Now!
    But the knife felt reassuring in his shoe-top.
    Dolores was at the table when he came in. Ma was in front of the stove, stirring a battered pot full of cocoa. “Where were ya so late?” Rusty asked his sister.
    She was a pert, slim girl, with shiny black hair pulled into a ponytail like her friends. Her eyes were very wide and very black and her lashes quite long. Yet there was an insolence about her, an invisible smirk that seemed about to show itself on her full lips.
    Her body was held proudly,