Against my will I opened my eyes, saw lying in the hubcap beneath me a hand, and lying next to it in a little pond of blood was the penknife.
The men had let go of my arms and I was able to rock up on my knees and see Mable. She was still on her knees, but now she was holding her arm in front of her, minus her hand, and watching blood leap from the wound like freshly tapped oil.
Mable looked at me and said, “Oh my.”
A number of the congregation dropped down to try and suck at the stump of her arm, and the girl with the greasy hair began lapping at the blood that had sprayed my face. Her tongue was rough and dry, like a cat’s.
“Who’s next?” a voice called, and I turned to see Bob standing there with the shotgun, a wreath of gunsmoke about his head. With his hair and beard grown long, his sweaty hat drooping, he looked like an old-time desperado. At his feet two men lay holding their heads. He had apparently cleared himself a path into the huddle with the stock of his gun.
“Mess with me,” he said, “and I’ll shoot you just to check the pump action on this baby.”
Mable said, “Sam, Sam, my hand’s done come off. Do you think we can get me an artificial one?”
“They cost too much,” Sam said, and Mable fainted forward on her face. The stump-suckers stayed with her, working on her arm, pushing and shoving each other out of the way, tongues darting and colliding as they pursued the taste of the hot blood.
“Quit that sucking on her,” Bob said. “Get away from there.” He stepped in and gave one of the lappers a quick kick to the seat of the pants. “Spread the hell out.”
They did.
“And you,” he said, giving the greasy-haired girl a kick in the ribs, “you quit licking his face.”
She scrambled away. I sort of hated that. I was beginning to like her.
A guy tried to pull a pistol on Bob, and Bob saw him out of the corner of his eye and gave him the stock of the shotgun to eat. The man went down and the gun slid across the asphalt. Bob looked at the greasy-haired girl and said, “Do me a favor, sugar, hand me that gun. Easy-like.”
She gave it to him without protest and he put it in his belt.
“All right, all other weapons hit the deck,” Bob said, “or I’m gonna start opening up heads.”
Another pistol dropped to the ground. Can openers, knives, clubs, coins in socks. A condom full of marbles.
Bob nodded at the pistol. “I’d like that one too, sugar. Okay?”
The greasy-haired girl gave it to him. He put it in his belt next to the other one. Now he did look like a desperado.
The crowd had spread out, and I got up. I felt a little on the limp side.
“Take off your belt, Jack,” Bob said, “and give it to that preacher fella to put on the woman. He doesn’t make her a tourniquet pretty quick, she’s gonna die.”
“She’s gonna die anyway,” a man in the crowd said. “Why don’t you just let us go on and eat her, and you two can join in. Hell, you can go first.”
“That’s a good idea,” the greasy-haired girl said.
“No thanks,” Bob said.
I took off my belt and gave it to Sam. He got down on his hands and knees and applied it to Mable’s arm, about six inches above the wound. It cut off most of the bleeding.
“I think you’re supposed to let that off now and then,” Bob said. “You don’t, she’ll lose her whole arm . . . if it don’t kill her.”
“I got some idea how to do it,” Sam said. When he leaned over to make an extra adjustment on the belt, a can of sardines tipped out of his pocket. All eyes went to that can.
“They’ve got a lot of those,” I said to Bob. “That’s how they’ve been holding things together. And nobody’s tried to take it away from them because they’ve got the bus rigged with a bomb.”
“You don’t say?” Bob said. “And here I was thinking this was all just the power of the Lord, and it’s cans of sardines.”
“You mess with that bus,” Sam said, “it’ll blow you out of this drive-in,”
“That’s an idea,” Bob said. “Okay, Mr. Preacher, get your wife there. Jack, give him a hand. Ya’ll come with me. Rest of you Christians just sort of lick up here while we’re gone.”
Sam and I got our arms around Mable and got her up. She came to briefly, but she couldn’t walk. We dragged her away, the toes of her house shoes scraping the asphalt. I looked back over my shoulder as we went away from there, and the greasy-haired girl grabbed the sardines and tried to make a run for it. She was swamped. At the bottom of the mound of thrashing arms and legs you could hear her yelling, “Mine, mine.”
The guy who had dropped the hubcap snatched Mable’s hand from it, sprinted off tearing at it with his teeth. He rounded an elderly Chevy, practically leaped from one row to the other, weaved into some other cars and disappeared into shadows, perhaps to lie under some automobile and chew on his prize like a contented terrier.
A middle-aged woman in jean shorts and a red blouse dove down on the hubcap and began to lap at the blood there. A man dropped to his knees to join her. They growled at each other like Dobermans.
“Praise the Lord,” Bob said.
“Oh, shut up,” I said.
When we came to the bus, Bob made Sam put Mable down and give him the key. Sam said he would give him the key if he was going to be so foolish, but he would rather be shot point-blank with the shotgun before he would open it himself. The results would be too terrible, and the death of all of us would be on his hands.
Bob put the key in the lock and opened the back door.
He looked at us and smiled. “Boom,” he said.
“Well,” Sam said, “it worked up until now.”
Bob climbed inside and we went after. The bus had shelves and the shelves had wire over them, and behind the wire were oodles of canned goods, mostly sardines and Vienna sausages. Two of my all-time non-favorites under normal conditions. Right now they looked rather attractive. My stomach growled like an attack dog.
“Comfy in here,” Bob said.
Sam and I helped Mable over to a bed that folded away from the bus wall, and Sam got a bucket and put that by the bed and took the pressure off the tourniquet. Blood shot out of the wound and into the bucket. “We were afeared of a nigger takeover,” Sam explained as he tightened the tourniquet again. “Figured it came down to us or the niggers, we’d have this food put back, and that would hold us for a time.”
I looked around more now that my eyes were adjusted. There was all manner of stuff in there. Plumbing tools, carpentry tools, painting equipment, even a welding torch and the tanks to go with it arranged on a dolly.
“Guns?” Bob asked.
“We hadn’t gotten around to that,” Sam said. “That was next.”
“Wouldn’t lie to me, would you?”
“I’m telling the truth . . . Damn you, why’d you have to shoot Mable’s hand off?”
“Seemed sort of necessary,” Bob said. “She was about to cut my buddy’s throat. “Though I figure the dumb sucker deserved it. Christians, my ass.”
“Watch your language,” Sam said. “If it had been her foot, that wouldn’t have been so bad. But her hand. She likes to cook and give me back rubs, and she needs two good hands to do them things right.”
“She wasn’t holding the knife with her foot,” Bob said. “Just be glad I’m shooting slugs, or you’d have all got peppered.”
I looked at Mable. Her face was as pale as a baby’s ass, and her eyes were foggy. I figured she wasn’t going to make it.
About then she opened her eyes and said, “You know, the thing that would do me some good right now is a chicken fried steak. Maybe some mashed taters and cream gravy and rolls with it. Big ole glass of ice tea.”
“Rest now,” Sam said.
“It’s the batter does it on them steaks,” Mable said. “Don’t got that right, it ain’t worth eatin’. You dip the steak in the milk-and-egg batter, then into the flour, then back into the milk and egg, then back into t
he flour. Makes it extra crispy.”
“Ssshhhh, now, sugar bee, you rest.”
“Don’t do it that way, you don’t get that good flaky crust, and I do like a good flaky crust.”
She passed out again.
Bob came over and gave me one of the pistols from his belt. “Here, you might want to shoot someone later.”
I took it and walked to the open door at the back of the bus and looked out. The Christians were fist-fighting, probably over drops of blood on the asphalt, or what was left of the sardines Sam had dropped. I could see the greasy-haired girl lying on her side with her eyes wide open. There was a young man with a knife cutting strips of meat off her legs. I took a deep breath and closed the door.
2
Bob and I ate sardines while Sam lay asleep on the floor near Mable, who now and then came awake and gave us in great detail one of her favorite recipes. We had been through cherry pie, buttermilk biscuits, chili and hominy cakes.
“I feel kind of bad eating another person’s food,” I said.
“They were going to eat you,” Bob said. “Look at it that way.”
“A point,” I said, and ate a little faster.
“You’re going to need your strength when the Christians come for us. They’re not going to be worried about the bomb anymore. They’ll have it figured now, since we didn’t get blown up.”
“How’d you know the bus wasn’t rigged with a bomb?”
“Just figured . . . didn’t know for sure . . . Hell, Jack, I don’t care anymore. If this is life, it ain’t worth living. I think what you and I ought to do is something real foolish. Otherwise, we’ll end up licking blood out of hubcaps.”
“What you got in mind?” I asked.
“Destroy the Orbit symbol.”
I mulled that over awhile. “It has a ring to it. Any reason?”
Bob looked back to make sure Sam and Mable were still sleeping. “Come with me.” He pulled the lever and opened the door and we went outside, “You’ve been a mite busy to notice, but when I woke up and seen you were gone, I figured you’d joined the Christians.”
“Okay, I was a jackass. Happy?”
“It’s just your way, Jack. I’m used to it. Anyway, I woke up and come out of the camper and the first thing I seen was that.”
He pointed at the Orbit symbol. “And it’s worse now than when I’m talking about.”
“God Almighty,” I said.
The Orbit symbol had turned a hot blue, so blue it hurt my eyes. It was getting the juice from the tentacles—there were twelve of them now and I couldn’t think of them as anything other than tentacles—and they were twisting and lashing across the blackness, spitting lightning from their tips like venom, and this lightning no longer ran the length of the pole, but just gathered in the symbol alone, and the symbol was spinning very fast, hurling more lightning than ever from it, striking the concession. The concession glowed so violently that at any moment I expected it to move, like amputated frog legs hopping in response to a live wire. The marquee was no longer there. I figured it had exploded and crumbled down, like a charcoaled stick.
“I figure something new is about to happen,” Bob said, “and I’m not sure it’s worth waiting around for. Last time we had something like this we got the Popcorn King.”
I agreed with Bob. I felt it was gearing up for something bigger and more catastrophic. I tried to figure exactly what it was with the symbol and why the power from the lightning concentrated itself there before going to the concession. A number of B-movie possibilities presented themselves: The symbol had accidentally been made from smelted iron ore that had been mixed with some strange and horrid sentient metal that had come to earth in a meteor, and once it had been converted to the Orbit symbol it had awakened from a long sleep and was now tormenting us earthlings for lack of anything better to do. I figured being a chunk of rock, or even a sign, could get pretty boring. It was the sort of thing that could give you a bad attitude. And I thought again of the B-movie gods, and that idea appealed to me most of all. Their motives seemed to fit in with those of most low-budget moviemakers. Bring it in on time. If it doesn’t make sense in spots, well, make it pretty or exciting. Don’t let them think about it too long.
“You getting hypoglycemic again,” Bob said, bringing me up from the pit of my thoughts.
“No,” I said. “I was just thinking.”
“About what?”
“About rewriting the script.”
“The script?”
“Let’s just say this is a movie and those tentacles—”
“Just drips of goo, Jack.”
“—belong to the B-movie gods, and they’re manufacturing all this, using us as actors, only we’re not acting, and they’re making up the script as they go. They’ve isolated us, they’ve given us our monster, the Popcorn King, and now they’re looking for the big finish, and I don’t think they’ve planned a heroic ending. I think this is one of those downbeat films.”
“Always got to have something to believe in, don’t you, Jack? Astrology, Christianity, now B-movie gods.”
“Give me something to blame all this on. A random universe with no god, evil or otherwise, is just too much for me. Just let me say it’s the B-movie gods and they have this bad scenario planned, and you and me, we’re not going to stand for it. We’re going to destroy the symbol . . . Hell, let’s do something even if it’s wrong.”
“Believe the ghost of Elvis is doing it if you like,” Bob said. “It don’t make a hang to me. But I’ve got a plan for taking that symbol down . . .”
Bob woke Sam up when we got back to the bus. He pulled him up front and said, “You know how to use that torch and stuff?”
“I don’t just carry it around, boy. Sure, I know. But I aint’ got a hankering at the moment.”
“I’m going to give you a hankering,” Bob said. “We’re going to cut the Orbit symbol down.”
“Have at it,” Sam said.
“We want you to do it. You know how to use the equipment.”
“After what you done to Mable, you think I’m gonna help you? You shouldn’t oughta shot her hand off, little buddy.”
I thought he might add “nahnuhnahnah,” but he passed on that.
“We want to cut that sucker down and drop it on the concession,” Bob said. “See if we can smash the Popcorn King . . . Christ, we want to do something besides wait to get eaten, or end up eating one another. What say, Sam?”
“Don’t use the Saviour’s name in vain . . . I don’t know. You have to cut it just right, get it to fall that way.”
“That’s why we need you,” Bob said. “You’re the expert.”
“Well,” Sam said, rubbing his lingers along his chin, “it might not change a thing, but it sure could give a man peace of mind for trying, now couldn’t it?”
“Our point exactly,” Bob said. “You’ll do it then?”
“All right, but this don’t mean we’re friends.”
“Wouldn’t think of it. One more thing. We’re gonna need this bus, and when we finish with it, it won’t be in any shape at all.”
“No sir,” Sam said, “you ain’t gonna ...” Then he looked hard at Bob and the shotgun. “It don’t matter what I say, does it? You’ll take the bus anyway.”
“We’d like to have your permission,” Bob said, “just to be sociable.”
Sam nodded wearily. “Well, tell me what you’re gonna do to it.”
The bus was part diversion, part weapon.
We tore the wire off the shelves, took the food and put it in a couple of blankets and tied it up, pulled it to the rear of the bus. We took the wire outside and Sam welded it into a kind of pen on the hood of the bus while Bob watched with his shotgun, just in case we had visitors. When Sam finished, I brought all the cans of paint thinner he had and put them in the wire enclosure, made sure they fit snug by pushing a couple of moldy pillowcases in between them.
“When the front end hits that electrical field,” Bob said,
“it’ll blow. And if we can get enough momentum behind this baby, really put the hammer down, it’ll run on into the concession and the gas tank will go. We’re lucky, that’ll get the Popcorn King. Or the symbol will when it comes down. The idea here is to try and hit him with both things at once. I’ve got a flare gun in the camper, and I’ll give that to one of you. When the symbol is about to drop, shoot off the flare and I’ll put my foot through it, put this sucker in his lap.”
“And how will you get out?” I asked.
“I’ll jump. I’m a jumping sonofabitch, didn’t I tell you?”
“No. I knew you could hide under mufflers good, but I didn’t know about the jumping.”
Bob smiled. “If Wendle was here right now, big guy or no big guy, I’d kick his butt . . . after I had me something to eat, that is, like about ten cans of those sardines in there.”
“I don’t doubt it,” I said. “But right now, let’s kick the King’s butt.”
“I’ll get the flare gun,” Bob said.
Bob got the flare gun, then we took the blankets of food over to the camper, trying to make sure no one was watching, but not worrying too much about it. It was most likely a formality anyway. I didn’t really expect to be coming back. If our plan failed, the Popcorn King would have plans for us—lunch, probably.
Fact was, I figured our time was running out anyway. So far the King had been patient, waiting for us to get hungry enough to join his flock, or maybe not thinking about us at all. He didn’t seem to have any master plan. Feed the flock, and gradually feed on the flock. An insane demigod without true design; a voyeur of human destruction; the Jim Jones of Popcorn.
When we got back to the bus Sam was sitting on the bed beside Mable. “Died,” he said. “Just gave her buttermilk-biscuit recipe and died. Didn’t quite make it to the part about how long to keep them little buddies in the oven.”
Bob nodded and went to the front of the bus.