look dead, but I could see he was blinking. Blood was dribbling down his face. This was a long ways from sixties flower power. I imagined he was trying to figure exactly how he had looked at Merve, so if the situation came up again be could play his cards differently.
Merve pulled open the concession door and put a foot in there quick as a door-to-door salesman. He threw his chest out and stepped inside, saying, “Got some bullets here with your names on them, assholes. Come and get ‘em.”
Then he moved to the right inside the concession, out of view. Patrons who had been hanging around, and still had enough functioning gray matter, sauntered briskly off. A few lay down on the ground like whipped dogs. The aging hippie remained stone-still.
A shot was fired inside the concession.
More patrons scrambled. More briskly this time.
When no more shots followed, the hippie rolled quickly to his right, came to his feet and darted off. He looked to have been taking lessons from the guy Willard had hit with the baseball bat.
The moments moved by slower than dental work, then Merve Kinsman made his appearance. He came out of the concession walking like a drunk trying to look sober. He had Willard’s knife in his right eye. It was buried halfway to the hilt. Merve Kinsman Who-Didn’t-Take-That-Off-Anybody was complaining, though not as loud as before. He was now Merve Kinsman Who-Would-Not-Be-Messed-With, By-God, and he wanted every damn one of us to know it. He said something about hell to pay when he found his gun, then he went face down on the lot, the knife point punching up through the back of his head.
Willard came out then. Randy was still on his shoulders, wearing the popcorn container. Willard had to duck to let Randy through the door. Willard had the. 357. He looked real happy. He smiled. There was blood on his teeth (or maybe chocolate). Maybe he had been hit in the mouth or had bitten somebody. (Or had eaten an Almond Joy.)
“The concession is ours, you sapsuckers,” Willard screamed. “Hear me? Ours!”
Nobody made with an argument. A few people who had been too dull to run shuffled their feet.
Merve Kinsman Who-Didn’t-Take-That-Off-Anybody, alias Merve Kinsman Who-Would-Not-Be-Messed-With, By-God, didn’t come back from the dead to debate the point, and I figured if anybody could, or would, it would be that guy.
Willard stepped forward a couple more steps, waved the. 357 around. Randy beat his chest and let out with an anemic Tarzan yell. Away from the direct light of the concession, shadows falling across them, it was hard to see where one body quit and the other began, especially with Willard covered in those asphalt-black tattoos.
“We’re in charge now,” Randy screamed.
Willard waved the. 357 around some more, turned, ducked back through the concession door and closed it. He pressed his nose against the glass door and looked out. You could only see Randy’s legs. The rest of him was above the door, behind solid wall, that popcorn-cup hat damn near scraping the ceiling, I imagined.
Willard went away; the smudge circle of his nose remained to mark his passing.
“Reckon that concession is theirs,” Bob said, “until someone with more firepower shows up.”
“You got intentions?” I asked.
“Not me, but you can bet someone does.”
The blackness above grew cluttered with electric blue veins, and pretty soon there was more blue than black, and the thunder and the snake-hiss of lightning was tough on the ears, even inside the camper.
Bob got brave enough to open up the back and look out. He said, “Will you look at this?”
I did. The Orbit symbol and the marquee were drawing lightning like decay draws germs. The lightning was hopping through the symbol, kicking out dark blue lights that mingled with the fairy blue and white. The marquee’s red letters looked like bright blood blisters about to pop.
We watched as the electric bolts from the symbol expanded, reached out toward the concession and touched it (like God giving the spark to Adam). The concession glowed blue and white, and those bat and skull symbols in the windows looked almost alive.
“Look at that,” Bob said.
He was referring to the symbol again, or rather what was above it. Sticking out of the black was what looked like a green-black tentacle, though it could have been a trick of the lightning, a dipping rent in the blackness like a tornado tail. Out of the tentacle (I preferred to think of it that way as it went along with my dreams of something up there, something in control) the lightning was flowing faster than ever, zeroing in on the Orbit symbol, jetting from that to the strained marquee. The word “Massacre” exploded in a flutter of glass, fizzled. The rest of it looked ready to go, but held.
Now another tentacle shape dropped down, twisted in the air and gave lightning from its tip, and this lightning went through the symbol and the marquee, and it made the marquee blow the word “Dismember.” And that damn symbol began to spin, rapidly, kicking out more and more bolts of energy, all of it going straight to the concession.
One of the black bats in the window flapped its wings and flew away into the depths of the concession. A paper skull twisted and fell to the floor, out of sight. The lights in there were blinking like a strobe show. They went out. But there was still plenty of light from the energy bolts, and it was a strange light, and it lit the concession up inside and out, bright and garish as a cheap nightclub act.
Then I saw Willard and Randy on the roof of the concession. Willard was still carrying Randy and Randy still had that damn container on his head. Willard had the. 357 in his hand. They were spinning around up there in the blue glow, raising their hands, cussing, most likely, though there was too much thunder and hissing lightning to hear.
“Must be a trapdoor up there,” Bob said.
“Yeah, but what the hell are they doing up there?”
“Believe me, they don’t know.”
Willard raised his pistol and shot at the Orbit symbol, and, almost as if in answer, a thicker strand of lightning leaped out of it like a hot, bony finger with too many joints and hit Randy on top of his popcorn container hat, turned him and Willard the color of the bolt, and made them smoke. Willard did a kind of funky chicken dance across the length of the roof and back again. The lightning made him look like he was moving very fast. Randy stayed in place, didn’t even wobble.
Willard heel-toed it over to the trapdoor, and with the two of them glowing like a nuclear accident, they dropped through the hole.
The concession was lit up like blue neon. The original lights did not come back on. The movies, defying electrical logic, continued to churn.
I looked to see if there were still any paper bats and skulls decorating the window. Nope.
11
Things went from sho’ is bad to sho’ is rotten.
The lightning continued to shoot out of the blackness overhead (though the greenish-black tentacles were no longer visible), strike the Orbit symbol, and in turn strike the concession, and shower blueness over it.
Word of what had happened spread pretty fast through the drive-in, and in less time than it took for a messy dismemberment, the bikers showed.
They spun their bikes around in front of the concession and yelled some things. They roared around Bob’s truck a few times.
Most of them had guns: shotguns, revolvers of all kinds. A few had knives, chains and tire irons. They looked nasty. There were twelve of them, and I couldn’t figure exactly what had prompted them to show up, unless it was the idea of some guy with a gun and another guy on his shoulders taking over the concession that warmed their blood. Or maybe they had planned to take the concession over themselves and were just now getting around to it, mad because some chump had beaten them to it.
I tried to compute when they had taken over B concession, but couldn’t. Time was just too screwed up. It
