“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.
“You did this, cowboy,” Sam yelled at Bob’s back.
Bob pulled the door lever and went outside. I went after him. He was leaning against the bus, the shotgun cradled in his arms. He was watching the movie. It was The Toolbox Murders.
I went up and leaned beside him. “You saved my life. I’m sorry you had to shoot the woman, but thanks for saving my life.”
“I never said I was sorry for shooting her,” Bob said, but he didn’t look at me.
We leaned that way for a time. “Movie any good?” I asked.
“It’s all right,” Bob said, “but I’ve seen it.”
I laughed and clapped him on the shoulder. “Come on,” I said. “We’ve got things to do.”
We went back inside the bus.
Sam looked at me and snarled. “Damn you, if you’d just gone on and cooperated, we’d have eaten you and things would have gone on like they were… least for a while.”
“I have days when I’m obstreperous,” I said.
“To hell with this talk,” Bob said. “We’re going on with it, Sam, with or without you even if I have to teach myself how to use that torch by trial and error and let Jack drive the bus. So how’s it going to be? You in or out?”
Sam turned to look at Mable. He closed her eyes with his fingertips, then looked at us. “I’m in,” he said.
Bob nodded. “Now… what would you like to do with her body?”
There was no way to bury her, and options were few. We could toss her into the acidic blackness or we could leave her on the bus to burn when it exploded. (If it exploded. Just because we had a plan didn’t mean I had a lot of faith in it.)
Sam preferred to leave her on the bus. He got some cans of sardines out of her overcoat pockets (he wasn’t so sentimental as to leave those), and put some old clothes on top of her to help her catch fire. He took some plastic plumbing pipe, couplings and pipe glue, used a hacksaw to make her an artificial hand. Or that’s what it was supposed to be. It looked like a dull garden rake to me. He tied it to the stump of her arm with some rounds of twine and a twisted coat hanger.
Finished, he put a blanket over her and tied it and Mable to the bed with some strips of old sheet, changed out of his festive-tie shirt and put back on the one with a black tie. He said some words over her, then changed back to the shirt with the red tie painted on. I presumed that was also his welding shirt.
“Sam,” I said, “I’m not one to meddle, but I’ve been meaning to ask you. Why do you paint those ties on your shirts?”
“Can’t tie the knots,” he said.
Made sense.
We ate some sardines, talked the plan over one more time, then Sam and I lowered the dolly with the welding equipment on it out the back of the bus.
“Go for it,” Bob said. We shook hands and he gave me the flare pistol. I slipped it into my belt next to the revolver.
“Let’s get on with it,” Sam said. “I ain’t gonna shake hands with nobody.”
I took hold of the dolly, cocked it back and started pushing it across the lot at a dog trot. Sam ran alongside me, wheezing like a tire going flat.
3
We weren’t too worried about the Popcorn King noticing us. We were a good distance away, and hey, it wasn’t like there wasn’t something strange going on all the time anyway.
But the closer we got to the little fence that led out to the stretch of concrete where the Orbit symbol was, the more nervous I became. My courage began to falter, and I wanted to go back to the truck and get into the sardines and eat those, and just hope for the best.
Still, I kept running, and Sam was staying up with me. We saw the Christians here and there, standing around, watching, wondering, I suppose. None of them waved. Stuck up.
I looked toward the concession. It glowed beautifully against the blackness, like some exotic gem on black velvet. One of those little winds that kicked up out of nowhere from time to time started going and it carried the stink of the no-longerused toilets to me, and the smell was as hard and mean as a head-on collision.
In the window of the concession I could see the bodies hanging, like big fish in a market. Some of them were little more than skeletons.
We came to the wooden fence and Sam got up there and straddled it, and I pushed the dolly up where he could get hold of it and twist it over, lower it to the other side.
Sam followed after it and I took his place, straddling the fence. I looked out at the great tin fence surrounding
