“Maybe you’d like down?” Crier said.
“That would be right nice,” Bob said.
Crier got down on his hands and knees and started pulling the junk out of the piling holes and pretty soon the crosses were wobbling and then Crier pushed us down. When I hit the ground I thought my arms and legs would come off.
Crier went away for a while and when he came back he had a hammer. He used the claw end to free us. It hurt like hell. He got Mable free last, since she wasn’t in any hurry.
“I broke into your camper to get this hammer,” Crier said to Bob, “I figured you’d have one. Hope you don’t mind.”
“Nah,” Bob said, “it’s insured.”
My hands and feet hurt so bad I couldn’t move them and I couldn’t walk, least not without help. My legs seemed to have died. Sam looked walleyed and had gone to singing “The Old Rugged Cross” in a whispery kind of voice, and that wasn’t helping my nerves.
“What you driving?” Bob said.
“Well,” Crier said, “this is kind of odd, but I can’t remember what car I came in. Can’t remember who I came with.”
“Don’t matter,” Bob said. “We’ll take the camper. You can drive, can’t you?”
“Is it an automatic?”
“I thought you said you were a truck driver,” Bob said. “I figured you could drive anything.”
“Well, I may have exaggerated. A whole lot. I drove an ice cream truck, actually.”
“An ice cream truck!” Bob said.
“Yeah. But sometimes I drove it real fast. And it was an automatic. Which brings me back to the question. Is your truck an automatic?”
“Yep.” Bob said.
“Then I can drive the hell out of that. It’s been awhile, but I reckon I remember that much. But you don’t look like you got a key on you.”
“There’s one underneath the dash in a magnetic box. Doors aren’t locked.”
“Okay,” Crier said. “I’ll drive it over here and pick you up.”
“You wouldn’t just drive off and leave us, would you?” Bob said.
“Gone this far for you, might as well go the whole hog.”
When Crier came back with the truck, Bob said, “There’s some blankets in the back. There’s a knife back there too. We can cut a hole in the blankets and slip them over our heads.”
“Why the trouble?” Crier asked. “You boys got dates?”
“Just a thing I prefer, if you’ll do it,” Bob said.
Crier found the blankets and the sardines and the knife. He brought the sardines out and we ate all we could stand, Crier feeding them to us, as our hands didn’t work so good.
He cut the blankets and pulled them over our heads. Sam didn’t even notice. He was trying to sing “When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder.”
“What about her?” I asked, nodding at Mable.
“Dead, ain’t she?” Crier said.
“Maybe you could pile some boards on her or something, set her on fire if you had a mind to. She ought to have some kind of burial.”
“Ain’t you something,” Crier said.
“And the Popcorn King,” I said. “He ought not just be left.”
“You’re kind of tight with everybody, ain’t you?” Crier said,
“Before he was that, he was two friends of ours,” Bob said. “I know it’s a bother, but could you?”
“Hell,” Crier said. “Good thing you boys are paying by the hour.” He piled some boards on Mable and set fire to her and she caught poorly at first, but after a time was blazing away. It didn’t take so much to get the Popcorn King burning. He caught quick and flared like a torch, the blanket whipping to flame immediately. Black smoke churned up from the corpses and floated up into the clear sky and faded.
“Now,” Crier said. “Any little ole chores you boys want performed? Just anything would be all right. Maybe you’d like to see if I can make a few laps around the lots.”
“Would you?” Bob said.
“You know what you can do,” Crier said.
Crier helped Bob and Sam into the back of the truck and led me around to the cab. It seemed to take forever and my feet felt like raw stumps. I had Crier on one side holding me up, and the truck on the other. I touched the truck with my elbow because my hand wouldn’t take it. I still couldn’t open or close either one of them. They looked like talons.
Inside the cab, Crier started the truck again, leaned on the wheel and looked around. “Strange, I feel funny leaving.”
“Maybe you can get over it,” I said.
“Maybe.”
“One thing, Crier,” I said. “You saw what that crowd was about to do to us. I know you couldn’t have stopped them, but would you have helped eat us? Could you have done that?”
“Been the first in line if I could have. No sense missing a free meal, even if it is made up of a couple of guys I kind of like.”
“Well,” I said, “that’s one way of looking at things.”
EPILOGUE
I leaned against the door and kept my sore hands in my lap. As we started rolling, I looked around at all the vacant cars, many of them wrecked. There were also lots of bones. You could see that clearly now. We drove by one car with its roof decorated with human skulls wearing popcorn sacks, and there was another car with a baby seat sitting on top of it with a little skeleton in the seat holding a rattle.
I glanced through the gun rack and the back glass, saw Bob and Sam stretched on the floor of the camper. Bob was up on one elbow, gingerly managing sardines from a can Crier had opened and left for him. Sam wasn’t moving. Later Bob told me he died before we got out of the lot.
We went through the exit, and though the highway was there, the yellow line had faded and the concrete had buckled and grass grew up through it in spots. Nothing else was remotely familiar. I wasn’t in the least bit surprised. I remembered what Sam had said: “It ain’t over yet. It ain’t never over.” No, it wasn’t over. It was time for the second feature. A lost world movie. As we drove, a massive shape stepped out of the jungle foliage at the right of the highway and Crier eased on the brake and we watched. It was a Tyrannosaurus Rex covered in bat-like parasites, their wings opening and closing slowly, like contented butterflies sipping nectar from a flower.
The dinosaur looked at us in a disinterested way, crossed the highway and was swallowed by the jungle.
“I don’t think this leads home anymore,” Crier said, and eased forward again, started picking up speed. I looked in the truck’s wing mirror and I could see the drive-in in it, one of the screens in Lot B. The projector might still be running back there, but if it was, I couldn’t make out a picture. The screen looked like nothing more than an enormous slice of Wonder Bread.
BOOK TWO
