die same as me.
Still, you can only hold out so long. Hunger is the biggest monkey ever made. It can make heroin addiction seem like a Coca-Cola habit.
Timothy caved in. He got tired of chewing seat covers and listening to his belly rumble. He went the way of Sue Ellen and ate the vomit corn. First time he had it he came back talking about the color of lies. His breath was sewerish and his eyes were dull; I wondered what movies were showing on the backs of them.
I used my martial arts to keep me away from the corn. I was too weak to practice it, but I did the movements in my head, tried to fill the hungry thoughts with visions of me nude and strong and practicing every technique I knew, fast and slow and medium.
It worked well, but not well enough. In time my belly started to win over, and I would have gone for the corn had the man not come along.
This is hard to talk about, but it seems to me, bad as this was, it was better than the corn. The corn would make me sing the King’s song; I wasn’t ready for the color of lies and movies on the backs of my eyes.
Okay, here goes. Straight plunge.
Timothy and Sue Ellen were just back from the concession, sitting in the car, eyes closed, seeing whatever it was the corn made them see, and I was sitting there thinking of stripping off another piece of seat cover to chew on. There wasn’t much left and it made me ill to think about chewing on that nasty stuff, but what else was there to do? So I’m thinking about this, trying to get the will to do it, when this man staggered by on my side, put his hand against the door frame, said, “Shit, this ain’t heartburn,” and fell over.
I got out of the car and looked at him. He was about thirty with long, stringy, grayish hair and he was lying on his stomach with his head turned to one side, his eyes open. But he wasn’t seeing much. He had been correct. It wasn’t heartburn. He was as dead as a dodo’s agenda.
Sue Ellen and Timothy got out of the car and came around and looked at him, then looked at each other, and finally me.
We didn’t say a word. We got hold of him and put him in the backseat and Sue Ellen got back there with him, and Timothy and I got in the front.
Of course, I knew what we were doing. We were saving him for food. I hadn’t been willing to eat popcorn with eyeballs on it, but somehow this was different. It would have been a shame to let him go to waste when we were starving. And if we didn’t eat him, someone else was going to come along and drag him off for just that purpose.
Hell, it wasn’t like we’d killed him.
I remember sitting there thinking about this, turning from time to time to look at the body on the backseat, and finding that each time I looked, Sue Ellen had removed yet another article of his clothing. When he was completely stripped, she called for Timothy’s knife, and he gave it to her.
My next memory is of holding the corpse’s still-warm liver in my hands and rubbing it into my face, then eating it. Strength flowed back into me immediately, and for some reason my legs began to jerk spasmodically and my knees hit the bottom of the dash and caused the glove box to knock open.
Timothy kept a little mirror in there, and it was at an angle, and by the light of the pulsating Orbit symbol, I could see myself. My face was stained a rust color from forehead to chin, and my eyes were little pits.
I looked at Timothy and Sue Ellen.
Timothy was chewing on a bone with a few chunks of meat on it. He had his eyes closed, and when he chewed he made little orgasmic noises deep in his throat.
Sue Ellen was on her hands and knees straddling the body, and she had half her head buried in an opening she had cut in the man’s stomach. She was rooting around in there like a pig.
I opened the door and fell on the ground and threw up.
I don’t think Timothy or Sue Ellen noticed. They were too busy with lunch.
I crawled under the Galaxy and tried to wipe the blood off my face with my forearms, then lay on my side with my knees pulled into my chest, and shook.
A young man so thin his pants flapped around his legs like flags on poles, came by, dropped to the ground, and made a meal of what I’d thrown up. His face was turned toward me as he lapped. When he saw me, he lapped faster. Maybe he thought I wanted it.
He finally staggered off. Where my vomit had been was a damp spot.
I rolled on my back and looked at the underside of the car and tried to think about nothing, but all I could see was that man gutted from throat to crotch and Sue Ellen with her head dipped into him. And lastly, my own face in that mirror, smeared with blood from hair to chin.
Bones were dropped out of the Galaxy’s windows on the left side, and I turned my head and looked at them and tried to determine if they were rib, forearm, or leg bones. I couldn’t make a decision.
As I watched, people came along and snatched up the bones and ran off with them.
I lay there for the longest time, feeling very sick to my stomach and my soul.
When I heard Timothy and Sue Ellen getting out of the Galaxy, I refused to watch their legs go by. I knew they were going to the concession to get their vomit corn from the King. I had decided I would starve to death before I did that.
I don’t know how long this went on, my lying under the car hoping to starve. It could have been thirty minutes or it could have been days. But Timothy and Sue Ellen came and went several times and I always felt dizzy, as if I were in the middle of some huge platter that was being spun.
But my starvation plans weren’t working out. The hunger had a mind of its own, and finally I crawled out from under the car and tried to stand up. But couldn’t. I was too weak. I got hold of a door handle and pulled myself up and looked in the window at the body on the backseat.
There was hardly anything left of the man. Even his eyes and genitals had been eaten. Only his pelvis, ankles and feet had flesh on them, and it was turning black.
I felt hungry enough to bite the toes off his feet, one at a time, and would have tried, but about the time I started to go after him, the concession stand blew up.
4
That was us that did it, of course, and no use going into that again. Anyway, we smashed the concession, killed the King, and for our fine work, the crowd got hold of us and crucified us. But I told you all about that too.
Summing up this part of Grace’s story, she didn’t see what happened to the concession, but when she turned around it was in shambles and on fire. Of course the movies from the concession were snuffed too, though the projector over in B section of the lot was still pumping. But the thing is, we killed the King.
Grace’s dizziness subsided and she managed to walk toward the flames. She saw what was happening to us, but later when she met us, she didn’t remember our faces. The crowd was about to put fires under the crosses and cook us, and the comet came back. The black goo went away, and the drive-in folks were out of there.
Grace wanted to help get us down. Her dizziness had passed, and she tried to talk Timothy and Sue Ellen into helping, but they had come back to the car and they were ready to leave.
Anyway, Grace said
I got the keys from Timothy and pulled the body out of the backseat. Doing that made me dizzy again, but I put a hand on the side of the car and stood that way until it passed.
I went around back to the trunk and opened it. I wanted to find something I could use as a tool to get those people down off those crosses, but there wasn’t much there. A tire tool, a spare, and a bag full of golf clubs. I leaned down deeper, seeing if maybe there was something way in the back, and when I did, my head felt as if it were flying apart.
And as they say in the old detective movies, I fell into a deep, dark pit and it closed around me.
“I didn’t mean to hit you that hard,” Timothy said.
“Someone meant to,” I said. “What did you use?”
