“A golf club.”
It was bright daylight and I was stretched out on the ground beside the Galaxy, which was parked on the grass next to the highway. I felt a little too warm.
Timothy helped me to a sitting position and gave me a piece of fruit. After what we’d been eating, it tasted like heaven. I began feeling better immediately. Which is not to say the golf-ball-size lump (which was appropriate) had gone away.
“I panicked,” Timothy said. “I was afraid it would go back to how it was. I’m thinking better now that I’ve had some food.”
I looked for Sue Ellen and spotted her sitting in the shade of a big tree, eating fruit. She was rocking a little and humming to herself.
“She’s not doing so good,” Timothy said.
He got an arm under me and helped me to my feet. I looked down the highway and saw nothing but more highway bordered by jungle and topped by blue sky.
“I’ve got to go back to the Orbit,” I said.
“I can’t do that,” Timothy said. “Neither can Sue Ellen.”
“Just take me back. You don’t have to go in.”
“We’ve come a long ways since I hit you.”
“You owe me, Timothy.”
He drove me back and waited while I went inside the drive-in. I thought maybe I could find something in a car there to use as a tool to get those fel las down, if they were still alive. But when I got inside, the crosses were down and they were gone.
I didn’t stick around to look at the empty cars or the bones. I went outside to where the Galaxy was waiting, and we started on down the highway.
Okay, gang, I’ll interrupt here to say that we stopped Grace’s story and told her that Bob and me were two of the folks on the cross, and Crier was the one that got us down. And when we finished that, she picked up with her adventures.
But before we get to those, why don’t we take a brief intermission. My tongue is getting tired.
THIRD REEL
1
So we went on down the highway, traveling only a few miles a day, stopping to look around, relieve ourselves and search for fruit and berries.
I was amazed at the way the gas held out. It was like when we were in the drive-in and the electricity worked for no logical reason, and now here was the gas gauge showing us to be getting incredible mileage. It was going down all right, but slowly compared to the miles we were racking up.
Still, gas was going to be a problem eventually. But it was a problem that was solved when we came to a place with lots of cars pulled off the highway and parked along its edges and out in an area that had been partially cleaned by nature and partially by human beings.
A crude sign had been painted on a big, split limb and stuck up in the ground beside the road. It read:
People were living in their cars and crude huts. There was a river nearby and they were getting fish out of it. And, of course, there was abundant fruit.
You wouldn’t call it a harmonious little town, but it seemed to be doing well enough, considering a canopy of doom hung over it; a canopy knitted stitch by stitch by dark experience.
We stayed on a while, living out of our car, watching the place try and become a real town.
One night this guy about my age got a rope from somewhere and went out to the edge of town and picked this big oak and threw the rope over a limb and fashioned a noose and hung himself.
Next morning he was dangling there, purple-faced, looking like some oddshaped, overripe fruit about to drop from the vine. The log he had stood on and kicked away at the last moment was about six feet from where his feet dangled. I wondered if in his last painful moments he had looked down at the log with regret.
Timothy and I helped get him down and some others got rid of the body, and the next night a girl of about twelve went out there and climbed up on the limb and put the rope around her neck and hung herself.
In the morning she was discovered. Sue Ellen went over to look at her. Neither Timothy nor I tried to stop her from seeing the body. She had seen much worse than that, and keeping her from it was akin to shutting the barn door after the stock have run off. Still, the way she looked at the dead girl’s face made me shiver. You’d have thought she was gazing on the countenance of the Madonna.
No one cut the rope down. I think it was a way out everyone liked knowing was there, even if they never actually planned to use it.
New people joined the community regularly. They had all been down the road a piece and they had given up and turned back, coming rolling into Shit Town in cars propelled by little more than fumes. Or they walked in, weary and defeated.
I was still thinking about the end of the highway, so I talked to as many newcomers as I could. No one I spoke with had made it to the end. They said it got rougher and stranger as you went, and some of them felt certain the highway never ended.
The town grew and the rope became more popular. Sue Ellen spent a lot of time looking at it. I decided it was time to move on.
Timothy agreed. He spent his days gathering stones and taking them out to the middle of the highway and putting them on the fading yellow line and swatting them with a golf club. His strength, like mine, had come back, and he could knock them real far. He did that day in and day out until it was too dark to do it. He didn’t talk much.
I talked to people in the town that had cars, asked if I could have their gas. A lot of them said they had gone all they intended to go, and they gave it to me. I managed to get a can and a hose. I siphoned gas from the cars into the can and transferred it to the Galaxy.
While I did this, Timothy golfed and Sue Ellen looked at the rope.
I put a can of gas in the trunk and some fruit too, then I got Timothy and Sue Ellen and drove us out of there. Timothy wasn’t shit for driving anymore. He couldn’t keep his mind on it, and the King’s popcorn had done something to the both of them. They had flashbacks of a sort. Recited lines from the movies back at the Orbit. Sue Ellen could even do the nail gun noise from The Toolbox Murders.
Anyway, we drove on out of there, and I put the pedal to the metal and kept my eyes ever forward, searching for the end of the highway.
2
We went along quickly, stopping only to sleep and get fruit from the trunk of the car, but after a few days, things began to change.
It was getting along night when I first noticed it. As it grew darker the jungle grew thicker and great roots cracked the concrete and coiled onto the highway along with vines that twisted and knotted like threads in a complex tapestry.
When the Galaxy’s tires went over the big roots, the shocks throbbed, and when they went over the larger
