I took off the safety and waited for another car, remembered to cock the lever and jack a shell into the chamber. I felt like Lucas McCain, the Rifleman.
Next car that came I shot at, and I don’t know if I hit anyone or not, but it veered off the road, then back on, and went under the overpass and kept going, very fast. Next car I hit someone because it went off the road and through a barbed wire fence right before it reached the underpass. I saw a man stumble out of it and fall down in the pasture and get up. I took a couple of shots at him, and I guess I finally hit him because he fell down and didn’t get up. I shot once more in his direction, then went back to watching cars.
A station wagon was next, and I put a shot into it and it ran into the side of the overpass and a woman opened the door part of the way and fell out. The lights from the overpass were bright on the windshield in the car, and I could see a child in a baby seat on the passenger’s side. I could even hear it crying.
I leveled the rifle and fired until I finally hit it and it shut up. I figured I had done enough then. I was a celebrity, though no one knew it yet. I could just imagine being apprehended and handcuffed and the television cameras coming out and taking my picture in my Hopalong outfit, and then taking pictures of my pistols and my loop-cock Winchester. I hoped they’d let me see myself on television in the jail. But just knowing I was going to be there was a great thrill. I was, for the first time in my life, somebody.
At first I thought I should turn myself in, but this seemed too easy. I would let them come for me. I might take a few shots at them, then, if they fired back, I would toss out my weapons and say I quit; I had watched that sort of thing on television more than once. They didn’t kill you if you quit. After I got on television, I didn’t care what they did with me.
I put the rifle in the trunk and drove away. I drove until I came to a little serveyourself gas station and grocery. I was very hungry and I needed gas.
I went in there and got a Coke and a Twinkie and the girl behind the counter stared at me. I liked that. I felt like a movie star. “Who are you supposed to be?” she said.
“Hopalong Cassidy,” I said, and pulled out my pistol and reached across the counter and put it next to her nose and fired just as she screamed. Blood went all over the cash register. I went around and opened it and got some of the money just to have something to do, got my Coke and Twinkie and started to leave.
A man in a big black wrecker drove up then, and he walked inside just as I was about to go out. He looked at me and I saw his head jerk a little. He knew something wasn’t right. I pulled the revolver and shot him in the chest and he went back against the glass door, hitting it so hard it cracked. It swung open and he fell out on the ground. I bent over him and shot him twice in the head.
Something about the wrecker appealed to me. I put my Coke and Twinkie in the wrecker’s seat and got my rifle out of the Fairlane and put it in the floorboard of the wrecker. I had some trouble driving the wrecker at first, but I knew how. I had learned how to drive a lot of things at the station so I could put them in stalls to have flats and oil changed.
I drove along not thinking about much, and I saw the Orbit drive-in. I couldn’t pass that up. I had been away from a screen too long and had begun to feel unreal. I drove in there and watched the movies and waited to be arrested. I thought I might not even wait. I thought I could get my rifle and go behind one of the screens and poke a hole in it and start shooting at people in their cars like the guy did in Targets. Maybe Boris Karloff would show up to stop me. I would have liked that.
But before I could do anything the comet came and trapped us all in the drive-in. I wasn’t going to be arrested. I wasn’t going to be on TV. It was depressing at first, until I realized an incredible truth. I was living a movie. This wasn’t like working at the filling station. This wasn’t like walking home and seeing the winos. This was even better than watching television. It was like when I was shooting from the top of the underpass, only more so. This was constant, and everyone had to be involved, like it or not. The movie owned us all and you couldn’t change channels or turn it off. Here was a movie with blood and guts and a wild monster, the Popcorn King. He was wonderful. He preached violence and religion. If he could have gotten wrestling into his talks he would have covered the three manias of television. I loved him. I wanted him to beat me with a belt. I quit wearing the Hopalong outfit. I stripped off and went around naked like a lot of the others. I was not ashamed of my body now. Everyone looked awful. The comet and the Popcorn King had made us all alike. My constant fear was a happy ending, which meant, of course, everyone would go back to what they were before. And for me, that wouldn’t have been much.
But things did not last. The comet came back. I put my Hopalong outfit on and drove out of the drive-in behind the others. I figured the old world would be out there and the only thing I could think of that was positive about that was that I would eventually be arrested and my picture would be on TV, and I would be recorded on video for all time.
But the old world wasn’t out there. There was this world. This double feature.
I became determined to drive to the end of the highway. Things got weirder as I drove along, and I wanted to see just how weird they would get. I wanted to be part of the weird.
Once, when I stopped to find fruit, I saw a crowbar lying on the bed of the wrecker, and I got it and used it to break the padlock of the big metal box welded below the back window. Inside was a tarp, flares, knives, electrical wire, miscellaneous items. I knew these would come in handy later.
The gas in the wrecker lasted a long time, and when I got to this place with the film draped in the trees, I knew I was on the right track.
I pushed on. I felt like Humphrey Bogart in They Drive by Night.
Though the shadows and the storms and the crawling film persisted, I began to see new things. Solid things. Munchkins from The Wizard of Oz, for example. I never saw a live one, just dead ones. They were lying beside the highway or in it, obviously having been hit by cars. They were smashed and/or bloated. Their little caps lay beside them like markers. I passed one that someone had propped up with a stick. They also had a stick down one of his sleeves and had rigged it so his arm stuck straight out; he looked as if he were thumbing a ride.
I passed cars beside the road. Empty. Came to one where a body was wrapped like a mummy in film; the film was pulsing like a tumor.
Cars passed me on their way back. None of the drivers waved.
Beside the road I saw what looked like a collapsed water tower, but it was one of the Martian stalking machines from War of the Worlds. A squid-like creature was dangling out of an opening in the top of the machine, limp as spaghetti.
When the storms came now, they were more violent than ever. The blue lightning flashed through the films and the images on the films were cast onto the ground and into the trees and onto the wrecker. They lived and breathed during those brief moments of lightning.
The wrecker was rigged with an auxiliary tank, and I switched that on and kept at it. I finally had to stop and use the hose from the box on the wrecker bed to siphon gas from a couple of dead cars, which turned out to be the last ones I saw on the highway. What gas I got from them you could have put in a paper cup. But it was gas that got me to the end of the highway.
I got closer looks at the Munchkins. They were solid all right, but they weren’t real after all. They were elaborate dummies. As I went, there were more of these, and not all of them were Munchkins. They were the sort of dummies they used to use a lot in old movies, when they wanted to have a body tumble over Niagara Falls for instance. I stopped in the daylight and looked at the Martian machines. Cheap wood painted silver. The Martians were rubber octopuses.
I liked that.
Finally I came to the end of the highway.
And there was the Orbit.
It was different in many ways, but it was the Orbit. The highway was a snake biting its tail.
Amid the wreckage that had been made by the fools who killed the Popcorn King were strips of film, more dummies, props of all kinds, lobby cards, TV sets and fragments of antennas. In several spots there were piles of TV sets; piles that made pyramids that tipped through a continuous bank of dark clouds.
At night there were really violent storms. Worse yet. The wind blew popcorn bags and movie posters and soft drinks and movie magazines against the wrecker with a sound like wet towels popping.
When it rained, it rained chocolate almonds and popcorn and soft drinks-every kind imaginable: cherry, orange, Coke, Dr Pepper, Pepsi. I recognized the taste of these and more by drinking from puddles in the blacktop. Later I sat cups out at night and in the morning I drank from these, picked up chocolate almonds and popcorn and the occasional unwrapped Snickers for my breakfast. I confess, I longed for Twinkies.
