4
“I don’t remember much,” Reba said.
We were under the tree boughs, and it was daylight outside. I was pretty certain time had been working consistently over the last few days, because they had felt exactly like days. My inner clock seemed happy with the timing.
Still, for all I knew, we could have been sleeping for days before the light came.
We had meant to move on the very next daylight, but we hadn’t. We decided to let Reba regain her strength. It wasn’t like we knew where we were going, anyway. Or if we should go. Or if it mattered if we did go.
“All I know was the bus came up, I was clinging to it,” Reba said, continuing her tale, “and I think I saw you in the water,” she said, indicating me.
“You did. I dove after you. But couldn’t find you.”
“I lost my hold on the bus,” Reba said. “It came to me that it was taking me down, and I knew it was best if I didn’t hang on, but I don’t know if I let go, or the force of the water pulled me loose. But I came loose. “Still, I was too weak to swim, and I just knew I was a goner. Then I was lifted up.”
“Ed,” I said.
“Yeah. He surfaced, and as he did, he brought me up. I rode on his back for a moment. Long enough to get my breath. Then he dove again.
“I was sucked under. I thought, well, this is it. I blacked out, came awake as I surfaced again, got a gulp of air. Then, guess what? I blacked out again. Next time I woke up you were standing over me, Jack. And, believe me, that was a pretty sight… What’s the plan now?”
“We kind of loosely thought we should go along the beach a ways, just to see what’s about. Then cut inland toward the bridge. We don’t know why, but-”
“Why not?” Grace said.
“Yeah,” Reba said. “Why not?”
We abandoned the idea of walking along the shore. It had seemed like a good idea at first. Dead fish could be collected. We might even find a way to fish for fresh ones.
But, now that we had learned to eat the dog-urine fruit, we decided to break it open and let it dry, pack it in my pack, along with my de-sodded writing goods, and carry it as food.
We wanted to go straight for the bridge.
Another thing. We thought it might be the safest place.
The night before, while sitting out on the beach, a star had fallen from the sky and landed in the water, washing a large wave nearly all the way to our sleeping tree.
The next night, we had seen the moon sag.
And that morning, much of the blue sky on the horizon was hanging low and being washed and moved by the water. The sun was almost in the wet itself.
“I get the feeling,” Grace said, “that those who put this whole thing together aren’t home anymore.”
“Or they’ve lost interest,” Steve said.
The jungle was dense, but we found a trail, an animal trail, I presumed, and we went along it as fast as we could go. It was strange. We had no idea where we were actually going, but we were damn well getting there fast.
I suppose I could say the bridge was our goal. And being as how I had become very goal oriented, because staying in any one place on the drive-in world soon led to depression, it gave me a feeling of motion and accomplishment.
We stopped several times to rest. We found plenty of water in nice gurgling pools, and there was a lot of the dog-urine fruit. We kept our dried fruit and ate the fresh stuff, and when night fell, we slept beneath trees. That is, until one night we heard a cry from the island forest so frightening that we took to the trees after that.
I thought of the trees as Tarzan trees. They were large with broad limbs, and there were enough smaller limbs about, coated thick in leaves, you could find natural hammocks to sleep in.
I felt good about this, until I thought our screaming predator might be able to climb trees.
In our nice tree hammocks, twenty to thirty feet off the ground, Steve and Grace tucked up in a bundle of limbs above us, Reba and I talked about all that had happened, about all that had been before the drive-in, about what we would do if we ever escaped this world and returned to our own.
We even discussed the idea of staying where we were.
The island was beautiful, and if we could find something better to eat than the dog-urine fruit-fish maybe-we could stay here for a long time. Maybe forever. Eventually, Reba said, either she or Grace would become pregnant, no matter how careful we were, and there would be children.
It was a thought.
A nice island.
Cool winds. Lots of water.
Plenty of dog-urine fruit… Well, that wasn’t so good.
Most likely we would learn to catch fish, and maybe there was other food on the island. Had to be. From the sound of that scream, that was a predator, and predators had to have something to eat besides dog-urine fruit.
And maybe this wasn’t an island at all. We had come to call it that because of the way it looked. But it could have been the edge of a continent. A place away from all the weird movie worlds and strange occurrences; an oasis in a morass of what Reba called Weirdity.
And, of course, for me, there was Reba.
She was pretty and smart and we didn’t seem to age.
How would that work for children? The children in the drive-in hadn’t aged a lot. They grew, but, come to think of it, none of them ever made adulthood.
Then again, how long had we been here?
The oldest the kids had been was three or four, and most of them died. Or got eaten.
And there were the weird creatures. The results of the Popcorn King’s poisoned sperm. They had grown very fast, to a kind of retarded adulthood on one level, and on another, to an advanced childhood where they could move things with their minds.
And there was the drive-in mist. When we were close to the sea, it would come out of nowhere, floating along the black water. But it never came to shore.
Never. It was a seagoing thing, or so it seemed. And Grace had a theory about what it was.
It was similar to my own idea. Television ghosting. If this was a movie world with different stories going all at once, perhaps our past and our present were colliding; different channels and episodes running together; movies mixing and misting, and falling apart.
It was a disturbing thought.
My mind rambled like that, going from this to that, as Reba and I lay in the boughs, she cradled in the crook of my arm, my eyes on the sky.
And I thought: What a pretty thought. To stay here. To have children. To live naked and free and full of piss and vinegar to the end of our days.
Lots of lying about in the sun.
Lots of fucking.
Lots of doing nothing and needing only something to eat and drink.
Life was really simple if you let it be.
But life was never simple here. You could never let down your guard. My arm had gone to sleep, and I wanted to move it, but hated to for fear of waking Reba and disturbing the wonderful fact that I had a fine-looking woman on my arm. For she had recovered fast. The puffiness was gone. Her hair had lightened. Her body was lean, but not starved, and her skin had developed a glow. She also wasn’t wearing much in the way of clothes. Always a plus.
Yet, even with that wonderful thought to consider, we were still here.
On the drive-in world. And this was a world where Chicken Little would be right.
