The Complete Drive-In (12 page)
Read The Complete Drive-In Online
Authors: Joe R. Lansdale
Merve Kinsman Who-Didn’t-Take-That-Off-Anybody, alias Merve Kinsman Who-Would-Not-Be-Messed-With, By-God, didn’t come back from the dead to debate the point, and I figured if anybody could, or would, it would be that guy.
Willard stepped forward a couple more steps, waved the .357 around. Randy beat his chest and let out with an anemic Tarzan yell. Away from the direct light of the concession, shadows falling across them, it was hard to see where one body quit and the other began, especially with Willard covered in those asphalt-black tattoos.
“We’re in charge now,” Randy screamed.
Willard waved the .357 around some more, turned, ducked back through the concession door and closed it. He pressed his nose against the glass door and looked out. You could only see Randy’s legs. The rest of him was above the door, behind solid wall, that popcorn-cup hat damn near scraping the ceiling, I imagined.
Willard went away; the smudge circle of his nose remained to mark his passing.
“Reckon that concession is theirs,” Bob said, “until someone with more firepower shows up.”
“You got intentions?” I asked.
“Not me, but you can bet someone does.”
The blackness above grew cluttered with electric blue veins, and pretty soon there was more blue than black, and the thunder and the snake-hiss of lightning was tough on the ears, even inside the camper.
Bob got brave enough to open up the back and look out. He said, “Will you look at this?”
I did. The Orbit symbol and the marquee were drawing lightning like decay draws germs. The lightning was hopping through the symbol, kicking out dark blue lights that mingled with the fairy blue and white. The marquee’s red letters looked like bright blood blisters about to pop.
We watched as the electric bolts from the symbol expanded, reached out toward the concession and touched it (like God giving the spark to Adam). The concession glowed blue and white, and those bat and skull symbols in the windows looked almost alive.
“Look at that,” Bob said.
He was referring to the symbol again, or rather what was above it. Sticking out of the black was what looked like a green-black tentacle, though it could have been a trick of the lightning, a dipping rent in the blackness like a tornado tail. Out of the tentacle (I preferred to think of it that way as it went along with my dreams of something up there, something in control) the lightning was flowing faster than ever, zeroing in on the Orbit symbol, jetting from that to the strained marquee. The word “Massacre” exploded in a flutter of glass, fizzled. The rest of it looked ready to go, but held.
Now another tentacle shape dropped down, twisted in the air and gave lightning from its tip, and this lightning went through the symbol and the marquee, and it made the marquee blow the word “Dismember.” And that damn symbol began to spin, rapidly, kicking out more and more bolts of energy, all of it going straight to the concession.
One of the black bats in the window flapped its wings and flew away into the depths of the concession. A paper skull twisted and fell to the floor, out of sight. The lights in there were blinking like a strobe show. They went out. But there was still plenty of light from the energy bolts, and it was a strange light, and it lit the concession up inside and out, bright and garish as a cheap nightclub act.
Then I saw Willard and Randy on the roof of the concession. Willard was still carrying Randy and Randy still had that damn container on his head. Willard had the .357 in his hand. They were spinning around up there in the blue glow, raising their hands, cussing, most likely, though there was too much thunder and hissing lightning to hear.
“Must be a trapdoor up there,” Bob said.
“Yeah, but what the hell are they doing up there?”
“Believe me, they don’t know.”
Willard raised his pistol and shot at the Orbit symbol, and, almost as if in answer, a thicker strand of lightning leaped out of it like a hot, bony finger with too many joints and hit Randy on top of his popcorn container hat, turned him and Willard the color of the bolt, and made them smoke. Willard did a kind of funky chicken dance across the length of the roof and back again. The lightning made him look like he was moving very fast. Randy stayed in place, didn’t even wobble.
Willard heel-toed it over to the trapdoor, and with the two of them glowing like a nuclear accident, they dropped through the hole.
The concession was lit up like blue neon. The original lights did not come back on. The movies, defying electrical logic, continued to churn.
I looked to see if there were still any paper bats and skulls decorating the window. Nope.
11Things went from sho’ is bad to sho’ is rotten.
The lightning continued to shoot out of the blackness overhead (though the greenish-black tentacles were no longer visible), strike the Orbit symbol, and in turn strike the concession, and shower blueness over it.
Word of what had happened spread pretty fast through the drive-in, and in less time than it took for a messy dismemberment, the bikers showed.
They spun their bikes around in front of the concession and yelled some things. They roared around Bob’s truck a few times.
Most of them had guns: shotguns, revolvers of all kinds. A few had knives, chains and tire irons. They looked nasty. There were twelve of them, and I couldn’t figure exactly what had prompted them to show up, unless it was the idea of some guy with a gun and another guy on his shoulders taking over the concession that warmed their blood. Or maybe they had planned to take the concession over themselves and were just now getting around to it, mad because some chump had beaten them to it.
I tried to compute when they had taken over B concession, but couldn’t. Time was just too screwed up. It could have been yesterday, last week, a month ago, a year back. No idea.
Whatever, they were here now, riding their bikes and yelling, shouting for the “sumbitches” inside to come on out and take their hanging like men.
To accommodate the hanging, one of the bikers showed up in a wrecker, which I’m sure didn’t belong to him. He was more the wind and bugs-in-the-teeth type. There was a noose made of barbed wire fastened to the wrecker hook, and it looked ready for occupancy; one size fits all. I wondered where they had gotten the barbed wire, but not much. People carried everything in their pickups, wreckers and car trunks; all the tools of Texas trades.
There were also a barbecue grill and a bag of charcoal on the back of the wrecker. Not standard equipment. That made me think cannibalism wasn’t a crime in the biker book anymore.
The biggest and ugliest of the bikers pulled up in front of the concession door, lifted one hip, farted, and yelled for whoever was in there to come out. Everyone else had quit yelling, and now he was giving it the “I’m the boss” tone. The others stopped their bikes, just sat on them and watched.
The one talking, calling out for Willard and Randy to give it up, was three hundred pounds if he was an ounce. A lot of that poundage was stomach, and it stretched his yellow T-shirt (I think the coloring was due to sweat, not dye) to the point of bursting. He, unlike most of us in the drive-in, didn’t seem to be missing any meals. I wondered how big he had been before all of this. For that matter, all the bikers looked pretty good.
But this guy wasn’t just a fat boy. He had arms big around as my head, a head a little bigger around than my arms. His hair was long and greasy, tied back with a piece of black cloth. He was wearing leather pants, chain-strapped boots, and an open leather jacket with BANDITOS on the back of it. Part of the jacket had been cut away, and it gave the impression of being too small; it was about halfway up between his waist and armpits.
I noticed the other bikers had done a similar thing to their jackets, or, if they had leather pants, to the legs of those. It hit me that they were cutting the leather off to eat. Maybe boiling it down in Coke so it wouldn’t be so tough; making their own kind of jerky.
Though, after looking at the wrecker with the barbecue grill, I assumed they were willing to try more exotic fare. And that being the case, I sat real still in the camper, looking out of those windows that were blacked on the outside so you couldn’t see in. I sat there glad that Bob had the shotgun. I had gone duck and squirrel hunting with him, and he knew how to use it.
I fretted over Willard and Randy. Knew they didn’t have a chance against these guys, even if Willard was a bad ass and had a gun. There were just too many men out there with weapons and a bad attitude.
For that matter, I didn’t even know if Randy and Willard were alive. We had seen them take lightning, lots of it, and walk away, but that didn’t mean they were okay. They might have died from it; lying in there now on the floor, Randy’s popcorn-container hat still on his head, Willard still gripping the gun.
The fat guy used his feet to push his bike forward, but when he reached the blue aurora around the concession, he backpedaled. It gave him such a shock that the handlebars and his hands smoked. He shook his hands rapidly and frowned.
“Damn you, in there, come on out and take it like a man. That ‘lectricity ain’t gonna keep you safe. Ain’t nothing gonna keep you safe from the Banditos.”
“That’s right,” one of the lackeys behind him said, and the big guy turned to look, as if the agreement had been unnecessary and off-key. The guy who had chimed out smiled wistfully. The big leader didn’t smile back. “Shut up, Cooter,” he yelled. “I’m the president of this here club, and I’ll do the—”
But he cut short when he saw the look on Cooter’s face, realized Cooter was looking at the concession.
The leader turned his head forward again, and there were Randy and Willard. They had come out of the concession, and Randy was still on Willard’s shoulders and he was still wearing the popcorn-container hat. But the lightning had melted the edges of the container, dripped it down over his head. His features had run together in such a way that one of his eyes was gone and the other had shifted to the center of his forehead. His legs had fused to Willard’s shoulders, his knees sticking up like pathetic knots on a charcoaled stick.
Willard’s tattoos were crawling all over his body like worms, in and out of his empty, blackened eye sockets. His nostrils had become two large round holes in his face, and his lips were gone, showing a wide mouth with smoldering teeth. Willard still had the gun, but there in the blue lightning you could see that it had fused to his hand, become one with flesh and bone. The tiger Randy had tattooed so lovingly on Willard’s stomach was poking a three-dimensional head out and was growling; flesh-colored whiskers twitched against its dark face.
“Man,” said the Bandito leader, “you are one geeked-out sucker. But we can fix you.”
With that, the biker reached inside his jacket, under his armpit, and pulled out a pistol (also a .357) and snapped off a professional shot that hit Willard between the ears of the tiger tattoo on his stomach.
When the load hit, Willard flinched a bit. The shot went into a rare pink space on his skin, and the flesh puckered up like a roughed mouth, spat the projectile out with a sputter. An ooze the color of Coke syrup boiled out of the hole momentarily, then the wound closed up.
“That’s different,” Bob said, his nose pressed to the glass.
Willard raised his revolver and grinned. Randy’s mouth grinned too. For a man without eyes, Willard was unerringly accurate. His shot hit the Bandito leader between the eyes, and the biker’s brains left home through the back of his skull with a slushy rush, came to rest on the sleeve of the one called Cooter.
“Man,” said Cooter. “Radical.”
All the bikers with guns opened fire. Slugs hit Willard and Randy repeatedly, but their flesh spat out the buckshot and revolver loads. Even that damn popcorn tub on Randy’s head had become flesh, molded into Randy’s skull, and it too regurgitated lead.
Willard raised his revolver and emptied it. Hitting a biker each shot, killing two of them, wounding one. He was empty now.
Or would have been, except for the tattooed bandolier across his chest. He reached up, pinched six dark loads from it, shoved the fleshy projectiles into the revolver, which puckered open to receive them.
This was the bikers’ clue to zoom out of there. Motors roared, bikes whirled, and they were off. The one called Cooter made a quick turn in front of Bob’s truck and Willard fired in the general direction. The bullet came out of the barrel, hung there a moment, then it was a streak and gone. It went around the edge of the truck in hot pursuit and I heard Cooter yell.
I went across the camper, shared a window with Bob, who was also checking it out, and there was Cooter’s bike still going down the row, veering slightly to the left. But the biker lay on the ground, face down, the top of his head gone. The bike hit a speaker post, went up it a foot, turned sideways in the air, came down, slid across the path and slammed up against the back of a Ranchero, bounced back into the row and lay on its side like a small foundered horse.
I rushed to the other side to take a look at Willard. He was still firing his flesh bullets. They sought out their targets like heat seeking missiles.
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