The Complete Drive-In

7

We scrounged up some food. A few fish Ed had swallowed. We cut them open and ate them raw. I wondered if they too were lined with little wires, a combination of flesh and electricity.

After eating, first order of business was to see if the bus would start.

It wouldn’t.

Steve and Homer opened the hood and checked around under there.

“I think it’s just damp,” Homer said. “We got to get something to dry the inside of the carburetor, and such. Some rags would do it.”

“We’re wearing them,” I said.

“Everybody shuck,” Grace said.

We took off our clothes and stood butt-naked while Homer and Steve took our rags or animal wrappings and used them to dry the inside of the engine.

Well, we weren’t all butt-naked. I had shoes. And so did all the others. Grace’s were made of dried animal hides, as were Reba’s. I’m sure I looked ridiculous standing there wearing only shoes, and shoes where the soles would have flapped like tongues, had they not been tied up with twine and vines I had scrounged during our stay in the drive-in.

This drying business went on for awhile, and in time, our clothes, now greasy, were returned to us. I put my rags on, as did the others. Grace, however, decided her top was too greasy and threw it away.

It was enough to make me want to believe in a good god.

Almost.

After a bit, we all tuckered out, and I was feeling queasy on top of everything else. Sea sickness. I guess Ed from time to time swam faster and deeper, and perhaps slightly off-center.

We decided enough was enough, closed up the hood, and tried it again. It fired up. We drove it up close to the pile of cars, decided to rest. I went right to sleep. As always, there were thoughts and worries and dreams. I dreamed about the ghost of the drive-in. Where was it? Did it only mist about on the sea above us?

I dreamed of aliens with devices that seemed to be cameras, and maybe special effects instruments. Were they filming us? If there were lights inside this fish, why not cameras? Were we some form of exploitation film? A documentary on strange life placed in odd circumstances; a kind of reality show for the quivering, tentacled, green-faced masses that slithered above our sea and above our sky?

And then, in an instant, it came to me, like the flash of an old-fashioned camera, one of those kind that made the eyes go bright, then see white, then turn one temporarily blind. In that instant, I knew for a fact that a truth was thrust upon me. Something inside me put it all together, worked it all out, took hold of it and held it and saw the insides of everything that was, and there was a revelation. I knew how the universe worked. To be more precise, I knew how my universe worked. I was astonished. I was elated.

And then I awoke, it was lost to me, fleeing fast from my memory like dark water down a drain. I felt as empty as a eunuch’s nut sack. I lay there on the hard bus seat and tried to call it all back to me, but it was like calling a deaf hound dog. That buddy had done run off and was gone.

I pulled my arm from over my eyes and sat up in my seat, and was startled.

The bus was surrounded by the fish cave folks. There were even a couple on the hood, their faces pressed up against the glass, looking in.

One of those on the hood was Bjoe. He was on his knees with both hands on the glass, sort of cupped, and his forehead was pressed up against them, and he was looking in.

I must have let out a startled sound, because Reba, who was lying on the seat across from me, sat up, saw them, and let out a loud noise herself. Pretty soon we all stirred.

Grace, who was in a seat near the front, rose up and looked around. Her naked breasts took my mind off of the fish cave folk for a pleasant moment. She didn’t look self-conscious at all. “What do you want?” she said loudly to the glass.

Bjoe put a hand to his ear.

Grace repeated herself.

Bjoe stuck the tip of a finger against the glass. It was pointing in her direction.

“Why?” Grace said.

Bjoe just smiled.

Grace shook her head. More of the fish cave fol k cl imbed onto the hood and pressed against the glass, thick as a grape cluster. All of us were out of our seats now.

Cory said, “Maybe they just want to talk?”

“They don’t look as friendly as before,” Steve said.

“They’ve had time to think about us,” Cory said. “Probably been comparing long pig recipes.”

“Ain’t no different than the rest of us,” James said. “I’ve eaten dead bodies. I’ve cannibalized.”

“Yes,” Reba said, “but those bodies were dead. We aren’t.”

“Yet,” Homer said.

“Is the door locked?” I said in a soft manner.

“Yeah,” Steve said. “It is.”

We watched them for awhile, then sat in our seats and watched them watch us, their faces and hands pressed against the window glass.

“I feel like one of those lobsters in a tank,” Steve said, “you know, the ones where you pick your own.”

“And I’m the prime lobster,” Grace said, without one hint of modesty.

“I think we’re going to need to start the bus up,” I said, “drive deeper into the darkness. This bit of shadow doesn’t worry them like I hoped it would.”

“I believe you are right, Brother Jack,” Steve said.

“I say we wait,” Cory said. “They’re just weird. We’re weird. They haven’t done anything else.”

“One of them has a large bone,” Reba said, “and he’s trying to work at the edges of my window.”

We looked on her side, and sure enough, one of the guys had a big old bone, sharp on one end from having been broken, and he was sticking it in the edge of the window, trying to work the glass loose. He wasn’t looking at what he was doing. He grinned at us. He had very yellow teeth.

They began to beat on the windows, all around, with their fists.

“Yep,” I said, “No question in my mind. They want to eat us.”

“Well, fuck them,” Grace said, turned her ass toward the front glass, and pulled down her little fur shorties and gave them a moonshot.

They beat on the glass harder.

“I think you’re just encouraging them,” I said.

Steve climbed into the driver’s seat, hit the key. The engine sprang to life. Steve jerked it in gear and punched it. The bus seemed to leap. The folk on the hood went flying backward, and there was a sound like someone stepping on crackers in cellophane. The bus bumped twice.

I looked out the back window. A couple of the fish cave folk lay in a bloody wad on the grating, and Bjoe was up and limping after us, shaking his fists. The others were coming at a run, passing him.

We were going pretty goddamn fast for a large bus in a small space with a short length to run. Also there was another problem. A large pile of cars in front of us, and no time to stop, and really, no purpose in stopping.

And there was the little problem of the Scuts, whatever they were, waiting in the dark.

The bus slammed into the pile of automobiles and the darkness that surrounded them.