The Complete Drive-In

5

On the morning after my night contemplating, thinking maybe this place was as good as it got, and that was good enough, I awoke and climbed to the top of our tree and saw an amazing and disturbing sight.

First off, the world was blood-colored; the sun had sunk halfway into the sea, and great clouds of steam were rising up from it.

The water was drying up, running away from the shore. Fish were leaping about as they were boiled alive. All of this I could see, and when I told the others, we made the decision to hasten our pace, to see if we could reach the great bridge to the sky.

Steve said, “I was thinking, wouldn’t it be nice to go back there and get some of those boiled fish.”

“And I was thinking,” Grace said, “the time we spent doing that might be a bad idea. We too could soon be boiled. And if the sun goes completely down into the sea, will it rise again? Will there be only night? Will the moon come out? Will it fall too? Will the stars drop off? Time, however it works here, is not on our side.”

So we went along swift in the blood-red light, and in time that light turned stranger yet as night fell. The sun didn’t want to go away, so there was a red stain across the night sky. The moon shone silver, and full, and the stars were dots of fire, and if you looked real close, there seemed to be creases in the night, as if dark velvet cloth that had been stretched was no longer taut, but was in fact drooping.

We ate the dried dog-urine fruit, and kept pushing, and just as the moon dipped away, and the day came on bloody-dark, we began to smell the odor of death. It was a stiff odor that shoved at us, but we ignored it. We could see the bridge clearly above the trees, and we pushed on in that direction, the stench growing strong enough to cut and make bricks.

It got so stout, that each of us took turns puking, but we kept on keeping on. In time, though the smell never went away, our nostrils and our stomachs accepted it.

By the time night had come, and we had slept, and risen again before the moon fell down, we came upon the source of the odor. The tropical forest had disappeared, and there was just a bleak stretch of ground, and a great milehigh (I’m guessing here as to the height) pile of something we couldn’t identify. We stood there looking at it, and as we did, slowly, the moon fell off, and the dying sunlight was all we had, giving us a rusty glow and a view of the clearing and the pile in the middle of it.

“My God,” Steve said.

“If God had anything to do with this,” Grace said, “then he’s just as big an asshole as I’ve always thought.”

I had to agree.

It was a great black pile, and the pile buzzed and flexed and moved.