Joe Lansdale - The Best of Joe R. Lansdale

It wasn’t as well lighted in there. The walls were bleak and gray. Brother Lazarus stopped the bus and got off, and another monk came on board. He was tall and thin and had crooked buck teeth that dented his bottom lip. He also had a twelve-gauge pump shotgun.

“This is Brother Fred,” the nun said. “He’ll be your tour guide.”

Brother Fred forced Wayne and Calhoun off the bus, away from the dead folks in their mouse-ear hats and the nun in her tight, black panties, jabbed them along a dark corridor, up a swirl of stairs and down a longer corridor with open doors on either side and rooms filled with dark and light and spoiled meat and guts on hooks and skulls and bones lying about like discarded walnut shells and broken sticks; rooms full of dead folks (truly dead) stacked neat as firewood, and rooms full of stone shelves stuffed with beakers of fiery-red and sewer-green and sky-blue and piss-yellow liquids, as well as glass coils through which other colored fluids fled as if chased, smoked as if nervous, and ran into big flasks as if relieved; rooms with platforms and tables and boxes and stools and chairs covered with instruments or dead folks or dead-folk pieces or the asses of monks and nuns as they sat and held charts or tubes or body parts and frowned at them with concentration, lips pursed as if about to explode with some earth-shattering pronouncement; and finally they came to a little room with a tall, glassless window that looked out upon the bright, shiny mess that was Jesus Land.

The room was simple. Table, two chairs, two beds — one on either side of the room. The walls were stone and unadorned. To the right was a little bathroom without a door.

Wayne walked to the window and looked out at Jesus Land pulsing and thumping like a desperate heart. He listened to the music a moment, leaned over and stuck his head outside.

They were high up and there was nothing but a straight drop. If you jumped, you’d wind up with the heels of your boots under your tonsils.

Wayne let out a whistle in appreciation of the drop. Brother Fred thought it was a compliment for Jesus Land. He said, “It’s a miracle, isn’t it?”

“Miracle?” Calhoun said. “This goony light show? This ain’t no miracle. This is for shit. Get that nun on the bus back there to bend over and shit a perfectly round turd through a hoop at twenty paces, and I’ll call that a miracle, Mr. Fucked-up Teeth. But this Jesus Land crap is the dumbest fucking idea since dog sweaters.

“And look at this place. You could use some knickknacks or something in here. A picture of some ole naked gal doing a donkey, couple of pigs fucking. Anything. And a door on the shitter would be nice. I hate to be straining out a big one and know someone can look in on me. It ain’t decent. A man ought to have his fucking grunts in private. This place reminds me of a motel I stayed at in Waco one night, and I made the goddamn manager give me my money back. The roaches in that shit hole were big enough to use the shower.”

Brother Fred listened to all this without blinking an eye, as if seeing Calhoun talk was as amazing as seeing a frog sing. He said. “Sleep tight, don’t let the bed bugs bite. Tomorrow you start to work.”

“I don’t want no fucking job,” Calhoun said.

“Goodnight, children,” Brother Fred said, and with that he closed the door and they heard it lock, loud and final as the clicking of the drop board on a gallows.

At dawn, Wayne got up and took a leak, went to the window to look out. The stage where the monks had played and the nun had jumped was empty. The skeletal shapes he had seen last night were tracks and frames from rides long abandoned. He had a sudden vision of Jesus and his disciples riding a roller coaster, their long hair and robes flapping in the wind.

The large crucified Jesus looked unimpressive without its lights and night’s mystery, like a whore in harsh sunlight with makeup gone and wig askew.

“Got any ideas how we’re gonna get out of here?” Calhoun asked.

Wayne looked at Calhoun. He was sitting on the bed, pulling on his boots.

Wayne shook his head.

“I could use a smoke. You know, I think we ought to work together. Then we can try to kill each other.”

Unconsciously, Calhoun touched his ear where Wayne had bitten off the lobe.

“Wouldn’t trust you as far as I could kick you,” Wayne said.

“I hear that. But I give my word. And my word’s something you can count on. I won’t twist it.”

Wayne studied Calhoun, thought: Well, there wasn’t anything to lose. He’d just watch his ass.

“All right,” Wayne said. “Give me your word you’ll work with me on getting us out of this mess, and when we’re good and free, and you say your word has gone far enough, we can settle up.”

“Deal,” Calhoun said, and offered his hand. Wayne looked at it.

“This seals it,” Calhoun said.

Wayne took Calhoun’s hand and they shook.

Moments later the door unlocked and a smiling monk with hair the color and texture of mold fuzz came in with Brother Fred, who still had his pump shotgun. There were two dead folks with them. A man and a woman. They wore torn clothes and the mouse-ear hats. Neither looked long dead or smelled particularly bad. Actually, the monks smelled worse.

Using the barrel of the shotgun, Brother Fred poked them down the hall to a room with metal tables and medical instruments.

Brother Lazarus was on the far side of one of the tables. He was smiling. His nose looked especially cancerous this morning. A white pustule the size of a thumb tip had taken up residence on the left side of his snout, and it looked like a pearl onion in a turd.

Nearby stood a nun. She was short with good, if skinny, legs, and she wore the same outfit as the nun on the bus. It looked more girlish on her, perhaps because she was thin and small-breasted. She had a nice face, and eyes that were all pupil. Wisps of blond hair crawled out around the edges of her headgear.

She looked pale and weak, as if wearied to the bone. There was a birthmark on her right cheek that looked like a distant view of a small bird in flight.

“Good morning,” Brother Lazarus said. “I hope you gentlemen slept well.”

“What’s this about work?” Wayne said.

“Work?” Brother Lazarus said.

“I described it to them that way,” Brother Fred said. “Perhaps an impulsive description.”

“I’ll say,” Brother Lazarus said. “No work here, gentlemen. You have my word on that. We do all the work. Lie on these tables and we’ll take a sampling of your blood.”

“Why?” Wayne said.

“Science,” Brother Lazarus said. “I intend to find a cure for this germ that makes the dead come back to life, and to do that, I need living human beings to study. Sounds kind of mad scientist, doesn’t it? But I assure you, you’ve nothing to lose but a few drops of blood. Well, maybe more than a few drops, but nothing serious.”

“Use your own goddamn blood,” Calhoun said.

“We do. But we’re always looking for fresh specimens. Little here, little there. And if you don’t do it, we’ll kill you.”

Calhoun spun and hit Brother Fred on the nose. It was a solid punch and Brother Fred hit the floor on his butt, but he hung onto the shotgun and pointed it up at Calhoun. “Go on,” he said, his nose streaming blood. “Try that again.”

Wayne flexed to help, but hesitated. He could kick Brother Fred in the head from where he was, but that might not keep him from shooting Calhoun, and there would go the extra reward money. And besides, he’d given his word to the bastard that they’d try to help each other survive until they got out of this.