Joe Lansdale - The Complete Drive-In

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.

Things 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.