Joe Lansdale - The Complete Drive-In

I looked, and sure enough, I could see the wires twisting down and into the tops of their skulls.

“Oh, God Almighty,” Reba said. We rushed over to where she stood, and what we saw made us all gasp and go weak.

Hanging in a row were a number of alien and human bodies. We recognized the human shapes. There were several copies of each. There were crude, carved wooden copies, and windup copies, and I suppose there could have been copies in the pile below, and we just hadn’t seen them, or they were too rotted, or too mixed together.

It was all the members of the drive-in.

Replicas of them.

I saw my old friends, Randy and Willard… Crier… Many others.

But there was something even more stunning.

Us.

Figures of us.

Rows of us.

Hanging there. Mouths open. Wires running into our heads. Windup versions. Crude wooden versions. Naked little suckers letting it all hang out.

“Ain’t this the shits?” Steve said.

“I think my tits perk higher than that,” Grace said, looking down the row of replicas.

“Damn, Jack,” Steve said. “Are you really that well hung?”

“He is,” Reba said.

“I second that,” Grace said.

“I wish I hadn’t asked,” Steve said.

Grace had Steve boost her up to the top of one of the hanging figures of herself. She put her hands on its head, said, “The cable has a little hook, and it fits into a thin loop around the bodies’ necks. The wires, they… seem to be just pushed into the tops of the skulls.”

Grace yanked at the wires. They came free. “Yep,” she said. “I’m going to unhook this one.”

She did, and swung down, and Steve managed the copy down. We pulled the body away from the hanging rows and out into an open space where there was a little more light.

We all bent over and pushed the inert figure’s hair around, felt where the wires had fastened into its skull. There were these little bumps, and if you looked close, really close, you could see the holes where they had gone in.

“What the fuck could this all be about?” Steve said.

“I have an idea,” Reba said. “And I don’t like it.”

“What?” I said.

“Bend over, Jack. Put your head toward me.”

I did as I was asked. Reba ran her fingers through my hair. She said, “I found these before. I just thought they were birthmarks… They look like the marks from the wires in the Grace figure head.”

“Now, wait a minute… Coincidence. They’re just little birthmarks or something. I didn’t even know I had them.”

Reba didn’t answer. She just bent forward, offering me her skull. Reluctantly, I ran my trembling fingers through her hair. There were little bumps.

“The same,” I said.

Grace ducked her head forward. I ran my fingers through her beautiful, blonde hair. Same bumps.

Steve ran his own fingers through his hair, said, “Me too.”

“I don’t think I like what I’m thinking,” I said. “The catfish,” Grace said. “Ed. Remember, there were edible wires inside his flesh. They were so big, we could see them. But with us… They’re small. They could be… must be inside us.”

“No,” Steve said. “I’m human. Can you make a machine hungry, make it want sex and Coca-Cola? I don’t think so. Shit, man, I had a life before this crazy place. It sucked, but it was better than this. I got all kinds of memories. I got a divorce, for heaven’s sake. I mean, what robot wants to shit or pee?”

“We all have lives,” Grace said.

“No,” Reba said. “Think about it. The windup versions, the woodcut versions. It’s like whoever made them was learning. Advancing.”

“But, couldn’t they just be models based on us?” Steve said.

“We all have the place for the wires in the tops of our heads,” Reba said.

“It’s too crazy,” Grace said. “You mean, all our memories are… false.”

Reba nodded. “Could be.”

“We’re just goddamn robots,” Steve said.

“Technically,” I said, “I think we’re androids.”

“But East Texas. Our homes… You mean, they never were? We never left this world? Or rather, we’ve always been here?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But, I’ll tell you what. I’m pissed. We’ve been fucked… Jesus. That means Mom and Dad. They never were. Or they were machines. Like everyone else.”

“Like us,” Reba said. “What I’m thinking is they may never have been your parents. It may be all in our head. In our… Jesus… in our wires and circuits. We were given past histories, tossed into this world for something’s entertainment. Even the aliens, they’re false. They’re just bodies. Rubber at first. Then devices like us. Something someone was playing with until he figured out how to do it better, and then, he/she/it grew bored.”

“That would explain why the world is coming apart,” Grace said. “Our creator. He just doesn’t give a shit anymore. I always thought, you had a creator, he had to be better than some egotistical Christian god, wanting everyone to love him and worship him while he killed people with diseases and made them suffer… But, you know, compared to our god, that Christian god is looking pretty good… If there ever was a religion called Christianity… My Lord, everything is in question.”

“All of it must have been based on some truth,” I said. “Our creator’s truth.”

We all sat down around the Grace shape on the floor. Just sat there. Quiet. For a long, long time.

Finally Grace said, “I say we find this creator, and kill the sonofabitch.”

“Sounds good,” I said.

“Wouldn’t that be a bad idea?” Steve said. “He is, after all, our Frankenstein… And how do I know that? Is there really a character called Frankenstein? Or is that just part of the whole brain implant, probably a chip in my head of some kind. Man, everything we know or have learned may be a big old fart-smelling lie.”

“We’re each different,” Grace said. “Where he fucked up, is he gave us free will. We can do what we want. And that means killing him. Hell, wanting to do that. Have some kind of revenge. That makes us human, don’t it?”

“If there ever were humans,” I said.

It took a long time for us to make our way around the funnel, to the other side. We ended up sleeping a lot, and eating all our fruit. But finally we made our way to where the planes and buses and such were.

Some were real, or looked real. Some had windups at their backs. One of the planes, a little two-seater, had a propeller in the front that was attached with a tightly wound rubber band.

The machines were average sized. One of the cars was a 1966 tan Chevy Impala. The window was down. Grace stuck her head inside, said, “The keys are in it.”

She got inside, turned the key. The car started.

“Now there’s something neat,” she said. “Low on gas, but I say we try it.”

We climbed in, Grace at the wheel. She wheeled around the automotive and aerial debris, and we were off again, tooling along a great tile floor.

We found a wide gap in a wall, a mousehole, and we drove through that. There were trees in there, but they were prop trees, the sort that looked real front on, but at their backs were little stands that held them up.

We passed towns made the same way. Towns we knew. It was Interstate I-45, or so said the road signs, and the towns were the right towns, but they weren’t real. There were even people standing about, at the sides of the road, but they too were false, with little stands at their backs. False cars. False dogs and cats.

Everything a plywood and cardboard lie.

We drove on, and the little towns fell away and gave place to more woods. The woods grew darker and we could see huge sets of glowing eyes out there.