The Prom Goer's Interstellar Excursion

by Chris McCoy

  “Does he know how to drive?” said Sophie.

  “I don’t see how he would,” said Cad. “He has no hands.”

  The door of the control room opened and Ferguson walked in. He pressed the intercom button, and his voice rang through the speakers.

  “Your bandleader has arrived,” he said. “Let’s lay the song down so we can move on to the next one. We’ve got a lot of time to make up for.”

  “We?” said Skark, outraged.

  Skark straightened his back and slowly walked up to the control room, showing Ferguson his full eight feet of height. Overnight, he had sweated out the chemicals in his system, and what I supposed was his normal pinkish-purplish color had returned to his skin. Apparently his pallid countenance had had more to do with what was going into his body than with heredity.

  Skark put his palms on the window of the booth and stared down at Ferguson, looming over him like the specter from Ferguson’s past that he was.

  “You will never be in this band again,” boomed Skark. “We fired you because you could no longer balance your lifestyle with your commitments to this band. We fired you because you embarrassed us in front of our fans. We fired you because you were a pestilential presence on the bus, draining us before and after shows. We fired you because you thought you were bigger than the rest of the band.”

  Skark looked back at Cad and Driver.

  “All right, I realize that I did those things as well, but please forgive a bit of megalomania in your front man. Once again, I’m sorry.”

  “Glad to hear it,” said Cad.

  “You can’t say that my new song isn’t good,” said Ferguson.

  Skark focused his gaze back on Ferguson.

  “Isn’t good?” said Skark. “I would wish deafness on this entire universe so that nobody would have to hear your song. I would destroy every instrument in existence if it meant your song would forever go unplayed. Last night the Perfectly Reasonable became a band again, wholly and magnificently without you. If I had a choice between this barren, worthless little planet exploding beneath me or putting you back in the band, I would select that fatal boom—”

  CRUNCH!

  On cue, Ferguson’s house was ripped apart by the out-of-control Interstellar Libertine. The bus was spinning through the air, pulling a large piece of metal behind it where it had broken free from Ferguson’s ship.

  Apparently Walter’s plan had been to just hit the gas and see what happened.

  Because we had been in the process of watching Skark reaming out Ferguson, nobody was prepared for the bus to come crashing through the house or for the foam walls to tear open or for the subzero air to bite our skin. It felt like we had stepped into a twister. I grabbed Sophie and was holding her tightly, trying to shelter her from the collapsing house, when Skark collared us with his thin hands and tossed us into the bus. Driver climbed in behind us, breathing heavily and carrying Cad, who seemed dazed, with dilated pupils and pieces of foam in his hair—he’d been whacked in the head by some sort of debris.

  “Skark, come on!” yelled Driver, but Skark was waving him off. He was searching the rubble for instruments. I watched a guitar fly into the bus, followed by Cad’s bass and most of Driver’s drum set.

  “Your cymbals are somewhere out here,” said Skark.

  “Forget about the cymbals,” said Driver.

  “The cymbals make things funky,” said Skark.

  Skark pulled a high hat from the debris and was about to toss it in the bus when—DING—Ferguson appeared on the other side of the combat zone, covered in dust, ice in his hair, gripping his triangle.

  “You’re not leaving here,” said Ferguson.

  Skark looked at him and shook his head.

  “I’m sorry, Ferguson,” said Skark. “I don’t have the time it would require for you to tap me to death with your wand. If you get out of this, I’ll have a pair of tickets waiting for you at Dondoozle so you can enjoy the show, provided you’re the one wearing the straitjacket this time. Good day.”

  Skark stepped onto the bus, where Walter was sitting in Driver’s seat, hooves still on the controls, covered in purple goo, looking woozy from the crash.

  “I had to turn the ignition with my mouth, and I couldn’t stop the bus without hands,” said Walter apologetically. “I was trying to just nudge my way through the wall.”

  “I’ve got it from here, Walter,” said Driver. “You did well.”

  Walter and Driver switched places, Walter falling out of the driver’s seat and stumbling to the back of the bus. I looked down at Sophie, who was lying next to me on the floor where Skark had thrown us inside.

  “You all right?” I said.

  “About half a second from frostbite, I think,” she said. “Same as you, apparently.” Our exposed flesh—our faces, my chest, her neck—was blotchy with deep blue spots, where the skin was trying to keep itself alive.

  I looked around for a blanket, but there weren’t any. I was shocked at how empty the Interstellar Libertine was. When Ferguson had cut the hole in the side of the bus, everything had been sucked out of it—the furniture, the kitchen appliances, the beds, Skark’s sleeping pod, the secondhand amplifiers the band had purchased outside Jyfon, the contents of the wet bar, and the entirety of Skark’s wardrobe. The only thing left was a pair of Driver’s drumsticks, stuck in the armrest where he stored them while he drove.

  Driver pulled back on the controls and the bus lifted off the smashed floor of Ferguson’s recording studio, pointing its nose through the broken roof. He hit the accelerator. It felt like a normal takeoff, but then there was a burst of heat and the sensation of suddenly being jerked downward.

  “Dammit, that chunk of Ferguson’s ship we’re pulling is too heavy,” said Driver. “Somebody open the emergency door and get rid of it now.”

  Skark ambled toward the back of the bus, lumbering like an old-time Hollywood monster to keep his balance. He looked dazed, which maybe made sense considering he had just learned his entire wardrobe had disappeared. All he had left was his jacket and the jumpsuit on his bony back.

  Slipping and careening, Skark made it to the emergency exit, where he crouched and yanked the lever of the door, throwing it open with a sweep of his arm. A blast of icy air shot through the bus. Skark swung his leg in a powerful arc, kicking the cable that was tethering the bus to the piece of Ferguson’s ship. The cable snapped through the air like a snake, and the Interstellar Libertine lurched forward ferociously, liberated from its anchor.

  And then we had another problem to solve.

  Straining against the heavy anchor had caused the engine to overheat, and with an ominous VVVTT, the Interstellar Libertine stalled. The interior lights went black, and the bus began to drop from the limited altitude we’d struggled to achieve. Driver was pounding on the wheel and the dashboard to no effect. We were about to crash back down into Ferguson’s house.

  “I can’t get it to start,” said Driver. The bus was already starting to tip on its side. When it hit the ground, it was going to roll.

  “Let me try,” I said. “I have a trick for whenever my pickup stalls.”

  Driver stared at me. He could see I wasn’t kidding.

  “Whatever you’re going to do, do it fast,” Driver told me, bolting up from the chair and hanging on to the railing of the door to steady himself. I took his place, and through the windshield I could see the ground roaring toward us.

  I stared at the wheel. Then I reached forward, rubbed its underside three times, and whispered to it.

  “I love you,” I said.

  I turned the key, and the bus roared to life, gaining altitude and tacking sideways, righting itself.

  Driver was staring at me, stunned.

  “How did you do that?” he said.

  “Sometimes all a car wants is a little appreciation,” I said. “Your turn to take over.”

  Driver switched places with me behind the controls, and I made my way to the back to see if Sophie was okay. I found he
r gripping the frame of the closet, holding Walter.

  “You used the I love you trick, didn’t you?” she said.

  “Cars are the same everywhere,” I said.

  Behind Sophie, I saw Skark grab the handle of the emergency door, twist his body, and bolt it shut with an authoritative clang. The Interstellar Libertine shot toward the outer reaches of the planet’s atmosphere. Sophie lost her grip on Walter, who slid on the floor past me and crashed into the wall. Cad hung on to his pull-up bar as the bus rapidly ascended. As I seized the frame of the bathroom door and Sophie clutched the sink, I saw Driver’s drumsticks whiz past at a hazardous speed.

  “We’re almost out,” said Driver. “Hold on….”

  We skyed upward. I looked out the window and saw a coatless Ferguson standing in the rubble of his broken island home, taking pained steps as he tried to make his way toward the shelter of his ship. I couldn’t fathom how in that cold, without any protective clothing, he was going to survive. I watched him bend over to pick something up—from the shape of the object, it might have been his triangle case—but soon he was too small to see and all I could make out was the remnants of his home, haloed by the frozen pond and endless meadows of snow. He had the entire hemisphere to himself, and it seemed like that was where he was going to stay.

  He would not be rejoining the band.

  There was a thud of impact and the sound of warping metal as the Interstellar Libertine’s front grille crunched its way through the atmosphere, and then we were drifting again, sequined stars and pinpoints of light all around us. I saw Driver slump back in his seat and shift the bus into a lower gear.

  “Never much cared for that guy,” said Driver. He glanced into the back of the bus. “Skark, stop being so quiet. It’s time to celebrate. Looks like you’ll get the chance to play Dondoozle after all.”

  There was no response.

  “Skark?” said Cad.

  Everyone turned to look at Skark, who was sitting against the back wall of the bus, pointing to his neck.

  “Mrmrff,” he said.

  One of Driver’s drumsticks was stuck through his throat.

  Nobody was sure what to do about the piece of wood protruding from Skark’s neck. There wasn’t time to go to a hospital and still make the gig, but he clearly needed some sort of medical attention. Cad wanted to pull the stick out and see what happened, while Driver offered to use his thick hands to break it off at the base but leave the rest of it where it was, if only to make sure that Skark didn’t accidentally hit it on something and push it in farther. Sophie was rolling her eyes at the scene, pointing out that it was probably better to skip the festival and get Skark the help he needed, but each time she repeated the suggestion, Skark shook his head. He wasn’t missing Dondoozle.

  Skark was sitting against the wall that Ferguson had bolted to the side to cover the hole, staring brokenly at the bald interior of the bus. Even the rugs were gone. The mobile opium den that I had encountered when I had first climbed aboard now resembled the kind of abandoned clunker where a hobo might hide from the rain. Skark touched the skin around the drumstick with his fingers and winced. He opened his mouth and tried to speak, but nothing came out but spittle and air.

  We stood around, looking at him. Walter was next to me, banished to the closet no longer, contorting his body to pull the last bits of goop out of his fur with his teeth.

  “What do you think we should do?” said Driver.

  “I already solved one of your problems,” said Walter. “You’re on your own for this one.”

  “How did you find us?” said Cad.

  Walter told us that he had been picked up by a couple of teenagers going to Dondoozle. When he had said he had also been going to the festival—against his will, but still going—the teenagers had asked who he wanted to see. Walter had replied that he didn’t want to see anybody, and that he had been a prisoner of the Perfectly Reasonable.

  The teenagers had never even heard of the Perfectly Reasonable, so they had looked up the band on their phones and spent several minutes mocking old promotional photographs of the group, dissecting song lyrics, and generally treating the band like the prehistoric oddity they considered it to be. Walter had joined in the fun, finally getting a chance to expunge himself of years of resentment.

  “One of the band photographs had Ferguson in it,” said Walter. “I said to myself, Huh, that’s the guy I saw creeping around while I was staring out the window at the Dark Matter Foloptopus gig.”

  “You saw Ferguson?” said Driver. “Why didn’t you tell us?”

  “Why would I ever tell you anything?” said Walter. “That’s when I put it together that Ferguson might have been the one who hijacked the bus, since Skark is talking about him all the time. The teens looked up where Ferguson lived on their phones and dropped me off. Simple as that. They set me down in the wrong spot, so I had to swim across that horrible lake, but I made it.”

  “Why did you come back?” said Cad.

  Walter nodded to me.

  “Bennett was the first one in four years to pay attention to me,” said Walter. “He gave me grass. I figured I owed it to him to at least try.”

  “So if it wasn’t for Bennett—” said Cad.

  “You would still be there, absolutely,” said Walter. “Forgive me, Sophie. I’m only talking about the band here. You seem sweet, and I don’t mean to sound like I’d intentionally maroon you somewhere.”

  “Don’t worry, I wasn’t taking it that way,” said Sophie.

  “Ghack,” said Skark. It was the first noise we’d heard him make.

  “I’m willing to take that as a positive sign,” said Cad.

  “As am I,” said Driver. “Skark, save your strength. Everybody think of ways to disguise that stick in his neck.”

  “You could hang a white surrender flag from it,” said Sophie.

  “Ghack ghack,” said Skark, his distressed eyes momentarily flaming to life. Regardless of the woebegone nature of his situation, he was clearly insulted by the idea that someone thought he wouldn’t find a way out of this.

  I had to say, it was kind of admirable. As unaccommodating a presence as he had been my first few days on the bus, over the past twenty-four hours I’d come to like him. Stripped of his wine, his voice, and all his possessions, he still wanted to get to the gig and do his job.

  He gripped the end of the drumstick and wiggled it around. I heard it squish.

  “Relax, Skark,” said Cad.

  But Skark did not relax. He gave the drumstick one more jiggle, then defiantly yanked it out, leaving a bottle-cap-sized hole in his throat.

  “Oh my God,” said Sophie.

  Skark might have looked somewhat human from the outside, but it was clear that his insides were nothing like ours—the tissue on the other side of his skin was white and had the consistency of Styrofoam. There was no blood, no fluid, no tendons, just nothing but a hole in his voice box. He looked like a smoker who’d had a tracheostomy but forgotten to ask for the speaking valve.

  That said, his decision to pull the thing out seemed to have had little effect on his ability to talk—he was still making the same wheezing, ghacking sounds, except now there was an unsightly neck crater as visual accompaniment to the gasping and croaking.

  “You could have given a heads-up that you were going to do that,” said Cad, looking a little disturbed. “Kind of messed up.”

  “Ghack,” said Skark.

  The band was in trouble.

  The Dondoozle Festival took place on a largely abandoned, sod-covered planet in a remote galaxy known as Dnarp 229, which Cad informed me was considered a kind of galactic Wild West—if you killed somebody in a more civilized region and wanted to make sure you were never found, you came to Dnarp 229. Except for one weekend a year, that is.

  Not only was Dondoozle the largest music festival in the universe, it was the only one that really mattered. A good performance here, and your name was on the tip of every in-the-know tongue in creation.
A bad performance, and you never got invited back.

  The fact that the Perfectly Reasonable had given a strong performance at the festival years before was the only reason they were able to play Dondoozle again. They had been the headliners a decade earlier, when they had been in total command of their powers, and it was this magisterial performance that had catapulted them to the height of their stardom. At the time, they had been coming off The Perfectly Reasonable Is in Your Kitchen and They’re Hungry, which was their biggest-selling album to date. Cad had just joined the group and had been burning for success. Driver had been in better physical condition, which had provided him greater power in his drumming. Skark had thought he was about to change the universe with his music.

  But today, the fans at the festival were there to see anybody but the Perfectly Reasonable. They were the first band playing—always the least desirable time slot, because attendees were still arriving and wanted to check out the schedule, stretch their legs, and generally get settled. The only reason the band was being allowed to play at all was that the festival programmer was doing them a favor as a nod of respect to their triumphant gig years before. How big a favor was debatable, given the way they had been buried in the schedule.

  The festival was located on a borderless stretch of flat, burned ground, and the lack of vegetation meant that it was possible to see the ten stages that had been set up, stretching all the way to the dead mountains on the horizon.

  Due to the lack of cover, it was hot, and to stay cool the fans milling about wore little clothing, which made for a crash course in alien anatomy. Because of the nature of the festival—bands from all over the universe coming to one place—it was by far the most diverse place I’d ever been. I saw wood-colored clouds disappearing from one side of the festival and materializing at the front of the lines at the busy beverage stands. I saw sheets of water whooshing through the crowd, avoiding overheated sand trolls that were trying to leap through them to cool off. I saw sentient chunks of asphalt rolling unsteadily along, and enthusiastic chairs walking about, carrying their girlfriends, who were also chairs, which was kind of cute. I saw lime-green shadows swooping down and snatching pretzels from the hands of patrons who actually looked like oversized pretzels, which made me wonder if some sort of cannibalism was going on. The grounds were crowded and the heat was oppressive, and yet everybody seemed to be in a jubilant mood—hugging, chatting, drinking, eating, comparing terrible tattoos.