Bubba and the Cosmic Blood-Suckers

by Joe R. Lansdale

  Colonel wandered over, said, “All right. Take the pills, and wait. You pull those rip cords to come back, the snapping free of the harnesses from the seats, one or both, activates the explosives. You have about three seconds, if that long, before it all blows.”

  “Gotcha,” Jenny said.

  Elvis took his pill, then a fat slug of water. He passed the water bottle to Jenny, and she followed suit.

  Colonel looked at his watch. He said, “Alright, everyone stand back. What’s near them goes with them.”

  I found myself hustling pretty quick, over to the front door of the house. I stood under the scorched door sill. I thought about it, decided it wasn’t so crazy it just might work. It was in fact so crazy it was not going to work. But it was done by then. All I could do was watch and wait, figure it was the last time I would ever see either of them.

  The air shimmered near the car, and then the car and Jenny and Elvis shimmered, as if I were seeing them through a heat wave, or maybe more like they were a mirage, and then Elvis turned on the car’s lights (cause it’s dark over there), started the car, jerked the gear into position as he popped the clutch and hit the gas, and let out with a rebel yell. And let me tell you, that pink Cadillac was out of there.

  I mean that. Literally. It leapt forward onto that ramp, started up, and then I saw a great hole open in front of the ramp, and then the whole ramp was gone, and there was this strange gap and the Caddy went up and over the lip of that ramp, and then…

  Nothing. The Caddy was gone. It may have been them taking the drug, but we saw what it did. We saw them go away and pop from view.

  The ramp was there, and the reels that the elastic was on whistled and whined and grew taut, but the straps just went into a spot in the air and stayed there, stretched.

  “Good luck, you crazy fools,” John Henry said so loud my head rocked.

  42

  ELVIS AND JENNY IN THAT PINK CADILLAC

  The drug made Elvis feel as if his head were swelling like a helium balloon. When he saw the gap open around them, the ramp temporarily poking into that dark dimension, he put the pedal to the metal. The Cadillac’s engine screamed, and away they flew.

  Jenny said, “Go, Elvis, go.” And then she hit a high note, right out of her act, where she ends her last song and goes for the gusto, raising the sting of her voice beyond the impossible; the thing she was noted for, and then the voice died out and the end of the ramp was clearly in sight.

  And then the ramp wasn’t a ramp. It was that black cliff of slick stone and around the cliff was more blackness. They could hear the pounding of the dark surf in the distance. The air was thin and hard to breathe. The car slipped and slid a little, but it managed to keep on track, and as they neared the narrow tip of the cliff they saw in the headlights the huge, dark, writhing thing.

  The Nest.

  Red dots like fire moved inside of the nest, pulsed and shined out of it in spots. Elvis and Jenny saw that the nest was actually alive. Two of the largest red dots were eyes, and they blinked, and a greasy red tongue about the size of the San Francisco bridge lapped out of a gap and whipped through the air, then withdrew back into blackness.

  Above the rock wall to which the living nest was fastened, Big Mama and a row of large white grubs could be seen. The cosmic vampires in another form had come home to visit. Their heads were bent down and jammed into the top of the nest. Their bodies vibrated as the nest sucked them dry.

  More interesting was this: the end of that cliff was coming up fast. Elvis yelled that rebel yell again and kept his foot to the floorboard. Jenny said, “Yee-Haw!”

  Elvis would remember it as if it all happened in slow motion. And who knows, maybe over in that dimension it did happen in slow motion.

  The Cadillac shot off the cliff and sailed toward the nest, and in the last moments before the car was to hit, they saw this in the headlights: Big Mama lifted her head out of the nest like an actor poking their noggin through a split in theater curtains. She looked up with a face that was wide and white, but somehow human. And then the car dipped slightly, all five thousand pounds of it, still on target for the center of the nest.

  “Now,” Elvis said, and he pulled his rip cord, or rather that which would pull the elastic bands taut, and Jenny did the same.

  The car sailed out from under them. The elastic popped them free (you could hear it snap in both dimensions) and the Caddy sailed out from under them.

  What Elvis hadn’t expected was the pain. Severe pain in his back and shoulders. And even in his pain he saw the Cadillac flying toward the nest like a rocket, the explosion happening on contact. And what an explosion. The air in front of them turned to hot flame, and in the light from the flame Elvis could see flying fragments of steel and glass, chunks of nest (meat or whatever), and then all those fragments spread out in all directions, black and red and white and hot pink, and then everything fell out of sight into the black abyss, and the cloth roof that could be fit over the Caddy fluttered by them like a giant bat.

  A piece of glass hit Elvis in the hip, and he yelled, and then the darkness that had consumed them was light again, like someone flipped a switch. They were snapped back over the ramp, coming short of the mats, striking the bottom of the ramp on their asses, and then sliding unceremoniously onto the mats that lay on the ground, and finished up by slamming against the mats leaning against the rack.

  Elvis thought: I could have missed the goddamn mats altogether and felt just the same.

  He turned his head. To his right was Jenny. She was unconscious, and he wasn’t sure she was breathing.

  43

  JOHNNY'S JOURNAL:

  AND IT ALL WRAPS UP

  So now you know who The One was. The thing that was inside the nest, or was the nest. Hard to sort that out altogether.

  In the aftermath, even in our dimension, the air smelled like burnt toast and a boiled egg fart. There were fragments of Cadillac, and pieces of this and that; white goo, black goo, and rock fragments, scattered on the ramp.

  Elvis and Jenny appeared to be intact, but Jenny wasn’t moving. Elvis was cursing and writhing his way out of the harness.

  By the time I got to them, Elvis was bent over Jenny, giving her mouth to mouth resuscitation. Her hands came up and pushed at his chest.

  “That’s the only way you’ll taste my lips,” she said.

  Elvis laughed. Tears ran down his cheeks. He grabbed her and pulled her to him.

  “Ouch,” she said. “Broken up here. Take it easy.”

  Well, that was pretty much it. We hung around for about a week there. Elvis and Jenny got some medical attention, but neither were badly injured, and we kept our feelers out for a resurgence of weird-ass shit activity, but there was none. They were either wiped out, or taking one hell of a rest. Blind Man took a bit of Rococo Blue and sent out his mental feelers.

  “The dimension is empty of life,” he said, and we decided to believe him.

  Later, outside, I sniffed. The smell from the explosion that had been partly in both worlds was gone. The air was crisp and stank only of the Mississippi.

  Elvis and House Ghost rode the light fantastic upstairs during the couple of weeks where he recovered from his hip wound. From all that went on upstairs I determined, wound or no wound, he was fine.

  I noticed Jenny seemed a little jealous, but she didn’t say anything. Frankly, it was all a little embarrassing, hearing Elvis and House Ghost go at it, but hey, it was also a little stimulating. I had a few nights with Mrs. Palm and her Five Daughters.

  We had a wake for Jack. Everyone cried, even Colonel.

  I will tell you this, once we left there, took the paddle wheel back to the dock where me and Elvis first joined the crew, when I drove the car up out of the innards of the great paddle wheel, Elvis was not only in the backseat, so was Jenny.

  House Ghost or no House Ghost, they had a connection. When I got them back to Memphis, Elvis didn’t stay at Graceland longer than a second, and then he and Jenny we
re out of there, riding in a powder-blue Cadillac convertible. This time, they wouldn’t be driving into hell. Where they went and what they did, I have no idea, but when Elvis came back a month or so later she wasn’t with him.

  About a month later I started seeing Jenny on TV singing, and I never worked with her again. I heard she had quit the monster-killing business. She had a few hits, and then she was gone, and in my view, so was Elvis. Oh, there was a guy that looked a lot like him (not quite as tall), but it wasn’t him, I will bet you that. He was the guy who came back in the powder-blue Cadillac. There was never a moment when that Elvis seemed to know about Monster Hunting, or anything that had gone before. He was well versed in all things Elvis, but I tell you, it wasn’t the same guy. A month would have been just the right time to get him all trained up in what he needed to know, especially if he was already an imitator, looked like him, knew the songs and could sing them.

  But I told you my suspicions early on.

  The real Elvis is out there, somewhere.

  44

  COLONEL AND ELVIS: A MOTEL IN HOUSTON, TEXAS

  “So I won’t lose all my memory?” Elvis said.

  “No,” Colonel said. “Just the parts that have to do with…the monsters. You’ll remember me, your career as a singer, your life as others know it. You won’t know about your mother’s spirit having been in that bag, or about me setting it free. You won’t remember meeting Jenny. But that’s all right, after last night, she won’t remember you either. She made the same choice, Elvis. I didn’t like it at first, but truth is, this game is getting old, and so am I, and old to me is a far more relative term than you might expect.”

  “After this, in other words, you’ll just be the same old asshole I’ve always known?”

  “Exactly. Sebastian Haff. He’s the best of the impersonators. You picked wisely. We can maybe do a contract or something, should you want to come back and be you. The musical you. The monster-killer you, that’s done now and forever, but the musical you, we could have a contract. You’re sure that’s what you want?”

  “It is.”

  Colonel nodded.

  “Now take this pill…it’s not Rococo Blue…but it helps me set the tone. It’s a powerful drug, but in a different way. Its effects pass quickly, but it’s not the sort of thing you would want to make a habit of taking. It’ll just be this once, this pill. There you go. Now close your eyes, and when you open them, look at what’s right in front of you, a shiny pocket watch, and watch it swing, and listen to the sound of my voice… I’ll walk you out of the Boo-Buddy world, as Johnny calls them, and into a new one where you’re you pretending to be someone else who is pretending to be you. Pay attention now. Watch the watch.”

  45

  OUT THERE

  In a powder-blue Cadillac, rolling down Highway 80, a man who looked a lot like Elvis Presley, but claimed to be an Elvis impersonator named Sebastian Haff, drove fast. He was driving away from two pasts. One he remembered and one he did not.

  We call this the end, baby.