Then, like a bad cartoon, the rotted telephone pole tumbled to the ground—right on top of the Asian. Fortunately for me, when the pole landed, Frank was on top of it—not under it. A crushed corpse wouldn’t have done me much good. He was unconscious, though; the fall had probably bumped his head pretty hard against the pole.
I jumped out of the car and so did Trash. Bowie knife in hand, he cut the ropes off Frank.
Trash helped me pick up the stunned Frank and put him in the front seat. But Trash stayed out of the car.
“Come on. Get in,” I shouted.
“There’s not enough room for me in there, too,” he said.
He was right. With me, Fiona, Garth, and Frank, the car was packed.
“Get going. I can take care of myself.” Trash handed me his knife. “Here, you may need this.” He shut the door.
“Thanks, buddy,” I yelled as we rolled away from Spider Square. I wondered if he’d forgotten about the fortune I had promised him. Or maybe—and I hope this was the case—he’d figured our well-being was more important than any amount of money.
Colliding with the telephone pole messed up the Ratmobile. The car wobbled like a drunken hippo. It veered to the left; with all my strength I pulled at the steering wheel to keep it going straight. I stepped down hard on the gas, but the top speed I could manage was only thirty miles per hour.
I drove the police car in the same direction as the tow train, but the vehicle was nowhere in sight.
There was a sign that said The Pits. Ahead I could see an expanse of flat land dotted with several craters. There the zombies stood packed tight in spider-filled holes with only their heads sticking out aboveground. This was where the dead came to get their venomous jollies.
I looked across the field and saw the tow train. If I drove through The Pits, maybe I could catch up with it.
I pulled the Ratmobile off the road. The land was flat but covered in blood and loose gravel; I was sliding around like crazy. I switched to low gear and drove the police car over the zombie heads to get better traction. The sounds of their heads cracking as we drove over them were completely sickening, but even worse were the excited squeals and frantic slurps of the enormous spiders, feasting on their exposed brains. It felt like we were driving through a pumpkin patch a couple of weeks after Halloween, except those weren’t ripe pumpkins exploding under my tires.
Finally I made it back onto the road and drove right next to the tow train. Then I sped the Ratmobile in front of it and slammed on the brakes. The tow train and the police car both ground to a metal-squealing stop.
I got out of the car and climbed onto the tow train.
“You wrecked my train. My beautiful train,” cried the flabby zombie, hitting me with an arm from one of the mummies.
I stabbed him in the throat with Trash’s knife, and he fell to his knees. I then turned him around and pushed him headfirst into the flaming boiler.
Garth and Fiona helped me unhook Monster from the tow train’s chains. Then we loaded Frank into the Barracuda.
“Uh-oh,” Fiona said. “Look what’s coming this way.”
Dozens of enraged zombies from the spider pits scrambled toward us, spiders dropping from their bite-flamed limbs. An especially spry cadaver raced ahead of the others and grabbed Fiona.
Garth rushed to help her. “You guys had better take off,” he shouted at me. “I’ll take care of this.”
I climbed in and started the engine. It was good to be back behind Monster’s wheel. As I drove off, I took one last look at my . . . friends? Yes, dead or not, they were my friends. Garth and Fiona were now on top of the tow train, pelting the crazed zombies with flaming mummy chunks.
They’d be okay.
I turned onto a long stretch of empty road, trying to figure out what to do next. Frank was still unconscious, but eventually he would wake up. Then what?
Ahead in the distance, I saw a sign. I squinted to make out the words.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
MR. FRANK’S WILD RIDE
Was it the same sign, or were there lots of signs like that?
Suddenly Frank reared up from his seat. “You just can’t keep your grubby mitts off this car.” He grabbed the wheel and twisted it sharply, setting the car spinning.
I tried to stop it but the brakes wouldn’t respond, no matter how hard I pumped them.
With a loud bray of a laugh, Frank stomped on the gas pedal.
The car roared to thunderous life.
“Attaboy.” Frank cackled. “This old beauty never lets me down.”
It was true. It was like the car was drawing power from Frank. Or maybe the car and Frank were fueling each other. Frank had recovered pretty quickly.
I was in a runaway car, struggling over the wheel with the craziest bastard I’d ever met. A man whose wife I’d been screwing, whose car I’d been driving, whose body I’d been wearing. I knew Frank’s head games. I knew him inside and out.
One would have thought he couldn’t have surprised me at that point.
One would have been wrong.
“I’m going to have to pull out my big guns to take care of you, boy,” he screamed. “Like I said—that River of Time gave me some power. I think it’s time you got a taste.”
Frank’s face—or rather, my face—was changing and not for the better. His eyes widened and swelled, his pupils glowing and spinning, spinning and glowing, until they became red spirals, twirling like twin hypnodisks.
His lips grew puffy like cheap hot dogs cooking in the microwave, though hot dogs usually don’t grow, like a second skin, a thick layer of cherry-red lipstick. His cheeks also puffed up, bulging into fleshy mounds as pink and shiny as a baby’s butt cheeks. His stubby fingertips sprouted long talons with bright candy-cane stripes that matched his twirling eyes.
“You’ve been clowning around with me long enough,” Frank said. “I’m glad I ran over your bitch mother. I’m sick of youriding my ass.”
He waved his clown claws in the air and then plunged his nails into the dashboard, splintering the plastic. Instantly, swirls of red and white raced outward from the damaged area along the surface of the dashboard, then over the steering wheel, the seats, the doors, until the inside of Monster looked like a queasy giant had barfed up the world’s largest sundae.
Suddenly a bangy-clangy racket rose from the back of the car, and Monster began to fishtail wildly.
“Listen to that junk in the trunk.” Frank cackled. Mad scarlet coils of hair sprang out of his scalp, and soon the top of his head was covered with a foot-thick tangle of wild, bouncing ringlets.
“What the hell is that sound?” I shouted above the noise.
“That? I put the safety bar back where I’d been keeping it,” Frank said. “Nobody told you it was okay to move my shit.”
I glanced out the back window and saw that the trunk door had flown off and a jumble of steel poles and pipes and bars—some bare metal, others painted red and glowing green—were rising out of the rear of the car. It reminded me of a gigantic daddy longlegs on its back, flailing its spindly legs at the sky, with Monster being the body of the critter.
The clanging continued to grow louder.
“Want a better look, kid?” Frank said. He raised his claws again and tore through the roof of the car from front to back, ripping through it with the ease of a plastic knife gliding through gelatin. He kept tearing until he created a huge hole.
Above us, the steel rigging was forming into a familiar structure. It took me just a second to realize I was looking at the skeleton of . . .
“A Ferris wheel,” Frank cried. “You loooove carnivals, don’t ya? Pretty rides, all those colors. Look, I’m growin’ ya your own personal ride right now. Growing it out of that safety bar. ’Course, you can’t really call it a safety bar if it doesn’t work. No indeedy. For my poor Maddy, that was a doom bar, plain and simple.
“Oh, I realize that faulty bar was to blame, not you, but ya know what? I don’t care. I still hate
you. I want to watch you squeal with agony in a lake of burning tar. And your loved ones, too. And I’ll see that the job gets done.”
The growing beams and rods rattled, clattered, and whined as they assembled themselves into the rotating framework of the Ferris wheel. I watched, mesmerized. I wasn’t watching the road, but then, there was no point in doing that anyway, since I no longer had any control over Monster.
Painted flames rose like bright blisters on the surface of the metal. Sparkling strings of red and green bulbs slithered snakelike over the metal supports, fastening themselves at various points along the way.
Then, like a magic tree simultaneously sprouting strange fruit and enormous leaves, rectangular metal panels and huge cottony puff balls and leathery flaps sprang forth from the circular frame, and they proceeded to twist and turn and fold themselves. The panels clapped into shape, the fluff billowed across them, and the leather stretched over all that—rivets even popped into place to hold the leather together—all to create perfect seats for the ride.
Frank stood up so that the top half of his body was above the roof of the car. He reached deep into his clown pockets and pulled out ball after syrup-drippy ball of multicolored popcorn. “Fly, my pretties,” he said, flinging the popcorn balls into the seats.
One ball hit a seat, stuck to it and—boom. Suddenly there was Connie, or rather, a bloated zombie version of her, dead as a roadkill skunk and twice as rotten. Boom. Next, zombie Moose. Boom. Zombie Mom. Boom. Zombie Grandma. Boom. And there was . . .
Right next to Mom sat an undead baby with a tiny, withered body and an old, old look in his big, sad eyes. Mom stroked his leathery gourd of a head, and I figured it must be Peter. Her first kid, the older brother I never knew. He kind of looked like me, as much as any dead baby can look like a sibling. The baby gave me a slow wink, then turned to gaze off into the distance. He lifted a bone-thin arm and pointed at the horizon.
A cloud of bats was heading straight for us. Skeletal bats with tatters of hairy leather stretched across their rattling wing bones. But that wasn’t the worst of it. Dozens of the enormous bat creatures from the River of Time were following close behind.
“No. You’ll spoil everything,” Frank shouted, staring at the bat creatures. “Get the fuck out. Private party. You’re not invited. Get the fuckety-fuck-fuck out of here, you big crazy flying fucks.” He turned to me. “Fuck ’em. I’m still going to have my fun. Get set for a wild ride.”
Wilder than this? I thought. Wilder than a runaway Ferris wheel rolling out of control through the Land of the Dead?
Frank tore away more of the car’s roof, then grabbed me by the shoulders and lifted me up as though I were a puny, lightweight scarecrow. He flung me into one of the seats on the wheel, where I landed in a heap, my right arm twisted behind my back. I struggled into an upright position.
The safety bar—or rather, that damned doom bar—dropped across the seat in front of me. Then more thin metal bars folded out of it, like blades out of a Swiss army knife. Each bar was tipped with pliers. The bars fanned out and extended toward me, pushing me against the seat. All the metal jaws clamped onto my legs, my arms, my belly, tearing into my flesh, pinning me into position.
The Ferris wheel began to spin fast. Faster. Faster still.
“Round and round she goes,” Frank said. “Where she stops, nobody knows.” One of the bat creatures swooped at him, but he managed to avoid it by ducking down into the car. I saw some of the smaller bats fly into the car after him. I couldn’t see what they were doing to him, but he started screaming.
Whenever the wheel spun me to the top, I peered through the flurry of bats to see where Monster was going. And finally in the distance straight ahead, I spied our destination: a lake of flaming tar, swarming with masses of what looked like enormous tentacles made out of lava.
Over to the left of that was the shining River of Time.
The bat creatures repeatedly flew into the side of the car and the wheel, always from the right.
Frank popped his head out of the car. A couple of the little bats were busy tearing at his ears. “Shoo. Get out of here,” Frank shrieked at them. “Mind your own business.”
Some of the bats flew back a hundred yards, then charged at Monster at full speed from the right, always from the right. Soon it dawned on me that the jolts were gradually changing the car’s course. The bats were trying to turn the car away from the lake of flaming tar and into the River of Time.
But why would they do that? Their job was to keep folks away from the river.
Suddenly the wheel stopped spinning, with my seat at the very top.
And from the left side, Frank scrambled into the seat next to me. “Well, I really, really, really wanted to fry you and your dead buddies in that lake of blazing tar—and that bitch Connie, too—but these fucking bats seem to have other plans for you. You’ll all be guano in a few minutes, so this is where I say adios, you rotten little shit.” With that he patted my cheek, gave it a pinch, then tightened the pinch and yanked a handful of skin off the side of my face, sending lightning bolts of pain racing through my brain.
He spread out his arms, and rainbow-colored membranes sprang up all the way from his wrists to his armpits down to his waist, creating clown-style bat wings. He jumped off the left side of the Ferris wheel and flew away.
The bat creatures instantly pursued him. They crowded him, forcing him to fly in the direction of their home, the river. They tore at his clothes, his wings, his hair.
Frank grew multicolored teeth and claws and fought back. He managed to tear chunks out of a few of them, but it was clear he was no match for the guardians of the River of Time. One of them tore off his right leg and gnawed on it like a drumstick. Another did the same with his left leg. The smaller bats joined in the feast, and soon all the winged things had reduced Frank—in my body—to a midair buffet, as they gobbled his organs, bloody masses of muscle, stringy loops of intestines.
Monster was now heading straight for the river, and the bats were flying right beside the Ferris wheel, almost as though they were dutifully escorting it to its doom.
I took a deep breath and held it as Monster flew into the shining River of Time.
For some reason, I found myself thinking of a line from a dream I’d once had.
You’re going to see your family, your family, your family . . .
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
THE GODS OF TIME
. . . Wherever they might be.
It was beautiful under the water.
Of course, it wasn’t really water. It was liquid time, which isn’t a liquid at all. Once I was submerged, I saw anything and everything. People living and long dead, events from the past, the future, and even other worlds. I kept saying to myself, “Look at that. I’m going to remember that.” But the thing is, when you see a hundred thousand things that you never want to forget, naturally you’re going to forget most of them.
I saw pterodactyls eating one of those big-eyed Roswell aliens, so I guess that meant aliens had visited our planet back in the dinosaur days. I saw a volcano with what looked like giant flaming wasps coming out of it. That might have been a scene from some other world. I saw rats mating after the atom bomb hit Hiroshima. They survived the blast better than the humans did. I saw Abe Lincoln having sex with two women at the same time. Did he know how to party or what? I saw Albert Einstein playing basketball; he was pretty good, actually. I saw Caligula playing with a fluffy white kitten, and he didn’t hurt it or try to fuck it or anything like that. Just Caligula, playing with a kitten while twenty of his soldiers took turns sodomizing one of his enemies.
I saw mermaids. Their eyes were as big as fists, and they had pincers instead of hands, so I guess the Disney movies weren’t all that accurate. I saw a sect of elderly men in purple robes eating cicadas right off the sides of trees. I saw a baby in a runaway pram, rolling down a hill toward the freeway. That vision cut away before I was able to see what happened, so I have no idea if the
skinny, frantic teenage girl chasing the pram managed to catch up with it or not. I hope she did.
Not everything I witnessed was that dramatic. I saw an old woman trying to figure out her taxes. I saw a maggot crawling on the side of a discarded hamburger patty. I saw a Sears sign—the kind with big, illuminated letters on the side of a building—that had a bird’s nest inside the letter R. The baby birds were looking out at the parking lot, wondering when their mommy would come back. I saw a fat guy in flip-flops mowing his yard. I saw a glacier simply sitting still or perhaps moving the tiniest fraction of an inch. I watched it for a year. Or maybe just a second. There was no way to tell.
Finally, someone put a hand on my shoulder. “Hello, Jeremy,” said a voice like honey gliding down a harp string.
I looked around and saw a creature that resembled a bat, a grasshopper, and a squid, all mixed together in a crazy-ass DNA blender. It had membranous wings, tentacles, huge compound eyes, and a human smile.
A nice smile.
“Hello,” the thing said again. I realized that the thing I’d thought had been a hand on my shoulder had in fact been a shining green claw.
“What the hell are you?” I said. The thing looked so silly, I couldn’t help but laugh.
“You find me amusing?” the thing said. “You won’t fifteen thousand years from now.”
“Yeah?” I said. “And what’s going to happen fifteen thousand years from now?”
“My name is Loki, and in fifteen thousand years,” the creature said, “you will look just like me.”
“No way,” I said, like a high school kid after being told that someday he’d become a potbellied old man.
“I’m afraid so,” the creature said. “This is actually the most perfect of bodies, with the best features of all creatures. I am beautiful in my complexity.”
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