Double Dead (27 page)

Then the Humvee went through a chain link gate and suddenly they were on an airstrip, whizzing past transports and tankers, past trucks and cars. They passed a helipad with a big clunky olive green chopper sitting in the middle. On the side, spraypainted in purple, was a big crown. Three diadems, like the symbol they’d seen way back in Erick.

Up ahead: big hangars. One after the other.

But Kayla knew that only one of them was their destination, and it was easy to see which. For starters, the damn thing was covered in neon signs, and it was lit up like a city bar at Christmas. Beer signs. Hotel signs. Open signs. Carnival signs. All stuck up around the hangar—either bolted to the side or stuck on poles—with neither rhyme nor reason. The black cables coming off them looked like bundles of black licorice. Then, the front of the hangar was closed off with a giant patchwork of fabric: bedsheets, towels, tarps, all stitched together to make a mostly red-and-purple motley curtain. Like a show awaited them inside.

Loco gunned the Humvee, and instead of braking and easing to a stop like most people would, he instead accelerated toward the bunker.

“What are we doing?” Kayla whispered to Danny. He shrugged, looking worried.

“Slow down!” Ebbie said.

Loco grinned, licked his lips.

“Loco,” Gil said, “you might think about—”

Loco engaged both brakes—yanked up on the parking brake and slammed his foot down at the same time. The Humvee skidded, its back end sliding like the ass-end of a dog running on oiled linoleum. Smoke drifted as rubber burned. The Humvee stopped.

Loco hooted. “God
damn
but that feels like a fucking meth enema. Lets you know you’re still alive. Now everybody get the fuck out of Dickbucket.”

Kayla, assuming that
Dickbucket
was the name Loco had given to the Humvee, got out of the vehicle. She heard the
chug chug
chug of a nearby generator, which explained the neon. Instantly she felt a not-too-gentle shove from the beefy ’roid-head, Dope Fiend.

“Move, bitch,” the thick-necked freak mumbled.

“Hey, okay,” she said, scowling. “Chill.”

Danny stepped up to Dope Fiend and shoved his finger in the muscled freak’s face. The look on Dope Fiend’s face said that he wasn’t happy—the skin tightened and his tendons corded, and he made a grimace like he was straining to take a really hard shit. Kayla knew what was coming, knew that he was going to cock back one of those log-jam fists and with it push Danny’s face to the back of his head, but then next thing she knew Loco was there, slapping Dope Fiend hard in the face with an open palm.

“Goddamnit, Dope Fiend, you about to be in the presence of the King of 66. Why you gotta be such a cranky nug?”

Dope Fiend looked like he was going to cry.

“Whatever,” Loco said. He made a little fanfare by forming a trumpet with his two chubby hands. “You are about to meet the Joker, the Monster, the motherfucking Mix Master. You are about to be in the presence of the Killer Carny, the Psychopathic Supa-Villain, the Clown Prince of Strangling Scrubs. It is time to behold the first rider of Satan’s Carousel, the liberator of Hell’s Highway, the King of the 66 States: King Brutha Thuglow!”

Loco whipped back the curtain, almost tripping as he did so.

Smoke—green and greasy—gusted from the open curtain.

Loco ushered them inside.

They were greeted by an even deeper haze of smoke and the sound of…

A pinball machine? Bells, beeps, clangs, fake screams, the familiar
dun-dun-dun-dun
from the Jaws soundtrack.

The hangar was pimped out. In the center, a big circle bed with black velvet sheets. Two naked girls lay slumbering across one another, asses up, their bodies forming a kind of pink, fleshy ‘X’ across the fabric. In the back, a hot-tub. Up front, a bar made with studded leather. Kayla was too young to know what bong-water smelled like and further, what a sex swing was, but if she
were
to know those things, she would’ve detected their presence immediately.

A blow-up Frankenstein hung out against the back wall. In fact, the whole place had kind of a ‘’seventies pimp meets a haunted house’ feel—a shelf of chalices lay draped in faux cobwebs, a series of foam graves lay across the floor forming a kind of obstacle course, a series of warped mirrors hung from above.

And in the back of this massive hangar stood what must’ve been the King of the 66 States, King Brutha Thuglow.

He was not what Kayla expected. By the looks on everyone’s faces, nobody expected this.

Thuglow was tall, and he stood hunched over a Jaws 3 pinball machine. He was shirtless, and so skinny that it looked like you could’ve reached out and gotten your fingers most of the way around one of his rib-bones. For pants he wore a baggy pair of zebra-striped chef-pants. His hair was long and thin, an aged rockstar mane that went down to the middle of his back.

He turned to face them—Kayla saw that his face was so lean it was gaunt, the cheekbones standing out like hard granite edges. It gave him a skeletal look, but he was certainly a
happy
skeleton. His grin of yellowed teeth stretched from ear to ear, and his eyes were pinched, watery, bloodshot.

“Oh, shit!” he said, laughing so hard he coughed. “We got guests?”

Loco hurried over and held up his M-16, then knelt by Thuglow like a knight offering his sword. Thuglow didn’t even seem to see him and kept walking.

They all stood around, not sure what to do.

Thuglow sauntered up, threw his arms wide and embraced as many of them as he could. Kayla noted that his hair reeked of skunky smoke.

“Pinball,” he said, shaking his head. “What a fucked-up game. Am I right? No matter how long you play, man, result is always the same. You lose. This isn’t Pac-Man or Asteroids. You never win that shit. Maybe you play for ten minutes. Maybe you play for ten hours. But you never win.” He headed over to a card table, reached down beneath it and pulled out a purple glass bong. With a lighter he sparked the flame, took a gurgling hit, exhaled a dragon’s plume of smoke—one jet from each nostril. When next he spoke, his words were more growly, and he coughed a little. “It’s like life, I guess. Nobody gets off this carousel alive.”

Gil stepped forward. “Listen, uhh, Thuglow—”

“
King
Thuglow,” Loco corrected, raising his gun but not pointing it (yet).

“King Thuglow,” Gil continued, “we’re just—”

“You cannibals?” Thuglow asked.

They all looked at one another. “No.”

“You got any diseases that you know about? AIDS? Gonorrhea? Sexual shit? Some kind of, I dunno,
space flu
?”

More shared looks—this time, even more confused and concerned. They all shook their heads.

“And nobody here is a boogieman.”

He was seriously asking if any of them were zombies.

“No,” Gil said. “None of us are boogiemen.” He pointed then to Leelee. “In fact, one of us has some medical training and would probably know if we were boogiemen or had some kind of disease.”

“Sweet!” Thuglow said, again laughing so hard he hacked. The lanky stoner wiped tears from his eyes, and Kayla was having a hard time believing he was king of anything but his own deluded imagination. “Hey, man, you guys want a bong hit? Or I can fix you a cocktail or something.”

Gil answered for the group. “No. Listen, King—”

“Cool. Here, check this shit out.” Thuglow went over to the wall, and pulled down a bundle of wrapped cloth from a metal shelf. He unswaddled it and revealed a cheap, flea-market katana. He started doing action movie poses with the Samurai blade. “I’m like the king of ninjas over here.”

“
Listen
,” Gil said firmly—he’d clearly had enough. The politeness in his voice had gone ragged. “This is all well and good but we’re just passing through, heading on out to the West Coast. Los Angeles. If we could just get a place to stay for the night, maybe we could discuss or negotiate transportation or food…”

“The West Coast?” Thuglow asked. “Pshh. Why? We got everything you could ever want here in the 66 States, man.”

“That’s for us to know.”

“Let me guess. You heard the CDC has some lab set up out there. Military dudes and scientists and shit. Trying to cure this thing. I heard that, too. Way I figure it, it’s total bullshit.”

He sliced the katana through the air at some invisible enemies. Imaginary boogiemen, Kayla wagered. “Same way those jizz-bags to the north are full of shit, too. Sons of Man utopia.
Whatever
. They got everything they need, why do they keep sending guys down here try to negotiate with us? Trying to buy up our jet fuel supplies? Trying to convince us to cede territory? Buncha richy-rich red-in-the-necks. They come at us, we’ll run at them with the hatchet, bro.” He cut a hard arc downward—the blade’s tip hit the floor of the hangar and snapped off, clanging off to the side. It woke the two naked girls in the bed. They looked around, but closed their eyes and went back to sleep. “Shit! Shit. Aw, man. Anyway. My bet is that out West? You ain’t gonna find nothing but a limp dick.”

“No, not the CDC. And we’d like to find out for ourselves.”

Thuglow came back with just the katana handle and part of the still-attached shattered blade in hand. “Nn-nn. Uh-uh. Nope. Sorry, old timer. But the 66 States isn’t inclined to let such healthy folks go. It’s like that old poster with Uncle Sam pointing all up in your grill and shit, and he’s all like,
I Want You For The US Army
? This is that. I want you for the Kingdom of the 66 States.”

“Excuse me?”

Thuglow seemed to be thinking. He began pointing to them one by one, down the line.

To Gil: “You look smart. You can rock the motor pool.”

To Leelee: “You got medical training. So you can do doctor shit.”

To Ebbie: “Man, you are a big dude. We got a gladiator circuit round here, figure I’ll send your meaty ass down to Abilene to fight in the arena.”

And finally, to Cecelia and Kayla: “And you two will make good whores.”

Uh-oh.

CHAPTER THIRTY

Mojo Rising

Kayla sat on the bed, trembling. Morning light, bright and white, came in through the blinds of the motel room, hurting her eyes.

As they said in the military, things had gone AWOL. SNAFU. FUBAR. The idiot ‘King’ of the 66 States sentenced them all to roles—and soon as he told Kayla and Cecelia what
they
were going to be doing, Gil moved faster than an old man should. He snatched up the glass bong and cracked it over Thuglow’s head—he screamed, backpedaling with shards of glass stuck in his head, the air filled with the sudden skunky stink of the spilled water. Loco, Dope Fiend and Jester were suddenly knocking Gil to the ground, kicking him and pistoning their rifle butts into his curled-up body.

Chaos reigned. Kayla and Cecelia attacked back, both singling out the muscle-head, Dope Fiend. Loco raised his rifle but found himself hoisted off the ground by a charging Ebbie. The wiry Jester started to get into the fight, but Danny stepped in his way, fists balled up. They had no chance, of course—Ebbie wasn’t anything close to a gladiator, and with Kayla’s cancer in play she and Cecelia had the combined upper body strength of a wilted daisy. Danny put up the best fight of the bunch and turned out to be quite the scrapper, but even still, he got dropped, his lip split and bleeding, a gun thrust up against his throat.

Didn’t matter anyway—eventually the hangar filled with the chatter of machine-gun fire. Ears ringing, Kayla rolled over and saw that King Thuglow stood there, a small submachine gun in his grip, gunsmoke climbing up out of the barrel like a pair of snakes wrestling.

Thuglow looked like he was crying. Like he just didn’t get it.

“You don’t appreciate me, man,” he said, blowing a snot bubble and wiping tears away with the back of his scrawny arm. “I thought I was doing you cats a favor, but this is how you repay me? My hair stinks! I got glass in my head!”

Then he swept his arm—“Take ’em away, Loco”—and turned to pout.

And now, here they were. In a place called the Friendship Motor Lodge. The sign out front made up in the motif of a giant teepee, for some reason. It was draped with tinsel and toilet paper. The power lines around it were hung with bloody sneakers, baby dolls hung together with makeshift nooses, and other morbid accoutrements.

They’d been separated. Ebbie, Gil and Leelee were off somewhere. Kayla and Cecelia were here in a room done up in a mid-century-modern meets the desert look. Thuglow had decided to take the dog, Creampuff. And Coburn…

…well, he was gone.

“I hope Gil’s all right,” Cecelia said. The face she wore was either sincere in its worry or a very convincing mask. Not that Kayla was in a real good position to know. “Those motherfuckers.”

“Daddy’s tough. He got beat up pretty good but…” She couldn’t finish it. He
did
get beat up pretty good. His face looked like a horror show, bruised and bloody and one eye already swelling shut.

“It wouldn’t be so bad, you know.”

“What wouldn’t be so bad?”

“Being… you know. Whores.”

“Ew. Cecelia.
Ew
.”