67) Super Sunday, February 21st: 5:55 to 6:00 AM… “Red Queen and a
Wicked Shepherd”
Dazed, bruised… coughing with violent, wracking spasms as the
smoke of a thousand toxins settled in their lungs – clutching their treasures,
or each other – Savage Saturday’s few ragged survivors were reeling across the
parking lot of the One World Mall, largely ignored, and grateful for it. Craig Synch supported Vicki, who still
retained the stick that had borne Evan Augsberg’s
placard into battle as her crutch.
“Can you walk?”
he’d kept asking.
“Do I have a
choice, ASSHOLE?” she finally
screamed.
“I… I could try
carrying you…”
She looked at
him, shaking her head… then planted the crutch down firmly and hobbled
onwards.
Further off, disguised
in his rough clothes, shocked at the carnage that was, in part, his creation,
Trent Lockett now intercepted a safe but shattered Reverend Ellsworth Godwin
who, like a somnambulist, peered out from the mouth of Ghede
towards the noisy crowd still gathered round the loading dock, trying to
squeeze into Giga-Plex even as those who had entered
were thrashing through the dark, plunder in hand, trying to find a way out as the flames encircled them…
“Over this way,
Reverend…” Lockett urged. “Reverend?”
“I don’t have
anything to take. Kill me, if you must…
I deserve to die…” the preacher wept bitterly from his cackling pagan womb…
seeing, all around, the destruction of his dream…
“Reverend… it’s
“I have to,”
Godwin staggered, weeping and pointing.
“Some of those people came out here because of me. You took away their means of communication,
and I led them through the door to perdition…”
“Forget that!”
Trent slapped at the plastic head. “All
God’s people are headed out of here, fast as their legs or wheels can carry
them, and as for the left behinds… well, leave ‘em behind. The only help from upstairs this place needs
is a Catholic priest to give it the last rights… what’s so goddam funny…”
Godwin had begun laughing hysterically in counterpoint to Ghede. “What a
wicked shepherd! I have led my flock
into the valley of the shadow and deserted them, and I have lost my father’s
raiment, then climbed his legacy, upside-down, out of
the mouth of Hell…”
“Well that sounds just about right,” Trent Lockett nodded. “By the ways, the President went on
television… not that anybody really saw or heard, but no matter… transition’s
off until Tuesday. Everybody gets to
watch the game tonight: eat and drink, forget about the world a little longer…
I’m saying, we won, we won,
Reverend. Sort of…”
Reverend Godwin stopped laughing and looked out across the
tongue of the orisha at the burning, barbarian-ringed
Mall. “Then all this… was for
nothing…”
“Nothing!” Lockett replied hilariously
as the iron collapsed and, with more gunfire blazing, the preacher reached down
and extended a shirtsleeved arm. “Up here, it’s safe,” and the FCC insurgent
grabbed, and was pulled up into the mouth of Ghede,
away from the now sporadic gunfire.
“Can we come up too?” begged a desperate looter holding a
cardboard box of cabbages and avocadoes.
“No!” the bureaucrat and Reverand
shouted back in unison.
¾ ¾ ¾
In the chaos of
the parking lot beyond the bent and twisted gate, Big Sonny’s retinue had
broken up… Jarlo Knupp and
the Soft Shell Dixieland Band drifting back towards the loading dock where… as
visible flames rose up to blow out the remaining windows of Roasted World Nuts
and the I. Prescott funeral home, the bandmembers
picked up and dusted off their instruments, donned their straw hats and
launched into a lively rag that… in certain cadences… derived from “Nearer My
God To Thee”. The Giga-Grrrlz, Crystal and Rae, having deserted Marko when he kept
pausing to grab this or that abandoned plunder in the parking lot – finally
wandered off in search of rescuers… quickly found… but the Queen of the now
deceased Sonny’s harem, Effie Lou Wilson discovered herself surrounded by Big
Sonny’s clowns, big shoes flopping against the hot pavement, greasepaint
smeared and running with the heat… as she stopped to catch her breath, she
turned around and began to count…
“One… two… three…
Omigod!… there are seven of you, and me,” Effie Lou
clapped her hands, doing a slow pirouette in the snow in her white spandex, fox
fur jacket and muff, her Miss Dominator wand and corona of fake jewels. “It’s like… like…”
“Like we were the
Seven Dwarves?” hinted the biggest of the clowns – he wore a frizzy red wig and
polka-dotted overalls, but his nose was black, not red and soot streaked his
face over the stubble beneath his melting mascara.
“And you’re our
Goldilocks!” said the sad, white-faced clown with the derby and unlit cigar.
Another clown
with an enormous, greasepainted mouth… wide and high like
the Joker in the Batman movie… the one Jack Nicholson played… swatted Sad Sack
with a rubber chicken. “Snow White, you idjit! Not
Goldilocks… Snow White…”
“I am a Princess, you know?” Effie Lou
reminded her seven servitors. “I was…
like… working in the store in Waxahachie, then I was Miss Dominator, and now
I’m a Princess…”
“That’s right,”
agreed the clown with the bright yellow flower poking out of his hat…
supposedly an inverted flowerpot, although it looked more like one of those tassled fezzes, usually worn by Arabs and Shriners. “You’re in charge of us all!”
The green clown
spread his arms, backlit by flames and smoke. “All of us around here…” he said, bouncing up
and down on his big, green Styrofoam shoes, “we’re all your subjects…”
“Then I don’t wanna be a Princess!
Don’t wanna... hawwk,
awwk,” she coughed, “tell people what to do…” Effie
Lou glanced from the clowns to the burning One World Mall, back to the
clowns. “I just wanna
go back to the hotel and sleep. I’m
tired! I’m a tired fairy princess... I’d
rather be Sleeping Beauty…”
Joker-clown waved
his rubber chicken aloft over her head, like his own magic wand. “Too late!” he cackled between his own
coughing.
The clown with
the flower in his buttonhole pressed a button on a little tube that ran up his sleeve,
spritzing his dry, tormented throat and then the Joker with warm water. “I’ll be your Prince Charming…” he proposed.
“No, me!” argued
the green clown…
“Me!” Blacknose cried…
Within moments,
the clowns had fallen to fighting with their clown-weapons as Effie Lou lay
down on the snowy pavement and tried to sleep, but it was smoky and loud and
uncomfortable… people kept running by or moving in slow-motion some costumed in
stolen raiments like cartoon characters, tugging
their prizes in their arms or in boxes or garbage bags. The sight and sound of a rolling, bouncing
giant African head that shuddered to a stop not more than two parked cars
distant jerked her awake... the last straw was a gigantic black helicopter
whose transit obscured the stars and moon, putt-putting overhead, looking for a
place to touch down. As two new,
bedraggled figures converged on the royal party, Effie Lou sat up, as if waking
from unpleasant, royal dreams…
“It’s no fun
being Sleeping Beauty,” she clenched her fist and scrunched up her face. “I’d rather be the Red Queen! Stop your fighting!” she ordered the seven
clowns, as Sad Sack pulled her to her feet, “…or, no, keep fighting! Harder!”
“Tha’s right, li’l lady,” came a
voice from behind Effie Lou as something cold and metallic prodded the back of
her neck. “Just keep them fools up to
their foolishness while Prince Charming takes a hike.” He pushed the sad fool around commandeered
his cigar and kicked him in the backside... holding his derby hat with both
hands, the mime hopped away towards his confederates’ melee. “You and us, we’s
gonna take a little walk...
“Got so many nice
trucks and vans around here, and no po-leese to stop
us,” Effie Lou heard the tall, dark man behind her as she turned, beholding her
abductor in a great, warm pilfered overcoat with deep pockets full of money and
bling, brandishing a big, shiny gun at her nose now
as he smiled: “we gonna find us one with plenty of heat an’ a system – play a little music, an’
party…”
“I got the party
favors,” said his smaller sidekick, who was holding a big, cardboard box with
Chinese writing and one big, black English word: ‘EXPLOSIVES’. It put Effie Lou in mind of the Roadrunner
and Coyote cartoons… all that was lacking was an Acme logo on the box.
Four more
figures, newly disgorged out of the mouth of the now-silent Ghede
like so many spat-out gobbets of gristle, were now advancing out of the smoke
to join Miss Dominator’s abductors while the clowns were lost in their
buffoonery.
Slim and Easy,
having slipped out the Giga-Plex fire door in Tenison’s office rather than trying to haul off its
expensive, but heavy, electronics, had settled on a strategy of robbing the
robbers, looting the looters… a task made easy once Slim displayed his gun and
Easy held up the box of explosives.
They’d gone for the small, but valuable prizes… the pockets of the civil
rights leader’s overcoat were stuffed with cash, Rolexes and jewelry, a few big
bottles of pills looted from the looters of a pharmacy down by the automobile showroom
and a box of chocolates from Henri’s, with which Slim planned to romance a lady
of his acquaintance. Easy’s
pockets were still empty, but he trusted his partner, and watching the eyes of
the vikz go wide when he held up his box of dyn-o-mite was worth a million dollars, just about…
Slim’s fingers tightened ‘round the Giga-Grrr’s abundant, blonde hair and he jerked sharply, Effie
Lou rising with a painful gasp.
The clowns looked
up. The four strangers kept advancing.
Easy removed a
stick of TNT from the box and bounced it in his palm, anticipating. He hadn’t had the chance to use one, yet, but
he’d seen how they worked from television and the movies… there was this little
fuse you touched fire to, then you had… what, five seconds? ten?…
to toss the thing and duck. “Gimme!” he appealed, and still clenching Effie Lou’s golden
locks, frowning at the dark roots, with his left hand, he sniffed the
confiscated stogie and made an uglier face, putting his gun in his belt and passing
the weed to his sidekick.
Suddenly, Slim
was surrounded by clowns, but he still held Effie Lou with one hand and
retrieved his new gun with the other, so it wasn’t exactly as if there was any
sort of danger. In fact, as the joey
made up like a Joker drew back the rubber chicken he was wielding, Slim pushed
Effie Lou aside, aimed his gun at the sky and invited the fool in. “C’mon, you think you gonna clock me with that?” he sneered. “Go ‘head… then I can put a cap in them great
big teeth of yours…”
“Ker-rrang!” was the sound that the iron-skeletoned
rubber chicken made, bouncing off the jackoff artist’s skull and, as Slim
executed a pratfall worthy of Barnum and Bailey, the suddenly uneasy Easy
looked from clowns to strangers, jiggling the box in what he hoped was a
menacing gesture.
“I got grenades!”
he warned. “Or... uh...”
The four
strangers who’d alighted from the mouth of the big black head were nearer,
menacing shapes in the smoke who might be friend or foe or... more likely...
more of the malljacker-jacker-jackers, so he touched the tip of El Stinko
to the fuse and hurled one Wily Coyote cylinder at them first, then setting the
box down, fumbling to open it to pull out more of the Chinese dynamite. His aim was perfect… too perfect… because
Trent Lockett caught the explosive on the fly and chucked it back at Easy who
had only time to watch as it landed back into the box... a perfect
three-pointer... before detonating.
The explosions
came in a series of thumps and whistles… long, silver trails of fire that shot
upwards though the smoke from the burning Mall, then bursting apart in rainbow
waves of light and sound visible from the loading dock. Fortunately, for Slim and Easy, the grenades
were fireworks… theatrical props left over from Chinese New Years’ Day last
week… unfortunately, they still packed enough wallop to crisp Easy’s hair and eyebrows, set Slim’s
stolen raiments afire and drive him, half-blinded and
stumbling, out into the parking lot to roll into the snow and scream, and then
scream again as he grabbed the gun which had suddenly become white-hot.
As the
Joker-clown grunted and pulled a steel rod from the innards of his rubber
chicken, Ellsworth Godwin retrieved his father’s overcoat, scorched and wet,
and somehow heavier by far than it was when it had been taken from him.
Leaving Slim to
whatever dreams were to wander his shivering way back to Purley,
the clowns had stopped their fighting and looked to Effie Lou for orders – all
save the impertinent and smokeless Sad Sack, who began playing an imaginary
violin. She stomped one white-booted
foot and pointed…
“To the cornfield
with you!”
Blacknose removed a harmonica shaped like an ear of corn
out of one of his many pockets, and swung into a tolerable version of “Turkey in the Straw” as the newcomers
approached… Craig Synch and a limping Vicki trailing Lockett
and the Reverend Godwin, brushing dust and snow, soot and blood off of the
lapels of his father’s overcoat.
The seventh of
Effie Lou’s dwarves… the only clown who really was a dwarf, costumed in the garb of a medieval master of
ceremonies… leered: “Pray, what would you have us do with these strangers,
Princess…”
“I’m not Princess
anymore, I’m your Queen. I’m the Queen
of… Queen of all the malls,” she
determined, “and my fish is your command.”
Miss Dominator waved an imaginary wand – first at her seven subjects,
then the strangers. “And who are you?”
“Miss Dominator?”
Craig ventured – accustomed, by now, to dealings and conversations with
crazy. “We’re from Giga-Plex…”
And this made the
Queen begin to cry. “Giga-Plex is fallen,” she sniffled, then bawled outright, “and
the King is dead! The Dominator smooshed
him!”
“The King is
dead! Long live the Queen!” the unctuous
Shriner-Clown attempted to curry some royal favor.
Effie Lou wiped
her eyes, faced her subjects… and, beyond them, the burning mall… and said: “By
my imperial command, be the King deemed dead and Giga-Plex
his funeral pyre…”
She waved her
wand at the sky and everyone turned to watch flames erupting through the roof
of the One World Mall. They enveloped
its sign, with its globe and friendly, clasped hands and the few tiny figures
waving desperately from the roof; the flames shot showers of sparks like comets
through the night while delirious applause arose from the mob still ringing the
doomed shopping center and the helicopter, above, circled impotently…
“The Lord have
mercy on our souls…” exclaimed Reverend Godwin, his heart almost as heavy as
his pockets…
“All those poor
people…” Vicki shook her head… “I hope they had life insurance!”
¾ ¾ ¾ ¾ ¾ ¾ ¾ ¾ ¾ ¾ ¾
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