This Disorder by The
Features
A pale face leaned out of the window of the big truck and shouted, “What is going on?”
Glinty raised his pistol back up and whispered, “Someone is
trying to steal your vehicle.”
I put my hand up and said, “No! That’s his own truck. We stole both him and
his truck. His name is Patrick. He’s kinda banged up.” I nodded at Joey.
Joey said, “Yeah, I pulled him out of his ride, dude. He’s taken a bump to the head. He ain’t quite right at the moment.”
Glinty put his Colt .44 back down into its holster and said,
“Seems to be a lot of that going on.”
Tellesco turned to him and said, “That’s like Sean! He had a bandage on his head, and I drove him
to the hospital in that hearse.”
Glinty looked back at him.
He put a finger up and itched the eye that wasn’t there anymore. His finger went into the socket and rubbed
around in there. He said, “What happened
to that hearse? I can’t seem to locate
its whereabouts.”
Tellesco pointed at me and said, “Mr. Will. He drowned it in my swimming pool!”
Glinty pulled out a small stone and examined it with his
eye. Then he flicked it away. “This true?”
I said, “Yup. Seemed
fitting. Drown it in the desert.”
Glinty tilted his head back and laughed big. His preacher’s hat fell off and he just kept
on laughing loud. I didn’t know what to
make of it. I thought he might be
laughing at me, but I didn’t care. I
hated that hearse and the one who owned it.
Glinty settled down a bit and spat out a clam. He said, “Drowned in the desert. Hehehe…
‘Seemed fitting,’ you said.
Hehehe… Yessiree, I guess that
about sums it up. Well done, m’boy.” He clapped my shoulder.
That didn’t answer anything, but he was walking away from us
to the white utility truck. I looked
around at the faces of the others and I could see they had no clue either. So I turned and followed Glinty, and the
others followed suit.
Patrick shrank back from the window as the old cowboy closed
in on him. He shouted out, “Hey! Who’s that guy in the Hallowe’en costume?”
I shouted back, “Nothing to be afraid of. Just ghost preacher. He’s gonna help us.” Yeah, I was an asshole like that. Sorry about that.
Glinty strolled around the big truck and inspected it. He saw the front was all dented up, but still
intact. The huge guardrail bolted into
the front end had taken a beating, but it was still solid and attached to the
chassis. He walked along the passenger
side and hopped up on the door step. He
peered in and said, “BOO.” Yeah, he was
a bit of an asshole, too. No apologies,
baby.
Patrick screamed and was quiet again. Probably fainted, poor bastard.
Glinty climbed back down and resumed his stroll. He examined the panels and opened each of
them up, one at a time, to look at their contents. He whistled, like a watery breath from a
grave. He said, “You boys have a lot of
wonderful tools at your disposal. Most
of these I don’t know what in the hell they for, but they look to be well made. Very well made.”
Then he reached the back, and saw the bucket and arm, attached
to the lift at the middle of the bed. He
turned back to me and said, “Is this some sort of fancy elevator?”
I nodded. “It’s a
man-lift. It can get up pretty
high. Controls here and in the bucket.”
Glinty smiled, and reminded me that he had no teeth. Those had followed his eyeball, an hundred
years ago. I got the creepy crawlies
again. Blecch.
He went to the other side and opened and closed more
panels. He turned around to face us
all. He said, “Well, this sure is one
blessed event. You have tools here that
can make for weapons. But we ain’t got
much time to go practicing what they can do.
That red moon is heading for the western range way off yonder. I figure we got ninety minutes to hide this
vehicle while under the cover of the dark.”
I looked back up at him.
“Then what?”
He smiled again.
Blecch. He nodded at the Sans
Joaquin range behind us, to the east. He
said, “Then the sun will be up and about, and the shit is gonna hit the
fan. We have to find that boy with the
missing part in his head. Someone else
come to town, and he wrong in the head, too, so to speak. He needs to be set straight. All these Purple Robes folks, well, I got a
beef to settle with them.”
Tellesco said, “ We gonna go save Sean?”
Glinty nodded. “First
we gotta find him. He’s out there right
now, doing some very bad things. But he
ain’t at the reins. He ain’t driving the
herd. He’s locked away in his own head.”
Tellesco began to weep.
Glinty came over to him and put a dusty old hand on his shoulder. He said, “Now don’t you worry, young
fella. You go ahead and get your eyes
wet all you like. But I promise you, we
will be doing our best to save that boy.
We have to.”
I didn’t know what that meant, but had another, more
pressing concern. I said, “Uh, Glinty,
how the hell are we going to do that? We
don’t even know who our enemy is!”
Glinty nodded. He
said, “Neither do I. but you can be sure
of one thing. He will make his presence
known. There will be no denying
that. You see, the enemy has been
infected by a cannibal. He’s gonna eat
them up from the inside.”
He was talking about Sven Slindlivrenn, but none of knew who
was that at that moment.
We just felt like we were in the dark about the whole thing.
Where Will We Go by
Iamdynamite
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