Damnation Road Show

“Sometimes,” the dark-haired boy said, staring down at his dusty boot tops. Though his lips moved, his face was expressionless. “But only when we didn’t have anything to eat, or nowhere safe to sleep. She was so pretty she could always find work in a gaudy.”

“They strung up the geezer who chilled my mom,” Leeloo told him. “I saw them do the whole thing. They yanked his pants down first. When his neck broke, it made a loud crack and his willy stuck out, like in wrestling. One time, before they cut him down, I clonked it good with a rock.”

“What about your dad?” Dean asked.

“Never had one that I know of. You’re lucky ’cause you’ve got one. And a good one, too. I can see that from the way he looks out for you.”

“Who takes care of you, then?”

“Fat Melchior, the headman of the ville. He took me in after Ma got chilled.”

“Is he nice to you?”

“Sure. But there’s not enough nice to go around. He has too many other kids of his own and the cabin is small.”

“You sound sad, Leeloo. Are you sad a lot?”

“I try not to be. I do things that make me happy, mostly by myself.”

“Me, too,” Dean said. “I like scouting ahead for the others when we’re on the move. Jak, he’s the one with the white hair, he’s teaching me how to read signs. He doesn’t say much, but I think I’m starting to get good at it.”

“You must have wonderful adventures with your dad and your friends. I’m still too young for adventures, I guess.”

“You’ll have some, though. Mebbe even better ones.”

“Do you really think so?”

“I’m sure of it.”

From the other side of the compound came the sound of her name being called. “Leeeee-looooo Bunny!”

“Dinnertime,” she said, destroyed at the prospect of being pulled away from something so exciting and extraordinary by something so boring and ordinary.

“You’d better go, then,” he told her. “Don’t want to be late, not with all those other kids at the table. You won’t get anything to eat.”

“Are you staying for the carny?” she asked him.

“Sure.”

“Then mebbe I’ll see you tomorrow?”

He smiled at her. “Of course,” he said. “I’ll look for you in the morning.”

With a totally mystifying combination of pain and joy sitting upon her heart, Leeloo Bunny descended the berm. She had never had a crush on a boy before. Had never wanted to kiss a boy before. In part, this was due to the awakening of her physical self; in part it was due to the fact that none of the ville boys interested her in the least. And for good reason. After watching the goings-on through the gaudy windows, the older ones got all panting and grabby handed, trying to insinuate their dirty fingers into very private places. Other girls in the ville, some even younger than Leeloo, let them do that, and more. Not Leeloo, though. The younger boys in Bullard ville were even more dismal crush prospects. They all had snot caked on their cheeks, and their breath smelled like creamed corn.

When she got back to Fat Melchior’s cabin, the chaos of dinner for ten was well under way. She didn’t compete for food, hardly ate any to speak of, and later, when she finally curled up on her tiny cot, she found she couldn’t sleep a wink. And the cause, strangely enough, wasn’t her excitement over the carny.

Chapter Seven

With Jackson trotting at the heels of his jackboots, the Magnificent Crecca headed back to the rear of the big wag, down the narrow, windowless, low-ceilinged corridor.

As the carny master approached the closed metal door at the far end, he felt a wave of the familiar, powerful unease he always felt just before entering the Magus’s lair. Gert Wolfram had been afraid of the Magus, too. At the time, Crecca had thought it hysterically funny to see that huge mountain of blubber tiptoeing around, trying to avoid even the most incidental contact. Wolfram had never shown his fear to the Magus’s face, if what he had could even be called a face—more like the jumbled contents of butcher and machine shop trash cans. The Magus loved to induce terror. And when he saw its first tender sprout, he nourished it and made it grow.

Crecca was much more comfortable when the puppet master wasn’t along for the ride. The carny picked him up and dropped him off at different locations on the route. No explanation was ever given. They never knew where he went or how he got back. All they knew was that he was privy to ultrasecret, predark whitecoat technology, and that he had developed some unique refinements of his own.

The Magus had a distinctly unpleasant smell. Crecca had always figured it had something to do with the unnatural combination of flesh and stainless steel. The worst thing by far, though, were the eyes. Like a pair of chromed hen’s eggs, with pinhole pupils. You could never tell for sure what they were looking at.

Crecca ordered Jackson to sit and stay outside the door. The Magus had been known to bite the heads off baby stickies on a whim, and Crecca had put in far too much time on this one to start over. He raised his balled fist and pounded on the door.

“Come!” said a strange, thready voice from the other side.

When Crecca entered the wag’s rear salon, he was slammed by the odor of machine oil, fried brake linings and spilled blood. The dim, smoky room was surrounded by one-way, blasterproof, glass windows. It was five times the size of his cabin, and it had a hundred times more junk in it. Unsorted junk. Littering the floor were piles of gears, pipe, wire, housings, glass beakers, lamps, conduit, parts of wag engines and computer motherboards. Sitting on the salon’s built-in rear-window sofa was living nightmare cast in decaying flesh and stainless-steel struts.

One of the rules of survival with the Magus was to not let him catch you staring.

Crecca tugged hard at his red chin beard, pretending to study with interest the vivisection that had been left abandoned on a crude wooden table. It was impossible to tell whether the half-dissected body was norm or mutie, as its layers of skin and muscle were now peeled back and tacked down to the tabletop, exposing a great yawning hole in the middle of its chest, lungs that still labored, a heart that still beat desperately.

“What do you want?” the Magus demanded. “As you can see, I am fully occupied at present.” He was screwing together a contraption made of plastic tubing and metal fittings. He kept turning the thing over in his hands, then holding it up to the gaping chest as if measuring its fit.

What the gizmo’s angles and ridges might do inside that tortured anatomy the carny master had no clue. He shifted his boot soles and felt the stickiness underfoot. Gear grease or guts, he couldn’t tell. Crecca cleared his throat before he spoke, afraid his voice might break. “I just wanted to let you know that the valve problem on the canisters has been repaired,” he said. “It was a rubber gasket that failed. We jury-rigged replacements. You said you wanted to be kept informed.”

The Magus got up from the sofa. Lurching forward on knee joints made of Teflon and titanium, he wasn’t a pretty sight.

Even though the carny master knew that to turn and run would have meant the end of him, it took every ounce of nerve to stand his ground. And as the creature clicked past him, he couldn’t help but let go a sigh of relief.

The Magus had to have heard the exhalation.

He stopped in midstep, his head rotating as if on massive ball-bearing swivels, his eyes spearing the carny master’s very soul.

Crecca opened his mouth, but no sound came forth. All he could see was the pupil holes in the chrome eggs narrowing to tiny pinpoints. He felt as if he were falling into them, drawn down as if by a whirlpool into spinning metal blades.

“So One-Eye has come for the world-famous show, has he?” the Magus said. “And brought his spawn to see it, too? How very, very convenient for me. To finally dispense with both the infuriating cyclops of a father and the annoying simp of a son. Poof!”

Crecca said nothing.

“Make sure he gets a good seat,” the Magus ordered. “Make sure his son is sitting beside him. And make sure they don’t get out of the tent.”

“Of course, Magus.”

“Death comes to all of us,” the Magus said brightly as he moved to the dissection table. “Well, most of us, anyway.” Then he threw back his head and made a noise.

Because Crecca had been the creature’s pawn for so long, he recognized the racket as laughter and stifled the urge to cover his ears. To anyone else, it would have sounded like a wag engine throwing a piston rod—shrieking, clanking, before rattling to a stop.

The Magus reached a steel-claw hand into the chest cavity and took hold of the beating heart.

“This ville is fat and ripe for the plucking,” the Magus said, weighing the pound of wet muscle on his palm. “There can be no mistakes.”

Crecca nodded.