smile. Broken white teeth in a red, lopsided smile. Sobbing,
screaming, and still more chuda-chuda-chudachuda, it’s never going to
stop, it’s going to go on forever, that terrible sound,
chuda-chuda-chuda. Then Holly’s moving, scrambling on her hands and
knees, away from both the old lady and the little girl with half a face.
Unavoidably her hands slap-skip-skid-slide through warm french fries, a
hot fish sandwich, a puddle of mustard, as she moves, moves, staying
under the tables, between the chairs, then she puts her hand down in the
icy slush of a spilled Coke, and when she sees the image of Dixie Duck
on the large paper cup from which the soda has spilled, she knows where
she is, she’s in a Dixie Duck Burger Palace, one of her favorite places
in the world. Nobody’s screaming now, maybe they realize that a Dixie
Duck is not a place you should scream, but somebody is sobbing and
groaning, and somebody else is saying please-please-please-please over
and over again.
Holly starts to crawl out from under another table, and she sees a man
in a costume standing a few feet from her, turned half away from her,
and she thinks maybe this is all just a trick, trick-or-treat, a
Halloween performance. But it isn’t Halloween. Yet the man is in a
costume he’s wearing combat boots like G.I. Joe and camouflage pants
and a black T-shirt and a beret, like the Green Berets wear, only this
one is black, and it must be a costume because he isn’t really a
soldier, can’t be a soldier with that big sloppy belly overhanging his
pants, and he hasn’t shaved in maybe a week, soldiers have to shave, so
he’s only wearing soldier stuff This girl is kneeling on the floor in
front of him, one of the teenagers who works at Dixie Duck, the pretty
one with the red hair, she winked at Holly when she took her order, now
she’s kneeling in front of the guy in the soldier costume, with her head
bowed like she’s praying, except what she’s saying is please
please-please-please. The guy is shouting at her about the CIA and mind
control and secret spy networks operated out of the Dixie Duck
storeroom. Then the guy stops shouting and he looks at the red-haired
girl awhile, just looks down at her, and then he says look-at-me, and
she says please-please-don’t, and he says look-at-me again, so she
raises her head and looks at him, and he says
what-do-you-think-I-am-stupid? The girl is so scared, she is just so
scared, and she says no-please-I-don’t-know-anything-about-this, and he
says like-shit-you-don’t, and he lowers the big gun, he puts the big gun
right there in her face, just maybe an inch or two from her face.
She says oh-my-god-oh-my-god, and he says you’re-one-of the-rat-people,
and Holly is sure the guy will now throw the gun aside and laugh, and
everyone playing dead people will get up and laugh, too, and the manager
will come out and take bows for the Halloween performance, except it
isn’t Halloween. Then the guy pulls the trigger,
chuda-chudachuda-chuda-chuda, and the red-haired girl dissolves. Holly
eels around and heads back the way she came, moving so fast, trying to
get away from him before he sees her, because he’s crazy, that’s what he
is, he’s a crazyman. Holly is splashing through the same spilled food
and drinks that she splashed through before, past the little girl in the
pink dress and right through the girl’s blood, praying the crazyman
can’t hear her scuttling away from him.
CHUDA-CHUDA-CHUDA-CHUDA-CHUDACHUDA! But he must be shooting the other
direction, because no bullets are smashing into anything around her, so
she keeps going, right across a dead man with his insides coming out,
hearing sirens now, sirens wailing outside, the cops’ll get this
crazyman. Then she hears a crash behind her, a table being overturned,
and it sounds so close, she looks back, she sees him, the crazyman, he’s
coming straight toward her, pushing tables out of his way, kicking aside
chairs, he sees her. She clambers over another dead woman and then
she’s in a corner, on top of a dead man who’s slumped in the corner,