“Drag the pieces of shit outside the berm and bury ’em on the plain.”
“And tomorrow morning nobody’s going to notice seven people who upped and vanished?”
Furlong shrugged. “Somebody might notice, but there’d be no proof, so what could they do?”
“What if one of them yells out as your boys attack or gets hold of a blaster? What then?”
Furlong was silent under knit brows, straining to come up with a good answer. He might as well have been trying to explain gravity. But he was too stupid to see the futility of the effort.
“Bullard ville’s gonna be the best pickings we ever had,” Crecca told him. “If we try anything on One-Eye and his crew and it goes sour, it will queer the whole deal. And I won’t risk that.”
The hairy man started to restate his case for a surgical strike, but Crecca cut him off. “Do nothing,” he said. “Do absolutely fucking nothing. Understand?”
It took a long moment for this to sink in, but Furlong finally, reluctantly nodded.
“Get out,” Crecca said, dismissing him with a wave of his hand.
After Furlong left, the carny master assured himself that even if One-Eye had come to pay them a visit, that even if he knew about the spoils of mass murder, it didn’t matter. Cawdor didn’t know how the chilling was done. He couldn’t know because there had never been a single survivor left to tell the tale. Cawdor and his six fellow travelers would die like dogs along with the rest of the Bullard ville hayseeds.
Crecca twisted the ends of his goatee into a point. It was too bad about the bitch, though. Her mutation—the squirming strands of flame-red hair— wasn’t flashy enough for her to make a sideshow attraction, but she had real potential as a sex slave. Ah, well, the carny master thought, sex slaves, even ones with legs as long as hers, could be had anywhere.
He reached in his tailcoat side pocket and took out a small beige cardboard box. On the box were printed the words Choco Duds. He shook a few of the predark candies onto his palm. They looked like ossified rat turds. Their milk-chocolate coating had crystallized to a floury white. More than a century of storage had turned once soft caramel centers to amber glass, unchewable by norm teeth and jaws.
Crecca flicked one of the Choco Duds across the cabin. It hit Jackson on the cheek with an audible whack. The stickie’s eyes popped open at once. It sniffed the air, mewled in delight, then rooted in the heap of rags until it found the treat.
Jackson had no trouble eating the pellet. The dead eyes begged for more.
“First we’ve got work to do,” Crecca said, getting up from his chair. He put a videocassette in the player and powered up the TV.
Jackson watched his every move with rapt attention.
Loud, hard-driving, backbeat-heavy music erupted from the speakers, and bright colors and dancing females appeared on the screen. Crecca fell into step with the lead singer-dancer—a dewy-eyed, teenage blonde with a bare midriff—and her troupe of four bare-bellied dancers. Their moves were complex and violent. And there wasn’t much room to work. Tails of red satin coat flapping, the carny master pivoted left and spin-kicked right.
“Come on, Jackson,” he called, teasing the creature with the offer of another treat. “Let’s go!”
The stickie began to follow along with its master. Singing, sort of. Unable to precisely vocalize the new words, which dealt with virginal angst, Jackson soprano-droned along with the video’s megastar. Dancing, sort of. The stickie waved its spindly arms, snapped and ground its narrow hips, a hair behind the beat.
“Good stickie,” he said, smacking the creature on the forehead with another well-aimed Choco Dud.
It was part of the Magnificent Crecca’s job, and the real, chilling-robbing operation’s cover, to keep audiences in the larger villes coming back every time the company circuited through Deathlands. This required the invention of new and ever more spellbinding acts. The carny master’s latest idea for a big-top finale was an all-stickie rock-dance number, with music and routines lifted from the video, and Jackson singing and dancing in drag—long blond wig, bare belly, tight miniskirt. As a Tiffany-imitator, the stickie had a long, long way to go.