“Huzzah!” the Magnificent Crecca shouted a greeting to the crowd, throwing his arms open wide. “Welcome, Bullard ville, to Gert Wolfram’s World Famous Carny!”
The Dead’s shambling, sour-note-filled opus swelled deafeningly, then faded to a whisper.
“This afternoon,” the carny master went on, “you will be treated to miracles and wonderments beyond compare. You will experience sights and sounds that you will take with you to your graves. Bullard ville, I give you the Fearless Flying Stickies!” Music up. Through the tent’s loudspeakers, a live-recorded Jerry Garcia noodled up the chromatic scale, more or less, while eight male stickies in a line crossed into the center ring. They were all naked, except for broad, limp, brightly colored plastic collars that draped over their shoulders, chests and backs. The stickies did three turns of the ring, high-stepping in unison, skinny arms pumping in unison, genitalia flopping in unison. While they were strutting, roustabouts lowered a trapeze bar from the tent’s peak. It wasn’t lowered very far—just enough to allow it to swing freely.
“What is that?” Leeloo asked Dean, pointing at the wheeled contraption being pushed forward from the wings by a half-dozen roustabouts.
“A cannon,” Dean told her. When she still looked puzzled, he added, “Like a giant longblaster. Shoots big slugs.”
Not in this instance, it turned out.
The smallest of the eight stickies raced over to the muzzle and climbed down it, feet first. The music suddenly stopped and was replaced by a loud, recorded drum roll as the roustabouts used a hand-wheel to crank up and aim the barrel at the tent’s peak.
“Should we do it?” the carny master asked the audience. “Should we blow the little mutie bastard straight to hell?”
The answer from the assembled residents of Bullard ville was a resounding “Yes!”
Leeloo flinched when the cannon roared and flashed. Out of a cloud of dense gray smoke shot the little stickie, its spindly arms thrust forward. The pale, living missile arced high in the air. When the stickie’s sucker fingers made contact with the trapeze bar, they locked on. It hung suspended, seventy-five feet above the center ring.
“Hoopa!” the Magnificent Crecca said, again throwing his arms wide. “If one was fun, folks, how about three?”
Bullard ville was all for that.
As the trio of muties climbed, one by one, down the cannon barrel, packing themselves in on top of one another, the carny master baited the crowd. “I have to warn you, good people,” he said, “this trick doesn’t always come off exactly as planned. A little too much blaster powder. A bit of a breeze. Too much humidity in the air. Those of you sitting in the front row should be ready to move quickly if it starts to rain stickies.”
Leeloo flinched again when the cannon discharged. Even though she knew it was coming, she couldn’t help herself; it was that loud. To her amazement, the three muties came out of the barrel in a living chain, the second and third stickies having fastened their sucker hands onto the pair of ankles in front of them. As the trio rocketed up into the air, the audience let out a single gasp.
It didn’t look as if they were going to make it.
It looked as if they were going to come up mebbe a yard short.
But the lead stickie stretched and stretched and somehow made contact with the feet of the little one hanging from the bar, and then all four of them swung from the trapeze, connected at the ankles.
“Whew, close one!” Crecca proclaimed, flicking an imaginary drip of perspiration from his forehead. “Shall we go for four?”
The audience shouted its assent.
“Lower the sights,” the carny master commanded his gun crew.
The remaining naked stickies scrambled down the still smoking barrel as the roustabouts changed the point of aim to the legs of the lowest of the four suspended muties, some fifty feet above the center ring.
Again, the cannon boomed and jolted, and another living chain of bodies vomited from its muzzle and hurtled toward the tent’s peak. The crowd groaned in unison as the first stickie missed the legs of its target by a good five feet. The groan stretched on as the four-car, runaway mutie train arced past the steel tent pole and, veering off to the right, crashed sideways into the far wall of the tent. Still stuck together by sucker and secretion, the stickie quartet crashed in a heap on the ground. For a long moment, none of the muties moved. Then, one by one, they stirred, untangling and unsuckering themselves.