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Oh, my, she thought as her heart melted into a small, throbbing puddle in the
center of her chest.
"Everything's going to be fine," he said.
Leeloo felt a twinge of confusion. Since when was there any question that
things were going to be fine?
Then the recorded overture started up. Through surround speakers,
"Tah-Rah-Rah-Boom-Ti-Ay" blared forth. No one in the audience knew the long
history of the song, nor did anyone recognize this particular version as
belonging to the Grateful
Dead.
The red-haired carny master jumped over the low bumper of the center ring and
into the spotlight. Behind him trailed a naked baby stickie on a long chrome
chain fastened to a choke collar.
"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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
Stickies were bastard tough to chill.
A few in the Bullard ville audience-perhaps those who had
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lost loved ones to this particular subhuman species-actually booed the
miraculous survival, but everyone else cheered the spectacle. Some folks rose
to their feet to clap as the entire acrobatic troupe took their waggle-weenie
bows in the spotlight.
As thrilled as Leeloo was by the performance, in the pit of her stomach was a
small knot of dread. She couldn't tell if the cannon miss had been on purpose
or not, but she thought it hadn't. And that gave her the distinct feeling that
the outcomes of the carny's acts weren't set in stone. That anything at all
could happen, at any time, this afternoon. It was scary, but the fear made it
all the more exciting.
The carny master waved an arm toward the wings. Grunting from the strain,
masked roustabouts pulled and pushed a trailer bearing a tarp-covered cage
into the center ring. Alongside the trailer, four beautiful, long-legged women
danced and mugged for the crowd. From the rear, their nearly invisible
costumes made it look as if they were naked but for thigh-high, high-heeled,
black leather boots.
"Lesser carnies drag around carloads of snakes," the
Magnificent Crecca bellowed. "They brag about how many deadly reptiles they've
got and expect you to part with your hard earned jack. I'll tell you this for
free. Numbers don't matter. It's size that counts. There's only one snake in
this carny. It's been here since the very first ticket was sold. Bullard ville
behold, Wolfram's Worm!"
The tarp was thrown back, revealing the twelve-foot-long, three-foot-wide
mutie rattlesnake. Worm slithered into a vast, diamond-backed coil and,
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