The Prom Goer's Interstellar Excursion (7 page)

But there was an obstacle keeping me from those burgers.

Blocking the drive-through was the largest, weirdest bus I had ever seen. It reminded me of a metal platypus—pudgy around the middle, where the wheels were, and then tapering out to a beaklike protrusion in the front and a thick tail in the back, which appeared to be an external trunk. A sharp sail ran down its center like a Mohawk, and its windows were tinted a heavy purple, nearly black.

My stomach grumbled in anticipation of a meal, but the bus didn't seem to be going anywhere. It was parked in the drive-through, its engine was off, and a team of In-N-Out employees was handing
dozens
of bags of food from the delivery window to the driver inside.

The driver's hand was as big as a baseball glove.

“Let's
go.
I'm
hungry
!” I yelled, honking my horn, but I was sure that nobody on the bus could hear me. Percussive music was pouring out of the vehicle—
BoombabaBoombabaBoom.
The bus was rocking back and forth, seemingly in danger of tipping over.

The In-N-Out employees handed over the final orders to the driver, who handed back a thick roll of bills as payment. Finally, the bus rolled out of the driveway and parked in the lot, where it continued to vibrate from the music.

I took my truck out of park and was easing it toward the drive-through when—
thunk
—my engine died. My seat shuddered underneath me, and I felt something fall from my car to the ground. I turned the key again, but nothing happened.

It was over. My truck had loyally taken me to Roswell, and then it had perished. In asking it to drive over one hundred miles in one night, I had pushed it beyond its limits. This time, I knew there was no point in massaging its wheel and telling it I loved it. It was gone.

I got out of the car and kneeled on the ground, and underneath the chassis I witnessed a pile of rusted gears and corroded metal. My truck's guts had disgorged themselves onto the pavement. Well, at least when I was in jail, I wouldn't need a car anymore. From now on, I was going to be on foot until the cops picked me up. I needed a cheeseburger for energy.

The tired worker manning the drive-through window poked his head out and looked at me standing there.

“Sorry, man, no more food,” he said. “We're closing up.”

“
What do you mean, no more food? It's In-N-Out.”

“There's nothing left,” said the worker. “No more burgers, no more buns, no more potatoes. That weird bus cleaned us out. They've been here for an hour. I'm surprised you waited in line—all the other cars got annoyed and left.”

“Can't you go into your storage locker and get more?”

“We
did
go into the storage locker. These guys rolled up and spent
thirty grand.
I'm telling you, we're
out.
”

“I can't get
one
cheeseburger?”

“If you want a burger, you ask the guys on the party bus. They have a hundred
cows'
worth of them. They're eating a
barnyard.
We're
closed.
”

The worker slammed the drive-through window shut.

I watched the bus shake in the parking lot. Not only was it not leaving, it sounded like the travelers inside had turned the music
up.

BOOMbabawahBOOMbabawah

Weird laughter—
rargh rargh rargh
—was followed by bowling-ball-sized wads of paper cups and hamburger wrappers being tossed out the windows. I had never seen such flagrant littering.

It seemed
impossible
that the people on the bus needed
all
the food in the In-N-Out, so I decided I was going to try to buy something off them. I had nothing to lose.

I walked over to the bus and knocked on the door. It made a sound unlike any metal I had ever heard before—hollow, but with a high-pitched clanging noise.

“Hey!”
I yelled.
“Open up!”

I heard footsteps. The door swung open, and suddenly I was face to face with the driver—or rather, I was face to face with the face the driver had decided to
wear
, because he was in disguise.

From a distance, you
might
have thought the driver was human—he had eyes, ears, a nose, he was about six feet tall and maybe three hundred pounds, so the proportions were right—but up close it was clear that his skin wasn't skin at all, but a rubbery peach-colored mask. His lumpy torso was jammed into a ripped T-shirt, and his legs were bursting from a pair of stonewashed jeans.

His figure resembled those of the messed-up Vikings who had taken Sophie, which gave me chills. Perhaps it hadn't been such a great idea trying to get her abductors to come back.

“Rargh garh ragh,”
he said, though his mouth didn't move because of the mask.
“Rargh grargh gargh.”

“I'm sorry…,” I said, suddenly very aware that I had made the Wrong Decision by coming to this bus. “I must have knocked on the wrong door.”

“Ragh garf raghr,”
said the driver.
“Ragha arghag rafg.”

“I'm truly sorry. I'll leave you alone.”

The driver shoved a bottle of wine into my hands.

“No thank you…,” I said. “I don't want any wine.”

“
Raghag fargh…
wine…
ragh
,” the driver insisted, grabbing my shoulder and slamming the wine against my stomach. He spoke at least one word of English.
Wine.
I guess in some cultures, that's all you really need to get by.

“
Fine.
I'll have a sip, but then I'm going.”

The wine tasted bitter and slightly nutty, but I gulped it down and handed back the bottle.

“Thank you,”
said the driver, sounding remarkably civil, with a lilting, almost Scandinavian accent. He took off the mask, and underneath he looked
exactly
like the aliens who had abducted Sophie. I froze.

“You know, when somebody offers you a drink, it's bad form not to accept,” he said. “
Now
we can talk like gentlemen. What brings you to our door?”

I was too stunned to speak.

“Do you still not understand? Let me try again, more slowly this time. Hello. Stranger. What brings you to our door?”

“I don't know….”

“You must have had
some
reason. You were pounding hard. And at this time of night, that can be construed as rude. This may be a bus, but look at the size of it—it's our home away from home, and nobody likes unexpected evening callers to their home. It makes everybody assume the worst.”

“I wanted a cheeseburger,” I said. “And the guy at the window said you had bought them all.”

A voice cut in from inside the bus: “Driver, what's going
on
with this open door? The temperature in here was
unbelievably pleasant
, and now you're letting in the dry desert air. Do you
know
what this heat does to my voice?”

“A gentleman up here wants to buy a cheeseburger off us,” said the driver.

“Good Lord, the cheeseburgers are almost gone,” said the voice. “Perhaps you should send him on his way, Driver. I can't bear to see disappointment on the faces of humans, though it seems like they wear such expressions
all
the time. Probably why nobody wants to visit this planet—no offense to you, Cad.”

“None taken,” said another voice from somewhere in the bus, this one with what seemed to be a New York or New Jersey accent. “I don't like visiting here either.”

“I don't know if we should turn the stranger down—he looks
angry
,” said the driver, examining my face. I could tell he was messing with me. “I think he made a gesture like he's going to slit our throats unless he gets what he wants.”

“A murderer darkening our doorway,” said the first voice. “How wonderfully romantic.”

“I didn't
make
any gesture,” I said. “I'm just a high school student. I didn't mean to interrupt you. I'm sorry for coming over here. I'll leave….”

“Wait wait, hold on, and
pause
,” said the first voice. “I'm reconsidering what I said about having no cheeseburgers for this wretched straggler, Driver. It's not in my
blood
to let a man go hungry. He can share my meal. We will sup as brothers, he and I.”

The driver—who, from the way the people on the bus were referring to him, appeared to actually be named Driver—stepped out of the way and gestured to the stairs.

“The band is requesting your company,” said Driver. “Lucky boy.”

The band?

“Come on, come on,” said Driver. “Let's go, up with you.”

Driver put his meaty palm on the back of my neck and unhelpfully shoved me up the stairs. Suddenly I was standing in the middle of what appeared to be a seventeenth-century French brothel.

The interior of the bus had been hollowed out, giving it the appearance of a long studio apartment, and was covered in purple pillows. Every few feet there were tables holding decanters of a glowing, ominous red liquid and towering brass hookahs sprouting tentacles like burnished metal octopi, wisps of smoke wafting above them. A pyramid-shaped disco ball hung from the cabin's ceiling, and piles of what seemed to be male fashion magazines were stacked haphazardly all over the place.

I stared into the shadows of the dim room, but all I saw was silhouettes.

“Cad wasn't kidding when he said humans who lived in the desert were unattractive,” said the first voice. “Look at how
thin
this one is. I can't say that I'm not a little threatened. Only
I
can have such an elegant waistline, so eat, intruder, eat. The fatter you get, the better I look.”

A cheeseburger flew through the air and splattered against my shirt. Driver laughed behind me—
wah ha ha ha ha.

“I suppose I'll now have to give him something from my personal wardrobe, though I'm not sure he has the
attitude
to pull it off. Bring him closer so I can take a look.”

Driver gave me another heave in my back, prompting me toward the darkest corner of the bus. There I saw the dim outline of a lanky man, along with the flash of a glittery sleeve and the tip of a snow-white leather platform boot.

“Closer…closer…don't be scared, I don't bite, though I have been known to
stab.
Never can be too careful, and it's best to strike first, particularly when you have an advantageous reach like mine.”

The figure leaned closer. “My goodness, your pores look terrible. If you used a skin-tightening mask at
least
once a week, it would help with those zits. I just want to grab your face and
pop
them. Or maybe pop your whole head. How hideous.”

Driver nudged my shoulder, and I took another step forward.

“Apologies for sending mixed signals, but that's
quite
close enough for the moment,” said the figure. He reached underneath the gold-tasseled shade of an antique parlor lamp, and I heard his bracelets jangling as he gracefully twisted his wrist.

The lamp snapped on, and light ricocheted off the heavily sequined jacket the man was wearing and up to the disco ball above. It was like having a cluster bomb going off around me. I recoiled.

“Oh, stop squinting and get used to it,” he said. “If you're going to be spending any time at all around here, you'll learn to love cutting-edge fashion. I like to make sure I'm seen, which is the nature of my profession, as you might imagine.”

I tried to look back at the man, holding my hands in front of my face to cut down on the glare.

“I told you to
stop
making such a
show
of how uncomfortable you are,” said the man. “I can't stand theatrics unless they're my own. But for the sake of adjustment, here, let me help you out, if you're going to be such a demonstrative hobgoblin.”

The figure pressed a button on his sleeve, and the sequins on his jacket flipped over and clipped into place, as if he was instantly changing clothes. A moment later, he was in a white jacket made of scaly leather.

For the first time, I looked into the face of the person who I would soon come to learn is the lead singer of the one billion sixteenth most popular musical group in the universe.

“Good evening,” he said, bowing slightly, but without a trace of humility. “I'm Skark Zelirium. But I'm sure you knew that already.”

He searched for recognition in my eyes, but found none. He frowned.

“Hmm. I understand. In dim light, it is sometimes difficult to recognize your heroes. But get on with it—introduce yourself, who are you?”

“I'm Bennett Bardo,” I said.

“What a
dull name.
We'll have to fix that if you end up hanging around. I could see you being a Chester, but certainly not a Bennett. Though Chester isn't terribly provocative either. Hmm. I'll have to think about this a bit. Maybe something sexy like Zaza.”

Skark didn't look like anyone I had ever seen, though the dimensions of his body were such that at night, from a distance, he might pass for an emaciated man with an overconfident
sense of style. He was wearing a tight white jumpsuit under his jacket, and his boots came over his knees. His fingers had rings with stones that changed color mercurially, flickering from sapphire blue to a splendid opal to charcoal black.

But where Skark looked truly otherworldly was from the neck up. His chin was pointed, coming to a dimpled tip that jutted out an inch beyond the rest of his face. His top and bottom lips were the same thickness. He was clean-shaven—either that or he didn't grow facial hair at all. He was wearing makeup—orange blush on his cheeks and green shadow under his eyes, which were speckled like the shell of a sparrow's egg—and yellow curls sprouted from his scalp and cascaded over his face and shoulders. His complexion was a subtle off-pinkish color, which gave an overall effect of sickly paleness, like a patient in a pre-industrial tuberculosis ward.