His hut gets hit next and it sends plumes of flame soaring miles into sky, debris bombing out everywhere: they've gotten away from it in the nick of time! What was he doing, running a dynamite factory in there? "My precious experiments!" he explains, gasping, as he pulls her, his pained face scratched and soot-streaked, on into the jungle. He leads her along a treacherous path through snarling panthers, shrieking birds, swamps full of crocodiles and mosquitos, until they reach a row of bunkers down near the beach, where a handful of exhausted soldiers are holding out against wave after wave of enemy invaders. He dumps a couple of bodies aside, grabs up their rifles, hands her one, and throws himself down into the bunker just as a dozen bullets ricochet off the lip of it. He pops up, guns down four or five invaders, ducks down again, the bullets pinging and whizzing around his ears, jeepers, he's something amazing. I'm in love! she thinks, unable to deny it any longer. I'm cuckoo, I'm on fire, I'm over the harvest moon! "Get down!" he yells at her. Oh yeah, right. Cripes! She's almost too excited to think straight!
She knuckles down beside him and he shows her how to use the rifle. He's such a cutiepie, she wishes he'd take another quick lap at what her friend calls her honey-dewzies, dangling ripely in front of him — or at anything else for that matter, she's open to suggestions — but, no, he's too busy jumping up and shooting at these other bozos, it's like some kind of obsession with him. Well, she'll try anything once, in spite of all the trouble that dubious principle has got her into in the past, she must be a slow learner. She picks out a gangly guy just splashing in at the shoreline, shooting dopily in all directions, gets him in her sights, and jerks the trigger. Wow, it nearly takes her arm right off at the shoulder! But it's fun watching him go down: he kind of spread-eagles and goes up in the air about six inches, falling flat on his back in the wave rolling in. She braces herself and takes another shot: it doesn't hurt as much as before, and this time the enemy soldier does a kind of pirouette, spinning on one foot and bouncing a little before flopping to the beach. She pops one in the face, propelling him into a backwards somersault, hits another in the knees and then in his cowlick when his hat comes off as he crumples toward her, gets this one in the belly button (misery loves company, she thinks, suffering an evil burbling and gargling behind her own) and that one in the ear, spins them around and doubles them over with shots in their ribs and finishes them off with bullets up their booboos, lines them up in her sights and blasts them two, three at a time, aims down their own barrels so their guns blow up in their faces. This is great! She never knew guys had so much fun!
But it's too good to last, as she might have known. She feels a tugging on the seat of her drawers and looks down: it's the sport she came with, lying wounded at her feet, a bloody bandage around his head, hands still clenching his smoking rifle, the knuckles raw, his eyes red with pain and fever. He seems to be trying to whisper something. She leans close. She can hear the enemy whooping and squealing as they scramble impetuously up the hill toward them like little kids on an Easter egg hunt. "There aren't many of us left!" he gasps. "You've got to go for help!" She starts to protest — where's the kick in that? — but he cuts her off with a sad endearing smile: "We're depending on you, sweetheart!" he wheezes, giving her a weak slap on her fanny like one pal to another, so what can she do?
She hurries back through the jungle, knocking off crocs and tigers as she goes, having pretty much got the hang of this shooting thing, but somehow, maybe because she can't get her lover off her mind (she thinks of him now as her lover, such intimacies as they've shared being no big deal for some people maybe, naming no names, but all histories, like they say, are relative), she takes a wrong turn and ends up in the desert. She tries to circle back round to the jungle, which she can still see on the horizon, but after plowing up and down a couple of dunes in her bare feet, she can't see it anymore, just acres and acres of endless sand. She tries to trace her footprints backwards, but after five or six steps, they disappear.
She thinks maybe it's about time to sit down and have a good cry, but while she's still only thinking about it, some guys in turbans, pajamas, and silky boots with curled toes come galloping along and snatch her up. "Hey, fellas, you wouldn't happen to have a cracker or something?" she asks hopefully, but they only heave her over the back end of the horse, her little heart's aloft, and go thundering off to some sheik's palace in an oasis.
So, okay, she's had a few surprises since the night she stepped into that movie lobby back in her old hometown all those years ago, but the biggest one is yet to come. This sheik is the very same guy who was standing under the poster and who she just left battling impossible odds back in that bunker, only now here he is with what is obviously a very phony moustache pasted on his lip, and she's made to understand that she's his new favorite and is to be his bride. Tonight. Of course, there are a lot of brides, the palace is full of veiled ladies sneaking about, there's a couple of dozen of them here in his bedroom alone, but she considers herself a gregarious person and doesn't mind company. She winks at the sheik to let him know she's in on whatever he's got in mind, but he only scowls darkly and bellows something about "stinking pig" and "prepare her for bridal sacrament." Okay, let him play it his way.
She's handed over to some eunuchs and serving girls who lead her down to a kind of shallow swimming pool full of bareass ladies and peel her rags off her. She pats her belly and points into her open mouth with her bunched fingers, but they don't get it. Oh well, it's a wedding, isn't it, probably there's going to be a banquet, she tells herself, ever the cheery optimist. She's just got her toe in the water, testing how hot it is, when up comes that driver of the gangsters' car again. The last couple of times she's seen him, he was crashing down a cliff in an exploding car and getting thrown into the maw of a smoking volcano, yet here he is again, disguised this time as a naked eunuch, and insisting to everybody that before her bath she has to be taken down to what he calls the "virginorium" for a health check.
Before she or anyone else can protest, he is hauling her at full pelt down a mirrored hall, her bare feet slapping boisterously on the marble floor, the rest of her all aquiver and goose-bumpy and no doubt rosy pink under all the grime. Her birthday suit, unfortunately, even as starved as she is, could still use a few tucks here and there, a fact that has probably not escaped all the people who are turning to stare at her galumphing by. He pushes her ahead of him suddenly into a dark corridor, presses his back to the wall, cranes his head around the corner. "It's clear!" he hisses. "There's a plane waiting out behind the camel barns. We've got to move fast!" "Wait a minute," she pants, "I know this guy, it's all right." "No, you don't! It's not who you think it is! This is his evil twin brother! Didn't you notice the telltale scar, the missing birthmark? Through forged papers he has stolen his brother's rightful inheritance! He'll stop at nothing! That's why you're involved!" "What?" It's getting pretty complicated. "Look, I'm not particular, they're both pretty cute." He seizes her wrist. "Let me show you something."
He drags her down more corridors, more stairs, more narrow passages. "Talk about stopping at nothing," she grumbles. They're now deep in the labyrinth of the palace. He puts his fingers to his lips, sidles cautiously toward a locked door. "This is the room of the favorites," he whispers. "First they dance for the sheik, they become his bride, and then they come here." He picks the lock with a piece of wire concealed mysteriously on his person. Inside: a whole roomful of severed heads! She screams. It's a kind of reflex. "I'm sorry, I don't know what came over me," she whispers. They can hear footsteps approaching. He strokes the stone wall like a blind man trying to guess what it is. Suddenly, just as the footsteps come clattering down the stairs into the corridor, a piece of the wall slides open and they slip behind it, pressing the wall quickly together again like completing a puzzle.