I climbed the ladder and out a hollow tree trunk. I dropped to the ground, turned and saw El Marrow glowing on the horizon. “Some tunnel,” I said to myself. I checked my compass and headed northwest.
After a few yards I heard something. I stopped to listen. It was very faint, whatever it was. I went on again. The sound got louder. Some kind of unearthly wailing. I stopped again, then pulled out the large knife I had found in my pack, and resumed walking. I came to an enormous, fallen trunk. I edged around it and saw a tire. I shook my head and moved a little farther forward to where I could clearly make out the rear of the Bone Wagon. I went a little further and saw a familiar orange-and-blue mountain lying on the ground near the car.
“Glottis, my friend!” I called out over the sound of his weeping. “Why are you crying?”
Glottis sat up a little. “Manny?” he exclaimed in surprise. Then he started wailing again. “Oh, Manny… they fired me!”
“Me, too, buddy,” I said, even though that hardly did it justice.
“You don’t understand, Manny!” he wailed. “I was created just to do that job! It was the only thing that made me happy! It’s like they reached into my chest,” suddenly Glottis thrust his hand into his own chest, “and pulled out my heart,” I went “Gahh!” as Glottis ripped his heart out of his chest, “and threw it into the woods to…” Glottis threw his heart over his shoulder and slowly toppled over.
“Glottis!” I yelled. “What have you done!” Naturally he didn’t answer. “Oh, Glottis,” I said with a sad sigh. Then I jumped when he suddenly snored.
I took a closer look at him. He was still breathing, but there was a big hole in his chest and I could see severed arteries and veins writhing around. “They’re not supposed to do that… are they?” I asked myself. But then, Glottis was a demon. I didn’t know what was normal with him. He snored again. “How long he can live without a heart?” I decided not to find out.
I trotted in the direction Glottis threw his heart and then quickly stopped. “Oh, ick!” I exclaimed at the sight of several demon spiders fighting over the still-beating heart. “Shoo!” I shouted. I grabbed something off the ground to throw at them, but froze when I saw it was a human bone. ‘Could this be Lana’s?’ I thought. I shook my head and threw the bone at the eight-legged demons.
One of the spiders launched itself at me. I beat it off with my walking stick. Some of the others turned toward me. “Yaaaah!” I screamed and rushed them, wildly swinging the stick. I grabbed the heart and ran away. They didn’t follow.
“Man!” I exclaimed. I looked at the throbbing heart in my hand, then at the hole in Glottis’ chest. I shrugged helplessly and dropped the heart in the hole. The arteries reattached themselves, the wound closed, and Glottis jerked upright.
“…eeeEEEAH… heart!” he gasped. “Heart is good! Be good to heart!” he babbled. “Don’t tear out heart! Heart is good! Strong, beating, good heart!” He surged to his feet, breathing heavily. “Hey, is that my car?” he asked.
“Sure is, buddy,” I said, a little shaken. “Wanna go for a ride?”
“I thought you’d never ask!” he exclaimed. “But where are we going, Manny?”
“To Rubacava,” I answered. “We’ve got to find Meche.”
“Miss Colomar?” Glottis asked, ears quivering. “What happened?”
“Everything’s gone wrong, carnal. I don’t have time to explain right now. Just head northwest and we’ll find the road to Rubacava.”
“But Manny,” Glottis protested, “this is a low-riding street rod, not a four-by-four! We should go back a ways, swing ’round the edge of the forest, and get on the main highway.”
“She’s got most of a day on us,” I said. I kicked the ground. “The ground seems pretty level and there’s lots of space between the trunks. Let’s give it a shot and see how we do.”
“OK, Manny,” Glottis sighed. “Hop in.”
I climbed up to my seat and Glottis got behind the wheel. He started out cautiously and gradually gained confidence, but the ‘road’ got rougher as we went on, if still passable. Close to dawn we came to the oddest thing I had ever seen.
It was some kind of industrial park and the trees around it had weird pieces of machinery and piping attached to them. Everything was still, probably because it was Saturday, but the colorless predawn light helped to give a Mary Celeste feel to the scene. I yelled to Glottis to stop the car.
“What kind of unholy Christmas tree farm is this, Glottis?” I asked over the Bone Wagon’s powerfully throbbing idle.
“Oh, city boy!” Glottis snorted. “You work all day in a sixty-story skyscraper, but didn’t you ever wonder what it was made of? The marrow of these trees, Manny! They suck it out! It’s like cement!”
“Is that why the town’s called El Marrow?” I asked.
“Huh?” Glottis said. “Never thought of that.” His face scrunched up while he thought of it then. “Maybe so!” he finally exclaimed with a vigorous nod of his head.
I looked over at the buildings and asked Glottis, “How’s our fuel situation?”
Glottis checked the gauge. “Not so good, Manny. Hey! I see some trucks over there. We could siphon off some gas!”
“You’re right,” I said, “but wouldn’t it be easier just to use those pumps?”
“Oh, yeah,” he said, finally seeing what I already had. “Good point.”
Glottis drove over to the pumps and started filling up the main tank and the auxiliary. I climbed down and looked over at some of the trees.
“Those pumps along the trunks draw the marrow into that piping,” Glottis explained. “And that spinning thing keeps the trunk balanced so it the pumps won’t bring it down.”
“Uh-huh,” I said, fascinated. Really.
“Oh!” Glottis suddenly exclaimed. “But if we shook a tree down, those pumps would dislodge and I could make high-lift shocks out of them for the Bone Wagon!”
“Maybe we could find some spare pumps or whatever in one of these buildings,” I said.
“Oh, yeah,” Glottis said. “Why be a vandal when you can just be a thief.” Was he being sarcastic? Whichever it was, we went off to look for what Glottis needed for his ‘high-lift shocks’ once he had finished filling up the Bone Wagon’s tanks. The ground was getting rougher and I figured we’d lose more time turning around, especially after having come this far, than it would take Glottis to modify the car. We found the gear he wanted in some kind of machinists’ shop and Glottis had four shocks ready by mid-morning.
“Manny,” he said when he had finished, “until now we scraped along the ground like rats. But from now on, we soar! Like eagles! Yeah, like eagles… on POGO STICKS!!! I’ll go get the car,” he said as he lumbered off.
I shook my head, wondering what went on in that massive skull of his.
It was early afternoon before Glottis had the shocks fitted to the car, tested out, and ready to go. “What a relief,” I said as Glottis demonstrated how the shocks lifted the body of the car three feet up and back down again. “I was getting concerned that our transportation wasn’t ostentatious enough.”
“Get in,” he said with a crooked grin, “or are you afraid of heights?”
“Watch how scared I am,” I said defiantly as I climbed up to my seat in that wailing, demonic taco wagon. “Let’s see how far we can get before nightfall, carnal.”