Zombie Spaceship Wasteland Read Online Free

Bryan barged into the booth, excited, huffing from flying up the flight of stairs from the snack bar.
    “Roddy’s out of his room, somewhere. It’s . . . come see what’s under his mattress!”
    I ran downstairs to see.
    “Well, I want the throwing stars,” said Gary Jay before anyone else spoke.
    Trace was standing, holding the air mattress like a Surf-board. On the floor, where it once lay, were three air pistols, five throwing stars, two throwing knives, and a pair of nunchakus. I subconsciously panned my eyes along the weapons, left to right, like the scene in
Escape from New York
where the camera pans along the equipment Kurt Russell’s going to take into the New York City Penal Colony to save the president.
    After Gary spoke, no one else did. We all, Wordlessly, bent down and took things. I took an air pistol (it looked like a revolver). Bryan took another air pistol—it looked like a 1911 Colt .45—and the nunchakus. Gary Jay swooped up the throwing stars and Trace took the third pistol. It wasn’t modeled after any existing gun. It just looked like a generic air pistol—vaguely ray gun–y, brown grips and black barrel. Trace laid the air mattress down and we all left.
    I rushed back up to the ticket booth and lifted the shade. Now we were in the magic hour, when the evening customers would start drifting up. They’d appear in groups of two or three, then in a brief, chaotic mass, which would quickly form a line. I put the air pistol in the drawer and got the three spools of tickets ready in their dispensers for the evening’s shows.
    Huh. Thick crowd early for
The Living Daylights
. I prepared, mentally, to start selling half stubs when I saw, over the heads of the people in line, Roddy.
    He was standing in the parking lot, leaning against the primer-paint derelict of his car, holding court in front of some prepubescent metalheads. He was trying hard to act bored, rolling his eyes and shaking his head in that sad, “You poor, uncultured idiot” way, where you want to assert dominance without saying anything startling or original. Roddy could only do this with twelve-year-olds. Anyone who’d experienced real heartache, traveled outside of the Sterling city limits, or read any book above the Young Adult genre never doled out more than fifteen seconds of regard for Roddy. This was where he got to wear his “old sage” costume. In the parking lot of a strip mall, lit by mustardy streetlamps, bracketed by the Giant Foods, Hunan Garden, a real estate office, karate and pizza and Waxie Maxie’s and the Towncenter 3—forever dropping vague hints about buying cigarettes or booze for kids who dreamed of someday, somehow, becoming Roddy. Soon they’d be the withholders of Pabst Blue Ribbon and Camels. They imagined pimple-ringed eyes looking up at them in wonder and imagined that Dire Straits’s “Money for Nothing” would play whenever they walked.
    But then Roddy nodded and pointed at one of the kids, and the
kid
produced a Camel hard pack and let Roddy bum a cig. Roddy stuck it in his mouth and then gestured—two more? Can I get two more for later? But the kid closed the pack. No dice. Maybe if we get some beer going later, he seemed to say.
    And it hit me—I stole this poor bastard’s BB pistol. The dude owned an air mattress, a bottle of shampoo, and three shirts. Hell,
I’d
want weapons, however useless, if I slept in the closet of a movie theater.
    I looked in the doorway and Trace was standing there, looking as stricken as I felt. We didn’t say anything to each other, but there it was, hanging in the air between us. Why had we stolen nine of the maybe sixteen possessions that Roddy owned?
    “You wanna put ’em back?”
    I said, “I do,” almost before he could finish. I slipped the BB pistol into his hands, out of range of a woman’s gaze, waiting to buy her ticket to see Timothy Dalton take on the ultimate Bond villain—Joe Don Baker.
    “See you downstairs later.”
    I said, “Is