Mark Henry_Amanda Feral 02 by Road Trip of the Living Dead Page A

new veiled area by Pioneer Square. Her goal, to provide budget-breaking couture to the skin and bones set, is a smashing success …
    —“Fashion victim” column,
Otherworld Weekly
    Fifty miles east of Green Gulch, Fishhook—as I’d christened him—snored himself awake, staggered up the aisle and plopped down in the passenger seat. I hadn’t really thought about him since we pulled out of that moldy excuse for a campground. As it was, I had the Winnebago sailing down the other side of the pass—careening might be the more accurate verb—so he really was taking his life in his own hands just by moving around—of course, no more so than sharing your veins with a herd of thirsty vampires.
    At that thought, I glanced his way, in what I hopedwas an expression of empathy. 33 He responded by ripping the wettest fart I’d ever heard, a massive gelatinous ass moan, that woke a gag reflex in me that I thought I’d lost with my death. He gave me an exaggerated wink in response. The bastard.
    “Jesus Christ! Did you burn a hole through the seat? Open a window! Gawd!”
    His laughter was a stutter of grunts, and I soon realized why. With every inch the window cranked down, the air molecules seemed to have bonded with shit. We’d rolled into a cloud of methane gas that could easily power a small island nation. The fucker knew it was coming, too.
    His laughter became deep and rolling and I, in turn, began gagging and shouting, “Shut that fucking thing before I puke.”
    “I … uh—”
    “I … uh nothing, asshole. I know a lame joke when I see one … or smell one.”
    The man nodded, grinning wildly and showing off those pearly blacks. The smell dissipated slower than I’d like but anything was an improvement to full exposure.
    Crazy ass got back up and shuffled back to the table where I’d first seen him.
    What are we going to do with him
?
    At the very least, he was going to need as much of a hosing down as this camper, to be at all presentable.
    We rolled into a small college town called Ellens-burg, where cows seemed to outnumber the human population by a mile. The stockyards were the first evidence of the place and they stretched from the freewayto the distant hills, a sea of shit, sectioned off by gridlines of fence post and barbed wire.
    The town itself was straight out of a Norman Rockwell painting, if good old Norm had been caked in shit and three beers shy of a nasty cirrhosis. A mid-sized college kept the population stocked in taverns and cheap restaurants, poverty chipped in on the thrift stores. Lucky for me, visiting parents require moderately habitable hotel rooms or I’d have nowhere to freshen. 34
    I pulled into a newish motel called the Round Up—which, if I’m not mistaken is also the name of a weed killer. Wendy parked the Volvo next to the camper and waited for me in front of the office.
    “You stay right here. You understand?” I leveled a glare and my index finger at the freak, and then reached down into his fishhooks and thimbles and mussed it up. He gasped and waved his hands over the rolling debris, and then busied himself reassembling his collage of crazy.
    “That ought to keep you busy,” I said.
    I opened the door and let in a burst of air thick with bovine butt funk. I gave the man one last threatening sneer and slammed it behind me. At the far end of the parking lot, a scruffy-haired youth traded balancing on his skateboard for falling on his ass. The stink didn’t seem to bother him.
    “Why, might I ask, would anyone choose to live in this hellhole?”
    Wendy shrugged nonchalantly. Too nonchalant for my taste. The day Wendy doesn’t have a snide comment,is the day she’s hiding something. This, I suspected, was that day. When she finally looked me in the eye, I saw a thin streak of brown below her lip that couldn’t be anything but the gooey, sweet and creamy afterbirth of … wait for it … chocolate.
    “Oh, honey,” I said.
    “Hmm?” Her brows rose in genuine interest,