Buddy Holly is Alive and Well on Ganymede by Bradley Denton (my reading book .txt) 📕

came into the house, “Peggy Sue” was playing. That in itself wasn’t unusual, but the version being played was not the original, but the cover that John Lennon had recorded. Mother was sitting on the livingroom floor in the midst of scattered Beatles and Lennon albums. I had seen this sort of thing before and would have been afraid, except that she was smiling and happy.

“Oliver!” she cried over the music. “Happy birthday!”

I went to the stereo and turned down the volume. “Is everything all right?” I asked.

She beamed at me. “Haven’t you heard?”

“Heard what?”

“John Lennon has been shot.”

Stunned, I sat on the floor beside her. “Is he dead?”

Mother put a hand on my shoulder. “So they say. But they’re wrong. Buddy, it’s all right. I understand now.”

I looked at her eyes and saw the glow of her insanity. “What do you understand?”

“That I’ve been wrong all this time,” she said. “I thought there was a battle raging in the other world, and that the agents of the malevolent ones were making us destroy ourselves. But now I know that can’t be true, because the Seekers who love us would never let John die.”

“Why not?”

“Don’t you see? John was one of our best, like Buddy. He was ‘Strawberry Field’ and ‘Give Peace a Chance.’ If death were bad, he would have been protected from it. The only way that someone could kill him would be if the body’s death were in fact a transition to the other world, where humans exist as energy, as ships of light.”

“Ships of light.”

She shook me. “The Unidentified Flying Objects! They’re the visual manifestations of the other world! Remember when we saw Elvis leave? His body died, but that was all right because the ancient Atlanteans, the Seekers, showed him how to reach the other world!”

“But you mourned for Elvis,” I said.

“No. I mourned for us, because we had lost him.”

“And we haven’t lost Lennon?”

The bright madness flickered. “We never had him,” she said. “We never deserved him. He always was of the other world, but he loved us and wanted to help save us from ourselves, so he stayed. Until now, when he decided to leave.”

“You said he was shot.”

“His body was shot. By a man in New York.”

“Then he didn’t leave of his own will,” I said. “He didn’t ‘leave’ at all. He was killed. And not by an Atlantean, but by some shit of a human being.”

Mother looked back to her scattered albums and stroked the cover of Abbey Road with her fingertips.

I went to my room. I wanted to believe that John Lennon lived on somewhere, but I knew better. There was no “other world” except in Mother’s mind. She had chosen delusion over reality. Over death.

I saw that being an adult would mean that my mother would no longer take care of me. Instead, I would have to start taking care of her.

Throughout the next few months, I tried to persuade her to see a psychological counselor, but she would have none of it. She wasn’t the one with the problem, she said; I was. She was able to accept the existence of the other world, and I wasn’t. So which of us needed help, hmmm?

Eight years later, I still don’t have the answer. How crazy, after all, is Mother’s “other world” in comparison to my own “Spirit Land”?

Of course, I don’t really believe in the Spirit Land. It’s just something I got from a John Wayne movie. It’s only a concept. A thought construct.

And I’m not afraid to die… just so long as I can keep my eyes.

At each flat stretch of road, I looked back and saw that the Jaguar was within a few miles, but getting no closer. Peggy Sue’s pace was eighty-five miles per hour, which is nothing to a Jag—so I figured that the Avenger didn’t want me or the Kamikaze to crash, but preferred to catch us standing still so that he could shoot us.

Since there was no point in sticking to the back roads if we were dead anyway, I took Peggy Sue onto I-35 just south of Oklahoma City. Pete was able to stay close, so we weaved in and out of the city traffic to put more space between us and the Avenger. I saw only one cop, and he was busy in the southbound lanes with a jack-knifed tractor-trailer. I congratulated myself on my shrewdness.

Then we reached the city’s northern edge and hit the biggest tent-revival and traffic jam in the history of the interstate highway system. We made a little headway by driving on the shoulder, but then we stopped dead still.

Vehicles crammed the pavement, and people packed the ditches and fields on either side. Men and women stood on vans and preached through bullhorns; others blew their car horns; others sang; others merely screamed. Fences had been trampled flat, and power poles and billboards had been toppled.

With Peggy Sue in neutral, I backpedaled so that I could talk to Pete. A ruddy, overweight man who occupied the Jeep beside us gave me a dull look and spat a stream of tobacco juice onto my left Nike.

Pete rolled down his window. “Ain’t this a bitch?” he shouted.

Gretchen turned in her seat and looked back. “At least the Avenger’s nowhere in sight. Then again, he could be three cars away in this mess, and we’d never know it.”

I leaned down. “He’s only part of our troubles. If we don’t get out of here soon, the natives are going to recognize me and Peggy Sue. And then we’re skinned.”

Gretchen raised an eyebrow. “What you mean ‘we,’ paleface?”

“She’s kidding,” Pete assured me.

“Bullshit,” Gretchen said.

“Any ideas?” I asked.

Pete looked around at the mob. “Nothing on the pavement is moving, so let’s go off-road until we get around the jam.”

“And give those holy rollers the chance to mob our car and cannibalize us?” Gretchen asked.

“I guess it could work out that way,” Pete said. “But if Oliver goes first, and fast, they’ll jump out of the way. Then we can come along after, and they’ll jump farther. Keep in mind that this is only a theory.”

“Hey, you!” a voice bellowed.

I turned and saw that it was the ruddy man in the Jeep. His dull gaze had become a malevolent glare.

“Yeah, you!” he roared. “Ain’t that bike an Ariel?”

I rapped out Peggy Sue’s engine, skidded around the Kamikaze’s front end, and plunged into the crowded ditch.

Pete’s plan worked until I had gained about fifty feet, and then I was yanked off my motorcycle and hoisted into the air. I struggled, but could not break free.

“We have him!” someone screamed. “We have Vale the Antichrist! Find a Corps minister!”

“Let him be! He’s a prophet!” someone else screamed.

“Satanist!”

“Communist tool!”

“Kill him!”

“But don’t let him bleed! You’ll get AIDS!”

They pounded on my helmet, ripped the Moonsuit with their fingernails, and flung me into the air over and over again. Peggy Sue disappeared under a sea of flesh.

“Leave my Ariel alone!” I cried.

The Kamikaze was mobbed. A man swung a tire iron against the passenger window, knocking a hole in the center and cracking the rest into greenish rectangles. Before he could swing again, Gretchen reached through the hole, grabbed his hair, and smacked his head against the roof. As he fell away, she snatched the tire iron from him and pushed her head and shoulders out through the rectangles, yelling, “Don’t any of you people have jobs?”

Pete pulled her inside, and the Barracuda’s 426 roared. Its rear tires spun, flinging chunks of mud, and it charged the maniacs who were tossing me like pizza dough. They dropped me, and I landed headfirst on the Kamikaze’s hood as the car stopped. Dazed, I rose to my hands and knees and found myself gazing through the windshield at Gretchen, who screamed, “Duck!”

The Barracuda lurched, I fell flat, and a metal fence post swept through the space where my head had been. It hit the windshield, which became a brilliant white spiderweb, and I rolled off the fender to lie on my back in the mud.

Above me stood the ruddy man who had been in the Jeep. He spat tobacco juice onto the Moonsuit, then raised his fence post over my faceplate. At that moment Gretchen’s tire iron thunked him across the bridge of his nose. He stumbled backward, and I scrambled to my feet and tried to dive into the car through the now-glassless passenger window. I made it halfway, ending up with my head in Gretchen’s lap.

Pete hit the gas, and the Kamikaze slogged forward. Outside, hands grabbed my right foot, and I kicked something soft with my left. The hands let go.

“Dorkhead jerkface!” Gretchen yelled, prodding me with the tire iron. “Get off!”

I floundered into the back seat, and when I faced forward, I saw that the starred windshield was completely opaque. Pete had rolled down his side window and was driving with his head outside. A few of the maniacs were throwing things at him, but most were either diving out of our way or fighting each other. From what I could hear, it seemed that a large number of Bill Willyites were busy beating the hell out of a group of fringe cultists who thought I was God’s personal representative on Earth. That battle, I was sure, was all that kept the mob from rushing the Barracuda and stomping it flat. We began to pick up speed, sliding and fishtailing on the mud and flattened grass, and I saw that other vehicles were now opting for the ditch as well, increasing the chaos and helping to distract the maniacs.

Several hundred yards farther on, we discovered that the traffic jam was the result of three overturned church buses and a number of smaller vehicles (including an Oklahoma Highway Patrol cruiser) that were crammed against them. As soon as we were past that mess, Pete took the Kamikaze up to the pavement and continued north. The car accelerated to almost eighty, but after only a few miles, the right rear tire collapsed. The Barracuda almost flipped, but Pete struggled with the wheel and was able to bring the car to a stop on the shoulder. The three of us clambered out.

Pete had a gash on his forehead, but other than wiping it with the back of his hand, he ignored it. “Break out the windshield so we can see to drive,” he said. Gretchen went to work on the glass with her tire iron while Pete sprinted to open the trunk.

I followed, intending to help, but as he pulled out the spare tire and jack, I looked to the south and saw smoke rising from near the spot where I had lost my bike.

The Willyites were burning Buddy Holly’s motorcycle.

Pete tackled me from behind as I ran, and I fell into the ditch. He threw me onto my back, put a knee on my chest, and held a tire cross against the sky as if about to brain me.

“Every religious movement has its martyrs,” he said.

Then he dragged me back to the Kamikaze and had Gretchen hold me while he jacked up the car and began removing the flat. I looked away and stared at the smoke.

“If your mother’s aliens are going to rescue their prophet,” Pete said, kicking the flat away, “they might want to show up now.”

I heard the whine of approaching engines, looked down from the smoke, and saw cars and pickup trucks speeding toward us. Wild-eyed men and women leaned out of the windows waving ax handles, shovels,