Crap Kingdom Read Online Free PDF

a look he could’ve gotten from any girl in one of those Earthly malls.
Great,
he thought.
I’ve been in this world for ten minutes and already at least one person thinks I’m a creep.
    The dock became a path leading to the top of a hill. The sun was bright and hot, and there was only one of it, like on Earth, and it shone down from a sky that was blue, like on Earth, and these things were disappointing to Tom for reasons he couldn’t quite explain. But it was nice to be drying off in the sunshine. They reached the top of the hill. On the other side of the hill was a parking lot.
    It wasn’t exactly like the parking lot in front of the Kmart, but the only differences were that the Kmart parking lot was paved and this one was just grass and dirt, and the Kmart parking lot had been mostly empty and this one was full.
    It wasn’t full of sleeping griffins, either.
    It was full of cars.

5
    GARK HAD CLAIMED the vehicles in his world were vastly different than the ones in Tom’s world. It turned out he’d meant that the cars in his world were cars from Tom’s world but with a lot of trash stuck to them.
    They found Gark’s car. Tom was not a car guy, but it looked to him like a windowless, mirrorless version of a 1980s sedan. Gark took Tom’s empty water bottle from the waistband of his pants. He reached into the car’s driver’s seat, pulled out a half-used roll of black electrical tape, bent down, and taped the bottle to the left front tire of the car. The tire was covered entirely in flattened, weathered bottles of various shapes and sizes. In fact it was made of them, Tom realized as he looked closer. It was like a tank tread made of water bottles and weathered, gooey straps of electrical tape. Gark stared proudly at this fresh new bottle, like it somehow made the makeshift tire complete. Tom noticed that every tire on every vehicle in the parking lot was like this. Some of the tires were made of crushed soda cans. The ones on the car across from Gark’s were made of grocery bags.
    “Let’s go!” Gark said. He reached through the space where the driver’s side window would have been and pulled up on the tab to unlock the door, and then opened the door and climbed in. Tom did the same on his side. Gark had left the keys in the ignition.
    Before starting the car, Gark leaned over and looked at a plastic cup that was fused into his dashboard cup holder. He noticed there were two inches of brownish liquid in the cup and said, “Perfect. I’m parched.”
    “How long has that been in there?” Tom asked.
    “Not long,” Gark said. “It’s just rainwater that collected while I was gone.” He put his hand through the space where the windshield would have been, demonstrating how the rain had reached the cup, and also how the one or two bugs in the water had gotten there as well.
No wonder he thought he could just throw up while driving,
Tom thought.
In this world, it would’ve ended up outside the car.
    Tom reached for his seat belt, only to discover that it had met the same fate as the tires, the mirrors, and the windshield. In its place were ten or so shoelaces hanging from one side of the passenger seat, each one spaced a few inches apart.
    “You just tie those across you,” Gark said.
    “Okay,” Tom said, reaching up to tie the top lace to the corresponding loop on the other side of his seat. He tried to lift his shoes up off the floor once he realized it was one big puddle of standing water.
    Gark had accidentally tied two laces in the same loop. “Oops! Let me fix this, it’ll just take a second.”
    Twenty minutes later, they were moving at last, crossing a grassy but otherwise featureless plain at a speed of maybe ten miles an hour. Tom looked over to see what their actual speed was but all of the needles on the dashboard panel that told you things like how fast you were going and how much fuel you had left weren’t there.
    “Where did you get these cars?” Tom asked.
    “They’re not cars,”