Crap Kingdom Read Online Free PDF Page B

Gark said. “They’re conveyances.”
    “They’re cars,” Tom said.
    “The parts came from your world,” Gark said, “but we combined them in our world, adding our own special touches.” To emphasize this, he leaned forward and took a sip from a very long straw that led to the dashboard-fused rainwater cup. He coughed.
    “Where do you guys get the gasoline?”
    “Oh, that stuff?” Gark asked. “We don’t have that here. That stuff is for cars. These are conveyances. They run on motion juice.”
    “Is that just what you call gasoline?”
    “No! Motion juice we make ourselves. It doesn’t have that annoying thing like gasoline where it runs all smooth. With motion juice—”
    Bang!
There was a small explosion behind Tom. He looked behind him out the no-window and saw a cone of fire pouring out of the gas tank.
    “
. . . it does that so you know it’s working
,” Gark yelled over the roar of the flames.
    “
It’s supposed to do that?
” Tom yelled.
    “
Yep,
” Gark yelled, and smiled. “
Motion juice!
”
    Tom looked back. The fire just kept coming out of the side of the car. Safety, he thought, was not a real concern here. He reached up and undid his top safety shoelace.
    “
Ooooh!
” Gark yelled.
“Rebel!”

    They rounded a hill, and Gark’s village came into view. On its outskirts there were a few “conveyances” like Gark’s. Their still-burning vehicle drifted into a tight space between two other conveyances. It was so tight that Tom didn’t know how they were going to get out. Then he watched Gark turn the engine off and throw his door open with gusto, causing the kind of metal-on-metal smacking sound that would have made Tom’s mom pull a piece of paper and a pen out of her purse so Tom could start writing the other car’s driver a note. Tom opened his door just as hard on his side. It banged the door next to him, hard. It was pretty fun.
    The motion-juice fire had gone out, leaving a cloud of awful-smelling black smoke Tom had to wave away to breathe or see anything. Finally, he’d flapped his arms enough and got a good look at the village. It was mostly forts.
    These were not the castle kind of forts. These were the kind of forts Tom would build in the living room when he was little and his parents were out for the night and there was a babysitter over, with a couple of kitchen chairs with a blanket strung over them to create a dark, private interior space. Sometimes he had even incorporated the couch, provided the babysitter was not asleep on it.
    Here, in Gark’s village, tarps often stood in for blankets, and old doorless refrigerators or rusty smashed-open vending machines sometimes took the place of chairs. Some of the forts were made of actual blankets and chairs. The blankets were dirty and the chairs were beat up, and they had fully grown adults running in and out of them, conducting business, but that was really the only difference between them and the things Tom used to build and climb in to hide from imaginary enemies.
    They walked into the village, dodging sleeping people in dirty thrift-store clothing and zigzagging between blankets strung over chairs placed back-to-back and a few feet apart.
    “What is this place called?” Tom asked.
    “Uhmm . . .” Gark said. “It’s not really called anything.”
    “And what are you guys called?” Tom asked. “I mean, your people.”
    “Good question!” Gark said. “Nothing in particular.”
    Tom liked this idea a lot. He’d never thought about fantasy worlds as being on actual planets. He mostly thought of them as flat, two-dimensional maps stretched out on the first few pages of the book that detailed a hero’s adventures within that world. Tom preferred to think that this village, humble as it was, and the lake, soapy as it was, were the whole of this world. If there was a singing grotto or a Forest of Undoing around as well, he wouldn’t complain. But once you started naming things it indicated there were