“Demucking Day!” Drutherstone boomed. “Ready up, you sodden drips!”
Ungulen revved the belching motorbike through thick sprays of muck and grass confetti. Drutherstone knelt on the seat behind Ungulen, gripping the man between his knees for balance. Drutherstone brought a crude bull horn to his mouth and continued to bark orders. “Sandbagging starts immediately! The laundry house is closed! Avoid the lake! By god I mean it this time! Avoid the lake! “
Lever boys and other inhabitants of the barracks foisted triages of gas masks, rubber boots, and dry towels to their cohorts. Bodies streamed in all directions, some to construct massive sandbag barriers around the foundations of the circus rides, others setting up tents on higher ground, and no small number took this opportunity to raid the mess hall of any last perishables before the entire grounds were running like a drainage tap.
As Ungulen and Drutherstone whizzed around — coated in slime from the motorbike’s feedback — a distant dirt cloud began to grow on the service road. It was the slime tanker.
Tha tanker was the size of a small ocean liner and just as graceless on land as a whale. It moaned up and over a small hill, clanged like total destruction over a speed bump, and passed the fairgrounds by on its laborious way down into the valley.
Drutherstone gave Ungulen’s shoulder a friendly smack. Ungulen sheered off the circus grounds and headed down to meet the tanker down by the lagoon.
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