mother, is toxic biological waste.
“The end result…well it’s horrible, like something thrown together by Hollywood special effects people. The body literally liquefies into fleshy soup hot with virus.” Price stared out the window at the ruin of civilization. “Ebola was bad enough, but we knew with Ebola-X we were looking at the perfect killing machine. The hand of a very angry god. A species threatening event.”
After that little discourse, nobody said a damn thing. Not for quite while. The gruesome details had done their job on us.
“Well, you certainly are a cheerful fellow,” Texas Slim told Price after a time and there was absolutely no humor behind his words.
I was still thinking about The Medusa. I wanted to relay my fears to Price somehow without sounding like some kind of paranoid whacko who couldn’t tell the difference between nightmare and reality. Later I knew, if the chance came and I could get him away from the others, I would tell him. I would make him listen. And if he thought I was raving, so be it.
We drove on and I saw Mickey watching me in the rearview. When I caught her eyes, she smiled. I was glad she was with us and at the same time I saw her as a possibly destructive element. I believed for the most part everything she’d told me that morning, but I wasn’t naive. I knew women like her with all the right stuff in all the right places made a career of manipulating men. I knew I had to be careful.
“If I might ask,” Price said, “what exactly fuels this desire to travel west? You seem to have no clear idea of where you’re going or even why you want to go there. I find that a bit confusing.”
Texas looked over at me and I didn’t dare meet his eyes. I could feel Janie’s eyes on me, too, probably bitter with hate and recrimination. I had to tell him; he was part of this, he deserved to know. But I was hoping for a more intimate chat. I don’t know what I would have said and I never had the chance because there was a sudden impact and the Jeep fishtailed in the street, glanced off a parked car and smashed into a pile of rubble.
10
Of course, Morse came out of his peaceful sleep screaming and immediately reaching for his Nikon. Everyone was yelling and shouting and wondering what in the Christ had happened. Me among them. Something had hit us and hit us damn hard. This was no accidental run into a parked car or a slab of building. Something had hit us. Something really damn big. Through the windshield I could see nothing but a swirling cloud of dust.
“Is everyone all right?” I said, once things calmed down.
“We’re okay, I think,” Carl said. “Have to check the Jeep, though.”
“What was it?” Janie wanted to know.
“Perhaps our friend Carl drove us into something,” Texas Slim suggested.
“Fuck I did. Something hit us. Something big.”
But what? That’s what I kept asking myself. We had come around a blind corner created by a shattered building and its attendant rubble and then…I don’t know…I saw a flash of silver. Then…boom.
“I think it was a bus,” Mickey said. “It came out of nowhere…but it looked kind of like a big bus.”
“That’s what I saw, too,” Carl said.
I looked from one to the other. “A school bus? A Greyhound? Hell kind of bus?”
“Nothing like that,” Mickey told me. “It was bright silver. Like a train.”
We piled out. The front passenger side quarter panel of the Jeep had a good dent in it, a very big dent, but it wasn’t pushed in enough to rub against the front tire. Carl checked the engine, the undercarriage. Everything was okay. For once, vehicle-wise, we’d caught a break.
“I’m still wandering what it was,” Texas said.
“Look,” Mickey said, examining the dent. She scraped something out of it with her fingernail: a strip of silver paint. “See? I told you. It was a big fucking silver bus.”
Morse got a shot of the paint.
I was picturing one of those chartered coaches that used to take elderly people down to Bransom, Missouri for foot-stomping country music. One of those out on a wild joy ride. It was ridiculous, but the image in my mind persisted.
“It didn’t have windows,” Janie said.
We all looked at her.
“That’s what I saw. I wasn’t really looking. I think I was nodding off,” she explained. “But then I opened my eyes and I saw this metal, silvery thing. It was huge. But it had no windows. No windows at all.”
I thought maybe some kind of military vehicle. But silver bus…silver bus…those words kept running through my mind. Where had I heard something about a big silver bus?
Mickey was tapping a long index finger to her lips. “That guy…do you remember? That weirdo in the bathrobe? He was saying something about a silver bus.”
Carl laughed. “That fucking Gomer? Shit, he had painted purple toenails and he was carrying a fucking phonebook. He said he ate his dog.”
But I was remembering now, too. The bathrobe guy, crazy, deluded, shellshocked…but not necessarily wrong. What had he said exactly?
They came in silver buses. I saw ‘em. They had orange suits on. They took Reverend Bob and threw him in the bus.
“Might I ask what you people are talking about?” Price said.
I told him. I told him about the guy and what he had said which had struck me as being very odd at the time. Now I was wondering if it wasn’t so odd after all and I think Price was wondering the same thing.
“Hmm. A silver bus. Men in orange suits, did he say? Interesting.”
There was no time for speculation then. We were wide open in the streets. We got back in and Carl got behind the wheel and got us rolling. As we drove out, I tried several times to engage Janie in conversation but she wasn’t having it. Every time I spoke to her, she’d ask Texas or Price a question or pose for one of Morse’s photos.
She’s gone over the line, hasn’t she? I kept telling myself. Bitch is alive because you’ve taken care of her and now she’s turning on you. You gonna put up with that, Rick? Maybe you ought to introduce her to big brother Shape next month…
An angry, betrayed sort of revenge fantasy, that’s all it was. I wouldn’t do that to Janie. But on the other hand, if it came down to it, who would I select? Looking at the faces crowded into the Jeep, I knew it wouldn’t be easy if it came to it.
Every corner we turned, every street we prowled down, I expected trouble. But there was nothing. Nothing at all. My guts in my throat, Carl drove us out of Des Moines. And even then I think I really knew where we were going. Because I’d heard it in my sleep last night.
Nebraska.
11
We left Des Moines and drove for a few hours until we spotted a little roadside park with a historical marker. A river ran through it and there was a waterfall back along the trail. We were dirty and we needed to clean up. So we took turns bathing and it felt wonderful. Janie and Mickey went first. Then Price and Texas and Carl. I made Morse go alone. I figured nobody wanted him clicking shots of them in the raw even if there was no film in the camera.
I went last. The water was chilly, but refreshing and I could have stayed in there all day.
I needed to think.
We were right on the outer edge of something and I knew it. Some great abyss was opening before us and it had everything to do with Nebraska, where The Shape wanted us to go. The endgame was coming soon. Destiny
