“Normally, I wouldn’t make such a big deal,” June Medill said. Paul was certain that wasn’t so. “But it’s coming down so hard. Don’t you think it’s hard?”
“Everything’s hard with you yammering,” the driver said, angling forward to peer through the powdered arcs cleared by his wipers.
Paul switched on his overhead light and rummaged through his pack for his iPod, last year’s holiday donation. He pulled out socks, snacks, rolled-up shirts, his notebook, and other items, and piled them on the seat next to him. He’d packed in a hurry. Nothing was where he remembered putting it.
He wanted to listen to something other than the chatter up front, and he was sorry that Annie had quit reading. Her soft voice and the tale of the traveling girl reminded him of story hours with his mother—a long, long time ago and far, far away. He couldn’t recall much about Jeanne Reid other than the yarns she spun, which starred heroes named Paul who always succeeded in doing right.
“Are you going to the Gaia festival?”
Paul stopped digging.
Annie held his notebook, which had fallen off the adjacent seat, along with a pamphlet and a photo from its pages.
“Not until summer,” he said.
“You’re going to San Francisco to see family, then, or is this your girlfriend?” She studied the worn snapshot.
“That’s my mother.”
“Now I’m prying. Never mind. It’s just that I like to sneak into the world of boys so I can be prepared for when he’s older.” She ruffled her son’s hair.
Zach scrutinized the tag on the seat back. From what Paul had seen of him, he might never be like other boys. Which might not be the worst thing, given what boys were capable of.
For instance, they abruptly left behind those who helped them. But that didn’t matter, right?
“It’s okay.” Paul didn’t like anyone handling the photo, which he’d examined so often and for so long that he could see it in his own mind with little effort. A young woman in a crowd, her hair the same shade of red as Annie's, looked back over her shoulder, caught before she could pose, as if someone had spoken her name. On her left hand was the ring Paul wore now.
“Very pretty. When was this?”
“Ninety-six.”
“Are you staying with her?”
“No. She’s not—” He didn’t want Annie to feel bad or, worse, feel sorry for him.
“I ask way too many questions,” she said.
If it had been June Medill, it would have been too many. But Paul was pleased that Annie wanted to know even one thing about him.
She handed him the photo and the notebook, then switched on Zach’s light and gave the boy a few crayons. The process required some negotiating before he had colors he liked, but he soon settled into drawing on the page from Paul’s notebook.
Paul steered the subject back to Gaia, an arts-and-culture festival held in the Nevada desert every year. He hoped that Annie might understand why he’d want to go to it, unlike most of the other New Beginnings kids, who didn’t.
“This was taken at the very first one,” he said of the snapshot, holding it like a charm to ward off the danger of him saying something stupid. “She told me it was one of the happiest times of her life.”
“That was nineteen ninety-six?”
“Yes.”
“You’re what—sixteen, seventeen?”
“Seventeen.”
“So she tried to explore a little bit before settling in with a baby.”
“I don’t think she had a plan. She was there to find one. That’s where she met my dad.”
“And he wants you to go there now?”
“No. That was the only time they … I never—“
Her eyes shone when she smiled. “Sorry. Too many questions.”
She did understand. Paul was sure of it. “I’m closing the circle,” he said. “I need to go there to figure out who I am.”
Up front, June Medill demanded to know how it was possible that they hadn’t yet passed the Delaware Water Gap. The driver said he thought the problem was going too fast, not too slow. June Medill told him that too many people drove while talking on the phone.
“This is already some trip,” Annie said, listening to them. “I’m guessing we both know about traveling, Paul.”
He agreed.
Later—much later—he would wonder why he had.
They hadn’t known a thing.
Bomp-bomp-bomp-bomp. The thud of Paul’s earbuds provided a backbeat to the bus’s plodding progress through the landscape of otherworldly white.
Outside, a man stood by a snow-carpeted car that looked like it had slid off the interstate. He watched the bus as it passed. Paul blinked, his eyes heavy. The car’s trunk was angled up higher than its hood; it wouldn’t be going anywhere without a tow.
A blast of wind coated the window with powder. By the time it cleared, the man was gone. After that, Paul couldn’t be certain he’d been there at all.
Bump-di-di-bump. Bump-di-di-bump. Bump-di-di-bump.
“Watch it. Watch it!”
“Dammit! I told you to sit down!”
June Medill and the driver invaded the rhythm, cracking through it, waking Paul. He hadn’t felt himself falling asleep.
Across from him, Zach and Annie dozed, the boy’s head in his mother’s lap. The notebook page and the crayons lay in the aisle.
Paul picked them up and turned Zach’s drawing over. It wasn’t a drawing.
It took effort to read the boy’s scrawl—the letters were more like shapes than language—but it was the tagged phrase from the seat back: “Unus pro omnibus, omnes pro uno.” What was weirder: that someone tagged a bus seat with such a thing—or that a five-year-old worked so hard to copy it down?
Paul tucked the paper and crayon into Annie’s bag. She didn’t budge.
Bump-di-di-bump. Bump-di-di-bump. Bump-di-di-bump.
Taillights passed the bus on the left—way too fast for the conditions. The veins of window ice flashed red, like lightning, flagging the recklessness. So did the scratched-in tag. IMUURS.
“I’m only trying to help,” June Medill told the driver.
“Look, you leave me alone from here on out, and maybe I won’t have you arrested when we get there, all right?”
Bump-di-di-bump. Bump-di-di-bump. Bump-di-di-bump.
“Can I just—“
He turned around to glare at her. “What?” He’d reached his limit.
The windshield glowed with the red of the passing car, framing the driver in crimson frost as he turned his attention back to the wheel. Then the red went sideways, replaced by the blue-white of headlights as the car spun out in front of them. The lines and shadows of the bus’s windshield wipers swept through the glare.
“Hey.” June Medill’s voice was soft, her surprise barely audible through the earbud beats.
The light grew brighter. The driver stomped on the brake pedal.
The bus fishtailed.
Bump-di-di-bump. Bump-di-di-bump. Bump-di-di-bump.
Everything slowed.
Something hit Paul very, very hard as shapes filled the white. A flash of a question. When had the fight started?
It hit him again. Cries from all around. Bang.
Bump-di-di-bump.
Some trip, Annie had said. But he didn’t care, right?
A thing broke. A thing tore. A thing howled.
Bright, bright light. Too much.
All was light as the snowy windshield blazed at him in lines of hot stars.
The bus imploded into white.
Bump-di-di-bump.
4
That No Longer Applies
Jonas Porter sat at a desk in the Central Assignment Department of the Envoy Corps home office. The desk was the size of a dining-room table, and it was not his.
Porter’s desk was in cubicle 814, near a window with good light. He’d earned that spot decades before, when Corps management rewarded his century of service with an enviable
new location and a leaded-crystal paperweight containing a hologram that resembled him if tipped just right.
He’d commandeered the team director’s office, which was closer to the message-relay tubes. If something came in, he would hear it. His assigned desk was out of earshot. That was why, when the office was busy, he received his assignments there only when a courier was on duty to deliver them.
There were no couriers left now. The office was silent. Porter was the only person in the building, which claimed a full city block, and his solitude was a circumstance to which he’d long since adjusted.
He clocked his days watching dust float in sunlight focused through thick windows. He wondered if he should again try to stop drinking diet soda.
When the tubes began delivering fewer assignments, the couriers stopped coming to work, so the Envoys monitored the tubes themselves. When the Envoys stopped coming to work, the director asked Porter to use a cubicle closer in. When the director failed to show up, Porter claimed her space. And when the vending machines ran out of caffeinated bubbles, he brought his own.
The relay tubes were pneumatic and noisy. Long before, when the office was filled with the din of Envoys coming and going with their assignees, typing reports, and giving counsel, the hiss and thunk of the steel capsules hitting the tubes’ intake doors was difficult to hear. When there had still been some hold-out Envoys left, they’d listen hard and race to the tubes at the sound of the rare capsule. Porter’s seniority gave him dibs on assignments, but he doled them out fairly to keep up morale.
Then the assignments ceased to mean anything. Then they ceased altogether.
Now there were no capsules and only one Envoy. The tubes could be heard anywhere if they bothered to clunk—even in the empty waiting room, which Porter paced to keep his legs from falling asleep.
The last of the Envoys checked the director’s desk clock, which no longer kept time. He drew a line through the current day on the blotter calendar—which had multiple lines through its days—and drank the last of his soda. He didn’t like ending the day early but allowed himself that lapse in professional rigor.
In the hallway outside, he turned the deadbolt and realized he’d forgotten his walking staff. He went back inside, retrieved it, and was locking up again when he swore he heard the hiss-thunk of a capsule through the door.
He did this to himself every day—this and the diet soda. Determined to make headway on at least one bad habit, he yanked his key from the lock.
Pocketing it, he walked to the elevators at a brisk pace. The heel-strikes of his wing-tips echoed down the hall.
They echoed up it, too, when he hurried back to the door and inserted his key for the fourth time that day, ignoring his inner voice’s scolding. The voice was winning as he inspected the relay tubes, which held only dust, their signal flags all down.
The voice shut up when he opened the door to the second-to-last tube in the rear-facing bank—the one with the flag that hadn’t worked in years.
Every fight Paul ever lost mattered, and he'd lost a lot. Pop Mike said he had a talent for being outnumbered and overmatched—a Captain Marvel heart in a Rick Jones body.
Paul Googled the reference. Pop Mike had a point.
The afternoon he happened upon the gang bangers bothering Victor Gonzales and his girlfriend mattered. They were targeted because she was white, or because Victor wasn’t, or just because the two of them were there and so were the guys.
After Victor ran off and the thing got started, Paul landed some respectable shots. He tried to protect the girl before the numbers had their say. But he went down hard into the gravel and glass while she screamed.
He needn’t have worried. They never touched her.
When the kicking was over, the guys moved on. Gonzales wasn’t coming back. The sobbing girl tried to help him.
It wasn’t clear whether she cried for Paul or for herself. Or maybe because her new boyfriend bailed on her. It didn’t matter. Paul just wanted her to let go of his wrists and stop trying to pull him up.
He couldn’t breathe. He was too hurt to stand, and her tears burned his burst knuckles.
Drip. Drip. He opened his eyes. This wasn’t the alley.
A crying peacock sat on a branch above, watching him. Paul blinked water away. The drops weren’t the bird’s tears.
He was on his back on a snowy hill. The peacock, lit by the undulating tangerine glow of nearby flames, peered down at him as ice melted from the tree’s limbs.
Paul took a breath, sending a crack of hurt from hip to shoulder. The next was a little better and the one after better still.
Cold wet splatted across his face. He wiped it off, and the back of his hand came away streaked with flecks of red. His nose had been bleeding. An icy rain followed as the peacock pushed off from the branch and flapped up into the sky, which was lightening into a gray dawn.
He sat up with care. To his left, a hunk of the bus was on its side, twisted. It had plowed a trench into the snow and earth, seats jutting from the floor at a right angle to the ground. Yards away, a woman’s shoe sat upright in the snow, as if its owner had jumped out of it in a trick performed for her child.
Beyond the shoe was Annie. A trough of pink on white marked where she’d dragged herself over to cradle Zach.
Both were still. Both were dead.
It was a tableau of awful serenity. Bodies, some still belted into their seats, marked the path of the motor coach. The bus’s remains were scattered—a few of the pieces burning—all the way down the hill.
Paul hurt inside. The hand he leaned on was numb. The cold was too much.
Annie and Zach were dead, as were many others. The trees wept into the snow.
Standing, the grind of his ankle and the jolt across his body were audible in his head, a pulse of their own. Then came louder sounds: the rhythmic thrum of helicopters, the growl of trucks. Help.
Paul wanted Annie and Zach to know, as if they could still be told—and might be saved. But that wasn’t so.
It all arrived fast. Black military choppers descended toward the hillside in the gray—hovering, surveying. Black trucks and black-uniformed soldiers in helmets and goggles boiled up from the woods at the bottom of the hill.
Paul waved his arms to get their attention, his shouts hoarse and unheard over the din. He looked to Annie and Zach again, maintained his fool’s notion. This could be changed for them.
Then the elements of the picture became questions, and the questions had answers. As Pop Mike said, Paul possessed survival skills. Why soldiers and not medical personnel? And who wore helmets and body armor for a rescue operation?
He stopped waving.
The soldiers ignored the living—the few on the ground who moved, the handful who sat up or tried to stand—and dealt first with the dead. The troops on foot worked in tandem with those in the covered trucks who handed down stretchers and bags.
Fast and not at all gentle, they zipped up the bodies, rolled them onto the stretchers, and hefted them up and into the backs of the trucks. Paul couldn’t see into the dark interiors. It looked like the bodies were fed into hungry mouths.
They were not here to help. This was not a rescue.
One man was able to get up on his own, waving an approaching soldier away and pointing him toward a woman lying nearby. He was clubbed down with a rifle butt and bagged. Other soldiers dealt with the woman in a similar fashion.
Paul didn’t want to register what was plain to see. June Medill shook him out of that.
One moment she wasn’t there, the next she appeared from behind one of the bus pieces to come at a soldier from his blind side, yelling. He didn’t notice until his partner pointed to her. The soldier pulled a long baton from a holster on his leg.
A truck passed, blocking Paul’s view. When it was gone, June Medill was on the ground, her hand reaching up, as if trying to tell the soldier she was sorry or begging for understanding.
Another truck passed. June Medill lay face-dow
n in the snow, arms out to embrace it. The soldier unzipped a bag.
Paul was exposed against the white.
Down below, a trooper spotted him and spoke into a shoulder microphone. Others turned to look up the hill. Some headed in Paul’s direction.
Move. Move and hide.
The bad ankle brought him down in one step, and he slid and crawled as fast as he was able. He bit down against the pain, fighting his way through the snow to the nearest piece of the bus—the one he’d been sitting in, judging by the trail Annie left. He threw himself into it and rolled his back up against the now-vertical floor.
He chanced a look over the sideways seats. Soldiers made their way up the hill, some stopping to bag bodies or club the living. Choppers beat the skies overhead.
The bus piece rocked as Paul grabbed the seat and pulled himself to his feet. He shouldered aside something hanging from the arm rest, and it fell to the ground.
His pack. In the snow next to it was his coat. He wriggled into the coat, grabbed the pack, and limped around the end of the bus piece.
Keeping the fragment between him and the soldiers, he made it to a nearby tree. His ankle threatened to give out again, but he clung to the bark and worked his way over the snow-covered roots to the far side. From behind the bus came a radio’s crackle and the sound of a man bludgeoned into submission.
The helicopter grew louder.
At the next tree, Paul could only hope that the chopper wouldn’t spot him—that the soldiers were too busy with the other bodies to target him.
Annie and Zach. He pushed that thought away.
He was a dozen long yards from a stand of trees, and a clump of woods beyond those offered the chance to hide. He looked back. Hope faded.
A trail of footprints and drag marks in the snow pointed the way right to him. His only chance was to run and pray.
Now came what Pop Mike called a moment of true seeing. They came along in various situations, but Paul had only ever experienced them just before a fight. It didn’t matter if you were smaller, outnumbered, slower, or scared. The thing started, and you were in it. You swung for the soft spots. You moved.
The Journeyman Page 2