by Lisa Klink
“Let’s not go accusing each other,” said Javier in a deep, soothing voice. “Let’s just get some help. Does anyone have their phone?”
The wreck was now fully engulfed in flames. Its long, vertical body served as a kind of chimney, concentrating the heat. Everything inside was being incinerated, including several of the passengers’ phones. Matt and Alex were the only ones who had taken their bags as they escaped. Alex kept his camo backpack close, as if afraid that some new disaster might snatch it away for good.
He pulled a cell phone out of the pack. Karen and the blond guy had theirs safely in their pockets. All quickly discovered that they had no signal. Alex glared at the high, steep cliff walls, which effectively blocked any cell reception. Refusing to accept defeat, he walked off into the canyon, phone held aloft, searching for bars.
Javier swayed on his feet slightly. “Are you all right?” asked the pierced young woman, putting a hand on his arm. Her nails were painted black, Matt noticed, and filed into triangular points.
“Just a little dizzy,” he assured her.
“Let me see.” She reached for his cap and he pulled back. “Hold still,” she scolded. She took off his cap, revealing a large gash beneath his close-cropped hair.
Their manner gave Matt the distinct impression that these people knew each other. They hadn’t been together on the bus, hadn’t acknowledged each other during the trip or since the crash. But there was a familiarity between them that hadn’t been there until just now, when Alex went out of earshot. Interesting.
Unless he was imagining the whole thing, maybe to distract himself from the fact that he still couldn’t move or even feel his legs. I’ll heal, Matt assured himself. I always heal.
Alex came striding back, frustrated. Sure enough, the two moved apart. “Nothing,” he fumed, flinging aside his phone.
Karen tried to stay positive. “Someone will come looking for us when we don’t show up in Battle Mountain, won’t they?”
“Of course,” agreed Javier. He checked his watch. “It’s just past two. We’re due in at around three. When we’re late, the Greyhound people will probably call the driver. When they can’t reach him, they’ll know something’s wrong and send someone out to find us.”
“One problem,” Matt pointed out. “We’re supposed to be on the highway.”
Javier was unfazed. “I’m sure they’ll know about the detour. That’s part of their job.”
The other passengers seemed reassured. Matt wasn’t. If the Dark Man had directed them off the road, no one else would know about it. A search party would have no idea when the missing bus had left its intended route, or where to start looking. And Matt had seen a map of Route 305. It cut through ninety miles of open desert. That was a whole lot of search area.
“Even so,” said Matt, “somebody should go for help.”
Alex gave a short laugh. “Go where? Up there?” He gestured to the road they’d fallen from. It was at least five hundred feet above them, up a crumbling sandstone cliff. It would be a challenging climb for anyone, functioning legs or not.
Matt nodded toward the northern end of the canyon. “Toward Battle Mountain.”
“Do you know how far that is? We were still an hour away. By bus,” Alex emphasized.
Matt thought back to the map. “We might not have to go all the way to town. There are other roads running through the desert where we could find people.”
“Easy to say when you won’t be the one stuck out there in the fucking heat,” said Alex, looking at Matt’s inert legs. Matt felt his face burn. He would really love to deck this asshole.
Javier intervened with that soothing voice. “Nobody needs to hike out into the desert. We should stay with the wreck.” He gestured to the plume of black smoke rising from the burning bus. “They’ll follow that and find us.”
That was the end of the discussion. Matt wished desperately that he could simply stand up and go look for help himself. But, as Alex had pointed out, he wasn’t going anywhere.
“Do we have any water?” asked Karen, looking to Alex and Matt, the only possible sources.
Matt dug through his duffel. He found a single, half-empty bottle of water and an iced tea. He put them on the ground in front of Karen. Alex pulled two full bottles from his pack and added them to the communal supply. That was it. Three and a half bottles of water and a single unsweetened iced tea to keep seven people hydrated for who knew how long. It wasn’t enough. But it would have to be.
“Let’s get out of the sun,” said Javier. He had a natural air of authority and he was emerging as the group’s de facto leader. Matt was happy to let someone else take charge for a change.
Javier gathered the drinks and looked for a shady place to keep them. There weren’t many options. In the middle of the day, a thin strip of shade ran along the base of the western wall of the canyon. The burning bus leaned against that same wall, still resting precariously on its nose. Javier moved a safe distance from the bus, and stowed the bottles in a small alcove in the rock wall. He sat in the shade nearby. Karen half carried Daniel over to sit beside him.
Matt started to drag himself over to join the group, when the blond guy took pity on him and asked, “Need some help?”
Matt hated asking for help, but it was too damn hot to insist on struggling along by himself. He nodded. “Thanks.”
“I’m Ryan,” said the guy.
“Matt.”
Ryan looked even younger than Matt had first thought. He couldn’t be more than twenty-two or -three. There was still some acne scattered across his forehead. He had a chaotic thatch of blond hair, with a liberal application of styling gel to keep it standing on end. Several shallow scrapes along his jaw were bleeding but not serious.
He hauled Matt into the shade, where it was marginally cooler. Karen had torn off a strip of her blouse and was attempting to tie it around Daniel’s broken wrist, hampered by her own injured arm.
“Let me,” said Matt.
She nodded gratefully and made room for him to scoot over to Daniel. The boy’s wrist was obviously painful, but he seemed determined to remain stoic. He didn’t make a sound as Matt bandaged it with the piece of cloth.
Daniel’s leg was a more serious problem. It was badly swollen, the skin around his knee and thigh an ugly purple, mottled with red. It was clearly broken, and Matt thought the boy’s kneecap might have been shattered.
“Let’s get a splint on that leg,” he said. As a kid, he’d spent a lot of time hiking in the Cascades. He’d acquired basic wilderness first aid skills by necessity. “I need two long, straight branches.”
Ryan went to collect them. When the bus crashed into the stand of pines, it had broken off the upper branches and scattered them around the canyon, out of reach of the flames. Ryan brought back several options. Matt chose the two straightest and snapped the smaller branches off the makeshift splints to make them as smooth as possible.
He placed a branch on either side of Daniel’s injured leg. The boy looked distinctly nervous about the whole operation. Karen sat beside him, holding his hand.
“I had to splint my own leg like this once,” Matt told Daniel, hoping to distract him, “when I broke my ankle on a hike.” He pulled an old shirt from his duffel bag and tore it into strips. “I was out by myself, which was kinda stupid. And I hadn’t told anyone where I was going, which was really stupid.”
He lifted Daniel’s leg to pass the strips of cloth under it. He tried to be gentle, but the boy sucked in his breath sharply. Matt confided, “Between you and me, I wasn’t the smartest kid on the block.”
Karen asked, “How old were you?”
“Nine.” He turned to Daniel. “Just a little older than you.” The boy smiled at that. Matt tied the makeshift bandages above and below his knee, to hold the splints in place. “It took me almost four hours to get home.”
He pulled the first knot tight. Daniel stifled a cry of pain. Matt kept talking. “My mom was so furious. Grounded me for months.”
H
e tightened the knot below the knee and this time Daniel yelled. Karen pulled him close.
“That’s it,” said Matt. “You did great.”
Karen smiled at him. “Thank you.”
The other passengers took refuge in the scant shade as well. They did their best to treat their injuries, using torn strips of their clothes as bandages. Javier held a piece of cloth to his head wound until it stopped bleeding. Ryan pulled off his shirt to examine a large, colorful bruise across his chest. He winced as he touched it. Matt guessed that he’d cracked a rib or two. He noticed that the kid wore an arrowhead on a chain around his neck.
Alex’s girlfriend gently dabbed at his broken nose, not really doing much to clean it off. Her name was Vanessa, but Alex rarely called her that, preferring “babe” or “hon,” or in less affectionate moments, “stupid bitch.”
Daniel settled into an uneasy doze, as much as the pain in his leg would allow. Karen let Matt take a look at her broken arm. Blood still oozed from the torn flesh around the jutting bone. He wiped it away with a torn piece of T-shirt.
“I should have rented a car,” she said.
He didn’t follow. “What?”
“For the trip to Battle Mountain. But the bus ticket was cheaper.” She shook her head, clearly angry with herself. “And I wanted to let someone else do the driving.”
Matt started to wrap a strip of cloth around her arm. “You can’t possibly think this is your fault.”
“Not the accident, but…”
“None of it,” he insisted. “You couldn’t have known this would happen.”
Karen looked at her son. “Doesn’t matter. He’s only here because of me.” Matt knew exactly how she felt. They were all stuck here because of him.
“That’s pretty arrogant.” Matt knew that voice. He closed his eyes, as if that would shut the Dark Man out. “Assuming this is all about you.”
Matt looked up to see Mr. Dark lounging in a beach chair, wearing sunglasses and a smear of white sunscreen on his nose, basking in the sun. Matt couldn’t react. Karen was right there but, of course, didn’t see the Dark Man. Only Matt had that privilege.
The specter pointed a long finger at Daniel. “See that little thing? He’s going to be a regular ass-kicker when he grows up. I don’t know if he can match your impressive body count, but he’ll give it a try. Much easier to take him out now.”
Now he nodded toward Vanessa. “Or maybe I’m here for that one. She’s studying mythology at OSU. Working on a master’s thesis about trickster gods in various cultures. You know, Loki, Coyote, Anansi…my kind of guys. She’s come across some very interesting ancient documents.”
Mr. Dark looked thoughtful for a moment, but couldn’t hold a straight face. “I’m just messing with you. This really is your fault.” He laughed.
As he did, Ryan shuddered, as if a chill had gone up his spine. The presence of evil sometimes had that effect on people. Then the Dark Man was gone.
Matt turned his attention back to Karen. When he finished bandaging her arm, she insisted on examining his back. She ran her fingers over his vertebrae.
“I don’t feel anything broken or dislocated. Just some swelling at the base of your spine,” she told him. “When that goes down, you should be okay.”
He nodded. They both knew she had no idea what she was talking about, of course, but it was comforting nonetheless. I’ll heal, he assured himself. He always healed, and with impressive speed. At least, he had since he came back from the dead.
Nearly three years ago, Matt had been killed in avalanche. His body was buried under the snow for three months before being discovered by a little girl building a snowman. She probably still had nightmares about it. Matt had been taken to the nearest morgue. That’s where he woke up, just as the assistant coroner was starting his autopsy. The poor guy must have nightmares of his own.
Matt had no idea how or why he’d come back to life. He knew it had something to do with the Dark Man, a spectral figure who spread evil with his touch. Since his resurrection, Matt could see that evil as it took hold in people. It looked, and smelled, like physical decomposition. Other people couldn’t see it. He’d learned the hard way that whenever someone showed that kind of rot, violence and death were soon to follow.
But Mr. Dark didn’t touch people at random. He always had a plan. Matt had come to realize that he and the creature were simply soldiers in a much larger war. Good versus evil, right versus wrong—Matt didn’t know what higher forces might be at work. He was more concerned about protecting the innocent people caught in the crossfire. Like the passengers on this bus. He had to get them some help.
Matt grabbed his right leg and pulled the knee up to his chest. He did the same with the left leg, then the right again, with some idea of stimulating the nerves. Hardly scientific, he knew, but he had to try something. He’d never been good at just sitting around and waiting.
Vanessa announced, “It’s three o’clock!” Matt wasn’t sure why she was so happy about the time. Then he remembered—that’s when the bus was due in Battle Mountain. According to Javier, help would soon be on the way. The passengers looked up at the road eagerly, already anticipating the sirens and lights.
Matt didn’t have the heart to tell them it wasn’t gonna happen, at least not anytime soon. If the road really was part of an official highway detour, there would a steady stream of traffic going by. They should be able to hear it in the canyon—at least the rumble of a truck or the occasional squeal of brakes. But he hadn’t heard anything since the crash. Matt continued to work his legs. I’ll heal, he told himself again. I have to.
CHAPTER THREE
As the afternoon dragged on, the passengers’ hopeful expressions faded. Javier passed around the water several times. They finished the first bottle quickly. The second one went more slowly, as the passengers took smaller sips, starting to realize that the water might need to last longer than they’d thought.
Alex and Vanessa began to argue in low, intense voices, growing loud enough for the others to hear. “You’re so fucking paranoid,” snapped Alex. “If I say it was nothing, it was nothing.”
“She was hanging all over you,” Vanessa insisted.
“She was falling-down drunk. You know what that’s like, don’t you?” he shot back.
“Fuck you,” said Vanessa.
Alex grabbed her arm roughly and shook her. “You think you can talk to me like that?”
Ryan spoke up. “Hey, take it easy.”
Alex turned on him. “Mind your own goddamn business.” The two men locked eyes for a moment. Then Ryan looked away.
Vanessa wrenched her arm free and stood awkwardly. She limped away, mostly hopping on her uninjured foot, to a cluster of large boulders in the riverbed. She found a sheltered spot between two of the rocks and sat alone.
Karen decided to lighten the mood. She indicated the arrowhead around Ryan’s neck. “Where did you get that?”
“My grandfather gave it to me,” he said. The arrowhead wasn’t very big, maybe three inches long, made of shiny black stone.
“Is it obsidian?”
“Flint,” he told her. He saw Daniel leaning in to take a closer look. Ryan slipped the neck chain over his head and gave it to the boy. “This belonged to a great Shoshone warrior, who passed it down through five generations. Then Grandpa won it from a medicine man on the reservation.”
“How?” asked Daniel.
Ryan smiled. “With a lucky draw to an inside straight. Of course, he says it wasn’t luck at all. He was meant to win this arrowhead, so he could give it to me.” He looked at Karen and shrugged. “Or he bought it at a souvenir shop and made up that story to make it seem special for my birthday. I was ten.”
“You still wear it,” she said. “That’s sweet.”
“Not really. It’s been sitting in a box of junk in the back of my closet. I dug it out because I was supposed to visit him last week and he asked if…” his voice broke, “…if I still had it.”
Karen touched the young man’s shoulder. “What’s wrong?”
“He’s dead.” Ryan abruptly burst into tears. The other passengers stared. He tried to control himself enough to speak. “He asked me to come last week because he wanted my help with something. But work got busy and I blew him off. And now my grandpa is dead.” Sobs overwhelmed him again. “I was on my way to his funeral.”
Karen hugged him. Daniel gave back the arrowhead. That was the end of conversation for a while.
Javier chose the location of their makeshift latrine. He walked to the far side of the bus. The fire had died down to a smolder. The black smoke that might have signaled their location to rescuers had also died out. Javier stayed out of sight for a couple of minutes then reappeared. When Alex had to go a half hour later, he used the same spot.
When he returned, he went over to Vanessa. They kept their voices low as they talked. Matt couldn’t hear the specifics, but followed the general drift. He was conciliatory. She was still angry, then softening. He flattered. She smiled. Then they moved around to the far side of the rocks for some privacy, the reconciliation apparently complete.
This kind of volatile relationship was foreign to Matt. Sure, he and Janey had fought on occasion, sometimes followed by hot make-up sex, but for the most part preferred to keep things calm. Their communication tended to be more subtle, a raised eyebrow or stiffened back. They could read each other so well. Matt wondered sometimes if it would be possible to find that kind of connection again. Not in his current life of darkness and secrets, he knew. Until this was over, if it ever was, he would remain isolated.
That’s when Matt felt it…a twinge of sensation in his left foot, somewhere between a tickle and an itch. He grabbed the foot and pinched it hard. He felt that, too. Matt poked his finger into several spots on one leg, then the other, and grinned.
Karen saw this. “What is it?” she asked.
“The feeling’s coming back. Here…” He jabbed at his thigh. Karen did the same. Matt nodded happily. “You were right. I think I’ll be okay.”
“I’m so glad.” She smiled.