* * * * *
When a person goes without sleep for days―and how many had it been now? Two? Three?―the sleep that eventually comes is of a certain breed. Heavy, dreamless, and maddeningly restless.
I snapped awake in the dark, mired in a puddle of drool.
The bus hummed and swayed. Highway speed. Still moving. Still nighttime. Many thoughts occurred at once. Recent events organized themselves in my memory, spurring the stunning realization that they had not been a dream. And one thought thundered to the fore, more urgent and powerful than all the others: I really, really needed to brush my teeth.
I rolled forward, blinking through a murky haze until the digital clock came into focus. Priority number two: clean the contact lenses.
It was 5:55 a.m.
The dividing door was still closed. I hovered close to it, listening hard. Everything sounded quiet up front. I could just make out Jesse's voice, and Jackson's, though what they were saying was unclear. Keeping one another awake, presumably.
I didn't want to go back out there, not yet. Teeth first. Contacts. Maybe more sleep. I crept backwards and slid open the door to the closet-sized lavatory, flipping on the lights as I entered.
I walked directly into something very big and very fluorescent pink.
Leaping back out again in a single startled bound, I gripped the doorway and gazed upward at Khan, who was crouching over the sink so as to position his face, one hand, and a lit cigarette close to an open window. He turned around to face me, which required a considerable amount of maneuvering from him, given the tiny space.
"Sorry," I stammered, feeling the blood drain from my face.
Khan lifted a hand and palmed the door seam before I could close it, flicking the last of his cigarette out the window and advancing―not to do me harm, I realized with knee-shaking relief―but to exit the lavatory.
I moved aside, giving him room to contort himself through the slim passage one shoulder at a time. "Go ahead," he said, in a mechanical, blood-chilling, polite sort of way. I readily complied. Had the shower been full of venomous snakes, he could have probably convinced me to dive right in.
The scent of nicotine he left behind made my mouth water. I hadn't smoked in years, but the past few days had given me more than a few occasions to crave a cigarette. I noticed that there was no sky outside the lavatory's open window―just steep walls of stone racing by without end, cut away from mountains to form the highway. One glance at the mirror showed Khan's shoulder disappearing beyond the door, on his way back to the front of the bus.
"Hey!" I said, and the shoulder froze. "Where are we?"
Khan did not answer, at least not with the name of a place. He laughed, opened the dividing door, and disappeared.
Jerk.
I glared into the mirror, flattened my bangs, coerced my hair into a ponytail, and snatched up my toothbrush. Midway through brushing, I realized that the closest bottle of contact solution was somewhere in my overnight bag.
Still scrubbing furiously, I ventured out of the lavatory and over to the sleeping berths. I was still digging around my bunk for the bag when a bright light pulled my attention to the rear of the bus. Beyond the thick window shades at the back of Jesse's room, a pair of headlights were growing in size, advancing at what seemed to be excessive speed. Beneath me, the bus's wheels clacked sharply as we drove over something metallic, and the sound of the road itself changed, as if we had entered a tunnel.
The headlights swung out into the passing lane and became four. There were two cars, one in front of the other, moving like one unit.
They accelerated.
I accelerated, too. I dove into the lavatory to spit.
Wiping frantically at the corners of my mouth, I looked out the small window and froze. Gone were the carved mountainsides by the road. There was only blackness, endless space. The two vehicles―two rather battered-looking U-Hauls―sped past, interrupting the nothingness.
I bolted out of the lavatory and tumbled through the dividing door.
"Guys!" I barked in one harsh, minty breath, startling both Ghi and Corin awake as I passed. "What just happened?"
Jackson smirked. I looked out the windshield, at the road ahead stretching forward into darkness.
"We're just crossing a bridge, Slick," he said. "A really big bridge."
"The New River Gorge Bridge," Jesse corrected, reciting from one of the many Wild and Wonderful West Virginia brochures he'd evidently picked up at the last truck stop―along with what appeared to be a coonskin hat, which was perched at an angle on his head. "The longest and highest vehicular bridge in the nation at nearly nine hundred feet above―"
"Well what are they doing?" I pointed at the U-Hauls speeding past.
Corin and Ghi blinked groggily out the windows to see what all the commotion was about. Jackson shook his head as the first truck made headway past the bus.
"Probably just some assholes in a big hurry," he said.
The assholes cut sharply out in front of us and hit the brakes hard.
Jackson cursed and braked, stiffening his arms to steady the wheel. I grabbed the back of his seat as the bus shimmied, watching the second truck sidle up to our driver's side door and keep pace, blocking entry into the passing lane.
These weren't just any assholes. They were assholes with a premeditated formation.
I looked ahead. No end to the bridge in sight.
"Shit," Jackson growled. He ground the clutch and switched gears.
"What are you doing?" Corin rushed forward.
"Reminding them that we're bigger," Jackson replied, then floored the gas. Before we could so much as decide what to hold onto, the nose of the bus rammed into the rear of the front-running truck.
"The paint job!" Jesse cried, his raccoon tail bouncing.
The truck popped forward but then accelerated, nearly matching our pace, nullifying the impact. With the front of the bus pressed persistently to its rear bumper, it began to brake again. Jackson cursed and pushed the gas harder, but the bus only strained and shook, unable to muster the leverage for momentum.
Less than two feet from the glass of our windshield, the back hatch of the truck rolled up.
Beyond it, poised in the close wash of our high beams, was a whole line of people. Men and women. All with guns.
Large guns.
Pointed at us.
"Back back back back!" Jesse screamed, bailing between the seats and knocking me to the floor with him. Jackson slammed the brakes and struggled to downshift. Khan lunged forward to do god knows what, but Corin and Ghi grabbed him from either side and wrestled him down, just before the first deafening shots fired.
The windshield shattered. Jackson threw an arm over his face and battled to steady the steering wheel with one hand. He looked sideways, shouted, and ducked. More people were hanging out of the truck in the passing lane, armed and taking aim. The driver's side window burst and fell over Jackson in one sparkling sheet.
Shots took out a front tire. The bus lurched and swung wide, hit the concrete railing and scraped along it for a good forty yards before it was steady again. I rolled from one side of the bus to the other within a tangled ball of limbs.
And then there was a roar from Jackson, as bullets tore into the meat of his shoulder, and everything that came next seemed to occur simultaneously: another shot punching into his chest, the rupture of two back wheels, the sideways leap of the bus, the sudden ramming from the truck beside us, and the firing of a bazooka―yes, a bazooka―into the side of the road directly ahead of us.
The boom filled our ears and left a shocking silence in its wake. Jackson dropped, cutting the wheel wide as he went. The concrete guardrail crumbled and gave way. The bus fishtailed, leaned dangerously, and then pitched headlong off the bridge, out into world famous heights.
With a slow, agonizing screech, it came to a stop with its rear third still gripping road. The back-most tires hooked over what was left of the railing, and, while we held ours
elves in rigid stillness, feeling that so much as a drop of sweat would end us, the bus halted, moaned, and swung downwards, jerking to a vertical stop.
We rolled like a burst sack of potatoes. Brochures, glass, and cups of coffee all rushed down into the blackness. I grabbed and gripped and clawed blindly until I found myself clinging to the front of the passenger seat, legs sprawled and kicking in the air where the windshield used to be, kicking above 870 feet of nothing. From there, even in the dizzying darkness, I could look down and see just what that height looked like.
It was a fucking long way down.
I looked over. Jackson was dangling in his seatbelt, staring straight down into the gorge, limp and bloodied. Someone else was hunkered over the back of the passenger seat, clamping down on my slipping forearm without even realizing it. The dual textures of ace bandage and expensive wool told me that it was Corin. Khan was bracing inside the couch alcove. I could not see Ghi or Jesse, but I could hear them, shouting in frantic medlies of their native tongues, shouting until another sonic boom from a bazooka drowned them out.
And then everything and everyone dropped.
C H A P T E R 1 5
Vessel, Book I: The Advent Page 43