by Tim Curran
Alive, but just.
28
They were throwing themselves against the bus.
The progeny of Cut River, the children of the night.
But with the bi-fold door safely locked down and the emergency hatch in the back only accessible from the inside, Lou wasn’t worrying about them. Not yet. When the evil bastards started busting through the windows, yes, but not right now.
He was staring at the guy in the driver’s seat.
He felt a wave of gooseflesh go up his back. If he’d have been a cat, he would’ve raised his hackles. He’d made a good run of it, found safety here…and now this.
Shit.
He kneeled there on the floor of the rocking bus, breathing, trembling, waiting for the moonish face of the driver to turn towards him, look at him with hollow eyes.
But it did not happen.
Because the guy was dead.
Lou prodded him with the barrel of the shotgun and he slid down further in the seat.
Dead, all right.
Lou muttered something about it not being personal and pulled him unceremoniously from behind the wheel. He slumped over and fell onto the steps, his face mashing against the door window. This drove the children outside into a veritable feeding frenzy. They began fighting for space at the door, licking and biting at the glass, trying to dig through it with their fingers.
The keys were in the ignition.
The seat and wheel were sticky with what Lou figured was old blood. The driver must have slit his wrists or throat.
Sweating profusely, barely able to keep his fingers steady, Lou turned the key.
The bus roared into life.
The gauges lit up and told him he had half a tank. He pushed down on the clutch and threw the shift lever into gear, pressing down gently on the accelerator and easing off the clutch. Last thing he needed was for the bus to stall.
It began to move.
He gave it some gas and most of the rabids fell away from it.
Others clung like leeches and still others (he could hear) were clinging to the roof.
No matter now.
He kept shifting gears until he was doing an easy forty-five miles an hour, speeding through what passed for an industrial sector in Cut River. He veered wildly from side to side, throwing off the little monsters. But there were still more on the roof, banging and screeching.
A white hand snaked down from over the driver’s cabin and took hold of a wiper blade, snapping it off like a twig.
In five minutes, Lou made Chestnut, the main drag.
He took the corner barely bothering to slow down until he was into the turn, then riding the brake for all it was worth. He popped a curb, smashed a little Ford Escort out of the way, knocked a STOP sign over, and thudded back into the street, the bus careening unpleasantly to one side like maybe it was going to roll over. But it didn’t.
In the rearview, he could see that he’d shed the remaining children.
He could see them crab-crawling off into the darkness.
Breathing a sigh of relief, he slowed down.
Shotgun at his side, he felt kind of like Dirty Harry in that one movie, plowing through the streets in his bus. Rabids popped out from behind parked cars from time to time, but scattered when he veered towards him. After awhile, he saw none, so he turned onto a side street looking for victims like a teenager trying to run down dogs or squirrels.
It was about that time that he heard a series of explosions and saw the eastern side of town light up with fireballs rolling above the treeline. Whether it was to his benefit or not, he let out a battle cry as the glow of flames not only didn’t die down, but raged with new life.
He’d heard gunfire off and on for some time now.
But what was this?
Had the Marines landed and called in an airstrike? The image of canisters of napalm incinerating Cut River made him grin ferociously.
That’ll put those rabids on the run.
His hi-beams illuminating the blackened streets, he saw rabids everywhere, hiding and skulking and sticking to the shadows. Only a few dared cross his path. Maybe it was the bus they were afraid of and maybe it was just the headlights.
He heard more explosions as he tooled around an avenue of brooding, dark houses and that’s when he saw two figures coming right up the middle of the street, waving their arms wildly.
Jesus, it couldn’t be.
Not again.
He slowed down and yes it was!
He skidded to a halt.
Johnny Davis and Lisa Tabano.
They came up to the folding door, weapons drawn. He took a good look at them before he pulled the lever and opened the door. He wanted to be sure their eyes were normal.
They were.
He opened the door.
Johnny leapt in, sticking a .30-06 in his face, then withdrawing it. “You?” he said, dumbfounded. “What in the hell are you doing alive?”
Lou shook his head. “I’m too pretty to die.”
Lisa dragged herself in and Lou shut the door behind her.
“We gotta stop meeting like this,” he told her.
She laughed or tried to…but hell, she looked like ten miles of bad road. She smiled grimly and tossed him a pack of cigarettes, then collapsed into a rear seat.
Lou took them, lighting one up, wondering, though, if she’d been infected.
Johnny and he looked at each other and Johnny shook his head. “No,” he said, reading his mind, “it’s not that.”
Lou saw figures creeping from the shadows and got the bus going again. And while he did that, Johnny told him yet another story. Except this one was about a certain rock star with a particularly bad habit.
Lou exhaled a column of smoke, keeping the bus under twenty-five to save fuel. “You mean…you mean like a…a…”
“Junkie,” Lisa said in a croaking, broken voice. “That’s me.”
He supposed it didn’t matter.
It wasn’t any of his damn business…except, Christ, she looked rough. A bag of bones topped by tangled mess of long, dark hair. Even her breathing seemed ragged. She hugged herself back there, rocking back and forth. He had to wonder if infection by the Laughing Man germ could really be any worse than heroin withdrawal.
He searched for words, finally found them. “If we can get our asses out of here, Lisa, we can get you to a hospital. They have things, I bet, that would make it easier.”
She said nothing. Her chin was resting on the seat before her, her eyes shining dimly in the dark.
Johnny said, “First we have to get out.”
Lou nodded. “Exactly what I’ve been thinking about. You know that barricade of cars? What do you say the chances are of us ramming through it with this rig?”
Johnny considered it. The green dash lights winked off his bald head. “I’d say maybe it’ll work.” He shrugged. “And if not, beats the living shit out of sitting here doing nothing.”
“How about you, Lisa?” Lou asked. “You concur?”
She mumbled in assent.
That was that then.
Lou pulled a U-turn, plowing through a few yards and taking out some rose bushes and a few withering flowerbeds. Off in the darkness, he could see the ever-present eyes of their silent witnesses. A few minutes later, he was moving up Chestnut.
“I suggest everyone hang on now,” he told them.
Lisa crouched down between the seats.
Johnny stayed next to Lou, putting down his rifle and clutching the chrome handbar with everything he had.
“There’s gonna be a jailbreak,” Lisa said in a low, tortured voice, an old Thin Lizzy song echoing in her brain.
“Lot of steel in this bitch. But she’s light, rolls easy,” Johnny said, more to himself than the others.
Lou navigated his way up Chestnut, leaving the way he’d originally come in. The bus was doing fifty by the time he passed his little Grand Am parked at the curb, doors wide open. At sixty the bus started to rattle a bit. The s
teel floor plating began to vibrate and it went right through their feet and up into their bones.
“Keep it there,” Johnny said over the noise of the engine. “She ain’t made for too much speed. Fifty, sixty’s plenty. If there’s no heavy metal in that barricade—big trucks, heavy equipment and the like—we’ll smash right through. Those sonsofbitches’ll never stop us.”
Half a block from the barricade, they could see lights.
But these were not the flickering, burning lights of bodies being roasted. These were electric lights—from vehicles, from searchlights. Closer they got, they could see now that the barricade had been pushed aside.
“What the hell is this?” Lou said. “The army?”
“Slow down,” Johnny said with an air of urgency.
“What—”
“Slow the fuck down!” Johnny snapped. “Now!”
He was up at the dash, face to the windshield, checking out what they were driving into and not liking it one bit. Beams from searchlights played over the bus, blinding him.
Lou downshifted and brought the bus to a crawl.
“Turn around,” Johnny said. “Right now.”
Lou was going to ask him why in the hell he should do that when he heard the popping of automatic weapons. The front of the bus was grazed by bullets. Two or three holes appeared in the windshield.
“Sonofbitch!” he said, wheeling the bus around in a huge, rocking circle and coming back onto the street again.
The bus was filled with light now.
A vehicle was coming up fast behind them. It looked to be some sort of assault vehicle. More bullets slammed into the back of the bus. There was a gun mounted on the approaching vehicle.
Lou saw fire belching from it.
The rounds that struck the bus didn’t ricochet off this time, they ripped right through the metal. Suddenly, the bus was full of flying lead and shattering glass, bits of metal spraying around like shrapnel. They were firing a machine gun at them. There was no doubt of that. Slugs were ripping through the seats, tearing into the dashboard. The windshield took a volley and collapsed into itself, a sheet of safety glass fell into Lou’s lap.
He got the bus going—forty, fifty.
The bullets still rained down on them. One of them burst through his shoulder, another grazed his leg.
He cried out and pushed down on the accelerator.
The pursuing vehicle fell behind.
“We’re losing ‘em!” Johnny called out.
The vehicle—Lou was pretty sure it was a Hummer, like the troops had used in Iraq—was falling behind now. He figured it was on purpose, as if the troops weren’t allowed to chase them beyond a certain point.
He was driving with one hand now, his left arm numb from shoulder to wrist.
He was bleeding profusely.
More searchlights played over them now. These from above.
“Helicopter!” Johnny said.
Lou could heard the rapid thunk-thunk of its rotors as if it were right on top of them. There was a sudden flash of light and the street ahead of them exploded, air-to-surface rockets blowing great chunks of road into fragments.
He knew what came next.
He saw the plate glass front of a department store and spun the wheel.
The bus rocked over the curb, took out two parking meters in a spray of pennies, and went right through the front of the store. Shards of glass and wood exploded in the air. Mannequins were dismembered. Lawn furniture was turned to kindling. A display of gas grills was sent airborne. The bus rammed through a counter, coughed, jerked, and died.
Lou was hurting.
Not only his shoulder and leg now, but his face and arms which were a mass of tiny, innumerable cuts from flying bits of glass. He’d managed to shield his eyes, though. And they were about the only thing that didn’t hurt.
Johnny pulled himself from the floor, scraps of glass and wood rained off him. “Everyone okay?” he said.
“Yeah, I’ll live,” Lisa sighed.
Lou dragged himself from behind the wheel, a mannequin arm wearing a cheap, flashy bracelet slid from his lap. “I’m hit,” he said to them.
Johnny said, “How bad?”
Lou told him.
“You’ll survive.”
“Gas,” Lisa said. “I smell gas.”
They all did. It was getting stronger by the moment.
Johnny helped Lisa to her feet. “They must’ve got the tank. Everybody out. Right fucking now!” He found his rifle and Lou’s shotgun, took them with.
Bruised and battered and bleeding, they helped each other from the bus, wading through the wreckage of the department store. Carefully, quiet as they could be with glass crunching under foot, they stepped out into the street. The chill night air stank not only of gasoline, but of cordite and smoke.
They could see the glow of the expanding fire in the east.
They hobbled up the block
They ducked into an alley and collapsed there, waiting.
The helicopter did not return. The pilot must’ve figured (wrongly) that he’d hit the bus, sent it careening into the storefront. They could still hear gunfire, occasional booming explosions.
“What the fuck’s wrong with those bastards?” Lou wanted to know. He slipped a cigarette between his lips and Lisa lit it with badly trembling hands.
She shook violently, pulled in a ragged breath. “Maybe…they think we’re rabids.”
Johnny was watching the streets. “I don’t think it matters to them by this point,” he said grimly. “I don’t think those boys are from a conventional unit. Some sort of emergency response group, a containment unit, NBC. Sort of troopers that are trained to crush and quarantine an area in the wake of a biological or chemical attack.”
“So we’re fucked?” Lou said.
“Maybe. As far as they’re concerned, we’re all infected. Whether this whole clusterfuck was on purpose or by accident doesn’t matter now. Nobody’s coming out of here. They can’t have that.”
Lou shook his head. “They can’t get away with that.”
“Sure they can. They’ve been planning and preparing for an emergency like this for years.”
“The media, though,” Lisa said. “If they get a hold of this…”
Johnny smiled. “And they will, but they’ll only learn what the feds want them to know. Cut River? Attacked by terrorists, maybe. Militias. Some bullshit like that. We can only be sure of one thing—they’ll have every eventuality covered.”
“They can’t. It’s too big.”
Johnny shook his head. “They do it every day, Lisa. Every time you hear about a a political scandal or an act of terrorism…you can be sure that what you are told and what really happened are not the same thing. Perception management. That’s why nine out of ten people surveyed prefer bullshit. It makes it easier to sleep at night.”
Lou grunted. “Johnny is like our own Jesse Ventura.”
“It must be spooky in your head,” Lisa said.
“You have no idea,” Johnny said. “I’ve seen things that would turn your hair white. If we had the time, I’d tell you what really was behind Watergate.”
Lou found it easy enough by this point to accept everything Johnny said. He didn’t argue. “We have to contact the outside world,” he said. “That’s what we have to do.”
Johnny shook his head. “No phones. Even if some were working, they’d cut the lines. They’ve isolated us, people. They won’t let us out. Even CBs and Ham radios will be jammed, I bet.”
Then Lou thought of it. “The municipal building. The police cruisers there. They have radios.”
Johnny was going to object, but didn’t. “Damn straight,” he said. “Even if we don’t make it out, we can broadcast, tell the world what’s going on here.” He seemed very happy suddenly. After all these years, he’d finally found a way to fuck the government that had fucked him.
They made their way out into the streets.
The municipal building was about
a half mile from them, they could see its cyclopean girth squatting on the hill, overseeing the entire town. It was a long way in a warzone, but it was the only way.
“Let’s do it,” Johnny said.
29
“Oh my God…oh Christ…”
Ruby Sue was kneeling next to Joe.
A bloody smear marked his progress to this unremarkable spot on the street, his deathbed. His face had been scraped clean of meat from the friction. He had died only a few moments before, living long enough to tell her he was sorry about it all, bringing her here.
And now, he was dead. Crushed and broken.
She trembled in the night. First with terror and loss and violation, then with rage. “I’ll get ‘em, baby,” she told Joe’s raw face. “I’ll make those sonsofbitches pay for this.”
His corpse was unconcerned.
Warmth bled from it into the cool September air. He had finally found a way out of the asylum that was Cut River. He was at peace.
Ruby Sue kissed his dead face, her own washed by tears.
Something in her had died with Joe.
What was left was hard and mean and pissed-off. Her left wrist was sprained, she figured, but her right was just fine. She was scraped and bleeding, but very much alive. Back at the car, she got her Browning .380 and stuck it in her coat pocket. She took Joe’s Colt Python and left the shotgun behind.
Then she went to kick some ass.
She walked towards Chestnut. A pair of rabids—teenage boys, hideous imitations of the same—came at her slithering and snapping their jaws. She killed both of them and continued on.
The town was burning, gunfire everywhere.
Much of it was very close now.
She hid behind a row of bushes as a group passed.
But they weren’t rabids.
Soldiers dressed out in white hooded suits. The sort guys wore on TV when there was a nuclear accident or something. They looked like invaders from Mars. They were all carrying M-16s except for the guy in the back who had tanks strapped to him, a short pipe in his grip.
She was just willing to bet it was a flamethrower or something.
She let them pass and continued on.
The air was thick and acrid with rolling black smoke now as the fires she and Joe had set ate up the town.