by Doug Goodman
“C’mon!” Alyssa yelled at the bus. “Go! Go! Go!” The wheels continued to spin deeper in the mud. The first warg rammed the side of the bus, nearly knocking it on its side. The warg could have just as easily broken through the front window and bit her head off, but it was playing with her, probably in a mood of amusement because of the night’s festivities. It wanted to make her scared because it found pleasure in her fear, so it stood next to the bus, its paws almost underneath the vehicle. But hitting the bus freed it from its muddy grave. The bus slipped back and forth, then shot forward, running over the warg’s arm.
She saw Mr. Bunkner running away, his bloody face in his hands. The Renfield stood in her path. She ran him over.
Black Fang looked up to see the bus enter the fire light. The bus was like a battering ram, slamming into wargs and sending them running.
Alyssa hit the brakes, and the yellow dog skidded into the flatbed, knocking half the tortured people off. The others knocked the coals off their bellies and jumped into the bus.
Black Fang barked an alert to the wargs around camp.
Back at the camp, the tired, half-starved prisoners saw the chaos of the night’s activities and they ran to the chain link fences and began pounding on them. The fences, which were held up more by fear than good engineering, collapsed under their weight, and the people spilled out like the blood from a ripped limb and flowed into the fields and ran for the mountains. Some of them jumped into the bus with Alyssa. A few ran like martyrs right at the wargs and tried to overrun them. The wargs stomped on them and bit them, ending their lives quickly.
Dre’s uncle was the first one to the bus. As he climbed in, he said to Alyssa, “Let’s go! I can drive a bus.”
“Not yet!”
“But we got to go now!”
Alyssa grabbed the bus key and ran for Aidan.
Aidan’s face was covered in flies and other bugs that were trying to eat at the honey. Alyssa wiped them off his face, which had a hundred tiny nicks and scratches. He smiled at her. Then she unclamped the doors and tossed the top one aside. A great stink rose from the belly of those two doors, and she put out of her mind the image of what would have happened if she had not saved him.
Alyssa helped Aidan up and took him back to the yellow dog. There was just one problem, though. Black Fang stood between them and the bus.
“Leave them alone!” Mr. Bunkner yelled through his bloody face. He threw hot coals that bounced off Black Fang’s hide. It was enough, though, for Black Fang to turn and lunge for him. Alyssa and Aidan took advantage of the seconds they had gained to run for the bus. They could practically feel Black Fang’s fur brushing against them as they ran past him and jumped into the bus.
Dre’s uncle was sitting in the driver’s chair. She handed him the key, and he slammed on the gas once the bus was turned back on.
Alyssa and Aidan grabbed a seat as the bus charged towards the nearest road. Black Fang was not going to give up the chase immediately, though. After disposing of Mr. Bunkner, Black Fang dashed towards the bus. His long claws ripped at the side of the bus, shattering glass and screeching torn metal as he tried to grip the bus in his claws. Dre’s uncle floored the bus away from Black Fang, who howled in fury.
Colt nestled between Alyssa and Aidan, and even Val put his head on Alyssa’s shoulder. Someone in the crowded bus put a tarp over their naked and burned bodies. Then Aidan was truly surprised by the journal that was placed on his lap. He tried to see who gave it to him, but he was too tired to do much about it.
All night, they drove up into the red-granite mountains of Colorado. Outisde, snow fell quietly on the pines above and below them. Aidan hoped Dre’s uncle was a good driver. The roads were covered in snow, so they wouldn’t see any obstacles that could blow out a tire, which would be deadly this high up.
The bus came to a stop, and the airbrakes hissed.
“What’s the problem?” A voice from the back asked.
“Road’s out,” Dre’s uncle replied as he got out, “and I need a break.”
Aidan and the lost boys looked out the bus windows. A vast whiteness obliterated the road.
Like the other torture victims, Aidan wore clothes borrowed from other people. He had on an oversized wool sweater and a pair of sweats. He hobbled out of the bus and approached Dre’s uncle.
“Aidan,” he said, while shaking the man’s hand. “Tony,” Dre’s uncle said. He had a thin crown of grey around his balding dome and a look of exhaustion that he wore too comfortably.
“What do you think?” Aidan asked him.
“I think it is time for me to find a mountain trail and get the hell out of Dodge before those hellhounds show up. They will be coming with a vengeance for you, and I’ve seen first-hand how well those bastards can track.”
“But we need you to drive the bus.”
“Shit. That’s your problem,” he said.
“You really think they won’t track you? As good as they are?”
“I think they’ll be too busy feasting on your sorry asses to worry about mine.”
“You can’t survive in winter at this altitude with those clothes. You are better off staying with us. We will find warmth. Hell, the bus has a heater.”
“I’ll take my chances.”
“We need you, Tony. Your family needs you.”
“Don’t bring them into it. I’ve been living with them in that Godforsaken hellhole for almost half a year. Now we escape, and I’m supposed to keep helping them? I’ve earned my freedom.”
“Nobody will argue against that, but how will you feel knowing you left your family to the wolves? Knowing you could have saved them, but knowing you ran and left them to die?”
Tony’s left came out of nowhere so fast that Aidan didn’t see it before he was on the ground and nursing a black eye. Dre jumped out of the bus.
“What’d you say, Aidan?”
Tony pointed a finger at Aidan. “Not my problem. I’ve absolved my sins.” He started up the mountain pass.
“Uncle! Where you goin’?” Dre yelled up after her uncle. Her uncle was quickly becoming nothing more than a spec in the path of the avalanche.
Aidan climbed back into the bus. “Anybody know how to drive a bus?”
An older man with deep furrows in his brow raised his hand. “I drove an RV. Can’t be much different.”
“Good. You’re our new driver.”
“Where we going?”
“North.”
The bus turned around and found a new road to continue the long voyage northward. They stopped in the first town with a store and raided it. The freed prisoners swarmed through the aisles, taking every last can on the shelf. They dined like homeless people on other people’s leftovers. There were canned beats and old pumpkin pie filling, Spam and cream of corn. Rusted tins of sardines and Vienna sausages that were eaten anyway. They left behind a giant pile of opened cans, then climbed back in the bus and started heading north again.
As the bus rolled over the top of one ridge pass, they were met with the most bizarre thing any of them had seen in months.
A scouting convoy.
The old man hit the brakes, making the bus slide dangerously close to the rail. It came to a stop in front of the bright lights of the Hummers and Strykers.
The doors of the vehicles opened, and soldiers ran out like bees from a knocked hive. The soldiers all wore gas masks and white-camo body suits. They carried assault rifles and flamethrowers. They first shouted for everyone to get out of the bus. Once everyone was out of the bus, they were told to lie flat on the ground and not move. Then the soldiers searched them for arms. When they found none, they ordered everyone back onboard the bus.
“Follow us,” a tall soldier in a gas mask ordered the old man who was driving the bus. “If you try to run, we will shoot you down. Do you understand?”
The bus driver nodded.
“Hang on a second,” Aidan said. Despite Alyssa telling him to shut up, he asked, “What if I don’t
want to go? Where are you taking us?”
“Denver. The last known human stronghold in the United States. Because it is the last human stronghold, we have to be cautious about who we let in. So we check the roads for more humans to make sure that we aren’t surprised by a busload of people showing up in the middle of downtown Denver and seeking refuge. We caught you on our radar a few hours ago. Follow us.”
Aidan got back on the bus with the others. It was morning now, and the sun was soon to be coming up over the mountains. Aidan leaned back in the seat.
“I gotta admit,” Val said. “I feel a bit safer knowing there are all those people with guns and Hummers out there. It kind of reminds me of Bridgetown, in a weird sort of way.”
“That’s what I worry about,” Aidan said. His head was hurting.
A minute later, the wargs descended from the mountain ridge.
Chapter Eleven – Clean
Black Fang led the charge down the mountainside. The giant dogs padded swiftly and silently down the side of the mountain. Not even the soldiers saw them until the wargs were almost on top of them. The wargs rammed into the bus and the Hummers, and within seconds, the soldiers lit up the world with machine guns and grenades and incendiaries.
The warg hit the bus with such power that it spun the bus sideways so that the middle of the bus t-boned around the Hummer in front of it. Unlike back at the prison camp, the wargs did not simply hit the side of the bus. This was not for sport. A second warg dived through the front windshield and ripped out the bus driver’s larynx. Then the warg began snapping at every human within reach.
Machine gun blasts from the convoy drew its attention, turning the warg from the bus towards the soldiers.
Inside, the bus was complete chaos as the wounded prevented everyone else from escaping out the front of the bus. The bus was turning into a logjam of humanity.
“Quick,” Aidan said to Alyssa. “Let’s sneak out the back.”
“No. We wait our turn.”
“Are you crazy? We don’t have time to wait.”
“There is nothing to gain from adding to the problem. It’s this ‘every-man-for-himself’ attitude that gets everyone killed in these kinds of scenarios.”
So Aidan stayed in his seat and waited while people jumped off the bus and the sound of gunfire and howls erupted outside. Aidan kept looking around and trying to see what was going on outside, but it was hard to tell. There was a lot of noise and dirt and snow being thrown around. He couldn’t figure out where the people who were leaving the bus were running to. In fact, he wasn’t sure that people were actually leaving the bus.
“That’s it,” Aidan announced. He grabbed Alyssa by one hand, found a seam in the humanity, and pushed his way to the back of the bus, with Val and Colt following close behind. He swiveled the Emergency Exit handle to the side, kicked the door open, and jumped out the back just in time to see a young warg (perhaps one of the puppies) jump into the bus cab.
He hoisted Alyssa to the wintry floor, then helped Val and Colt down, too. Neither Val nor Colt could move very quickly. They had been barely coherent during the trip through the mountains because of their severe burns.
They ducked behind a brick wall as one of the wargs came around it. When the warg didn’t see them, it put its snout in their footfalls in the snow. They were close enough to hear its excited breathing on the other side of the concrete wall. It was the rapid inhalations of a predator on the hunt who knows the kill is close. The lost boys moved through the snow quickly, always certain that at any point the warg would figure out that they were on the other side and jump over the wall.
As they came around the other side, the warg trailed them to the far side of the wall. Aidan, Alyssa, Val, and Colt sprinted as fast as their tortured, weary bodies would allow back towards the Hummers. There was another explosion, and more howling.
“We’ve got them on the run,” he heard somebody say.
But when Aidan looked out at the pass, he didn’t see wolves on the run. The black beasts had stopped at the mountainside, far enough to not be shot. Black Fang was watching Aidan.
“C’mon! Let’s go!” the soldiers were shouting as they loaded everyone into separate Strykers. Aidan looked for Dre, but could not find her.
“Wait! We have a friend!”
“Let’s go, sir,” the soldier said, and forced Aidan into the Stryker. Aidan hoped Dre was okay and with his family.
The small convoy descended out of the mountains and down into the plains of Colorado. They entered a wasteland of suburban ruin. Cars had been moved off the major thoroughfares, creating the appearance of a labyrinth with walls made of automobiles. Aidan wondered if wandering somewhere inside was a giant minotaur with Chrysler horns and a Jeep muzzle. He thought it would probably breathe fire and smell of gasoline, and had a voice like a monster truck rally deejay.
With the Rockies at their backs, Denver rose above them like a second stretch of mountains, though made of steel and glass. The sun was rising behind the towers and casting long shadows across the ruin-scape. Aidan was again reminded of visions he had seen before, of decapitated buildings and a downtown that looked like a massacre of giants.
One-by-one the Humvees and Stryker crossed the North Platte River.
The convoy stopped at a large column-shaped building, a red and tan-painted sports arena.
The soldiers ordered everyone out of the Stryker and they were placed in a line. Aidan thought they all looked like zombies by way of the Holocaust from the looks of the refugees. Most of them were tight skin-sacks with markings on their faces to designate which warg owned them. Others were disfigured and broken and missing body parts. He looked down at Alyssa’s hand, which she had placed in his, her finger laying where his used to be.
Aidan saw Dre, who was with his family, and they waved at each other from different sides of the huddle.
A gray-haired soldier announced to everyone, “You are to stay here for quarantine for thirty days. You will be provided food and water. You will be safe from the monsters so long as you stay inside and remain quiet. After thirty days, you will be evaluated by our medical team and either approved for entry to the tower, or you will be required to remain here longer.”
He did not ask for any questions, comments, or go-backs. He motioned to the other soldiers, who led the refugees into the arena.
“Great,” Dre said, “from one internment camp to another.”
They were led through the front entrance with all its many-sectioned, broken windows. They opened double-doors to the inside of the arena. A burst of foul air blew at them. Inside, they could see nothing but black. It was like the darkest, foulest cave.
“You can’t be serious,” Aidan said to the closest soldier as he covered his mouth. He could taste the nastiness.
“I’m sorry, but it’s the rules,” the soldier said. It was the same soldier who had talked to him on the bus. He was pretty sure she was a redhead. “We have to make sure you are quarantined from disease before we let you into our settlements.”
“This place will be a breeding ground for disease.”
“The wargs will smell us from miles away,” Colt said while making a disgusted face.
“Be thankful, kid. That stench will protect you. The monsters won’t come near it.”
The soldiers left them then.
Aidan and the rest entered the vast darkness. A few people refused to enter. Some others even started dry heaving.
After his eyes adjusted to the dark, Aidan could make out lines of cots. A few people were still asleep in their cots and did not get up. In the center was a cornucopia of packaged foods. He fought an internal battle between the desire to escape the rancid smell and the urge to eat for the first time in days. The need to eat won out. Within minutes, the refugees descended on the mass of packaged food. Aidan and the rest of the lost boys grabbed several random packages (there was not enough light to determine what they were), and walked out of the arena. Outside in the cold and away f
rom the malodorous arena, they read the packages.
“Boxed octopus and squid in ink sauce. Of course.” Two seconds later, he dumped the boxes into his starving mouth. It was magnificent. They also feasted on canned artichoke hearts, uncooked chicken bouillon cubes, and hardened stovetop dressing. They didn’t care if it was settlement leftovers or if there was no water to hydrate the noodles. It was the best meal any of them could remember since the campfire venison in West Texas.
“Remember – don’t eat too much,” Val said. “It’ll mess up your stomach.”
“I don’t care if it turns my stomach into goo – I’m starving,” Alyssa said, and slurped hers out of the box.
“Remember when we had barbecue in Bridgetown and you said it was the best thing ever,” Aidan said to Alyssa, “And you two thought the venison was the best eating we’d had. Now look at us, devouring octopus in ink sauce. Have our taste buds changed or what?”
While they enjoyed their meal, Aidan’s head started to sting. “I think my warg-sense is going off,” he told the others. “Let’s get back inside.” As they were going in, one of the encampment survivors – a woman with thick bushy hair and the mark of Black Fang – spotted wargs approaching from the East. Nobody wanted to risk staying outside. They had no weapons with which to defend themselves, and they had no local knowledge of the terrain to help with hiding. As everyone went back inside and closed the arena doors, they hoped the soldiers were right and that the wargs would pass by. They stayed quiet as bugs in a cupboard and waited, but the wargs never approached.
“I need some sleep,” Val said. The others agreed. The calories were making them instantly sleepy. Val asked a nearby person lying in a cot if he would mind Aidan taking a cot. He didn’t realize until he touched the man’s iron shoulder that the body was dead. It should have affected them more, but they were too tired. How was finding a body in a cot any different than finding a body lying face-down in the encampments, or finding bodies in farms or small towns, or finding the two dead girls in their subdivision like Jax and Peter did? At least this body was at rest and not viciously torn to pieces.