Darkness Falling

by Peter Crowther

  The place was deserted and, after clearing the counter of greasy plates and cups of cold coffee, Melanie made them fresh coffee, poured orange juice, and put together a plate of sandwiches and stale Danishes while Rick checked over the Seville for gas and oil.

  They had strapped up Johnny's leg as best they could and pumped him up with painkillers from a machine on the wall, but the pills were really only meant for headaches brought on by driving, not for broken shinbones and they were having only a limited effect.

  Nobody said much at all.

  They used the washrooms to freshen up and ate in silence, each of them lost in their own thoughts and Melanie spending most of the time turning the dial on an old radio set on the shelf behind the counter. All she got was static. When it got to nine o'clock, Rick said that it was time to be moving on.

  The Seville's dashboard clock registered 9.08 as they pulled out onto I-90 again, heading east.

  The sun was blistering.

  The sky was a pure blue unbroken by clouds.

  And the road stretched off into the distance.

  They didn't know quite where they were heading but Melanie and Geoff had honeymooned in New Orleans and she had expressed a desire to go visit again. Rick and Johnny had shrugged together at that: hell, one place was as good as another, though they all felt that they needed a big city to try come to terms with what had happened.

  Up ahead, down the long miles that lay before them, a telephone was ringing in the concourse of the 16th Street Mall in the deserted city of Denver – the very same way it had been ringing, off and on, for the past couple of days…

  (33)

  "What do you think?"

  Virgil Banders shielded his eyes from the sun and looked around the road. He shook his head. "Can't be sure," he said.

  They were standing right in the middle of the pavement, Virgil holding a little foldout map of downtown Denver. The airplane was six or seven blocks behind them, the 16th Street Mall maybe another few miles ahead of them. Right alongside them, turned crossways across the street, was a bus.

  With his hand on the side of the bus, Ronnie made a clicking sound with his mouth and then stood back, hands on his hips. "We'd have seen it."

  "We had a lot on our mind," Virgil said.

  Ronnie grunted. He wasn't convinced.

  "Look at its lights," Samantha the doll squawked. She was being held up in front of the bus by Angel Wurst, and Angel had the doll move its head side to side in exasperation. "They're a mess."

  "Yeah." Virgil moved over to stand beside the girl and Angel took a few steps back, watching him carefully. "How did they get like that?"

  "Somebody pulled them out of the sockets," Ronnie said. He hunkered down and looked at the lights more closely. "See this?" He took a hold of one of the sealed beam units and pulled it slightly to one side. "There's a kind of girder-support system going on back here." He reached into the socket where the wires were all wound up and exposed a tiny mechanical grid that went right out of sight. "See, this allows the lights to move side to side and up and down." He demonstrated.

  "Huh," Virgil said. "Never seen nothing like that before."

  Ronnie grunted again and then said, "Never has been anything like that before. Not that I've heard of."

  They had been on the road for around an hour, taking it slow and easy and checking out the stores along the way. They'd already found a deli with a freezer full of bread and rolls, and a fridge heaving with salad and meats, so lunch was assured. Right now, it was a little after nine in the morning and Virgil was hankering for his first coffee of the day. He turned around and looked across the street to the Mile High Café. Karl was busy levering one of the windows open.

  "How you doing, map-man?" Virgil shouted.

  "OK. Nearly in. But I'm only going to give it another few minutes and then I'm breaking the glass."

  "Need any help?"

  Karl turned around and grimaced, holding his left shoulder. He shook his head. "Let me see how I get on."

  Virgil nodded. "Be prepared for an alarm."

  Karl waved and returned his attention to the glass doors.

  "Door's open," Angel announced, this time in her own voice.

  Ronnie straightened up and let go of the headlight, and he and Virgil moved around to the entry steps and looked in. The driving section had been torn apart. It didn't look as though the bus would ever move again. Ronnie suggested that maybe it was vandals. Virgil said not.

  "Why would they do that, man? I mean, you know, there's no gain."

  "There's all too often no logical reason for people–"

  Virgil shook his head. "No, I mean…" He stepped up onto the first step and pulled himself up by the handrails onto the bus. "… there must be a gain, that's what I mean." He plopped into the driver's seat and looked at the dashboard. "Like, it's a mess. But, then again… it isn't."

  Ronnie climbed up, followed by Angel.

  "I don't follow you."

  Virgil took hold of clumps of wiring and balanced them in his hand. "See, it's pulled free but it isn't severed." He leaned sideways to follow a trail of wires under the dash. "It's a good job."

  "You call trashing a bus a good job?"

  "It's not trashed. That's the whole point. Things haven't been removed, they've been added."

  "You mean to tell me that it's customized? Somebody has customized a damn bus?"

  "Looks that way," Virgil said, his voice muffled from under the dash.

  "Customized to do what?"

  "What are 'custom eyes'?"

  Virgil sat up and leaned on the steering wheel. "I have no–" He stopped and lifted his arms quickly.

  "What is it?"

  "I said, what are 'custom eyes'?"

  "Not now, honey," Ronnie said.

  Angel flounced around and, as she whispered something into Samantha's ear, she looked down the bus.

  "Get a load of this," Virgil Banders was saying behind her.

  "It's a box," Angel whispered. She glanced around, suddenly realizing that the box was maybe what the young man had been talking about. But it wasn't, she could see now, and she snapped her head back quickly.

  At the very back of the bus, on the back seat, was a large box.

  Angel took a step forward. And then another step. She was delighted to see that nobody was paying any attention to her discovery.

  "What is it?"

  "The steering wheel. It goes up and down."

  Ronnie pressed down on the wheel and it moved downwards slowly, as though on some kind of pneumatic air system.

  "You feel that? You feel what it did? Just then?"

  Ronnie was nodding. "It did something." He reached over with his other hand and used both to lift the wheel back to its original position.

  "It did it again, man? What is that?"

  Angel was now just a few seats away from the box, tiptoeing.

  She held Samantha in front of her. "What's in the box?" the doll whispered.

  "I don't know, Samantha," Angel answered. "Should we find out?"

  "Yes," said the squawky voice.

  Across the street, an alarm sounded, dopplering in and out of intensity. "Jesus, that's loud," Virgil shouted. He and Ronnie looked out of the side window just in time to see Karl push open one of the doors and disappear into the café. Ronnie leaned out of the bus window and looked back up the street. He felt nervous with that noise and he couldn't explain why. When he looked back at Virgil he saw that the boy too seemed a little apprehensive, looking over his shoulder at the steps and then leaning across to check the side street across from them.

  Angel Wurst had flopped onto the seat just two seats in front of the ornate box, her hands clasped tightly to her ears and her eyes squeezed shut. Samantha the doll seemed unperturbed.

  Suddenly the sound stopped and silence flooded in, like the ghost of a sound that had once been there but which was now disappearing, slowly, until it became something that maybe happened and then again maybe didn't.
/>   "Oww!" Angel announced. "That hurt!"

  Virgil leaned out of the door and shouted across to Karl. "You OK in there?"

  "Yeah, all OK." Karl's voice was muffled until he reappeared at the café doorway, arms raised up as he leaned on the door jamb window edging on the one side and the still-intact glass door on the other. "Had to knock the box off of the wall."

  "Just think," Ronnie was muttering as he checked the steering column, "any other time and we'd have cop cars screeching up all around us."

  "Any other time, there'd be people out there," Virgil said.

  Angel got to her feet and turned back to the box on the back seat.

  "You see anything in there?"

  Ronnie shook his head. "Someone's disconnected the drive shaft and then re-connected it so that you can't fix it into one position." He moved the wheel up and then down, feeling it click in the middle of the range. "See, it sticks around here–" He did it again. "–and then moves freely up and– Hey! Hold on a minute…"

  "What?"

  "Look." Ronnie moved the wheel first to the left and then to the right, feeling the same click again when he passed the middle point of the range. "It moves sideways as well as up and down." He did it again.

  Virgil held onto the tubular steel handrail and said, "There. You feel that? It's like the bus judders somehow when you move the wheel. Shouldn't do that if it's stationary. Should it?"

  Ronnie shrugged. "Who knows."

  "Who knows what?" Karl said. With a deep groan, he pulled himself up onto the bus steps with one arm and slumped against the handrail. He glanced down the bus and saw Angel on the back seat, making her doll dance around on some kind of box. "Hey, I got coffee percolating in there." He jerked a thumb back at the café.

  "Sounds good," Virgil said. "I'd kill for a cup of coffee." He felt his neck and ears redden at that and glanced quickly at the others to see if they had noticed but Ronnie was still jiggling the steering wheel and Karl was watching him.

  "Somebody's been messing with the steering mechanism," Ronnie said. "First the headlights and now the steering column," he added.

  "What's up with the steering?"

  Ronnie showed him.

  At the back of the bus, Angel had Samantha sit on the seat while she looked around the box some more. It was around five feet long, a couple feet wide and maybe the same height off the seat. It was smooth all over except for a series of what appeared to be little glass portholes. And there was no handle. She checked the top and then the sides. Maybe the handle was on the other side, the side that's against the seat, she thought. "Or maybe some dummy put the box on the seat upside down," Samantha squawked helpfully.

  "Can someone come help me?" she shouted.

  Karl had moved across and was swapping places with Ronnie on the driver's seat. Virgil turned to Angel and smiled coldly.

  Not you, she thought. I don't want your kind of help.

  "You know what?" Karl said. Without waiting for an answer, he added, "Let's start her up and see what's what."

  "Hell-low?" Angel's voice was lost in the sound of the engine's throaty roar.

  "Christ, sounds more like an eight cylinder Mustang than a courtesy bus," Virgil said.

  Angel turned her attention back to the box and ran her hands along the side. There was definitely a thin line where the top and bottom parts of the box joined but there was no way she was going to be able to prize them apart.

  At the front of the bus, Karl said, "OK, let's make a move," and shifted the gear stick into drive. The bus moved forward slowly. He turned the wheel and the bus's direction moved the way he wanted it.

  "Try lifting it," Ronnie shouted.

  Angel had crawled on top of the box, her full length covering its surface. And all of the little glass portholes.

  The bus lurched forward.

  "I don't believe this," Karl said.

  "What?"

  The map reader looked over at Ronnie and said, "I suggest you take a hold of something."

  Virgil said, "What are you going to–"

  Karl pulled the steering column back and down.

  Angel frowned. The bus was doing something to make the box jar against her stomach.

  "Jesus H. Christ!" Ronnie said, and he grabbed a hold of the upper curtain rail around the driver's area. "What the hell…"

  The bus lifted slowly from the street, the engine whining.

  "I think it's going to be better in the manual gears," Karl shouted, and he shifted the lever into second. The bus shuddered and then clanked. They were some four or five feet above the ground, heading for a women's clothing store and a Mexican restaurant on the opposite side of the road.

  "Jesus Christ!" Ronnie said again. "We're actually flying."

  Angel sat up on the box and leaned on the back of the seat. They had taken off… in a bus.

  "Better sit down," Karl said through clenched teeth. "I'm not too sure how steady this is going to be."

  Virgil slid into the seat next to the door, still holding tight onto the upright handrail at the top of the steps. Ronnie looked around and saw that Angel had perched herself on some kind of box on the back seat.

  "You OK back there, honey?" he shouted.

  Angel nodded emphatically but her furrowed brow and hands tightly clenched on the seat backs in front of her suggested that she felt like she was on some kind of rollercoaster ride.

  "Take it easy, Karl," he said.

  Karl nodded. "I'm taking it down again," he said.

  A few seconds later, they touched down again in the street just a couple of hundred yards from where they had started.

  Karl reached out a jittery hand and turned off the ignition.

  Nobody said anything for a while, they just sat and listened to the engine ticking. It sounded just like any other engine settling down after a little exercise – but, of course, the bus's customized engine wasn't like any engine any of them had ever experienced before in a road vehicle.

  "Who on earth fixed this heap up to fly?"

  "That's only half of the question," Karl said, turning to face Virgil.

  "What's the other half?"

  Karl looked away out of the windshield onto the empty pavement surrounding them. "Where are they?" he said.

  "Hey!" Angel Wurst shouted from the back of the bus. "I'm hungry." And she jumped down from the box and headed for the front.

  (34)

  The I-25 freeway had been a ghost road and they were glad to get off of it, though they knew that the new route would eventually cause them some problems.

  And so it was that, under a midday sky the color of gunmetal and bruising, they pulled the Seville into a mini-mall parking lot in a little town on the outskirts of Denver to empty bladders, grab some refreshments and generally gather their thoughts. Rick stood alongside the car and marveled at the fact he'd driven all the way from the station. He wasn't going to get too confident right now but he figured that maybe he was over the worst where the accident was concerned. Accident, he thought. Strange how people came up with these little euphemisms for the various unpleasantnesses that plagued them from time to time.

  "Shee-it, my goddam leg is killing me here," Johnny hissed from the Seville's back seat. "I'm gonna have to get something stronger for it."

  Melanie leaned in and looked at Johnny's face. It was ashen and he was perspiring badly. "How'd you feel otherwise?"

  "How do I feel otherwise? Is that like, a joke?" He shook his head and laughed without any trace of humor. "What does that mean, exactly? How do I feel otherwise from what?"

  "Hey, take it easy, Johnny. Mel doesn't–"

  Melanie flashed her eyes at Rick and crouched down, watching Johnny between the front passenger seat edge and the door surround.

  Johnny leaned over and placed his hands gently on either side of his knee. "It's killing me, Mel," he said. There were tears in his eyes.

  "I know, honey," she said, and she reached over to run her fingers through his hair. She felt tears brim in her
own eyes and, just for a second, she pretended it was Geoff's head she was stoking. She closed her eyes and swallowed hard.

  It had been a long couple of days.

  The first light had hit when she was doing her early morning stint on the radio and it had left the world empty. OK, it probably figured that there were some other people who had been bypassed by whatever it was – they still didn't know, didn't even have a clue, nor any idea what it was they all had in common to sidestep the light – but the ratio had to be small. After all, Jesman's Bend was deserted – no, emptied was a better word: she didn't think the townsfolk had had much of a say in the matter.