"So that's four we know of – sorry, five," Johnny said. "That's us three and Geoff, and now the guy in the Escort."
Rick pulled himself up by the Escort's roof and dusted himself down.
"Five?"
"Five of us who were not affected by the light."
Melanie looked around at the Escort. "What if the guy in there died before the light, or maybe during it?"
Rick shook his head. "No," he said, straightening up. In that instant, Melanie suddenly felt safer with her husband's brother. She thought of all the times the two men – or even two boys – had spent together, all the words they had spoken to each other, all the confidences they had shared. There would be confidences in there that concerned her, too. Early conversations when Geoff must have told Rick that he had met a new woman. She imagined Rick saying, in response to that, What's her name? And then, in her head, she heard Geoff whisper, Melanie.
"–as we can figure it out," Rick was saying, "it was a pretty instantaneous thing." He clicked his fingers. "And you're gone. History. Just disappeared. And if the driver went, then the car would continue rolling on, maybe doing forty, fifty miles an hour…" He let his voice trail off and looked at the Escort.
"Until it stopped," Melanie said.
"Until it stopped," Rick agreed, "or until something got in its way."
"And it's lights out," Johnny said.
"And still no logical reason for any of us still being here," Melanie said.
Everyone stayed silent until Rick looked over towards the east. "It's getting dark. Sun must be going down," he said.
"What time is it?" Johnny asked.
Mel checked her watch. "Hey, it's only a little after four."
"Hey, hold on a second," Rick said. He pointed over to the west. "See the sky over there?" Then he turned and pointed in the opposite direction. "Doesn't it look darker east to you?"
Mel and Johnny did a double take in each direction and then had to agree. It did look slightly duskier in the east than it did in the west. At first Mel was just going to shrug it off and then she stopped. "The sun rises in the east and sets in the west," she said, immediately feeling dumb for pointing out the obvious. So she scooted along as fast as she could and added, "So it figures that the sunset will spread from the east the same way as the dawn spreads from the east."
"Yeah, but it's only four in the goddam afternoon, Mel."
She nodded. Johnny had a point.
"Maybe it's just a–" Johnny was stumped for words. What exactly could it be, maybe? An optical illusion? Global warming? No illusion: it definitely was darker in the east than it was in the west. Not by a whole lot but enough to make it noticeable. Johnny wished he was able to see the sun. That might make things a little easier to figure out.
"You know," Rick said, "I think we should get the car off the roads and hole up someplace."
"You got a feeling about this?" Mel said.
Rick looked to the east again, scanning the sky on the horizon. Was it his imagination or did there seem to be a gentle darkening – no, not exactly a darkening; a shading was more like it – spreading over the distant sky?
"I dunno. I just think we should get off the road."
A couple of minutes later they were back in the car heading north again, checking the cross streets for a clear way through towards the city.
(35)
They were sitting in the Mile High Café.
They had tentatively touched on such mundane matters as how long the power was going to last. Presumably nobody was overseeing power supplies – how did that work? Light, heating, refrigeration… they didn't know but they guessed that eventually it would all stop. That seemed like bad enough news in itself until Virgil Banders suggested that maybe someone would come in and fix it.
Angel Wurst wasn't sure she liked the sound of that and she said so. She had a feeling that the power wasn't the only thing they'd fix. Ronnie made a shh! face and smiled at her. It didn't look like there was any warmth behind it.
The girl was sipping a mango and pineapple smoothie from the refrigerated cabinet over by the door that Karl had smashed in order to get inside. Her face was smeared with chocolate from the enormous piece of cake from a different cabinet. They watched her for a while, Ronnie and Karl eating cinnamon pastries and Virgil Banders smoking a cigarette. The smoke smelled good to Ronnie: he had half a mind to ask for one when he'd finished his coffee. He would see how he felt. Right now, the pastry tasted heavenly, and the coffee was a life-saver. He told the map reader as much.
"My wife used to say coffee was the only thing I didn't burn."
Noting the past tense, Ronnie said, "Divorced?" He suddenly thought about Martha and was surprised to find that her image was a poignant one rather than one of loathing. Perhaps it was true that absence did indeed make the heart grow fonder. He suspected that his own heart was going to get mighty fond – he did not expect to see Martha again.
Karl shook his head and looked down into his coffee cup. "Died." He lifted the cup and swirled the contents around a couple of times before returning it to the table.
Ronnie winced and made a face. "Hey, sorry I–"
Karl waved him never mind. "Nothing for you to apologize for," he said. "It was a good few years back now. Never found anyone else – never even looked, for that matter."
"How did she die?"
Ronnie looked around at Virgil Banders and flashed his eyes at him. What was the boy thinking, for Chrissakes? And was it Ronnie's imagination or did Virgil's voice sound suddenly different – excited, perhaps?
"That's OK," Karl said. Turning to Virgil, he said, "Elaine keeled right over in the middle of a meal – lasagne, as I recall. Heh, I say 'as I recall' like there's a possibility I might have gotten it wrong." He shook his head. "There's no way that could ever happen. I remember every single second of that evening… play the whole thing back now and again… sometimes intentionally, other times in my dreams. And every time I do the same thing: I sit at the table and I say to her, 'Elaine? You OK, honey?' And Elaine is slumped forward with her head right in the middle of the pasta, her glass of merlot knocked over and steadily spreading on the table like blood, her fork – with pieces of food still on it and scattered around it – lying on the floor next to her drooped hand."
Ronnie reached over and rubbed Angel Wurst's head. "You OK, honey?" he said, suddenly realizing that those were the very same words that the map-man had just used. The girl nodded, took another sip of her smoothie and returned to adjusting Samantha the doll's attire.
Virgil Banders cleared his throat and shuffled around in his seat.
Karl sat upright and clapped his hands. "Hey, sorry. I just pissed on the campfire."
"My fault," Virgil said. "I shouldn't have asked."
Ronnie thought, no, you fucking shouldn't, but he didn't say anything. There was something not altogether to his liking about the boy, he realized. Maybe Angel had been right all along. He glanced sideways at the girl as the thought drifted first into and then out of his head, and he saw her looking at him. As their eyes met, hers darted to the side and widened. Ronnie turned around and saw Virgil was watching the pair of them. He smiled, but it was a smile completely without humor.
Angel looked directly at Ronnie and said, "Hey, you wanna look in my box?"
There was something vaguely ambiguous about that innocent inquiry and Ronnie felt that Virgil had felt it too. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the boy uncross and recross his legs.
"What box is that, honey?" Ronnie asked.
"The box on the bus."
"Box on the bus?"
Angel nodded.
"What's in there?"
Angel shrugged and twisted Samantha around to face Ronnie. "We don't know," said the squawky voice. "No," Angel added, "we can't get into it."
"Maybe it's just a part of the bus."
"Uh uh."
"Where they put the bags, maybe."
She shook her head again.
"You s
ure it's not a part of the bus, Angel?" Karl had a point.
Perhaps it was part of the heating system, dressed up nattily but only accessible through the back of the bus or maybe the sidepanels, where the long haul passengers would store their bags.
"It moves."
"You mean it's not fixed in place?"
Angel frowned and made an exasperated face. "I mean, there's something inside it. Something that moves."
"You were bouncing it around back there," Virgil said by way of an explanation, the general theory being that when Karl was maneuvering the bus from side to side, whatever was in the box was sliding around.
Angel looked across all of their faces, one by one, moving the doll around constantly. "No, it didn't move when you were driving. It moved when I laid on top of the box."
Karl sighed and stood up from the table. "Let's take a look," he said, stretching his arms up and wincing at his right shoulder. "Then we need to make a move."
"Need to make a move? We on a deadline?"
Karl smiled at the boy. "Well, I just thought that–" He stopped and looked at Angel. He was about to say that it might be best to make a move – with or without the flying bus – before whoever made it into a flying bus came back to claim it.
He moved around the table and hunkered down beside Angel, looking straight out of the Mile High Café window into the street – at the bus. "How big is your box, Angel?" he asked.
This time, there was no awkward movement from Virgil Banders and Ronnie wondered if maybe he had imagined the boy's reaction earlier.
Angel held her hands wide apart and then tried to stretch even further. "This big," she announced proudly, "but even bigger."
The men exchanged glances. "Let's go take a look," Karl said. And they walked out into a darkening street.
(36)
"She dead?"
"Can't see from here," Rick said.
"But she isn't wearing sunglasses," Melanie offered.
"Amen to that, Melvin," said Johnny. He rubbed his leg and although he still winced a little as his hand passed over his shin, it didn't seem quite so bad as it was. "You know, I think I'm gonna live."
"Thank you, Lord," Rick muttered. He turned to face the back seat, where Johnny was sitting with his leg up. "Well, we know she wasn't taken. And that's all we know." He turned back to watch the prone figure lying almost spread eagled outside the movie theater. "She looks dead to me."
"Shit, I'll go check her out, man," Johnny said as he shifted his leg back onto the floor. "It's daylight out there and, like you say, she isn't wearing glasses – nor gloves, far as I can make out."
Rick held him back. "No," he said, tiredly, rubbing his eyes, "I guess I should go."
Johnny started to ask why but it was obvious: if anything did require fast movement then the chances were that Johnny wouldn't be able to do it.
"Go easy," Melanie said, patting Rick's knee.
It was intended as a purely platonic gesture but there was more to it than that and both of them knew it. Rick was a part of Melanie's husband, skin created by the same genes, experiences they had both lived through,. some of which Melanie might not even know about. So the pat was not entirely selfless and as she withdrew her hand, Melanie's slight coloring reflected that knowledge.
"Don't worry, sis," Rick said, using a term he had never – to Melanie's knowledge – used before, "I'll look after myself."
They watched him get out of the car, close the door and stretch, looking around in every direction. After a few seconds, he seemed to have satisfied himself. But he still turned to Melanie and, frowning, pointed at the group door-locking button on Rick's door frame. Melanie pushed it down.
Rick took a couple of steps and then kind of crouched and leaned forward. "Hello?"
They could hear him clearly inside the car.
"Damnedest weather," Johnny said. He nodded over in the direction of Melanie's side. Thick black tendrils were snaking around on the horizon.
"Storm coming," Melanie said. She turned around to watch Rick, who had taken another couple of steps.
"Doesn't look like a storm to me."
"Hey… you OK?" Rick was shouting.
Melanie gasped and pointed. "She moved."
Rick stopped dead and turned to the car, eyebrows raised.
"The wind," Johnny said, "blowing her clothes."
Melanie shook her head. "Uh uh. She moved."
They watched.
"Lady?" Rick shouted.
Sally Davis lifted her head and looked up at the man standing above her. He looked young – about mid-twenties, maybe thirty – and fit, a craggy face with softness around the eyes.
"You're not… you're not," Sally began. And then she slumped her head onto her arms.
Rick turned and waved for Melanie and Johnny to come out.
The woman lifted her head again and licked her lips. "Sunglasses?" she said.
Rick nodded. Then he shook his head. "Nope," he said. "No sunglasses."
He's a nice man, one of the voices said. But Sally ignored it.
(37)
"Getting late," Ronnie said.
Karl the map reader grunted an acknowledgement of that and persevered with his latest attempt at prizing the girl's box open.
"Light's beginning to go," Virgil Banders added. He wasn't quite sure why that concerned him so, but it did concern him.
Angel Wurst sat on one of the seats swinging her legs as she watched Karl work. "It did move," she said.
Nobody said anything to that.
"You know what it looks like to me?"
Ronnie knew damn well what it looked like and he was pissed at the boy for making it official. Once someone else commented on it then it became a pretty sure thing. Well, three pretty sure things, he was now thinking.
The first one was, it looked like a goddam coffin. Now that one right there was bad enough. But the second one was a little more uncomfortable. It didn't look like it had been made from any material Ronnie Mortenson had ever seen. OK, so coffin-making materials were a long way outside his sphere of reference, but some things you just knew. And this was one of them.
But it was the third thing that made Ronnie the most apprehensive. He believed Angel Wurst. He believed her when she said that something had moved in there. And now, the afternoon was moving along and the light was fading and they were in what appeared to be a bus that had been customized by aliens and, well, my oh my, what do we have here, snuck away on the back seat in his or her (or maybe its) very own little home from home? Could it possibly be the driver?
"Yeah," he said, "it looks that way to me, too."
"There's someone in there, isn't there?"
"It's getting dark outside," Angel Wurst announced.
Karl tried to stifle a cough but, in the end, had to take out his handkerchief and clear his throat into it. When he glanced down into the material before returning it to his pocket he saw blood. He folded it up and put it away quickly, glancing around at the others. The boy, Virgil Banders, was studying the box. But Ronnie was watching him. Neither of them said anything but Karl gave a little movement with his mouth – a kind of oh well, that's the ball game! sort of movement – and Ronnie's face grew suddenly soft and concerned. Karl looked away.
"Have you tried to lift it?" Virgil asked.
Karl got to his feet but Ronnie stepped in his way. "Here," Ronnie said, "you're the brains of the outfit. Let me do the lifting." He hefted it and jiggled it a couple of times.
"Is there anything inside?"
It was Samantha the doll that had asked the question and Ronnie was tempted to mimic that squawky voice right back at her, but he thought better of it. "Can't say," he said.
"There's something in there, I know there is." Angel's voice emerged from out of Samantha the doll's strangled squawk.
"Well," Karl said as Ronnie rested the box back onto the seat, "I'm damned if I know how to get in there." He pointed to the side. "There's definitely a join – see?"
&nb
sp; Ronnie leaned forward, squinting, trying to figure out what Karl was referring to. He kind of half fancied he could see an occasional hairline but nothing that appeared to travel the full length.
Karl nodded, more to himself than to anyone else.
"You OK?" Ronnie kept his voice low. Virgil Banders had gone back to the front of the bus for a smoke and Angel Wurst had shuffled back into her seat to converse with Samantha.
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