As Ronnie watched, a fold of hairy skin lifted upwards and what looked like a large, frilly-sided anemone pushed itself free from the mess of brain tissue and bloody sinew. The thing had a large circular translucent ball set into the top of it but Ronnie could see that the ball had been punctured and a milky liquid was oozing out onto the paving slabs. As the thing moved completely out of the boy's head, Ronnie saw that one half of it was gone and it was trailing white slime over the kid's neck and jacket collar.
Without even thinking about what he was doing, Ronnie lifted the pump and fired at it point blank. The shot took off the boy's shoulder and pretty near dislocated Ronnie's. But the thing was unharmed – or, at least, no more harmed than it had been before the shot.
Ronnie pumped another round, leaned over so that the end of the barrel was just above the thing as it seemed to contemplate dropping itself onto the sidewalk, and pulled the trigger. Both the thing and the boy's head disappeared in a cloud of gelatin, bone and gristle.
He pumped the gun again, starting to feel like he was getting into it, his jaw set and his teeth clenched as he turned to face the street. That was for Martha, he thought, the words having a strange resonance that he would never have expected. Just for a few seconds there, he might even have cried.
He remembered, way, way back, back when they had just gotten married and things were still good, how he had woken up in the middle of the night in a sweat, with Martha lying alongside him, her breath soft and even tuneful. The boneyard blues was what Martha called it. What Martha had called it. Once. A long time ago.
Rick ran across Market Street to the sidewalk that the house was on, fired his pump a couple of times into the air and shouted, "Hey, in the–"
(48)
Junior had just taken hold of a piece of wood from amidst all the bricks and debris and tugged at it, eventually managing to yank it free. The man on the ladder end – the man who seemed to be having a hissy fit because he didn't have his glasses on (though why that should be important when you had a pair of empty eye sockets was anybody's guess – unless you wanted to keep from upsetting folks, and Junior didn't think that was likely in a man who had just crashed a fire engine into his mom and dad's house – upstairs window, no less) somehow sensed that Junior was close by, and he stretched out blindly, his face screwed up, empty eye sockets tight shut and squinting, and his hands snapping at the air like crab claws.
"Wayne!" Junior shouted on the fourth or fifth swing, pretty much most of the previous ones having connected but the man not seeming to be adversely affected, just reaching out with those snappy pincer hands trying to catch himself a nice juicy Junior.
All bets were now off. His kid brother was loose amidst a bunch of things that looked like people (though Junior didn't think they were people at all) and the rest of the world had disappeared or, at least, this particular suburb of Denver – Junior had checked the news channels when Wayne had been taking a dump and they were either dead (unfortunate choice of word, that one) or, in the case of Fox, showing an empty newsdesk set.
Junior stumbled back as the man on the ladder took a little tumble to the left and crumpled to the floor from his ladder aerie. Junior hefted the piece of wood and stepped forward purposefully.
The thing–
thwakkk!
–to make sure–
thwakkklshh!
–was that this guy didn't just stand up and–
swullthk!
–proceed to wandering around the house with–
thuunnnk!
–his arms stretched out in front of him.
Junior stood up, panting, and surveyed his work. The guy had to be dead – just had to be – but he was still twitching a little, particularly down at the hands. Junior looked at the hands and frowned. Why the hell was he wearing gloves, for Chrissakes?
"Hey, in the house!" someone shouted.
(49)
"You know," Sally Davis said as she watched the three men disappear around the corner of the intersection and into the street they had just passed, "there are times I miss my husband and there are times I really miss him?" She lifted the statement into a question with the last word.
She was leaning against the bus window, next to Melanie, the young woman from the radio station, the pair of them with their arms propped on the metalwork below the glass alongside their seats, one in front of the other, each of them watching the glass mist up from their breath. The little girl, Angel Wurst (such a lovely name, the voices in Sally's head crooned enthusiastically), was standing beside Sally with her doll pressed against the glass.
"You two not–" Melanie stopped and reconsidered before she went on to say, "–not together?"
Sally shook her head. "He died. Years ago."
"I'm sor–"
"Don't be." Sally's voice sounded calm and even a little dismissive. Then she said, "He killed himself." The voices whispered. Killed himself? Had we known this? Our father killed himself? Why'd he do that? Sally realized that she had probably never thought the truth to the voices, but rather had let them believe that Gerry had simply died. (Did anyone "simply die"? Surely the whole process of giving that final breath and the body commencing on its journey of decomposition was a complex affair. In that single split second, while she waited for some kind of reaction from Melanie, Sally wondered how it felt to die.)
When the reaction came, it was a muted "How?" that was hardly more than an exhalation of breath.
"He shot himself?" Sally said, once again turning a simple statement into a question. "With a shotgun? In his mouth." She didn't turn the last bit into a question. That was all there was. He shot himself in the mouth. End of story.
Sally thought of telling Melanie how she had driven out one night, long after Gerry had done the dastardly deed, and seen her husband's ghost appear in their old Chevy, but she thought better of it. What would it achieve? The answer was, of course, absolutely nothing.
"Hey, ladies?" Johnny's voice from the front of the bus sounded a little tense. "I think we may have a small problem."
"Small isn't too bad. Yeah, we can do 'small'."
"Well, dear Melvin, it's maybe a little more on the medium size. Plus there's a second problem."
Melanie slid out of her seat and duckwalked up the aisle of the bus. "Ah," she said as she reached the back of Johnny's driving seat and crouched next to him. Sally pulled the girl close to her and breathed in her youth and her innocence while the voices twittered.
Up ahead, maybe sixty or seventy yards, a man and a woman were walking down the street heading straight for the bus. They could have been out for a summer evening's stroll along the promenade at a fashionable seafront resort in the Hamptons, if the weather had not been so cold and the visibility so dark as to register sunglasses quite heavily into the "totally unnecessary" category. And despite the low temperature, the gloves looked out of place where the couple's other clothing suggested a warm evening.
"You think they've seen us?" Melanie whispered.
"They've seen the bus," Johnny said. "Whether they know it's one of theirs is anyone's guess but–"
"They know," said a squawky voice from the aisle behind them. Melanie and Johnny turned their heads in unison to see Angel Wurst having moved from her seat and Sally Davis and now standing holding her doll aloft. "They know we're here," Samantha the doll croaked menacingly.
"Get down, honey," Melanie hissed. She turned to Johnny. "What's the second problem?"
Johnny pointed to the ignition. "That," he said.
Melanie grunted, unable to see the difficulty.
"No key," he said.
"They took–" She stopped and lowered her voice. "They took the fucking key?"
"Not deliberately, Melvin. Cut them some slack here, OK?"
Outside, the man and the woman had almost reached the front of the bus. "I can't even close the door," Johnny said, unable to keep the moan from his voice. "The door relay is attached to the ignition."
"Angel, get down, honey
," Sally Davis said as she took hold of the girl's shoulders and forced her down first to her hunkers and then onto her knees.
The man was close now, only fifteen or twenty feet from the front of the bus. Johnny lifted his gun and flicked the safety catch.
"You know how to use that thing?"
"I'll figure it out," he said. "How hard can it be?" He slumped down further into the driving chair and trained the gun on the open doorway. "Best get yours ready, Melvin," he said. "And yours, too," he added, pitching his voice a little higher and over his right shoulder to where he knew Sally Davis and Angel Wurst were crouching in the aisle. Sally lifted her gun and held it awkwardly, giving a little smile to the girl when she watched her.
In the street, the man had stopped while the woman continued towards them. Johnny looked around helplessly.
"Now we really do have problems," Melanie said. "Look."
Sally Davis looked up and saw three young men step out of a side alley onto the street, all nicely turned out (as Sally's mother used to say), swept-back hair, jerkin jackets and, in one case, a lettered sweater.
Johnny twisted himself out of his seat and onto the floor. He waved his hand – the one holding the gun – towards the back of the bus and snapped at Melanie and Sally Davis, "Get back in the seats – each of you in a different one – and keep the girl quiet."
Melanie said, "She is quiet."
Johnny nodded. "Well make sure she stays quiet."
"They know we're here," Angel Wurst said as Sally turned her around and walked her back down the aisle towards the rear seats. The girl's voice was calm and confident. She was sure that the people outside knew they were on the bus. So she didn't bother crouching over.
"How come she knows so much?" Johnny whispered to nobody in particular.
They heard gunshots from way over in back of where they were and Johnny looked meaningfully over at Melanie, who had just ensconced herself between a pair of seats down the left side of the bus. "Sounds like someone's having some fun," he said as he turned himself around at the head of the steps.
"You think that's at them or from them? The shots, I mean."
"You mean our guys? The good guys?" Johnny shrugged and, laying his gun on the floor next to him, he reached down to a lever alongside the pneumatic door and tugged at it. "Anybody's guess." The lever wouldn't budge. He glanced up at the people in the street – there were now eight of them, all heading for the bus, with two of the young men in the expensive threads leading the pack. "They don't seem to have guns–" He nodded at the blank faces now gathering on the road and sidewalk. "–so I'd guess that, back there, it's us doing the shooting."
"You think they have the keys?" Sally asked. For a second, Johnny thought the woman meant the two people who were at that moment negotiating the bottom of the bus steps, their arms outstretched to the handrail, one leg apiece suspended awkwardly as they made to mount the steps. And then he realized that the woman meant the others from the bus – Rick, and the guy from the plane (Johnny liked him). And Virgil Banders. He frowned when the mental image of Virgil Banders popped into his head and, without thinking, he lifted the gun, closed one eye and took aim, and fired. The force of the blast pushed Johnny back onto the floor, but it did far worse to the young man in the lettered sweater. The bullet took the man in the neck, laying it wide open and splattering the brass name and address plaque on the wall behind him with pieces of flesh and bone. The man lifted a gloved hand and seemed to be attempting to find the wound – and Johnny thought that, just for a moment or two there (and the dark glasses made it very difficult to be sure), the man had been frowning – and all as he had been slowly falling over backwards, his sweater now sprayed with darkness, until he hit the ground and didn't move again. Johnny knew that, under a decent light, that darkness would be a deep red.
"Sorry, what'd you say?" Johnny shouted as he pulled himself back into a sitting position.
"I was wondering if we knew where the keys were," Sally said, though it didn't seem so important any more.
Johnny nodded as he shifted onto his knees. "Uh huh," he said, and this time he rested his right arm on the tubular rail at the head of the steps. "Uh huh," he said again, and fired. The shot missed the girl completely but it must have been close because her auburn hair fluffed out on the left side of her head. The girl got a hand on the right rail and one on the left and then pulled herself onto the first step. Johnny shot her in the face and the girl fell back onto the other men behind her. He watched with a kind of detached interest as the girl's glasses flew from her face, and he barely raised his eyebrows at her blackened eye sockets: of far more interest was the smeared cavity where the girl's nose had been and the smashed teeth suddenly exposed by the flap of cheek-skin. He wasn't sure whether he saw anything move inside those eye sockets before the girl was lying on the ground, her arms and legs twitching. Then she was still.
Johnny shifted himself to one side and immediately grimaced at the sharp pain in his leg.
"You OK?" Melanie called and Johnny would have nodded but, out of the corner of his eye, he saw a youngish man move into view and stand on the sidewalk with his legs astride the girl's body.
And that's when he dropped the gun.
He wasn't quite sure how it happened. A silly thing, errant clumsiness, perhaps. Or a distraction – one of the women in the seats farther down the bus (maybe even the girl) diverting his attention. Or maybe it was the pain in his leg. Then again, maybe it was just a minor infarction in the cosmic comings and goings of the stars in the sky, wreaking their chaos on mankind (or what was left of it) far, far below. Or maybe it was none of the above.
Whatever, it didn't actually matter. Johnny's hand fumbled, turned on itself as the gun butt shifted itself from the soft pad of skin below his thumb, tried to grasp the butt, the butt catching a small flick of the thumb-end and shifting its trajectory, giving it a little spin.
He watched the gun twirling over and over itself, like something from one of the music videos they showed on MTV or maybe even something from a movie or a complex trick from Penn and Teller, the streetlights right outside of the bus occasionally catching the gun's blackness and giving little gleams.
Other eyes were watching it, too, Johnny saw. Or at least, they were aiming in the general direction of the gun – he couldn't be sure they were watching it exactly because of the dark glasses.
The gun hit the floor of the bus right on the barrel end, twirling the weapon back into the air. Johnny reached out to grab it but the lettered sweater-man thrust an arm forward and, gloved fist clenched, he brought it down onto Johnny's wrist. Johnny yelped and pulled his hand back, and the gun hit the deck again, this time on the grip. There was a loud explosion and the right-hand side of the windshield shattered, glass peppering the street.
Someone screamed from down the bus but Johnny didn't turn around. He got to his knees and threw his hand forward towards the man's face as the man scrabbled for the gun while trying to keep a hold on the rail. Johnny's hand was outstretched for some reason, instead of folded over in a fist, and the tip of his middle and index fingers hit the man's cheekbone. The impact was enough to dislodge the man from the bus stairs but it also sent waves of pain up Johnny's already tender arm.
As he pulled his arm back and slid the hand under his armpit, Johnny heard a dull thud from the front of the bus. When he looked over, expecting the worst (though exactly what that might be he couldn't even guess at), he saw an elderly man's head moving backwards away from the bus. After a few yards, the man stopped and ran forward, his arms in the air, until he crashed into the bus. The man seemed not to have felt anything. He just straightened himself up and walked backwards again.
"He's trying to get in through the broken window," Johnny said, the pain in his hand forgotten.
"Johnny!" Melanie shouted.
Johnny spun around and saw the letterman was back on the steps again, this time with his left arm wrapped around the rail. He was pulling at the fingers of the glove o
n his right hand, and just for a few seconds, Johnny could have sworn that the man was smiling.
"Don't let him touch you," Melanie shouted.
Johnny glanced down and saw the gun.
The glove came off just as the old man at the front of the bus managed to hook his hands over the window rim. He immediately started scrabbling for a foothold.
Sally Davis hoisted her gun and pointed it towards the front of the bus, her hand wobbling.
"Shoot it," Melanie said. "Shoot the fucking thing."
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