Maybe it ate her face off like Chuck Peterson ate Sprinkles’s face off.
Maybe it ate even more.
Newfie continued growling, and Andrew kept sounding like chalk on a blackboard. The thing on the bus, moving between the seats, slowly made its way up to the front. Then it did the strangest thing I had ever seen a poxer do.
It opened the door.
In slow motion, the door folded in on itself and a cloud of smoke rushed outside to join the rest of the mist.
I smelled tobacco.
“It’s about goddamn time,” I heard a familiar voice say and I almost wet myself.
I think maybe I did wet myself.
“Dorcas?” I whispered. “Dorcas? DORCAS? DORCAS? OHMYGOD OHMYGOD OHMYGOD.”
In seconds I was squeezing the stuffing out of an ancient chimney that had told the soldiers off then got blown away. I saw it all happen with my own eyes. The blood splatter—everything.
Yet here she was. She wasn’t dead. She wasn’t a poxer. She was smoking a cigarette, because Dorcas wouldn’t be Dorcas without a butt in her mouth.
“Geez, kid,” she grimaced. “Can you let an old broad breathe a little?”
Newfie stopped growling and Andrew stopped chirping. In seconds we were all gathered around her.
“Are you hurt?” Prianka said. “You were shot.”
“Ain’t no bullet in me,” Dorcas said, holding out her arms for all of us to see.
“Man, it’s so good to see you,” smiled Jimmy. “You are one brave lady.”
Bullseye didn’t say anything, but he didn’t have to. He just kept staring at Dorcas with a grin on his face that stretched from ear to ear. I guess after watching his whole family die right in front of his eyes, finding Dorcas alive was like finding his grandmother with oodles of presents in her arms on Christmas morning.
Sanjay held back, which was understandable because that’s what Sanjay did, but Trina marched right past our little reunion, climbed onto the bus, walked down the aisle, and stopped where the huge blood splatter painted the window. She reached out and jabbed at it.
Seconds later the window slid down.
“Are you kidding me?” she said to all of us. She jabbed at the bloody mess again and stuck her finger into her mouth. “It’s strawberry jelly.”
Dorcas started chuckling. “Thank God for Trudy Aiken,” she croaked before hawking up one of her signature phlegm balls and spitting it on the ground at our feet. “That big girl had a stash of food under her seat. When those wet-behind-the-ears soldiers showed up after I had parked the bus across the road, I was holding a jar of strawberry preserves.”
“Why?” said Prianka, but I knew why.
“You were going to pelt them with jelly?” I almost laughed.
“Yeah, kid,” she said. “What the hell else was I gonna do? I was gonna fire off anything I could get my hands on to buy you all some time to get away.”
Trina left the bus, sucking on one of her fingers. “This is my Aunt Ella’s preserves,” she said.
“Yup,” smiled Dorcas. “Trudy took a whole bag full of treats from Ella’s when we left her house up in Cummington. It ain’t no pizza, but it ain’t bad either.”
I involuntarily reached up and swiped at my eyes. I knew they were wet. I couldn’t help it. I was so freaking happy to see Dorcas Duke, the tears just squeezed out of me. “Do you mean to say that the soldiers shot at you and hit a jar of strawberry preserves you were holding in your hand?”
“You’re damn right they did, the bastards. And I gave them a good what-for, too. Who the hell did they think they were shooting at an old lady?”
I laughed. “You’re not an old lady, Dorcas,” I said and reached in to hug her again.
“Say what?”
“You might be old and you might be a lady, but you’re not an old lady,” I said. “You’re awesome. You’re freaking awesome.”
8
“THE SOLDIERS LEFT me behind,” said Dorcas. The dark skies had started to sprinkle again so we all climbed onto the bus, shut the door and sat quietly as she told us what happened after the soldiers shot the strawberry preserves out of her hand.
“I’m sorry we left you, too,” I said. My voice actually cracked and I could tell my eyes were still wet with happiness, relief, and a fair amount of grief, all at the same time. I was positive Prianka thought I was a big, fat baby, and was planning on dumping me the first chance she found someone better.
“Would you shut your damn trap and stop leaking already,” Dorcas barked at me. “I swear, kid. If you make me leak, too, you’re in for one hell of a walloping.”
“Can’t help it,” I said. “I still can’t believe you’re alive.”
Dorcas put one age-spotted hand on the back of her neck and shook her head. “It’s gonna take a lot more than a few army brats playing with the big guns to knock this girl down for good.”
Wow. If Dorcas Duke wasn’t already my hero, she was now. She was about the most classless class-act I had ever met. Every time she coughed like she was getting ready to keel, or drop some colorful language, my heart melted.
“So they left you behind?” Prianka said, repeating Dorcas’s words. Dorcas just nodded her head.
“That makes total sense,” said Jimmy. He looked a little defiant. “They don’t want anyone over sixty.”
“Nope,” said Dorcas.
“I guess I don’t make the cut either.” He laughed with his hands on his wheels. “They don’t know what they’re missing. I’m a rare find.” Thank God for glass-half-full Jimmy. In all honesty, I didn’t have to look around the bus too far to pinpoint the other obvious person the soldiers would have left behind.
Sanjay.
Thankfully he seemed totally unfazed. He was sitting by himself, staring out the window. Andrew perched on the back of the seat in front of him. Newfie couldn’t fit next to him. Instead, he was stretched out in the aisle with his big head on his big paws.
“But they shot at you?” said Bullseye. “I thought people don’t shoot people.” He cast a sideways glance in my direction and I rolled my eyes.
“We . . . meaning us. We don’t shoot people,” I said. “Normal people don’t shoot people. Crazy people with crazy agendas that don’t allow for the old or the sick or the . . . whatever—those people shoot people.”
“Look who’s getting all socially aware,” said Trina. She wasn’t wrong, but I wasn’t exactly getting socially aware. I was getting angry, all because of Diana and her stupid vision for a stupid new world.
I liked the world I already had before Necropoxy started. I liked the Internet. I liked hanging with my friends. I liked pizza probably as much as Trudy Aiken. I even admired dudes like Jimmy who could bench press a smart car if he wanted to, and I’d like to think that I would be cool with kids like Sanjay, even though he was my first exposure to autism.
Frankly, he was cool. No, Sanjay was more than that. He was vital. Every single one of us was vital, no matter our circumstance.
My mouth grew a little thin. I turned to Dorcas. “What did the soldiers want?”
Dorcas chuckled a little and leaned back in her seat. “You mean after I tore them a new one for shooting a bullet at me? The dummies said it was an accident. They said they were just firing a warning shot. A warning shot. Do you believe that? At my head?”
“Yeah, but . . . what did they want?”
Dorcas snorted. “They wanted me to move the bus. I told them to go pound sand. I didn’t have the keys anyways.”
My forehead creased for a moment. Oh yeah, of course she didn’t have the keys. She had tossed them in the woods after she parked the bus across the road, right before the soldiers got there.
“So what happened?” asked Prianka.
“You mean before or after
I slugged that potato-headed fool who shot at me?”
Bullseye’s mouth fell open. “You punched a soldier?”
“Hell, yeah, I punched a soldier.” Dorcas laughed. “The damn fool tried to frisk me because he didn’t believe I didn’t have the keys.”
Bullseye sat there, his mouth still hanging open. I think with that single slug, Dorcas Duke solidified her folk-hero status with him, too.
“What about us?” asked Trina. “Were they still looking for me and Tripp?”
Dorcas nodded. “If by ‘looking’ you mean shoving that picture of the two of you at the beach with Molly and Doug in my face? You betcha.”
I shook my head. “Did you say anything?”
Dorcas slowly stood, her knees and ankles crackling as she did. I watched as she took a couple steps toward me. When she was close enough, she reached out with one hand and smacked me upside the head, not hard enough to bleed, but hard enough to hurt.
“Ow,” I yelped.
A short burst of laughter exploded out of Trina’s mouth.
“What do you take me for?” barked Dorcas. “You think I’m some sort of stool pigeon?” For a moment, just a quick moment, I thought that Dorcas Duke might have done time in jail at some point in her life—she was that tough.
“Ow,” I whined again. “And no. I was just asking.”
“Humpf,” she muttered as she turned and made her way back to her seat. As she sat, she deftly pulled a pack of cigarettes out of her pocket, popped one in her mouth, then held out the pack. Jimmy held up his hands and shook his head. The rest of us followed his lead. “Suit yourself,” she muttered. “I figure all the tar in these sticks is the only thing holding me together these days.”
“So?” I said, “What did you say about the picture?”
Dorcas took a deep drag on her cigarette and blew smoke up to the ceiling. “I told them I was as blind as a bat, so don’t go shoving pictures in my face.”
I let out a deep breath that I didn’t even know I was holding.
“What about the bus key?” asked Prianka. “They had to have known you used it to park the bus across the road.” All I could picture was Dorcas throwing her big keyring into the woods, not even thinking that it might end up a cinder if the wind blew the wrong way.
“What about it?” she smiled. “I told them I swallowed it.”
Without batting an eye, I turned to the littlest member of our group, not counting Andrew or Poopy Puppy, and said, “Sanjay, how long does it take a foreign body to pass through, ugh, the stomach?”
I didn’t want to ask him how long it would take an old lady to crap out a bus key. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know if we needed to go find prunes and force feed them to Dorcas. I mean, there was gross and there was gross. That whole idea was really, really GROSS.
Sanjay didn’t move. He sat staring out the window at the smoky fog, but he slowly put Poopy Puppy to his ear. After a moment he said, “Most ingested foreign bodies pass through the gastrointestinal tract without event. However, a patient’s stool should be closely and continuously observed. Spontaneous passage of said object can be expected in four to six days, but in rare cases, this process can take up to four weeks.” Sanjay got a strange look on his face. “Poopy Puppy says look at the poop.”
Bullseye’s face turned red.
“Not me,” said Trina. “I’m sitting this one out.”
Dorcas snorted then started braying like a mule. She slapped her knee and rocked back and forth. I actually thought she might be having an episode or something,
“It’s not funny,” I said to her as she squeezed her eyes shut and tears of laughter started streaming down her cheeks.
“Yes it is,” she said. “That kid is something else. What a hoot.”
I just stared at her, probably the same way that my father used to stare at me when I was acting totally immature. Meanwhile, Dorcas dragged the back of her hand across her face then reached into her mouth with one hooked finger.
“Don’t puke,” I blurted out, and Jimmy backed his wheelchair up as far as he could.
Dorcas rolled her eyes as she fished inside her molars. Then she pulled her finger out, along with a slimy bus key. “I may be old but I ain’t senile,” she said.
“Whoa . . .” whispered Bullseye. He was totally mesmerized.
“Yeah, kid,” she said to him. “I got me some pockets in my cheeks just like a squirrel.”
Sanjay shifted a little in his seat with Poopy Puppy still at his ear. He cleared his throat and said, “Most ground squirrels have cheek pouches, but flying and tree squirrels do not. When present, cheek pouches sit just behind the front teeth on both sides of the face. A muscle in the pouch helps the squirrel empty it once it is back in its burrow, to feed to family members or save for later when food is scarce.”
I sighed. I think it was too much of a sigh because Prianka shot me an icicle stare. I just shrugged and mouthed ‘sorry.’ Meanwhile, Sanjay kept on talking.
“Gray squirrels, better known as Scurius Carolinensis are tree squirrels. They lack pouches. As tree squirrels, they primarily eat seeds, flowers, buds, fruits, fungi, insects and occasionally bird eggs.”
“Poopy Puppy says that, don’t he?” Dorcas asked in a very deadpan voice.
“Yes,” he answered. “He also says that Scurius Carolinensis doesn’t eat keys.”
Dorcas turned to Bullseye. “So nope. I ain’t no squirrel. The little professor says so.”
I cringed because I expected Prianka to explode because Dorcas called Sanjay a little professor, but she didn’t. As a matter of fact, of all the slurs and nicknames Dorcas could have come up with for Sanjay, calling him a little professor was actually sort of a compliment.
“So, Mrs. Duke . . .” Prianka began.
“Just plain Dorcas,” she said.
“Okay . . . Dorcas. So what happened to the soldiers?”
She shrugged. “They went back the way they came. I started hollering at them because you would have to be a dang fool not to realize that a forest fire was burning the woods up, but they didn’t care. They left me just the same.”
This time it was Jimmy who said he was sorry to her. “We shouldn’t have stranded you like that.”
“Go hush yourself,” she said. “All y’all. I’m a big girl and I know my way around the woods. That fire was heading away from me, anyway. So I figured I had food and I had shelter right here.” She pursed her lips. “And maybe, just maybe, I was hoping that someone was going to come back for me.”
“We came back for the guns,” said Bullseye, “But I think finding you was way better.”
For a moment, I actually thought that Dorcas Duke’s cheeks turned a little red, but that couldn’t have been. Dorcas wasn’t the kind of woman who blushed.
“Alrighty,” she finally said. “Pit stop is over. Where’s the rest of ‘em?” She meant my parents, Aunt Ella, and everyone else we had been traveling with.
“Would you believe me if I told you that we locked them inside a Walmart in Apple?”
“I’d give you points for creativity,” she answered in that raspy voice of hers.
“Then I guess we’re the creative types,” said Trina.
Dorcas looked up at her with her old eyes and did a once-over. Finally, something sparked in them. “Hey,” she said. “Why do you look so clean?” She looked around at all of us. “As a matter of fact, why do you all look so clean?”
I smiled. “There’re showers at the Walmart, in the breakroom at the back of the building.”
I’ve never seen an old person move so fast in my life. She was down the aisle and out the door of the bus before I even had a chance to tell her that we weren’t heading back to Walmart. We were heading someplace else.
I took a deep breath and decided to giv
e her about twenty seconds of unbridled happiness before I dropped that particular bombshell on her head.
Maybe even thirty.
Thirty would be good.
9
WE ALL STOOD around Dorcas Duke in the drizzling rain. It was still dark and smoky. I looked down at Uncle Don’s watch. The time was just after 7 a.m.
“You’re nuts,” Dorcas said for like the hundredth time.
We had just finished telling her that Freaky Big Bird, Randy, and Eddie with the fake hair all got bitten but only Eddie turned into a poxer. Dorcas stared at the ground when we told her about him. Her mouth turned into a frown and the little wrinkles around her lips deepened.
“Such a nice fella,” she said.
Then we told her what we had figured out—that everyone from Site 37 who got sick had a chance of being super-immune; but Diana, Dr. Marks and the rest of them didn’t know it. If we could just find them and wave the white flag of truce long enough to explain to them that they didn’t need us anymore, we would be home free.
Dorcas didn’t buy it. Not for a second.
“Forget nuts,” she huffed. “You’re cuckoo for cocoa puffs if you think that cockamamie plan has a chance of working.”
Maybe she was right. Who knew?
“Do you have a better idea?” barked Trina then sort of sucked on her lip because even she knew that she had just mouthed off a little too much.
“Yeah,” said Dorcas. “Almost any idea.”
I sighed. “If we tell Diana and her people that she doesn’t need me and Trina anymore, maybe she won’t keep coming after us.” I actually believed my words. “Wouldn’t it be nice if we didn’t have Diana, her soldiers, or the helicopter people at our backs at every turn?”
Dorcas just stood there with another cigarette in her mouth and her arms crossed over her chest.
“I know you don’t want to hear this,” she said as she stared at all of us. “But you’re just kids. I know kids. I’ve driven kids in my bus all my life. Kids are stupid. They make stupid decisions and sometimes get themselves hurt, or even worse.”
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