400 Boys and 50 More

by Marc Laidlaw

  “Join us on the bus out front,” he’d whispered in her ear. “We’ll take you wherever you want to go.”

  He wore a cowboy hat, which, for a guy who called himself Neuron, was an odd thing. But the crown of the hat was transparent, clipped away and replaced with a transparent dome which crisply replicated the crease down the center of a Stetson. And down in that dome you could see lights moving and pulsing inside a plastic model of a human brain. At least she hoped it was plastic.

  “It’s not plastic, you know,” he’d said right away, as if she’d asked audibly. “It’s laminated so you can look right in. Just as tough as my old skull.”

  “You go around like that?” she said.

  “Sometimes I wear a regular hat, like when I’m working in bright lights. But on nights like this I like to keep the top down and . . . ‘just let the lights shine!’”

  The last of his words were a line from a song the Group was singing right at that exact same instant.

  “So how do I know which bus is yours?” she leaned and asked him.

  “Can’t miss it. She’s black and weirdly angled, as you’d say.”

  “I’d say? You said it.”

  Now he was putting himself down beside her, his cowboy hat tossed off, and wrapping a black bandanna kerchief around his head. The neural lights had dimmed anyway. She vaguely remembered seeing his brain bobbing along way up ahead in the dark tunnel as they were seeping out of the amphitheater, the last chords of music hanging behind them like a bubble about to burst. She had followed him dreaming of nightlights. “I don’t suppose you have any wisdom pills, do you?” he asked.

  She pulled a vaporizer out of her pocket. “Will this do?”

  “Hafta.”

  When he could speak again, he did so raspingly. “Who’s your friend there? The comfortable one.”

  “That’s Driver,” Sonora said. She couldn’t tell if he was asleep or just pretending. The motion of the bus lulled him. She realized it was probably the first time he had ever allowed himself to sleep on a moving bus. My God, she thought. The most basic pleasure of the journey and he’s never experienced it until now, no wonder he seemed so uncomfortable all the time.

  Driver opened his eyes and looked at them.

  “What kind of bus is this?” he said.

  “You’ll be sorry you asked that question,” Neuron said.

  Sonora had ominous intimations of an unspeakable horror about to be revealed. No sooner had Neuron spoken his warning than an old man near the front of the bus began to talk, twisting his leathery neck around so the cords twined together.

  “This is the only kind of bus there is,” the old man said.

  “That there’s Crouch,” said Neuron. “And you just started him on his favorite subject.”

  “It’s not my favorite—not by a long shot,” Crouch said, knee-walking toward them. “But it’s one on which I have many opinions.”

  “That’s what I meant,” Neuron said.

  “They’re not the same thing, what you said and what you meant.”

  “Crouch, you make my brain tired.”

  “And it makes my soul weary looking at you, Cerebrus.”

  “What was that again?” Sonora asked, looking on amazed at this stream of bickering, which suggested old well-worn rots in the relationship between these men, so that she doubted they could ever talk to one another in any other way—had they even wanted to.

  “Cerebrus. The Spectacular Transparent Head. The Mind-Body split made manifest.”

  “I have many opinions about buses, too,” Driver said. “I’ve thought about them a lot, while I was driving. But this isn’t like riding on any bus I can imagine. This is like moving on waves, just soft little swells over the sea . . . or a big lake.”

  “Or a river,” said the old man. “A river’s more like it.”

  Then “Look!” said Yvette at one of the windows, peering out through a tiny spyslot she’d lifted beneath the shades. “It’s our bus!”

  Sonora turned around and made herself one of the eyeholes. They were coming down from the mountains, narrow curving roads winding around and switching back, wriggling down the slopes. They were out of the cool dark trees, the pines and rivers and rocks. This was the arid desolate place above the foothills, the place where nothing grew but weeds and aluminum guardrails. She had always hated this part of the road—of any mountain road. This was where the dust beat itself senseless, blowing in from the plains; or where the salt fell, whisked in off the sea. Nothing moved here but headlights.

  On the switchback below—moving past, under them, and then in the opposite direction—she finally saw their bus. Unmistakable. And there were people in it.

  “Hey,” she said. “Driver, I thought you said the bus was broken.”

  His face darkened in a scowl. “I know that bus,” he said. “And it died tonight.”

  “Maybe it hasn’t, yet.”

  Sonora looked over at Neuron, but only briefly. His smile, like his words, puzzled her. She went back to watching the bus below. Headlights vanished around a curve, came out again, continued to weave. The air was full of dust or smoke, so she could see the beams swinging back and forth.

  Driver pushed up next to her. “What are you looking at?”

  “Just what Yvette said. It looks like

  “It can’t be our bus.”

  “That’s what it looks like, I’m sorry.”

  “It can’t be our bus.”

  He looked anyway.

  Someone up front switched on a radio and music came out of the scattered speakers. It was the Group, predictably, broadcast from the microsatellite they owned, which all the pilgrim buses picked up with a special antenna. Sonora hardly heard it, it had been background music for so long. But she noticed when the broadcast cut off suddenly.

  Suddenly was hardly the word for it.

  The tune died with a scream, then a hysterical wailing and clamoring. Voices in panic and terror. “No!” someone shouted. “No, my God!”

  “No—no!”

  Screams. Then a clearer voice, only slightly stronger than the others, high and nasal, a man: “This is a report—hello, are you there? Anyone? I’m reporting live from the airfield where the Group was just now departing. It’s hard to be sure, but we just saw—everyone waiting out here is afraid of it —”

  For a moment the sane voice was drowned out by shrieking that completely overwhelmed everything else. He moved away or somehow regained control—at least of himself, at least for the moment. “Oh my god, yes, it’s apparently true. We saw a fireball—well, heard a horrible sound, first, hard to describe—impossible to describe, I’d have to say—sort of a metal scraping and then a crumpling crash—and then that fireball, an explosion that is now pouring up into the sky.

  “Brothers and sisters, I do not want to be the one to tell you this, but I saw them with my own eyes and I have the microphone now, so my voice is going to have to be the one to say it. I saw them board that plane a few minutes before it took off. I would like to tell you that they were not on it, but I saw all of them go in, and then the door closed and the ladder pulled away and the plane started to taxi off down the runway into the darkness, so I could only see its running lights moving across the field. It was very dark out there, everyone. I don’t know if another plane came in out of nowhere or if the Group’s plane just didn’t get off the ground in time . . . or if something else went wrong. But I can see a giant wing or a tail sticking up out of the flames; that’s all I can see through the smoke. That’s all I can tell you now, my friends . . . my poor friends. My God . . . I’m so sorry for all of us.”

  Silence in the black bus, indecipherable. Sonora knew that she and Yvette and Chad and Driver were all looking out their windows at their own bus on the road below, but somehow none of this seemed real. What they were hearing, what they were seeing—none of it.

  Their crazy, colorful bus’s headlights drove in and around, wove sharply once, twice, and again. In an instant—it happ
ened that fast—Sonora saw the bus speed up and go out of control. The turn ahead was sharp and lit too late, and whoever drove was not thinking of the road.

  “You idiot!” Driver said, yelling down at the bus as if he could save it with a word.

  But he couldn’t. None of them could have done anything to stop it going over the edge. The disaster had begun when the Group got onto the plane; now it was only spreading, a shockwave, carrying all of them with it.

  “Shut those shades now,” Crouch said firmly.

  “But—but —”

  “I said shut those shades!” the old man insisted.

  “Come on.” Neuron was up next to her now, gently taking the shade out of her fingers, sealing it down again. “Crouch knows.”

  “What’s happening here?” Driver yelled at them.

  It had to be asked, eventually. Sonora was not so sure it would ever be answered.

  The speakers shut off and the lights dimmed drastically. Only a few little bulbs remained to show a way through the heaped pillows. For the first time Sonora noticed figures sleeping, wrapped in sheets, on the overhead bunks which lined the interior. There was not much room up there, under the curved ceiling; they were crammed in like luggage, and among luggage. The bus whirred on, and it was as Driver had said: it felt as though they were rocking, but not so gently now. Crazily. With growing violence. She lay down flat on her back, afraid she might be thrown or at least rolled; with arms spread wide, she grabbed onto the mattress, convinced that they too were now going off the road.

  A wave of sound roared through the bus, beginning in the pings and creaks and groans and rattles of the engine, the shocks, the brakes and the tires—growing louder and louder, until it sounded like jabbering voices. It built into a storm of howls and crashing as if they’d been caught in an avalanche of souls on the steep road. The sides of the bus felt too thin to protect them. Hail or hammerblows struck the ceilings, the walls, even pummeled them from underneath. She felt a repetitive, dull slamming just under one of her shoulders, a steady beat that seemed to be aiming up deliberately at her, driving toward her heart.

  Her mind had room for nothing else. The lights flickered and went out, and she would have screamed except that Neuron was right up next to her, whispering comfort in her ear, and she could see his brain glowing faintly, comfortingly, through his bandanna. She grabbed onto him, wondering for a moment how Driver was taking this—sorry that he had always been so aloof from them. She supposed he would be all right.

  Then, some long time before she accepted the fact, the sounds died out and the hammering stopped and even the sickening motion was done. They seemed to be at rest, the motor purring—idling—underneath them; and all around them, otherwise, perfect silence.

  A few lights came on again. Neuron sat up and pulled his hat from a hook between the windows, settled it over his head. He looked down at her. “You might want to wait here.”

  “For what?” she asked, words that barely escaped her dry throat.

  But he was moving on his knees toward the front of the bus, along with some of the others, including old Crouch, who was coughing with a wet, bubbling sound as if the shaking had jarred something loose in his chest. The others from their old bus were sitting against the walls, the masked windows, some curled into fetal positions among the pillows, eyes squeezed shut. Yvette sat with her arms wrapped around her knees, watching Crouch.

  Sonora looked over at Driver. His eyes were open but he was staring at the ceiling, looking contemplative, resigned. When he saw her looking, he smiled briefly, a darting flicker.

  “Are you okay?” she said.

  “I don’t suppose so,” he said. “On the other hand, does it matter?”

  Crouch whistled sharply, and she turned to look down the aisle at him. But he wasn’t calling her, or any of them. He was looking up at the sleeping racks. One of them, up there, was stirring.

  Just then, there was a loud pneumatic wheeze. A rash of warm air tore at her scarves, as if the bus had gasped out its last breath. A bitter metallic cold replaced the warmth she hadn’t noticed until it was gone. The driver—whose face she had not seen, who was no more than a scarcely registered shape in her memory—stepped from his seat and descended the steps at the front of the bus. Everyone watched him depart through the accordioned doors, his shoulders sharp in a dark, stiffly pressed uniform, disappearing outside. When he was gone, Crouch moved irritably toward the sleeper in the closest bunk.

  “Come on,” he snapped, shoving the figure there. “It’s your time.”

  There was a crackling sound, something like a canvas sail being unfurled in the confined space, and a creaking groan. What Sonora had thought were sheets slowly unfolded into wings. Pale leathery wings, bald as a rat’s tail, with clawed hinges. The sleeper, at Crouch’s prodding, rolled from the bunk and dropped to the floor, moving awkwardly on thin legs, its long nails catching and tearing in the mattress covers. She had only a glimpse of its face—but that was enough. Sleepy slitted eyes, long white snout, thin ranged mouth. Then Crouch was harrying it ahead of him through the aisle, down the steps and out the door. Only when it was gone could Sonora look away, and then her eyes went immediately to the others still slumbering overhead. They did not all appear to be of the same sort; but there were more like that one up there.

  Suddenly the black bus seemed less of a haven than she had imagined. She went on her knees after Neuron, who was sitting at the edge of the platform pulling on tall boots. Her own sandals were below in a pile of shoes.

  “Be sure you get the right ones,” he said as she rooted for her pair. “This isn’t the place to go walking off in someone else’s shoes.”

  “You and your identity,” Crouch called back sourly from the doorway. Then he stepped off into the night, and Sonora distinctly heard his footsteps crunching down hard into gravel or sand. The sound reassured her. At least they were somewhere.

  There was a pile of loose shawls and blankets near the shoes. She dragged a poncho with a mandala pattern over her head and went down the aisle, down the steps, looking over once at the driver’s seat and the dashboard as she went. She didn’t drive, herself; but it looked like any other bus.

  Stepping out, she learned instantly where the heat had gone. Sucked up, sunk into the reddish sand, which instantly snatched the last trace of warmth from her body. She stood hugging the blanket around her, cold as alabaster yet not quite feeling the chill. That numb.

  Footprints led away from the bus, toward the horizon. At the end of that lengthening trail was the dark uniform of the driver, plodding steadily along. But Crouch, who stood outside, and Neuron, who now jumped down beside her and stamped his feet as if to force nonexistent heat into them, were not looking that way. They gazed straight out ahead of the bus, in the direction it was headed. Neuron pushed back his cowboy hat for a better view of the winged silhouette that was lofting higher by the second against a dark sky with faint stars in it. It was the violet hour, wolf-glow, but lacking qualities she associated with dawn or dusk. Then she realized what it was. At the zenith was a molten orange glow, like a sun without definition; while spreading away from that in rippled waves was steadily deeper darkness, purpling till it coalesced into perfect blackness against the land. It was the exact opposite of sunrise or sunset; here, darkness massed at the horizon, and light retreated toward the center of the sky. Stars burned and flickered close to the ground, like the lights of a desert city. The flying shape, as it gained distance, gradually merged with the darkness that ringed them entirely. Behind them, she noticed, was no sign of the mountains they had traversed; nor of any river, for that matter.

  Sonora was grateful to have at least the thick blob of molten light above, though it cast no warmth that she could feel. Even as she thought this, she saw that it was dwindling—that the darkness was not a static thing, a mere wall around them, but continued to grow and seep up across the sky. Blue and violet invaded the orange flare, weakening it while she watched. It was like a foreign c
ell under attack, dissolving. Stars marked the territory taken by night.

  Well, she thought. At least there are stars. For the moment. I won’t take them for granted.

  As the orange light faded, Crouch and Neuron grew visibly nervous. They peered hard at the horizon, squinting into the dark, until the old man began to curse.

  “I can’t believe it,” he said. “Another one.”

  “Maybe he’ll be back,” Neuron said. “Anyway, there’s more.”

  “Not many!”

  This, too, had the feel of an old—an endless—argument.

  “Okay,” Neuron said, turning toward Sonora. “That’s about it for us, now. You better get back up inside there.”

  “What about the driver?” Sonora said, for at the end of that long trail of footprints there was nothing now but more darkness.

  “Looks like that’s taken care of,” he said, nodding up the stairwell. Driver himself had taken the seat, settling in with an eager look as he examined the dashboard, tested the steering wheel, and finally tried the lever that worked the door. It sighed shut casually, squeezing the inner light to a narrow slit between its rubber flaps—until even that went out.

  “Hey!” Neuron shouted.

  “Shit!” Crouch yelled. “Don’t move!”

  The black bus was gone. There was nothing now but darkness sweeping in over the empty plain of sand, with the three of them standing there alone while wind erased the tire tracks.

  Sonora spun to look around, to see where it had gone; but Neuron grabbed onto her, harder than she had ever been grabbed. “Don’t . . . move!” he cried. She could hardly see his face, it was so much darker now. A membrane seemed to have been pulled even across the stars. There was only a tiny sullen dot of orange being extinguished in the vault overhead. Once it snuffed out, there would be nothing left to see by.

  Everything was quickening. Night came on like the wind, which roared out of nowhere as if bent on tearing them from their place. She planted her feet in the sand and knelt, dragging Neuron down beside her. Voices buzzed in the sand, which scoured her flesh, tore at her eyelids. She screamed and the sand rushed into her mouth, caking her tongue, drinking every ounce of moisture—stealing it from her, sucking the life away. Neuron and Crouch had her by either arm, holding her between them, and they were doing something she couldn’t quite see. Waving their arms, pounding the air with a hollow sound.