Biohazard

10

Of course, Morse came out of his peaceful sleep screaming and immediately reaching for his Nikon. Everyone was yelling and shouting and wondering what in the Christ had happened. Me among them. Something had hit us and hit us damn hard. This was no accidental run into a parked car or a slab of building. Something had hit us. Something really damn big. Through the windshield I could see nothing but a swirling cloud of dust.

“Is everyone all right?” I said, once things calmed down.

“We’re okay, I think,” Carl said. “Have to check the Jeep, though.”

“What was it?” Janie wanted to know.

“Perhaps our friend Carl drove us into something,” Texas Slim suggested.

“Fuck I did. Something hit us. Something big.”

But what? That’s what I kept asking myself. We had come around a blind corner created by a shattered building and its attendant rubble and then…I don’t know…I saw a flash of silver. Then…boom.

“I think it was a bus,” Mickey said. “It came out of nowhere…but it looked kind of like a big bus.”

“That’s what I saw, too,” Carl said.

I looked from one to the other. “A school bus? A Greyhound? Hell kind of bus?”

“Nothing like that,” Mickey told me. “It was bright silver. Like a train.”

We piled out. The front passenger side quarter panel of the Jeep had a good dent in it, a very big dent, but it wasn’t pushed in enough to rub against the front tire. Carl checked the engine, the undercarriage. Everything was okay. For once, vehicle-wise, we’d caught a break.

“I’m still wandering what it was,” Texas said.

“Look,” Mickey said, examining the dent. She scraped something out of it with her fingernail: a strip of silver paint. “See? I told you. It was a big fucking silver bus.”

Morse got a shot of the paint.

I was picturing one of those chartered coaches that used to take elderly people down to Bransom, Missouri for foot-stomping country music. One of those out on a wild joy ride. It was ridiculous, but the image in my mind persisted.

“It didn’t have windows,” Janie said.

We all looked at her.

“That’s what I saw. I wasn’t really looking. I think I was nodding off,” she explained. “But then I opened my eyes and I saw this metal, silvery thing. It was huge. But it had no windows. No windows at all.”

I thought maybe some kind of military vehicle. But silver bus…silver bus…those words kept running through my mind. Where had I heard something about a big silver bus?

Mickey was tapping a long index finger to her lips. “That guy…do you remember? That weirdo in the bathrobe? He was saying something about a silver bus.”

Carl laughed. “That fucking Gomer? Shit, he had painted purple toenails and he was carrying a fucking phonebook. He said he ate his dog.”

But I was remembering now, too. The bathrobe guy, crazy, deluded, shellshocked…but not necessarily wrong. What had he said exactly?

They came in silver buses. I saw ‘em. They had orange suits on. They took Reverend Bob and threw him in the bus.

“Might I ask what you people are talking about?” Price said.

I told him. I told him about the guy and what he had said which had struck me as being very odd at the time. Now I was wondering if it wasn’t so odd after all and I think Price was wondering the same thing.

“Hmm. A silver bus. Men in orange suits, did he say? Interesting.”

There was no time for speculation then. We were wide open in the streets. We got back in and Carl got behind the wheel and got us rolling. As we drove out, I tried several times to engage Janie in conversation but she wasn’t having it. Every time I spoke to her, she’d ask Texas or Price a question or pose for one of Morse’s photos.

She’s gone over the line, hasn’t she? I kept telling myself. Bitch is alive because you’ve taken care of her and now she’s turning on you. You gonna put up with that, Rick? Maybe you ought to introduce her to big brother Shape next month…

An angry, betrayed sort of revenge fantasy, that’s all it was. I wouldn’t do that to Janie. But on the other hand, if it came down to it, who would I select? Looking at the faces crowded into the Jeep, I knew it wouldn’t be easy if it came to it.

Every corner we turned, every street we prowled down, I expected trouble. But there was nothing. Nothing at all. My guts in my throat, Carl drove us out of Des Moines. And even then I think I really knew where we were going. Because I’d heard it in my sleep last night.

Nebraska.