400 Boys and 50 More (61 page)

“Damn,” Neuron said. “I guess we are headed the right way.”

“You’re not going out there again,” Sonora said.

“No. You can keep on going, Driver-man.”

Driver sank back into his seat. The engine had stalled, but it started up easily enough. He pulled forward slowly, watching the ruined thing pass under the front bumper. He was careful to drive as straight as possible, but even so, he thought he heard the wide wings crackle as the tires passed over them.

Neuron clapped him hard on the shoulder. “It’s a good sign,” he said, nodding. “A real good sign.”

Not long after that, the stars reappeared. Dead ahead, clustered low on the horizon, spreading slowly apart as the bus sped forward.

He was squinting for a better look when he saw something moving. He wasn’t ready for a repeat of the last collision. He started to brake, hoping to avoid a mess; but then he saw the pale thing waving. A person.

“What’s going on?”

Without answering, he brought the bus to a stop. The person outside—a skinny, ratty-looking kid—came running toward them down the bright twin tunnel of headlights, waving his arms desperately. When he reached the bus he started banging on the door.

Driver looked back at Neuron, as if for permission. “Go ahead,” the cowboy said, and Driver opened the doors.

The kid hurled himself up the stairs, breathless and laughing. “I can’t believe it!” he was saying. “You—you found me out here. I mean, there’s others here? Wow! I thought I could hear them up ahead, you know, I been following just the little sounds in the dark, just those few notes you can barely hear. But I should have known I wasn’t the only one. I couldn’t be the only one. I mean, of the followers who’d do this, who’d come here.”

His eyes were everywhere all at once, pupils enormous, as if he’d been staring into darkness forever. Finally his gaze settled on Driver, and his wide smile froze inside his pale ragged beard.

“I remember you,” he said. “I met you! And you’re really here now. Man!”

Driver started to look away, leaving him to the others. The kid was crazy or high. Then, abruptly, he remembered their meeting in the amphitheater earlier; the kid had come rushing up to him just like this, exactly as crazed, and then staggered off.

“Man, this is great,” he was saying. “We’ll catch up with them now, yeah. You got a bus and everything. How’d you manage that? I mean, on foot it’s tough. I didn’t have much to go by. But—but maybe it’s what you have when you go, right? I mean, were you all in a bus? All of you?”

He looked around the interior of the black bus, but no one answered. The other passengers seemed almost embarrassed by his manic energy.

“I mean, all I had was my own two feet, right? Only way I could think to follow was to, you know . . . walk. I found an edge, like, a real high place, top of a building. A real tall building. It was so tall the lights on the ground looked like tiny faraway stars, you know? Like stars, yeah. And I just went walking toward them, right out into the sky, stars above and below, stars everywhere . . . and I walked through that for a while, till the stars went away and it got dark. But I could hear the Group again, finally. Like they were up ahead just a little ways— they didn’t have much of a head start on me. That was such a relief, right? I mean—I was trying to imagine the world without them. What’s left? Hey . . . you got a radio, why aren’t you tuned in? You gotta tune ‘em in. How else you gonna follow?”

The kid went to the dashboard and punched on the radio. It hadn’t been on since they’d seen their old colorful bus plunge into darkness. It crackled to life now, as if the satellite were still out there orbiting in the dark, bouncing signals to anyone who cared to receive them. . . .

Music.

Driver straightened when he recognized it. The Group was coming in clear, as if they were outside the bus, surrounding it.

“Yeah,” the kid said, ecstatic. He sank down on the steps.

Some of the others began to whisper, in the back of the bus. Yvette and Chad sounded excited. They knew all the tapes, all the recordings going around, being traded; they knew not only all the songs, but all the individual concerts, had heard most of them in person. But this was something new. This was. . .

“It’s happening right now,” Chad was saying. “Can’t you feel it?”

And Yvette: “It’s live!”

“Yeah!” the kid on the steps agreed. “That’s them! We’re catching up! What’re we doing sitting here, Driver? Let’s get moving!”

Driver had already been in the act of pushing the great bus forward. He bent once again to the task of driving, while music filled the black bus and the stars spread out on the horizon, drifting higher now. Not stars at all, he saw, but fires. Scattered fires burning all over the slopes of some dark shape. He sensed that something held them up, but could gain no impression of it. Spires, or simply a wall? The sky was too black to allow a silhouette, and the fires lit nothing but themselves.

The excitement in the bus grew as they approached the lights. The music was getting louder, the signal stronger. It was strange to know that the Group was up ahead playing—but to what audience?

And then, from the passengers, came a cry of disappointment and frustration—even of despair. For the tunes had blurred into a final lullabye . . . the Group’s signature piece, after which they always left in utter silence.

“Hurry!” they were yelling at him, as if he could squeeze any more speed from the bus—as if they didn’t mind crashing headlong into whatever black enormity held the specks of flame aloft. He couldn’t bring himself to drive blindly, though. The closer he got to the lights, the slower he went—he had no sense of depth here. How far had he come? How far had he to go?

The tune crested, tumbled over an inevitable edge into silence.

“Noooooo,” they wailed inside the black bus.

At that moment, the bus passed through a gate, an entrance or exit of some sort, into a tunnel. It was luminous with a deep violet light. They were descending, so he took his foot off the accelerator for an instant—and just then, they burst out abruptly into a huge arena, a stadium or coliseum whose dimensions were almost inconceivable.

They had emerged somewhere in the middle of the field. Ramparts or bleachers rose on all sides; they were like distant mountains, their true size impossible to judge. He had no sense of scale.

The ground was littered with rubbish: chunks and splinters of whitish rock that looked like the shards a mason leaves behind when he chisels a tombstone. Gnawed, discarded bones; soiled take-out containers. Worms and flies crawled and buzzed through the heaps of filth. Glass crunched and burst under the tires. Wide piles of embers smoked and glowed here and there like the remains of bonfires. He drove carefully through the waste, not wanting to be stranded here. Static poured from the speakers; all directions looked equally undesirable, all destinations futile. To head for any one of the surrounding walls would have been equally vain; they were all impassable.

“We missed ‘em,” the kid on the steps said, dejected. “We just missed them.” He put his head on his knees and began to sob. “All that . . . and . . . and . . . ”

Sonora moved over to him. Her eyes were on the desolate scene beyond the window, but she put a hand on the boy’s shoulder.

“Hey, don’t worry. We’ll catch them next time, okay? They’re still out there.”

“But where?”

Sonora fiddled with the radio dial, but all bands seemed equally dead now.

“We’ll figure it out,” she said.

“Not here, though,” said Neuron.

“What do you mean?” Sonora turned to look at him. Driver kept the bus moving slowly, weaving around heaps of smoldering coals, because that was what he knew how to do.

“We have to keep moving. We have to get out now. If we get stranded, stuck here, they’ll pull so far ahead we’ll never catch up.”

“How . . . how do you know all this?” she asked.

“We’ve been following them a lot longer than you,” he said. “You learn these things.”

“But—but all this, it only happened tonight—I mean, if this is still tonight.”

Neuron shook his head. “You don’t see. It didn’t happen tonight, whatever that means. And it hasn’t happened yet, neither. It happened a long time ago—and it’s still happening, even now. It keeps deepening; it keeps moving through all the levels, and that’s where some of us come from . . . from the world before, or another one before that. Just like you, now, hooking up with us. It’ll change you eventually, like it changed me.” He put a finger to his skull. “You’ll become what you are, along the way; but what you are will change.”

Sonora stared at him, irritated. “Just tell us what to do,” she said.

“If I knew that . . . ” Neuron started.

“Let me,” came a rasping voice from above them. In the rear-view mirror, Driver could see someone stepping down from the bunks. It was Crouch, the old man. He hadn’t been there long, but apparently it was long enough. He almost wasn’t Crouch anymore.

He knelt before them, extended his pale, long-fingered hand, and slowly opened his fingers. Driver gasped. From the popping blue veins in the old man’s palm, red slugs were crawling. They wriggled up, dried, curled to a wisp at one end, a rounded blob at the other. “Corpsules,” Crouch said. “I can make my own now.”

It was the first thing Driver had seen here that truly frightened him.

Then he remembered when he had seen them before.

When and where. . . .

The amphitheater. Like this place, only smaller, enclosed, packed with people. Could this be the same place, much later that same night, with all the people gone from it? Had they been driving in a circle all night, and now everyone was home and sleeping except them? But it was so immense . . . had they shrunk somehow?

“Disgusting,” Chad said, his face pressed to a window. “Look at all them fukkin diapers, my god. And the cans, the garbage bags.” Which there were, bursting at the seams, stuffed with rancid meaty stuff, ground worms maybe, that wouldn’t quite ever decay, it was so rubbery and plastic.

“Yea, verily,” said Crouch now, raising two fingers in a peace sign, then making a sign of power over the handful of red drops. “Behold me, that am yet angel.”

And then his wings unfolded.

It wasn’t a good idea, there in the bus. He battered them against the racks and jumped back, hunching smaller. “Jesus!”

“Looks like this isn’t your day, old man,” Neuron said, putting arms around him, helping him pack the wings back in again. In almost the same gesture, he swiped the handful of drops from the white-furred palm. Apparently it was expected. Crouch sucked in his cheeks and, still stooping, hobbled painfully toward the front of the bus.

“Open the doors,” he said commandingly as he passed Driver.

“But —”

Crouch hit the lever himself. The smell that swept in was unbearable. He faced into it, descended with his nose held high, turned and faced the bus and all its company. Seeing him out there, surviving in the emberlight, some of the passengers let up the windowshades on that side. Crouch clicked his heels together, put his hand to his brow in a crisp salute, and bowed stiffly at the waist. Then he sprang into the air and was gone.

“Now we take these,” Neuron said. Waving a corpsule under Driver’s nose.

Sonora also remembered the droplets. She rushed over to Neuron and grabbed it out of his hand.

“This!” she cried. “This is why we’re here!”

“Well, in a sense,” Neuron said with a shy smile. “Or hadn’t you figured that out yet?”

“I don’t mean what you think I mean,” she said. But she wasn’t sure how to put it. Wherever they were—death, a dream, some other kind of place whose name came not quite so readily to the tongue—they wouldn’t have been here except for the drag. They would have been somewhere else completely; perhaps they might have passed through here briefly, on their way to that other place. But instead they had gotten off the road—driven off it almost deliberately—and were now trapped in this . . . she wanted to call it a borderland, but she wasn’t sure it was either a bordering region or a zone between borders. It was more like another planet, that extensive.

“He’s wigging out,” said one of the original passengers, whose name she had never known. She thought he was talking about Neuron, but he saw she thought that and shook his head, nodding toward the ceiling.

Wild laughter from overhead.

They went out, all of them, to see Crouch turning somersaults in the sky above. He was just luminous enough to be visible.

“Come on, old man!” Neuron yelled, clenching his fists. He had dropped the red tears into a vial he wore around his neck.

“I’m not following him,” someone else said.

Crouch hooted at them.

“Where are they?” the bearded kid cried. He sounded mad.

“Right here,” Crouch called down to them. “But not right now.”

“We know that much,” Neuron said. “Should we drop now?”

“Not yet. They’re farther ahead. Just follow me.”

“Good job, old man.” Neuron looked ecstatic, and when the kid saw him, he relaxed, too. “You heard him, Driver! Everyone back on board!”

Sonora went up just before Neuron, who came last. She realized she had smelled nothing outside—not since the moment she stepped out of the bus. As if the decay were only an image of decay, a projection affecting only the eyes. But as she boarded the bus again, she gagged on the stench that followed her in. Driver had his face covered with a monogrammed handkerchief he pulled from the label of his charcoal black uniform. It was a relief when the door shut behind Neuron.

She let him past, smiling broadly when he looked at her, then turned and whispered urgently to Driver: “Don’t take those drops!”

Neuron was looking back at her. She straightened up and walked toward him, feigning easiness. She swayed as the bus moved forward, and Neuron put his arms out to catch her. They went right around her, tighter this time than before. “Whoa, there. Gotcha,” he said.

“You sure did.” Sonora smiled, hands on his forearms, twisting away. She went down to the mattress, scooting back in between Chad and Yvette. Neuron took a lazy swipe at her, let his arm dangle, and smiled sideways sort of regretfully, as if: oh well.