When Grace hit the floor of the bus, Cory was already there.
I forgot all about my turn at the watch. I moved forward, stood over Cory. His mouth was open, and blood was coming out of it. His head seemed awkward on his neck. His eyes were open, but they had a kind of “I’m wearing milky contacts” look.
Homer eased up, bent over, and touched his fingers to Cory’s neck.
“I don’t feel nothing.”
I bent down and checked him out as well. I’d seen enough of it now to know one thing for certain. I was looking at death.
“Dead,” I said.
“No, shit,” Grace said.
“Yeah,” I said. “No, shit. You kick a guy in the neck like that, it ain’t just gonna modify his speech patterns. A kick like that, back home, wherever that is, I bet his family pictures fell off the wall.”
“I’m not bothered at all,” Grace said. “I’d like to make him that way twice. James. You still with Cory on this share-the-wealth thing?”
“No,” James said. “I mean, I could see his point. But not a lot ... Not at all ... It was a bad idea.”
“Damn,” Homer said. “You killed that man with a kick.”
“I certainly did,” Grace said.
“Cool,” Homer said. “Not only are you hot, but you are deadly ... And, remember: I wasn’t in on that ... you know, plan.”
“Good,” Grace said.
She bent over and grabbed Cory by the arm and dragged him to the front of the bus.
“Open the door, Steve,” she said.
Steve, briskly, I thought, stepped to where the door device was, grabbed it, and pulled. The door hissed open, and Grace, being not careful at all, bumped Cory down the steps of the bus and tossed his ass out into the dark.
There was a rustling noise, and then out of nowhere the darkness became darker and Cory was snatched up. I saw his feet flap once or twice at the air, then he was absorbed by shadow.
Steve pulled the bus door closed quickly, and something dark slammed against it.
“Just in time,” Grace said.
She walked to the center of the bus, said, “I’m serious. Dead serious, as you saw. Anyone else have any kind of plans for me or Reba? Come on. Anyone want to talk pussy?”
No one raised their hands.
“I don’t go for any shit,” Grace said. “Especially if it has to do with me. And if you think I feel bad about Cory, I don’t. I meant to kill him. It worked a bit better than I thought. I figured I’d have the pleasure of beating him to death, but it didn’t work out. James, now you ain’t even got Cory’s warm butt to wrap around your little old pecker. I better not so much as see you look in my direction or scratch out a picture of a vagina on the back of a seat with your fingernail. Hear me?”
“Yeah,” James said, standing very stiff at the back of the bus. “I do.”
“Good,” Grace said. “Now stare at the floor.”
James looked at the floor.
“Keep looking down for awhile. Don’t look up anytime soon. I don’t want to see your ugly face. Got me?”
“Got you,” James said, without lifting his head.
Grace said, “Jack. I’ll take the next watch.”
And she did.
10
“They keep working their way closer,” Grace said.
Grace was still at the back of the bus, at the back window, and when she said this, we all took notice. Fact was, we were paying Grace very close attention.
“I hope you don’t kill me for having an opinion,” Homer said. “But, what happened to my plan? We sit here long enough, either Bjoe and his bunch will get us, or these ... shadows will, whatever they are.”
“The bus’s lights work, don’t they?” I said.
“Yeah,” Steve said. “I didn’t exactly have time to think about them before, but yeah, they work. I mean, they should, all the dampness didn’t short out a wire.”
“I say we turn on the lights, drive in deeper,” I said. “There isn’t any going back, and we’re going to try and make our way to the rear of the fish anyway, so, crank it up, turn on the lights, and drive on.”
“It’s a start,” Grace said.
I looked to the back of the bus. Bjoe and his followers were standing out of the light, just over the line into the world of shadow.
Bjoe was worrying his pecker as he glared at the bus. He stepped into deeper shadow, and I couldn’t make out his features, then he eased toward us slowly. His minions followed.
“They’re getting a hell of a lot braver,” Grace said.
At that moment, one of the female minions came forward, bent to the ground there in shadow, and made a movement with her hand. There was a spark. She went at it again. More sparks. Then a blaze.
I realized what they were doing. Striking metal to get sparks, knocking it into some tinder. Dried seaweed probably. The little blaze struggled at the shadows then was lit to a torch, most likely coated in fish oil or fish fat. The torch tore a bright hole in the darkness.
Other torches were lit.
Soon there was a crowd of torches moving our way.
“They really want you, Grace,” Homer said.
“They want us all,” Grace said. “We’re nothing to them but a big old dinner.”
Steve said, “All right then. Now we find out. Hold onto your asses.”
He started the bus, hit the lights.
They came on.
A cheer rose up inside the bus.
I know. No big thing. But, hey. We took our victories, small as they might be, where we could get them.
The bus lurched forward, began to pick up speed.
Behind us Bjoe and the others ran after us, their torches bobbing in the shadows like bouncing balls.
Steve put the hammer down, and in a matter of moments they were nothing more than bright pinpricks, and soon the little pieces of light quit moving, but we didn’t. We rolled on.
“Won’t be long,” I said, “and they’ll all eat each other. It’s bound to come down to that eventually.”
“Glad to not be part of the feast,” Reba said.
We slowed and rolled on. The darkness became darker yet, and there started to be a kind of thumping against the side of the bus, against the glass.
Shadows, like large black pieces of construction paper, but with heft, blew about the bus and rocked it, crawled all over it. We could hear them on the roof, scuttling from one end of the bus to the other. Where they had hit the glass was dark, oily slime.
When the glow of the headlights hit them, they scattered. They were ragged in shape. Not one like the other, just torn black curtains of night, the tears all different, all irregular.
Once I saw a split in what could only be described as the dark face of one, and there was something not so dark there. Teeth. Shiny. Almost silver.
“What the fuck are they?” Homer said.
“Parasites,” Reba said. “Maybe some kind of crazy cancers. With dentures. They may be killing our giant fish host as well. Only more slowly than they would kill us.”
“I think they’re just pure pieces of evil,” Homer said. “You see, I finally figured out where we are. It took me some thinking—”
“I bet,” Grace said.
“—but I come to a conclusion. It was our time. We died. And we went to hell.”
“Why the fuck would I go to hell?” Reba said. “Bad language?”
“Me,” Grace said, “I did some serious fucking. But, hey, would that count? There really isn’t a commandment that says no sex. Just no adultery. And besides, I don’t believe that shit anyway. Which part of the Bible you gonna believe. The mean-spirited, mean-assed God of the Old Testament, or the sweet philosopher of the New Testament?”
This didn’t faze Homer.
“That’s where we are,” Homer said. “Hell. We’re being punished.”
“I don’t deserve punishment,” I said. “Well, I didn’t. I’ve done some things since coming here that might be debatable. But to get here, if it’s hell, hey, I must have got in the wrong line somehow.”
“I suppose it could be that,” James said. “The wrong line.”
He had been real quiet up till now, possibly not wanting Grace to leap in the air like a fucking Ninja Turtle and kick his head around in a three-sixty.
“We thought we was all in the line for drunken fun, movies, sex, what have you, and it was a trick line, so to speak. We got in the wrong line ... Wrong place at the wrong time.”
“There isn’t any hell,” Grace said, “and if there is, this isn’t it.”
“It’s bad enough to be a hell of sorts,” Reba said.
“We get to make choices still,” Grace said. “I figure that’s hell, when you can’t make choices. When you can’t struggle or strive anymore. Can’t choose to be who you are no matter what the circumstances. We get to that point, then we’re in hell. Right now, we’re still alive.”
About that time Steve brought the bus to a halt.
“Shit,” he said.
We moved to the front of the bus, looked out over the hood. Shadows washed over the hood like floods of ink, but finally they parted long enough for us to see what Steve saw.
A drop-off.
A place that just went ... down.
“We won’t be driving any farther,” Steve said. “We’ve come to the end of the trail.”
11
“What now?” Homer said
“Well,” Grace said, “if we’re going to execute your plan, we’re going to have to start using our heads. Here’s what I suggest. We all relax. Just relax. We keep someone awake at all times. Say two of us. What we do is we start being real quiet. We only talk if we have to. Boring, I know. But what we got to do is be quiet inside ourselves, and listen, and feel for when things change.”
“The pressure in the ears?” Homer said.
“Exactly,” Grace said. “If at least two of us are awake at all times, and two of us feel it, we try to decide if it’s oppressive pressure, you know, going down, or relaxing pressure, surfacing, or being near the surface.”
“Uh,” James said, holding a hand out to Grace, “not to be kicked to death or anything, but near the surface, wouldn’t that be as bad as being way below?”
“Depends on how near the surface,” Steve said.
“But how can we know for sure?” James said.
“You can’t,” I said. “We judge the way Grace says for a time. When we feel we can recognize the way it feels when we get close to the surface, then we plan for the next time and go for it.”
“Don’t your ears adjust after a time?” Steve said. “Get so they don’t pop?”
“You better hope not,” Grace said. “And another thing, we’re going to have to go out there.”
“Outside the bus,” Homer said. “I don’t even like to hang my ass out the window anymore. I got to go, I go damn quick.”
“Yeah,” Steve said, “the bus is starting to stink, all that stuff on its sides.”
“We have to go out,” Grace said. “We got flashlights, and those things don’t like the light.”
“How bad do they not like it?” Homer said.
“It’s the chance we have to take,” Grace said.
“She’s right,” I said. “We have to go out there and find the way out of Ed. The flush, so to speak. And when we do, then we got to figure how to ride our way out, and hope for the best.”
“We could just stay right here,” James said, “inside the bus. It’s not so bad.”
“For how long,” I said. “We’ll run out of food. We’ll end up eating one another—”
“Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea throwing Cory away,” James said. “I mean, he was already dead ... I’m just saying what I think others are thinking.”
“I wasn’t thinking that right then,” Grace said. “But I could. We all could. Some of us have not only thought it, we’ve done it.”
James’s hand went up.
“No shame in that,” Grace said. “If the meat is available. It wasn’t too good for Olympic hopefuls crashed in the snow, and it wasn’t too good for pioneers crossing the Rockies, caught in blizzards, so, by God, it isn’t too good for us. But, I must admit, I wasted some not-so-prime meat.”
“Yeeew w w w w w ,” Reba said.
“You just haven’t got hungry enough,” James said.
“Could be,” Reba said, “but I don’t want to start being a cannibal any time soon. I might start to like it the way Bjoe likes it. And then I might not want to wait for the food to die. Or, I might even think how nice it might be if someone did die, so there’d be the meat.”
“At the time,” Grace said, “I was thinking I wanted that bastard out of my sight, not how I could prepare him for dinner. If I really thought about that sort of thing, wanted that sort of thing, I wouldn’t have thrown him out there for the shadows to snack on. Thing is, we can’t sit here. We have to find a way out, even if it kills us.”