Chapter 10 (part 2)

Evan breathed heavily and fought off a sickening few moments when he was afraid that he might actually start crying in front of this trio. When that moment came and went without the shedding of a single tear, Evan looked Lott squarely in the eye and did his best to explain his situation.

“I’m in the middle of a very screwed up drug deal,” he said. “My life was threatened earlier tonight because the men I work for tried to outwit the men I’m buying from.”

“If you’re buying drugs from around here,” Lott said, “you must be mixed up with the cocaine pushers, yes?”

Evan realized at once that Lott was trying to trip him up, hoping to catch him in another lie. “No,” Evan said. “Peyote. From a tribe somewhere south of here.”

He was delighted to see a flash of recognition in Lott’s face as he heard this. Lott knew that there was not a big cocaine supply out here and, Evan guessed, he was equally aware of the peyote peddling tribe.

“Continue,” Lott said, paying closer attention now.

“They sent someone for me tonight, thinking that I was responsible for trying to pull one over on them. When they realized that I was blind to what was happening to them, they still kept a gun on me and sent me on a little errand.” When he said this, Evan couldn’t help but smile in spite of the situation. “My God, that asshole had no clue what he was talking about.”

There were slight tremors in his voice as a result of the pain in his hand, but as he spoke about Sam, he didn’t care. If he could just have three seconds alone with him…there’d be much more than broken pinkies for Sam to fret about.

The puzzled looks on the faces of his three listeners made him want to stall the story as long as he could. But the insistent pain in his left hand proclaimed that to do so would not be wise. So Evan went on.

“They told me about this bus that had been spotted driving through the desert at night. They said that it was a suspected disguise for running drugs without being picked up by police or competing sellers. These guys thought that the people on the bus were stealing their business.”

“That makes no sense,” Lott said skeptically, although even as he said it, he began to realize where Evan’s story was going.

“Tell me about it,” Evan said. “But drug runners aren’t really known for being clever, now are they?” He paused here and then continued. “So they told me to flag down the bus, to get on and see what sort of things were going on. Tthey dropped me off in the middle of the desert and I did what they asked. And here I am.”

The two men opposite of Lott braced themselves, awaiting any instruction that Lott may give them. But when the last word had left his lips, Evan could tell that Lott didn’t doubt the story.

“So, this tribe knows about our bus?” Lott asked.

“Apparently,” Evan said. “And according to them, I think the local cops know about it, too.”

“The police have known about it for quite some time,” Lott said without much interest. “Tell me, Evan…this tribe and their competitors…they know about the bus and even knew when we would be out, but they have no idea what we do?”

Evan shrugged. “I guess not.”

He was terrified as to what sort of condition he might be in within the hour, but he also knew that in situations like this, it was best to keep your panic at bay and carry on such conversations as if they were as simple as a casual interview. He could feel his heart racing in his chest and still felt as if he could piss his pants as a result of his painfully snapped finger. But the will to live overruled all of that and he did what he thought might help him to get out of there with only a broken finger as a souvenir.

“But you know,” Lott said. “You’ve seen first-hand what we do. Have you not?”

Evan nodded slowly. He didn’t beg ignorance and he didn’t promise that he would never tell anyone. He simply nodded slowly and said, “Yeah, I saw.”

Lott thought this over for a moment and stared at one of the black candles for a good thirty seconds without speaking. As Lott sat there thinking, Evan wondered where the bus and all of the other passengers had gone.

“What else is there?” Lott finally asked. “What else have you seen? You were in the bathroom for quite some time. Did you see anything in there?”

The mere memory of the thing in the toilet made Evan shudder and once again, he told Lott what he wanted to hear as best as he could. “I don’t know what I saw in there, but I saw…I don’t know…I saw something.”

Lott actually chuckled at this. He drummed his fingers on the table again and then stood up slowly. “Well, Evan,” he said. “This is the first time we have been put into a situation like this, so I have no idea what needs to be done. Considering your occupation, I assume that you are good at keeping secrets. So, I suppose we could let you go, so long as you vow to never tell a soul.”

Evan said nothing. He knew that if he did, he would come off as desperate and maybe end up pulling one of Lott’s triggers. But even though Lott showed no signs of having decided his fate, Evan knew that he would not be let off with something as simple as a broken finger. The fact that Lott had claimed that the police knew about their activities made Evan wonder if he’d be safe even if Lott did let him go. If the local PD was in on this somehow, maybe Lott would let him go only to have him arrested or killed.

Evan thought of Max Young from the bar and found it hard to believe that he and his fellow officers could have a hand in all of this.

“I see only one way of solving this,” Lott said, slowly approaching Evan. “Despite what you saw me do tonight, I am not an unjust man. I believe that you have told me the truth, and that truth means that you had no ill intentions towards our group when you stopped the bus. I do not doubt that you are truly a victim of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“That’s putting it mildly,” Evan said.

“If it were up to me,” Lott said, “I’d let you go and request that you never show your face in this part of the state again. But you see Evan, we serve a higher power here and it would be sinful for me to decide your fate. We will leave such decisions in more divine hands.”

Evan slowly began to register things as Lott spoke. The black candles, the talk of a higher power, the ritualistic style murders…Lott and his minions were part of some cult. And if the ungodly thing he had seen in the back of the bus was any indication, it was a cult that dabbled in some truly bizarre shit. The beheadings and the murders were nothing when compared to that monster. There was crazy and homicidal and then there was just plain evil.

“What divine hands?” Evan said. He didn’t care if he came off as afraid anymore.

“We’ll put you before His children, Evan. Only then can your fate be decided.” After Lott said this, the two men beside him stood up from their seats and chanted, “Amen.”

At that single word, Evan felt incredibly cold.

Evan couldn’t help but resist. He pushed himself away from the table but before he had a chance to move, Lott’s two henchmen were on him. He was once again put into that same sleeper hold and was jerked to his feet. As he was raised, his head began to ache again but he did not care. He struggled against them and even when he realized that his efforts were in vain, he kept fighting. His vision grew hazy and his head pounded like a drum. Through all of that, he could hear the chants from the three men that carried him away from the table and into the hallway that Lott had appeared out of.

They chanted in some foreign language that Evan did not understand and he was actually glad that he couldn’t make out what they were saying. He did his best to keep control of himself, to take in his surroundings and make sure he knew where they were taking him. While he knew his chances of escape were incredibly slim, it wouldn’t hurt to have an escape route planned.

Halfway down the dank and featureless hallway, the two men stopped pushing him along but still held their grip on him. Lott came from behind them and stood in front of Evan with a look on his face that could have very well been sincere sadness. Behind Lott, there was a single wooden door with two bolted locks on it. There was a strange marking in the center of the door that looked like some form of ancient hieroglyphics that had been crudely carved with a knife.

Lott chanted a prayer and then cupped Evan’s face in his hands. “Forever we are and forever we will be,” Lott said, “the seeds of His rule, his legacy.”

And with that, he removed a set of keys from his pocket and set to unlocking the pair of locks on the door. Lott unlocked them as if he was taking some sort of sexual pleasure away from the action of inserting the key into each lock. When both of the locks were undone, Lott slowly opened the door to reveal the other side.

There was only a set of ancient wooden stairs to be seen. Other than that, there was total darkness. Evan tried to push away from it but the two men that held him were far too strong. There was a single moment of relaxation when the bearded man removed his arm from around Evan’s neck, but this was quickly replaced by a sheer horror as he was pushed hard from behind.

Evan went tumbling down the stairs and into the darkness. There was a moment when he felt his shoulder hit a stair very hard and then, after several hard thumps and cartwheels, Evan came to rest on a hard dirt surface, landing on his broken finger as he did so.

He screamed out in pain, not caring how desperate he seemed to Lott now. He slowly raised his head up to look up the stairs, but all he saw was a slowly thinning beam of light as Lott and his partners closed the door on him.

Evan was left alone in the darkness with only the brief clicking sound of the locks being reset to keep him company.

And then, after a few tormenting moments of silence, there came the sound of something slithering around with him in the darkness.

Chapter 10 (part 1)

Evan sensed that he was being moved. He also felt something very cold on his head and something wet touching his mouth. His lips recognized the wetness as water and he opened his mouth to receive it. He gulped at it greedily and when he swallowed, his head began to ache. He heard a door close somewhere behind him and he instantly thought of the bathroom door on the bus. That recollection brought to mind the horrible creature he had seen pulling itself out of the toilet and he began to panic.

Evan opened his eyes but his vision was incredibly hazy. He tried to scream but as soon as he opened his mouth to do so, his head seemed to explode. He could vaguely remember being hit in the head, but that seemed like a dream right now. As his vision swam in and out, he could imagine several of those horrible toilet-monsters scurrying around him and that made his panic intensify.

He felt himself being lifted and then felt solid ground beneath his feet. “Walk,” said a smooth yet demanding voice from beside him.

He then felt a hand grab each one of his arms. He was carried forward by what he thought was two men. They assisted him with the first few steps but then Evan’s disoriented mind seemed to remember what walking was and how to do it.

His vision finally settled down and he was able to see a small house in front of him. It was actually more like a shack than a house, its construction no more inspired than a ten year-old’s clubhouse. There were two windows on the side that he faced, both of which were boarded up. It’s roof sloped down in a sharp triangle, the shingles peeling and falling off.

Behind this shack, there were three other similar structures. The four buildings seemed to be connected by crudely built walkways that were barely boarded over. The construction was flimsy at best, but the almost symmetrical sloppiness of the buildings and the walkways as a whole seemed abstract in the open spaces of the desert.

The two men to his side remained quiet. They stopped for a brief moment as they approached the shack so that the man to his right could open the front door. Evan looked at both men and recognized the one to his left as the bearded man that had spoke to him on the bus.

“Stop looking at me,” the man said. He gave Evan a slight shove towards the open door. “Go inside.”

Evan did so without struggling. He was a fighter at heart and would normally have refused to follow the bearded man’s orders. But it seemed useless to fight in that moment. His head hurt too badly and the pictures from the night that were zooming through his head seemed like a nightmare. He saw the beheadings again, saw the little monster-type thing in the toilet, saw the fat meaty leg sticking out in the aisle of the bus.

Inside, Evan looked around and saw that the shack consisted of a single large room that was lit by several candles and two kerosene lanterns. All of these light sources sat on an enormous table located in the center of the room; the light was so abundant that it was almost as bright as natural overhead light. Scattered around the table there were a few empty chairs and stools. In the farthest corner of the room there was a thin entryway that most likely led out to one of the connecting walkways.

“Take a seat,” the man to Evan’s right said, pointing to the large table. As he pointed with his right hand, his left hand drew a large knife from the waist of his pants. “If you go along with what we say, I won’t have to do anything nasty with this,” he told Evan.

Giving this man an awkward glance, Evan did as he was instructed. He took a seat at the head of the table, noticing for the first time that all of the candles that sat upon it were black. Uneasy with this, Evan looked back to the two men that had carried him in. They were also taking their own seats at the table, sitting at the sides a good distance away from him.

The sight of the black candles made Evan incredibly uneasy. Just what in the hell had he stumbled onto here? Certainly, it was something more than Sam’s crazy drug-trafficking theory.

Before he could give this any thought, he heard footfalls coming from the entry-way across the room. The sound of the footsteps carried as if coming from the depths of some amplified cavern, a sound that added to the ache in Evan’s head. He looked to the entryway, awaiting the source of the footfalls with dread.

The man that finally came through the doorway was frail and looked slightly underfed. His white hair was all over the place and unmistakable. Evan stared at the man and his heart sank. It was the man that had sat in the back of the bus…the man with the electric white hair and the axes…the man that had beheaded those people. The only difference in his appearance as he approached the table was that he was now wearing a shirt and he was not holding his axes. That, at least, put Evan a bit more at ease.

“Good evening, Evan,” the white-haired man said.

He reached into his back pants pocket and withdrew a wallet. He hefted it in his hand and gingerly tossed it onto the table in front of Evan. He then followed the wallet’s progress and took the seat to Evan’s right. He hunkered down calmly, as if he were about to discuss something trivial. He seemed incredibly relaxed and this somehow bothered Evan more than anything else. There were no signs at all that he had just killed four people in the desert.

Evan eyed the wallet on the table and recognized it at once as his own. He then looked stupidly at the thin white-haired man as if to ask a question that he did not yet have the words for.

“I apologize,” the man said. “We never have guests on our bus, so I felt it necessary to find out who you were.”

“Did you come to that decision before or after you had me brained with a crowbar?” Evan asked, not caring if he angered the man or not. The black candles and the memories of the beheadings from earlier led Evan to believe that he was doomed no matter what he did or said.

“Before,” the man answered without a trace of sarcasm. “We wanted to make sure you were an innocent and that you were not sent to snoop around in our activities.”

Evan didn’t respond right away. He looked from this man to the other two that had led him into this room. His original two captors stared in the direction of the thin man with much admiration. The flames from the black candles pasted an eerie wavering light onto their faces.

The thin man habitually ran a hand through his wild white hair and then offered the same hand to Evan. “Well, it’s not fair of me to know your name and not introduce myself, now is it?” he asked. “The name is Lott.”

Evan blinked in surprise at the gesture. “I’m sure you’ll understand if I don’t want to shake your hand,” Evan said, looking at the man with as much hatred as his fear would allow.

“I suppose so,” Lott said, withdrawing the offered hand and smirking. Evan was surprised to see that he actually looked a bit hurt at Evan’s response. “I hope you know that we had to bring you here. I know that you saw what we do. I’m not really worried about that, though.”

Lott drummed his fingers on the table and then eyed Evan with suspicion. “What interests me,” Lott said, “is how you knew about us.”

“I told your driver what happened to me when I got on the bus,” Evan said.

“Yes you did,” Lott said. “However, my driver is not stupid, nor am I. So I’m going to give you five seconds to tell me what I want to know. So, I ask again, how do you know about us?”

Evan didn’t know what to do or what to say. But he knew that if he were to change his story, the punishment for his lie might be rather painful. He didn’t have to look back to the man with the knife to be reminded of the blade that was waiting to do him harm.

“I don’t know what you want me to say,” Evan replied. “I got jumped and I needed a ride.” As the words came out of his mouth, he was achingly aware of how paper thin they sounded.

Lott leaned back in his chair a bit, considering Evan’s explanation. A good ten seconds passed before he made any sort of reply. When he did, it was to his partners. He gave them a simple nod and before Evan was completely aware of what was happening, all three of the men were in motion towards him.

Lott got to him first and did nothing more than grab his left arm. While Evan began to struggle against this, the other two came to assist Lott. The man with the beard wrapped an arm around Evan’s neck and held him in a sleeper-hold position while the other one helped Lott with his left arm. Evan squirmed against the seemingly mammoth arm that was firmly planted around his neck, but there was no resistance. In fact, the harder he fought, the tighter the hold seemed to grow.

Evan knew within moments that he was helpless. So, hoping that it might pay off in the end, he simply stopped fighting. He relaxed against the man’s grip and allowed Lott and the other man to have his arm.

The man that had pulled the knife out moments ago placed Evan’s left arm on the table, securing it by the wrist. It was a peculiar thing to do and Evan found himself tensing up in anticipation of whatever might come next. As he tensed, the vice-like grip at his neck flexed and Evan found that if it grew much tighter, it would be very difficult to breathe.

With his arm on the table, secured even tighter now by Lott’s henchman, Lott took a firm grip on the top half of Evan’s pinky.

“I tried to give you a chance,” Lott said almost sympathetically.

He then pulled Evan’s pinky hard and to the right. Before he was aware of what Lott was doing, Evan heard and felt his finger snap in two. He screamed in the chair even though his throat was mostly closed off by the bearded man’s grip. He tried to fight away from his three tormentors but to no avail. He shuddered in pain and finally relaxed his back against the chair in defeat, breathing hard and grimacing from the pain. The scorching ache in his hand was excruciating, but he knew that he would have to look past it if he hoped to get out of here alive. And besides that, he did not want to sob or whimper in front of these men.

Gasping for breath and in horrendous pain, Evan looked down to his left hand once Lott released his pinky. The finger was hanging onto his hand at a sick slanted angle and it made Evan sick to his stomach to see it. He whimpered against the pain as the other man released his wrist but Evan did not bother attempting to get out of the chair. What would be the point? One of them had a knife and Evan knew that there were axes around here somewhere. He also knew what these assholes were capable of when armed with those axes.

“I hate doing things like that,” Lott said. “But you forced my hand.”

Evan bit the remark before it left his mouth, but he thought, Yeah, breaking fingers is a huge step down from cutting off people’s heads, you crazy fuck!

“Now, Evan,” Lott went on. “I’m going to give you another chance. And here’s how we’re going to do it. I’ll keep asking you and you can keep telling lies if you want. But the next time you lie, I won’t break any more fingers. I’ll simply cut that broken pinky off. And I’ll do that to all ten fingers until you tell us the truth. So save us the time and trouble and save yourself the use of your hands by being truthful.”

The maniac was still speaking calmly and in a soothing tone, as if he were explaining the alphabet to a preschool class. Evan cut his eyes at him, trying to use his anger as a means to control the fear and the warm flashes of pain that were slamming through his left hand and head.

Somehow, Evan got a few words out beyond his trembling lips. What he said was true, but he didn’t think it meant much to Lott and his two helpers. “The truth,” Evan said, “sounds even dumber than what I just told you.”

“It often does,” Lott replied with a smile. “I can tell when I’m being lied to, so as long as you tell me the truth, you’re in good shape.”

Evan found himself feeling more exposed and vulnerable when he noticed the bearded man looking at his broken finger with interest. Evan withdrew his hand from the table slowly and cradled it carefully in his lap, trying not to wince at the pain that flared through his hand as he moved it. He found himself wanting to hide his pain from these three; it wasn’t because it seemed the macho thing to do, but because he knew that they would take him more seriously if he made it through this interrogation without crying like a baby.

“The truth, Evan,” Lott said. “Quickly, or we’ll cut that finger off.”

Chapter 9 (part 2)

Five minutes into his ride, Max almost wrecked.

He had kept a check on the terrain pretty frequently but had somehow missed a small washed out spot on the desert floor. The hole was no more than six inches deep and maybe a foot across, but when he hit it, he had no idea it was coming. The slight jolt of the bike took him by surprise and he nearly took a nasty spill. Not only that, but in fighting to regain control of the bike, his thumb had somehow hit the switch to cut on the headlight.

He snapped the light off immediately and then corrected the balance of the bike. With his heart hammering in his chest, he checked the terrain with the binoculars again and saw that he had smooth sailing for quite a way. And even though he could not see the bus, he could see the faint trail of dust that it was kicking up. The dirt of the desert was so hard packed that the dust cloud was nearly nonexistent, but it was there. He had to use this faint cloud as his tracking measure because, as on previous nights, the driver of the bus had killed the headlights.

He wondered if he had been seen in the brief moment when his headlight had come on. He was pretty sure no one on the bus had seen him, but Max knew that there were others out here that would get suspicious if they found him.

He knew that there were a few men cruising along the highway, looking for the bus. They were members of a drug cartel that Max knew only as The Tribe. It was the same group that he had discussed briefly with the young man at the bar earlier in the evening.

Thinking of that young man made him think of the two fighting elderly men, particularly the one that had killed himself several hours ago. And then, of course, there had been the unheard of shooting of a police officer by another officer. It had all been so unreal, like something out of a really bad movie. Max had barely known the old man, but he had known both of the officers very well. The shooting had made absolutely so sense at all.

It had certainly been a fucked up day.

But Max had almost been expecting it. The unexplainable violence in Shinoe, the bus and the beheadings…he’d been piecing it all together for a while now. They were both very odd pieces to a puzzle that he had been obsessed with for a few years now.

His thoughts returned to The Tribe and when he thought of them and the behind-the-back deals they had with the Shinoe police department, it both shamed and angered Max. He was in on it just like the rest of them and he was getting the same benefits as everyone else. He was just as guilty as all of the others. But on a day when an officer was shot for no apparent reason by another cop, one was forced to put things into perspective. Illegal dealings with drug runners seemed twice as bad and twice as unnecessary on a day like this.

Max forced himself to stop thinking about it. All he knew was that if one of those assholes from The Tribe found him out tonight, there would be a very intricate mess. How would he explain himself?

The Tribe thought that the bus was a clever tool being used by a competing cartel, but Max knew otherwise. Max knew what was really going on with that bus, but he could never tell anyone. He had his own demons to keep at bay and he could not do away with them until he knew everything about the bus, its occupants, and the reasons behind their actions.

But to Max’s knowledge, The Tribe and a few outside people were the only ones who knew about the bus and its peculiar and seemingly randomly timed routes. The idea that they were a competing drug circuit was a simple stupid assumption that had misled the Tribe. For all Max cared, they could go on thinking that one of their competitors was running drugs on the bus. It was an excellent cover story for what was really happening.

That false assumption had given him plenty of time to hunt them down and study them. It had given him this chance, this very night, to get to the bottom of it once and for all.

But what if The Tribe found out that he knew about the bus? Then he’d have to either go along with their fabricated drug-running story or tell them what was really going on. If this were to happen, he’d basically be putting the entire police department on the chopping block. And if he did that, he would be admitting that he had knowledge of kidnappings and murders over the last two and half years and had told no one. He’d also be getting the Shinoe police is one huge heap of trouble because they knew what really occurred on that bus, too. They knew what Max knew.

But they didn’t know that Max was tied to that bus and its passengers in a way that they would never understand.

Max checked the lay of the land once more with his binoculars and swerved slightly to the left to avoid a boulder the size of a medicine ball. Through the binoculars, he could see that he was getting a little too close to the bus, so he let off of the gas a bit and slowed the bike considerably.

He wondered what the deal was with the man that they had pulled off of the bus after the beheadings. He also wondered what they did with the bodies after every one of their barbaric beheading sessions. He was pretty sure that he knew; he had heard rumors, but he wasn’t gullible enough to believe them.

Perhaps more importantly, he wondered what it was inside of him that justified keeping his knowledge of the bus and the people on it a secret. True, the entire police department was in on it, too. But surely Max could take the matter in secret to the FBI. Still, the reasons he had for hiding what he knew would be justifiable to almost anyone. But being able to watch this demented group do what they did was unnerving. At times, it made Max wonder if there was truly something wrong with him.

But he had his reasons.

And that was more than enough for him to be out here tonight, chasing after a bus that no one knew about, following it to an unknown destination. His hope was that when he arrived there, he would find some answers and a way to close the door on a very dark chapter of his life.

Chapter 9 (part 1)

Max Young was lying on the desert floor with a pair of night-vision binoculars cupped in his hands. He held the binoculars to his face and lifted his upper body slightly by digging his elbows into the dirt. He gazed into the lenses and let his eyes become adjusted to the bright lime green images the night-vision showed him.

He watched for five minutes as the bizarre events unfolded. He saw the men in blindfolds crouch on the ground and then watched as they were beheaded without mercy. This was nothing new to Max; he had seen the entire act carried out four times before tonight.

He knew the routines of these people. After the beheadings, two vans would come from somewhere else out in the desert and take the bodies away. Then the others would pile back up onto the bus, drive further into the desert and eventually cut the headlights off.

It was at this point that Max had always lost them. But tonight was different. First of all, he had purchased the night-vision binoculars from a highly illegal internet site. It had been a risky venture mainly because he was a member of law enforcement. But if he was able to track these lunatics down, he wouldn’t care if he lost his job.

Hell, he wouldn’t even care if he did jail time for it. He had his own reasons for taking such a risk. These were the same reasons that had essentially placed him on the Shinoe police department in the first place.

Another change in the group’s activity tonight was the fact that after the beheadings, something new had taken place. Whatever it had been, Max could tell by their actions that it was being improvised and had not been expected. Max watched as several members of the group boarded the bus while the remainder of them stayed outside. Moments later they had come off of the bus, carrying a struggling man overhead. This man was then thrown to the ground and whacked across the head. The fact that this man was not beheaded was puzzling to Max because the maniacs on the bus were usually very ritualistic in their killings.

Why had things changed tonight? he wondered.

Max continued to watch as two vans with their headlights turned off drove up from the west. Two men got out of each van and then the beheaded bodies were loaded into the back of one of the vans. With the bodies loaded, this van headed back the way it had come while the other one stayed behind. There was a brief discussion between the leader and a few of the other members. They stood around the fallen man that had been pulled from the bus, as if discussing what the unfortunate fellow’s fate would be.

In the end, they had placed this man in the back of the second van. Max was a good two hundred yards away from the area, so he could not tell if the man was dead or not. He assumed that he was still alive because if the maniacs had have wanted him dead, they would have probably swiped his head off, too.

Max remained still and quiet on the desert floor, making sure not to move at all until the killers had boarded the bus again. As had been the case on the other nights Max had spied on them, the leader that carried the axes got into the remaining van rather than the bus. Max had no idea why things were carried out in such a manner, but it was exactly how they had always done it.

As the killers finished up things, Max found himself wrestling with guilt. He had watched this twice times—three times including tonight—and, as a result of his private investigation, at least fifteen people had been beheaded. But Max knew that if he sprung out at them before he knew their exact intensions, the last two years of his life would be wasted.

Maybe tonight, he’d finally be able to find them. Something in the air felt different tonight, something he couldn’t place. Maybe the cult’s ritualistic killings came to an end tonight.
Tonight, maybe Max would get his revenge.

He remained on the ground until he saw the bus’s lights came on. Once Max could tell that the bus was in motion, he got to his feet. He studied the bus for a while longer through the binoculars, making sure he knew which direction it was headed. When he had a general idea of its course, he removed the binoculars from his eyes and began to run in the opposite direction.

About twenty yards behind him, he had parked a dirt bike. It was a sleek black color that was just about impossible to see in the dead of the night. He had purchased it a week ago from a dealership that had customized the bike so that it was exceptionally quiet. The muffler subdued almost all sounds from the exhaust and the engine purred like a kitten. It had gotten him out here unseen and unheard so far, but the next stage of his pursuit would be the toughest.

He adjusted the gun holster that he wore on his hip so that it would be comfortable while he rode. Comfort would be key in the following pursuit; he wouldn’t be able to use his headlight because it increased his chances of being spotted by a ridiculous measure. Instead, he’d have to creep far behind the bus, using the night-vision binoculars very frequently. Not only did he have to keep up with the bus, but he also had to keep an eye out for any rocks, shallow ravines or other obstructions in his path.

Taking a deep breath, Max cranked the dirt bike to life. He took a final quick glance with the binoculars, then kicked the bike into gear and followed after the bus. He’d been after that bus for a damned long time now and by God, tonight he would find out where these lunatics were hiding out.

Chapter 8 (part 3)

The bathroom was terribly hot and the smell of piss was almost sickening. But Evan looked past those things right away, sure that within a matter of seconds, the five men on the outside would start hammering away on the door and eventually break it down. He could imagine the tire iron beating dents into the door but the scarier thought was the blade of the skinny man’s axe splitting through the door as if swung by Jack Nicholson in The Shining.

The small square that served as the restroom was no more than six feet wide and Evan suddenly felt as if he couldn’t breathe. He looked around the small space as he heard the footfalls of the passengers getting closer. A small mirror hanging over an even smaller sink and the silver-colored toilet were the only features in the room. The toilet lid was up and the hole in the center of its base looked impossibly black.

As disgusting as he knew it was, he could not take his eyes away from the toilet. The hole where countless passengers had sat to take care of business seemed like a desolate black hole that had floated down from the depths of space, landing here next to him, in this charter bus bathroom with its sticky floors and reeking of piss, with death marching towards him on the other side of the door.

The hammering on the door began and at first the attacks seemed much louder than they actually were. Each strike absorbed into the small confines of the restroom and seemed to resonate in Evan’s head. He flinched back against the wall and jostled the entire bathroom a bit. He once again looked to the toilet, not sure why his eyes kept returning to it.

This time when he looked at it, something was different. There was something inside of it, moving around.

As Evan watched in disgust, something splashed from within the murky water. Following the splash there was a smell that was mostly pure sewage. There was another putrid smell as well but Evan could not place it, nor did he want to.

His nostrils seemed to singe and he felt his stomach lurch. He gagged and did everything he could not to vomit. Inside the toilet, the unseen thing splashed again.

From outside, something hit the door hard and for a terrifying moment, Evan was sure that the force of it would cause the bus to fall over onto its side. The door was dented and it buckled in its frame with the force of the strike. There was a heavy creaking sound as one of the hinges gave way. Evan let out a weak scream, one that he was ashamed of, one that he didn’t want the maniacs outside to hear, but one that he could not contain.

To his left, the water in the toilet continued to splash. Evan glanced over and for a moment the lunatic part of his mind crept into play and instantly thought of Mr. Hanky, the talking turd from South Park.

But Evan clearly saw something come out of the water and slap the side of toilet’s rim. It was slick and light green in color, covered in sludge and muddy grime. Evan blinked against what he saw but there was no denying that it was an appendage of some sort, an appendage with horrid speed and fluid movements.

As he continued to watch, two more of these things came out of the toilet, one of them clinging tightly to the rim. There were no fingers, nothing to grip with, but it wrapped itself around the edge of the toilet with an eerie speed and strength. Evan was sure that all of these tentacle-like appendages were from the same source rather than individual creatures. He tried to imagine the torso and head of such a creature but could not wrap his mind around it.

Suddenly, he found himself wanting to tear the door off and let the passengers have him. He began to whimper and somewhere in his head, he could feel something like a cold drop of water sliding around. He wondered if this was the feeling of having his sanity slip away.

Another tremendous thud sounded out in the bus as something or someone else banged at the door. This time it was a rather metallic sound and Evan once again remembered the man with the tire iron loading up onto the bus as he had retreated into the bathroom.

The door gave a few inches and Evan could now see through the widening crack between the door and its frame. The five people that had originally come into the bus for him had been joined by others. Their eyes looked cold, and insane; the totally blank slates of their faces only added to this appearance.

A louder splashing sound from the toilet drew his attention away from this crowd. This time when he looked over, he saw the slight spherical top of a shiny dome breaking the water. It was dented and had small pucker marks on it, covered in the same slimy residue that clung to the tentacles. As the form broke the water, it made a hideous gurgling sound.

Another thud came from outside. This one freed the door from the frame and there was a moment where Evan felt relieved. He closed his eyes and sank against the bathroom wall, waiting for the coming violence. He waited to see what would take him first: the rough onslaught of human hands or the gruesome caress of that thing in the toilet. As he sank to the floor, he could still hear it splashing around and gurgling.

A pair of human hands fell on his shoulder and jerked him out of the bathroom. Ignoring his better judgment, Evan opened his eyes as he was thrown over a large man’s shoulder as if he weighed no more than a pillow. He didn’t bother fighting. At that moment, it didn’t even seem worth it.

He looked back into the restroom as he was carried away. The domed shape now peered over the toilet’s rim, having pulled itself up by several of the tentacle things. The dome shape was, of course, a head.

It stared out at the commotion as if eager to participate. It looked at the skirmish with five insect-like black eyes on a head that looked almost human and infantile. It cried out in a weak protest and then sank back down into the drain from which it had come.

Sorry, Evan thought mildly and from some far away place within his head. But you lose, my shit-smeared friend.

Evan wasn’t aware of too much after that. He was vaguely aware that he was being carried forward by a series of hands and arms, being carried in the air, over the heads of the passengers. He felt a slight jostling sensation as they carried him down the bus steps and then the next thing he knew, he had the wind knocked out of him as he was thrown to the hard desert ground.

Evan rolled onto his back, looking straight up into the night sky and gasping for breath. The crisp desert air was a blessing to his nose and head but the sight of the approaching group of people surrounding him sent him back into the void of unreality that he had been swimming in since witnessing that first appendage surface through the water in the toilet.

He was vaguely aware that the man with the crowbar was standing closest to him. Behind this man stood the white haired man in the army pants, still holding his axes. Far off behind them, Evan thought he could see twin sets of headlights floating out in the distance.

The man with the tire iron approached him and raised his arm. Evan watched as his arm came down, the tire iron quickly catching the glare of the bus’s headlights. The iron struck Evan squarely on the side of the head.

Evan heard the thunk of the iron against his skull and then felt the momentary rush of blood pouring from his head.Then he closed his eyes and felt nothing.

Chapter 8 (part 2)

Evan watched in horror, expecting much more gruesome results than what he saw. With the axes planted squarely in each side of his neck, the victim convulsed twice and then went limp. If there was time to scream, the axe blades apparently blocked the man’s windpipe because he died without making a sound.

Even when the skinny man with white hair pulled the axes away, there really wasn’t a lot of blood.

It was watching the man drop to the ground and seeing his head roll away that almost caused Evan to scream. Seeing the act of murder in such a brutal and odd fashion had not quite pushed him to terror, but seeing a human head rolling away from its body across a barren desert and illuminated by headlights had certainly done the trick.

Evan threw a hand to his mouth and it covered the little bit of scream that his voice mustered up before he forced his throat to close.

He watched as the same act was carried out on the other three men. The method was never the same, though. The second man caught the same motions—the blades crisscrossed in the air to fall down and eventually meet one another in the center of his neck—and then fell in almost perfect alignment with the first victim. The third and fourth men were treated to simple swinging motions, as if their heads were no more than the trunks of trees. With graceful but forceful swings, the skinny man lopped their heads off cleanly, as neatly as he might cut firewood.

The fourth man bled quite a bit, and it was the sight of all of the blood that finally made Evan step back from the windshield. He watched as the skinny man walked past the recently murdered as if they weren’t even there. He approached the man with the ZZ Top beard that had come back to speak to Evan before his nap. The bearded man nodded and then turned to speak to a few of the others.

Their circle now began to break up. Some of them went to the dead, pulling gloves onto their hands as they approached the bodies. The rest of them—at least a dozen—turned towards the bus.

Inside the bus, Evan froze. He knew it wasn’t possible, but he felt like all of their eyes were on him. From where they stood, they probably couldn’t even see him. But they knew that he was there.

“Oh shit, oh shit,” Evan breathed to himself.

His occupation had sent him headfirst into several situations where his survival instincts were his only way out, but never anything like this. Still, it was those experiences that helped his knees to unlock, to start to let his mind see beyond the panic and fear and into his logical, fight-or-flight rationale.

He had to run. He had no idea where they were in the desert, but it was his only way out. He started for the door but saw that he had apparently frozen longer than he thought because the horde was already at the front of the bus. If he ran for the door, they’d easily cut him off.

He was trapped.

With no other options, Evan remembered the far back row of the bus, the row where the man with the axes had sat. Evan recalled the small enclosed cubicle of a restroom that had been back there and his legs instantly began to carry him in that direction. As far as ideas went, it sucked. But he’d be damned if he’d just stand there in the aisle and let them take him without a fight.
Evan heard the first footfall on the bus steps. As if that single footfall were the sounding shot to start a race, Evan quickened his pace and bolted for the back of the bus.

He never took his eyes off of the plastic-looking door of the restroom as he made his way to the back. Without bothering to look back even once, he grabbed the door handle and pulled. The door swung open so easily that Evan almost fell backwards into the row of seats that the skinny white haired man had occupied. But his senses were at full alert and he kept his balance with ease. As he entered the restroom, he finally glanced back before shutting the door.

There were five people marching slowly down the aisle towards him. One of them had a tire iron in his grip and while the rest were unarmed, they still looked sinister, all of their faces gaunt and zombie-like.

Evan practically fell into the restroom. He slammed the door behind him and set the lock. With his back resting against the wall, he finally allowed himself to scream.

Chapter 8 (part 1)

Evan was still sitting motionless in his seat when the man with the axes had made his way down the stairs and off of the bus. His hands were clenched tightly at his sides and his head felt like it would float off of his head. From outside, he could hear a hard clasping sound, followed by a few metallic clicks and clanks. This was followed by a slight scuffling noise, during which Evan could feel the bus move a bit.

He realized that what he was hearing and feeling was the luggage compartment on the side of the bus being opened and looked into. But as he pieced this together, another question came to mind: had he simply been overlooked during the unboarding process or had he been left behind on purpose?

The slight rocking of the bus continued, accompanied by a few more metallic clanging sounds and what sounded like muffled voices and grunts. Evan looked to the aisle once more and saw that it was still completely empty. He tried to slowly get to his feet but his legs were shaking and would not cooperate. He stood up anyway, bracing himself with the seat in front of him. He stepped into the aisle and walked a few steps forward.

The overhead lights were still at their brightest peak and when Evan tried to once again look out of the windows, he could see nothing more than the tint of the windows and the glare of the interior lights. As he walked, he noticed that the engine was still idling, something that he had not realized at first due to the rampaging thoughts in his head and the fact that his breath now seemed to be far too loud.

As he took another step, there was a loud metallic slamming sound from outside. The bus rocked a bit and Evan placed the noise to be the closing off the luggage compartment.

Evan froze where he was for a moment, ready to dive into the nearest row of seats when he heard the first footfalls on the entrance steps of the bus. He waited a few moments but the sound never came. Feeling somewhat sure that it was safe to do so, Evan headed forward again. He looked to the front of the bus and saw that the driver had also stepped off. Not only that, but he could tell by the dull glow in the front windshield that the bus’s headlights were still on.

Keeping his eyes on the shine of the headlights through the windshield, Evan walked further down the aisle. He listened closely for any kind of voices from outside but heard nothing.

When he reached the front of the bus, he was a bit tentative. The door stood open and when he peeked over the small enclosure that separated the steps from the bus, the opened door showed only a small area of hardpan dirt. He looked from this to the windshield. He was close enough so that he could now make out what lay in front of the bus and although he wanted to look outside, another part of him was afraid to do so. But, as it always was in Evan’s case, his curiosity was the stronger part of him and he found himself at the windshield, looking out.

The tint of the windshield was obviously not as dark as the passenger windows. This, accompanied by the spotlight that the headlights cast, gave Evan a clear view of his surroundings. He saw that one of his theories had been correct, but this did not ease his mind at all.

At some point during his sleep, the bus had turned off of the main road and had trekked back into the desert. To all sides, as far as the headlights cut through the night, there were no roads to be seen. All there was to see was the large group of people that stood about twenty feet in front of the bus.

The group consisted of all twenty-four heads Evan had counted earlier. In the midst of the group, Evan easily spotted the obese man. He was waddling around as if drunk, with no particular destination in mind, weaving in and out of the people that were around him. Actually, they were all weaving around one another, huddled together as if coming up with a fourth quarter play that would win the game. They stood in a tight group and as Evan spied on them from the bus, he also spotted the biker type with the long grey beard. He could also see the driver among them. He looked closely for the Christopher Lloyd zombie but saw him nowhere.

Seconds later, he discovered why he had been hard to locate.

Eventually, the crowd separated a bit and within the center of the group stood the frail man with the axes.

The crowd began to distance themselves from one another, walking backwards but looking forward the entire time. As they walked away from one another, Evan noticed that they were spreading out into a circle. He watched with a knowing fear in his guts, feeling as if he were about to watch some demented marching band or flag core do a grotesque march.

As they effortlessly walked backwards and made their circle, Evan’s eyes went back to the zombie-like man with white hair. From this distance and through the windshield, his axes looked like extensions of his arms. He still stood in the middle of the circle, looking towards the sky. As he looked upwards, he carried the axes in that direction, holding them up over his head and making a perfect X with them in the air.

Sitting on the ground around him were four human figures, wrapped in what looked to be torn burlap sacks. The sacks started at their necks and covered their bodies to the knees. Their heads were exposed but they had all been gagged and blindfolded. Their arms were tied behind their backs and their legs were bound with thick strands of rope.

They fought helplessly but were unable to move. Evan watched as one—a bald man with a large cut on his head—fought to the point of toppling over, his face landing hard in the dirt.

Evan was pretty sure that these people were what had been taken out of the luggage compartment while he had still cowered in the bus. As he watched all of this unfold, he was suddenly very sure of what was about to happen, yet he could not tear his eyes away from it. Set in the exact center of the headlights’ glare, the whole act seemed like a play acted out by drugged performers.

The shirtless man with the axes looked down from the sky. He said something that Evan could not quite hear clearly from the bus. Whatever it was that he said caused a man to step out of the crowd of twenty-three people. This man was dressed in coveralls and boots, and he carried a large knife in his right hand.

He slowly approached one of the bound figures, walking directly in front of them so that he was almost exactly face to face with the shirtless man with the axes. The man in the overalls used his knife to make a very quick and shallow cut along the victim’s forehead. He said something and then advanced to the next figure where he performed the same act.

He placed this incision on all four of the bound people’s heads. From what Evan could tell, all of the bound were males. By the time the cuts had been made to their heads, their weak fighting and protests had stopped, as if they knew that it was useless. The fourth cut to be made was on the head of the bald man that had toppled over and when he was set back up by the man in coveralls, his fighting spirit was apparently drained.

The man in the coveralls said something else which also went unheard by Evan. He could see their mouths move, but could not hear anything clearly. He watched as this man backed away from the bound victims, reclaiming his place in the circular form the group had made.

Three second passed and then the skinny man with the axes spoke again. Whatever he said drew a unanimous reply from those around him. The reply was so loud and in unison that Evan could actually hear it, although it was apparently a foreign language. To Evan, it sounded like “Bainada.”

With that reply, the skinny man turned slightly to his right. Without any warning and with a speed that Evan’s eyes almost couldn’t keep up with, he brought both axes down in arched, swooping motions. Both blades met one another and would have made a nice clanging noise if they had not been slowed by the thickness of the neck into which they were driven...

Chapter 7 (part 2)

Evan was aware that the bus had stopped even before he heard the light squeak of brakes. The deceleration of the bus’s speed woke him but he didn’t open his eyes right away. He listened all around him, hearing the light shuffle of people moving about, preparing to get off of the bus. He imagined the passenger with the fat leg standing up and falling straight through the floor. Smirking at this thought, Evan opened his eyes, stretched his neck a bit and then looked at his watch, which read 1:22.

He looked out of the window to his right, trying to see outside. But the windows were tinted a bit too strongly and the night was far too dark to see anything. Evan cocked his head to the side, a bit puzzled by this. If it were truly that dark outside, wouldn’t any kind of light from outside easily show up? Where were the lights of the bus stop, the glow of the stop’s surrounding security lights, the glow of nearby streetlights?

Evan thought back to when he had been walking down the road and spotting the bus’s headlights for the first time. It had appeared as if the bus had been coming directly from the heart of the desert. Perhaps that’s where they had stopped: somewhere in the middle of the desert.

But that didn’t make any sense.

Unless Sam’s story was true.

Yet, that didn’t make any sense either. This bus was without a doubt a normal charter bus. The passengers seemed to be normal passengers and the driver seemed to be an every day bus driver, his kindness and smile completely fake.

Evan didn’t want to stand up. This was far too weird and the world suddenly made no sense at all. But he knew that if he waited for everyone to get off ahead of him, he’d be the last one out and that would mean he’d be the last to know where they were. He mentally kicked himself in the ass for not asking the driver where they were headed. At that time though, he had been afraid to ask too many questions, sure that Sam’s story had contained a great deal of truth.

Evan remained seated, not sure what to do. He glanced ahead, seeing that everyone was getting up from their seats and heading for the front of the bus. Evan watched as the fat person stood up. He now got a better look at the person and saw that it was a man, wearing a stretched out tank top and that too-revealing pair of shorts. Evan saw that his guess of three hundred pounds had been extremely generous. This man was morbidly obese and Evan didn’t doubt that the man weighed a good five hundred pounds. How he could fit in one of the bus seats and waddle down the aisle without much trouble was beyond Evan. His legs jiggled when he walked and the folds of fat and the criss-crossing of varicose veins looked almost like a 3-D road map.

As he watched the obese man manage to squeeze his way down the aisle, Evan heard a shuffling sound from behind him. He turned and saw the man in the far rear row, sitting by himself. He had been sleeping when Evan had first seen him but he was now awake and gathering his things.

The man was frail and thin and was not wearing a shirt. His pants looked to be faded army fatigues with holes torn in both knees. His hair was completely white and disheveled with a large bald spot in the middle of his head but he did not look old. Evan was reminded of Christopher Lloyd’s character “Doc” from the Back to the Future movies. But this man’s face seemed sunken in, his eyes like hollows and his cheeks pulled tight so that the sharp outlines of his jaw were clearly visible.

Evan turned away as the man walked around the seats and started down the aisle. He felt certain that if he made eye contact with this man, he’d probably soil himself. He began to panic, his heart hammering and his eyes fixed firmly on the back of the seat in front of him. He didn’t see how he had overlooked such appearances when he had loaded onto the bus. The lights had been dimmed and the dark desert night outside had done little to help. But now, with the bus stopped and the front door open, the overhead lights were on at full force and Evan felt like he had stepped into another world.

When the frail man with white hair passed him, Evan cringed. He feared that the man would stop and say something to him, like the biker with the gross beard had done earlier. But this man said nothing, did not even look in Evan’s direction. He only stared blankly ahead and walked slowly, falling in behind the other passengers.

Evan forced himself to look out from behind the seat and to the row of marching passengers. He didn’t see much, but what he did see nearly sent him over the edge.

What he saw was the back of the skinny man with the faded camouflage pants. Like the rest of the passengers, this man didn’t have any luggage; he had no suitcases, no bags, no books, nothing.

Instead, he held an axe in each hand, the blades hanging limply by the floor and glimmering sickly in the dull glare of the overhead lights.

Chapter 7 (part 1)

Evan had taken two of the three stairs to get aboard the bus when the driver pushed the handle in and closed the door behind him. The driver seemed harmless enough and Evan could not find anything particularly odd about the man at first glance. The driver smiled at Evan as he got on but he did not put the bus into Drive yet. Instead, he looked Evan up and down with that smile still on his face.

“What seems to be your trouble?” the driver asked.

Evan started talking before any rational thoughts came. He spun the most unbelievable story he could think of that could be almost believable but not ridiculous enough to sound crazy.

“These three guys jumped me a ways back,” Evan said. “They took my car and most of my money. They beat me up pretty bad. That was sometime just around seven, I think. I came to on the side of the road about an hour and a half ago. I don’t really know where I am.”

“Damn,” the driver said. “That’s tough. Do you have any idea where you need to be going?”

“I’m not really sure,” Evan said. “I guess I could just get off at the next stop and use a phone or something.”

“Sounds like a plan,” the driver said, shifting the bus into drive. “Go ahead and have yourself a seat.”

Evan nodded and climbed the last step thinking it odd that, this apparently being a charter bus of some kind, he had not had to discuss any sort of payment with the driver. He passed the driver and turned to his left, looking down the center aisle. There were a good number of people on the dimly lit bus, but it wasn’t crowded by any means. He walked fairly quickly to the back, doing his best to take a speedy head count as he did so. When he found an empty seat at the back, he had counted twenty-three people in all, the driver included.

Once he was in his seat, Evan took a moment to relax, arching his back and neck against the seat’s cushions. He rolled his head on his neck, the softness of the cushion at his neck and back feeling incredibly good.

He then looked to the row of seats beside him and saw that they were empty. Behind this row there was a final long row that stretched the length of the bus, book-ended by the right side of the bus and the restroom in the far left corner. There was one man sitting back there, hunched over and asleep in the shadows. Evan added this man to his head count, making the number twenty-four.

Evan closed his eyes and tried to think as quickly as he could. The driver certainly didn’t seem as if he was up to any foul play and so far, the bus seemed to be a typical every day, normal bus. It was well kept and smelled highly of a sweet smelling disinfectant cleaner. From somewhere up front, he caught a whiff of a man’s cologne and heard someone snoring lightly.

Evan found himself wishing that he had have paid more attention to the passengers as he took his head count. Maybe by taking in their appearances he could have gotten a better feel for what kinds of people were riding this supposedly suspicious bus. Call it stereotyping or not, but it was sometimes very easy to tell if someone was a drug user. The dealers were a little harder to pick out, but the users were usually no problem. And if you were really good, you could even go so far as to pick out their drug of choice.

Before he did any kind of investigating, Evan kept his eyes closed and sighed, taking deep breaths and steadying his shaken nerves. Although he tried to clear his mind and make sense of everything, his thoughts kept turning to Shinoe and the peculiar events of the day: the Egg and Spit debate from the two old men in front of the diner, Sam breaking into his motel room, the hit and run, and then Officer Max Young’s accounts of the cop-on-cop shooting. For such a small town, there was certainly a lot of shit to be stirred around.

Evan was broken from his thoughts by light footfalls beside him. He opened his eyes, turned his head and watched as a gruff looking biker type took the empty seat directly across the aisle from him. The bus had not stopped, meaning that this man had moved from his seat with specific intentions of taking the empty spot next to Evan.

“Having a rough night, I hear?” the biker type said. He wore a bandana around his presumably shaved head and his long beard looked as if it had not been touched in months…by soap, a comb or a razor.

Evan nodded and said, “Yeah, man.”

“Those kinds of people piss me off,” the stranger said. The large growth of hair on this man’s chin was one of those miniature ZZ Top rip-offs. He pulled at it gently as he spoke. “A bunch of rowdy assholes that pick one single person to attack. Makes me sick, you know?”

It took Evan a while to understand that this man had probably somehow overheard the story that he had given the driver. “Yeah,” Evan agreed. “I’m just happy I came out of it okay.”

“I’ll say,” the stranger said. “There doesn’t seem to be a bruise or scrape on you. I’d say you got out really lucky.”

There wasn’t necessarily an accusatory tone to the man’s voice, but Evan could see it in his face. This man was not buying Evan’s story. He wasn’t buying it at all and there was apparently something about Evan that this man did not like. Evan watched the man tug at his once-brown-now-grey beard, noticing how with each tug, the skin on the man’s chin stretched out, creating on odd leathery effect.

“Very lucky,” Evan agreed. He tried not to be intimidated by the man’s frigid gaze, but it was difficult.

“Well,” the man said, standing up, “thank God for small favors, right?”

Evan nodded, more than anxious for the man to walk back to his own seat and tug on his cheesy old beard from there. The man turned and walked away, but slowly, as if he didn’t want to take his eyes off of Evan just yet.

With the man gone, Evan rolled his eyes and sighed. Letting a few seconds pass, Evan peeked around the side of the seat in front of him, trying to get a look at some of the passengers with aisle seats. But all that he could see was a woman a few rows ahead with her head resting in her hand, her elbow propped against the armrest. The weak light inside the bus made it hard to see her clearly, but from her rigid posture, Evan took her to be an older woman.

A few rows ahead of her, a little over halfway towards the front of the bus, Evan saw a mammoth looking leg sticking slightly into the aisle. Evan turned his head slightly to the left, making sure that he was seeing it right and that the darkness of the bus wasn’t playing tricks with his eyes. He winced when he realized that he was seeing it right. The owner of the leg was wearing a pair of unfortunate shorts that stopped far too high above the knee, revealing a horribly plump leg that looked to Evan like a large Christmas ham. The owner of the leg had to weigh at least three hundred pounds, and that was being generous.

Other than these two, Evan could see no one. He supposed that the only way to discover any sort of foul play was to pay more attention when the bus came to its next stop. But the further the bus drove ahead, the more confident Evan became that he had been duped by Sam and his friend. As far as Evan could tell, he was on a plain old charter bus with a very interesting and annoying group of people.

He relaxed his head again and closed his eyes. He was suddenly exhausted and felt as if he had been thrown against a brick wall about a thousand times. When he felt sleep tugging at his senses, he didn’t fight it. He let his questions about the day in Shinoe and the crazy story Sam had told him about this bus slip away. He fell asleep fairly easy and slept soundly until the bus came to a stop.

Chapter 6 (part 2)

He stretched his back out, flexed his legs a bit and then started walking again. He walked and he thought of the role that irony played in the life of every human being on the planet. He thought of how he had decided less than a month ago that he was going to wash his hands of his ill-chosen career path. He wanted to get away from all of it, wanted to maybe go to school for a few years and seek something out in communications. But he had also decided that he’d wait until he earned another twenty grand or so, just to have a nice little cushion when he decided to leave it all behind.

Shinoe would have been the first of two jobs that would have eventually gotten him the money but from the looks of it, this might be the last job he ever took…if he got out of it alive. The twenty grand be damned; after a day like this one, who needed any more signs? A day like this one made him wonder if his mother had been right all along. According to her, by making a living off of drugs and the assholes that dealt and shipped them, he was going down a very dangerous and uncertain path.

Well, maybe not a path. Maybe a lonely desert road in the middle of the night.
Evan’s watch read 12:32 when he saw the next set of headlights. He didn’t bother getting excited because the more he thought about Sam’s story, the more ridiculous the whole thing seemed. He was out here walking and being spied on just so they could fuck with him. It was that simple. And when he got back to Shinoe, they’d probably kill him.

Only, he didn’t think that would happen either. Thinking back on it, he thought of how Sam and his buddy had abducted him. They’d done it in the middle of a parking lot where any snooping passerby had the chance of seeing them. Also, now that Evan had a clear head to think with and didn’t have a gun to the back of his head (and the effect the five drinks had on him had split the instant he had felt that gun at his head), he also realized that they had not patted him down for a weapon or a cell phone. They were apparently careless criminals, leading Evan to believe that they really had no idea what they were doing.

But his only weapon was in his car back in Shinoe and his cell phone was lying in tiny shattered bits back at the motel room. As he watched the approaching headlights get closer, he cursed himself silently at the memory of losing his temper and throwing the phone.

Evan strained his eyes, staring ahead at the headlights. They were approaching at an odd angle, as if from the right rather than straight ahead. If Evan’s memory served correct, there was only one turn between the place he currently stood and Shinoe. And that road was at least ten miles away. There was no way that he was seeing headlights from such a distance, no matter how clean, clear and unobstructed his view was.

Whatever this vehicle was, it was relatively close to him and it appeared to be coming through the desert.

Evan slowed his walk a bit. He was tempted to stop but then he recalled the warning shot that had been fired when he had sat down earlier. So he walked at a moderately slow pace and watched the lights get closer at an angle.

A few moments later, he could make out the sounds of an engine. By studying the lights, Evan started to second-guess his dismissal of Sam’s story. From what he could tell, those lights could very well belong to a bus. They were sitting up too high to be a car or a normal sized truck. And the engine sounded a bit too hushed to be any kind of off-road vehicle. If it was one of those jacked up trucks that some people liked to cruise around deserts and ravines in, the engine would have been louder than the one currently approaching him.

Evan watched as the lights turned slightly towards him and straightened. They were now headed directly for him, apparently out of the desert and now on the main road. If this was Sam’s bus, Evan wondered what would have happened if it had have kept on through the desert and not come out onto the road until it was at some point miles behind Evan’s back. If there truly was a drug-trafficking bus and Evan missed it, what would Sam and his friend do to him when he returned to Shinoe?

He didn’t let that thought bother him for long. The headlights were now no more than one hundred yards away and as each second passed, Evan became more certain that it was a bus.
This realization brought on a whole new batch of thoughts. Firstly, who was to say that the driver would let him on? Secondly, if he did manage to get on, Evan felt confident that the drug dealers would not allow him to ride with them all the way to the drop point. The third and perhaps worst scenario Evan imagined was that when the driver saw someone trying to flag the bus down, they’d panic and haul ass without so much as stopping, thinking that someone was on to them and wanting to get away as quickly as possible.

The lights were closing in and Evan could now see that it was indeed a bus. It was a charter bus and looked like a Greyhound or one of the Greyhound rip offs. Without thinking about what he was doing, Evan ran into the middle of the road. He jumped up and down, waving his arms and shouting.

“Hey!” Evan screamed. “Hey! Help me! I need some help!”

As he screamed this, another scenario played itself out in his mind. What if he were to get on and clue the traffickers in on Sam and the people he worked for? If Evan let them know that another chain of drug runners was on to their scam, they’d surely protect him from Sam and his higher-ups, wouldn’t they?

Sam continued to jump and flail his arms about. He was nervous and slightly amused that the story was looking to be true. But more than anything, he was uneasy about the uncertainty of what was going to happen next. He could imagine the driver slamming on the gas and running him down without a second thought.

But as soon as that thought came, the bus began to slow down. The lights were terribly bright and Evan narrowed his eyes against their glare. He watched through the glare as the bus crept to a stop, the squeaking of its brakes a welcome sound against the dead silence of the desert night.

There was a slight clicking sound followed by a faint whoosh as the driver opened the door.
“Everything okay down there?” the driver yelled from inside the bus.

“I uh, I need some help,” Evan said, cautiously walking around the front of the bus and closer to the opened door.

“Well climb aboard,” the driver said rather cheerfully as Evan stepped into sight.

Confused, Evan slowly walked towards the door. He looked up at the smiling driver with an uncertain expression. Then, knowing that he really didn’t have much of a choice, he stepped onto the bus.

Chapter 6 (part 1)

He thought about the threats that Sam and his friend had made. What were the chances that Sam and his friend had other members of their tribe riding up and down the road to spy on him? He supposed it was likely; if they knew enough to know about this elusive drug-trafficking bus, then they probably had the means to keep an eye on him.

Evan walked on, casting his eyes to the endless stretch of blankness that lay to both sides of the highway. Even the road itself seemed to be disintegrating, the black pavement crumbling away into the abyss that taunted him from both sides.

Evan walked to the center of the road, balancing himself on the broken yellow lines that ran down its surface. They seemed unnaturally bright in the middle of the night but they somehow served to anchor him to what was real. He was sure that if someone spent enough time alone staring out into the featureless dark of the desert night, they might start to slip a bit in the head, especially if they were in a similar situation as the one he currently found himself in the middle of.

A drug trafficking bus! The thought of such a thing slipping under the noses of the police or even the FBI seemed illogical to Evan. Part of him wondered if this wasn’t just Sam’s idea of a prank to play on the delivery boy of the man who had passed off phony money on his people. But then again, there was another part of Evan that thought the idea was genius. He ran a few scenarios through his head, trying to imagine how such a ploy would work, but could never come up with a surefire one.

Sometime shortly after eleven thirty, Evan saw a faint glimmer of light ahead of him. He continued walking towards it, wondering if this could be the bus already. The lights got closer and closer, and soon Evan could tell by simply looking at the headlights that the approaching vehicle was most certainly not a bus. Seconds later, he was proven correct when a beat up SUV went speeding by, probably coming from Shinoe.

Or, as Sam had promised, these could have been someone from Sam’s group that had been sent to spy on him.

Evan turned and watched the SUV’s lights grow smaller in the distance, its tail lights like retreating comets. He then turned around and started walking again. He looked up to the moon which was just barely a quarter full. It did little to illuminate the night and the only advantage Evan had was the fact that his eyes had long ago adjusted to the dark.

When he looked at his watch again, it was 12:06. His feet were killing him again, the pains of his walk to the bar having not yet diminished, and he wondered if he had ever walked so much in one day. Thinking of the bar and a cold beer made his mouth water and he could not remember ever wanting a drink so badly in his life.

Evan sighed and looked all around, still seeing nothing but darkness and the broken yellow lines in the center of the road. He felt exhausted and, in some very intangible way, lost.

“Screw it,” Evan said. He stopped walking and hunkered down on the side of the road. He sat about two feet away from the pavement, his butt resting in the hard packed dirt alongside the highway, allowing his legs to stretch out.

He sat that way for thirty seconds or so and then, from somewhere in the emptiness of the desert night around him, he heard the sound of an engine. It came from his right and it seemed to be pretty far away. Still, it took Evan about five seconds to realize that the engine was really of no concern to him. He wouldn’t be alarmed until he could see actual headlights.

Still, the thought of being caught by Sam and his partner had him paranoid. Who was to say that there weren’t cars parked out in the desert with some of Sam’s men behind the wheel? And what if they had binoculars or night vision equipment to spy on him?...

Bullshit, Evan thought. What sort of an Indian tribe has night vision equipment?

Despite this reasoning, Evan was still growing increasingly nervous. He slowly got to his feet and looked around again, searching for any form of light or signs of movement. But, as had been the case for the last hour or so, there was none.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Evan said loudly, but not quite at scream pitch. He enthusiastically gave the surrounding night the middle finger as he continued to scan the dark horizon.

Chapter 5

Sam and his henchman were driving a red van with Conner’s Fresh Produce painted on the side. Sam walked closely behind Evan, the gun barrel aimed squarely at his back. The streets of Shinoe were virtually dead and even if anyone happened to pass by, the parking lot was so badly lit that a passerby would not have seen the events unless they had been specifically looking out for them. The van was parked at the far edge of the lot, cloaked almost completely in darkness and shadows.

“Inside,” Sam said.

“Conner’s Fresh Produce,” Sam said. “Nice cover.”

“In!”

Evan opened the sliding door on the side of the van and stepped inside. He was ordered to sit in the front seat while Sam took the wheel and the second attacker sat directly behind him. Sam handed his friend the gun as he started the van. From behind, Sam’s friend leveled the gun at Evan’s head as Sam pulled out onto the road.

“We’re giving you a chance,” Sam said. “We’re giving you a chance to come out of this smelling like roses.”

“How’s that?”

"We’re in the same boat,” Sam said. “We are both drug runners. So is my friend, sitting right behind you. I don’t know your bosses or who you work for, but if they are anything like the people I work for, your job is probably shit. And if you were to tell them that you lost the drugs that their fake money paid for, they’d probably kill you. Does that sound right?”

“It had crossed my mind,” Evan admitted.

“Well, thanks to your fake money, I may be killed,” Sam explained. “I have a considerably huge debt to pay off and your money was supposed to pay it. It was to be paid by tomorrow morning and now that is obviously not going to happen. Not unless you can get me two hundred thousand dollars by tomorrow morning.”

“That’s impossible.” It was a large figure and Evan wondered how Sam had racked up such an enormous debt.

“That’s why you’re going to do me a favor,” Sam said simply.

“What favor?”

Sam had pulled onto a road that Evan was fairly familiar with. It would carry them into the desert, far away from everything living and into the absolute middle of nowhere.

“You’re going to be my spy,” Sam said. It was not a question, nor a suggestion. It was a demand.

“I don’t think I’m really qualified for that,” Evan said. “I didn’t even realize you had slashed my tires until about four hours after you had done it, so I think spy work is a little over my head.”

Sam’s friend tapped the gun barrel against Evan’s head. “No jokes,” he said simply. Evan got the impression that this man didn’t speak very often. He bit his lip to refrain for making any further wisecracks.

“A spy for what?” he asked, ignoring the man sitting behind him and exchanging glances between Sam and the road that unwound ahead of them.

“There’s a bus that runs down this road every so often,” Sam explained. “Usually it’s about two times a month, sometimes three, sometimes only one. This bus…somehow it’s like a ghost. There are stories about it driving down the road but I have never spoken to anyone that has been on it.”

“Like a Greyhound bus?” Evan asked.

“I think so. But rumor has it that a huge drug cartel out of Mexico is using it to deliver drugs back and forth from Mexico to California.”

“That sounds far fetched,” Evan said, baffled at the absurdity of the concept. “Where did that rumor come from?”

“It’s sort of obvious, really,” Sam said, as if Evan had asked an incredibly stupid question. “It’s a bus that runs a route that is not on any local bus schedules and, by all accounts, never stops at any regular bus stops. There aren’t but so many things it could be doing out so late, you know? And I figure that if I can let my debtors in on a tip like this—that there is some secret drug train running under everyone’s noses and stealing their business—then maybe they’ll take it easy on me.”

It was hard for Evan to hide that the idea impressed him. Still, the story about the bus seemed nonsensical to him. “Wouldn’t something like this be reported to the police or something?” he asked.

“I thought so, too,” Sam answered. “But apparently there have been no complaints about missed stops or foul play. And to tell you the truth, I really don’t even know if anyone other than drug dealers and a few of the folk in my tribe know about it.”

Evan was so confused by the story that he had almost forgotten about the gun pointed at his head. “How would people in your tribe know about it?”

“I think you know as well as I do how much peyote and mushrooms my people sell to you stupid white people. Therefore, if you want to get technical, my entire tribe is really nothing more than a drug warehouse.”

“That’s true,” Evan said. Then, once again unable to stop his sarcastic tongue, he added, “It’s nice to see someone take pride in their heritage, but where do I fit in?”

“The bus is running tonight. We’ve had a few people keeping their eyes out for it for the last two months, set up along the routes that it’s been said to follow. I got a call less than an hour ago from one of my guys out in Arizona. It should be through here in about an hour and a half. And when it comes through, you’re getting on it.”

“You think a bus running drugs is going to pick up a hitch hiker?” Evan asked. This notion seemed dumber that the scenario of a secret drug-running bus.

“Well, that’s where it’s all on you,” Sam said, pulling the van over onto the side of the road. Evan had almost completely lost track of where they were, but if he had to guess, he would say they were probably a good twenty miles outside of Shinoe.

“All on me?” Evan said. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Sam parked the van on the bare and dusty side of the road and turned to Evan. “It means that when you see that bus coming, you do anything you can to get on it. I don’t care what you do, but you have to stop it and convince them to let you on. So when you get out of this van, keep walking to the south to meet the bus.”

“And,” Sam added as an afterthought, “don’t bother trying anything stupid. You’ll see a few cars on the road periodically. Those are members of our tribe that we’ve sent out to check on you.”

With that said, the man with the gun reached up past Evan and opened his door for him. Nudging the gun against Evan’s neck, he pushed Evan out of the seat and into the dry desert night.

“That’s it,” Sam said. “Get on that bus, find out what’s on it and who is running it and then meet me back at your motel tomorrow.”

“So you honestly think that a secret bus that’s running drugs will not only pick me up, but will also let me off with no problems? Are you crazy?”

“That’s your problem for right now. But if you don’t show up tomorrow morning, it had damned well better be because you’re dead.”

Before Evan could even start to protest, Sam closed the passenger side door in Evan’s face. He threw the van into Drive and made a quick U-Turn, headed back towards Shinoe.

“Shit!”

It was the first time Evan had screamed to the top of his lungs in a long time. It felt surprisingly good, despite his situation. His voice didn’t echo; it only rolled gently in all directions to the wide open spaces all around him.

He glanced at his watch. It was approaching eleven o’ clock. The desert was now cloaked perfectly in the night, an endless sea of dust on dark that stretched out further than he cared to imagine. He was all alone in the midst of it and he felt like a very small fish in an enormous sea.

Chapter 4 (part 2)

The cab picked him up and the ride back to the motel was made in silence. Evan had simply stared out of the windows, wondering if life in Shinoe was always as hectic as today had been. Max Young had spoken about today as if it had possibly been the worst day of his life, so Evan assumed that the town was usually pretty quiet. He then thought about what the desk clerk had told him about how the heat could put people a bit on edge. Evan guessed that this was possible; the sweltering heat of the desert sure as hell irritated him most of the time.

But when the cab dropped him off at the motel, Evan found the air to be a bit cooler, almost pleasant. While Shinoe wasn’t really in the desert per se, it was damned close. It was close enough that Evan considered the warm breeze that swirled around him to be a desert wind.

Evan watched the cab drive away as he took a seat on the hood of his car. He supposed he could just rent the room for another night and then find a garage tomorrow to replace his tires. After that, there was still the decision of what to do about the drugs and his boss. But he’d cross that bridge when he got there.

He stood up and headed for the motel office. He didn’t make it three feet before someone jumped him from behind.

The weight of the attacker was light and Evan nearly saved himself from falling to the ground. But he soon felt the additional weight of a second body on top of him and he knew right away that fighting might only make the situation worse. Besides, whoever was on him was not punching or kicking him. He was simply being pushed to the ground and pinned there. There was a slight yet sharp pain as the right side of his face smacked the pavement.

“Don’t move and don’t speak,” one of his attackers said. This was followed by a familiar clicking sound as a hard cumbersome object was pressed against the back of his head. “You do anything stupid and we’ll kill you. Got it?”

Evan had had his life threatened several times before, but never with a gun to the back of his head. But he knew that it would be best to respond to any comments that were made to him. Staying silent might only infuriate his attackers and from the sounds of it, they were already plenty pissed.

“Yeah, I got it,” Evan said. He realized that his assailants had taken the effort to push him down so that they were on the ground on the passenger side of his car, hidden away from the road. To anyone passing by, they could not be seen.

“Good,” a second voice said. “Not such a stupid white man after all.”

Evan noticed the voice and the cheesy reference and although he knew it might be stupid to do so, his sarcastic side took over. It was something he had always had trouble keeping in check.

“Hey, Sam. What can I do for you?”

“The money was marked. Every single bill.”

“Did you discover that before or after you broke into my room and stole the shit?”

This question prompted a hard elbow to be driven into his back. Evan coughed weakly as the right side of his face was pushed harder into the ground. He could feel pebbles and grime scratching and stinging at his cheeks but that sensation was not nearly as dominant as the insistent weight of the gun pressed to his skull.

“What’s the matter?” Sam asked. “Did we screw you over before you had the chance to screw us? Did you know the bills were marked?”

“No, actually,” Evan answered honestly. And he was suddenly not so mad at Sam; all of his anger was in that moment directed towards his boss, Emile Gorrengo. “I just picked the briefcase up and followed instructions. That’s all I ever do.”

Again, another elbow crunched into his lower back. This time the force of it caused Evan to bite into his bottom lip.

“Don’t lie to us,” the other attacker said. This second voice sounded almost the same as Sam’s, only with a stern edge to it.

“I’m not,” Evan said. “I swear. Just tell me what to do and I’ll do it.”

There was a brief silence as the two men pressing him down took a while to sort out their thoughts. Finally, Sam said, “Come with us.”

Chapter 4 (part 1)

When he reached the bar, he still had no ideas as to how to improve his current situation. He was sweating profusely, his feet were aching when he arrived at the bar, and he had no clue as to where to go from there. His brain remained empty of ideas when he took a barstool, was still empty when he finished off his first drink and emptier still when he ordered his fourth.

After placing the order for his fourth drink, the bartender smiled at him and began to mix his Vodka Tonic. “Rough couple of days, I take it?” the bartender asked.

"You could say that,” Evan said. “Was my performance last night all that memorable?”

“I’ve seen better,” the bartender said. “But just to let you know, if you get that drunk tonight, I’m calling you a cab. I shouldn’t have let you drive as drunk as you were last night.”

“I know. Sorry.”

“Also,” the bartender said, “this drink is already paid for by the nice man sitting there on the other end of the bar.”

Evan looked to his left and saw a man sitting on the opposite side of the bar with a bottle of beer. Seeing that Evan had spotted him, he smiled and waved. It took Evan a while to place the face but it finally came to him. It was the policeman that had pulled up next to him that morning during the fiasco with the elderly boxing match.

Evan had always been nervous around any form of law enforcement, but he figured there was no trouble he could get himself into right now. Sam had the drugs and the drug money, leaving Evan’s hands clean. And as far as his personal life, Evan had not touched any form of drug—other than alcohol—in over three months. So what was the harm in going over to thank the policeman? Besides, the fact that the guy was drinking and not in uniform made him a little less of a threat anyway.

Evan walked to the end of the bar and took the stool next to the officer. “Thanks for the drink, man,” he said. “I really appreciate it. What’s the occasion?”

“For breaking up Senior Citizen Wrestlemania this morning,” the cop said. “Most people would have just had a laugh and carried on with their day, you know?”

Evan tilted his head and shrugged. “Honestly, I usually would have done the same thing. I don’t really know why I stepped in. It seemed like the right thing to do, I guess. And it was just too funny to pass up.”

“Well anyway, it was nicely done.” He took a sip of his beer and then offered his hand. “Max Young,” he said. He was a man of average build. He had a face that men would call haggard but women would call rugged. There was a decent growth of hair on his face but it was not so thick that it could be called a beard.

“Evan Abner,” Evan said, shaking the man’s hand. “What happened to those two old farts anyway?”

Max Young shook his head and took another sip of beer. “Man, today was the worst day I’ve seen in a long time. I’ve been a cop off and on for eleven years and I never saw anything like today.” He then nodded towards the beer in his hands and said, “This is the first beer I’ve had in about two years. Today was that bad.”

“Yeah, I heard about the hit and run and the shooting. That’s terrible.”

“Yeah, we tried to keep the whole shooting incident quiet, but it got out. When one cop offs another one in plain sight, it’s pretty big news, you know? But today, it seemed like everything that happened was bad. There was that hit and run, then the old guys fighting, then the shooting.

“But as far as the thing with the old guys…that got even weirder,” Max explained. “I knew right away that I was going to let them go. I’d just warn them, like a slap on the wrist, you know? So I talked to both of them and they went on their merry ways. Then right around four o’ clock this afternoon, right after I got off duty, I got this call at home. One of those old men—the one in the checkered pants—killed his wife and then tried to kill himself.”

“Oh my God,” Evan said, genuinely shocked.

“It’s obviously not looked well upon when a cop divulges all this kind of information to a stranger, but I had to get it off of my chest somehow, you know? This has been one absolutely fucked up day.”

Max Young truly did seem upset about something and while it did seem peculiar that a cop would spill this type of information, Evan was glad that he could help the man unwind…even if he was a cop. Besides, there was something to Max's voice that made Evan think that he didn't give a damn if someone found out that he was blabbing police business to a stranger. Max Young seemed pissed, upset and extremely anxious about something.

“Yeah, it sounds like it” Evan said, sipping uncomfortably from his drink.

After a moment’s silence, Max said, “So you’re not from around here, I know that. I know every face in this town. What brings you here to Shinoe?”

Evan thought quickly, hoping to kill two birds with one stone. “Well, I heard about this tribe of Indians out in the desert. And I’ve been fascinated with the culture since my freshman year of college.”

“You’re not talking about those peyote freaks out to the west, are you?”

“I think so, yeah.”

“Nothing but trouble. We’ve had tips that they’re dealing the stuff to these big name guys in California and Texas. But when we question them, they pull this ‘you’re infringing on our religious practices and rights’ bullshit.”

Evan was well aware of this fact. It was why his Emile Gorrengo had selected the tribe as a source in the first place. “That must suck,” Evan said.

“Yeah,” Max agreed. He tipped his beer to his mouth and finished it. He looked at the empty bottle, contemplated getting another and then decided that it was time to leave. Apparently not having one for two years had made Max cautious around the bottle.

"Well, I just wanted to thank you for your good deed this morning,” Max said. “Be careful driving home. And if you do head out to find those hallucinating-mushroom- eating-peyote freaks, watch out. You could get in a lot of trouble. ”

“You don’t think much of them, do you?”

Max Young shook his head. “Not a bit.”

Evan thought better of asking for directions to where the tribe could be found. Although he could think of no better pleasure than putting a few rounds through Sam’s stupid head, Evan knew not to push things. The last thing he wanted to do was to make a police officer suspicious of him.

“Well, thanks for the drink,” Evan said.

“No problem,” Max answered. “And it was nice to meet you.”

With that, Max paid his tab and left the bar.

Evan sat at the bar by himself for a while. A few stragglers came in and out of the bar as he watched the TV behind the counter and shared small talk with the bar tender. Somewhere in the midst of the talk, Evan finished another drink. His head was a bit swimmy and he was feeling incredibly pleasant.

“What number was this one?” Evan asked the bartender.

The bartender took a moment to count in his head. “That was number six. But I’ll be honest with you…I started making them weak after number three.”

“That was probably for the best.” Evan looked at his watch as was amazed to find that it was 8:45. “Eh, I guess I’ll pay my tab and take you up on that offer for a cab.”

The bartender nodded and handed Evan his bill. “If you don’t mind my asking,” the bartender said, “are you okay? Like, are you in trouble or something? You look sort of antsy and came off as a bit uncomfortable when Officer Young started chatting with you.”

“No, I’m not in any trouble,” Evan said. “It’s just been one of those days, you know? A really strange and messed up day.”

“Yeah, for the whole town or so it seems. What a weird day.”

Evan and the bartender shared a silence as Evan paid his tab with his credit card. The bartender called a local cab company and after that, headed to the other end of the bar to refill another customer.

Evan got off of his barstool and then went to the bathroom. When he came out, he waved to the bartender and headed outside to wait on his cab. As he sat there on the bar’s small porch, he stared into the approaching night.

Somewhere off in the distance he could hear the piercing sound of ambulance sirens.