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.