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.