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.
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