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C H A P T E R O N E
Aftermath
TRAVIS GRAYLARK AWOKE FACEDOWN in cool grass. His nostrils flared with the acrid stench of burning rubber and gasoline.
He turned over, noting a sharp pain in his left side, and sat up with all the stiffness of a geriatric. The undercarriage of the bus loomed before him, great and flaming in the night, once-smooth white body now shredded and scuffed beyond recognition. Now it was a hulking box of curled steel, bits of wood, and glittering glass shards lurking in the tall grass.
Someone was screaming.
He felt moisture on his face and found blood there; wiped it on his pants and went back to studying the wreckage in a daze. The sun had completely gone down, leaving him sitting in a primordial darkness at the edge of the crash, so much like resting by a campfire that he couldn't shake the nostalgia. The crickets were a constant undertone to the crackling of the flames and tumbling pieces of burning debris.
So he must have been out for an hour or two, maybe. He looked down at his cheap digital sport watch and discovered it was broken, the face split by a hideous crack.
Someone was screaming!
Travis snapped out of his injured reverie and struggled up off the ground, then stumbled toward the sound, wary of the flaming carnage only several yards away. The faint realization came to him that he might be in danger of being blown away by the gas tank, but the frenzied shrieking he could hear beyond the bus superceded any notion of self-preservation he might have had. As he made his way through the wheatgrass, he favored his left foot: every time he put weight on it, the pain of a badly barked shin shot up his leg. He wondered if it might be broken in some way.
Flanking the bus, he found himself looking at a grisly scene. A young woman was standing at the front of the overturned bus, hysterically clawing at what must have once been the driver. A tree had made its last stand as the bus had plowed against it, and the birch had practically sawn sideways through the windshield and peeled back the roof for about seven or eight feet.
Unfortunately for Mr. Juan Espinoza, former charter driver for the Greyhound company out of Atlanta, Georgia, the tree had robbed him of everything from the nipples up. All that was left of him was a pair of pants with a very twisted pair of legs inside them, and a corpulent, hairy stump full of what looked like cherry cough syrup and steakhouse scraps. Splintered rib bones protruded from the remains of Espinoza's chest. His head, shoulders, and arms were nowhere to be found; however, one of his hands was lying on the ground at the woman's feet.
Travis found this scene difficult to process; his eyes wanted to roll back in his head and he grew drowsy. The air turned gray and he couldn't concentrate on--
God! Gotta stay conscious. Gotta get out of here. Gotta save the girl. The old man is fucked.
He summoned the rest of his wits and limped toward the girl, a slender blonde in a powder blue track suit. "Come on, he's gone, we can't do anything here. Let's go."
She was in a state of pure, atavistic panic, sobbing and bellowing things like "What the fuck!" and "Oh God!" and "His fucking head!" When he touched her, she rounded on him and began flailing, screaming, and Travis slapped her. Didn't work like the movies, though, and now enraged, the woman flew into him with a hail of tiny fists.
Travis would have none of this. One fist bounced off his chin as he reached into the chaos and grasped the collar of her top, then hauled her away. Her knees buckled and she fell; Travis jerked her up and half-dragged her through the tall grass, into the darkness. At their back, the roaring bonfire illuminated the wilderness around them.
THEY WERE SITTING ON THE roadside an hour later when the fire finally died down to embers under a steady warm, sprinkling rain. The faint glow of the wreckage showed him the orange contours of the girl lying next to him, curled into the fetal position. She was largely unhurt; several cuts on her face and scalp had bled freely and made her look far worse than she really was. One arm had been dislocated at the shoulder. She had cried dearly when he'd wrenched it back in, and out of sympathetic respect, Travis left her alone after that. The entire wordless experience was like some sort of indie horror film: Travis inspecting her for injuries, and the girl groaning softly like Helen Keller. Very awkward and disconnected.
He had fared a bit worse. One broken rib, a heavy nosebleed, and what was probably a bruise or a hairline fracture in his left shinbone. What bothered him more than that, however, was the fact that he was wearing an empty cellphone holster and apparently, the girl didn't even own a phone.
They remained there, nursing their wounds and trying to make sense of their circumstances for a while. Finally, the girl gingerly sat up and crossed her legs, her limp hands lying palm-up in her lap. The two of them huddled at the edge of the cooling asphalt and stared at the flickering wreck as monotony set in and they started coming down from the adrenaline rush. Articles of clothing drifted by them, pushed across the road by the cool breeze. Drowsiness hit Travis like a train, and he could feel himself nodding off even as the thoughts barrelled through his head: Now what? How far are we away from the nearest town? Is it even safe to walk in a place like this at night?
It was the girl who tied a knot in his ruminations. Her voice jerked him out of a halfway phantom-world and he woke up, mumbling, "What?"
"I said...where is everybody?"
There it was. The unanswered question. He hadn't even thought of it. Travis scrambled to his feet and looked at the remains of the bus. Scattered in a haphazard arc was a motley assortment of clothes, bus parts, and bags, strewn and broken open all over the road's northern shoulder, but he couldn't see any bodies or hear any voices. Suddenly all he could hear was his own labored breathing and the rustle-stomp of his frenzied dash for the bus. When he got there, Travis slung himself this way and that, trying to look everywhere at once, running all over the place, kicking baggage over, jogging laps around the ember-laced steel skeleton. During one particularly vigorous search, he ran under a tree and tripped over a root, sprawling facefirst into a powdery mud. Underneath the grit was a thick cake of fudgey black loam. He rolled over and swore, then leapt to his feet and stormed back to the girl.
"There's no one else here! They're all gone!" he was saying, as he trudged up the short hill to the highway. "Where did they go? Without us? What the fuck! Why did they leave us here? We aren't dead!" Then a thought struck him, and he added, "Did we look dead? How long were we out? How long were you out? When did you wake up?"
Travis stood there for a moment, looking fully vexed and sweaty and disheveled, with his hands on his hips. He was a slender young man, built like a swimmer, with a mop of unkempt brown hair and the scruffy beginnings of a goatee. He gestured to the girl and said through labored breath and a pained expression, "Ah hell, I don't even know your name. What's your name?"
"Um," the girl said. "Audrey. Audrey Novak."
"Travis Graylark," he said. Standing there on the roadside gravel, they surveyed the scene and noticed the faint red cityglow coming from the northern horizon.
"You got up only a few minutes after I did," said Audrey, hugging herself. "Then I found--driver--"
Travis embraced her briefly, and left a reassuring hand on her shoulder.
"Anyway, I didn't see anybody. I could hear someone running into the woods in that direction just after I came to, though. Crashing through the woods, actually, like they were running."
"Running?"
"Running. Just sounded like a couple of other people. One, two."
"The hell were they running? What--bears? Mountain lions? I don't even fuckin' live down here, I have no idea what I'll run into trying to walk back to the last town. Jesus."
"All kinds of animals," said Audrey. "Mostly possums and dogs, though. I've lived in Alabama my whole childhood, and all I ever saw were possums, deer, dogs, raccoons, and armadillos."
"Armadillos?" asked Travis, surprised. "There're armadillos in Alabama? I thought that was like, a Nevada-Texas sort of thing."
"Nope. They got dillos here."
"Really. That's--that's just," said Travis with a snort. He threw his hands in the air and looked back at the cityglow.
"That's probably where they went," said Audrey. "We should follow 'em."
"Y-yeah," said Travis, pleasantly surprised at her resiliency. "I'll check and see if they left the first-aid kit in the bus before we go. Just in case."
APPROACHING THE HORRIFIC PORTRAIT of death pinned to the driver's seat, Travis leaned into the ragged crater and started bailing out bits of debris. The air so close to the bus was blistering, even after most of the flames had guttered out. Travis was soon sweating like a horse running laps in a sauna, and he was grateful for his luck when he finally stumbled across the white red-crossed lunchbox under a pile of dirt and grass near the dead driver. There was also a three-hole binder with a sheaf of papers inside. He took that as well.
The bus was hot to the touch, so he couldn't open the luggage compartment doors that weren't already ripped off. He decided to search the luggage that was already scattered across the meadow, but after nearly forty-five minutes of picking through the damaged packs he could only find ruined clothing, two shaving kits, a hell of a lot of toothpaste, two folding pocket knives, a broken CD player, a handful of triple-A batteries, a Guns and Ammo magazine, and a hat across the front of which was printed, "I Hunt Because My Wife Can't Climb Trees" with a picture of a man sleeping in a tree-mounted deer stand. This elicited a chuckle regardless of the circumstances.
When he returned to Audrey, Travis dressed their wounds while she inspected the binder. It turned out to be a passenger manifest and gas-receipt folder. A couple of road maps were stuffed into the front pocket, as well as a Fuelman fleet-fuel card. Company drivers used it to refuel company vehicles, but Travis wasn't sure why a bus driver would have one. The paper sleeve containing the Fuelman card bore the word "MAZDA", written with an ink-pen.
The manifest was specified for this trip, but there were far more names on it than had been on the bus. They could tell who they were riding with, however, because checkmarks were made in pencil next to whoever was on the bus at the time. Travis Graylark and Audrey Novak were two of twenty-one. Some of them had either changed their minds, or were late for departure.
"Do you think we should wait until daylight to head for that town?" asked Travis, as the two of them sat by the roadside. No cars had passed since they had awoken.
The girl looked up from the manifest. "No," she said, decisively. "If we wait, we won't be able to see the glow."
"But if we go, we can't see where we're going, in the dark."
"Between the devil and the deep blue sea," said the girl, looking out across the glowing wreckage. The cicadas droned on.
THE FOREST WAS AN OMINOUS wall of featureless black. They approached it head-on, carrying a torch made by wrapping several shirts around a stick and dipping it into the flames of the crash. The flickering fireball gradually brought into focus a thick layer of insidious-looking undergrowth, watched over by a sparse infinity of trees that faded into the far night. The insect commotion was nearly intolerable here, where it apparently originated.
Travis examined the broad, bright green leaves and spiky brambles of the undergrowth and picked out a place where fallen pine needles had carpeted a deer trail. By the time he had discovered it, however, Audrey was already walking toward it.
"You're a straight-up survivor, aren't you?" asked Travis, following her into the woods.
"I grew up in the country," Audrey said, wading into the brush. "I moved to the big city to stay with my Aunt Celia, though, for a little while. She had throat cancer and nobody there to really take care of her while she was going for treatments; my mother's passed, she died in Iraq. MP guard in a supply convoy. Staff Sergeant Novak. Blown out of the back of a chow truck by an IED. Hell if I know where my father is. Anyway, she pulled through and I'm heading back to Birmingham for college. Tough old bird, I'm so proud of her. Ruined her saliva glands--she has to carry around a bottle of water now--but she's doing okay now."
Travis pursued Audrey into the forest, where they were immediately surrounded by immense wooden sentinels. Their feet crunched on sticks and leaves, and aural paranoia washed over him like a rising wave. He imagined a radar beam circling his head, picking out foreign sounds in the darkness. "That's good to hear. What are you going to college for?"
"Film-making. Gonna be a famous director one day."
"What are you directing?"
"Chick flicks. Romantic comedies. I'm going to discover the next Meg Ryan."
"God help us all."
"Kidding. I'm in it for the gore. Zombie, slasher, psychological horror, thrillers, suspense, surprise-ending chillers, all of that. I'm going to make The One. The Horror Movie. It's my American Dream. The movie that'll keep audiences burying their faces in their couch cushions for decades to come."
"Impressive." Travis neglected to mention Audrey's reaction to the mutilated bus driver. He supposed Karo syrup and KFC stuffed into a latex dummy were far different than the authentic interior of a former human being. Especially when that interior happened to look like something out of a butcher's case. Being a medical student and before that a driver for a mortician, Dave had seen enough ravaged cadavers to make a vegan out of Charlton Heston.
A contented silence fell between them as they hiked. The darkness seemed to grow less oppressive as the two of them befriended each other in the nebulous circle of firelight.
"So I guess you're a doctor or something," said Audrey.
"Yeah. General practitioner. My American Dream is to run a little clinic out in the boondocks. I happen to like the idea of Mrs. McFeely calling me up at two in the morning cause little Billy's up sick. I like to think of myself as a harvester of good karma, but I'd rather sit on the shore with a rod and reel than shack up on a sea-fishing boat with a bunch of grizzly old sailors like that show on the Discovery Channel. You know what I mean? What's the point in money if you don't have the time to enjoy it?"
"Yeah," said Audrey, looking back at Dave with a raised eyebrow. She turned away, her attention refocused on the trail before them. "I guess."
The journey was difficult for the first three hundred yards, the thick scrub of leafy foliage and briars making for slow going. After a few minutes, the woods opened up into a swath of low pines. It was like walking through a museum built of trees; under their feet was a hushed carpet of dead brown conifer needles, over their heads a ceiling bristled with bright green. Corinthian columns of umber bark formed a labyrinth of trunks all around them. One tree sported a dented No Trespassing sign.
An hour of steady walking found them looking down from a ten-foot drop-off over a secluded gravel driveway that snaked to the left and right through the wooded abyss. Travis was the first to gallop down the steep slope onto the clean gray gravel, then Audrey, who knelt to retrieve something from the ground. It turned out to be a silvery .45 shell casing. Another one lay a few feet away.
"Hunters?" asked Travis.
"Never met anybody that hunted with a handgun."
"Let's go down this way, see if there's a house at the end of this road."
They continued, taking the driveway and walking left. Travis looked down at his watch; even though the face was broken, the floating compass orb was in pristine condition. According to the bobbing orb, they were heading west-northwest. The gravel crackled under their feet, broken by two ruts through which a family car must have passed a thousand times or more. Another No Trespassing sign loomed at them out of the darkness, shining fluorescent orange in the firelight of Travis's makeshift torch. Matching its luster were three ammo casings nestled into the gravel underfoot: two of them were .45 rounds, the other a spent shotgun cartridge.
A house materialized from the gloom before them a few minutes later, like a frigate bearing down on them from a midnight sea. Of no determinate style, it was merely the archetypical piecemeal woodland ranch bungalow peppered across the Alabama countryside for hundreds of miles in every direction. Dark brown fiberglass-shingle roof at a shallow angle, rough-hewn wood siding painted a green just this side of avocado. To the left, the front porch was common red brick, with a porch swing and a concrete slab for a floor. The front entrance was hidden beyond a screen door with a big hole torn in it, the edges frayed by time. A few sun-faded toys were left to bake in the front yard, encrusted with grainy dirt. A spacious garage to the left held an ancient slate-gray Buick and a dusty moss-colored Forerunner.
Standing about a hundred yards into the forest to their left, facing the back of the house, was a lone woodshed. At this distance, they could barely make out cords of grey firewood stacked against the northern side. The door was shut.
They found the front door and the door leading from the garage into the kitchen to be locked. The vehicles were unlocked; however, they could find no keys in either of them. Audrey discovered a police-weight barrel flashlight in the backseat of the Forerunner; the gold-dust beam was weak but enough to illuminate what they were looking at through a fog of granular particles. The garage smelled of fresh-cut cedar. Feeling jumpy, Travis browsed the hardware selection hanging from the pegboard over the worktable in the back, and chose a crowbar.
Wandering around the garage, they stepped onto a deck made gray and fractally rough by years of swimmers, sun, and rain. To their right yawned the murky depths of an unkempt swimming pool; to their left was a sliding patio door, the glass panel shattered all over the deck and the carpeted living room inside. Silvery .45 casings littered the floor and had settled between the boards of the sun deck outside. The propane barbeque grill had been overturned, a bullethole marking the underside of the grill basin. Luckily, the fuel tank remained unscathed.
Travis tossed the torch into the swimming pool, where it extinguished with a dull thump. There were a couple of shotgun casings floating in the dark green water. "What happened here? This place is like a vacation retreat in Mogadishu."
Audrey shrugged, shining the flashlight into the house. She led the way, the glass of the patio door crunching in the treads of her sneakers, into a roomful of silent chaos. She slowly panned the dim spotlight across the domestic carnage, producing a washed-out panorama of demolition. Shadows lurked behind every artifice, peering out from behind every edge and corner.
A broad brown faux-suede couch was overturned in the middle of the room, the underside facing the gaping glass hole leading outside. Behind that, a cheap flatscreen with a jagged hole in it was leaning against the inside of a woodgrain Formica entertainment center. A couple of taxidermy masterpieces lent the room a rustic air; or would have, if they hadn't been knocked off the wall and destroyed. Travis thought he recognized a deer-head, lying crushed underneath a toppled loveseat. A fallen trout had knocked a lamp off of a nearby end table.
Travis picked up a nearby cordless phone handset and tried to dial out, but he got only a dead line. Audrey tried to flip the light switch, but nothing happened. The bulbs inserted into the ceiling fan were nothing more than bristling crowns of broken glass. "This is insane. I don't understand this at all," said Travis, as the ceiling fan began to turn.
"Freaking World War Three in here, what the hell happened?"
"I wonder if the other passengers've been through here."
A noise from deeper within the house made them fall silent and whip around. They stood there for a long moment, listening, watching, breathing shallowly through their mouths as Audrey's flashlight beam trembled all over the kitchen. The dull yellow light flickered back at them from the sink faucets and cabinet door handles.
Suddenly, Travis stepped into the kitchen with a muttered epithet. "Jesus, look at this."
Audrey joined him in front of the refrigerator, where a pump-action shotgun had been thrust through the door of a stark white Frigidaire almost to the trigger-guard. Travis pulled the door open with a flat sucking sound and marvelled at the sight inside; emerging from a flower of jagged aluminum was a double-barrelled muzzle, scraped and bent to shit. He tried to pull the weapon out of the appliance, but it was stuck. The pump-grip rattled against the inside of the door. The chamber was empty anyway.
The girl shook her head, hugging herself. "What could do this?"
"You got me," said Travis. Then his legs abruptly felt like Jell-O and he could feel every bone in his body throbbing with exertion and injury. Before he closed the fridge, he reached inside and took out a Bud Light, using the crowbar to knock the cap off.
Audrey gestured with a wave of her hand, giving him a look as if to say, What the hell are you doing?
Travis shrugged, chugging the beer. He glistened with a sheen of slimy sweat that made the sawdust stick to his face. "I'm hot and thirsty. Would you like a better excuse? Better yet, would you like a beer?"
Audrey shook her head and ventured into the hallway flanking the fridge, shining the weak flashlight into the corridor. At the far end was an open door leading into what was probably a bedroom, and several other doors lining the hall led into other rooms. She could hear an air conditioner rumbling somewhere in the house.
"Besides, judging by how this place looks, I don't think the occupants would mind," Travis was saying. "And my fucking ribs are killing me. I need a little something to make life a little bit more into a bed of roses. As a matter of fact, I wonder if there's anything in the medicine cabinet. I could use a Percocet or something right about now."
"Can't believe you're thinking about that shit at a time like this," said Audrey, following him down the hallway. "Aren't you the least bit freaked out?"
Travis opened a door and found a linen closet full of sheets, blankets, washcloths, and towels. "Of course I am." He closed the door with the crowbar and continued in a tired, shuffling saunter. It reminded Audrey of Shaggy from Scooby Doo. "But fear does not necessarily preclude the gathering of provisions for survival, does it? We just crawled out of a burning, overturned bus. I don't know about you, but I feel it. I feel it good."
Behind the next door was a bathroom, the walls covered with tiles the minty green color of toothpaste. No bodies lay in the bathtub, and no one was hiding behind the shower curtain. A dark window looked out on the backyard, which was currently little more than a featureless black void. The countertop was piled dense with an array of healthcare and beauty products. Travis began to sift through the pill-bottles casually, like someone appraising tomatoes at a supermarket. The entire spectacle alarmed Audrey; she was beginning to feel that Travis was succumbing to shock and losing touch with reality.
"Are you okay?" she asked, leaning in so that her face was between his and the mirror.
"Eh?"
"I mean, mentally. You don't seem like yourself."
"How do you know what 'myself' is?" asked Travis, screwing the lid off of an orange pill-bottle. "Damn. A little strong, but it'll have to do." He put two oxycodone on his tongue and washed it down with Bud Light. Putting the beer on the counter, he said, "How do you know who I am? You've only known me for an hour or three. For all you know, I could be a serial killer, skipping town, heading for a safe house somewhere."
"No, I don't think so," said Audrey. "For one, you're too scrawny. Don't you need a little muscle to haul all those bodies around?"
"For your information, I am very offended by your hasty assessment of my physical capabilities." He lifted his shirt to reveal a surprisingly taut physique. He wasn't chiselled by any means, but his chest wasn't sunken, either. In fact, it overhung his abdomen handsomely. The shirt dropped, and Audrey looked up into Travis's smart-assed expression. He was smiling a tiny little smile. "See? Don't be so quick to judge."
"Well, maybe now I should be afraid of you, then," said Audrey, backing out of the bathroom with a smirk. Emboldened by Travis's flirting, she approached the bedroom door and prepared to club someone or something with the flashlight. Nothing leapt out at her, fortunately, and she stepped into a refreshing breeze.
The bedroom was dark and cool, containing a queen-sized bed that seemed to occupy nearly half of the space inside, bisecting the room down the middle. On the far side was a folding closet door on a track, and to her right was a dresser. Items of sentimental significance were positioned on it, as well as personal items such as a comb and a pocket watch. The watch wasn't working, but the burning red digital numerals hovering over the dresser told her that it was half past one in the morning. The bed looked extremely inviting, neatly made with a soft purple cotton sheet.
Travis was standing behind her, close enough so that she could smell his breath. The sudden proximity sent a chill across her scalp, and she stepped away, startled. Travis entered and immediately flopped across the bed facedown. "This is our way-station for now," he murmured into the cool sheets. "Majority vote. Can't hurt to rest here a minute. Keep...keep going. Ugh."
The light bulb was broken. The wall switch was ineffective. Audrey tried to remember if the garage lights were broken, too, but the memory was elusive.
"Something's wrong here. Very wrong. I think we need to get out of here."
"Mwat?" said Travis. Audrey looked up at the jagged crown of glass, the only damage visible in the entire bedroom. Bits of glass sparkled on the pile carpeting.
"I don't think we need to be here. Something's weird here."
"Overreacting. Jussiddown. Take a load off."
That's when the closet door slid open.
April 12 2011, 21:41:38 UTC 1 year ago
April 15 2011, 16:21:32 UTC 1 year ago
November 4 2011, 03:59:44 UTC 6 months ago