“How far?”
“A good mile and a half.”
Everyone growled.
Dylan handed Tyson his camera. “I’ll try to hot-wire the bus,” Dylan said.
“Why did you wait until now to say something?” the director asked.
“We were about to hike it to the Wrights,” Terrence said.
“Hike?” the director said.
“Ugh, do you want me to do it or not?” Dylan asked.
We nodded.
We watched him do what we’d all seen in movies or on TV shows. He removed the panel and tried manually turning the ignition switch with a screwdriver, and surprisingly it worked.
“Good, I don’t have to strip wires to hot-wire,” Dylan said, sitting in the driver’s seat. “I’m guessing you want me to drive too.”
“No, no, I’ve got it,” the bus driver said, wiping his mouth on his sleeve. “I’m the only one sober to drive.”
The bus didn’t have quite the power it did when we’d arrived on the mountain, but we had the downward momentum and just coasted until we reached the bottom. We turned on the interstate and headed back to Griffin Flat.
Interstate 40 was deserted. There were no automobiles or semis. It was strange. It felt strange. The air was thick with dust, and the bus driver had to turn on the fog lights.
Everyone was quiet and looking out the windows. The trees had been stripped of their leaves and bark. And huge areas where trees once stood were now barren.
“Where’s your camera, Dylan?” the director asked. “We need to get this on tape. It would be perfect as transition material.”
“How did Skeet do this?” I asked.
“Don’t you understand how this works?” Dylan asked.
“Apparently I don’t. Because it looks like he blew up half the state.”
“Well, of course it does. He’s the best in the business,” the director said.
The bus driver used the windshield wipers to clear away the black soot.
Dylan grabbed his camera and went to the bus steps. He pried open the door as we drove down the interstate—the only one—and filmed the desolate wasteland that was known as Central Arkansas. The smell of rotting trash filled the bus. We covered our noses with our jackets. Like that did any good.
“Guys, my eyes,” Owen said, leaning his head up against the seat in front of him.
“Can you please stop your complaining? I’ve lost three teeth. Do you understand how much time that is going to take to get fixed?” Freddy asked, climbing on his seat to turn to stare at him.
“Wow,” Max mouthed, looking at me from across the aisle. “You made out with him.” He smiled. “Yeah, you did.” He held out his hand for a high five. “Don’t leave me hanging.”
I slapped his hand away.
A bloodcurdling scream echoed throughout the bus and made the bus driver swerve. It knocked me against the window and made Terrence hit his chin on the seat back. And Dylan almost went splat on the concrete highway as we zoomed at a respectable seventy miles per hour.
“What the hell?” Tyson said, looking at Owen.
I made my way up the aisle and almost lost my lunch. Terrence did. He had a weak stomach.
“My eyeball just fell into my lap,” Owen got out, whimpering.
“That’s not normal,” Freddy said.
“We need to get him to a doctor,” I said. “Keep going to Conway. Don’t stop in Russellville. For the love of God, don’t stop in Russellville.”
The bus driver pressed on the gas, and he topped the max speed for a yellow school bus, which was eighty.
“Going to die, we are, hmmmmmmmm,” Max said in his Yoda voice.
“I’m fine,” Owen said. “I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine,” I said.
“That’s not an eyeball,” Freddy said, picking up the so-called eyeball. “It’s just a bloody, balled-up bandage.”
Max went up to Owen’s seat, lifted the bandage, and poked him in both eyes.
Owen screamed.
“I’m not a doctor, but I can say with certainty that you still have both eyes,” Max said.
“That hurt, asshole.”
“Yeah, but it’s better to know, right?”
Owen closed his eyes and leaned his head back on his seat.
“False alarm. We don’t need to go to the hospital,” Freddy said. “He’s still got both eyes.”
“I still can’t see a damn thing,” Owen whispered.
“Well, don’t worry, neither can I,” the bus driver said, turning into the right lane.
We were almost home.
“Insane how it spread this far,” Dylan said, still filming the outside.
“This is going to cost us a hell of a lot of money,” the director replied.
Griffin Flat was the next exit.
“The first thing I’m going to do is get out of these awful clothes and into something—” Freddy stared out the window. “Clean,” he said, finishing his thought.
We got off the interstate and turned right at the stop sign, and around the sharp corner that nearly knocked Dylan out of the bus again. The bus driver had to dodge abandoned cars as he swerved onto Sixth Street.
There was smoke everywhere. The crew had set fire to a couple of old buildings on Sixth Street, and the blaze had spread. There was glass everywhere from broken windows. Citizens of Pikesville, aka Griffin Flat, were walking around in a daze with shaved bald heads, prosthetic latex scar tissue, and burn marks affixed to their faces, plastered with coats of artificial mud and dressed in tattered clothes and coughing up movie blood and their oatmeal-coated guts due to their faking radiation sickness.
Dylan kept filming, but the director looked a little sick. “Like I said, this is going to cost us a hell of a lot of money.”
-
Hours after the atomic bomb falls on Pikesville, rescue squads are dispatched to scour the area for stragglers to get them to shelters. Danger is imminent. The deadly cloud of radioactive particles, invisible to the naked eye, will soon blanket the town.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
The road to the fairgrounds was blocked. A huge sign, written in capital letters—the end is here—was crudely spray-painted with an x.
“What’s going on?” I asked, sitting up straight.
“I think the explosion was worse than we thought,” Dylan said, shutting the bus door with one hand and then grabbing the handle to help him up. He went back to his seat.
“Bet it looks great on film, though,” the director said. “I bet Popeye got great footage.”
Popeye was the other camera guy. Not his real name. They called him that because he smelled like spinach. He was the one who got all the footage from Main Street.
While the director talked Oscar nominations and award speeches, I was wondering when and how and, more importantly, who was going to rebuild our town.
I bet Mayor Hershott was angry. But I also bet he already had a plan. He always had plans. They just were never really executed well.
The bus driver put the bus in park and pulled the lever to open the door. He was the first one off the bus. The director followed him, along with Dylan and Freddy. Terrence helped Owen off, then Max, Tyson, and me. But I turned around and grabbed the screwdriver from the ignition. Protection. Just in case. I hid it in my coat pocket and ran to catch up with the group. The smell was intoxicating. And that wasn’t a good thing.
The gate that used to be there was gone, like it had disintegrated. Same went for the fence and the golf carts, and the trailers.
“What the hell happened?” Freddy asked the director, who was just as dumbfounded.
The explosion took out everything.
We did a walk-through. Nothing was there. We spent most of the time going, “That was there, and that was there, and that was there.” Even the Ferris wheel was now gone too. The shell of a minivan was left standing, though. It was Kitty’s and Raymond’s van. They made it back here. But where were they?
“Kitty? Raymond?” I yelled.
We searched all over, but there wasn’t a soul here. The director looked for a place to sit, but there was no place to sit except the ground. And no one wanted to sit on the ground.
I held the screwdriver out in front of me for protection.
“Is anyone here? Anyone at all?” Tyson yelled.
No one responded. It was strange. I thought I saw a cockroach as big as my head—but on further thinking about it, it probably was just a shadow—but anyway, I wasn’t paying attention, and I tripped on debris and almost face-planted.
I screamed and nearly fainted. Max grabbed a stick, and we all ran over to where they were.
Max pointed.
I screamed.
Freddy too.
The bus driver passed out.
Terrence and Tyson threw up.
Dylan filmed it all.
“Is that—a body?” I asked. “Was that a person?”
Max nudged it with a stick, and then he walked over to it. It was hard and made a hollow noise. A human being wouldn’t make that noise.
The director bent over and touched the crusted black thing with his hand. “I think it’s a mannequin.”
Everyone took a deep breath and laughed.
These explosions that Skeet built had done more damage than anyone thought.
We got back on the bus. I handed the screwdriver to the bus driver, and he started the engine. There was nothing left for us here. Freddy was crying. He lost all those video games and his console in the explosion. But I didn’t know who was more distraught, him or Terrence.
We went back to Sixth Street.
The director ran up to a few people who were out, trying to ask them what happened. Where Skeet was. Where the rest of his cast was at. But they just stared at him. Black eyes. Like all the life was sucked out. Or a gag order had been put in place.
“Ma’am,” the director called, “can you tell me if you’ve seen any of my crew?”
She looked up at him and burst into tears and ran down the sidewalk.
“Well, that can’t be good.”
Dylan was filming all of this.
“Wait!” the director yelled, and we stopped dead in our tracks. “How stupid are we? Filming has to be going on. We better get out of the shot.”
He moved across the street and we followed. Stood underneath an awning waiting to hear “cut.” But “cut” never came.
“It was supposed to be a long sequence,” the director said.
Dewayne’s store was just down the way. Next to Dane’s Ice Cream Shoppe. The windows were broken out and trashed. Comic books were torn, wet, or burned. I dug through the pile and found one that was in okay condition. I stuffed it in my bag.
Terrence came out from the café and passed out candy bars. One for each of us.
We ate and went searching for more. This time we found Cokes, which we drank with our second candy bar. And a pair of sunglasses for Owen. We waited for a while until Max said we could go to school, and according to the clock above the cash register, school was in session, but closer inspection revealed the clock had died at exactly 10:05. There had to be a logical explanation. We climbed onto the bus and went to school.