They were.
He opened the door.
Johnny leapt in, sticking a .30-06 in his face, then withdrawing it. “You?” he said, dumbfounded. “What in the hell are you doing alive?”
Lou shook his head. “I’m too pretty to die.”
Lisa dragged herself in and Lou shut the door behind her.
“We gotta stop meeting like this,” he told her.
She laughed or tried to… but hell, she looked like ten miles of bad road. She smiled grimly and tossed him a pack of cigarettes, then collapsed into a rear seat.
Lou took them, lighting one up, wondering, though, if she’d been infected.
Johnny and he looked at each other and Johnny shook his head. “No,” he said, reading his mind, “it’s not that.”
Lou saw figures creeping from the shadows and got the bus going again. And while he did that, Johnny told him yet another story. Except this one was about a certain rock star with a particularly bad habit.
Lou exhaled a column of smoke, keeping the bus under twenty-five to save fuel. “You mean… you mean like a… a…”
“Junkie,” Lisa said in a croaking, broken voice. “That’s me.”
He supposed it didn’t matter.
It wasn’t any of his damn business… except, Christ, she looked rough. A bag of bones topped by tangled mess of long, dark hair. Even her breathing seemed ragged. She hugged herself back there, rocking back and forth. He had to wonder if infection by the Laughing Man germ could really be any worse than heroin withdrawal.
He searched for words, finally found them. “If we can get our asses out of here, Lisa, we can get you to a hospital. They have things, I bet, that would make it easier.”
She said nothing. Her chin was resting on the seat before her, her eyes shining dimly in the dark.
Johnny said, “First we have to get out.”
Lou nodded. “Exactly what I’ve been thinking about. You know that barricade of cars? What do you say the chances are of us ramming through it with this rig?”
Johnny considered it. The green dash lights winked off his bald head. “I’d say maybe it’ll work.” He shrugged. “And if not, beats the living shit out of sitting here doing nothing.”
“How about you, Lisa?” Lou asked. “You concur?”
She mumbled in assent.
That was that then.
Lou pulled a U-turn, plowing through a few yards and taking out some rose bushes and a few withering flowerbeds. Off in the darkness, he could see the ever-present eyes of their silent witnesses. A few minutes later, he was moving up Chestnut.
“I suggest everyone hang on now,” he told them.
Lisa crouched down between the seats.
Johnny stayed next to Lou, putting down his rifle and clutching the chrome handbar with everything he had.
“There’s gonna be a jailbreak,” Lisa said in a low, tortured voice, an old Thin Lizzy song echoing in her brain.
“Lot of steel in this bitch. But she’s light, rolls easy,” Johnny said, more to himself than the others.
Lou navigated his way up Chestnut, leaving the way he’d originally come in. The bus was doing fifty by the time he passed his little Grand Am parked at the curb, doors wide open. At sixty the bus started to rattle a bit. The steel floor plating began to vibrate and it went right through their feet and up into their bones.
“Keep it there,” Johnny said over the noise of the engine. “She ain’t made for too much speed. Fifty, sixty’s plenty. If there’s no heavy metal in that barricade—big trucks, heavy equipment and the like—we’ll smash right through. Those sonsofbitches’ll never stop us.”
Half a block from the barricade, they could see lights.
But these were not the flickering, burning lights of bodies being roasted. These were electric lights—from vehicles, from searchlights. Closer they got, they could see now that the barricade had been pushed aside.
“What the hell is this?” Lou said. “The army?”
“Slow down,” Johnny said with an air of urgency.
“What—”
“Slow the fuck down!” Johnny snapped. “Now!”
He was up at the dash, face to the windshield, checking out what they were driving into and not liking it one bit. Beams from searchlights played over the bus, blinding him.
Lou downshifted and brought the bus to a crawl.
“Turn around,” Johnny said. “Right now.”
Lou was going to ask him why in the hell he should do that when he heard the popping of automatic weapons. The front of the bus was grazed by bullets. Two or three holes appeared in the windshield.
“Sonofbitch!” he said, wheeling the bus around in a huge, rocking circle and coming back onto the street again.
The bus was filled with light now.
A vehicle was coming up fast behind them. It looked to be some sort of assault vehicle. More bullets slammed into the back of the bus. There was a gun mounted on the approaching vehicle.
Lou saw fire belching from it.
The rounds that struck the bus didn’t ricochet off this time, they ripped right through the metal. Suddenly, the bus was full of flying lead and shattering glass, bits of metal spraying around like shrapnel. They were firing a machine gun at them. There was no doubt of that. Slugs were ripping through the seats, tearing into the dashboard. The windshield took a volley and collapsed into itself, a sheet of safety glass fell into Lou’s lap.
He got the bus going—forty, fifty.
The bullets still rained down on them. One of them burst through his shoulder, another grazed his leg.
He cried out and pushed down on the accelerator.
The pursuing vehicle fell behind.
“We’re losing ’em!” Johnny called out.
The vehicle—Lou was pretty sure it was a Hummer, like the troops had used in Iraq—was falling behind now. He figured it was on purpose, as if the troops weren’t allowed to chase them beyond a certain point.
He was driving with one hand now, his left arm numb from shoulder to wrist.
He was bleeding profusely.
More searchlights played over them now. These from above.
“Helicopter!” Johnny said.
Lou could heard the rapid thunk-thunk of its rotors as if it were right on top of them. There was a sudden flash of light and the street ahead of them exploded, air-to-surface rockets blowing great chunks of road into fragments.
He knew what came next.
He saw the plate glass front of a department store and spun the wheel.
The bus rocked over the curb, took out two parking meters in a spray of pennies, and went right through the front of the store. Shards of glass and wood exploded in the air. Mannequins were dismembered. Lawn furniture was turned to kindling. A display of gas grills was sent airborne. The bus rammed through a counter, coughed, jerked, and died.
Lou was hurting.
Not only his shoulder and leg now, but his face and arms which were a mass of tiny, innumerable cuts from flying bits of glass. He’d managed to shield his eyes, though. And they were about the only thing that didn’t hurt.
Johnny pulled himself from the floor, scraps of glass and wood rained off him. “Everyone okay?” he said.
“Yeah, I’ll live,” Lisa sighed.
Lou dragged himself from behind the wheel, a mannequin arm wearing a cheap, flashy bracelet slid from his lap. “I’m hit,” he said to them.
Johnny said, “How bad?”
Lou told him.
“You’ll survive.”
“Gas,” Lisa said. “I smell gas.”
They all did. It was getting stronger by the moment.
Johnny helped Lisa to her feet. “They must’ve got the tank. Everybody out. Right fucking now!” He found his rifle and Lou’s shotgun, took them with.
Bruised and battered and bleeding, they helped each other from the bus, wading through the wreckage of the department store. Carefully, quiet as they could be with glass crunching under foot, they stepped out into the street. The chill night air stank not only of gasoline, but of cordite and smoke.
They could see the glow of the expanding fire in the east.
They hobbled up the block
They ducked into an alley and collapsed there, waiting.
The helicopter did not return. The pilot must’ve figured (wrongly) that he’d hit the bus, sent it careening into the storefront. They could still hear gunfire, occasional booming explosions.
“What the fuck’s wrong with those bastards?” Lou wanted to know. He slipped a cigarette between his lips and Lisa lit it with badly trembling hands.
She shook violently, pulled in a ragged breath. “Maybe… they think we’re rabids.”
Johnny was watching the streets. “I don’t think it matters to them by this point,” he said grimly. “I don’t think those boys are from a conventional unit. Some sort of emergency response group, a containment unit, NBC. Sort of troopers that are trained to crush and quarantine an area in the wake of a biological or chemical attack.”
“So we’re fucked?” Lou said.
“Maybe. As far as they’re concerned, we’re all infected. Whether this whole clusterfuck was on purpose or by accident doesn’t matter now. Nobody’s coming out of here. They can’t have that.”
Lou shook his head. “They can’t get away with that.”
“Sure they can. They’ve been planning and preparing for an emergency like this for years.”
“The media, though,” Lisa said. “If they get a hold of this…”
Johnny smiled. “And they will, but they’ll only learn what the feds want them to know. Cut River? Attacked by terrorists, maybe. Militias. Some bullshit like that. We can only be sure of one thing—they’ll have every eventuality covered.”
“They can’t. It’s too big.”
Johnny shook his head. “They do it every day, Lisa. Every time you hear about a a political scandal or an act of terrorism… you can be sure that what you are told and what really happened are not the same thing. Perception management. That’s why nine out of ten people surveyed prefer bullshit. It makes it easier to sleep at night.”
Lou grunted. “Johnny is like our own Jesse Ventura.”
“It must be spooky in your head,” Lisa said.
“You have no idea,” Johnny said. “I’ve seen things that would turn your hair white. If we had the time, I’d tell you what really was behind Watergate.”
Lou found it easy enough by this point to accept everything Johnny said. He didn’t argue. “We have to contact the outside world,” he said. “That’s what we have to do.”
Johnny shook his head. “No phones. Even if some were working, they’d cut the lines. They’ve isolated us, people. They won’t let us out. Even CBs and Ham radios will be jammed, I bet.”
Then Lou thought of it. “The municipal building. The police cruisers there. They have radios.”
Johnny was going to object, but didn’t. “Damn straight,” he said. “Even if we don’t make it out, we can broadcast, tell the world what’s going on here.” He seemed very happy suddenly. After all these years, he’d finally found a way to fuck the government that had fucked him.
They made their way out into the streets.
The municipal building was about a half mile from them, they could see its cyclopean girth squatting on the hill, overseeing the entire town. It was a long way in a warzone, but it was the only way.
“Let’s do it,” Johnny said.