Megan scrambled for the driver’s seat. The sobs escaping me as I lay on the dirty floor were like nothing I’d experienced before. They were the wails of a mourning lover. Of a victim. And of a survivor. And I didn’t know if I really wanted to be a survivor if it meant I would never have Callie again. I laid my cheek against the cool floor as I cried because I didn’t have the strength to do anything else. Eunice tried to soothe me and help me to a seat but I told her to leave me be.
The bus lurched forward and I was vaguely aware of the jarring way it jumped and pitched and the dull thud and bump of the vehicle as Megan began to mow down any man in her path.
Chapter 12
The cacophonous roar of the bus’s engine combined with thuds and the screech of metal on metal and the yells of directions shouted between Eunice and Megan but the clatter of everything happening around me couldn’t penetrate the despair and pain filling my head and body as I lay on the floor of the bus.
The mantra Callie’s dead! played over and over in my head to the point the words lost all meaning and I panicked about losing the memory of her. The fear of losing her a second time sent me into a renewed fit of sobs. I couldn’t be sure if the pain of losing her was greater than my physical pain but the combination of the two was crushing and I was certain—if not somehow wishing—I was dying. My cunt hurt. My ass, knees, and hands were covered in fresh road rash. My whole arm ached with the burn from the tail pipe of the bus. Every muscle in my body felt as though it was pulled and my wrists, elbows, and shoulders were filled with the overexerted ache of having been yanked on by Eunice and Megan. But none of it compared to the chest-crushing and stomach-wrenching ache of grief.
I curled into a fetal position on the floor as Eunice and Megan debated on taking an exit ramp or staying on the city street. A trickle of something ran from my vagina and down my thigh and I thought, Oh, please, please, please, for the love of anything good left in this world, please don’t let that be semen. As a lesbian, birth control was something I’d never bothered with. The fear of getting pregnant with that fat fuck’s child made me nauseated and I dry heaved. I scrambled to a seat and examined my cunt to find the trickle was blood, most likely from a tear in my vagina. I dry heaved again.
Eunice called from the front of the bus, “Are you okay?”
“That may be the stupidest question anyone has ever asked me!” I responded.
She was crouched in the seat behind Megan. She looked around frantically and noticed a green box with ‘first aid’ printed in red letters on it strapped to the bus’s wall above the front window. She stood and teetered on her feet as Megan navigated. I stood on shaky legs, covering my crotch with one hand. I steadied myself with my free hand, holding onto the seat backs, and made my way toward the front. I sat in the front seat in front of the door. The raw skin of my ass burned when it touched the cold and clammy material of the seat. As Eunice struggled to dislodge the first aid kit I noticed a broom had been lodged between the steps and the folding door. I assumed it was to brace against anyone trying to shove it open.
Once Eunice freed the kit she sat across from me and began rifling though its contents. She removed some antibiotic ointment, squirted a large amount of it on a gauze pad, and motioned for me to move to the edge of my seat. I complied and she proceeded to gently swab my hands and knees.
I took in our surroundings as she worked. We were on the highway running through the city. Megan was steering the bus down the barely wide enough strip on the edge of the road designed for emergency pull off. Empty cars littered the highway. Some of them were wrecked into each other. Others were abandoned. I noticed an unmoving body in the road ahead and a man kneeling over its head. It became obvious the body was a dead woman as we approached it and the man was fucking her mouth. Men were scattered everywhere. We passed one man desperately trying to fuck the tail pipe of a vehicle crashed into the median concrete barrier. I spotted more dead bodies of broken women as Megan maneuvered the bus around a car parked on the emergency strip.
Eunice taped gauze bandages to my wounds before asking me to stand and turn around. I did as she asked and faced the window to look at the city. Black columns of smoke billowed into the sky in several spots and I wondered if they were distress signals from women trying to mark their location or the ghosts of the destruction the men were causing.
Eunice told me to keep standing and moved to the glove compartment by the steps. The faint calls of the men could be heard as we passed them.
“Let’s get out of this place so we can hate each other in the morning!”
“What’s a babe like you doing not sitting on my lap?!”
“Wanna blow this joint and then me?!”
“I’m a professional orgasm installer!”
“She was asking for it!”
“It’s a man’s world, baby!”
Eunice returned with a travel package of tissues and a couple of shop rags. She dressed the scrapes on my buttocks with the tissues and then tied two of the rags together.
She handed me the dirty rags. “Here. I think we can make you some cover.”
I took them from her. “How?”
She lifted a rolled up Ace bandage from the first aid kit. “In my day you had to wear a belt with your maxi pad.”
I’d heard older women reference the old fashioned form of sanitary napkins before and always thanked the corporations for inventing a more convenient self-adhesive version by the time I’d hit puberty. There was something humiliating about grown women being forced to wear a large diaper to deal with their periods.
I placed the rags between my legs and did my best to hold up the front and back as Eunice wrapped my waist with the elastic. She then added several strips of gauze tape to the makeshift band and rags to keep them from slipping out. The result was a sumo wrestler belt. It was better than nothing and the best we could do. I sat gingerly, hoping the whole contraption wouldn’t fly apart. It seemed to work, for now.
Once I sat my attention was drawn to a black box with a dangling spiral cord mounted on the underneath of the dash near Megan. It took me a few seconds to register what it was and I bolted for it. The scrapes on my knee protested as I fell on them in front of the contraption. I lifted the mouth piece for the CB radio and turned it on.
Megan broke her concentration from driving long enough to realize what I’d discovered. “Holy shit!” she proclaimed. “Put it on channel nine!” She yanked the wheel abruptly.
The sudden shift of the bus knocked me to my butt. The scratches on my buttocks flared with a new pain but I ignored them and did what Megan told me.
The tiny speaker squelched and crackled as I flipped through the channels before emanating the lunatic ramblings of the President once I reached channel nine.
Megan slammed the heel of her hand into the steering wheel. “Fuck! They’re blocking the emergency channel by broadcasting it there. Keep flipping through and call mayday. If you run across any chatter say breaker.”
I turned the dial back to the beginning and began to call and listen. I skipped over channel nine once I reached it.
Megan mumbled a curse under her breath and I could make out a man’s voice from outside before a loud bang came from the front of the bus. Eunice let out a strangled yelp. The bus rocked left and right, almost pitching me into the stairwell. I was filled with a feeling of glee and smugness as I realized we’d hit and run over a man.
When I made it to channel nineteen I caught the tail end of someone speaking before it went silent.
My heart hammered and I yelled into the microphone, “Mayday! Mayday!”