“Okay, son,” Hannah said, a little caustically. “You think there’s never been dead batteries in this lot before? Think nobody’s ever screwed up and left batteries in a school bus over a Christmas holiday or a spring break? How about all summer? Yeah, it’s happened. They keep spare batteries in the workshop.” She motioned toward a long flat-roofed red brick building with closed-up garage bays. There were no windows. A green-painted metal door was closed at the top of a set of cement stairs. Dave figured that if all these entrances were locked, it was going to be a bitch to break into. Alongside the building were two diesel fuel pumps, and in the oil-stained concrete, a yellow fill cap that indicated the underground tank. “You want to stop wastin’ time, get in there, and see what’s what?” Hannah asked.
“Yeah. Have you got any explosives on you?” Dave looked at Joel. “You got any ideas?”
“We can try the door,” Joel answered with a shrug. “If it’s locked, try to blow it open, the Hannah Grimes way.”
“Or maybe,” Hannah said, “we can walk around to the other side of the building. There’s one window in this place, and it’s in the shop manager’s office. Used to overlook a flower garden.”
“How do you know all this?” Dave asked.
She smiled, the deep lines crinkling up around her eyes. The smile was of a memory, and Dave thought it softened her hard face enough to reveal someone who had once been almost pretty. Almost. “Kenny Ray was my honey for awhile,” she said. “I planted the flowers so he’d have somethin’ nice to look at when I wasn’t around.”
“So that’s why you volunteered to begin with, I’m figuring?” Joel asked.
“Maybe. Never know who you’ll meet at your neighborhood bar. Time’s movin’, friends.”
The window was positioned just above Dave’s head and was broken out. The flower garden had long gone to the corrosive rain and the twists of time. Dave figured that if someone had broken in this way, they’d probably come out through the door but had closed it behind them. A scavenger with a sense of order, in a mad, disordered world.
“Let’s try the door,” he said.
As he went up the steps, Dave felt like asking God for a favor. He wasn’t religious, was far from it, and if he’d been at all religious before the death of his family, that terrible event had wiped the visions of Heaven out of his head. He knew Hell existed, though. No doubt about that. It was everywhere now, burst from its realm of space and time. God, Dave thought as he reached the top of the stairs, if there’s anything to you, how about giving us a break? How about manning up and helping us?
They needed so much to get one of those buses moving. They needed luck and about eight feet of hose, a hand crank pump of some kind, and two new batteries. They needed a probe to find out if there was already fuel in any of the buses, tanks so they wouldn’t be wasting their time on a dry hole. They needed so much, and there were so many people depending on them.
But right now they needed for that door to open.
Dave reached out for the handle.
He felt his face tighten in preparation for disappointment. But even if this damned door is locked, he thought, we’ve got the broken window. Old Kenny Ray’s window, looking out at the flowers of love.
Help us, he thought, and tears stung his eyes. Please.
He grasped the door’s handle and pulled.
H
Through the binoculars, Ethan saw what was coming.
It had once been a yellow school bus, but the rain had done its damage. The top of the bus was rusted brown, and brown streaks of rust had dripped down the sides. Poudre School District was imprinted on the bus in faded letters, and the number 712. The bus was going slow, in allowance for the two horses whose reins were tied to the rear bumper.
“They found a school bus!” Gary shouted to the people who waited below. There was a stir of activity as even some of the severely wounded managed to haul themselves to their feet. JayDee, Olivia, and and a few of the others had been trying to give them comfort, as much as could be done without medical supplies. Gary took the binoculars from Ethan once more and watched the bus approach. “Christ, I never thought they’d find anything!”
Ethan said, “I believe in Dave.”
In another moment, the bus pulled into the open entranceway, came up the quake-cracked road, and stopped where the survivors had gathered near the swimming pool, in the shadow of the dead Gorgon ship.
The doors opened, and Joel was the first one off, followed by Dave and then Hannah. All of them were dirtier than before, if that was possible. They looked wrecked. Dave staggered and had to catch hold of Joel’s shoulder to keep from falling. As those who could walk crowded around, Dave caught sight of Ethan standing up on the tower with Gary and Nikki, and he gave a slight nod that said, I haven’t forgotten.
“Let’s get these people on board,” Dave said to Olivia, who came up to him with a plastic jug of water. He took a swig and passed it to Hannah. “Sorry, we lost one of your horses.”
“We lost the rest to a group who decided to go on. No matter, we can’t keep them.” Her eyes looked bruised, but her voice was steady. “I’m going to untie those two.”
Dave nodded. The important thing now was getting everyone out of here. Bus 712 had had a little more than a quarter tank of fuel already in it before Dave had used the pry bar, rubber hose, and metal containers he’d found to siphon diesel out of the underground tank. There had been four boxed-up heavy-duty batteries in the workshop; now two were in the bus and two were still in their boxes at the back of the bus. While they were at it, they’d put new oil in the engine, and though the thing still ran rough after being awakened from its long sleep, it did run, the wheels turned, it had an uncracked windshield, and six pretty good tires, and Dave thanked God for the Blue Bird bus company. He thanked God also for Hannah, who had gotten them around a lot of debris without tearing up the tires.
“Couldn’t get to Poudre Valley North. Every way we tried was blocked,” he told JayDee as he helped get people aboard. “We went to Poudre Valley South, but every drug in the storeroom was gone. Hell, I wouldn’t know what to get if there’d been anything there but empty shelves. We stopped at a CVS and two Walgreen’s, both cleared out. Figure we might do better down the road.” Billy Bancroft was still cursing as he was carried on, but Dave knew it was to mask a lot of pain. A small number of canned goods had been recovered, as well as a few pistols, rifles, and some ammunition. Four oil lamps and two bottles of fuel made the cut. A dozen plastic jugs of water were put aboard. There was not going to be room in the bus for the heavy machine guns, and the ammunition was almost gone for those, so Dave and Olivia made the tough decision to leave them.
Ethan, Nikki, and Gary stood up on the tower as the bus was being loaded, and finally Gary gave a sigh and said, “I’m not going to say I’ll miss this place, but it kept us alive.” He put a hand out to stroke the machine gun on its swivel. “I’d take this, if I had my way. Just hope we don’t wish we had it, wherever we’re going.” He cast one more look around at the sorry fate of the Panther Ridge Apartments, and then he went down the ladder.
Ethan was alone with Nikki.
She was staring at him, and her silence was making him nervous. “We’d better go,” he said. He started for the ladder.
“I’ve heard things about you,” she said, and he stopped. “I’ve heard somebody say you think you caused the quakes that night.”
He shrugged, but he didn’t look at her. “Who told you that?”
“Somebody who heard it from somebody who heard it from somebody else. People think you must be…like…whacko.”