CHAPTER 20

The acid started to work while they were on the road between L.A. and Barstow. Jeff Stavers was sweating. His mouth felt dry. Splotches of heat seemed to move across his face. He was disoriented, but oddly, it wasn’t an uncomfortable feeling. He actually felt kind of giddy.

He got up and walked to the rear of the bus, where they had set up a full-service wet bar. The bus was swaying under his feet. He grabbed the headrests on either side of him and closed his eyes and imagined himself floating. This was how he used to feel, walking past Widener Library in the early morning, the only sound the snow crunching beneath his shoes. The whole world had been at his feet in those days, ready for the taking. Now, his skin was tingling with the memory of snow. Colin always bought the best drugs money could buy, and time hadn’t changed that.

He passed Colin and Katrina Cummz on his way to the bar. They were both high. Colin was squinting, eyes beet red and drowsy. His clothes and hair somehow managed to combine a look of tousled unconcern with immaculately tailored elegance. Katrina, wearing a flimsy white blouse with a black lacy bra clearly visible through the fabric and a faded and alluringly shredded blue jean skirt, was curled up in the seat next to him, her big blue eyes fixed on Colin. A strappy sandal hung seductively from her toes.

She was asking him what he thought about the riots. When they left L.A., the news was breaking in on all the channels, talking about the street fighting, about how the LAPD was getting overrun and whole areas of the city had devolved into anarchy.

“It’s like Rodney King all over again,” Jeff heard Colin tell her. “It gets dull, if you ask me.” He patted Katrina Cummz on her tan, well-muscled thigh, his fingers lingering at the hem of her skirt. “Don’t you let it worry you. It’ll be long over by the time we get back.”

“You think?” she said. She was responding to his touch, and her own hand was sliding up Colin’s thigh to his crotch.

It almost sounded like she was purring, and Jeff thought, She’s perfect for him, completely vacuous. Or at least she seemed that way. Maybe she wasn’t. Maybe she was a freaking rocket scientist. Maybe she had a natural gift for recognizing what men want from a woman, and for giving it to them. Talent was a sort of intelligence, wasn’t it? If it was, her intelligence certainly came across in the movies she made.

He continued back to the bar and opened the little personal-sized refrigerator for some ice cubes.

Colin’s two other groomsmen let out a whoop. One of them was an investment banker with some big Japanese bank. The other was some kind of executive with Paramount. Jeff couldn’t remember which was which.

One of them was sliding a black bra off the shoulders of one of the blonde porno queens they’d brought with them. Another blonde was sitting reverse-cowgirl style in the other guy’s lap, her head back and mouth open as his hands moved over her breasts.

Beyond them, toward the back of the bus, was Bellamy Blaze. She was watching him, stirring her drink with a fingernail that was as red as candy.

She smiled at him and he quickly looked away.

She made him nervous.

There was a sink next to the bar, and Jeff made an exaggerated show of dumping ice into his drink. Anything to keep from meeting her gaze. Then he took a cold can of Coke and mixed it with a heavy shot of Grey Goose.

He took one last look at her, saw she was still smiling at him, and quickly wandered back to his seat. He closed his eyes and let the drugs take over again.

When he opened them again, Bellamy Blaze was French kissing the two naked blondes. Colin’s other groomsmen were watching, hooting and hollering like a bunch of frat boys at a strip club. The girls had pretty much been interchangeable during the trip, fucking and sucking at the wink of an eye, all except for Bellamy Blaze. Jeff wasn’t sure if Colin had declared her off-limits for the other guys, but it was possible. Colin knew Jeff was infatuated with her. The subject had come up a few times in their e-mails. And it was just like him to spend forty thousand dollars on a week’s worth of drugs and reserve a porno star for his old best friend from school.

Now that she wasn’t watching him, he was watching her. The warm, sultry chords at the beginning of Gordon Lightfoot’s “Sundown” came over the bus speakers, and Bellamy Blaze disentangled herself from the naked blondes and drifted forward, her hands in her hair, eyes closed, lips barely parted in a gesture of obvious arousal. She was wearing a loose pair of faded blue jeans that were barely holding on to her hips. Her white camisole showed a lot of midriff and stretched around the fullness of her breasts.

The drugs were playing with Jeff’s senses now, creating an odd sort of visual synesthesia he could feel in his groin. The air became an almost liquid blur around her face. He watched the slow roll of her hips, and it seemed the song had taken physical form. Everything seemed so right about the way she moved, so effortlessly graceful.

His eyes rolled up to her face. She was looking at him again, watching him as she danced.

And then she was standing next to him. He had zoned out, he realized. But now he could smell her, and her scent was like some warm, wonderful blend of sandalwood and cloves and tarragon, only more delicate and distinctly feminine. There was a thin sheen of sweat on her belly.

He swallowed hard. Then he looked up.

“Your friend is quite a bullshitter,” she said.

“Huh?”

“Colin,” she said, and nodded back over her shoulder toward the rear of the bus. “You should hear him talk.”

“I have,” Jeff said. He laughed. “All four years we were at Harvard together.”

“Oh, God,” she said. “Don’t tell me you’re one of them.”

“One of what?”

“You went to Harvard? You’re one of those guys?”

“Yeah,” he said. He wasn’t quite sure why he felt embarrassed about it, but he did. “But don’t worry. None of it rubbed off.”

She smiled. “You mind if I sit down?”

“No,” he said. “That’d be okay. I mean, sure. Yeah. That’d be great.”

He winced. He sounded like a jackass.

But she didn’t seem to mind. She squeezed around him, her breasts passing only inches from his eyes. Her nipples were erect, and for a moment he thought he could actually see them through her camisole.

Or maybe it’s the drugs, he thought.

“I like the way you dance,” he said.

“This is one of my favorite songs,” she said.

“Really?” Again, he sounded too eager. Jesus, he was handling this badly. He looked for something to say, something brilliant to keep her attention, but his mind was a blank.

“I love seventies folk rock,” she said. “It’s cheesy, I know, but I still love it. Always have.”

“I don’t think it’s cheesy.”

“Yeah, it’s kind of cheesy,” she said, and laughed. “Fun, but cheesy.”

He started to ask her about music, but stopped himself. It would just end up sounding dumb. Jesus, why was he having such a hard time talking to her? He usually didn’t have this problem. Was it the drugs?

“Robin Tharp,” she said.

That brought him back into the moment. “What?”

“That’s my name,” she said. “My real name.” She rolled her eyes toward the two plastic blondes getting passed between Colin’s groomsmen. “I’m not anything like them, Jeff. No more than you and Colin are alike. I get the feeling neither one of us fits in here.”

A slow smile formed at the corner of his mouth.

“What do you suppose we do about that?” he said.

“I like to be treated like a real girl, Jeff. I like to hear guys call me by my real name. Will you do that for me?”

“Sure,” he said.

“Sundown” faded away. Static took its place. And then, a moment later, he heard a man’s voice talking Spanish.

Jeff cocked his head to listen.

“Is something wrong?” she said.

“Listen.”

He closed his eyes and tried to focus. The radio was spitting out static again. The man’s voice was coming in brokenly, but Jeff was getting enough of it to pull the sense out of the rapid-fire Spanish.

The man was talking about the collapse of the quarantine zone around the Houston area. Wave after wave of the infected were pouring out of South Texas, but apparently there were other problems farther east. Outbreaks had been reported in Florida, up the Atlantic seaboard, and out West. He said Los Angeles, San Francisco, Santa Barbara, San Diego, Las Vegas, Salt Lake City, and Phoenix, anywhere with a major airport, were reporting devastating outbreaks. The border states in Mexico—Baja, Sonora, Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo Leon, Tamaulipas—were in anarchy, the people there in a mad flight south, away from the infected pouring out of the United States.

Jeff opened his eyes. He looked at Bellamy Blaze—at Robin, he reminded himself. She had a hand over her mouth. Her face was stricken, her eyes wide.

“You speak Spanish?” he said.

She glanced at him and nodded.

“What are we gonna do?” she said.

Jeff looked back down the length of the bus. The others were partying at top volume, rubbing up against each other like alley cats in heat. For two days they had been like this, too high to notice the country was experiencing a full melt-down. Colin and the others still didn’t have a clue.

Jeff scrubbed a hand across his face and tried to think clearly. He couldn’t focus, and the more he tried, the faster his heart beat. His fingertips were trembling. Robin was saying something, but she sounded like a bird singing, the words pleasant but indistinct. Were they slowing down?

He leaned forward and looked out the window. The desert sands were the color of ripe wheat and dotted with innumerable green balls of sagebrush. Off in the distance, a low line of chalky black hills hunched up to the cloudless sky. Here and there, industrially drab block-shaped buildings shimmered in the heat. Traffic was forming itself into knots. And they were slowing down. He could feel it.

They stopped.

“What’s going on, Jeff?” Robin asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Something’s wrong,” she said.

All he could do was nod.

Then the driver put the vehicle in reverse and backed up as fast as he could go, sending everything in the bus rolling forward. The bus rocked violently from side to side as the driver struggled to control the wheel. Jeff was thrown from his seat. Robin had to catch herself by grabbing onto his shoulder. There was a stuttering bark of tires. Brakes squealed. They hit something, and the bus lurched violently to a stop.

For a moment, Jeff felt his whole body go limp. Then, after a long, disoriented moment, he looked up at Robin.

“Are you okay?”

She nodded.

“What the goddamn holy fuck is that asshole doing?” Colin shouted from behind them.

Colin’s other groomsmen echoed his angry shouts. One of the girls was crying. Jeff couldn’t tell which of them it was. Colin, still zipping up his pants, headed for the front.

“What are you going to do?” Jeff asked him.

“I’m about to put my boot up the fucking driver’s ass is what I’m going to do.”

The bus lurched forward again and there was another impact. Colin fell over the back of one of the chairs. When he straightened himself up, he was insane with rage. He slammed his fist into one of the overhead bins and screamed.

Then he charged forward. The other two groomsmen were right behind him. Jeff watched them go. He turned to Robin. “I got to stop him. He’s gonna kill that driver.”

She nodded.

A black curtain separated the party area from the driver’s section up front. Jeff pushed his way through the curtain and nearly ran into the back of one of Colin’s other groomsmen. Colin had started to scream at the driver, but now he was just standing there, staring out the windows.

Outside, in the distance, was the sparse industrial tedium of downtown Barstow, nothing but one metal warehouse after another. Traffic was snarled up all around them. They could hear tires skidding, the muffled sounds of people yelling, and every few moments there came the sickening crunch of metal and busting glass from somewhere behind them. People were moving between the cars. Some were running, obviously terrified. Others seemed to be injured. They were staggering through the drifting dust clouds and whirling smoke like wraiths coming out of a fog. Moans and screams surrounded them.

A middle-aged woman slapped a bloody hand against the folding glass door to their right. She was screaming at them for help. Jeff couldn’t make out what she was saying, but her terror was clear.

Then she disappeared down the length of the bus, still banging against the sides.

“Get us the fuck out of here,” Colin said to the driver.

The man looked at Colin and shook his head. “We can’t move,” he said. “We’re stuck.”

Then the driver reached under his seat and came up with a black revolver. “You people stay here,” he said.

“Where the fuck do you think you’re going?” Colin said.

The driver didn’t answer him. He threw open the folding doors and stepped down onto the street with his pistol pointed in the air. He looked right, then left, then stalked toward the traffic piled up in front of the bus.

“That fucking idiot,” Colin said. “Where the hell is he going?”

Colin stepped off the bus.

“Colin, wait,” Jeff said, but it was too late. Things were happening too quickly for his acid-muddled mind to catch up.

A moment later, he and Colin’s other two groomsmen were out on the street as well. Jeff felt the desert heat curl his hair, and for a moment the world was swimming around him.

“Colin, wait,” he said.

But Colin wasn’t listening. He was yelling at the driver, who was leveling his revolver at a man staggering toward them from between a pair of Honda Accords.

Jeff grabbed Colin and caught his shirt. Colin swatted at his hand, but when Jeff wouldn’t let go, Colin slid out of the shirt and ran after the bus driver, wearing only his T-shirt and slacks.

Jeff was left holding the shirt. He looked around, momentarily lost, and began to notice all the people. One guy, a kid of perhaps seventeen in torn and blood-soaked clothes, was approaching the bus driver from behind. One part of Jeff’s mind was aware that the kid was infected, and Jeff wanted to scream out for the driver to get out of the way, but that part seemed to be struggling through a dense fog, unable to make itself heard.

A man screamed out behind him. Jeff turned to see one of Colin’s groomsmen throwing a man in blue coveralls to the ground.

The groomsman landed on top of the man, pinning his shoulders to the pavement.

“Help me!” he said.

Jeff was the first to move. To his left was a pickup truck modified with steeple brackets in order to haul large panes of glass. In the confusion, glass had fallen off the truck and broken into pieces on the asphalt. Jeff saw one that looked like an icicle. He scooped it up, wrapped Colin’s shirt around one end to form a handle, and ran back to the two men struggling near the front of the bus.

“Move out of the way,” Jeff said. He had the shard of glass in both hands, the tapered point poised over the infected man’s face.

The groomsman didn’t move.

“Get out of the way,” Jeff said.

“I can’t,” the man shot back. “Just do it. Hurry.”

The zombie was clawing at the groomsman’s face. The groomsman was doing his best to deflect the zombie’s hands with his elbows, but he already had several deep gashes on his jaw and on his neck.

“Hurry,” he shouted.

Jeff took a breath and slammed the glass down. The point went deep into the zombie’s eye, stopping only when the edges of the glass caught in the orbital bone around the socket and couldn’t go any deeper.

Jeff lost his balance and fell over, the glass shard snapping with a brittle crack.

The groomsman climbed off the zombie, and the zombie made no effort to get up. He lay there with his arms spread eagle to the clear blue desert sky, his mouth open. His teeth were black with dried blood.

Jeff was sitting now, his back against a truck tire, watching the zombie. He heard a whimpering sound, and when he looked up, he saw that it was Colin, backing away from the carnage. He was shaking his head, a comma-shaped lock of his rumpled hair moving on his forehead with the motion.

Someone was yelling his name.

He looked to the bus and saw Robin standing there, pointing off to his right.

“Help him,” she said. “He’s got a gun. Help him.”

Jeff saw the driver backing up into the side of a Toyota 4Runner. In front of him was a man whose face was badly burned on one half, as though he’d slept in a puddle of battery acid. One arm hung limply at his side. The other was reaching for the driver. The driver fired at the man, hitting him in the limp arm. The burned zombie twisted away from the hit, but didn’t cry out.

“Ah, fuck me,” the driver said. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

He fired again, but this time only managed to hit the side of the car behind the zombie.

Colin’s other groomsman was kneeling beside his injured friend. Jeff grabbed him by the collar and pulled him to his feet. “Help me,” he said.

“Fuck off,” the groomsman said. He swatted Jeff’s hand away, then knelt again next to his friend, who was starting to convulse.

“You can’t do anything for him,” Jeff said.

The other man ignored him.

Jeff stood there, looking around uncertainly. He wasn’t sure what to do. His thoughts were so damn foggy. He took a step forward, stopped, then started forward again. Jeff grabbed the uninjured groomsman by the shoulder and pulled him away.

“Help me with the driver,” he said.

The man wheeled on Jeff and took a wild swing at his face. The blow missed by a good six inches, but it caused both men to teeter off balance and they stumbled backward. Jeff kept his feet and caught the other man. He pushed him up to his feet and stepped back right as another shot rang out, and this one was so close he heard it whiz past his ear.

In front of him, the groomsman he had just put back on his feet doubled over, punched in the gut by the bullet. A woman screamed. The groomsman swayed for a long moment on wobbly legs, then looked up at Jeff and fell over.

Confused, Jeff turned around. The bus driver was backing away from him. He didn’t seem to be aware of what he had just done. His expression was pure panic. The gun in his hand was shaking. He raised it once again, this time pointing it somewhere over Jeff’s shoulder.

The driver never saw the man who pulled him down from behind. Jeff watched him fall between a pickup truck and a Chevy Malibu and heard him screaming as the zombie tore into him.

When the screaming stopped, Jeff heard Robin calling his name. Colin was there, pushing his way past her and onto the bus in a panicked rush. Jeff stood in the middle of the highway, a dashed white line between his feet, and watched in horror as Colin dropped down behind the wheel, put the bus in gear, and hit the gas.

The bus lurched backward, traveled a few feet, and crashed into something.

“What are you doing?” Jeff said. “Wait.”

But Colin made no sign he’d heard him. He wrestled with the gearshift, then hit the gas again. He turned the wheel hand over hand, veering just to the right of Jeff.

There was another crash as the bus collided with a row of parked cars, but this time Colin didn’t let up. He kept the gas pedal mashed to the floor. Jeff heard the engine straining, the tires starting to slip on the asphalt.

The cars moved sideways. Slowly, inch by inch, the bus pushed its way through the cars.

Jeff glanced up at the windshield. Robin was there, screaming at him. She was waving him inside, toward the door. He jumped over a car’s hood just as the bus pushed it to the shoulder. Then he scrambled around the front of the bus and jumped on. He lunged forward and hit the lever to snap the doors shut behind him.

Colin was screaming at the top of his lungs as he piloted the bus forward through the cars. Jeff watched him and thought, Jesus help us, he’s fucking lost it.

Jeff held onto the railing next to the stairs as the bus bounced off the roadway. Peering over the dashboard, he could see they were headed for a large, and nearly empty, surface street. Colin straightened the bus out and as soon as they were on paved roads again he stopped screaming, though the muscles in his arms were still tightly knotted, his knuckles a bloodless white on the steering wheel.

“Colin,” Jeff said. “Colin, slow down.”

It took Colin a moment for the sense of what Jeff was saying to sink in, but when it did, he lifted his foot off the gas, and the bus slowed to a stop.

Jeff put a hand on his arm and pulled at it until Colin finally let go of the wheel.

“Come on,” he said, and guided Colin out of the driver’s seat. With Robin’s help, he managed to get Colin into a chair on the other side of the aisle. Then he dropped down behind the wheel and peered out the windshield. They could still hear screams and crunching metal from the freeway behind them, and here and there they saw people running, but the road ahead of them seemed relatively clear. A nearby street sign said they were at the intersection of Barstow Road and Windy Pass.

“What are we going to do?” Robin said.

“Figure out where we are first.”

He reached into his pants pocket and pulled out his cell phone. One bar. Good enough. He called up the menu and went to Google Maps. Right away, a map of the city popped up on the tiny screen. Barstow seemed to be laid out precisely along a north–south east–west grid. He zoomed in on their position, and a street name caught his eye.

“Jeff?” Robin said.

He looked over his shoulder at her. “It’s okay,” he said. “At least, I think it is. Here. Look at this.”

He showed her the map. With his thumb, he pointed to a horseshoe-shaped road on the southern edge of town.

“Harvard Street?” she said.

“Yep.”

“But it doesn’t go anywhere.”

There is a joke in there somewhere, he thought. He found it very funny, and he told himself he’d have to explain it to her sometime.

“It doesn’t,” he agreed. “But look at this.”

He pointed south of the horseshoe to a long, pencil-thin line on the map called Pipeline Road.

“It goes all the way to Interstate Forty, way over here. We bypass all the major population areas and end up here.”

She looked out at the desert doubtfully. “You think we can make it? I bet that road’s not even paved.”

“I don’t see that we’ve got any other choice.”

“No,” she said. “I guess we don’t.”

He smiled at her, then put the bus in gear.