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I risked a quick glance at the sign above the missing entry door.
ALL CONSOLIDATED MINES AND LIVING CAMPUS
“Make sure he gets off at Number Four,” my escort said.
“Poor bastard,” said the driver. He looked like he should be standing beside the road with his thumb out rather than at the wheel. “No luggage?”
I held up my bag.
“You’re a regular genie-us,” the driver said. “What you throwing him in the hole for?”
“Not my decision.”
“Hey, buddy, do me a favor. Talk to your boss about getting me out of this pickle-chiller and getting me chauffeur work. I’ve kept this thing out of the potholes, so I should be able to take one of the Maynes family to the golf course and back. Do that and I’ll make sure he’s properly ear-tagged at Number Four.”
My ears flicked involuntarily back.
“You firearm qualified?”
“It’s in the works. The vetting’s done and my picture’s turned in.”
My escort smiled and raised his chin, a duke getting ready to grant a favor to a peasant while looking down his nose at the request. “Sure, pal. Write down your name and locator number.”
The driver extracted an old envelope and carefully spelled out his name in block capitals and added a nine-digit series of letters and numbers, tongue poking at the side of his mouth in concentration. He handed it over. “Don’t forget me now.”
“Whether I forget or not depends on the big boy arriving.”
The other passengers—spouses of miners by the look of them, a couple carrying babies in baskets—didn’t seem to object to the driver taking his time with the security man.
The driver indicated that I should sit all the way at the back of the bus. He opened a box under his seat and took out a length of heavy dog chain. He proceeded to belt me into my seat by throwing a figure eight of chain around my chest, then fastening it with a keyed padlock.
I accepted the chains and made a show of sniffing his hands as he checked the lock.
“Hope you went potty before you got on my bus,” he said.
As we pulled away, my escort made a great show of pocketing the envelope with the driver’s name. When the White Palace was out of sight, I spent a few moments reading the advertising running above the windows of the bus. There was a shiny new placard exhorting the reader to REPORT SABOTAGE! and featuring some steely, feminine eyes looking out of the darkness. An older paper advertised a new fertility enhancer and aphrodisiac:
Increases desire! Enhances pleasure! Assures result!—three effects in just ONE DOSE!
A disclaimer beneath counseled those interested in becoming pregnant to check with their New Universal Church family coordinator to determine the best time for procreative activity.
The oldest and most dilapidated one was for that staple of budget-cutting cooks and food service pros looking for a cheap dish that, with a bit of English on the verbal cue ball, could be called meat: WHAM!—“PURE, POWER-PACKED PROTEIN.”
NOW IN EXTRA BOLD MESQUITE
The new packaging was red, white, and green. Same great price!
Same big bug, I thought to myself. I was told by the legworm ranchers, who usually just ate the fleshier, lobster-like meat running down the millipede-like claws, that everything save the hide from a legworm went into a wood-chipper about the dimensions of a missile silo, and came out the other end as gooey pink foam. I’m thankful I’ve never seen the process from beginning to end, because over the years I’ve eaten enough cans of the stuff to fill a trailer.
We bounced over the bottom land roads, stopped at a yawning strip mine that looked as though one of the Coal Country Mountains had been extracted like a dentist pulling a tooth, then puttered through a small redeveloped town called Gardenia. The driver lost all his other passengers there, and it was just the two of us bouncing up a crudely patched road that was an amalgam of asphalt and gravel running beside a set of rail and power lines.
He hadn’t lied about his skill in avoiding potholes, but this road defeated him. Every few minutes the bus gave a bang-lurch-curse-from-the-driver combination that felt and sounded as though he’d run over a motorcyclist.
We pulled up in front of some brick buildings that looked as though they might have once been an industrial garage and what had clearly been a motel next to a bridge over a small river. The rail line divided here, with the less-used tracks and the power line running up the mountainside.
“Number Four. This is you, big boy. Thanks for not shitting up my back bench.”
I looped a finger in his key lock and gave it a good pull. The padlock gave a brief, musical ting! as it fell to pieces and I extracted myself from the chains.
