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Idling.
Exhaust spilling into the night.
No one around.
Not one person on the platform.
Because they’ve already boarded. They’re on the bus. It’s leaving!
Forcing herself even faster, she sprinted.
The doors closed with a whoosh. The bus started to move, big tires rolling, the beast lumbering forward.
No. No. No!
“Hey!” she cried, her lungs burning, her throat a rasp. “Wait!” Oh, please, God!
Taillights glowed an eerie red.
No, no, no! This couldn’t happen! Not after all she’d been through! Heart crumbling, adrenaline propelling her, she threw herself forward.
Miracle of miracles, the Greyhound slowed for a traffic light.
Redoubling her efforts, she ran and saw the light change from red to green.
With a growl and belch of diesel fumes the huge bus moved forward again.
Shit!
Frantic, her heart beating a thousand times a minute, Ivy tried desperately to flag the driver down. Couldn’t he see her in his huge mirrors?
“Stop!” she yelled, wildly thrashing her arms. “Stop!” Oh, please, please!
With a squeal of brakes and flash of bright taillights, the bus jerked to a halt.
“Yes!” She picked up the pace again, her breathing fast and hard. Obviously the driver had spotted her. Finally. A bit of hope appeared just as she saw a flash, a quicksilver movement caught in the beams of the Greyhound’s headlights.
A scrawny coyote zipped through the swath of illumination to scurry into an alley near the station.
Good enough.
Again the bus started to inch forward, but Ivy was alongside the silver beast now and began pounding on its paneled sides. “Stop!” she cried, banging her fists on the metal until she reached the door, still running alongside the moving bus. “Let me on! Stop.”
The driver’s gaze jerked to the door and in an instant the bus ground to a stop.
A burly man with thick jowls and a bulbous nose, he squinted through the smudged glass to stare and take stock of her.
“Let me in!” she yelled, gasping for breath.
For a second he looked as if he might reach for some kind of weapon or drive off. “I have a ticket!” she cried, freaked that he might leave. As she pleaded with him, she saw the ghostly outline of her reflection in the doors—a pale woman with strange hair, smeared makeup, and a desperate, wild look contorting her face where blood was running from a cut above her eye and a bruise was beginning to show over her cheek. “Please!” she cried, and reached into her jacket pocket. “Please, sir. Let me in.”
His eyes widened as if he expected her to pull out a semiautomatic, but she retrieved her ticket and waved it at him.
From the corner of her eye she saw movement a few blocks behind the bus, an eerie shimmer that didn’t belong to a vehicle.
Oh. No.
A man staggered into the street behind them, his head still glowing from the fire burning through his hair.
