Pancake House, Dalton Georgia 9 am
"Jonathan let us give it a few more minutes before we load up. Dustin has done it again." Ralph said with a chuckle.
"Done what again?" asked Jonathan.
"Go look at mah bathroom."
"Ralph, I am not going to look at your bathroom."
"Then take mah word fer it." Ralph refilled the cup without being asked. "It were a bathroom twenty minutes ago. Two stalls, a sink, and a mop been settin in that corner since Reagan. They's a shower in it now!"
Steven looked up from his plate.
He had felt it before Ralph said it. That was the trouble with being what he was. The whole room had gone soft and warm and astonished all at once, like somebody had opened an oven door, and Steven had been sitting there for a full minute wondering why.
"A shower," said Mom slowly.
"Hot water an ever thang. Tile on the walls. They's a bench!" Ralph shook his head the way a man does when he has decided not to think about a thing too hard. "Janet went in to check on the boy and come back out and set down and ain't said a word in ten minutes."
Janet was in fact sitting at the end of the counter with her hands flat on the formica, looking at the wall.
Steven found Dustin in the corner booth. Nine years old, a plate of pancakes he had not touched, drawing on a paper placemat with a crayon out of the kids' cup. Sneakers that did not match his socks.
Steven reached for him. Gently. He had gotten very good at gentle.
There was nothing there.
Not empty, exactly. Steven had touched empty people before and empty was a room with the furniture gone. This was more like putting your hand flat on a window and finding out the glass went on forever.
Dustin looked up. He saw Steven looking at him, and he smiled a very small smile, and he went back to his drawing.
Steven put his fork down. His hands were not quite steady.
"Mom," he said quietly.
"I know, baby."
"You don't. I can't - " He stopped, because Dale was asleep against his shoulder and he did not want to wake him. "There's nothing to read. He's not hiding it. There's nothing to hide."
Mom put her hand over his on the table and squeezed it once, hard, and got up.
She did not go to Dustin. She went down the little hallway past the pay phone and stopped outside the door with the tin sign on it, and Steven watched her stand there with her head tipped.
Then he heard it too.
Water running. And a boy singing under it. Badly, tunelessly, the way you sing when you are certain nobody in the world can hear you.
Tate had not made a sound in two days. Not in the RV, not at the rendezvous, not when Uncle Will checked his ribs and went very quiet about what he found. He had said yes ma'am and no ma'am and nothing else and he had held onto his brother's sleeve the whole time and pretended that he wasn't.
Steven felt his mother's heart come apart in the hallway like a dropped plate, and he had to put both hands over his face.
"Sis," said Uncle Will, behind her.
"I'm fine."
"I know you are."
"I'm fine, Will."
"I didn't say nothin."
She wiped her face with the back of her wrist and turned around, and he had already stepped aside to give her the hall.
---
Tate came out in clothes that fit him.
That was the part nobody had an answer for afterward. Not the shower. The clothes! Jeans and a plain grey t-shirt and socks, folded on the bench, in his size.
He came out wearing them with his hair wet and stuck up on one side and his old shirt balled in his fist, because he did not know if he was allowed to throw it away.
"You kin put that in the trash, sweetheart," said Janet.
He looked at Mom first. She nodded. He put it in the trash.
Then something happened to his face, and Travis was up out of the booth and across the room before anybody else could move, and the two of them stood in the middle of the dining room holding onto each other while a trucker at the counter studied his eggs with enormous concentration.
Ralph turned the radio up a little. It was a kindness and everybody in that room knew it.
Steven, who could not help it, felt all of it at once, and did not try to stop.
Dustin kept drawing.
---
Highway 41, north of Dalton 9:50 am
They found the boys eleven minutes after they pulled out of the lot.
Uncle Will saw it first, the same way he had seen the wreck in the ditch two days before, which was a thing about Uncle Will that Steven had stopped trying to explain to himself. The car was well off the shoulder and down in the weeds with the grass grown up over the hood, and it had plainly been there since sometime in the night.
"Annie. Pull it over."
"Will - "
"Pull it over, Sis!"
Steven got there second, and he wished for the rest of his life that he had been slower.
Two boys. The little one was asleep or near it, curled in the footwell with his coat over him, and the bigger one was sitting straight up in the back seat with his arms locked around a fat paperback book and his eyes wide open, and he had been sitting like that, Steven understood immediately and completely, for about nine hours.
He was screaming. Steven could hear it. There was not a sound in that car.
"Hey," said Steven, very softly. "Hey. Hey, I'm right here."
The boy did not move.
"What's your name, buddy?"
Nothing.
Uncle Will got the little one out first and had him wrapped and in the RV inside a minute. Mom came down the bank sideways in her good shoes, took one look, and got into the back seat of that wrecked car and sat down beside the older boy like she was settling in at church.
"All right," she said. "All right, baby. I'm not going to touch you and I'm not going to ask you nothin. You just set there long as you need to."
She sat with him eleven minutes.
At the end of the eleven minutes he got up and walked out of the car with her and did not let go of the book.
His name was Corey and he was eleven. His brother's name was Nate and he was seven. That was all they learned that day, and they only learned that much because Nate said it.
Corey would not get on the bus. He would not say why. He got up into the old RV and sat on the back bed with his brother and the book, and when Uncle Will suggested the bunk on the bus was warmer, Mom shook her head.
"He asked for one thing all mornin, Will. He gets the one thing."
---
The bus, Interstate 75 northbound 11 am
The bus took some getting used to. Twenty-eight seats and half of them out, a bunk built along the back where the last five rows had been, and Dave up under the dash with a flashlight in his teeth doing something to the wiring that Linda had decided not to ask about.
The BTS pulled out behind her with William at the wheel and both little ones asleep across the back bed.
Jonathan came and sat down beside her about an hour up the road.
He had the radio in his lap. Not the CB - the other one. The one she had carried in a coffee can under the sink for fifteen years and had used exactly eleven times, and every one of those eleven times a road had been clear that had no business being clear, or a motel room had been paid for, or a sheriff two counties over had been called away on something.
He set it on the seat between them.
"You've been waitin for me to ask," said Linda.
"I've been waiting a long time for you to ask."
"I didn't ask because I was afraid you'd stop."
Jonathan nodded slowly. "That's what Dave said you'd say."
Out the window the pines went by in long grey rows with the fog still lying in the low places between them. Somewhere behind them a state line. Somewhere ahead of them Charleston, and after that Florida, and after that she genuinely did not know.
"Twenty years," she said. "You told me at that counter in front of God and everybody like it was a small thing. Twenty years."
"Twenty-three."
"Twenty-three." She laughed once, with no humor in it at all. "Who do you work for, Jonathan?"
"Nobody. Not any more." He turned the radio over in his hands. "We were supposed to be somewhere else. There was a - " He stopped, and started again, and she watched him decide how much truth a woman driving a busload of runaways up I-75 could carry on four hours of sleep. "Our craft came through something. We didn't steer into it and we couldn't steer out of it. It set us down in a field outside Ringgold in the spring of nineteen eighty-one, and it has never once told us why."
"A craft."
"A shuttle."
"From where?"
"Not from where." He met her eyes. "From when."
Linda sat with that a while.
She had expected something. She had expected government, or worse, and she had rehearsed a hundred versions of this conversation over fifteen years in the cab of that RV at three in the morning. She had not expected this one.
"Then you know," she said.
"Know what?"
"How it comes out. For them." She jerked her chin toward the back of the bus, toward the bunk, toward a boy asleep in clothes that had not existed two hours ago. "You know how it ends."
"Linda - "
"Don't."
Her voice did not rise. That was the frightening thing about Linda Wilhelms, and every one of those children would have told you so. It never rose.
"Twenty-three years. You had a radio and you had a shuttle and you knew what was comin, and you set in that pancake house and you helped me, and I am grateful. I am. Jonathan, I have never in my life been so grateful for anything - "
"I know."
"Then tell me why it took you till nineteen eighty-nine to find Marcus Bell."
Jonathan did not answer.
"He was eleven years old," said Linda. "He was eleven and he was four miles from my house, and I got there in March, and I have thought about February every day since. So don't you tell me you're from when. Tell me why you were late."
The bus went on north. Dave's radio hissed once in Jonathan's lap and went quiet.
"Because we're not what you think we are," said Jonathan. "We can't see it. We only lived it. Nobody sends you with a list."
"Then what were you sent with?"
"Orders to stay hidden." He set the radio down on his knee. "There's a protocol. You come through something you don't understand into a time that isn't yours and you go dark. You don't speak to anybody. You don't fix anything. You find a hole and you get in it and you stay in it, and if nobody ever comes you stay in it anyway." He shrugged. "It's a good rule, Linda. Better men than me have died keeping it. You start pulling threads in a year that isn't yours and you have no idea what comes down on top of you."
"But you didn't."
"We didn't."
"Why?"
"Because on the ninth day a kid walked into the field," said Jonathan.
Linda went very still.
"We were down to the ration packets nobody eats. Dave was up on the hull with a panel off. I was setting in the grass. And a boy came up out of the treeline, about nine years old, hands in his pockets, and asked us did we know where we were." Jonathan almost smiled. "I said Georgia. He said that's not what I asked you."
"Dustin."
"Dustin."
"He was nine."
"He was nine."
Linda looked up the aisle. Three rows ahead, a small boy with a crayon in his shirt pocket had his forehead against the glass, watching the pines go by.
"Jonathan."
"I know."
"That was nineteen eighty-one!"
"I know what it was." Jonathan's voice stayed very level, the voice of a man who had had twenty-three years to get used to a thing and hadn't. "He has not changed. Not a day, not an inch. Same shoes." He paused. "Same socks."
The bus rocked over a seam in the pavement. Nobody in the back woke up.
"He gave us a choice," said Jonathan. "He didn't make it sound like much, either. He said we could do what we were told and stay hid and be safe and likely die of old age in a hole in Georgia. Or we could help people find somewhere safe to live. That was how he put it. Help people find a safe home. Like he was askin did we want to go in on a truck."
"And you said yes."
"Dave said yes in about four minutes. I took the night on it." He turned the radio over again. "I've had twenty-three years to work out whether the night counts against me."
"It doesn't."
"You don't know what I was thinkin during it."
"I don't have to." Linda said it flatly. "You got up in the mornin and you said yes. That's the only part of a night that ever counts."
Jonathan did not answer that for a while.
"He comes back," he said at last. "Every so often. No pattern to it I ever found. Three years, then eight months, then five years. He sets down, he asks how we're doing, he asks about you. He never tells us one thing." He nodded up the aisle. "Yesterday he stood at the side of a road and got on a bus like we'd arranged it. First time in twenty-three years he has ever come to us in front of anybody."
"That means somethin," said Linda.
"It means something."
"He can see it. That's the difference between him and us, and it's the only difference that ever mattered. We just chose." Jonathan looked down the aisle. "We chose, and then we did it badly for twenty-three years, and some of them we got to in time."
Linda followed his eyes.
Dustin was already looking back at her.
---
County fairgrounds, somewhere north 6:15 pm
They drove all day and saw nothing worth stopping for, and then a little after six they saw the lights from two miles out.
It was a little county carnival in a mowed hayfield. A Ferris wheel, a Tilt-A-Whirl, a row of game booths with the paint coming off them, and a Zipper that Mom took one look at and ruled out loudly and permanently. String lights on poles. A generator thumping away somewhere under everything.
Nobody said a word. Fourteen people looked out of two windshields at it.
"No," said Jonathan.
"I ain't said a thing," said Mom.
"You've said several."
"We have been runnin thirty-six hours and they have not put their feet on grass." She was already indicating. "One hour. Cash only. Nobody uses a name. Nobody gets on that Zipper."
"Linda - "
"Corey has not spoken since we found him, Jonathan."
That ended it, as she had known perfectly well it would.
They gave them an hour and it cost eleven dollars a head, and Uncle Will said afterward it was the best money anybody in that group ever spent.
Alexander rode the Ferris wheel with his arm in the sling and his face turned all the way up. Derick ate two funnel cakes and regretted the second one publicly and at length. Tate and Travis stood in front of the fun house mirrors for twenty minutes making each other laugh, which was the loudest either of them had been since the church.
And Jax won Steven a stuffed frog at the milk bottle booth.
He threw like a man who had loaded trucks for four years, which he had, and he knocked all six bottles into the next county, and then he stood there holding a green frog and went the color of a stop sign and did not know what to do with his hands.
Neither of them had said one word about the pancake house. About Steven going down like a dropped coat, or about whose arms he had woke up in, or about the fact that Jax had gone on rocking him a good while after he did not need to any more.
Steven could feel every bit of it coming off him now. Hope and terror in about equal parts and no plan whatsoever behind either one.
He could also feel, very clearly, that Jax was about to say something stupid to get out of it.
"Jax," said Steven.
"Yeah?"
"Just hand me the frog."
Jax handed him the frog.
"Okay," said Jax.
"Okay," said Steven.
They stood there. The Ferris wheel went round. Somewhere off to the left a child screamed happily.
"You knew what I was gonna say," said Jax.
"Yes."
"Was it stupid?"
"Very," said Steven, and Jax laughed so hard he had to sit down on the edge of a hay bale, and Steven sat down next to him with the frog in his lap and did not say anything else for a while, because he did not need to.
---
Corey went past all of it.
Steven watched him do it. Past the rides, past the games, past every light in that field, all the way down to a folding table at the far end under a bare bulb where a woman was selling used paperbacks three for a dollar.
He put his finger on one and he did not take it off.
"You want a book, baby?" said Mom, coming up behind him.
He nodded.
"You can have three, sugar. That's how it works. Pick you out two more."
He shook his head and kept his finger on it, hard, the way you hold a thing down in a wind.
And Steven, standing eight feet back, felt the boy come apart.
"It's mine," said Corey.
His voice was hoarse from two days of not using it. It was the first thing anybody had heard him say.
"It's my one. I had it. It was in the car."
Mom looked down at the book.
It was a fat cheap paperback with the corners gone soft and a price sticker somebody had tried to peel off. On the cover, painted in that flat airbrushed way they used, a starship hung over a blue planet with its running lights on. Across the top in silver letters:
**DIGITAL REFRESH**
"It's the best one," said Corey. "There's a ship and they take people off the bad places, and there's a boy who's not real, he's made out of light, and then he is real, and they got a whole family of them and they go and get kids. They go and get kids! Nobody ever comes and gets you but in the book they come and get you - "
He ran clean out of air.
Mom put a dollar on the table and did not wait for her change.
"Then it's yours," she said, and put it in his hands. "And ain't nobody ever takin it out of a car again."
She stood up.
Jonathan was about eight feet behind her, and Dave was beside him, and Dave had stopped so suddenly that the candy apple in his hand was still swinging.
Steven turned around because of what hit him.
He had felt fear before. He had felt Dale's fear, which was a small animal in a corner, and he had felt Alexander's, which was a door being held shut. This was neither. This was two grown men looking at a paperback book on a folding table in a hayfield, and what came off the both of them went through Steven like cold water thrown in his face, and he had to grab the edge of the table to stay upright.
"Ma'am," said Jonathan. His voice had gone strange and flat. "Where would a boy get that."
"It's a book. It's a book off a table."
"I need to see the back of it," said Dave.
"You're frightenin him!"
"Linda. I need to see the back of it."
And Dustin came out of the crowd with a paper cone of shaved ice, and looked at the two men, and looked at the book, and was not surprised in any way at all.
"I was going to tell you at Charleston," he said.
Jonathan rounded on him. "Tell us what!"
"That it's a story here." Dustin licked the shaved ice. "That's the whole difference. That's the only difference there has ever been." He nodded at the paperback in Corey's hands, at the starship over the blue planet, at nine hundred pages of somebody's favorite thing in the world. "Where you're from, that's a duty log."
Nobody moved.
The generator thumped. The Ferris wheel went round.
"Y'all should ride somethin," said Dustin. "The hour's about up."
---
Two pump station, eleven miles on 7:40 pm
Dustin got out of the bus with Linda and stood by the front tire with his hands in his pockets while William worked the pump.
He did not say anything for a good while. Linda let him stand there. She had learned in fifteen years that if you wait long enough a child will tell you what he came to tell you.
"You want to ask me about Marcus Bell," he said.
"I wasn't going to."
"You were. You've been going to since the pancake house." He scuffed his sneaker on the concrete. "Everybody does. It's always the first thing."
"Then I won't be the first thing." Linda leaned back against the warm side of the bus and folded her arms. "I am fifty-one years old, Dustin. I know what a no sounds like when it's comin."
"That doesn't mean you don't want to hear it."
"No," she said. "It surely doesn't."
The pump clicked over. Inside the station a bell rang as somebody opened the door.
"I can't," said Dustin.
"All right."
"No, you have to hear the whole of it, or you'll spend the rest of your life thinking I wouldn't." He looked up at her. "I can move people. That's what I do. If somebody's alive I can put them somewhere they get to stay alive. That's all it is. Everybody thinks it's power. It's a door. I'm a door."
"And Marcus."
"Marcus was already through a different one." He said it plainly, without any of the softening a grown person would have wrapped around it, and it landed the way plain things land. "I can't go back for the dead. Not anybody, not ever. It isn't a rule somebody made up to be cruel. It's just what's true, same as you can't drive that bus to Tuesday."
Linda nodded slowly. She found that she had known that. She had known it for years and never had anybody to say it to.
"But you said the whole of it," she said. "That's not the whole of it."
Dustin was quiet.
"Say it."
"Some of them I couldn't take even if I could," he said. "Because their dying is holding something up."
"Holding what up?"
He did not answer.
"Dustin. Holding what up?"
"You," he said.
Linda did not move.
"In March of eighty-nine there's a woman with a ranch and a bad RV and no radio, and she's a cook. She's a real good cook. She's got a brother who drives a truck and she has never once in her life gone lookin for anybody." Dustin's chin came up. "And then there's a boy four miles from her house and nobody comes, and she finds out about it on a Tuesday from a woman at church who says it like it's the weather."
"Stop."
"You know what happens next. You did it." He was not crying, which was somehow worse. "Everybody on that bus is on that bus because of a Tuesday in March. Steven. Dale. Alexander. Tate in the back with clean socks on for the first time in I don't know how long. If I go and get Marcus Bell out of February - and I can't, but if - then there's no woman with a radio in a coffee can. There's a cook. And there's nine kids I have never met and never will, in nine different places, and not one of them is on a bus!"
The pump clicked off. William hung it up, looked over at the two of them, and then very deliberately found something to do at the back of the vehicle.
"Where I come from they say it like this," said Dustin. "Sometimes bad things happen, so good things can happen."
Linda turned her head and looked at him.
"That is an obscene thing to tell somebody," she said.
"I know."
"You're nine years old."
"I'm not, though. Not the way you mean it." Dustin put his hands back in his pockets. "I look like this because it's easier on everybody. It isn't easier."
Linda looked at him a long moment. The mismatched socks. The crayon still in his shirt pocket. The folded placemat. A boy shaped thing standing at a gas pump in the dark carrying something no nine year old ought to be able to lift.
Then she did the only thing she had ever known how to do.
She put her hand on the back of his head and pulled him in against her shoulder.
He went stiff. He stayed stiff about two seconds. Then he didn't.
"You have told a lot of people that," she said into his hair.
"Yes ma'am."
"Has anybody ever done this after?"
Dustin did not answer that one either, and after a while Linda quit waiting on him to, and just stood there in the cold with her arms around him.
"It don't make it fair," she said at last.
"No ma'am."
"I am not going to stop being angry about February."
"You shouldn't." He said it into her coat. "That's the part that works."
---
Gravel lot behind a closed farm supply 9 pm
They pulled off well after dark, and Mom cooked.
Steven had watched her do it a hundred times and she did it the same way every time. The two burner came out of the bay. The folding table came off its brackets. And then she stood over it with a wooden spoon in her fist and made a great deal more food than anybody thought they were going to eat.
Chicken and rice, because chicken and rice went further than anything on this earth. A pan of cornbread in the little propane oven. Green beans out of a can with bacon grease in them, which was not health food and was not meant to be.
Nobody asked her to. That was the thing Steven watched for every single time, and it happened every single time. She had been driving since four in the morning and been told the world was bigger than she thought it was, and what she did about it was feed fourteen people in a gravel lot.
"You want a hand?" said Jax.
"I want you to set down."
"I'm real good at settin down."
"I can tell."
Derick laughed into his sleeve.
They ate on the ground and on the bumper and on an upturned milk crate. Derick, who had sworn off food permanently and in front of witnesses at about seven o'clock, had seconds.
"All right," said Dave, when the plates were down. "I want to know who everybody is."
"They know who everybody is," said Jonathan.
"They know names. That ain't the same." Dave leaned back against the tire. "One thing about you that nobody here knows. Anything. Don't have to be big."
"That's a church game," said Travis.
The lot got quiet in a very particular way.
"Then it's a bus game now," said Dave easily. "And I'll go first so y'all can see how bad it goes. I have never in my life been able to whistle."
"That's it?" said Derick. "That's your thing?"
"Forty years of trying. Nothing. Air comes out."
"Show us!"
Dave demonstrated. Air came out.
That broke it wide open. Derick went next. He had wrecked his uncle's boat at fourteen and let his cousin take the blame eleven months. Jax said he had wanted to be a paramedic and had failed the written twice, which he said lightly and then went red about. Uncle Will said he could set a bone but could not watch anybody else do it, and had thrown up in a hospital parking lot in 1993.
"Steven," said Dave.
Steven had been sitting with his back against the wheel with the frog beside him.
"I know when people are lying," he said.
Nobody said anything.
"It's not like readin a book. It's more like a smell." He turned his cup around in his hands. "Derick's story about the boat is true. Jax failed that written three times, not twice."
"Hey!" said Jax.
"Sorry."
"Three?" said Derick.
"The third one didn't count, the fire alarm went off - " Jax stopped, put his face in his hands, and everybody laughed, Jax included.
"That's a hell of a thing, son," said Dave, when it settled down.
"It's not a good thing." Steven said it fast, the way you say a sentence you have had ready for years. "Everybody thinks it's a good thing. It come on me when I turned fourteen and inside of a month I knew what every single person in that church actually thought about me while they was bein nice to me. Includin my daddy. Especially my daddy."
Mom did not turn around from the stove.
"Steven Charles."
"Ma'am?"
"You know exactly what I think about you."
Steven looked into his cup. "Yes ma'am."
"Then it ain't all bad, is it."
"No ma'am."
"I'll go," said Tate.
He had said maybe eleven words since the pancake house. Travis's hand came out and landed on his back and Tate let it stay there.
"I can sing," said Tate. "That's my thing. I'm real good at it. I was in the choir before - " He stopped and started again. "I was in the choir. I got the solo at Christmas two years runnin, and Pastor said it was a gift from God. And then he said a lot of other things about me later that he said was also from God. So I quit doin it." He looked at his plate. "I forgot I could. Till this mornin."
Nobody rushed in to fill it.
"Would you sing somethin?" said Mom.
"Not yet."
"All right."
"But I will," said Tate. "Sometime. Not yet."
"That is the correct answer," said Mom, and she started handing out cornbread, and the moment let itself go.
Dustin was sitting on the milk crate with a plate he had hardly touched, watching all of it with an expression Uncle Will described afterward as a man at a museum.
"You didn't go," said Dale.
"I don't have one."
"Everybody's got one."
Dustin considered that seriously, which was somehow funnier than if he had made a joke of it.
"I have never once eaten anything I needed," he said. "I do it because it makes people comfortable when I do." He looked down at the plate. "This is the first time I wanted to."
Mom took the plate out of his hands, put another piece of chicken on it, and gave it back to him without one word.
Steven, who had been reaching for him on and off all day and finding that window with no end to it, reached one more time.
And felt something. Just for a second. Small and warm and about nine years old.
---
The old turnpike 11:20 pm
"Dustin, honey," said Linda, to the mirror. "I hope you know this road has been shut since before I was married."
"Yep."
"There's no lights on it. There's no phone. There's no gas. And I am fairly certain that second tunnel's got a wall across it."
"Yep," said Dustin happily. "It's perfect."
"That is what I was afraid you were fixin to say."
"It's perfect because of all that," he said from three rows back. "Nobody's looking at it. Things are easiest where nobody's looking."
Four lanes of cracked concrete going nowhere with the grass coming up through it. The guardrail rusted down to lace. Linda drove it at thirty with her hands at ten and two and the BTS's headlights swinging along behind her.
The lights came up on the mountain, and on the stone face set into it, and on the date carved in the keystone.
"Ma'am," said Dale, "there's somethin wrong with the - "
The tunnel was turning.
Not the bus. Not the mountain. The opening. The dark inside that arch was rotating, slow and then not slow, a great smooth spiral of purple and black winding down and down into the middle of itself with a rim of gold light chasing around the edge of it, and it made a sound like a struck wine glass held forever, and every blade of grass in front of it leaned in.
"That's a cartoon!" said Jonathan, getting up. "Dustin. That is a cartoon."
"It's funnier."
"It does not have to be a spiral!"
"No," Dustin agreed. "It doesn't. Regular works exactly the same." He buckled his seat belt, which he had not done once all day. "But it could be a spiral."
Linda found his eyes in the mirror.
She had been awake forty-one hours. She had been told the world was bigger than she thought it was, and that she could not have Marcus Bell back, and that a boy she had fed cornbread to had been checking in on two stranded men since before some of her children were born. She had not laughed since Tuesday.
She was grinning at him. She could not help it and she did not try.
Dustin grinned right back.
The radio crackled on the dash.
"Annie." William, from the BTS. "You seein what I'm seein?"
"I'm seein it, Will."
"Right. Well. Two things, then." A pause. "We still got a couple of tails. Same three off the state line. One dropped off. Other two are about a mile back and closin since we come off the interstate."
Linda looked at the mirror again.
"Dustin?"
"That's fine," he said.
"That's fine."
"They can follow us all they want." He shrugged and looked out at the turning gold. "They won't be able to do any harm once we arrive."
Linda opened her mouth to ask the obvious question and discovered, somewhat to her own surprise, that she was not going to.
"Hold onto somethin back there!" she called down the bus. "Tate, honey, get your feet under you. Steven, take Dale's - thank you, baby."
She keyed the radio. "Stay on my bumper, Will."
"Annie, what in the world is that thing - "
"Stay on my bumper."
She went in at fifteen miles an hour with every child on that bus pressed to the windows and Tate laughing out loud, which was twice in one night now, and Travis turned all the way around in his seat to watch his brother do it. The gold rim came up over the windshield and swallowed them whole and the wine glass note went straight through the middle of everybody's chest.
Then there was just a tunnel. Old tile. Bad air. Water coming down one wall. Two headlight circles on wet concrete a hundred years old, and the BTS blooming in her mirror thirty feet back.
It went on a long time. Longer, Linda thought, than a mountain.
Then grey at the far end, and the grey went white.
---
Somewhere else
They came out into daylight.
Not morning. Afternoon. High clean gold-white afternoon with a sky over it the wrong shade of blue, and Linda's foot came off the accelerator by itself.
The bus rolled to a stop on a smooth wide surface that was not concrete and had never in its life been a turnpike.
It was a rest area.
That was the part that undid her. A travel rest area, the same as a hundred she had pulled into at three in the morning with a load of sleeping children behind her. Painted bays. A low kerb. Trees down both sides in even rows.
And beyond the trees a building in white and glass that no rest stop on God's earth ever had. And beyond that, a long way off and much too big, something in the sky that was not a cloud and was not an airplane and was holding perfectly still.
The BTS rolled up alongside and stopped. Through her windshield Linda could see her brother with both hands still on the wheel and his mouth open.
And twenty feet away, nose on to the same line like somebody had parked them for a photograph, was another bus.
It was older than hers and painted green and it had a name down the side in gold. It was full of people. They were pressed to their windows in exactly the way her kids were pressed to theirs, wearing the identical expression, and an older man in the front seat had his hand flat against the glass, and a woman standing in the stairwell had a clipboard she had plainly forgotten she was holding.
The woman got her door open first. She came down two steps and stopped.
She was pale and drawn and looked like she had been travelling a long while and had lately been unwell.
Linda pulled her own lever.
The two of them stood in the air between their buses. It smelled like cut grass and something faintly metallic.
"Are you Hedley Hollow?" said Linda. She had no idea on God's earth where the words came from.
"Some of it." The woman's voice cracked. "Most of it. Ninety-eight percent of it, apparently. They made us vote." She laughed, badly. "Jess Hedley."
"Linda Wilhelms."
"Did a nine year old bring you here?"
"He's on my bus."
"He's on mine too," said Jess Hedley.
They both turned and looked. Linda could see him through the green bus's windshield, sitting up front with his hands in his pockets.
She could also hear him behind her, three rows back, telling Derick to set down before he fell down.
"All right," said Linda, after a moment. "All right."
Behind her, the door of the BTS banged.
Corey came down out of it at a dead run. He did not stop at Linda and he did not stop at the strangers. He ran out past the front of both buses into the middle of that impossible rest area and stood there in his socks with his head all the way back, turning in a slow circle, holding a soft cornered dollar paperback against his chest with both arms.
At the far end of it, past the trees, a set of glass doors opened and people started coming out.
Some of them were grown. Most of them were not.
Corey turned around to face the bus. His face was doing something Linda had never seen a face do.
"It's real!" he said.
---
The rest area, a few minutes later
Steven came down off the bus last.
Everybody else had gone ahead. He could feel them all out there on that smooth pale ground, fourteen people running on no sleep and pure astonishment, and Corey turning in his circle, and Mom standing with the woman from the green bus with her hand pressed flat against her own mouth.
Dustin had not moved.
He was standing a little apart with his hands in his pockets, watching the glass doors at the far end the way a man watches a road he has driven a great many times.
Steven went to him.
He had been reaching for this boy all day. At the pancake house he had found a window with no end behind it. In the gravel lot he had found something small and warm and about nine years old, for about a second, and had not been able to find it again.
He did not reach this time.
He put his hand on Dustin's shoulder.
*Learn to listen better.*
It was not out loud. It was in Dustin's voice and it did not come out of Dustin's mouth, and it did not sound like a scolding at all. It sounded like a man handing you the keys.
"What?" said Steven.
Dustin did not turn around.
And then Steven heard him.
Not close. Not anywhere. A boy, somewhere far down under everything, crying the way you cry when you have been doing it a long while and have stopped expecting anybody. Not screaming. Steven could have handled screaming. This was worse. This was the sound a person makes when they have quit calling out and are only crying now because their body has not been told to stop yet.
Steven's knees went.
Dustin caught him by both arms and held him up, and for a boy of nine he did it very easily.
"Breathe," said Dustin.
"Who is that?"
"Breathe first."
"Dustin, who is that!"
"I don't know," said Dustin.
Steven got his feet back under him and stared at him.
"You don't know."
"I have never been able to hear him." Dustin let go of his arms, carefully, one and then the other, the way you let go of something you are not sure will stand. "I've known there was somebody for a long time. That's all I've ever had. Somebody, somewhere, and no room and no road and no door, because you cannot open a door onto a place you can't find."
The generator hum of that impossible afternoon went on around them. Out in the middle of the paving Corey was showing his book to a boy about his own age who had come out through the glass doors, holding it up with both hands like a thing recovered from a fire.
"That's what I'm for," said Steven.
It was not a question. He heard it come out of himself and he did not entirely recognise the voice it came out in.
"That's what you're for," Dustin agreed.
"I thought - " Steven stopped. He had to. "My whole life I have thought this thing was a punishment. I found out what my own daddy thought of me when I was fourteen years old, and he was smilin at me when I found it out."
"I know."
"It ain't a punishment."
"No," said Dustin. "It's the other half."
Steven stood in the wrong-colored afternoon with his hands shaking and a boy he had never met crying somewhere underneath the whole world, and he did not tell it to stop.
He listened.
He got it wrong for a while. It came and it went and twice he lost it completely and had to sit down on the step of the bus with his head in his hands until it came back.
But it came back.
"He's still goin," said Steven.
"Yes."
"Then we better learn where he is."
Dustin smiled. It was not the uncomplicated grin from the tunnel. It was older and more tired and a great deal more like relief, and Steven understood, with a lurch, that he was looking at a person who had been waiting an extremely long time for somebody to say that sentence.
"Yes," said Dustin. "We better."
---
Dustin's note:
Howdy reader, just letting you know we have hijacked this author's mind so we can work through this chapter. He is relatively unharmed from this however he has experienced other issues which we won't discuss here. Just checking my watch now, we should be able to fold the time and space properly to meddle and fuddle with time to push the limits of this poor author's mind.
Happy Reading!
Author note:
I was told no more snacks until I finished this chapter.