… the front end of the bus folding like the world’s largest piece of origami. It was an experiment in modern art gone hideously awry. The yellow of the bus melded with the red of another vehicle – impossible to tell what make and model, though it looked like it might have been a sporty little coupe of some kind – to create a stunning piece of abstract art.
Ken’s mind vomited up a name for the new sculpture: The Bloody Bee. It sounded about right: the kind of thing you might find selling for a million dollars at some museum filled with pretentious crap that everyone pretended to understand even though no one had the foggiest idea what it meant – beyond contempt of artist for audience. The emperor’s new clothes had found a new hold in the well-educated, the well-bred, the well-to-do. People searching for meaning where there was none, and missing the meaning that really surrounded them. Finding art in a dog turd shaped into a crucifix and missing it in the smile of a loved one.
Ken knew the interpretation of this particular creation, though. It was dark art, a pastiche drawn on a shifting canvass, but its meaning was clear.
It meant death.
The bus bounced. A strange sensation: not stopping exactly, but a stutter-step in its forward momentum, as though it had momentarily changed its mind about moving onward, then changed its mind again and resumed course.
Ken’s face bounced off the bar that ran along the top of the seat in front of his. He tasted blood in his mouth. Something hard, too. He spit. Something fell on the floor with a tap that sounded far too loud for what it was.
Lost a tooth. The Bloody Bee and The Tooth At My Feet.
His tongue pushed into the hole where his front tooth had been.
That’s gonna cost a million bucks to fix.
He realized that was a ridiculous thought. There were no more deductibles. No more insurance, no more dentists. Cosmetic dentistry had gone the way of the dodo and uninterrupted cable service and the primacy of the human race.
He would never sit in a badly-carpeted waiting room and listen to crappy music while reading a fishing magazine circa 1972 again. The thought made him suddenly and surprisingly sad.
Ken leaned over and picked the tooth up from the floor. People were shouting, Sally was growling. It all sounded muffled. He focused on the tooth.
Is the baby coming?
He heard the words in the voice of the doctor who had delivered Derek. But it wasn’t Derek whose arrival he was worried about. Not yet, at any rate. It was the thing whose body had integrated a diaper and whose face had become a saw capable of chewing through solid metal.
And still he reached for the tooth. Held it in front of his face. It was blurry – everything was – but it looked whole. Not cracked or broken, but an entire tooth that had been pounded out of his jaw from root to crown.
He shoved it back in his mouth. It wobbled but stayed in the socket.
Maybe it’ll grow back.
Maybe I can keep it.
Maybe monkeys will come out of my butt and shoot caramel apples out of their butts.
Someone grabbed Ken’s shoulder.
He looked over. The motion seemed to take a long time. Hours, if not days.
Buck was standing there, pulling him up one-handed while holding Hope in the crook of his other arm. She slept –
(the sleep of the dead the sleep of the undead)
– on his shoulder.
“We’re going!” Buck shouted. Ken knew he was shouting because he looked like he was shouting. But it sounded like a whisper. Everything sounded like a whisper.
Ken looked over the top of the seat in front of him. There was blood on the bar where he had bounced off it.
The driver, the redheaded savior, was standing at the front door of the bus. Half on, half off, her lead foot hanging out the door like she was trying to decide whether to jump out and leave the group to fend for themselves or not. She was talking into something. A radio?
She turned to the rest of the group and gestured to them to get moving, come on, we’re leaving, get moving.
Ken struggled to his feet.
His tongue felt the tooth.
Loose.
Wobbly.
He moved to the front of the bus.
Wondering what the new sound was.
The thrumming, thudding, pounding sound.
23
Ken felt someone else touch him. Maggie. She was smiling at him. Or trying to. Trying to look like everything was all right and they weren’t being chased by things that would give nightmares to the Devil himself.
“Come on, hon,” she said.
Ken nodded. Everything seemed thick, padded. Everything but the pain, which was a slick shard of glass slashing at his face, his neck, his back. When he stood the pain skipped on lightning feet down his left leg and he almost fell over. Buck’s arm tightened around his chest.
Ken saw Aaron holding onto Christopher, leading the kid out of the bus. Christopher was sobbing openly.
“What…?” began Ken. He didn’t finish. Didn’t need to. Everyone knew Christopher well enough to figure out the end – ends – of the question.