American Quest (40 page)

Bruce grinned, thinking her reaction meant that she’d read it and was having flashbacks of the giant squid. But when he cast a look over his shoulder, he saw smoke coming from the map.

Bedelia snapped to attention, blinking the sleep from her eyes. “What’s going on, hon? Oh, shoot!”

She grabbed the cardigan from her shoulder and swatted at the atlas like she was smacking a wasp.

“What is it?” Bruce said, shooting a glance at the rearview mirror.

“The map caught on fire!” Emily exclaimed.

Bedelia produced her glasses from somewhere within the folds of her clothing and shoved them to an awkward cant over the bridge of her nose. “How strange. Now that the fire’s gone, the only thing that’s left is a little slash. It didn’t even burn through.”

“Yeah,” Emily said. “And look where the burn mark is. I think that’s right about where we are right—”

Bruce slammed on the brakes. A crater lay just beneath a dip in the road. He hadn’t seen it until he was almost on top of it. The van screeched, sliding, back end swerving as if in a race with the front. Jamie woke up screaming. Bruce’s foot jammed down hard, his arms locked and shoulders thrown back as if by pushing away from the steering wheel he might prevent the van from plunging into that abyss.

They slowed, but too late.

The van lurched at a horribly wrong angle, Jamie’s side leading at a downward diagonal. There was a moment when everything was suspended, everything jostling, waving in the air—the road atlas, empty
and partially empty plastic bottles, Bruce tethered only by the seat belt that seized around him. And then a tooth-cracking jolt as the van jerked to a stop.

Everything that had been small and loose in the back now piled atop the dashboard on Jamie’s side. Bruce groaned. For a second, he felt as if he’d woken up in a strange hotel room, his face in a fluffy white pillow, and he saw Jamie sleeping with her face buried in her own pillow. His vision took in the bedspread that looked like a map. And it took in a creeping black line that slowly trailed along the interstate on that map to show the progress of the van. Texas. Arkansas. Kentucky . . .

He blinked and these jumbled things revised themselves. There weren’t pillows beneath their heads, but air bags. And as Jamie slept on her nonpillow, the black line was trailing not along the map, but from her temple; black on her face but smearing red when it touched the air bag.

“Jamie? Oh my God! Jamie!”

He reached for her. She moved without resistance under his touch.

“Jamie! Jamie!” Emily cried. Her face was wild and she clawed at her seat belt. “Jamie’s hurt!”

“Don’t undo it, honey!” Bruce shouted. “Just leave yourself buckled up for now.”

Emily nodded, her breath coming in short gasps. “Okay, Bruce. I’ll . . . I’ll check on everybody.”

The van lurched another inch and a collective scream erupted among its occupants. Bruce grabbed Jamie’s elbow. “Jamie? Tink? Can you hear me?”

Jamie groaned. She was alive, but she was obviously not coherent. Ahead, Bruce saw mostly darkness outside the van. There were occasional shadows of rocks and even snaking white roots, but mostly what he saw was black. Behind and to his left, daylight streamed through dust motes. Gravity was pulling him hard to his right, toward Jamie’s side of the van.

“Bedelia’s okay,” Emily reported from behind him. “Shannon is . . . Shannon looks okay. Charlie?”

“Okay, tyke.”

“Charlie’s okay. I think we’re all okay except for Jamie.”

Bruce’s hand cupped the back of Jamie’s neck. He was afraid to
move her. Afraid to touch her—back injury, neck injury, and all sorts of unthinkables raced through his mind—and yet he couldn’t not touch her.

“Come on, Jamie-girl. We got some Pravus trouble and we need you to give them that Tinkerbell hell.”

“Nngh?” Jamie’s head drifted from side to side as her spine began to straighten. “What happened? Did we hit a pothole?”

Bruce laughed with such a wild expulsion of air that it made his eyes bulge. He coughed, spittle flecking his chin.

“Yeah, well, it’s one helluva gigantic pothole. Okay, listen. We gotta get out of here. Nobody on the passenger’s side move. We’re hanging down on that side. Emily, can you open your door?”

He heard the sound of a rattled handle followed by a creak.

“It only opens a few inches.”

“Okay, close it back up.” Bruce tried his. He was wedged in tight.

Jamie was blinking now, the sleepy confusion transposing to bewildered alarm. She reached for her door.

“No, Jamie, don’t!”

But she’d already opened it and it immediately swung downward with alarming suddenness.

“Oh my God!”

Jamie’s legs slipped down after the door and Bruce lunged for her, grabbing her elbow and left thigh. The seat belt held her blessedly snug. A half-empty water bottle that had landed on the dashboard glanced off Jamie’s shoulder and tumbled past her, past the door, and on down, disappearing into the black. Bruce gaped after it, waiting to hear the sound of it bouncing at the bottom, but that sound never came. The only thing he heard was rushing air; groaning, creaking air moving below him, shifting inside an inhospitable blackness that seemed unaccustomed to and invaded by the feel of oxygen.

“Just . . .” Bruce gulped. “Just . . . nobody move okay? We’re all okay. We’re all okay.”

Suddenly the urge to pee returned, ridiculously insistent this time. A worm of perspiration slithered from his hairline to his nose, dove off the end of it, and spattered on the shriveled air bag in front of Jamie.

“I’m gonna . . . I’m gonna try to . . .”

There was an explosion next to Bruce’s ear as the driver’s-side window shattered. He flung his arms over his head. Everybody screamed. Gravel drizzled in, bouncing off Bruce’s neck in a lazy stream, and then stopped.

The van lay still.

Bruce made a mental diagnostic check of his person. He hadn’t wet his pants and he was still basically injury-free. However his body sparkled with breakthrough glass like sequins on a Hollywood starlet.

“Hallooooo down there!”

Bruce looked back and to his left, though he had to move his head through the busted window in order to do so. He saw a silhouette framed by the sun with hair so red it looked like a man whose head was on fire.

“Hello!” Bruce called back. “Oh my God, hello!”

“Sorry ’bout the window. Dinna think you heard me calling.”

“No I . . . you . . . you broke the window?”

“Seemed the only way to get you out, now didn’t it? Just give a hop through the window and up you go.”

Bruce swiveled his head out through the opening. It looked like the guy was standing behind the rear driver’s-side tire. A landslide of dirt had buried much of the van, covering the very back and Emily’s window, ending just shy of Bruce’s.

“He’s right. I can crawl up through there and help you guys out.”

“I don’t know, Bruce,” Emily whispered from the back.

He turned and looked at her. “Why are you whispering?”

She lifted her shoulders, turning a creased brow up toward the voice, dim splashes of light slanting across her face.

“I don’t think we have much choice,” Shannon said.

“Oh dear God,” Bedelia said.

Bruce turned his head out the window again. “Hang on just a minute.”

He unfastened his seat belt, gripping the overhead handle as he moved. He crawled gingerly downward, down toward Jamie.

The voice from above became alarmed. “What’re you doing down there, lad? Don’t be stupid!”

Bruce didn’t reply. He braced himself with his legs as he reached across Jamie. She squeezed her eyes shut. Nobody breathed.

“Sorry lot this is! Come to save the day and he’s off gallivanting. What’re you doing down there, really? Give us a hint!”

Bruce locked his legs and feet around Jamie’s seat and reached, stretched, grasped at the door. His fingers found the handle and he pulled it up and closed with an ever-so-gentle click.

He retreated and saw a glisten of tears streaking along Jamie’s face parallel to the blood.

“It’s okay, Tink. We’re getting out now.”

“Just be careful, Bruce.”

He hoisted himself from the window.

“Well it’s about time, I’d say! Paused for tea, did you?”

Bruce moved carefully, exerting as little pressure against the van as possible. He looked down, which was a mistake. The crevasse gaped to a black void. It was as if they were clinging to the thin ledge of an iceberg that sank to nothing less than the entire ocean below.

He averted his eyes, focusing on getting them out. He crawled up along the buried section above Emily’s window toward the man with the red hair who still crouched behind the rear wheel of the van.

Bruce reached across the expanse of asphalt and hoisted himself up. “Do you have some rope? A winch or something? We could secure the van and then help them . . .”

He stopped, gaping. “Are you . . . are you holding the van up with your bare hands?”

“And took your own sweet time with it, didn’t you! Got me squatting’ere like a proctologist to a hippo with my finger up the bloody thing’s arse!”

And then, bizarre as it all seemed, crazy unbelievable already, what happened next came with such surreal incongruity that Bruce’s brain failed to register it. At first.

This peculiar, hunched, red-haired, red-bearded fat man, this stranger with his finger lodged, as he put it, in the van’s arse, stood up.

Removed his finger and stood up.

“No!”

And the van sailed downward.

“No!”

And from inside Bruce could hear them scream.

A cacophony of rock shrieking against metal, dirt flying, all of them screaming! Shannon, Forte, Bedelia. Oh God, Jamie! Emily! No!
No no no!

The van grinding, sliding down, forward, down.

And then it stopped.

Below the surface now by about fifteen feet, it stopped. A grumble of rocks trailed along the broad side and disappeared.

“Oh bloody hell!”

Bruce lurched, hope filling his heart. The van remained well within sight, and from the exuberant screams that still drifted from the crevasse, at least some of the travelers, if not all, were still alive.

The fat man wasted no time. He hopped down into the crevasse, slipping on the dirt and losing balance. He fell on his butt with a trumpeting fart.

“Blah-dy fah-cking hell!”

He righted himself and stuck out his tree trunk of a leg and pumped it against the rear of the van. The vehicle rocked under the force of his foot, and Bruce could hear renewed shrieks from within.

He scrambled back into the crevasse. “No! My God! Stop! Oh God, get out of the van!”

Only they couldn’t. Because the van was now angled in such a way that the nose pointed directly down, and to crawl through the window was to fall into a black depth that seemed to have no bottom.

He grabbed the fat man by the shoulder, but was immediately thrown backward.

Those screams!

The ache in his bladder contracted with incongruent demand. Bruce cast around, looking for something, anything he could use to bash the fat man and make him stop. He thought about his battle with Ichabod and realized he would choke the bastard to dust if necessary.

Another sound pierced through the screaming.

A sudden, buzzing rumble, escalating sharply and drowning out all other sounds.

Bruce staggered up the berm and looked wildly up the road. A 4x4 burst over the side of the hill, dust and rocks flying. Not just a 4x4. A monster truck.

The red-haired man jerked away from the van and scrabbled out of the crevasse and back to the surface. His mouth worked inside his beard in a streak of curses that fell off under the roar of the motor. He bowed his arms and legs and dug in, facing the truck like a sumo wrestler. The truck bore down on the red-haired man and he stuck out his meaty hand and seized the thing by the hood.

The red-haired man held his ground and the truck came to a halt, wheels spinning but unable to advance. A small landslide danced toward Bruce and he had to sidestep to avoid it.

For a minute, the 4x4’s front tires seemed to rise up and Bruce thought the red-haired man was going to actually lift the thing up into the air. But then the giant vehicle began to heave and rock—it almost looked like a lizard engaged in a mating dance—and it crept forward.

The red-haired man bellowed. His legs buckled. The truck gnashed him up, pinning him under the tire.

Bruce gaped, but only for a moment. He turned back to the van, which was no longer visible. All the commotion had loosened more dirt atop it. He saw a mound of earth suspended in the space where it had come to a stop. Bruce’s stomach reeled.

He heard the 4x4’s engine go silent and he turned to see the driver’s-side window roll down. The red-haired man was still lowing like a fallen bull. But though he lay pinned under a tire, he seemed uninjured and appeared to suffer only from raging indignation.

Bruce scaled back to the surface. From the driver’s window an elderly woman appeared, white hair woven in an elegant twist. She inclined her head toward the massive brute she held pinched under the truck. “That’s enough, Hedon.”

“Fucking harpy! Get this pile of scrap metal off of me!”

She tsked and shook her head, then regarded Bruce. “You’d better hurry. There’s some cable in the back of the truck. And take this.”

She turned and rummaged around the seat, then tossed him what looked like a harness. “Make sure it’s secure around your waist so you don’t fall.”

The red-haired man she’d called Hedon let loose with a string of expletives. “Fucking scrap heap . . . !” His fists pummeled the tire. “. . . piss on your bleeding . . .”