Runaways (21 page)

The light was dim in the tunnel and it got dimmer as they moved forward. At least Stormy moved forward. Dani’s feet seemed out of control, refusing to budge, while her ears worked overtime, listening frantically for any sound that might be the beginning of a rattle or slither. By the time they’d reached the other side Stormy was definitely leading the way. His voice seemed stronger too, although he was still talking through almost motionless lips. “I guess the rocks chased them out,” he said. “Or else it was time for them to go hunting.” He looked up at the sky. “See,” he said. “It’s getting late.”

He was right and, with the tunnel out of the way, Dani could concentrate on their next big problem. The time. One advantage of not being able to afford a wristwatch was that you developed a feeling for the time of day. And at the moment it felt late, like maybe six o’clock or even later. If the bus happened to be on time for once, it might already have come and gone. But there was nothing to do but push on and hope that it would be late, as usual.

The rest of their route led westward through the gully until they were well past the Sagebrush Motor Lodge and the outskirts of Rattler Springs. It was then that they climbed out of the ditch and headed back toward town. They had to pass through Old Town first, where what used to be a residential area was now a shamble of tumbledown buildings that hadn’t been occupied since the silver mine closed. Just beyond the last crumbling, roofless cabin they came to the straggle of broken fencing that marked the western edge of Gus’s property. And the beginning of Gus’s junkyard.

Dani had always despised junkyards as the ugliest and most depressing places on earth, but now she found herself appreciating all the huge, rusty carcasses of long-dead cars and trucks, and even wishing there were a few more of them. A few more enormous hulks for her and Stormy to shelter behind as they moved slowly toward town and the bus stop. The sun was low now in the west and the air seemed a little cooler, but Dani was beginning to feel exhausted, and terribly hungry. She knew it must be very late, certainly way past dinnertime. And Stormy was wobbling again.

As Dani turned to watch him he stopped to lean carefully against an old station wagon, and again, a minute later, on the radiator of a truck. “What is it?” Dani asked him. “Are you all right?”

“I—don’t—know,” he whispered. “I feel funny.”

He staggered then and Dani grabbed him as he sank to the ground. Propping him up against the truck’s front wheel, she opened the duffel bag and got out the last Thermos. It wasn’t until she had poured water over his head and face and managed to dribble a little between his lips that his eyes opened. “What happened?” he asked. “Was I asleep?”

“I think you fainted,” Dani said. “Did you? Do you think you fainted?”

“I don’t know,” Stormy said. “Maybe.” His eyes, even the poor swollen one, rolled thoughtfully before he said, “I think I’m hungry.”

Dani grinned and said, “I know. So am I.” And Stormy must be famished. There had been the food poisoning and then, before he’d fully recovered, the swollen lips problem. Pawing through the stuff in the duffel bag, she said ruefully, “All I have is some squashed peanut butter sandwiches.”

Stormy nodded stiffly and said, “Squashed is okay.”

A few minutes later Dani left Stormy propped up against the wheel of a truck, eating peanut butter sandwiches by pulling off tiny pieces and pushing them carefully between his swollen lips. Dani hurried off to look for Pixie. For Pixie—and the Thursday bus to Reno.

She had almost reached the garage where Gus repaired cars, and dangled people he didn’t like over his grease pit, when, out of nowhere, an angry voice called her name. Dani jumped, stumbled and almost fell as she looked frantically in every direction.

“Where have you been? You’re late,” the voice went on. And then there she was. Pixie Smithson was sitting on the backseat of a wheel-less, windowless sedan. Sitting there comfortably, looking cool and collected in her stylish safari shorts—and eating a huge hamburger sandwich.

“Pixie,” Dani said. “I know we’re late. But we couldn’t hurry. Stormy’s been too sick. Has the bus gone? Have we missed the bus?”

“Here. Hold this.” Handing Dani the hamburger, Pixie started to crawl out through a window. “No, we haven’t missed it,” she said as she came out legs first and slithered down to the ground. “The bus is late. I bought the tickets and I’ve been going back to the post office every few minutes to ask about it. At least I was until Mrs. Arlen went home. Mrs. Arlen said the bus’s radiator must be boiling again. Anyway, it hasn’t come yet.” She looked at her wristwatch. “Every ten minutes I go out to the parking lot to see—” She shrugged. “But so far, no bus.”

Dani was relieved to hear that they hadn’t missed the bus after all, but with that worry taken care of the look and smell of the big, juicy hamburger took over. She only halfway heard the rest of what Pixie was saying. Something about all the things she’d been doing while she waited. One of which had obviously been done at the Silver Grill. Dani swallowed hard and, without even deciding to, took a big bite of hamburger sandwich.

“Hey,” Pixie said. “You’re eating my sandwich.”

“I know,” Dani said with her mouth full. “I couldn’t help it. Come on. I’m taking the rest of it to Stormy. We’re starving.”

They found Stormy right where Dani had left him, propped up against the wheel of the truck, but to her relief, the shade and the peanut butter seemed to have helped. He was looking and sounding a lot more normal. And when he saw the half-eaten hamburger he looked even more like his old self. Clutching what was left of the sandwich in both hands, he managed a one-sided grin before he began to eat by using his peanut butter sandwich technique, breaking off little pieces and squashing them before he pushed them between his lips. He was getting better at it, but it was still a slow process. Before the hamburger was gone Pixie and Dani had each taken a turn sneaking out to the parking lot to check on the bus. When Pixie came back for the second time she was running. “Come on,” she called as she skidded to a stop. “It’s here. The bus came. Hurry.”

T
HEY HURRIED TOWARD THE
bus stop, or at least went as fast as Stormy could shuffle. But, as it turned out, they needn’t have. When they reached the parking lot the bus was there all right, but the passengers were all on their way across the street heading for the Silver Grill or the bar at the Grand Hotel. They watched from behind a beat-up old Buick as the bus driver, a tall, scrawny man wearing a sweat-stained uniform, locked the bus door and followed his passengers across the street and into the restaurant.

“There he goes,” Dani said angrily, slamming her fist down on the fender of the car. “He’s already two or three hours late and now he’s going off to have dinner. We’re not going to get out of here for hours, and by then everyone in town will be looking for us.”

“I know,” Pixie said, and then she added, “I’ll find out how long it will be.” Before Dani could stop her she took off running across the lot and the road, and disappeared into the Silver Grill.

“Well, that’s it,” Dani said to Stormy. “She’s going to get us caught for sure.”

Stormy swallowed the last of the hamburger before he asked, “Do they know about us?”

“Does who know?”

“The cafe people?”

Dani shrugged. “No. I don’t suppose so. But the Smithsons might be looking for Pixie by now. And my mother too. My mother might go in there looking for me. She’s probably been home by now and …”

She stopped as she was suddenly seeing, almost as if it were happening on a kind of movie screen inside her head, her mother walking in the door and calling out the way she always did. Calling out and then beginning to look around the cabin. Imagining Linda searching more and more frantically, caused a sharp pain in Dani’s chest and a swollen feeling in her throat. She swallowed hard, telling herself she was being ridiculous. After all, it was a little late to start worrying about how Linda would take it when she found out that her only kid had disappeared. Dani was still telling herself she was being ridiculous, and to just stop thinking about it, when Pixie dashed back across the lot.

“Hi,” she said excitedly. “I found out everything. I talked to the bus driver and he said they’d be leaving soon. I told him we’d been waiting for hours and there were three of us. And he said there was plenty of room and that he’d be leaving in half an hour. So we’re all set. We just have to keep hidden until the bus leaves.”

They went on waiting, watching from behind the old Buick while the short desert twilight deepened toward night and Rattler Springs Main Street became dim and shadowy. But then, finally, things began to happen.

The first thing Dani noticed was a familiar figure coming down the street and crossing over to the parking lot. A huge mountain of a man with a dome-shaped head surrounded by straggly hair. It had to be Gus. And then, about the time Gus reached his parking lot, the bus driver emerged from the Silver Grill and came back across the street. Peering carefully around the Buick, Dani and Pixie watched while Gus and the bus driver chatted and worked on the bus, filling the gas tank and doing things under the hood.

“Get ready,” Dani whispered. “Pixie, where are the tickets?” When Pixie had given them each a ticket, a blue adult one for Dani and green ones for herself and Stormy, Dani said, “Now. As soon as Gus goes back inside the station we’ll start out. We should just walk calmly over to the bus, give the driver our tickets and get on.”

Pixie nodded excitedly. “Yes,” she said. “We’ll walk right over and get on.”

“Calmly,” Stormy said. “After Gus goes away.”

Only it didn’t turn out to be that easy.

The bus driver said no. The scrawny, sweaty bus driver looked at the three of them and at their tickets, and then he shook his head and said, “No way, kids. ’Fraid I can’t let you on without a parent’s say-so.”

“But I told you,” Pixie almost shrieked. “I told you about how our mother was dying and we don’t have any father so we were going to go live with our aunt in Reno. I told you in the restaurant, and you said okay.”

“Yep, you told me that,” the bus driver said. “That and a whole lot of other stuff, as I recall. But I thought there’d leastways be someone here to put you on the bus. Them’s the rules, kids. No kids riding alone unless their folks put them on the bus and tell the driver where they’re supposed to be let off.”

Pixie was starting to shriek again when Dani interrupted. Reminding herself to be calm, she said, “But our mother can’t come. She can’t come to the bus stop.”

“Yes,” Pixie said more calmly, following Dani’s example. Calmly—and pitifully. “She’s too sick and we can’t stay any longer because she’s running out of food. If we stay any longer we won’t have anything to eat.”

“Is that right?” the bus driver said. “Well, that’s a real sad story for sure. Real sad.” He looked from Dani to Pixie and back again. Then he sighed, and started saying, “Well, now, maybe I could …” But he stopped in midsentence. Pushing past Dani, he said, “Come here, kid. Let me get a look at you.” He was talking to Stormy.

Forgetting that he should stay back in the shadows while Dani and Pixie did the talking, Stormy had moved closer. Had moved into the light, and now was wincing and trying to pull away from the driver’s hand on his shoulder. But the hand held on, and as he pulled Stormy forward into the light, the bus driver said, “Good Lord, kid. What happened to you? Who did this to you, son?”

But Stormy only shook his head and went on shaking it. Both Dani and Pixie started trying to answer but neither of their stories was going anywhere or making much sense. And anyway the bus driver had stopped listening. “You girls just be still a minute,” he said. “I don’t know what you’re trying to pull, but it looks to me as how something’s happened here that’s not the kind of thing the bus company would want to get mixed up in. So why don’t you kids go talk to someone here in town? Someone in charge, like the sheriff, maybe.”

They tried, both Dani and Pixie tried to argue, but the bus passengers had started to straggle back across the street by then, and the driver turned his attention to them. At last Dani whispered, “Come on. Let’s go. It’s no use staying here.”

“But where?” Pixie whispered frantically. “Where can we go?”

“I don’t know,” Dani said, and she didn’t, but her feet seemed to be moving, taking her back into the deeper shadows. When they stopped she was back behind the Buick, and so were Pixie and Stormy. “Okay,” Dani said, trying to sound calm and confident. “What we need to do now is—is to make a new plan.”

“Okay,” Stormy said, “a new plan.”

Pixie nodded, but for once she didn’t say anything. And, in the next minute or two, neither did anyone else. But when a voice finally broke the silence it was Pixie’s, and what she said was, “What about that truck idea?”

“What truck idea?” Dani asked. She knew what Pixie was talking about, of course, but she didn’t feel like saying so.

“No. No truck.” Stormy’s voice was loud and clear. The clearest it had been all day.

“Why not?” Pixie asked him.

Stormy moved closer to Dani in the semidarkness. “Because,” he said quickly and firmly, “because Dani says so.”

Suddenly Dani was fighting a weird urge to do something she’d never done before or even wanted to do, and that was to reach out for Stormy and hug him. And she might really have done it, too, except she remembered just in time that a hug, even a small one, would probably hurt him a lot. So she just swallowed hard instead and said, “Yeah, I said no trucks, but …” She paused, thinking that stowing away on a truck might be their last chance. Stormy’s last chance to get away from—from Rattler Springs. Of course, the odds weren’t very good that, at that particular moment, the right kind of truck would be there in the yard. But then again …

“We’ll look,” she said. “We might as well go see what’s here.”

There were a lot of vehicles in Gus’s parking lot that night, most of them parked near the garage, waiting, no doubt, for their turn over the grease pit. But out front, in the short-term parking area, there was only one truck. One van-type truck, closed and padlocked. So there was no hope there. But there was another parking area on the north side of the service station. And it had been there, Dani remembered, that she had seen the canvas-covered truck—and met the driver with the Gila monster face.