“I do. The pen is starting to run out of ink, but I have an eyebrow pencil and some mascara that I found in a car. Have to, we can write with that.”
“Good. As I was saying. A couple of us need to go on an expedition. Outside. See if we can find the exit hole.”
“I’ll go,” I said.
“Me too,” Reba said.
“All right,” Grace said.
James raised his hand, looked at Grace. “I know this is something I shouldn’t ask. But who made you captain?”
“I did,” she said. “Problem with that?”
“No. That works fine for me.”
We still had a few flashlights, and there were even a couple of matches Grace had produced from somewhere. And there were knives, of course.
Grace, me, and Reba moved to the front of the bus. I took one flashlight, Reba the other. We each took a knife. We spoke quietly.
“Thing to do,” Grace said, “is go out there, see if you can figure where Ed relieves himself, and can we get out that way. This critter, he isn’t going to be like a normal fish—”
“No shit,” Reba said.
“No telling what you’ll find,” Grace said. Then almost too soft to hear: “But you got to find something. Some way out.”
“Those things move awfully fast out there,” I said.
“I know,” Grace said. “I can go instead of you.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“I can, though,” Grace said, “but the problem is James. I don’t trust him, and with me out of the way, well, Steve could handle him, but I like having him doubleteamed. I may just go on and kill him. That would be the smart thing to do.”
“But it wouldn’t be the right thing,” I said. “We start doing things like that, then Homer is correct, we’ll be like a lot of other folks on this world, and with no one acting as room monitors, this will be hell.”
“I’ll try to remember that,” Grace said. “Now, you remember Bjoe’s story, about how the torches his folk were carrying went out, and they were nabbed. I think that’s exactly what happened. The torches burned out, and the light went out, and when it did, they were nabbed. Once you turn your flashlights on, don’t turn them off. No light, and they come. You’ve got light, they won’t bother you.”
“You’re sure?” Reba said.
“Of course not,” Grace said. “I’m trying to make you feel better. All we know is they don’t like light. They might be strong enough to have put those torches out themselves. They might jam those flashlights up your asses. I don’t know. I can go, you can stay. One way or another, someone has to go out there and look around.”
“We could all go,” Reba said. “Isn’t it a bad idea to divide? You know, we’ve all certainly seen enough horror movies.”
“If we all go, and it goes wrong, none of us make it,” I said. “I wouldn’t like that. I want some of us to survive, if for no other reason than I’m stubborn. We don’t make it, then we still got others who can.”
“You could send James,” Reba said.
“He wouldn’t be worth a damn if I did send him,” Grace said. “I don’t like him, and I don’t trust him. Besides, I’d hope he would drop his flashlight. Here’s the bottom line. We got to find a way out. We all go, we wouldn’t have a chance. There’s only two more flashlights. There would be a wad of us out there without enough light. The two of you, you can fend for each other. I don’t know what to say you’re looking for. A way out. That’s it. We’ll all probably drown anyway. But I’d rather do that than sit here and hope there’s a god who notices and sends us individual scuba suits.”
“I got you,” I said. I turned to Reba, said, “Think the way we do this, Reba, is one of us takes up the rear, sort of back to back, and we wave the lights around a lot. Let them know we’re armed with bits of sunshine.”
“I’ll have Steve turn on and flash the lights every now and then. I can’t tell time, but I’m going to wet a string, hang it from the ceiling, when the drips fill a paper cup—”
“You don’t have any paper cups,” I said.
“I’m going to fold one out of a piece of paper from your pack. I’ll make it a small one. When it fills, I’ll flash the lights. Then I’ll flash them again. Three, four times. Then we’ll wet the string again, let it fill the cup.”
“And if the string dries out before the cup is filled?”
“I’ll keep it wet,” Grace said, “if I have to pee on it.”
“All right,” Reba said. She took a deep breath, called over to Steve. “Open the door.”
12
Even with the lights it was very dark, and my first thought was that those little pale yellow beams of ours weren’t worth anything when it came to the big bad things out there in the wilds of Ed’s belly; those dark things all het up and fast and nasty and full of teeth.
Reba actually put her butt to mine and backed. We rotated our beams like search lights looking for Kamikazes. We hadn’t gone far when we found the little shadow dears.
They whispered past us, rattled and fluttered there in the dark. I shone my light this way and that, felt something at my elbow, snapped the beam over there, only to have a chunk of the dark pop away.
“Oh, shit, don’t fall down, Jack. Don’t trip. Don’t fuck up. And, for heaven’s sake, I hope the flashlights don’t go out.”
“I’ve been trying not to think about that,” I said. “All I’ve been thinking is, I ever get hold of the director of this picture, boy is he gonna take a bitch-slapping.”
“Oh, Jack,” Reba said. “It hit me.”
“What?”
“Those things. One of them hit my arm. It’s bleeding.”
“Get the light off yourself. Keep it searching. Keep moving.”
“I shouldn’t have come. I sounded so brave when I volunteered. But I shouldn’t have come.”
“Neither of us should have. Do you want to go back to the bus?”
“Yes. But guess what? I can’t see it anymore.”
I looked back the way I thought we had come. And Reba was right. There was nothing but the dark to see.
The things moved around us as if we were the center of a hurricane. They swirled, crinkled, and cracked, like an old film negative being wadded. As we moved forward, flashlights extended, waving this way and that, the things scattered.
But it seemed to me they were getting a bit more testy, coming ever closer. Pretty soon, we both had a number of cuts from the edges of the things as they flittered by.
“Look,” I said.
So she could look, I turned right and she followed around until I took her position and she took mine.
“My God,” she said.
“Yep.”
What she was looking at was a narrow metal bridge. A grillwork bridge. It went across into a darkness the flashlights would not cross.
The bridge spanned what looked to be an abyss.
“Let’s scoot onto the bridge,” I said. “One of us can point our light, get a better look at what’s down there while the other watches for critters.”
As we made our way onto the bridge we were confronted by a foul smell.
“God Almighty,” I said. “We must be at Ed’s sewage plant.”
“Or a way out,” Reba said. “It goes down a ways, but it also veers to the right there, to what could be Ed’s rear end. Though, with just a flashlight, it’s hard to tell what I’m seeing.”
“Let’s change roles,” I said. “You flash about, I’ll have a look.”
Reba was right. The hole beneath the bridge dropped way down, and there were worker ladders on either side of the pit, something the robots used for maintenance. But there was a ki nd of tunnel that went off to the right. I noticed too that it was moving. As I watched, it irised open, then closed. Then repeated itself. Again and again.
It was a sphincter. I saw a mass of something dark rise up from the pit and reach the tunnel, flow into it as if sucked, and disappear.
I lifted my light and joined Reba
in flashing mine about.
“I think it’s a sphincter that exits Ed’s waste. We might could get out that way.”
“Boy, won’t that be shitty?” Reba said.
“Frankly, I don’t see how we can do it. Not and live.”
“Grace is right though. We have to try something. We can’t just wait here. We’ll die anyway. I’d rather go out trying.”
“I could go down there and investigate. I think I can swing over the bridge and get closer for a look. Can you stand being here by yourself?”
“Oh, Jesus ... Make it quick as you can.”
“Kiss me,” I said.
She did. Quickly.
I went to the base of the bridge and started climbing over. Reba’s light hit me.
“Shadow,” she said.
I jerked my head and my light. My carnivorous shadow friend fluttered away from me.
I got my foot on the ladder and started climbing down. It was hard to do with my flashlight, and I knew if I dropped it, I was dead meat. Maybe the things wouldn’t come down here, but even still, if I dropped the light, when I went up, they’d be waiting.
The deeper I went the stinkier it got.
What had seemed like depth from the bridge, darkness in the light, was something moving, gurgling, and stinking.
Ed functioned as a fish, but had never been completed. Like Bjoe said, someone forgot, or the mechanisms just played out too soon. Still, Ed was working all right, and his innards were working satisfactorily enough to manufacture what we in the bathroom business (which is pretty much all of us), would describe as pure-de-ole-identifiable-for-a-fact—you-bet-your-smelly-ass—
S-H-I-T.
No question there.
13
I shined my light down there. The tunnel was pulsing, sucking in that nasty goo. I thought, well, I die this way, it isn’t a death I ever expected. It was, to put it mildly, a unique way to go. Had to be better than cancer or some sort of horrid disease, going slow, like being gummed to death by proteindeprived octogenarians.
In a way, it was no less dignified than aging and lying in your own shit and being eaten away slowly from the inside. Of course, if I were home, who was to say I wouldn’t just die quick of a heart attack at the age of eighty while in bed with a twenty-five-year-old hooker with her little finger crooked up my ass.
So, that thinking business, sometimes it was better not to do too much of it. It could get you in trouble.
I was pondering this to the point of almost feeling that hooker’s little finger in my tail, when suddenly, above me, there was light.
Not heavenly light, but light. And it was too much light for Reba’s flashlight. Light from a distance, filtered through something the consistency of a gunnysack. It held for a long moment, then went out.
“The bus,” Reba said. “Oh, God, Jack, come up.”
I carefully padded my way up the shit-slick ladder onto the bridge, somehow maintaining my grip on the flashlight.
When I was standing beside her, she said, “Wait.”
I waited. The birth of the universe couldn’t have been any slower than that wait.
Then, the light.
When the beams hit, the darkness shredded like something dark tossed into a fan. There was a sound like a baseball card in bicycle spokes, the bicycle being peddled fast.
“The darkness,” Reba said. “It’s absolutely alive with them.”
“They may be the dark,” I said.
When the bus’s head beams went out, I made a swooping movement with my light and Reba flashed hers about too. After a moment, I used the light to nab the direction of the bus, though I couldn’t actually see it in my feeble beam, and pulled the flashlight over my shoulder. I did this repeatedly, signaling for them to come.
“Oh, Jack, behind you.”
I turned with the light. The darkness sucked back a bit, the bridge trembled.
“Sorry,” Reba said. “I had the light on it, but it was still coming.”
“They’re not as afraid now,” I said. “They’re getting brave.”
“Look.”
We could see from a great distance the bus beams moving toward us, two headlamps that looked to be the size of the tips of our thumbs.
Seeing the light grow and brighten was as hypnotic to us as it might have been to a moth. Soon, we stood on the bridge in a bath of yellow. It was heartening.
We worked our way back to the bus, and to get in the door, we had to step momentarily out of the glow of the bus’s head beams and into shadow. Our flashlights seemed less bright than before, and I could feel those things all around us, closer, touching, almost tasting us. Steve, sitting in the driver’s seat, worked the door lever and let us in. As the door slammed behind us, Steve, eyes wide, said, “You don’t want to know what was right behind you, almost up your asses.”
Inside, everyone gathered around, and we told what had happened. Steve drove the bus right up to the edge of the divide. He let the bus idle. The lights struck across the chasm like a golden honey bridge.
“It’s ugly down there,” I said. “Once you go in, you might be wadded up with the turds. If you aren’t, you’ll be stuffed with turds, won’t be able to breathe. I don’t see a way to make it work.”
“We haven’t got but one choice,” James said. “We got to go back into the light. Maybe Bjoe will let us stay with him. He might do that. Or we have to fight him. Hell, Grace can kick Bjoe to death. We can become the leaders. We can’t get out without being killed, and we can’t stay back here in shadow, so seems to me, that’s the only way to go.”
“In case you haven’t noticed,” I said, “we’re a little outnumbered. Not even Grace can fight all of them. Not even with our help.”
“Bjoe might listen to reason,” James said. “I mean, we’ll be in the bus. We’d have some protection, and we could fight them if they try and come in. I think we got a better chance that way instead of waiting for our fucking ears to pop, diving into that shit, and hoping we aren’t made into turds or stuffed with them.”
“He’s got a point,” Homer said.
“Much as I hate to admit it, he does,” Grace said. “But I’m not big on going back. A place I’ve already been that isn’t good, doesn’t seem worth going back to.”
“Fucking news flash,” James said. “We’ve already been here, too, and it ain’t for shit.”
Steve had killed the engine while we were talkin’. Now he turned the starter and fired it up again.
“Hey, man,” I said, “what’s the scoop?”
“I don’t want to go back,” Steve said, “and we’re at the end of the line here, so why don’t we go forward?”
“You been sniffing glue, doing the bag?” James said.
“Do you feel it?” Steve said. I had, but it hadn’t really registered. “We’re surfacing.”
Everyone was silent for a moment, then Homer said, “Yeah. We are. But for how long? It may have been kind of my idea, but I’m liking it less all the time,”
“We can’t go back,” Steve said. “There’s only one place to go ... Into the shit.”
“Oh, man,” James said, “you don’t mean it?”
“The bus is our only protection,” Steve said. “It might survive the process.”
“And if it does,” Homer said, “we’ll squirt out the fish’s ass and into a whole hell of a lot of deep water. We’ll sink like a goddamn brick tied to an anvil tied to a Cadillac transmission.”
“We have to be ready,” Steve said.
“What the fuck does that mean?” James said.
“When we shoot out—”
“—you mean if we shoot out. And if we do, we’ll sink, like the way Homer said.”
“—we have to be ready to open windows. They slide down, so the water pressure ought to allow that. We slide them down, and we swim out.”
“Oh, that’s a good plan,” Homer said. “And why don’t we find something heavy to tie to our dicks to make it just a little fucking harder?”
>
“We haven’t got much time,” Steve said. “My ears are clearing. We’re reaching the surface.”
“Count my ass out,” James said. “Give me a flashlight. I’ll take my chances back with the cannibals.”
“It’s now or never, folks,” Steve said.
I gave James my flashlight, said, “Good luck, man.”
“It would be best if we all went back,” he said. “Best all around.”
“Not gonna happen,” Grace said.
Steve opened the door as James turned on the flashlight.
“Goodbye, asshole,” Steve said.
“You’re all gonna do this?” James said.
“I guess we are,” Grace said. “Anyone that isn’t, go now.”
“I’m crazy, but I’m sticking,” Homer said.
The rest of us nodded.
“Goodbye, dumb shits,” James said, waved the beam at the pulsating shadows in the door, made them scamper.
He went out.
Steve closed the door.
We moved to the back of the bus and watched James and his light. Actually, just the light. The shadows were too thick to see anything else. The light bobbed quickly as it raced away from us.
“Think he’ll make it?” Homer said.
“He can’t make it either way,” Grace said, fastening the back window down tight. “If those shadows don’t get him, the dinner bell is waiting for him on the bright side. Frankly, I don’t care if they use his balls for tennis. He made his own goddamn bed, now let him lie in it.”
“I hate to just let him go like that,” Homer said. “I mean, I did let him fuck me in the ass. It wasn’t that much fun, really, but I let him. I feel like me and my ass owe him something.”
“You’ve heard my thoughts on the matter,” Grace said. “I’m all done thinking about him. Your ears still popping, Steve? I can’t feel it.”
“I think our buddy has surfaced.”
“I think it’s time to do the big deed, baby,” Grace said.
Steve made with a wild rebel yell that shook me to my bones.
“My mama always said I was a little turd,” Reba said, as we filed into a seat next to one another, our hands gripping the seat in front of us. “I guess she was right.”