Chapter 7

I figured that the slow rural bus system would take us at least a week to make it to DC, as I certainly didn’t expect it to match even the miserable reliability of the American train system, but I was delightfully surprised. Our buses (we had to transfer twice) weren’t fast, but they kept moving onwards, reasonably slow and steady, inexorably closer towards our destination. They’d stop at every single town, hamlet, village, gas station, residence, warehouse, farmhouse, henhouse, outhouse and doghouse along the route, but a minute or two later the wheels would roll again, onwards and eastwards.

The wheels on the bus go around and around ... and so forth. For some reason I couldn’t get that damned song out of my head.

By the time we left Ohio and crossed a tiny corner of rural Pennsylvania into Morgantown, West Virginia and had changed buses there to our final connection that would take us into Maryland and eventually DC, I’d stopped worrying about lurking federal agents entirely. I just kept my eyes closed and actually managed to sleep for a few fitful hours off and on for the next few days. I don’t think Miranda’s eyes, or her mouth ever closed. She’d declined to sit next to me and instead seated herself next to another young lady and the pair of them clucked and cackled like hens for endless hours at a time.

Having an invisible partner with an endless supply of quality hard alcohol certainly didn’t hurt, although my brain certainly still did. Every hour or two all for most of the first two days of our first bus trip Sean would slip a few bottle of something decently potable into my carry-on bag, and thus I developed the happy reputation of having a seemingly endless supply of bootleg booze on hand. It made me quite popular! Since Sean and I still had remnants of splitting headaches from the aftereffects of the null bomb, a quick swallow of good sipping whisky every hour of two was our preferred remedy. Sean would take a long slug that would kill a quarter of a half-liter bottle and I’d then imbibe two small sips and then pass the bottle on to my fellow passengers, making lots of casual friends in the process. I don’t think a single bottle ever managed to make the circuit back to my seat with more than a drop left in it.

It became quite the party nearly from the start of our trip and it lasted quite all of the way to Morgantown. My fellow riders became less dour with every nip from a bottle they could finagle, and a seemingly endless avalanche of food stuffs from hitherto hidden picnic baskets emerged and was freely shared by all. One rider pulled out his harmonica, another, a mouth-harp and yet a third produced a small stringed instrument of some sort and although none of them could carry a tune worth a shit, the musical bedlam at least had cheerful enthusiasm going for it.

Most of our now-jolly passengers left us at points along the way and a few got off with us at Morgantown, but none joined us for the final trip to DC. Just as well, by then nearly everyone was sure that I was a bootlegger and I had probably brought far too much attention to myself with my generous redistribution of Sean’s limitless booze stash. I didn’t worry that much about it. Everywhere I’d been in this country the Prohibition laws had been at best ignored and usually even outright flaunted. In the eyes of most people, I was conducting an invaluable public service. Even the most law abiding passengers just politely ignored my offerings and found other things to focus their progressive zeal upon. The driver certainly wasn’t going to complain – he’d been taking a good many nips at the contents of various bottles passing by his way, not the least of which was a metal flask tucked away in his jacket pocket. Surprisingly, his eyes kept focused and his hands remained steady, keeping our bus on the proper side of the road (usually). At odd irregular intervals the main driver would switch out with his relief partner and snag a few hours of shuteye before returning to the wheel, but as the mid-aged gentlemen appeared nearly identical to my pain (and drink) blurred eyes, I never could really tell the difference between them. Functionally, it didn’t matter anyway.

The wheels on the bus went round and round ... Damn! That kid’s song was stuck in my head again!

My magically induced headache was mostly gone by the time we transferred to the final bus, so probably it was time to lighten up on the booze anyway for the last phase of our trip. This close to DC, I didn’t want to stand out at all or attract any attention. The poor FBMA bastards would figure out soon enough that we’d slunk into town to piss in their corn flakes and I didn’t want to give them any more preparation time to think of yet more stupid plans to deal with us than I could help. Given enough time, they might even think of a smart plan for dealing with us!

The new bus for this last part of the Maryland route did not inspire us with any confidence, but its obvious excessive age and probably indifferent maintenance didn’t seem to frighten any of our other passengers unduly. Trusting their experience rather than my eyes, I refrained from making snarky remarks and got my ass into the bus anyway, sitting about in the middle rear part so that I could blend in better and be less visible. Miranda almost sat down next to me. She hesitated in the aisle for ten or twelve long seconds before sitting down in a seat just across the aisle and one further back from me. Joining another young lady of about her age traveling unattended and before the bus had even released its parking brakes, my perky apprentice had made another fast friend.

I didn’t open any booze bottles, at least not yet. I wanted the chance to think a bit about the ratfuck we were likely to fall right into the moments our fannies hit the mean DC streets. This wasn’t the time or the place to start working on any specific magical preparations, but since I was finally no longer suffering from a massive skull splitting headache I could at least work through a few previsualization exercises. Mental what-the-fuck-to-do’s, just like magically encoding sets of Arc-Tec ‘If-Then-Else’ magic conditionals in my small lab back home in Austin. I’d burned through an insanely crazy amount of magical power in Cleveland and that sort of wholescale destruction wasn’t going to be acceptable in Washington, even from a former burnout Adept from Texas.

Not without a declaration of war, anyway. In that case, I’d be right at home... ‘One riot – one Texas Ranger’, or wizard!

Rest and quietly think. That was my plan ... two things that I’m not terribly good at.

Our new bus, as I’d mentioned was more than a tad obsolete and ought to have been in some museum. No one in Texas would have even seen a model like this in at least fifty years, even in the back ass end of nowhere. Mechanically I think, it was only held together by Bond-O and bailing wire. Miracle Putty, buckets of it, would have been needed to put this old rattling heap all together and back into one piece. As for its engine and operating fuel; I couldn’t hazard a guess, but it didn’t run on gasoline. Maybe strained cooking grease and vegetable oil, with an additive of strained pureed roadkill for good measure. All I could tell was that every town stop some mysterious viscous liquids of no particular color were poured into the fuel tank by the open bucketful. It stunk going in and the black exhaust fumes stunk ten times worse coming out the tail pipe. By-processed latrine waste? I didn’t even want to know.

The bus must have violated dozens of EPA pollution regulations, not to mention road safety requirements, but it kept going until it reached the small town of Accident. Yep, that was the town – I’m sure of it. You just can’t make up some stories!

Going just over the top of a hill after a brief stop in Friendsville where we’d grabbed a quick lunch while refueling and dropping off a few passengers, it wasn’t much of a surprise to me when Sean grumbled, ‘oh shit’, into my ear.

“Brakes are gone,” he added with a hint of concern, “hydraulic line to both front brakes just snapped ... quite naturally caused, but it’s just a wee bit of a drop down this hill and to the small river bridge at the bottom of a dead man’s curve just ahead.”

Sean’s usual sort of understatement; it was a pretty darned steep hill and the bus was now flying down it at a far greater speed than it had ever achieved before in its motoring life. I thought for a moment about asking Sean to do a hasty secret patch job to the brakes ... but I was too bemused by our bus driver, who wasn’t sweating the crisis one darned bit!

“Got a bit of an issue with the bus folks,” he genially admitted with a slow drawl, “but it’s not a big one. This sort of thing happens all the time, so ... no worries!” He wasn’t. Not in the least.

I started to round up a tentative hold on some weak Air leys, in case I urgently needed to shield the bus from a ninety mile-an-hour head on crash with the immoveable iron bridge, which seemed to grow larger the faster we flew down the hill. The barely paved two lane road here became reduced to a single lane as it crossed the old steel bridge with a none-too gentle left hand turn as it met the bridge. The old bridge itself was barely wider than the bus, with hardly more than a foot of clearance on either side. Taking the turn at any speed seemed suicidal.

Without any direct magical aid, by me in any case, our calm, cool and collected driver took the dead man’s curve onto the bridge with perhaps just two wheels making ground contact, and with a loud scrape sheared off the right side drivers mirror against the first iron railing of the bridge. Somehow, the bus avoided a furious plunge into the shallow river and squeezed across the narrow iron bridge to safety. We still doing at least eighty miles an hour on the other side of the river, but now the road was all uphill once more and the laws of gravity now worked in our favor and gradually the bus slowed down to much safer speeds.

About halfway up this hill was the small town, barely more than a village, called Accident. Don’t ask me why. Still under its own power, the bus gently turned into the gravel covered parking lot for a small country store that also passed for its local bus station, and once the emergency brakes were applied we were at a safe controlled stop.

Damn ... that crazy driver still hadn’t broken a sweat!

I thought we’d just be stuck in this backwoods nothing of a semi-frontier outpost for an hour or at most two, but the repair took all night. The jist of the issue was that that the bus company operated on a federal charter with grants from the Rural Transportation Board, or some such federal humbuggery. In practice, this meant that payment for unscheduled local roadside repairs was authorized only by a government voucher system. The local Joey Bumfuck does the repair, gets his expense voucher from the driver and then sends it in to Washington, where after months of careful deliberation and study the voucher will be declined for payment, citing an error in the completion in part 47 of the government form.

Having more sense than God gave most governmental paper pushers, the local Joey Bumfuck the mechanic here in Accident wasn’t going to even touch that voucher with a proverbial ten-foot pole. There would be loud threats, screams of anguish and enough emotional drama to satisfy a gaggle of teenaged girls, but in the end (hours later) it would all be settled the usual way this sort of mess was always handled ... the bus driver would pass around the hat and make the passengers pay for the cost of the repair. Or, if they declined, that they could all park their asses by the side of the road and wait for the next bus. Sure to be here tomorrow, or perhaps the day after.

I could have let Sean secretly make the repair. That though, in the eyes of the local and the bus driver, might be a rather strange (and memorable) occurrence ... if not that evil and forbidden ‘M‘ word, magic. I didn’t want any federal interest at all in our journey. If that meant sitting my ass on the side of the road for a day or two, so be it. Sean did have an entire virtual liquor store stashed away in his miraculous bag of infinite storage and I was just getting annoyed enough to start having a thirst for just a good sip of two of something smooth and mellow. I could sense Trixie flying nearby, invisibly, probably heading to the river to scrounge a snack of fresh river fish. She was a growing girl too, like Miranda and neither was happy when they missed meals! We could all just twiddle our fingers here and wait!

Having a regional bus break down in their quaint tiny town was apparently much like having the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving rolled into one unexpected new holiday and the locals quickly got into the spirit. Bless them! From seemingly nowhere, tables and chairs were hastily set up under the wide canopied trees behind the general store and an alarmingly vast smorgasbord of food was produced with amazing alacrity until the tables all groaned under the weight. This was a community of poor rurals, but they shared freely what they had, and with strangers. I couldn’t tell you what even a quarter of the stuff was, but it was actually the single best meal I’d had to date in the US!

No one said a word of complaint when I quietly produced a large bottle of red dinner wine from out of my miraculous overnight bag and it swiftly made the rounds, an ounce or two into every tumbler, glass and jar bottle. I could have provided another couple of bottles after that, but that might have raised interesting questions. It was still a meaningful contribution to the feast that was well accepted.

After the entire township and their grateful guests had all been fed, and the slightly smaller mountain of leftovers somehow dealt with, a bonfire was started at dusk and an entire orchestra of fiddles, guitars, banjos, jugs and washboards started played and the feast become instead a hoedown! When the local corn squeezing started appearing in stoneware jugs, I rummaged into my bag to produce a few worthy contributions of own, that were far from unappreciated.

Now fueled for their lust for life, the locals (and soon most of the bus passengers) began to dance around the bonfire to the music, in a shameless sight that would have caused the blood of any Department of Health, Welfare and Public Morality bureaucrat to run cold. At even the rumor of such a shameless public event, the Senate Committee for Un-American Activities and the Preservation of Decency would have launched an investigation and conducted hearings that would pontificate for the television cameras and the press for endless days!

I didn’t however join them; the fine rural country music was a pleasure to sway and stomp your feet to, but my preferred partner was otherwise busy the entire evening. Miranda danced for hours with every man and boy in town, quite breaking some hearts in the process, all the while openly glancing in my direction in an increasingly wistful come-hither manner. I wasn’t going to bite. She’d started the silent treatment with me – now she could make the overt first move to end the frosty war too!

I’d screwed up countless things in my fairly young life that I now regretted – but putting a bullet into the head of the murdering FBI boss that had killed our friend Stan was not one of them!

Sometime well after dark, perhaps just an hour or so before midnight, the jamboree began to wind down and the locals made their good-nights. Some of our stranded bus passengers had offers of an extra bed or a sofa for the night and the rest just happily took their rest back on the stranded bus. Having had less dancing exercise that evening, I wasn’t quite yet in the mood for sleep myself so I wandered over to the front of the gas station/general store to sit on the middle one of three long benches there. A pair of old-timers were already sitting there at the far end, each whittling sticks of wood into progressively small chips of not much in particular with their pocket knives. As each stick was exhausted into tiny kindling, another would be gathered to be cut apart in exactly the same manner. Well, it did kill time. A few minutes later a few of the other men of the town, including a few young chaps, wandered over to join the quiet assembly.