Charlie Huston - Six Bad Things

I peek left and right through the open front doors. No sign of either of them.

– Rolf!

– Dude?

He’s still outside the driver’s side.

– Toss the keys in and then I want you both to walk over in front of the bus where I can see you.

– Dude, no fucking way.

– Rolf, I am going to come out there and just shoot you guys. Now throw in the keys and get where I can see you.

– Dude, you know we have a gun, right?

Uh?

– Like, Sid had to shoot that deputy with something, right, dude?

My stomach drops.

– Bullshit. Why didn’t he just shoot me?

– Dude, because I don’t want to.

Sid, still on the passenger side.

– Bullshit.

BANG!

I duck.

– That wasn’t at you, dude. Just to, like, prove it, you know.

Bad plan, Hank, very bad plan.

– So, dude, toss your piece out and we’ll all chill and get back with the program.

I get on my hands and knees and crawl around the bench seat, into the back of the bus. I find the Anaconda where I stashed it under a loose flap of carpet, and stick it in the pocket of my pullover.

– Dude?

I edge up onto the bed where I hid earlier, staying flat so I can’t be seen through the windows. I grab the handle that opens the rear window, push the little button at its center, and twist.

– Dude?

Is he a little closer? I shout.

– I need to think!

I push the window and it lifts up and out.

Sid calls.

– Brah, don’t do this, man, don’t fuck this up. You know, you so know how important this is to me. I’m all, I’m all… please, dude.

I let go of the window and springs draw it open. I lever myself up and over the window’s lip, roll out, and drop to the ground. The landing jars my squishy brain and blackness strobes at the edge of my vision, then recedes. I crawl the first few feet, the sand dragging at my clumsy limbs, then get into a low crouch, stumbling away from the bus, trying to keep it between me and them.

– DUUUUUDE!

I hear them behind me, climbing into the bus. I drop flat on the ground, worming around so I’m facing the VW. I hold the pistol out, line up the sights with the open rear window of the bus. Rolf’s dreadlocked head appears in the window. I have a shot. I drop the sights and pull the trigger. The bullet dimples the body of the bus and Rolf disappears.

– Dude! No good, man.

– You guys fuck off right now. It’s over.

– Dude. It is not over.

– Rolf, I got more than a few rounds left. You want to rush me? Wait me out till daylight when anyone can see us? It’s over. Take the bus and get going.

– We had a fucking deal.

– Not anymore.

Silence. Then the front doors shut and the bus’s engine starts. The running lights blip on, the bus moves forward a couple feet, stops, and the passenger door opens. Sid steps out.

I draw a bead on him.

– Get back in, Sid.

He walks to the back of the bus.

– I’m gonna shoot, Sid.

He stops, stands there, bathed in red from the taillights.

– This is wrong, Henry. We should all be, like, working together. We can do things together. It’s no good being alone, dude.

– Get back in the bus or I’m gonna shoot you.

– Dude, so ill.

He turns and shuffles back through the sand, head hung low. He’s climbing back into the bus.

– Sid!

– Dude?

– Try not to hurt any more people. It’s wrong.

– Whatever.

He gets in and slams his door. The bus heads for the highway. At the edge of the blacktop it pauses, the headlights come on, a blinker blinks, signaling a merge onto the empty road, and the Westphalia pulls away, the sound of the Allman Brothers spilling from the open back window. “Whipping Post” trailing into the distance.

I stand there, alone in the desert with two guns.

JUST TWENTY miles to Vegas, and I may not be able to make it.

Walking through loose sand in the dark with a gunshot wound in your left leg, a swelling right ankle, and a concussion, is an ordeal. Thirty minutes into the hike I’m exhausted and I’ve smoked my last two cigarettes. I stumble into an embankment, falling into loose rock, and jarring my head. Again. I wait a moment for my vision to clear.

I remember Russ, remember dragging him around, his head getting knocked over and over after I had already smacked it with a baseball bat. The way his speech started to slur, the way he silently died. I need to stop falling down.

I crawl up the short embankment, and grab onto a steel rail. I’ve tripped over the tracks of the Union Pacific.

I pick my way over the tracks and down the opposite embankment and find a two-lane local road. I look in both directions. The road is long and straight and has a culvert running parallel to it. I walk along the edge of the road, making better time, the aches in my foot and leg easing a bit. I pass a road sign. I’m on the County 6 East, six miles from Sloan. Great. Sloan. Not that I know what I’ll do when I get there.

I’m getting cold. I stuff my hands into the front pocket of the pullover along with the two cold hunks of steel. Then I hear a sound building behind me and look over my shoulder. No headlights, but it sounds like a diesel is back there. I edge down into the culvert and lie on my stomach. I can feel a vibration going through the ground. Oh. I flip over and see the headlight of the locomotive coming up the track. Train. I could hop a train. Do these tracks run into Vegas? Where else would they be going out here?

It’s hard to tell how far away the train is, but it must be pretty close for me to feel its vibrations. And it doesn’t look like it’s going all that fast. I climb out of the culvert, hustle as best I can to the tracks, and crouch there. Yeah, this should work. The light gets brighter. The train gets bigger and louder, taking its time, chugging closer. Bigger. Louder. Closer. Bigger. Bigger. Uh. A multiton, yellow and black monster of steel slams past at sixty, buffeting me in its diesel cloud, shaking the earth like a quake and leaving me clutching the rocks on the rail bed, in awe at my utter stupidity. I get to my feet, still shaking, and watch the train disappear in the night. Well, that was an interesting way to almost kill myself.

A mile later I come to a place called Erie, find the same train sitting on the siding, creep up to a car loaded with Nissans, and climb on. Sometimes, even I get lucky.

THE TRAIN pulls out five minutes later and I spend the next half hour huddled between the nose of one Pathfinder and the rear of another, and try to expose the least possible amount of my flesh to the wind of our passage. When I feel the landscape open up around me in the darkness, and the deafening thunder of the train rolls out across the desert, I stick my head out. Up ahead I can see the apocalyptic glow of Las Vegas, the spear of light from the top of the Luxor shooting into the underside of the cloud cover.

Soon, we are passing through the kind of gritty neighborhoods you expect to find bordering a rail line. I see street signs like Blue Diamond Road, West Warm Springs Road, West Sunset Road. None of them are on the very short list of Vegas place names I have in my head, most of which have been culled from Viva Las Vegas and the one trip I took out here when I was in college. Then it’s there, The Strip, a couple blocks off to the right. I can’t see much, but, even ten years after my only visit, I know that’s the place.

We pull into the Vegas rail yard. The train is slowing now, but not much. Doesn’t matter, I have to get off before I find myself in a locked yard patrolled by Union Pacific security.

The train can’t be moving faster than twenty as it pulls in to the yard and I fling myself from the edge of the railcar. I hit, bounce, flop to the ground, and roll over and over in the rocks, praying that the loaded guns in my pocket don’t go off. They don’t.