Justin Cronin - The Twelve

And then one night Danny heard Momma crying in the bedroom. Once in a while she cried like this, all alone, it was normal and natural and nothing for Danny to worry about, but this felt different. For a long time he lay in his bed listening, wondering what that must be like, to feel something so sad it made you cry, but the idea was like something on a shelf he couldn’t reach. Sometime later he awoke in the dark to the feel of someone touching his hair and he opened his eyes to see her sitting there. Danny didn’t like to be touched, it gave him the jangly feeling something awful, but it was okay when Momma did it, mostly, on account of he was used to it. What is it, Momma? Danny said. What’s wrong? But all she said was Hush now, hush now, Danny. Something was resting in her lap, folded in a towel. I love you, Danny. Do you know how much I love you? I love you, too, Momma, he said, because that was the right answer when someone said I-love-you, and to the feel of her hand caressing him he fell asleep, and in the morning her bedroom door was closed and never opened and Danny knew. He didn’t even have to look.

He decided to drive the bus after all.

Because maybe he wasn’t the only person still living. Because it gave him the happy-click, driving the bus. Because he didn’t know what else to do with himself, with Momma in the bedroom and the milk spoiled and all the days gone by.

He’d laid out his clothes the night before the way Momma always did, a pair of khakis and a white collared shirt and brown tie shoes, and packed a lunch. There wasn’t much left to eat except for peanut butter and some graham crackers and a bag of stale marshmallows, but he’d saved a bottle of Mountain Dew, and he put it all in his backpack with his pocket knife and his lucky penny, then went to his closet to get his hat, the blue-striped engineer’s cap that Momma had bought him at Traintown. Traintown was a park where kids could ride the trains, just like Thomas. Danny had gone there since he was little, it was his favorite place in the world, but the cars were too tight for Danny to fit in with his big legs and long arms, so he liked to watch the trains go round and round with their little puffs of smoke chuffing from their stacks. Except for trips to Traintown, Momma didn’t let him wear the hat outside the house, on account of she said people would make fun of him, but Danny figured it would be okay to wear it now.

He set out at dawn. The bus’s keys were in his pocket, flat against his thigh. The depot was 3.2 miles away, precisely. He hadn’t walked a block before he saw the first bodies. Some were in their cars, others were lying on their lawns or draped over garbage cans or even hanging in the trees. Their skin had turned the same blue-gray color as Mrs. Kim’s, their clothing stretched tight over limbs that had swollen in the summer heat. It was bad to look at, bad but strange and also interesting; if he’d had more time, Danny would have stopped to get a closer look. There was a lot of litter, bits of paper and plastic cups and fluttering grocery sacks, which Danny didn’t like. People shouldn’t litter.

By the time he got to the depot, the sun was warm on his shoulders. Most of the buses were there but not all. They were parked in rows with empty spaces, like a mouth with missing teeth. But Danny’s bus, the No. 12, was waiting in its usual spot. There were many different kinds of buses in the world, shuttle buses and charter buses and city buses and coaches, and Danny knew about them all. That was something he liked to do—to learn everything there was to know about one thing. His bus was a Redbird 450, the Foresight model. Built to the most exacting engineering standards, with all-permanent frame fixtures, Easy Hood Assist™, an advanced driver’s information display providing a wealth of system knowledge to both the operator and service technicians, and the purpose-built, single-scope Redbird Comfortride™ chassis, the 450 was the number one choice for safety, quality, and extended life-cycle value in the industry today.

Danny climbed aboard and wedged the key into the ignition; as the big Caterpillar diesel roared to life, a warm surge filled his belly. He checked his watch: 6:52. When the big hand hit the twelve, he put the bus in gear and pulled away.

It seemed odd at first, driving through empty streets with no one around, but by the time Danny was approaching his first stop—the May-fields’, Robert and Shelly—he’d settled into the rhythms of the morning. It was easy to imagine that today was just an ordinary day. He brought the bus to a halt. Well, Robert and Shelly were sometimes late. He’d honk the horn and they’d come dashing out the door, their mother calling after them to be good, have fun, and sending them off with a wave. The house was a bungalow not much bigger than the one Danny lived in with Momma but nicer, painted the color of a pumpkin and sitting behind a wide front porch with a swing. In spring there were always baskets of flowers hanging off the rails. The baskets were still there, but the flowers had all wilted. The lawn needed mowing, too. Danny craned his neck to look up through the windshield. A window on the second floor looked like it had been ripped from its frame. The blind was still hanging in the space where the window used to be, lolling out of it like a tongue. He honked the horn and waited a minute. But still nobody came.

Seven-oh-eight. He had other stops to make. He pulled away from the corner and guided the bus around a Prius lying on its side. He came to other things in the road. An overturned police car, smashed flat. An ambulance. A dead cat. A lot of the houses had X’s spray-painted on their doors, with numbers and letters in the spaces. By the time he arrived at his second stop, a townhouse complex called Castle Oaks, he was already running twelve minutes late. Brittany-Maybeth-Joey-Darla/Denise . He gave the horn a long honk, then another. But there wasn’t any point. Danny was just going through the motions now. Castle Oaks was a smoking ruin. The entire complex had burned to the ground.

More stops: all were the same. He guided the bus west into Cherry Creek. The houses were bigger here, set back from the road behind wide, sloped lawns. Big leafy trees draped curtains of dappled shade over the street. There was a quiet feeling here, more peaceful. The houses looked like they always did, and there were no bodies that Danny could see. But still there were no children.

By now his bus would have had twenty-five kids in it. The silence was unnerving. The noise in the bus always built along the route, each stop adding a little more with every kid who got on, the way music rose in a movie, approaching the final scene. The final scene was the bump. A speed bump on Lindler Avenue. Do the bump, Danny! they’d all cry out. Do the bump! And though he wasn’t supposed to, he’d give the bus a little extra gas, jolting them from their seats, and for that one moment he’d feel himself to be a part of them. He’d never been a kid like they were, just a kid going to school. But when the bus went over the bump, he was.

Danny was thinking about this, missing the children, even Billy Nice and his stupid jokes and har-har-har, when up ahead he saw a boy. It was Timothy. He was waiting with his older sister at the end of their driveway. Danny would have known the boy anywhere, on account of the cowlick—two spikes of hair that stuck up from the back of his head like antennae on a bug. Timothy was one of the youngest kids, second grade or maybe third, and small; sometimes the housekeeper waited with him, a plump brown woman in a smock, but usually it was the boy’s older sister, who Danny guessed was in high school. She was a funny girl to look at, not funny ha-ha but funny strange, with hair streaked the color of the Pepto that Momma gave him when his stomach got nervous from eating too fast and heavy black eyeliner that made her look like one of those paintings in a scary movie, the kind with eyes that moved. She had about ten studs in each ear; most days she was wearing a dog collar. A dog collar! Like she was a dog! The odd thing was that Danny thought she was sort of pretty, if not for all the weird stuff. He didn’t know any girls her age, or any age, really, and he liked the way she waited with her brother, holding his hand but letting it go as the bus approached so the other kids wouldn’t see.