Untitled #1
Contributors: Ahchie, The Diesel, Brother Nature, Throcksmorton, Albuquerque Tom
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen (stay tuned...)
Seeing a van on its side naturally produces adrenaline. Sure there was a horrific accident ahead, Felipe leapt from his warm bed in the back of the bus and ran towards the front. He was in boxer shorts and a wife beater undershirt but his hair looked good. The bus was 42 feet long and after about 20 feet of running, Felipe had to stop as his side began to ache. He bent over coughing and started staggering towards the front of the door. He stopped again, in a full fit of uncontrollable coughing.
Bill, the bus driver, looked back annoyed. He was trying to figure out what had happened and how not to get involved with this scene. He could see someone yanking on someone else in the wreckage. Felipe could not stop coughing as he fell to his knees. He then fell to his chest and tried to call out to Bill who had begun slowly and carefully to drive around the wreckage.
Felipe thought of Conway Twitty, who had died on his own tour bus suddenly on his way from Branson, Missouri, to his home in Hendersonville, Tennessee. Conway died of a ruptured abdominal aortic aneurysm. Felipe was sure that was what was happening to him. He stopped coughing, unable to breathe as he clawed at the ground and found something with his right hand. Small and oval shaped he struggled to bring it to his face to see what it might mean. It was a dusty Skittle. Bright green.
“I'm going to die with a dusty Skittle in my hand and no one will know why,” Felipe thought. He tried to throw it far from him, but the sweat from his hand made it stick. Conway died at age 59, a ripe old age for a country road dog. But Felipe was only 29. He tried with all of his might to push himself up off the floor. He gulped at the air trying to breathe and felt the bus jerk to a halt and he crashed to the floor once again.
He heard the bus door open and a high man's voice say, “Going my way, stranger?” Then everything went black.
- - -
Bill stared, mesmerized at the smoldering wreckage, then slowly asked Frank,
“What the hell happened out there?”
Frank took a step backwards on the asphalt, while turning himself slightly
towards the apocalyptic scene and said, “Don't really know.” Looking
back at Bill, Frank added, “So where is it that you said you’re
going?”
Getting up from his seat, Bill asked Frank, “Who’s that helping the girl out of the van?”
Frank was now halfway up the stairs; Bill remained fixated on the happenings outside of the bus. Frank looked down the hallway of the bus. Apparently, nobody else was on board.
Frank’s poorly acted role of a mildly concerned citizen fell to the wayside and gave birth to the same soulless face that he had worn back at the hotel. As he was about to step down to the first step, Bill looked away from the accident and back at Frank. He didn’t see Frank’s hand swoop up from underneath his view as it thrust towards his neck. Frank grasped Bill’s Adam’s apple with such force that his body went limp from the pain. Frank was able to wrap his thick fingers around the huge knot in Bill’s neck and began squeezing. Just before Bill’s upper body reached the ground, a muffled pop, similar to opening a new can of tennis balls, signified the full compression of Bill’s neck bubble. It only took a slight tug to give Bill enough momentum so that he rolled down the stairs and out of the bus.
Bill helplessly wriggled in pain as Frank pulled the lever and closed the double doors. Frank began walking towards the back of the bus while he kept an eye on the smoking vehicles. The smell of hairspray and cologne became increasingly powerful as he made his way further down the bus. Strong enough so that Frank’s clothes would still have the pleasant scent of musk two days later.
Before unknowingly stepping on Felipe’s body, he noticed two injured bodies making their way towards the bus. Frank turned back and quickly ran to the front of the bus. Near the front, he stopped and bent over slightly to look out the window one last time before sitting in the driver’s seat and turning on the ignition. He grabbed Bill’s warm coffee from the drink holder and gave a mock toast to Bill through the plexiglass of the doors just before he swallowed it down. With both hands he grabbed the wheel and began moving the bus as he turned it sharply towards the survivors.
- - -
Scout had managed to stand up, although in a daze, and make his way to the back of the purple van where he found the woman in the blue dress trying to sit up. He looked on a little perplexed as she wasn’t twitching or convulsing as before. He reached under her arms and pulled her up to a standing position. They slowly walked around the van and saw the large tour bus ahead of them.
“Hey, look, maybe they can help us,” Scout mumbled to momma.
As Scout lifted his arm and motioned to the bus, he noticed it was moving forward directly at them. He could hear the engine increase in acceleration. He grabbed momma and looked to his left for somewhere to jump for safety.
- - -
Frank stepped harder on the accelerator as he heard a moaning coming from the back of the bus. He turned his head for a second and saw only darkness down the interior of the bus. He tightened his jaw and stared forward moving the bus toward the two people, one who was starting to wave to him. Then he looked a little harder at the person in the blue dress and noticed it was a woman. A woman with a mustache. “Hey that’s momma. What the hell is she doin’ here?!”
He slammed on the brakes and brought the bus to a stop.
- - -
Everything often happens all at once. That was the case as the scene unfolded after one of the most spectacular crashes to hit the interstate not far from the sleepy lakeside town that was watching its one hotel burn to the ground. Scout, who desperately needed a change of clothes after soiling himself just before the big crash, was about to throw momma and himself out of the way of the approaching tour bus when suddenly it stopped.
The last thing momma could remember was standing on the hillside with her shotgun trying to save her boy from three filthy longhairs. Now she was being grabbed by a longhair who stank even worse than she could have ever imagined, and she was standing in the middle of what looked like a battlefield centered around her very own van.
At the same time a sleepy female voice made gruff through years of smoking cigarettes was coming from the back of the bus, saying, “What’s going on up there? Come back to bed, Felipe.”
And at the same time this latest Twit groupie was waking up and wondering where her lover went, Felipe, who had just moments before come back to consciousness, was saying, “Pusher?” as he realized that the new bus driver was none other than Frank, the man who had been the wedge that had come between Herman and Felipe in their college days.
Forgotten in this whole scene was Charlotte, the half-naked, one-eyed, one-legged woman with the brutalized face, who helped Scout out of the wreckage that was once a beautiful van. The last thing she remembered was sipping coffee on the balcony of her hotel suite reviewing her plans and Herman’s map, and then being interrupted by a knock at the door. When she came to, she was face down in a puddle and the first thing she saw when she lifted her head was a woman who had gone head first through a windshield and was sticking halfway out of a smashed up van that seemed somehow familiar. She discovered that the woman was really a man who, despite numerous injuries, was still breathing. After helping him out of the van and laying him on the ground, she had managed to crawl towards a nearby suitcase that also had a bit of familiarity to it before she found she was unable to move any farther. Now she was sitting in the mud wondering how in the world she got here and where in the world her leg was.
How they all survived was impossible to adequately explain. Scout had survived despite being in the driver’s seat, without a seat belt, of a van that had crashed into a car and had flipped multiple times while briefly catching on fire. At some point he had been propelled halfway through the windshield and was knocked out until he woke up lying on the ground. Momma, who earlier had survived an epileptic seizure, had now survived the same crash as Scout had, as she had been in the passenger seat of the van, also without a seat belt. She had been sent, unconscious, through the back of the van while the van was in mid-flight.
Felipe, who still had a bright green skittle stuck to his hand and whose chances of living were diminishing every second he did not receive medical care, had so far survived a ruptured abdominal aortic aneurysm. His bus driver, Bill, had survived having his Adam’s apple crushed to the point that it simply popped. And the Twit at the back of the bus had survived a night with the disease-ridden Felipe.
Most remarkable of all, however, was that Charlotte had survived, despite
first being shot in the leg; then being knocked unconscious by a blow dryer
slammed into her face; then losing, in the initial impact of the crash, the
same leg that had taken a bullet; and finally being thrown far enough away
from the car so that Frank could not find her.
Though he still did not know about Charlotte, this collection of walking wounded
was the perfect example of why Frank never believed anyone was dead until
he actually saw the body with his own eyes and verified with his own hands
that the person was indeed gone.
In the moments that followed this convergence of tragedies, the injuries and events of the day suddenly caught up with all involved. Charlotte started mumbling to herself while slapping aimlessly at the puddles with her hands as her one good eye glossed over and she stared out at the distance, focusing on nothing in particular.
Scout realized that he was wearing pants filled with excrement and that he had a pounding headache that was probably caused in part by the shards of glass sticking out of the top of his head. He turned to momma and was about to speak when he passed out and fell to the ground. As Scout fell to the ground, he also fell into a coma, from which he would never again regain consciousness, as the life support plug would be pulled from him just two days later.
Momma, who did not realize her daughter was nearby, pushed her confusion to the back of her mind and became angry, wondering where her Herman was and why she had been manhandled by the putrid and malodorous hippie. Unable to see through the windshield of the bus, momma also wondered who the idiot was that had been driving.
Felipe realized he wasn’t dying after all and figured out that he was just assuming the worst after another bout with coughing and severe heartburn. The groggy woman lying in bed in the back of the bus wearing only Felipe’s purple sweater realized in a brief, fleeting moment of clarity that she had just spent the night with the sickest and most twisted individual she had ever met. And Bill, who had lost a massive amount of blood, succumbed to the trauma of losing his Adam’s apple, as he realized it would be better to die than to cope with the indescribable and unyielding pain that centered on what was once his throat.
Sitting in the driver’s seat of the bus that had stopped just a few feet from momma and the, until now, incredibly durable longhair, Frank was realizing that he knew the crumpled up form that was addressing him from the floor. “Flip?” Frank said incredulously. “Is that you Flipper?” continued Frank, calling who he thought was an old friend by the name that Felipe hated most of all.
Frank grabbed the nearly full pack of cigarettes that used to belong to Bill
from the dashboard and got up from his seat. Somehow, while on his way to
confront an old friend turned enemy, fate had placed in his way that old friend’s
mother along with another old friend, Flipper.
This tableau, which had the appearance of an ensemble of b-grade actors playing
out a scene in a high budget, low quality zombie movie, is what state troopers
Adams and McHenry gazed upon with mouths wide open as they approached the
wreckage on their way down the hill to respond to reports of a massive three-alarm
hotel fire.