Apex Book Company

She watched as the bus crested the hill and cut a silver blur across the burnt landscape. Her name was Tamara, and she had survived when the rest of her family had passed into eternity or oblivion, whichever came after death. Her husband, Terrance, had died in the fields, toiling to bring forth fuel from the red earth. Her mother and father had died in one of the subway attacks—a bomb or a terrorist or a derailing—she could no longer remember which. Her brother disappeared with the wind, and her sister died last winter, giving birth.

Tamara shuddered as the bus drew closer. When Terrance had been alive, they’d had a car, and he had taken the bus, but she had sold the car months ago for next to nothing. Now she saved her money for bus fare, and waited in the South Alabama heat for a bus without air conditioning. But that wasn’t all. She could tolerate the heat. What she hated, what she dreaded was the bus itself. The driver. He frightened her most of all.

Once Tamara had asked her seatmate if she thought the bus driver was strange.

“Strange?” the woman, whose name Tamara did not know, said. “No. Just broken down. All of ours talk gibberish. I’ve heard up in New York that those things are spit-shined and polished every day. I’ve heard those robots never say anything that isn’t interesting.” The woman had nodded her head vigorously before falling silent again.

But Tamara knew the difference in gibberish and something, well, something more sinister.

She took a deep breath as the bus slowed and the air brakes hissed and locked. The door creaked open wide, a sideways leer, inviting her in. The robot’s head swiveled on his neck and he gazed at her through slits that weren’t eyes as much as razor blades, cutting her skin, peeling her open like a husk of corn, laying her wide with sharp strokes and exposing her naked center. She wanted to turn and run back to her house, but that meant certain death. The sweepers would come and take her temperature and find her healthy but useless, vigorous but lazy, unworthy of breathing the oxygen, consuming the fuel, or riding the bus.

So she kept her eyes down and stepped onto the bus. She did not look as she placed the coins in his slotted hand. As the robot shut his hand over the money, sucking it down into his belly, a silver fingertip grazed her hand and she felt sick inside. “Welcome,” the bus driver said, “to the last stop.”

Tamara hurried past, sliding into the first available seat. She closed her eyes and counted slowly, until she convinced herself that it was only her imagination, and that if Terrance were alive, she wouldn’t even be worried.

“The damn government will be by today,” a voice next to her croaked. Tamara opened her eyes and saw she was seated next to Missy Faye. “Be by today to take my check and slit my neck. The damn government will be by today to feel my cooter and bug my computer.”

Tamara looked to see if any other seats were available, but the bus driver announced that they should fasten their belts. “Next stop, nowhere.”

She glanced around the bus to see if anyone else noticed the ominous words. The man across the aisle from her slumbered, a shiny coat of drool sparkling on his chin. A seat in front of her sat a woman and her baby. The baby, mercifully, slept. Tamara couldn’t bear to think of babies awake. It always made her feel better when she saw one sleeping rather than languishing in this world. The mother was silent, her head lolling from side to side in the rhythm of the road, though the bus had not yet started to move.

No one but me, Tamara thought. It is only my fear.

“. . .break my mind and realign my spine. The government, lawsy mercy. The government.”

Tamara closed her eyes. This was the easy part. The hard part came later.

She slipped in and out of sleep for miles, never missing an ominous proclamation from the bus driver: “Today is fair and dark. Tonight there will be a slim chance of moon and the rain will be full. Franklin Thomas! This is your stop. On this date in history the great state of Alabama slipped between the cracks. The low tide is pulling us out to sea, and the undertow is making us forget.” She opened her eyes and watched the bus driver’s steel-trap mouth clanging out prophecy and stop times, trivia and destinies.

Missy Faye slept beside her, her mouth slackening out into a formless bag, and her words turned to breathing, her eyes rolled back like hard soulless marbles.

“Next stop, Babylon!” the bus driver said.

The bus groaned to a stop, red dust exploding into the air. The driver jerked the door open. “Wendell Patrick this is your stop,” came the voice. He never got this part wrong. Of course, this was the essential part, Tamara thought. So many people sleeping or drugged. They would miss their stop without the bus driver telling them. Then the sweepers would come in with their questions and their guns.

She wished the government had just kept the real bus drivers. She would never understand why they had bothered to send all the robots down here to southern Alabama. Tamara remembered, Mr. Ayers, the fat old man that had driven the bus before they sent the robots on their silver, terrorist proof buses. He had whistled while he drove, and nodded politely at her each morning. Told her to have a nice evening each afternoon. But this bus driver, with his vibrato voice and soulless eyes. This bus driver had never been right. He had never even been like the other robots she knew, which had always left her feeling cold and lonely no matter how many other people were around.

She looked at him, using the big rearview mirror in the front of the bus. He was looking back, all jagged metal teeth, smiling at her.

The bus lurched. “Arlie Sherman!” he shrieked. “This is your stop.”

Robots don’t smile. This thought and she closed her eyes again. Better not to think.

“Missy Faye! This is your stop.” Missy Faye jerked awake and continued babbling as if she had never stopped. “The government gave us silver buses with bots so the terrorists can’t shoot us full of hots. The government took my guns away, sent me a robot that can’t think like my pistol on a bad day. Senators, congressmen, the Governor, the President, robots all rot.” She climbed off the bus and went along her way on Main Street, which was mainly deserted these days, except for the women like Missy Faye who picked up trash and swept the gutters free of rats.

Tamara watched her amble down the sidewalk. “She should be retired somewhere,” Tamara muttered.

The man beside her was awake now. He grunted his assent. “We should have all retired by now.”

“Edward Smile! This is where you get off.”

One by one they left her, until she was alone with the driver. Tamara sunk down in her seat. She hoped he wouldn’t look at her.

“Next stop, Oblivion!”

Oblivion. What did that mean?

She straightened up to see the bus driver and he saw her right back through the rearview mirror. She stifled a gasp. I’ll make it today just like the others, she told herself. Except each day lately she’s noticed the bus driver acting more and more strangely.

“A few more miles,” she said beneath her breath. Her stop would come soon and he would thrust open the silver doors and shout her name. She had made it so many other days. Why not today?

Her nails dug into the vinyl seat.

“On your right, just out your window,” the bus driver said, pleasantly, “You can see the fields of death. Men toil day and night only to die! We are all driving into oblivion.” Then his head swiveled until she could see those razor blade eyes. Tamara pushed back in her seat, trying to escape his line of vision. Those slits, the way they narrowed on her—she looked away.

The bus sped up.

“What are you?” she said, her eyes still shut tightly.

“There are ghosts in the machine and ghosts in the government and ghosts online,” the driver said. “Ghosts on the moon, ghosts under the sea, ghosts everywhere for you and me.” She could have sworn that he cackled.

Her stop was on the horizon, beyond that she knew there was a vast wasteland where the sweepers took the bodies of the useless people.

“My stop,” she said.

She forced herself to look at him. The steel-trap mouth was grinning at her. “Your stop is coming right up, Tamara Teasdale.” The bus speed up.

“Look at the road!” she said.

As in answer the head swiveled a little farther around. He seemed to study her, and all she wanted to do was run away from the iron grin and the sharp inhuman eyes.

“The road to hell is paved with good intentions,” he said, his mouth moving in a garish parody of human speech.

The bus hurtled through the brown landscape very fast now. Her stop flashed by in a colorless blur. She got out of her seat and tried to run to the back of the bus for the emergency exit. Before she reached it, she heard it click shut. He had locked it. She couldn’t even choose suicide and somehow this was the worst. She would have to try to take the bus over. She turned back and saw the bus driver was no longer driving the bus. He was standing in the aisle, his stilt legs planted like metal pegs, his narrow humps of shoulders squared in her direction, his mechanical mouth working back and forth from snarl to smile, from robot to bus driver to something more.

“Oblivion!”

She closed her eyes, trying to find eternity before oblivion found her.

END

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John Mantooth’s work has appeared in the following publications: Future’s Mysterious Anthology Magazine, Thirteen Stories, Feral Fiction (www.feralfiction.com), Smokelong Quarterly, NFG, and Stephen D. Rogers Presents. His nonfiction piece, “Going to Dalton,” won first place in the Alabama School of Fine Arts Literary Contest. He lives in Alabama with his wife and two children, Joy and Luke. He is currently working on landing an agent for his young adult novel.