D A Novel (George Right) - By George Right Page 0,17
street, but stuck out separately. Here, this one jutted forward to the very edge of the street, there, that one receded deep into the dark. Their locations resembled the curve of decayed teeth of a mutant from a horror movie. The blank walls with no windows occurred more and more often, and buildings with windows looked even worse. Tony doubted that such shabby ruins could exist even in the poorest and the most remote parts of New York, let alone the business area of Manhattan. Municipal services were simply obliged to demolish all this very long time ago before it crashed on somebody's head... It seemed the majority of these buildings, though obviously multifamily, were not stone; in the cold air, the heavy, damp and musty smell of decaying wood was clearly present. Moreover, outlines of either some dilapidated villas or farm houses loomed ahead; but while such buildings usually stand in rural open space, here they were literally piled up, leaning against each other in terrible narrowness, interlocking by lopsided walls and fallen-in roofs and, probably, only for that reason had not yet collapsed completely.
Looking around, Logan almost stumbled against some object lying directly in the middle of the street and merging with the blackness of the asphalt. For a terrible instant it seemed to him that it was a swollen corpse–more precisely, a trunk without legs, arms or head. But it was only a very full black plastic garbage bag. All the same, looking at it was unpleasant. It seemed that it was just about to burst and spew out its fetid contents. How long had it been lying right in the middle of the road?
At this moment a quickly approaching noise–some rhythmical scratch and gnashing rustle–came from behind Tony. He turned back–and saw just few feet from himself the rapidly approaching blunt muzzle of a radiator, a heavy rectangular bumper, the blind cataracts of extinguished headlights, the dark glass of a windshield... He hardly had time to jump aside. The long vehicle rushed past without reducing speed, with a filthy sound–skwashhh!–squelching the garbage bag. Tony opened his mouth to shout out his opinion of the driver (certainly, Logan was guilty himself of walking in the street, but...)–but the abuse stuck in his throat. It was not the fact that the driver didn't honk or even try to brake that amazed Tony most of all, but what kind of vehicle it was. A school bus. An ordinary yellow school bus that can be found on plenty of New York streets, as well as in any other American city... But not in the deadest hours of night.
Although, of course, anything could make a school bus driver go out at night. Perhaps, the bus urgently needed repair... or the driver simply used municipal transport for personal purposes... Yes, all these hypotheses were possible if there were no passengers in the bus. Those passengers for whom it was intended–children.
But, though there was no interior light, Tony had clearly discerned the white spots of faces pressed to windows from within. Yes, exactly–not simply half-turned somewhere inside, but pressed, flattened out against the glass faces and palms, as if children desperately and hopelessly tried to escape outside from a glass captivity of the bus, from the dark and narrow closed space in which they have been confined long, oh, very long already... so long that they had no more strength to struggle or even simply to move, and could only press their faces in mute despair against cold windows... The bus had already passed, but Tony still saw in his mind their flattened noses turned on one side, black holes of open mouths, dark stains shading their sunken eye sockets...
"Nonsense," he told himself. "Just something I glimpsed in the dark. I saw it for no more than a second! It is simply some late excursion. Or the bus got delayed somewhere by a traffic jam... or a power failure..."
But why at night, moreover in a fog, had the headlights been switched off? And why, by the way, had he heard only a metal scratch and a garbage rustle from under the wheels–but not the sound of a working engine?
He looked after the departing bus. The tail lights did not burn, either. And in the back window a stiffened, warped face shone whitely. There was something especially wrong with it, and, an instant later, Tony understood, what exactly.