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Eggy hulked over Parkwood.
"So what would you do, Iceman?"
"I'm going to stick with the program. Someone's gone to a lot of trouble to put us on this bus and I'm not about to get off it until I have a few more facts. Whatever happened at the house has happened and there's nothing we can do about it."
Debbie became stubborn. "You didn't have friends back there."
Parkwood's eyes froze. "If you were the professional you're supposed to be you wouldn't have had friends back there, either."
Vickers, who'd been watching intently, realized for the first time just how deadly Parkwood might be if pushed. He was what the Japanese had in mind when they made up the saying about the best killers being already dead. Eggy abruptly sat down.
"Yeah, go with the fucking program."
Debbie, now isolated, bit her lip. She pushed her way past the guards and went to the back of the bus. She sat down, staring out the rear window at the plume of smoke.
"You think I'm crazy, you should have seen my brother. He used to sit in the park and burn money until someone beat him up. Then he'd laugh in their faces. Somedays he'd go to the bank and he'd draw out a hundred in singles and then he'd go to this favorite bench that he had in the park and he'd take this big fucking radio that he had and he'd settle himself down and turn up the radio real loud so's people would notice him and then he'd start into setting fire to one bill after another. He'd do it real slow, holding each one up in the air until it was all burned up except for the last little corner that he was holding it by. He'd light them with this old fashioned Zippo that our uncle had given him. He claimed that he'd used it in Vietnam to burn gook huts."
"Your uncle was in Vietnam?"
Eggy shrugged. "I was never sure. He was my old man's oldest brother so I guess he could have been the right age. He claimed he was but I couldn't figure how he could have gone through all that and still stayed such an asshole."
Eggy's sudden burst of intimacy came out of nowhere. It was almost as much of a surprise as the blowing up of the house. They'd ridden in silence for a further two hours, bouncing and swaying along the unsurfaced desert trail when the outburst had begun without preamble or even a clearing of the throat. He talked at no one in particular, addressing the whole of the bus with the weird confidence of someone who lets go so rarely that he's certain everyone will be paying attention.
"Pretty soon, a crowd would start to gather. My brother would pretend not to notice them at first."
"What was your brother's name?"
"It don't matter." Eggy seemed to resent this second interuption. He glared around belligerently. "Anyone else got anything they want to ask?"
As one they shook their heads.
"Okay, like I was saying, first off a crowd would gather and my brother'd start by completely ignoring them. He'd just sit there burning his money, pretending it was the most normal thing in the world. Pretty soon some of the crowd would start mouthing off. They'd start making smart remarks to each other about how my brother was a mental case and ought to be locked up. If he wanted to get rid of his cash, he didn't have to burn it, he could give it to them. When my bro went on ignoring them, they got a bit bolder. They'd start coming onto him direct. 'Hey, fuck, what the fuck do you think you're doing? You insane or something? You gotta be fucking crazy.' You know what I mean? It was real slick, Oscar Wilde stuff. There was a pattern to it though, it always got physical in the end. They might make a grab for the money while it was actually burning but, usually, it would keep them mesmerized. Nine times out of ten, the violence would start when my bro reached into his pocket for a fresh bill. Some fool would grab for it, like he was rescuing the sacred dollar from the pyromaniac. My brother didn't actually resist, but he'd do his best not to let them get the bill and that always led to someone hitting him. Once the first punch had been thrown the dam was broken, all hell'd break loose. They'd be all over my brother and, because even then I wasn't going to stand by while a bunch of hysterical assholes beat on my bro, they be all over me too. Sometimes the cops would-come and we'd get beat up all over again. When you're a kid and the cops beat on you, it can really hurt. They can do it without leaving marks, too… Jesus fucking Christ! Will you look at that!"
All heads turned to follow Eggy's open-mouthed gaze. The bus had crested a rise and in front of them, at the other side of a flat, dry valley, was a ridge of low, rocky hills. The side that faced the bus was a fairly steep escarpment. What had surprised Eggy was that someone had carved what, from a distance, looked like a giant mailslot right in the hillside. It was, however, a mailslot that could swallow a light cruiser, even if it was set sideways. The bottom edge of the vast, rectangular, manmade cave was level with the desert floor. All round the edge the living rock was reinforced with massive expanses of forbidding gray concrete. It was flanked by two enormous buttresses. Parkwood, who'd been standing up to get a better view, abruptly sat down.
"You all know what that is, don't you?"
Debbie's voice was awed. "It's a bunker, a nuclear survival bunker."
"I never realized they were so big."
"There's like as not a whole small city under those hills."
Vickers hoped that he looked as amazed as everyone else. Fortunately, no one seemed to be paying him any attention. Eggy was instantly suspicious but it was all directed at the distant bunker mouth.
"Why the fuck should they bring us to a survival bunker?"
Fenton gri
Vickers decided that it was time to ease naturally into the conversation.
"I doubt that."
"So?"
"Don't ask me. I gave up trying to make any sense out of all this when I left Las Vegas."
As the bus eased closer it became possible to make out more details of the approaches to the bunker entrance. A geometric system of roads and rail tracks fa
A number of heavy freightliners were moving along the road system, all heading for the bunker entrance. Squat, magnetic shunts were moving lines of boxcars in the same direction. A number of smaller, military-style vehicles rolled slowly along the roads as if on patrol. It was, though, like no other military installation that Vickers had ever seen. There was not a trace of either the all-pervading army green or even the dull tan favored by some desert forces. Everything here was the same mushroom gray as the uniforms of their guards.
The dirt trail along which the bus had been lurching wasn't in any way incorporated into the bunker's road and track system. In fact, by the time they reached the perimeter highway, it had been graded out of existence. The bus finally bounced onto the outer road in a less than graceful cloud of dust. It was clear that no volume of traffic had ever been pla