Member
The Billy Bus
12:30 PM, en route to the Outback
The van kicked on with a stutter, a gulp, and a sudden waft of fried food as Billy turned the keys with a jerk and what had once been fryer oil streamed into the chambers of the practically-bespoke, homemade, kitbashed engine. For a couple of terrible moments, the engine seemed as though it were drowning, coughing and spluttering under the sudden stress of working again, and a small cloud of blueish blackish smoke billowed from the exhaust pipe - but then, after just a moment longer, it all calmed right down; the fearful yelping under the hood subsided, the smoke cleared, and Billy started to grin as it was all replaced by what almost sounded like a purr.
He turned to face the others in the car, adjusting the position of his rifle - muzzle down, safety on - between the door and his leg, as his grin grew and grew.
"Y'all underestimated me, dintcha?"
The journey was paradoxical in both duration and direction - firstly, in that it took less than fifteen minutes overall, and secondly, in that rather that leaving Goodnight, once everyone had settled into the ancient kombi Billy drove in entirely the opposite direction to what you'd have expected. Instead of turning out of the car park and towards the main road, Billy turned straight back towards the shopping centre and drove around the rear side of it, towards the loading bay. Once there, he parked up about twenty metres from one of the shut bay doors, and waited.
Two or three minutes later, a scruffy looking middle aged man in grey jeans and a tank top emerged from an employee entrance, and gave Billy a thumbs up as the bay door started to open, sliding upwards.
Billy returned the thumbs up, and gently accelerated, pulling the van into the loading bay - which was remarkably empty inside.
"Alright kids, I'd tell ya to buckle up, but from what I understand we ain't even really gonna be moving." He added as the door came down behind them and left you in pitch black darkness.
A minute passed.
Another minute.
Then there was a moment of uncertainty - a most bizarre moment of uncertainty, because it was neither an emotional nor a mental feeling of uncertainty or doubt, but a decidedly physical one, spread across all of your body at once, like a dark stain across pristine white cloth, or like the cold of the sea in the moment after you dive in. It subsided as quickly as it came, but left an impression of itself for a second longer - and in that moment, as opposed to the moment you first felt it, you realise that this is the same feeling as when you passed through the Blue Magic gate on your way to Goodnight, just more intense.
Well, it was either more intense, or you were more sensitive to it.
Whichever it was, Billy didn't seem to react. At all. Another minute passed in the darkness.
“Well, that should be us. I sure hope some of you felt somethin’ there, because I sure as heck didn’t.”
Fearlessly, he opened the door of the kombi and stepped outside, flicking on a torch to reveal surroundings that were completely different to the ones you’d seen before the doors shut on you back at Goodnight. Wherever you were now, it wasn’t where you’d started.
Billy strode up a slope towards a smaller garage door, and tugged on the rope to tilt it back and open it up. Pale morning sunlight streamed into the basement - it was definitely a basement, you were sure of that now - as the door opened up, and Billy took a big breath of the fresh, cool air.
About fifteen seconds later, you were all pulling up the slope and out into the open in the Billy Bus, and that’s when it hit you that something was terribly, terrifically, violently wrong.
There, cast in the wintery light of the early sun, thrown down at the foot of the shed opposite you, a body. The dirt underneath her body was stained brownish-red with blood, and more of the same speckled the ground behind where she had fallen.
Up the road slightly, towards the outhouse, another body, male, crumpled over forwards on the spot like he’d been caught unawares, blood pooling and trickling downhill of the corpse.
The other two bootleggers - and crucially, the medical supplies they were delivering - were nowhere to be seen.
“Oh shit.” Billy said after a moment.
He spoke for everyone.