The last of those herded into the truck settled on the benches. The driver and his partner closed the cargo-box doors, bolted them, and returned to the cab.
Deucalion raised himself on one arm to determine exactly where at the phone company they were, and saw the employee parking lot.
As the engine started, he transitioned from a supine position on the roof to the interior of the cargo space, where he stood in the center between the facing benches.
In what was full dark to them but at worst murky to him, he was able to discern eleven people sitting five on one side and six on the other. They were not secured in any way, but they rode in docile acceptance of their fate.
The weeping woman still wept, although her whimpers were hardly audible. A man repeated softly, “No, no, no, no, no, no ….”
Several of them were sweating in this cold night, and they had the sour scent of terror.
“Who are they? Who’s done this to you?” Deucalion asked.
Ten remained silent, but one woman spoke in a slurred voice, as if she had suffered brain damage: “My sister … my sister.”
A half-seen face. Like an apparition at a seance.
Deucalion said, “Your sister did this to you?”
“My sister she … she Wendy.”
“Wendy? Why would she harm you?”
The eyes of the apparition glimmered darkly in the dark as she said, “Wendy Wanda twins my sister.”
“Your name is Wanda?”
“She dead my twin five years.”
The truck yawed slightly, rhythmically, as if they were boating on the river Styx. A man began to groan in anguish.
The woman said, “Dead five years now back.”
Deucalion thought of the replicants in New Orleans. Upon seeing a replicant, an identical might think her dead sister had returned.