It was late the following afternoon when they boarded a school bus Lester had arranged to borrow from the city of Hidalgo. Faded yellow, with no working heat or air and windows that didn’t close all the way, the bus seemed the relic of another era, but it would serve their purposes. They gathered at the Vickers ranch, dust rising from the cars and trucks that made their way up the road. People parked in a fallow field, lining up their vehicles the way they would for the state fair.
The sun beat down as if it were early summer instead of the dregs of a haunted Texas winter. Zeke sat in the fifth row on the driver’s side. He’d taken the aisle and given Savannah the window, but she made no effort to look out through the glass or turn away from the glare of the setting sun. He had changed her into blue jeans and high-top sneakers and a thick cotton T-shirt that hung loosely on her so as not to draw attention to the hole in her chest. The shirt had a sparkly design on it and he thought she might have borrowed it from her friend Imogene, who’d loved such things but hadn’t laid claim to it after Savannah’s death, either because she didn’t know how to ask or because she thought it might carry some of Savannah’s bad luck.
As he had undressed her, Zeke had kept expecting to feel embarrassed. His little girl had been evolving into a young woman and had all the hallmarks of that transition, and fathers weren’t supposed to see their girls unclothed past a certain age. But fathers weren’t supposed to see their little girls dead, either. Instead of making him blush, her nudity only made him want to weep at her fragility. Without him blowing notes on the pipe, Savannah lay there and let him do all of the work, but he didn’t mind. He had changed her and bathed her and held her when fever and sickness had seized her. This was his daughter, and he would walk through the fires of hell for her.
As the last of the pipers arrived, the bus remained eerily silent. The dead did not speak and the living had nothing to say. Like Zeke, either from fear or shame, they barely made eye contact with one another. Linda Trevino sat several rows ahead of him, keeping up a constant stream of whispered endearments to her dead son. Zeke could barely breathe, watching her. Waiting for Ben to move. To reply.
“Okay, bud,” Zeke whispered, turning to look at Savannah. He touched her chin and turned her to face him, noting a momentary alertness in her eyes. She had focused on him. Just for a moment, but he would take it. “We’re just going for a little ride.”
Enoch stood out in the road, a little man who somehow managed to look smaller with every glance. He carried a small leather bag that hung from his shoulder as if he were a college professor instead of some kind of hoodoo man, and Zeke knew that his own pipe must have been inside that bag. Aaron Monteforte moved toward the bus, playing those now-familiar discordant notes on his pipe, walking with his sister, Trish. Like Savannah’s, Trish’s death wounds were hidden by her clothing. If not for her complexion and the utter lack of expression, she might have been alive—just another twentysomething South Texas girl waiting for her life to really begin.
Zeke took Savannah’s hand and tried not to be disheartened by the lack of any confirming squeeze from her. Time, he thought. Give it time.
People began to shift in their seats, some craning around to look out the windows of one final vehicle coming down the long, dusty drive. Zeke had been counting and knew there were forty-two people already on the bus, twenty-one dead and an equal number of those who had followed Enoch’s ritual to resurrect them—the ones Zeke thought of as pipers and Vickers called proxies.
Music drifted to them, a thumping, crashing rhythm that started low and grew louder as the car approached. In the front seat, Vickers moved his considerable bulk and leaned over Martha—whose dented forehead throbbed like a newborn’s fontanel—to look out at the car roaring up his driveway.
The music blared from the open windows of Alma Hawkins’s little Volkswagen as it pulled to a stop forty feet from the bus. Big Tim looked absurd sitting in the passenger seat, jammed in and hunched over. Zeke recognized the music only because the deputy had tried to convert the whole town over to his love for the Dropkick Murphys. It wasn’t the sort of thing Zeke could ever have enjoyed—headache-inducing stuff—but he figured if anything would get through the fog that clouded the minds of the returned dead, it would be that kind of jarring noise.
Big Tim didn’t seem to notice. His wife came around the passenger side of her VW and opened the door. Her pregnant belly hung low as she bent to coax him from the car. Alma Hawkins looked pale, almost corpselike herself. Big Tim had a chunk missing out of the side of his face, but a kind of dry crust that was more like papier-mâché than flesh had begun to fill in the hole.
“Thank God,” someone said, a few rows behind Zeke.
In the second row, just behind Vickers, Arturo Sanchez turned to stare into the back, looking just as pale as the revived dead.
“Please . . . ,” he said. “I beg you, let that be the last time any of us mentions God tonight.”
No one spoke. What could we say? Zeke thought.
With Monteforte and Alma Hawkins playing their pipes, they directed their beloved dead onto the bus and arranged them in the remaining seats. Enoch was the last to board. When he did, Vickers rose and offered up his place, which Enoch took while Vickers dropped his considerable bulk into the driver’s seat.
“You all know the plan,” Vickers said. “We’re only going to get one chance.”
The bus choked and then roared as he started it, coughing gray smoke out of the exhaust. Vickers drove the bus out to the gates of his ranch and turned south.
Out on the road, beyond the fence that lined his property, a couple of dozen cars were parked on either side and fifty or sixty people had gathered to watch them go. Enoch would allow the dead only one proxy apiece, but many had other family members who would have gladly taken the job.
Dressed in mourning clothes, they stood along the road and prayed, some with rosary beads and others hand-in-hand. Some held up photographs of the dead, back in their living years, and Zeke did not allow himself to focus on those pictures. He did not want to compare them to the pale, withered creatures riding on the bus with him.
Gazing out the window, he saw Skyler near the end of the line. She had swept her hair into a ponytail and wore a plain black dress. Her eyes searched the windows of the bus but Zeke could tell that she hadn’t spotted him yet. In her hands she held a small cardboard sign upon which she’d written two words in large black letters.
COME BACK.
Throat dry, he forced himself to turn away. If she saw him then, at least she would not see the doubt in his eyes.
Grinding noises came from the engine as Vickers shifted into higher gear. The bus lurched forward and then they were speeding west, toward sunset, with a cargo of breathless fears and unlikely hopes.
* * *
The McAllen-Hidalgo-Reynosa International Bridge spanned the Rio Grande and connected the United States to Mexico. Though it passed through Hidalgo on the U.S. side, the bridge began in McAllen, Texas. Zeke held Savannah’s hand as the bus rattled through miles of ranch and farmland all the way to Route 241, which Vickers followed straight through Hidalgo. In summertime, the sunlight seemed to linger forever, but in winter the night came on quickly, and by the time they were rolling along the bridge toward the checkpoint, it was full dark. Bright lights illuminated the short span and the four lanes going either direction. A high fence and a stretch of plain concrete separated the two, and with the towering light posts, it reminded Zeke of the time he’d gone as a boy to visit his uncle Frank in the state prison up in Houston.
“All right,” Vickers called from the front. “We’re almost there.”
Zeke took a breath and dug out the bone pipe that had been sitting heavily in his pocket, jabbing into his thigh. He hesitated, but others didn’t, and soon the whole bus was filled with a chorus of ugly notes, just a brief flurry of cluttered music that ended as abruptly as it had begun. He was one of the last to play, and once he had sounded the notes, he turned to Savannah.
“Close your eyes, kiddo. Pretend you’re sleeping.”
As the bus juddered and then surged forward, Vickers shifting gears, Zeke discovered he was praying. His entreaties amounted to little more than Please, Lord, let us both come back alive, but it surprised him to find himself on speaking terms with God again. After Savannah’s death, he had all but given up prayer. Now he lowered his head and reached out with his heart, hoping to be heard, and that what they had done was not the abomination he feared it must be. She’s my baby girl, Lord, he thought. What else was I to do?
And then, grimly, feeling the weight of his own guilt: You brought your own son back to life. Can you blame me for following your lead?
Though the air had cooled and the breeze that blew in through the partly open windows circulated well, he felt a damp sheen of sweat under his arms and down his back. It might have been his imagination, but even Savannah’s hand seemed warm and clammy to the touch. He tried to take that as a good sign.
The bus idled in line for a few minutes, but it was a weekday evening and they were coming from the American side into Mexico, so the wait wasn’t long. On the other side, Zeke could see headlights stretching back into the distance. Some of those people, he knew, would be waiting for an hour or two to cross the border into the States.
Vickers parked the bus and then worked the handle that rattled open the doors. Most cars were waved through, but with a bus like this, the Mexican border guards almost had no choice but to at least ask them what they were up to. The woman who stepped onto the bus wore her uniform proudly. In the dim orange glow from the tiny light above the door, Zeke could see the frown that creased her forehead.
“Some tired people,” the guard said.
“We were up very early this morning,” Vickers said. “I have all of the passports right here.”
He offered her a small plastic container that held forty-seven passports and the guard frowned at the box, obviously not inclined to examine them.
“Where are you going?” she asked.
“Voices of Faith conference in San Fernando,” Vickers said. “This is the St. Matthews Family Choir.”
There were a dozen obvious questions the guard could have asked, beginning with why they didn’t have any suitcases on board. Instead she frowned at them for a few seconds longer and then looked at Vickers.
“Your passport?”
He set the plastic box on his lap and handed her a single passport, which she gave only a cursory glance before returning.
“Good luck.”
“Thanks so much!” Vickers said brightly. “God bless you.”
The guard muttered something as she climbed off of the bus—perhaps returning the wish for the Lord’s blessings—but Zeke couldn’t make out the words. Then Vickers put the bus in drive, gears grinding, and they were rumbling over the bridge into Mexico.
“You said you’d made a deal with the border patrol,” teenage Tommy Jessup said from the back of the bus. “Was that a part of it?”
Vickers’s face was visible in the huge rearview mirror, bathed in yellow light from the dashboard. “No. That was just them not caring. Not a lot of people sneak into Mexico. The deal we’ve got is with the U.S. Border Patrol, and we’re going to need it to get home.”
The salesman, Mooney, spoke up from two rows behind Zeke. “Let’s just hope the ones you bribed keep their word.”
“Yes,” Linda Trevino said. “Because people who take bribes are usually so honest.”
“Linda, for once please shut your fucking mouth.”
It took Zeke a moment to realize that those words had come from his own lips, and then he smiled in the dark, happy to have told her off. It made him feel more alive. On a bus full of people coming back from the dead, it had begun to seem as if their presence was dragging him in the other direction.
He turned and looked at Savannah, marveling at her beauty as he always did, and he longed for morning to come, for all of this to be behind them and Enoch out of their lives forever.
The bloodstained pipe felt heavy in his hand.
And the bus rolled on.