Day 56: Bus 3

[rocksthecourt]

Waking carried a sense of disappointment along with it for the first time in a long time. Klavier actually sighed in irritation when he realized where he was. Damn it all. So they hadn't managed to move quickly enough to cover as much ground as they had hoped. It was a shame, really. Last night had actually proven to be relatively productive. If

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[its_the_mileage]

"His tail? He was a robot with a tail?" The note of disbelief in his voice barely registered despite the questions, which concerned him. Through a lifetime of logic-defying, there's-got-to-be-a-rational-explanation events, he'd managed to maintain a healthy sense of skepticism, and Landel's was threatening to suck it from him after a matter of weeks.

Robot dinosaurs sounded as credible as it got next to the idea of someone's having been a robot--why not, after all; they knew Landel loved his experiments, and if this one was less organic and inspired by something even older than usual, well, the man must've just branched out. If he assumed Landel was the architect, though, it did raise the question of why the things were still up and running. Did they move on their own, was he still on the scene somewhere, or were Aguilar's guys just maintaining the good doctor's murderous status quo?

"I hate that guy," Indy muttered, voicing aloud the next thought in the chain before shaking his head and moving on. "What do you know about what comes next?" The few people on the bulletin board who seemed to have been through it weren't much for talking about the experience.

[toxicspiderman]

S.T. kicked back and watched Indiana Jones boggle at that one for a bit, his grin bordering on smug.

Then he moved on. Given that it didn't sound like he was pissed at D.C., there was only one real possibility for who Indy hated. Two, if he thought Aguilar had been around long enough to blame. S.T. knew some folks who'd trust the Bastard over the General just because one had stars on his uniform. He considered himself above such knee-jerk reactions. Landel had earned his place at the top of the vileness food chain. Aguilar had a long way to climb.

"Not a thing. I tried fishing on the bulletin, but the best I got was a few people short on reading comprehension and some vague alarmist bullshit about Cassandra being right." The former he should have expected. The latter he hadn't. Evasion and secrecy, fine, but near-hysteria was weird. "Said I wouldn't find answers if I kept looking down there, but he was mum on what I would find."

[its_the_mileage]

Indy'd read that too. So Taylor didn't have any additional information. He wondered if they'd have better luck tracking down and talking to the people who'd been down there, or if they'd get the runaround again--with their luck, probably the latter. "If his grasp of mythology is as tenuous as Landel's, I wouldn't worry about it," he deadpanned. "But that is a strange reaction. 'Go find out for yourself' I could understand, but at least one writer has warned us away repeatedly. Maybe he was threatened."

Well, it was far from the first prophecy of doom Indy had heard, and he was still in one piece. Scorch marks aside.

"I didn't get much chance to see what shape Scott and--D.C. were in. Are you three ready to go back down there tonight, or do you need time for your injuries to heal?" he asked. If Indy was honest, he should probably take a night off himself, and Dent and Peter were likely to be in the same boat. But he was reluctant to take a break when they were finally getting somewhere.

[toxicspiderman]

"Depends on what you want me for. Taxi driver, I can do. Another firefight," he said, holding up a hand and waggling it. "I don't think any of us are feeling so hot right now, unless they've got a hotline to better speed-healing." He hadn't gotten a good look at anyone's injuries but his own, but they'd all been beat up.

"We could always answer another riddle. Finish the matched set." He started to stretch, and then realized how many bandages that might dislodge, and stopped. "Or I could just make another beer run." They even had something to celebrate, aside from another day of not dying.

"Course, what do you want to bet something goes wrong today? Hard to look for raining blood if you're holed up in a basement." If Aguilar even bothered turning on the prophesy generators. It'd been too quiet, in terms of night-time freakouts, since the takeover.

[its_the_mileage]

"Depends on what else is down there," Indy replied. That should be obvious. "Another riddle should be safe enough, though. It might not be bad to have two sets of those trinkets--who knows how many of them we need." Or even if they needed them. Failing that, maybe they could arm a couple of rats and set up a little gladiator ring in the cafeteria. It certainly wouldn't be the most trivial thing he'd ever done at night here.

"And it wouldn't surprise me." He smacked the card against his leg as he suddenly remembered something. "You've been here for a while, haven't you? Someone once suggested that problems with the trips happen on alternating weeks. I think it might have some merit."

Last week they'd made it back to the compound before the doors had gone haywire. The week before had been the Zombis, of course; before that, Indy recalled his first trip being uneventful. Who had told him there'd been an incident with the buses not making it back before nightfall the week before that? Someone on the bus ride over, he thought. It wasn't much of a sample, but it still suggested a pattern.

[toxicspiderman]

In answer, he flicked the dogtags out of the neck of his shirt. Class B. They hadn't figured out on the board exactly how much shit you had to put up with before you got to be one of the big boys. Either they'd know soon or he was forever doomed to Pepto-Oatmeal breakfasts.

"Two times isn't much of a pattern, but it's not nothing." Patterns always started like that. Not enough for anyone but the credulous and the bereaved to believe, when the second person in a town came down with a rare throat cancer. Next thing they knew the CDC and the EPA and the FDA were sniffing around, and everyone just knew who to blame. Then spin control and big money showed up and everyone forgot. Except the people who were dying. And Sangamon Taylor.

This place didn't play by real-world rules, though, so his experience meant approximately jack shit. He tried to look at it objectively.

Weird shit tended to happen every few nights. Never twice in a row, for the big stuff, the stuff that wasn't just them brainwashing a patient from somewhere that made acid trips look 2-D in comparison. "The night before the zombies there was all that blood, but if they turned on the omen machine we might have missed it. Enough of our own everywhere."