Hymn by Graham Masterton Read Free Book Online

brown smoke all across the valley.
    â€˜Oh, Mary Mother of God,’ Ric repeated quietly. ‘Don’t let this be.’
    Jim picked up his r/t microphone and said matter-of-factly, as if he were ordering dinner at a Korean take-out, ‘One-four-six, this is one-four-six. Doris, this is Jim Griglak. I have a multiple traffic fatality here on Highway 78, just about fifteen miles due east of Borrego Springs. I’m going to need choppers and firetrucks and ambulances, make that at least ten ambulances, repeat ten—we have a considerable number of casualties here—and backup. I’ll get back to you, okay?’
    â€˜Don’t let this be,’ Ric whispered, more to the Holy Virgin than to Jim as the patrol car jounced off the highway and sped across the scrub toward the burned-out bus, a plume of dust rising high behind it.
    â€˜It will be, all right,’ Jim assured him. He took a last suck on his extinguished cigar, and then tossed the butt out of the window. Fire department regulations forbade smoking at the scene of a blaze. ‘You can pray all you like, Munoz, but it frigging will be.’
    They swerved to a halt about thirty feet away from the bus, and climbed out. Ric wrestled out the fire-extinguisher, but Jim called across the roof of the car, ‘Forge it, Munoz. They’re all dead. Better to leave everything the way it is.’
    Ric nodded, and gave him an oddly clogged-up ‘Sure’, obediently replacing the fire-extinguisher. He took off his sunglasses and followed Jim closer to the bus, glancing at it with hesitant up-and-down motions of his head, and swallowing, desperately wanting not to look, but knowing that he had to. He didn’t know how Jim managed to stay so goddamned calm. Ric had been with the California Highway Patrol for six-and-a-half years and, like all patrolmen, he had seen some shockers. Bloody and scarcely recognizable children, jet-propelled through car windscreens because their parents hadn’t bothered to buckle them up. Irrationally cheerful men, crushed flat as cardboard from the chest down, still joking and asking for a cigarette. Women lying in the road screaming, unable to get up, because they had both of their arms torn off.
    He had seen people trapped behind brown smoked-up windows, burning alive, pleading with him, screaming at him, ‘Save me! Save me!’ but unreachable because of the heat. He had never seen anything like this.
    Maybe it was the silence that affected him so much. Usually there were sirens and traffic and people shouting. Out here in the desert there was nothing but the warm soft fluffing of the breeze and the ping-tikk-pinging of slowly cooling metal. Occasionally one of the tyres flared up, but for the most part the fire was out now.
    Maybe it was the dense charred-pork smell of burned human flesh. It saturated the air, so that every breath he took was greasy with it. Oh Christ, he thought to himself, I’m breathing in dead people. I’m actually breathing them in.
    It looked like an ordinary bus, a ten-wheeler GMC. Most of its paint was burned off and what was left of its aluminium bodywork was darkly discoloured, but Ric could make out the words Balboa Hi-Way Bus Ren in brownish-red letters, on the side.
    The blackened driver was still sitting in his seat; still grasping his carbonized steering-wheel. A rough headcount came up with twelve more passengers, men and women. They were all dead, no doubt about it, although the fire had charred them unevenly. Those sitting on the left-hand side of the bus were burned into tiny crispy monkeys, their teeth grinning brown through their black flaking skin, their little fists raised in front of them as if they had all been drumming, their drumsticks suddenly confiscated.
    Those sitting on the right-hand side, particularly those at the back, had been less devastatingly charred, and one Hispanic girl of about twenty-four years old looked almost untouched at