Hymn by Graham Masterton Read Free Book Online Page A

first. It was only when Ric walked around the back of the bus that he saw that her black hair was all burned off down one side of her head, and her pretty floral-pink sundress had been incinerated from her left knee to her left shoulder. He could see her scorched white panties and it made him feel like a ghoul.
    Ric and Jim met each other round on the far side of the bus. Ric took out his handkerchief, folded it into a triangle, and pressed it against his nose and mouth.
    â€˜Some cookout, hunh?’ asked Jim, although he was far from laughing.
    â€˜What the hell do you think happened here?’ Ric asked him, unsteadily. ‘You think maybe the gas tank exploded, something like that?’
    Jim grunted and hunkered down, and examined the underside of the bus. ‘No signs of explosion. Nothing’s ripped apart, no distortion. Gas tank’s intact, luggage is burned but not blown apart. This baby just caught fire and that was that.’
    He stood up, and wiped the perspiration from his forehead with his fat ginger arm. ‘It can happen, I guess, especially with fuel injection. But you don’t often see it with diesel.’
    He squinted at the tyre-tracks that the bus had left in the dust between here and the highway. ‘No signs of any other vehicle involved. The driver headed straight here, no swerving, no skids. It’s hard to say for sure, but it doesn’t look like he was panicking none.’
    â€˜His whole goddamned bus was on fire and he wasn’t panicking? It doesn’t make sense.’
    Jim reached into his shirt pocket and took out a roll of wintergreen Life-Savers. He offered one to Ric but Ric shook his head. ‘Nobody was panicking,’ he observed, tucking a Life-Saver into his cheek. ‘Look at them, they’re all sitting in their seats, no heaps of bodies next to the door, nobody anywhere near the emergency exits.’
    Ric walked back along the side of the bus and stared up at the girl in the floral-pink sundress. The unburned side of her face was Spanish-looking and remarkably pretty, and her right eye was open and staring at him, or just past him, anyway. The extraordinary thing was that she looked like she was smiling. She looked happy.
    You, young lady, you’re a goddamned conundrum, you are, thought Ric. How can you smile when your legs are on fire? I mean, Jesus—how much that must have hurt.
    Jim came up and stood beside him and stared at the girl, too.
    â€˜She’s smiling,’ said Ric, with a nervous laugh.
    â€˜Naw,’ Jim’s Life-Saver rattled between his teeth. ‘It’s the heat, shrinks the facial muscles, same way a steak curls up. Saw a guy burning in a truck once, trapped, couldn’t get out. Looked like he was laughing his head off. I felt like calling out, what’s the frigging joke?’
    They walked back to the patrol car. Ric glanced back once or twice, and the girl was still staring at him with that single expressionless prune-brown eye.
    Jim reached into the car and lifted out the radio microphone. ‘Doris? Jim Griglak. Listen, tell the coroner we got thirteen of them. That’s right, a baker’s dozen. Yeah, that’s right, baked pretty good, too.’
    There was nothing else for them to do but wait. They stood leaning against their patrol car in the wavering afternoon heat, watching the bus tyres burn themselves down to criss-cross hoops of radial-ply steel, and the last few flames around the body framework gutter out. In the distance, from the west, they heard the echoing flacker-flacker-flacker of approaching helicopters.
    â€˜You know what we’ve got ourselves here, don’t you, Ric?’ asked Jim, lifting his bulk away from the car. Jim had never called him ‘Ric’ before.
    Ric shook his head, conscious that Jim was going to tell him something serious.
    â€˜We’ve got ourselves a massacre, that’s what we got.’
    â€˜You think this was