“Pamela?” Steve called out.
Pamela’s head appeared beside Tarah’s.
Steve reached up and hugged his wife as best he could without the ability to see a bumper to climb onto. “God, you scared me!”
Well, at least we could agree on one thing.
Tarah bit her lower lip. “Sorry. There was a sheriff’s car that kept passing by out on the street. So we got Mike to do his cloaking spell on the trucks. Pretty good, huh?”
I choked down the insane urge to laugh. “That’s an understatement. We thought...” I cleared the knot from my throat. “Never mind.” I told her about the latest developments with the bus driver. “I know it’s a risk hiring him, but it seemed like a good idea at the time.”
Her smile flashed bright, lighting up her eyes. “You followed your instincts?”
“Yeah.”
“Then you did the right thing. We’d better warn everyone about keeping our new cover story, though. Especially the kids.”
I nodded. “I’m going to move my truck so it doesn’t draw attention before Bud gets here.” I hadn’t even left it in a parking space. It was still in the way of other drivers.
“What’s he like?” she asked before I could turn away. “Bud, I mean.”
I paused, trying to think of how to describe him. A farmer. An old man. Weathered, lonely and bored. A man I sure hoped I was right about hiring. “I think you’ll like him.” I turned away, then had to pause again. “We’re going to have to ditch these trucks somewhere after we get everyone loaded onto the bus. When you were looking up local bus rentals, did you happen to see—”
She held out a slip of paper with a cheeky grin. “GPS coordinates for the nearest lake. It’s supposed to be a deep one too.”
I had to smile at that. “You are a mastermind’s dream.”
“I know. And speaking of which, I had another idea…”
Tarah had suggested we get walkie talkies so I could keep in contact with the bus for the rest of the trip. She also thought at least one of the outcasts would be able to jam Bud’s cell phone signal if he tried to call his family and tell them our destination. So while she plotted with her truck’s half of the group, I ran back inside the superstore to do a little final shopping, returning with walkie talkies and batteries only minutes before Bud was supposed to arrive.
And that’s when I realized just how good Mike’s abilities were. Even knowing their approximate location and slowly walking all the way around them, I still couldn’t see a single hint of the stolen vehicles. Now that I was on the receiving end of the illusion, I was blown away by the spell’s complexity. This had to be way harder than simply gathering your energy into an orb to throw at something or directing the wind or even creating fire on the palm of your hand. What Mike was doing with his mind was directly messing with other minds, making our own eyes lie to us.
“Tarah,” I whispered, stopping a couple of feet short so I wouldn’t run into the invisible trucks face first and make a fool out of myself.
Her head popped into view. “Is it time?”
I nodded.
She whispered something over her shoulder to her group then climbed down. We worked together with the tailgate till we managed to find and release the catches to lower it. Then we started the process of guiding everyone out of the truck.
“Steve,” I hissed in the general direction of the other truck. “Time to get moving.”
He peeked out at us, then climbed down and dropped his truck’s tailgate. I noticed he only helped his own family down from the cargo area, ignoring the others as they struggled to exit as well. Most of the adult passengers didn’t have too much trouble jumping down or else stepping onto the flat metal bumper and then hopping the rest of the way to the ground. But the younger kids and the elderly found the distance to the ground to be too much to manage on their own. Muttering a few choice names for Steve under my breath, I left Tarah and Mike to help their group while I went to assist Steve’s.
Once they were outside the trucks, everyone began to shiver as the wind cut through their thin wool blankets and their breath made puffs of fog in the air. Thankfully Bud showed up right on time, so our group didn’t have to stand around in the cold for long. As soon as the charter bus pulled into the parking lot and stopped, Steve hurried his family over to it. The rest of the group trailed more slowly after them, with Mike and the trucks’ drivers hanging back to maintain the cloaking spell on the trucks till the last possible moment.
The bus’s door opened with a hydraulic whoosh, then Bud eased down the stairs. “Ladies and gentlemen, your chariot awaits.”
Smiling so the wrinkles in his face turned into folds, he grandly swept out an arm, indicating the group should climb aboard. Steve and his family eagerly took the first seats.
Tarah took a dazed elderly woman’s elbow and slowly helped her up onto the bus. As they passed Bud, Tarah paused to tell him, “Thank you so much for helping us out on such short notice.”
Bud’s leathery cheeks turned pink. “Well, that’s alright, little lady.” He must have been a John Wayne fan. He sounded just like The Duke.
Tarah and I worked as a team, me on the outside guiding the shell-shocked group onto the bus, while Tarah helped everyone find a seat inside. Most had no trouble getting settled in. However, the mother and child who brought up the last of the group didn’t seem so eager to board. It was the catatonic woman, the one who had lost her baby, and her little girl. The child clung to her mother’s seemingly unfeeling hand as they stood there, the child’s eyes darting from side to side in fear, the mother’s eyes open and unseeing.
I bit back a curse. I’d thought for sure the mother would have come around by now and started taking care of her surviving child. From the look in the little girl’s eyes, I had to wonder if anyone had even explained to her what was going on.
I squatted down in front of the kid. “Hey, sweetheart. I’m Hayden. What’s your name?”
“Kristina.” She had a strong lisp. It came out as “Kwithina.”
“Nice to meet you, Kristina. Listen, we’re all going to go on this bus together because it’s nice and warm and comfy. Doesn’t that sound much better than riding in the cold?”
Her big brown eyes blinked at me. She didn’t respond.