The Atomic Blood-Stained Bus

By Michael J Ritchie

Gwen McKenna, a bored journalist, has lost faith in her work and instead spends her time pondering the locations of missing people and attempting to make magic work. When David Lowry goes missing, she seeks out his trail, only to find herself tugged under the surface of the normal world and into a layer inhabited by banished gods, secretive witches and psychotic bus drivers.

This time, she might be in too deep.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Impera Books
• Release date: Aug 4, 2014
• ISBN: 9780992771829

Book preview

Chapter 1

The Bus in the Alley

THE ATOMIC BLOOD-STAINED Bus has gone by many names over the last few centuries, and many different appearances. It is said that not a single piece of the original bus now remains – which begs the question, ‘Is it really the same bus?’

But that’s a whole other kettle of ballparks and not really the sort of philosophising that there is time for right now.

The bus’s first outing took place at some point in the late fourteenth century. The exact date is lost to history now, but Garfield Sutton, the driver of the bus for those last 700 years, knows that it was a Friday. He'd sold his house, clipped his two horses to the front of his cart and set off, knives in his belt and a thirst in his heart.

The bus no longer has horses, or indeed a cart; it currently looks not unlike the sort of double-decker bus seen all over London. There are, of course, differences. London buses are not prone to leaving bloody tyre marks in their wake. Neither are they usually found declaring their destination THE END OF THE LINE, unless you get on the 72 at Hammersmith on any Tuesday when there’s an unfinished crossword in your bag, and a full moon. The Atomic Blood-stained Bus is also known to scream occasionally, and from certain angles reminds one of a hovercraft, although no one can ever explain why.

London buses are also a slightly lighter shade of red.

On this particular Saturday evening, the bus was parked down an unlit London alleyway, just around the corner from a pub, a nightclub, a kebab shop and, therefore, swarms of people filled in equal parts with blood and alcohol. It was rather like thousands of other streets up and down the cities of Britain. It was a waiting game on nights such as this, for there would always be someone stupid or drunk enough to be fooled by Garfield.

Garfield himself stood on the rear platform of the bus, twirling a jagged knife against his thumb. His calloused fingers were much used to this sort of behaviour and his skin was rarely cut, having grown so thick and crusted over centuries of abuse. Still plump, his hands conceal the true age of their owner. In fact, there was nothing about Garfield Sutton to suggest he was born during the reign of Edward III. Like the machine itself, he was also slightly worn, seemingly stitched together from different eras. However, he looked, to the layman, like a man in his early forties who had experienced difficulties but actually used the rowing machine he’d bought during his mid-life crisis.

His messy, self-cut hair was black, and his brown eyes glimmered faintly with a barely-perceptible fury. His slender body was draped in a horsehair cloak, indigo jeans poking out from beneath and funeral shoes appearing in turn beneath them. He had had to move with the fashions to some degree – there weren’t nearly enough druids left in the country for him to look normal.

There was a shriek of laughter and a clatter of bins, and Garfield’s attention was drawn to the entrance of the alley. Two young revellers, one male, one female, stumbled into the darkness, giggling and groping. Garfield watched with a certain perverted interest as the man pushed the woman up against the wall and she allowed his hands to crawl up the inside of her flimsy blouse.

Their lips were locked together with such fervour that they might have believed the only oxygen left in the world was inside one another’s mouths. She fiddled with the buttons on his jeans and slid her hand inside them. She whispered something through the kiss and they moved deeper into the alley, closer to the bus.

The man dropped his trousers and the girl lifted her skirt and pulled her tights down a little, and there, right in front of Garfield’s focused eyes, they performed that most animal of interactions. The alcohol ensured that their connexion didn’t last long. Only a few moments later, the girl was running her fingers through her hair in a vain attempt to tidy it up, whilst the man was doing up his trousers.

‘Come on Dave, we’d better get back to the club,’ she said, her words slurred slightly from too many tequila slammers.

‘Nah, come here, come here,’ said Dave, pushing her back against the wall, biting and kissing at her neck and cheeks. ‘Mmm, you’re the best I’ve ever had, baby.’ The girl looked suddenly uncomfortable, the first hint of the word ‘mistake’ beginning to form in her brain. Dave put a hand up her skirt, fingers fumbling as they tried to pull her tights down again.

‘Once more, I’m not done,’ he said. ‘Let me do it again.’

‘No, not here.’

‘Come back to mine then, come on,’ said Dave, squeezing her arm a little tighter.

‘Get off me Dave, I’ve got to go back inside.’ She seemed to sober up slightly.

‘No, come on, stay with me,’ Dave spat like a drunken cobra.

Perhaps she seemed almost resigned to it and didn’t say anything to stop him, or maybe even squeaked a noise of acceptance, or maybe it was all in Garfield’s head. He wasn’t sure even she would ever be able to say if she did or not. Dave grabbed a handful of her thick dark hair in his fist and pushed her head against the wall behind them. Carried away by his lust, he was more forceful than he intended. Garfield could instantly smell the fresh blood that began to trickle out into this dark, horrendous night. He did nothing as Dave’s grip only became tighter and Garfield wondered if he planned on taking the girl a second time, there and then. The girl’s breathing had become shallow and fearful. Just before Dave could even make an attempt, Garfield spoke.

‘Fancy entry to an exclusive club?’ he said, softly. The girl screamed. Dave swore loudly and spun round, his jeans still unbuttoned and sagging around his hips.

‘Piss off, old man,’ he snorted. ‘She’s mine, alright?’

‘I’m not interested in her. I said, do you want to come into an exclusive club? Lots of other girls there, not nearly enough guys for them all. I’m sure you could find fresh… prey in there.’

Dave contemplated the words, the young woman’s hair still wound around his tightly-clenched fist. Garfield pushed open the back door of the bus, filling the alley with the thud-thud-thud of the modern music that he hated so much, and red, white and orange bursts of flashing light.

‘The club is on a bus?’ he said, incredulous.

‘The club is on a bus,’ repeated Garfield.

Dave sorted out his jeans and put himself away, eager-eyed, losing interest in the whimpering girl instantaneously and dropping her like a used tissue. She fell to her knees and then scrabbled back up onto her stilettos.

He stepped up onto the platform. Garfield didn’t move aside even an inch. Dave had to slide right up against him to pass, a filthy hunger in his eyes. Once he was inside, Garfield closed the door and locked it, sealing the fate of the stupid man who couldn’t control his simple brain.

‘I’d get a move on if I were you,’ said Garfield to the girl.

‘But what about…?’

‘I’ll deal with him,’ Garfield smiled. ‘Go.’ He waved his knife a little to hurry her along.

She nodded, tears and mascara streaming down her face. She turned and ran out of the alley, stumbling slightly on her six-inch heels. Garfield watched her wobble round the corner and then turned around, unlocked the door with a click of his fingers and stepped inside. The door closed quietly behind him.

Like so many of them, Dave’s final words were expletives. Garfield usually began by slicing out the voice box – something he particularly enjoyed – so Dave had little time to make much noise, and his yells were easily drowned out by the pounding music from the city around them. Garfield missed the days when the final words tended to be sudden prayers and calls to God. It was far more poetic than this.

The deed was complete in ten minutes.

Not long after, another figure stepped off the bus. He had flowing blond hair, muscled arms and a handsome, chiselled face. He held an acorn in his hand and raised it to his ear. A dozen panicked whispers, like a frustrated jury, talked over one another and garbled things that Algernon didn’t really understand. One of them was apologising; another one was scared and begging for his parents. A third said something about cream cheese. Garfield had insisted that this acorn was not to be planted. As such, Algernon simply threw it into one of the large dustbins nearby, gazed up briefly at the inky, starless sky, and stepped back onto the bus. It coughed into life, Garfield plunged it into the right gear, and the Atomic Blood-Stained Bus took off into the night, not bothering with headlights, heading out of the city towards the countryside.

Chapter 2

Missing

ONCE UPON A TIME, Gwen McKenna had been the prom queen, captain of the hockey squad and girlfriend of the offensively handsome Lawrence Fairbairn, but the following fifteen years had been less kind. They had involved two divorces before the age of 30, the prolonged illnesses and deaths of both her parents, the unexplained disappearance of both of her sisters and her once best friend, and twenty-eight separate incidents of failing to dye her mousy brown hair blonde, the results of which ranged from anything from day-glo orange to pond scum green.

She was currently sitting at her desk on the fourth floor of a nondescript, grey office building in southwest London, a gently-steaming cup of takeaway coffee in front of her. It was barely light out; even the sun looked irritated at having to work so early.

The newspaper that Gwen wrote for was called… well, it didn’t matter what it was called because after a certain point they all basically merged into one black and white globule of celebrity tittle-tattle, scaremongering and editorials about what Princess Diana would think of it all. In her mind, Gwen simply referred to it as The Paper, inserting several choice adjectives when she’d had a really bad day.

This particular paper had been ousted from the centre of London by the others after some scandalous stories concerning one or two of the minor royals, and had since taken up residence nearer to Surrey than they liked to acknowledge. The offices were smaller and smelt strongly of unwashed carpet, breakfast panini and lunchtime sushi. Gwen tapped at her mouse, playing a game of solitaire. When she’d lost her sixth game of the morning, she opened her e-mails.

Seventeen of them were potential story leads, two were general inter-office emails about the toilets on the fifth floor being out of use and the upcoming team-building holiday in Llanfairfechan – paintballing again – and a further six were spam.

Gwen flicked lazily through the leads. Their importance varied wildly, from ‘arson’ down to ‘saw Keith Chegwin’s face in my margarine’. Gwen opened one at random.

Big cat spotted in Richmond Park – apparently. Go easy on this one as we don’t want another stuffed tiger incident. Woman seemed a bit doolally. Investigate if the day is slow.

She deleted it and opened a second.

Man claims to have shagged Kate Moss, wonders if we want his story. Do we? Figured we probably don’t as the address he gave was for sheltered housing and we traced the call back and it came from a public telephone box. Might be willing to talk for a can of cider – we could use it for a piece on mental illness or something. Still, might be real. Stranger things have happened.

Some days, Gwen quite enjoyed her job. Those days had become less and less frequent over the last nine years she’d been with The Paper, and today was certainly not one of them. She enjoyed chasing stories about community spirit, about good triumphing over evil, about big disasters, and murderers getting their just deserts. She was not so keen on the mad ramblings of the public. Everyone these days was obsessed with celebrity, and Gwen found it hard to stomach the notion that people genuinely cared what cereal Victoria Beckham was buying, or what drugs the latest vacuous waste of space from The X Factor had been snorting.

She got up and tugged on her leather jacket. Coffee in hand, she ventured into the hallway, stepped into the lift and was soon outside breathing the thick London air and gulping back latte.

Where had her life gone so wrong? She’d had it all at 18, but those teenage years had turned out to be the best of her life. It had all been downhill from there. She’d joined Facebook and hunted down those she’d been to school with, not having a single friend she knew before university that she still spoke to, and she was surprised to see what had become of them all.

The popular kids had lost it. They were now waiters, barmaids, cleaners, eking out a living in their home town, hopes dashed on the town borders. The ones who had been quiet and picked-on were now barristers, managers, doctors and pilots, travelling the world and posting hundreds of photos of themselves, their glorious wedding days, their beautiful children, their lives that had been touched by Midas as soon as everyone stopped giving a crap about their sixth form reputation.

Gwen was lucky in that, while not everything had gone to plan, she had at least escaped the town and forged a vaguely successful path of her own. She may not have been married (although not for lack of trying) or have kids, and she may have lived in a one-bedroom flat in Ealing where she paid a fortune to be kept awake by the omnipresent smell of skunk weed and never-ceasing drum and bass, but she had her health, she had a few good friends, and her job at least demanded more than just mindless number crunching for a dull corporation.

She also had her hobbies, such as they were. While most people enjoyed something like gardening, badminton or coin collecting, Gwen had two loves about which she rarely spoke to anyone.

The first was a curious passion for unsolved murders and mysteries, particularly strange disappearances that were never explained. This had begun ten years earlier, when her younger sister Rachel had gone missing. The last anyone had known was that she had been going to visit her boyfriend, but she never arrived. The boyfriend was questioned and held on suspicion of murder for a while, but in the end no one could prove anything. They never found a body; after a large-scale manhunt, the police eventually gave up looking. Gwen believed the stress and tragedy of the incident was what killed her parents.

Convinced that life couldn’t get any worse, Gwen returned to her routine, but only a couple of months after her father’s death her older sister Robyn also went missing. She’d left on a business trip to Milan and while there had been witnesses to say that she arrived at the airport, no one seemed to have noticed her get on a plane, and certainly no one in Milan had seen her.

Once again, Gwen’s life was thrown into turmoil as the police crawled all over her grief, and her story became national news. She began to fear for her own life. As with everything, media hype died down and when, as before, no one found a body, Gwen was left to sort her life out on her own. She became close, quick friends with a guy called Steven, with whom she shared a gym. They had six months of intense friendship, with him putting up with and helping her through all of her troubles, despite it costing him his own boyfriend, who was convinced Steven was cheating, before history repeated itself and he vanished as well. He’d last been seen getting onto a tube train in Kennington and hadn’t turned up at his mother’s birthday dinner.

Lonely, hurt and frustrated, Gwen began to become obsessed with what happens to people who go missing. She wrote articles about disappeared persons for the newspaper, although they were rarely picked up on and used unless they had something particularly notable about them. She kept photos of Rachel, Robyn and Steven in her bag at all times. She pored over missing person posters in supermarkets, and websites that