MORT day 5 - the buses

I did remember coming to Savior.

The ride to savior city took a while. Savior was one of the newest settlements and further north than any other settlement in existence. They had made a big deal about that when I was at the recruitment meeting.

Most of the people around me looked like bullies. They were probably street kids who were looking for a better life. Most of these guys didn't have families, which made me feel lucky, because I had my mom.

My mom had sent me to one of the recruitment meetings a couple of months before I signed up. She was so proud that her little man was going to become a settler, just like her father had been. I sat In a dark theatre in the outskirts of New Jerusalem and listened to a man who looked and sounded much like Bishop black, tell med the great promise that awaited me if I became a settler. The promise of unexplored land and greener pastures made the Savior city seem appealing. I was 13 at the time.

The pilgrimage (as the makers called it) to Savior city started out great. My mom saw me off at the edge of new Jerusalem. We were standing at the brink of the newly re-paved street and saw 6 buses pull op. Honest to god buses!

I can't remember ever being so excited and so scared, as just at that moment. I was going to drive inside of a real bus. I had only ever taken the train once and I was far to young then, to remember much about that.

The buses were huge steel monstrosities with 6 wheels each, they had large spiked bumpers and big spot light on the nose. I remember my mom wondering out loud how they got the fuel for these things, but I was just happy I would get to ride one and then scared that I was going away.

After a short, teary goodbye with my mom and a last look at New Jerusalem, I filed into the second bus with allot of kids my age, who were all chatting excitedly..

I settled down in a seat and began staring out a window as we started driving. The landscape went from dull autumn to barren and rocky wasteland over the next couple of days. I kept to myself for the most part, most of the other kids scared me anyways.

The entire first day I was anxious, but that died down, when I realized that we would be driving for quite a few more days to come.

I settled into a routine after a while, ignore everyone during the day, eat by myself whenever we stopped for meals and sleep against the cold window during the night.

The first bit of excitement happened a couple of days after we had left New Jerusalem, when one of the guys on my bus spotted a geek off in the distance.

We were passing a huge empty field, where nothing larger than a bush grew, when one guy across the isle from me started shouting excitedly. Every kid on the bus hurried over to his side of the bus, making the thing lurch. I had to fight my way to the window, but once there, I could see a small figure way off in the distance. He was just walking alone, there really wasn't anything special about him, but he still gave me the creeps. Most of us had never seen a geek before, they were mostly gone in the south.

After that first geeks started turning up with more regularity. They would be wandering aimlessly through fields  or you'd spot one emerging from a forest of weeds. They were old geeks, so most of them were in pretty bad shape. Their skin had turned a dull gray, their eyes had long since rotted out of their sockets and there were huge gaping holes where their mouths should have been. Some of them were still wearing the clothes they died in, which hung in laces on their shriveled bodies.

The geeks would hear the bus and start stumbling in our direction, with their arms outstretched. those spindly, spidery creatures scared me so much that I had nightmares for the rest of the trip.