CHAPTER SEVEN
Sadou Maurie stuffed her comm back into her bag and hefted it to her shoulder. So Great Aunt Mami was upset about something. Grandpere would probably know what to do about it. Or he’d continue to ignore it along with all the rest of the growing problems.
She suppressed the traitorous thought, but not quite firmly enough. Douala, Yaoundé, and even smaller N’goundéré could still pretend to possess a growing city’s vibrancy. Once she could get on to the next job maybe she could pretend along politely again.
In this era, the country only had twenty or so family groups really trying to hold things together. And most had a leech or seven in each generation. Pascaline was the child of the single most notable wastrel from Uncle Benoit’s generation, so of course everyone assumed she was worthless too.
But the little town of Wangai had Maurie wondering if being a leech might not be the reasonable choice. The village camped on the west side of a long blacktop road that had seen better days. Some buildings like the clinic had all cement-block construction, but most were only made of sunbaked clay. Few of the roofs had solar panels.
The administrator from the clinic had Pascaline’s water truck backed up between two stalls in the open-air market. He was selling what remained of the clean water, and the line of his customers snaked around out of sight.
Dirt crusted Maurie’s toes and the pack of belongings hung heavy on her shoulder. The red flip-flops with their simple plastic strap felt comfortable in the heat. She and Pascaline had both worked hard for Grandpere, propping up the oil and gas business and fixing what they could here and there in the countryside. And a lot of places looked like Wangai, with living conditions no better than they’d been a hundred or two years prior. If she became a leech, she’d help no one. But she’d also not have to watch all her efforts evaporate with no more lasting impact than that soon-to-be-empty water truck.
Their bus laid on the horn for a solid five minutes before pulling off the road. Children scampered out of the way, and a few vendors wandered over to see if passengers wanted to buy something on their way through.
Her ride was a newer model commercial passenger hauler with a boxy frame. Aftermarket railings had been welded to the roof, and a sturdy ladder ran up the side. She could take this bus or wait for one coming tomorrow. Nothing else had so much as slowed on the paved road in the last hour.
The bus’s horn stopped. It pulled off the road toward the wide empty lot under the big mango tree at a crawl. The vehicle edged forward and back over a dozen times in a tight parallel parking maneuver which would’ve been necessary if there were other vehicles squeezed together on either side. It was the only vehicle here. Automated drive systems did things like that when confronted with terrain outside their program designs like: dirt roads, large potholes, or children waving mango leaves and giggling.
The market stall vendor shooed away the kids, and the bus was finally able to come to a complete stop next to the bus sign.
“Let’s go!” the operator called out in French. He hopped out of the vehicle and stationed himself at the front corner of the bus. The man’s head swiveled back and forth watching the sides of the bus for anyone who might attempt to climb it and steal a ride without paying.
A few other passengers paid the man and trudged back to use the ladder to claim a spot among the rooftop baggage.
Maurie fished her comm back out again and changed the display to show her ticket. He scanned it and waved her into the packed interior. No one got off the bus at Wangai.
No one else new joined Maurie inside either, so she had her choice of where to sit. Or rather the rest of the passengers did.
They sized her up and rearranged themselves to give her a seat to herself in front of a quiet family squashed together on one bench seat. The toddler slept but the older kid watched her with interest. Both parents avoided eye contact.
No one was afraid of her exactly, but she had boarded from a middle-of-nowhere village where everyone else had taken the half-price option of a spot on the roof. They’d wait to see if she were sick before spreading out to share a seat bench with her.
In five or six hours, they’d get to N’goundéré where everyone could easily switch to another bus if she still seemed potentially dangerous.
Maurie had a comfortable bus ride until the third stop when another woman chose to jostle in next to her. The window by her seat was stuck in the up position and not enough of the other passengers had pried their own windows open. Sweat dribbled down her back and salt-welded her shirt to her skin.
At the fourth stop, they used a police station’s paved parking lot for the pickup. She considered joining the rooftop passengers, but a man from above came down complaining loudly of the road grit rubbing his face raw.
“You slow down!” he said to the driver and continued a lengthier complaint in a pidgin mix of Fulani, English, and French that Maurie couldn’t follow entirely. He seemed to be describing his face being sandpapered by the wind.
“I keep the schedule,” the bus driver insisted. “You don’t like it, you pay for ticket inside.”
The father from the family behind Maurie called for the driver to get the bus moving again. The rooftop passenger didn’t seem to have enough money for an interior passage.
The driver pointed up and said something in pidgin, which earned him a scowl from his rooftop passenger.
“We paid. You go slow.”
The man spat on the ground and walked off without even stopping to retrieve luggage. Maybe he wasn’t traveling with any?
The driver called after him, but he didn’t come back.
A few young men in worn uniform castoffs stopped repainting the police station walls to watch, but none of the other rooftop passengers came down to continue the argument.
The driver climbed back into the bus, slapped the door shut, and pushed the button to restart the route.
Maurie grabbed the back of the seat in front of her at the jerk of the bus’s return to motion. Her seatmate sniffed and made a noise of disapproval.
She gave the woman a pleasant smile and tried to ignore the discomfort. She could leave at the next stop. That particular roadside town had looked barely twice the size of Wangai.
It might not have had any other buses coming through today, and she wanted a larger town with one of those travelers’ kiosks with showers. At the Douala airport spa you could have a rainforest waterfall shower with adjustable temperatures or take a steam bath in a massive tub. Customer demand didn’t support that sort of luxury in the bush county, but there’d be some options at the bigger towns. Even if the temperature controls had broken, a shower at whatever the water tower’s ambient heat might be would be great.
And for her next bus, she’d really love one with a functional air-conditioning unit. Or better yet, perhaps she could end her bus-taking entirely and find a nice little airport with bush pilots willing to take on a passenger for the cost of fuel and a bit more for their trouble. Cost remained the problem.
After paying that water bill, Maurie’s checking account balance had hovered far too close to zero to afford a chartered flight. But the bus smelled more than she’d thought it would, and worse yet, Maurie realized her own body was contributing more than its fair share of the stink.
Maurie swallowed her pride and called Great Aunt Mami.
“Good afternoon, Great Aunt, I just wanted to apologize for my rudeness earlier,” Maurie began.
“I don’t care.” The comm crackled a bit. The connection wasn’t the best. Maurie switched to text-based and started typing.
“Great Aunt, I really am sorry. I don’t know what I did, but you were clearly very upset, and…”
“Speak or don’t speak. I have no time for staring at a comm.” Great Aunt Mami switched on video which made the connection worse. She was using her admin controls again: not nice, but very great-auntish of her.
Maurie’s seatmate squeezed closer to get a better look. Great Aunt Mami didn’t appear to be lacking in time at all. The camera pointed at a ceiling like a comm does if a call is accepted with the device left flat on a table. Or like it would if a salon assistant pressed the button for a valued patron at Chez Angelique’s in WuroMahobe. Maurie recognized the ceiling fan.
“Sorry to bother you, Great Aunt. I can reach out to someone else,” she said.
“No, you can’t.”
“I’m sorry again.” Maurie tried to squeeze further against the window to gain a bit more privacy. She ended the call and dialed Uncle Benoit.
Chez Angelique’s reappeared, fan turning lazily. “I said, you can’t,” Great Aunt Mami’s voice replied.
The corner of Maurie’s comm showed the image she was transmitting to Great Aunt Mami. Maurie smoothed her expression back to neutral. She wished Grandpere had paid for the device. He never used the admin controls.
“Uh, Great Aunt. Is there something I can do?” Maurie tried a text-only message to Pascaline. It didn’t go through. Great Aunt Mami again. Weren’t older people supposed to be bad at technology?
“Oh probably,” Great Aunt Mami answered. “If you try hard enough, I’m sure you’ll think of something.”
“Perhaps you could tell me what I did wrong?” Maurie felt snippy, but she was pretty sure none of it came out in her voice, because Angelique chimed in on the other side of the call.
“Maurie’s a good girl, Ms. Mami.” Angelique’s elbow flashed in and out of the camera view. “Lean your head a bit more to the left please.”
“Maurie never does anything wrong,” Great Aunt Mami snapped. “But that doesn’t make her less at fault.”
Angelique’s response was lost to static.
“Dirty child sent away,” the older woman sharing Maurie’s seat commented and shared a laugh with a few of the other passengers. The mother of the family behind her made up a few more embellishments. Maurie couldn’t quite follow it all, but the gestures of smelliness made by the man with a bench seat on the opposite side were perfectly clear.
Maurie tried a message to Grandpere. It didn’t go through either. She needed someone who’d actually have their comm with them, who might have cracked Great Aunt Mami’s admin controls a while ago, and who would help if asked nicely enough.
She sent Uncle Benoit a message collect. “Stuck on bus 38 headed to N’goundéré. Can u help?” The device marked the text as pending. Well, that was something at least.
Angelique said something more. It sounded questioning.
“What do I care if he wants to go to Yaoundé and have a coup, he’s got no right to go after me,” Great Aunt Mami replied.
Maurie’s seatmate grabbed her arm in a death grip, and the echoes of speedily translated rumor echoed through the bus as the words “coup d’état” were repeated up and down the seats.
“Not the government,” Maurie corrected quickly. No one repeated her correction. Her seatmate eyed her with distrust and moved to a different seat far forward next to the exit.
A new seatmate crammed in next to her. A hint of gray roots hid under dark braided hair adorned with brilliant pink and yellow plastic beads. She poked Maurie in the ribs.
“Not the government?” she said.
“No, ma’am,” Maurie agreed.
The woman began a series of rapid translations in several different languages.
“Great Aunt?” Maurie kept her voice down. “You mean Uncle Benoit is calling for a vote again to replace Grandpere, right?”
“What else?” Great Aunt Mami snapped. “And this time he decided to have me shunned first. I told Moussa the foreign bank situation was a mistake, but no, he was always convinced he’d have a smooth transition handing everything over to your dad. Over ten years later, and he still doesn’t have another plan in place. Little Benoit can’t begin to do the job. Nobody likes Pascaline, and you’re too nice to do it.”
“Also too stinky,” the kid from the seat behind her suggested. “Chiefs can’t be stinky.”
She ignored him. “Uncle Jacques,” Maurie suggested.
“Isn’t family,” Great Aunt Mami said. “He’s not even a direct marry-in. He’s a cousin of a marry-in who happens to be a decent manager.”
Maurie glanced around the bus. She had a large audience now. Some of the bus riders were translating softly to their seatmates. The woman beside her had left out quite a few bits in her translation. There hadn’t been any mention of banks or financial accounts in the French version and while Maurie with her off-continent English-only education didn’t have a hope of following the other languages, most everyone else on the bus would be able to understand her seatmate. The multiple translations at volume weren’t necessary; they were reassuring. She’d been trying to keep everyone calm.
But the woman’s hands, out of direct line of sight for her audience, held a yellow leather handbag in her lap with a white-knuckled grip. Maurie swallowed, but her seatmate’s voice maintained its calm, even tones. The woman seemed able to project peace without feeling it herself. The hair beads matched the purse exactly. The swirling print of the woman’s blouse had an unusual pattern like something made with of child’s fingerpaints and custom printed at a novelty fabric shop. Heaven help her, she’d just been joined by a proud grandmother.
“Ma’am,” Maurie whispered, “it’s really okay. Not the government at all. Just my family is having some difficulties. Our grandfather is older.”
The woman set her chin, neither appearing to believe or disbelieve her just yet. But the bus passengers had calmed down.
“Great Aunt,” Maurie held the comm close and kept the volume dialed down. “I’m on public transportation. So we’ve got an audience. Why don’t we turn off video and switch to a text call?”
Angelique’s response was soft and barely audible. “Ms. Mami, did she say public transportation? That isn’t safe. Not for a Sadou.”
Great Aunt Mami grabbed the comm and stared. She shook her head at Maurie.
The comm chose that moment to fritz. No signal, and not something Great Aunt Mami had done remotely.
The volume hadn’t been quiet enough to avoid her closest neighbors overhearing. Her seatmate’s eyes went wide, but mouth stayed clamped shut.
The father of the family behind coughed.
“I know electricity,” he said with a careful lowered voice. “Any system, any house or office, run generators or fix.” When Maurie didn’t answer immediately he changed tactics. “My wife, she cooks. Good frugal meals for staff. No waste.”
The wife gave her husband a frightened look, no doubt remembering that she’d laughed at Maurie not too long ago, before they’d realized who she was.
He tried another pitch. “And, and, I have cousins with degrees. Very bright. My one brother is top of his class. They work hard all day, every day.”
He lowered his voice further and began to list off his marketable skills and those of his family members who might be able to find positions with her extended family’s businesses. He had his son slip a business card to her in the narrow space between the side of the bus and the seat.
The grandmother beside her relaxed enough to dig out a refurbished comm, and beg a contact transfer from Maurie for a hiring manager in Douala that a certain grandson of hers might look up.
Maurie tried to shrink. They weren’t repeating her name. They knew not enough good jobs existed for everyone to get one. She promised to give their names to Grandpere, and they relaxed their pressure, not mollified and not entirely believing her promise, but satisfied that they’d done their family duty.
The rest of the bus returned to other distractions. Maurie stayed quiet.
“Listen to your mother,” the woman from the family behind Maurie finally spoke up, softly misidentifying Ms. Angelique as a relative instead of family staff. “One like you should not be here. Don’t tempt a starving man.”
Maurie’s grandmotherly seatmate clucked a warning noise effectively silencing the soft outburst. “The roads are safe. We have a good gendarmerie.”
“When she gets kidnapped for a really big ransom, do we fight for her? The other passengers that do that always get shot in the movies,” the child said into the pause that should have included only an agreement about the effectiveness of the police. The kid missed the startled looks his parents exchanged and switched languages to beg his father for a sweet.
His mother shushed him. Without answering either of the child’s questions, the father said, “His grandmother lets him watch too much television.”
Maurie’s seatmate and the boy’s parents turned the conversation into a cheerful argument on the disgraceful state of young people in this day and age. When they agreed that kids these days were spoiled, Maurie suspected they were referring to her more than to their own children. But they didn’t explicitly say so.
“No VR time for kids one expert says. Don’t limit, another says, kids need to know how to use it for jobs. All these parenting rules are ‘two crocodiles joined in the middle,’ you know,” the boy’s mother quoted the truism, earning a nod of agreement from Maurie’s grandmotherly seatmate. The rest of the proverb, of course, was that when the two-headed crocodile found food, the heads fought over it even though they shared a stomach.
Continuing on from that agreement, they also agreed it was harder these days to find good work. All three adults avoided looking at her. Maurie’s grandmotherly seatmate quoted a proverb of her own: “Not everyone who chased the zebra caught it, but he who caught it, chased it.”
“I don’t watch the little children in my family much,” the grandmother added, “but my sons and daughters-in-law all ask me who I saw on my travels and give me thanks for the positions I can find for them with my many friends.” She shared a grin with the mother and father, and all three adults looked at her with the same pleased look in their eyes.
Apparently Maurie was the zebra today. She supposed it was better than being one of the heads on the self-destructive crocodile that represented a family quarreling with itself about how to raise the kids. She was beginning to suspect that the real reason other Sadous didn’t use public transportation was that the general public would get far too good at zebra hunting. And considering Uncle Benoit’s many messages, she probably didn’t get to opt out of being a part of a single-stomached but multiheaded crocodile.
Maurie focused on trying to get her comm working again. With the connection itself unreliable, she might be able to use her local settings to get something through before admin resets either blocked it or redirected everything to Great Aunt Mami.
She dialed the numbers she could think of for Grandpere. The public number for his administrative office would reach a polite administrator, but she didn’t bother with that one because with Uncle Benoit on offense, Grandpere would have made himself more difficult to reach. She tried the private number, theoretically for family and close friends only, and got a not-in-service message. That was her own fault.
She’d served as his assistant for several interim periods between hired aides and had implemented a policy of changing that number frequently to cut down on the unwelcome calls.
It seemed she didn’t have the current one. There were other ways to do call screening which would have worked better for also maintaining connections with intermittently communicative relatives, but Maurie hadn’t known about those simple programs at the time. And no one else in the family had bothered to enlighten her. One of the curses of being thought of as smart was that even people who should know better assumed she possessed uniformly deep knowledge rather than bits and pieces scattered over a broad range of topics—just like everyone else.
The bus driver sold her seatmate a candy bar. Maurie declined anything from his tray, and he turned to the opposite side of the aisle. The empty driver’s seat had the seat belt buckled to fool the bus’s autopilot into thinking the driver was still in the seat serving as backup. No one else had a seat belt, so the driver not using his showed a fatalistic sort of solidarity.
“Shouldn’t you be up there?” Maurie asked.
“This is my job,” the driver explained. He tapped on his chest where his shirt displayed the food service logo matching the emblem on his tray. “Regular driver sick, so”—he nodded with a confidence—“I do both today.”
He continued on his way giving children their choice of the cheaper snacks for free.
Maurie’s seatmate raised an eyebrow at her and whispered, “Do you know how to drive?”
She looked up from her search through the contacts to determine who was most likely to both have Grandpere’s current number and be willing to share it with her. “Um, yes.”
“Good,” the grandmother said. “I tried it once. Too scary. I prefer the autodrive.”
Maurie had been her father’s shadow and then Grandpere’s at countless new construction sites with unpaved access roads not yet programmed into autodrive systems. An out-of-control autodrive scared her a lot more than driving a vehicle did. But she understood why the grandmother and most of the public would hold that view. Learning to control a vehicle without autodrive was something the wealthy did in order to go extremely fast on a private racetrack. Here, and on most of the rest of planet, driving was a rich man’s hobby.
Mauri tapped on Uncle Benoit’s contact. He would have Grandpere’s current contact even if Grandpere didn’t want him to. Uncle Benoit used one of those more advanced screening tools and while the underlying number might change, she didn’t have to manually update it. He’d answer or not as suited his whims, but she would reach his device. The call started to go through and then disconnected. She tried it again.
Maurie’s seatmate squeaked a warning.
“Clear the aisle!” the driver bellowed from the far back of the bus, and the autodrive at the front of the vehicle let out a series of disturbing beeps. Then he took a deep breath and yelled even louder, “Does anyone on the bus know how to drive?”
The road was turning a gradual curve to the left, and the bus was not.
The bus driver called out in several other languages, somehow remaining calm. Maurie stood up.
Branches slapped the side of the bus. The right tires edged onto the ancient rumble strip and longer branches whipped into open windows.
She vaulted over her seatmate into the aisle. Her knee clipped against the old woman’s cheek knocking her down. Maurie had to get forward, though, or they’d all get battered a lot worse.
Branches snapped against the right side of the bus and turned into whips when they found open windows. A man yelped and clipped Maurie’s side, trying to avoid a long branch. She jumped over a couple who’d ducked into the aisle. She drew in a breath to yell for a clear path and was thrown against the side of a seat by another passenger’s body.
“A gauche! Move left!” her old seatmate yelled over the sounds of panic. The full bus seemed to triple its passengers as they all crowded into the aisle away from windows on either side. Maurie gasped pleas for them get out of her way.
The driver tried another bellowed order for clearing the aisle and might’ve had some success except for the pounding drum of fists beating on the top of the bus. The rooftop passengers expressed their displeasure toward those within with a volume that drowned out even the shrieking metal-on-branches scream of the bus’s side against the scrub brush lining the side of the road.
Maurie threw the last passenger out of her way and slammed into the driver’s seat. She grabbed the steering wheel in a death grip to bleed out her panic and forced herself to calm.
Road ahead empty.
Two tires off the gravel berm.
Two still on the edge of the blacktop road.
She slapped the button to take manual control. She turned the wheels off the shoulder and back onto the road. Remembering the unbelted rooftop passengers, she very gently pressed down on the brake pedal to slow the bus to a crawl. Maurie eased the bus entirely off the road and parked.
Everyone quieted.
“Everything is fine,” the driver announced. “Please get off the bus while we check quickly for damages. Come.” He repeated himself in French while he scrambled up the aisle and quickly disembarked the bus.
“Free snacks!” he called from outside the bus door. Candy bars rustled and were held aloft and waved overhead where passengers could see them through the windows.
With this promise of normalcy, the front-seat passengers grabbed their bags and climbed down to claim first choice of candy.
The bus’s center aisle immediately clogged with people as the passengers tried to boil out. No one thanked her, but her grandmotherly seatmate patted her on the shoulder as she hobbled out.
A spreading bruise marked the side of the woman’s face, and she hadn’t been hobbling earlier. The crush of panicked passengers in the aisle where Maurie had pushed her to get to the front of the bus had not been kind to her. The man from the family behind her helped the older woman.
Maurie couldn’t bring herself to meet his eyes. Who hurts an old lady? She twisted sideways against the press of passengers and made her way back to her seat. His wife clutched her sleeve as she passed and said something, Maurie pretended not to feel the touch and freed her sleeve.
At her seat, Maurie gathered her few things. The boy from the family behind her tapped her on the shoulder. She turned. The child at least seemed well.
He presented her with her comm, miraculously unscuffed, and pointed out the bruises on his hands and arms, incurred while rescuing her device. Heat rose in Maurie’s face, but she thanked him. His mother patted the boy on the head proudly. It was worth it to them, and it shouldn’t have been.
A better autopilot system, something that didn’t glitch in whatever way this particular one had, that might—possibly—be worth some bruises.
Maurie searched for the family’s card, couldn’t find it, and mimed for the kid to enter the contact information directly into her comm.
He did with great pleasure and returned to his parents beaming. After a brief conversation the adults looked back at her with matching expressions of pleasure. She was going to try to find at least one of their extended family members a good job. Hopefully, some of the skills they’d claimed for the clan members were accurately represented.
She pulled up Uncle Benoit’s contact again. It showed her last call had, finally, connected and stayed connected for several minutes. But now the thing said NO SERVICE. She powered it off and on. Still no service.
Her comm might be broken after all. The scrub brush trees lining the sides of the road lacked the height to hide an ultra-luxe night club of the type which might employ jammers. And also, no such party venue would ever launch out here so far from a customer base.
Departing passengers packed the front of the bus aisle still, so Maurie opened the back emergency exit and went down that way.
The child from the family behind her tried to turn to follow her, but his mother held him back. The free candy waited with the snack vendor at the front exit.
The long dusty road back the way they’d come shot straight for quite a ways before it twisted out of sight over rolling hills. In the other direction, a splotch of darker green announced a village or at least a farmhouse with a good well. That much clumped dark green in the bush country meant someone had watered mango tree saplings all dry season long for at least three years to allow the trees’ root systems to grow deep enough to sustain themselves. Maurie walked around to the front of the bus to suggest they head for the town. It would be a more comfortable place to wait for a new bus or repair assistance.
She came up behind a group of five men who could easily have stepped out of a high-end club. Except for the machetes, that is. Tall, broad-shouldered, and dressed in desert chic, they wore loose clothing to account for the heat combined with very nice hiking boots and face-covering head scarves.
A sixth man in a white headscarf puffing behind the group lugged both a toolbox and a large backpack sporting antennas. She didn’t recognize the gear, but the man headed straight for the bus. Communications jammer and maybe something that caused the autopilot to fail? She felt an urge to take a wrench from the man’s toolbox and ring him over the head with it.
The driver with his open tray of candies cocked his head to the side and goggled at the six men.
“Aren’t kidnappers supposed to wear ninja costumes?” the little boy asked.
“People only do that in the movies,” Maurie said. They hadn’t been on the bus. There was no reason for anyone else to be around, and they weren’t dressed like local farmers who’d just happened by. Maurie glared at the men. “I think these robbers broke our bus.” She’d never been robbed in person before. People sometimes broke into Sadou properties or stole from work sites, but this was a new—very unwelcome—experience. And in the movies, they definitely would’ve been in head-to-toe black costumes. Maybe these ones weren’t very good at it? Their faces were completely covered just the same, though. But really, weren’t there ways to get more money for less risk than robbing a public bus? What could make this worth it?
“Maybe they aren’t very good robbers,” she speculated out loud.
The comment earned her looks of horror from the closest passengers who were just beginning to recognize what was going on. A few drifted back along the side of the road. She hoped they’d break into a run soon. If everyone tried to go at once, a few would get away. Some people would certainly be able to hide in the roadside brush and make their way to a village for safer transport somewhere else.
Maurie stepped forward. “Everyone go!” she called out, trying to sound authoritative but not to show any of the growing fear that might induce panic. She could afford to be robbed and if everyone else ran, somebody could get a message back to her family. Of course, only the grandmother and family of three knew who she was. What if they decided to kidnap her and none of those four got away?
A snake-y hiss of laughter felt like it was going to come bubbling out of her mouth, but Maurie suppressed it. Now was not the time to be seeing things.
“Who’s the driver?” the lead thief called out. His head covering was a Hermès scarf. Maurie winced at the choice of non-disguise. The specialty stores that sold that sort of antique clothing kept records of their customers. The other five wore plain head scarves in white, gray, red, green, and blue like they were some kind of children’s action hero team. Did only the boss get fancy headgear?
The driver gaped at the robbers in horror and panic. He slapped down the lid of the candy tray as if that were the most valuable thing he could protect and held it tight to his chest, covering the logo on his breast pocket. The passengers looked to him for guidance anyway.
The driver turned to Maurie and held out a hand like he was about to ask her what to do.
Hermès snapped his fingers at a couple of the other thieves.
“Green. Gray. Go with her. Get this bus out of here.” Hermès gestured at Maurie, and she was pulled out of the crowd by the two thieves with the green and gray headscarves.
This was too much for the candy vendor-turned-driver. He rushed forward.
Hermès transferred the machete to his left hand and threw a punch with his right fist. The man crumpled.
“Hey, that’s not necessary.” Maurie held up her hands in surrender when one of the other thieves with a blue scarf pointed a machete at her.
Green whispered quietly, “The boss is pissed off, but play along, and you’ll still get your cut.”
“Do what I say, and your passengers don’t get hurt.” The Hermès thief looked straight at her and spoke in a carrying voice, clearly not intended for just her.
Maurie kept her hands up and tried not to look confused. “I thought we’d lost control,” she said. “The operator was in the back with the snacks tray, so I didn’t want us to crash.”
Hermès slapped her across the face while Gray yanked her away. The loud crack his hand made slamming into his other hand shocked her so much that at first she didn’t realize that she hadn’t really been hit at all.
Gray pulled her to her feet and spun her toward the bus. He kept her unbruised face turned away from the passengers. She stumbled and Green grabbed her by the other arm to help her keep her feet.
They marched her together to the bus and pushed her into the driver’s seat.
“You were supposed to stop right away.” Green narrowed his eyes, the only part of his face visible. Then the corners of his eyes crinkled like this was all a ridiculous joke. “Don’t worry. We’ll get you through this.” He pulled at the sweat-slick fabric of his robe. “Get that air-conditioning on. We had to jog almost a kilometer to get to this bus.”
The windows were still down and some broken leaves and branch stems lay in the aisle.
“The AC is broken,” Maurie said. “And I’m not…”
“Get out your wallets!” Hermès yelled at the crowd of passengers. “We can fix your bus and have you all back on your way, but there’s a fee involved.”
White had his large backpack off and hunched head down over his toolbox. He grunted in annoyance and, finding her feet in his way, he pushed past to crawl into the space beneath the steering wheel. An automatic screwdriver whirred on and off four times. He popped open a panel under the dashboard, connected a computer, and batted at her legs. “Give me space,” he muttered.
She moved and stood uncertainly in the bus aisle. Green walked the bus checking for abandoned bags and poking under seats, confirming no one was hiding inside.
“Turn over your cash cards and electronics.” She could hear the Hermès-scarfed thief’s orders continue at top volume, easily audible through the bus’s broken windows. “Make sure to wipe your accounts. If you lock the devices, we’ll notice, and you’ll get hurt. Don’t be stupid.”
“Which passenger is the Tchami woman?” Gray-scarf asked her, waving a hand toward the crowd outside. “She’s offended somebody rich,” he added. “We’re supposed to break one of her legs or arms.”
Maurie swallowed hard. Her comm was registered to Great Aunt Mami. On a phone network it would have an ID as belonging to Tchami Magdalene.
“Not now, Gray.” White put his head into the space under the steering wheel where he could access the autodrive system. “Please go away, I need to focus on this,” he said. “Splicing the interrupt device in here is easy. Getting it back out again without hurting the autodrive is hard. And I don’t like leaving fingerprints. Go whine about the air-conditioning somewhere else.”
Maurie kept her mouth shut as she was hauled by an arm back out of the bus again by Green and Gray. They halted in a shady spot under a large baobab tree. The bus was lucky to have hit only scrub trees and not one like that. It would’ve crashed the bus instead of just scratching metal while being torn out of the earth.
“Also, you can’t call anybody,” Hermès continued.
Several people in the back of the crowd tried to look like they hadn’t been attempting just that.
“None of you have a signal,” he pointed out, clearly not caring that some had been trying to contact authorities. “None of you are going to have a signal until we are all well clear. This is a nice quiet fee collection. You keep wedding rings. For anything that’s been in the family a couple generations, you get in a line here. You can explain to my man in the red scarf one at a time why you need to keep whatever it is. Let me tell you right now, if everything you’ve got is very important to you, you’ll be giving it all up. Choose one thing to make a case for and volunteer up the rest. Be reasonable and you’ll be on your way to wherever you want to go very quickly.” After a pause he repeated everything he’d said in clear-carrying French.
Maurie’s head was spinning, but she reached for the comm in her pocket.
“Not you,” Green whispered. “You’re part of the team, you don’t get robbed. They said you were a little hesitant about this, but nobody said you were dumb. I was told it’d be your first time but didn’t anybody explain the plan?”
The group of passengers formed a disorderly mob around Red and complied with Hermès’ orders. One woman attempted the argument that her new release phone was from her grandmother. She got to keep it after another passenger suggested that perhaps she’d paid for it with a bequest from that grandmother. The proud phone owner did turn over a significant amount of cash. A small pile of loot grew at Red’s feet, filling empty backpacks apparently brought for that purpose. Maurie reassessed her mental judgment of them as inept.
Hermès passed his machete back and forth between his hands and circled the whole scene, stopping next to Gray under the baobab tree.
White scurried over to Hermès with his toolbox. “I fixed the bus, sir,” he reported. Then he looked at Maurie, really looked at her. “Who’s that?”
“The driver,” Hermès said.
“No, it’s not.” He shook his head. “My sis…” He stopped. “I know the woman who was supposed to drive.” He glared at her. “What are you, a temp or something?”
This caused Hermès to look at her more closely. “You aren’t the regular driver.” It was an accusation.
Maurie saw the actual driver/candy-seller in line with the other passengers, head down, and trying very hard to be invisible with one eye starting to swell shut. He saw her and avoided eye contact. No help there.
“You might have caught the wrong bus,” Maurie suggested. “I don’t know anything about a plan. Nobody does.” She took care to avoid noticing that White’s sister was supposed to have been the driver. “If the bus driver had known this would happen, he’d have been in the seat to take operator control when the autopilot failed. We almost crashed.” She pointed at the scarred side of the bus. “Those are new,” she said in an attempt to add evidence to her claim.
“The Tchami woman isn’t here and neither is the special freight,” Blue reported. “We went through all the luggage. It’s just passenger junk. No special freight. Nothing high value.” Blue gave Maurie a speculative glare. “You drop it off somewhere on the route? Trying to hold out for a bigger cut or blame us and keep it all to yourself?”
“I don’t know what you are talking about.” Maurie kept her voice very calm. Those machetes looked sharp, and she didn’t want them riled up enough to try them out on her. So far no one had been hurt very much, but that could change pretty fast especially since at least some of them thought she was a co-conspirator instead of another victim. She considered briefly trying to bluff and pretend to be a co-conspirator. But, if she failed at it, then they might think she was pulling some kind of double cross. And White knew she wasn’t his sister.
Hermès sent a man back to look more closely at the bus. “White, double-check the bus. Make sure it’s the one we’re supposed to have.”
The man returned quickly. “Vehicle numbers match up exactly.”
“Explain that.” Hermès poked her in the sternum with the dull flat end of his machete. Not a comfortable experience.
Maurie shook her head. “I can’t. I’m just a passenger who jumped in to stop the bus when I thought we were going to crash.”
The assembled thieves made expressions of disbelief.
“Why would you know how to drive?” Blue asked. “Who are you?”
“Sadou Maurie,” she said.
Green took a step back. “Sadou. Oh shit.”
“I’m sure this is all a mistake,” she suggested.
“Oh yeah,” White agreed.
Hermès snatched the front of Maurie’s shirt and shook her. “The hell you’re a Sadou. Those people don’t ride on buses.”
Maurie’s comm trilled from her pocket.
Gray fished it out and showed it to Hermès. “It says missed call from ‘Sadou Benoit.’” He let the face of the phone show. In response to Hermès’ continued glare White said, “The call blocker is out here with us; when Gray and Green took her inside the bus, the comm must have been shielded enough to make a connection. That’s a really high-end comm device; those things are better at making and keeping a connection than what regular people have.”
“I don’t want trouble,” Maurie said into the silence. “How about you give these people back their things and just go. Nobody needs to have any trouble.” I’m not one of the heads on the two-headed crocodile, she thought, I’m the meal the idiot carnivore is fighting over. How the hell did Uncle Benoit and Great Aunt Mami do this to me?
“We should kill her,” said someone behind her. She thought it was Blue.
“Fine,” Maurie snapped back. “You go ahead and do that. Murder always makes everything better. Who the hell decided I was special freight? It’s nowhere near April 1. They are not going to get to wave this off as a family joke.”
Hermès said, “Hold her. I’m going to make a call.”