61 Hours

turned over.
    The engine started. It clattered and rattled and settled to a hammer-heavy beat.
    No leaks.
    No fire.
    No fumes.
    He fought the cold and gave it another minute and used the time to check other things. The big tyres looked OK. Some of the front suspension members were a little banged up. The floor of the luggage hold was dented here and there. A few small tubes and hoses were crushed and torn and split. Some Seattle insurer was about to get a fair-sized bill.
    He scrabbled out and stood up and brushed off. His clothes were soaked. Snow swirled all around him. Fat, heavy flakes. There were two fresh inches on the ground. His footsteps from four minutes ago were already dusted white. He followed them back to the ditch and floundered around to the door. Knox was waiting for him. The door opened and he climbed aboard. Blowing snow howled in after him. He shivered. The door closed.
    The engine stopped.
    Knox sat down in his seat and hit the starter button. Way at the back of the bus Reacher heard the starter motor turning, churning, straining, wheezing, over and over again.
    Nothing happened.
    Knox asked, ‘What did you see down there?’
    ‘Damage,’ Reacher said. ‘Lots of things all banged up.’
    ‘Crushed tubes?’
    ‘Some.’
    Knox nodded. ‘The fuel line is pinched off. We just used up what was left in the pipe, and now no more is getting through. Plus the brakes could be shot. Maybe it’s just as well the engine won’t run.’
    ‘Call the Bolton PD again,’ Reacher said. ‘This is serious.’
    Knox dialled and Reacher headed back towards the passengers. He hauled coats off the overhead racks and told the old folks to put them on. Plus hats and gloves and scarves and mufflers and anything else they had.
    He had nothing. Just what he stood up in, and what he stood up in was soaked and freezing. His body heat was leaching away. He was shivering, just a little, but continuously. Small crawling thrills, all over his skin.
Be careful what you wish for
. A life without baggage had many advantages. But crucial disadvantages, too.
    He headed back to Knox’s seat. The door was leaking air. The bus was colder at the front than the back. He said, ‘Well?’
    Knox said, ‘They’re sending a car as soon as possible.’
    ‘A car won’t do it.’
    ‘I told them that. I described the problem. They said they’ll work something out.’
    ‘You seen storms like this before?’
    ‘This is not a storm. The storm is sixty miles away. This is the edge.’
    Reacher shivered. ‘Is it coming our way?’
    ‘No question.’
    ‘How fast?’
    ‘Don’t ask.’
    Reacher left him there and walked down the aisle, all the way past the last of the seats. He sat on the floor outside the toilet, with his back pressed hard against the rear bulkhead, hoping to feel some residual heat coming in from the cooling engine.
    He waited.
    Five minutes to five in the afternoon.
    Fifty-nine hours to go.

THREE
    F ORTY-FIVE MINUTES LATER THE LAWYER GOT HOME . A LONG, SLOW trip. His driveway was unploughed and he worried for a moment that his garage door would be frozen shut. But he hit the remote and the half-horsepower motor on the ceiling inside did its job and the door rose up in its track and he drove in. Then the door wouldn’t shut after him, because the clumps of snow his tyres had pushed in triggered the door’s child safety feature. So he fussed with his overshoes once more and took a shovel and pushed the snow back out again. The door closed. The lawyer took off his overshoes again and stood for a moment at the mud room door, composing himself, cleansing himself, taking a mental shower. Twenty minutes to six. He walked through to the warmth of his kitchen and greeted his family, as if it was just another day.
    By twenty minutes to six the inside of the bus was dark and icy and Reacher was hugging himself hard and shivering violently. Ahead of him the twenty old people and Knox the driver were alldoing pretty much the same thing. The windows on the windward side of the bus were all black with stuck snow. The windows on the leeward side showed a grey panorama. A blizzard, blowing in from the north and the east, driven hard and relentlessly by the winter wind, hitting the aerodynamic interruption of the dead vehicle, boiling over it and under it and around it and swirling into the vacuum behind it, huge weightless flakes dancing randomly up and down and left and right.
    Then: faint lights in the grey panorama.
    White