The People's Alpha ✔

2: Omnibus

"You should apologise to him. Doesn't matter if he's wronged you or not."

"I don't think it matters anyway. He's still going to be angry."

"Well there's no pleasing some people. Damned if you do, damned if you don't."

Tim, soon-to-be chief warrior of the Stone River pack, was telling me about a fight he had inadvertently started with one of his rivals, who had also been vying for the position, as he handed me luggage. I was on the roof of the bus, securing the suitcases and bags to the roof rack atop the bus.

On a patch of weedy ground next to the bus shelter, children played in the soft dawn light.

The Stone River Pack are our brothers. Our warriors do joint training exercises. We exchange recipes. Our children play together.

I lashed the last of the luggage to the roof rack, pulling the cords tight. Signalling the driver to start the engine, I climbed down from the roof and joined the last of the Stone River Pack members boarding the bus.

Tim was sitting in a window seat, near the back of the bus. I joined him.

The idling of the engine subsided as the bus pulled away from the shelter. Some of the children playing chased after the bus, shouting. They dropped back as the bus picked up speed.

It was barely seven o'clock, and the sun was just peeking out into the valley, but the narrow road was already busy with traffic. Car ownership was still rare in the Independent Territories, and most of our fellow road users were on mopeds or bicycles. The few cars that passed us were mostly secondhand, either imported from Zirconia or human lands.

Tim was telling me about his mate's obsession with the works of Jane Austen, but my mind kept flashing back to the events earlier in the morning. There was something I couldn't quite put my finger on about the whole situation.

I shoved the thought to the back of my mind. The girl was safe, asleep in the pack house. We would resolve this later.

The bus picked up more and more passengers as it wound down the valley, passing along the various pack territories. By the time we reached the bus stop that served the Pine Hollow Pack, there was only standing space.

I could barely hear the thrum of the engine over the hubbub of conversation as I explained the process of rebuilding a bus to Tim. Next to us, two chefs from the Stone River pack were debating a Groundnut Hill pack chef about the correct technique for the perfect meringue. Near the front, a group of bank workers from the Ebony Oak pack were cheerfully singing a traditional lycan folk song.

***

The Special Industrial Zone was located on the floodplain of the Arrowhead River valley, in a rough rectangle of former no man's land at the intersection of seven pack boundaries, a few miles from the Zirconian border. The ground flattened and the trees disappeared as we approached our destination, replaced by desolate rolling hills. Vast expanses of greenhouses appeared, then the vast tracts of little tar-paper shacks where the rogue workers lived.

Makeshift hawker stalls displaying street food and souvenirs lined the verges of the road. Underneath us, dusty tarmac had replaced gravel. The sun was a pale orange, filtered through the thick smog that covered the sky. The jungle-like skyline of smokestacks, blurred by the haze, loomed in the distance.

We passed a bus stop filled with commuters without stopping. Another operator ran the urban services within the Special Industrial Zone. Interpack covered the longer distance routes out to the pack territories, and school runs. Occasionally we also ran charter trips for human bus enthusiasts intrigued by the existence of front-engined buses in frontline duty in the Western hemisphere.