Panic!

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The desert surrounded the moving bus like an earthly vision of hell.

Heat shimmered in liquid waves on the polished black ribbon of the highway, in thick tendrils across the arid wastes extending eastward to the horizon, westward to a low stretch of reddish foothills. The noonday sun, in a charred cobalt sky, was a fiery yellow-orange ball suspended on glowing wires. Nothing moved beyond the dust-streaked windows except the heat; the only sign of life was a carrion bird, a black speck lying motionless above something dead or dying in the far distance.

Inside the bus, the air had the same furnacelike quality, smelling of dust, of sweat and cracked leather, of urine from the faulty toilet facility in the rear. It was not crowded. There were only five people riding in addition to the driver: two silent old ladies, with skin that had been dried and cured by twenty thousand appearances of the desert sun outside; a fat man, sleeping, snoring softly; a young, homely girl who sat with her legs splayed wide because the heat had chafed her inner thighs painfully; and, well in the rear on the driver’s side, a lean, hollow-eyed man sitting slouched against the window, breathing through his mouth, thinking about nothing at all.

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