CHAPTER SIX: WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU THROWING?
Catherine was roused from her sleep by the feeling that someone was throwing popcorn, or some other kind of missile at her. She immediately regretted falling asleep on the minibus. The way the seats were made meant that she would be suffering from neck cramp for quite a while. To top it all off, she had fallen asleep on a minibus that held Greg Sanders, so she was pretty sure she wasn't safe.
She looked around her. They were almost two and a half hours into their journey, so Warrick would be driving for a little while yet. Brass was sitting in the passenger seat next to him, and they were both discussing major league baseball. Grissom and Sara were sitting a couple of seats behind driver and passenger. They looked pretty snug. Sara was sitting by the window, but the way she was positioned in her seat, she was more facing it, with her back to Grissom. At first, Catherine thought they had fallen out, and were being stubborn, but when she looked more closely, she saw that Grissom had tucked his left arm underneath both of Sara's arms, and that Sara was leaning back into Grissom. She was using him to prop up her back.
Catherine looked behind her, in the direction from which the missile came. Three seats behind her, Nick and Greg were trying to look innocent, huddled behind a magazine. Catherine noticed that spread over their knees were two bags of popcorn, a bag of elastic bands and a pad of paper, which housed some sort of weird scrawling. She ducked down in her seat, and prayed to God for the strength to kill both Nick and Greg, at the same time, in equally horrible and painful ways.
Grissom and Sara were oblivious to the missile-flinging contest taking place behind them. Sara felt very comfortable using Grissom as a backrest, and Grissom was keeping his arm warm on Sara's stomach. He was equally engrossed in his book, an Isaac Asimov novel, one he had read before, but that was okay with him. This was a holiday, and he had no intention of bogging down his brain with scientific facts. He sneaked a look at Sara out of the corner of his eye, something he found himself doing more and more often. She was absorbed in a Clive Barker, one of the Hellraiser books by the looks of things. "Don't those things scare the hell out of you?" Grissom lowered his head and whispered in the direction of her ear.
Sara looked up. "Nope. I saw all those horror films when I was younger. Texas Chainsaw, Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween; the list is endless. None of them scared me."
Grissom raised his eyebrow. "You're kidding, right? I went to see Texas Chainsaw when it came out; I had to leave to leave the movie house when Leatherface stuck that girl on the meat hook."
Sara laughed. "Have you seen the remake? It's even more gory than the original."
Grissom shrugged, and turned sombre. "I guess stuff like that unnerves me. We see stuff like this every day, results of man's hatred turned on other people. I don't need to see horror films to remind me of those sorts of crimes. Work does that."
"You have a point," Sara conceded. "I never see it like that. What we see in our work is the after-effects of those crimes. These films, to an extent, explore the pathology behind the perpetrators of the crimes. If you'd have stayed for the end of Texas Chainsaw, you would've seen that Leatherface was physically abused by his father. He was one of those kids at school who was bullied, and it had a bad effect on him."
"Columbine was a copy of that, though," Grissom argued. "Instead of rampaging chainsaws, people were killed by guns. Kids killed other kids. That's wrong."
"But why were those jocks killed? They victimised the kids. However wrong it was, those jocks got their comeuppance." Sara broke off. "Hey, we're supposed to be on holiday, not debating crimes and criminals. That's for work. We should just relax now." She turned back to her book.
Grissom said nothing, and he too turned back to his reading material. He hoped that Warrick would stop for a break soon, for he feared his leg muscles might atrophy if he didn't walk around.
TBC