Chapter 13
The next morning, Tom and Mother carried their bags onto the bus. The driver still sat at the wheel, looking keen to go. He didn’t appear to have slept or moved at all.
At first, they drove through flooded land that glistened like the silver crocodiles that lived in it. The road itself had been improved not long ago, and it sat atop a mound of soil so that it wouldn’t flood every time the river came up. There was water across it in places, but it was never deep enough to stop the bus getting through. Whenever they came to a new section of unflooded road, the road would rise up and the driver would demand new payment, which he threw out the window to calm the bubbling road.
It took the bus a whole day to get to the outskirts of the city. They passed towns, increasingly closer
