I just looked at her mouth. And her nose ring. And her lips moving and making words. I wanted to say, “No. We can’t go out there. We have to stay where there is shelter.” But I couldn’t quite piece the words together.
She stood up and screamed to Jake and his people, “We’ve got to get into the store!”
Finally I croaked out, “We can’t go out! The hail will kill us.” But Astrid was at the back of the bus by then.
“Try the emergency exit!” someone shouted. At the back of the bus Jake was already pulling and pulling at the door, but he couldn’t get it open. There was mayhem for a few minutes; I don’t know how long. I started to feel very strange. Like my head was on a long balloon string, floating above everything.
And then I heard such a funny sound. It was the beep-beep-beep sound of a school bus backing up. It was crazy to hear it through the hammering hail and the screaming.
Beep-beep-beep, like we were at the parking lot on a field trip to Mesa Verde and the bus was backing up.
Beep-beep-beep, like everything was normal.
I squinted out, and sure enough, Mrs. Wooly was backing up the elementary–middle school bus toward us. It was listing to the right pretty bad and I could see where it was dented in the front from smashing into the store. But it was coming.
Black smoke started pouring in through the hole I was looking through. I coughed. The air was thick. Oily. My lungs felt like they were on fire.
I should go to sleep now was the thought that came into my head. It was a powerful thought and seemed perfectly logical: Now I should go to sleep.
The cries of the other kids got louder: “The bus is on fire!” “It’s going to explode!” and “We’re going to die!”
And I thought, They’re right. Yes, we’ll die. But it’s okay. It’s fine. It is as it should be. We are going to die.
I heard this clanking. The sound of metal on metal.
And “She’s trying to open the door!”
And “Help us!”
I closed my eyes. I felt like I was floating down now, going underwater. Getting so sleepy warm. So comfortable.
And then this bright light opened up on me. And I saw how Mrs. Wooly had gotten the emergency door open. In her hands she held an ax.
And I heard her shout:
“Get in the godforsaken bus!”
CHAPTER TWO
SPACE BLANKETS
I was sleepy was the thing. I saw the kids scramble back toward Mrs. Wooly. She helped them get down on all fours and scoot out the emergency door, which was sideways.
There was a lot of shouting and people helping one another over the battered seats and slipping on the hail on the floor, slipping because everything was sticky, now with the blood of the kids who had been crushed and Mr. Reed and maybe also motor oil or gasoline, maybe … but, see, I was so warm and sleepy.
I was all the way up at the front of the bus, at the ground level, and the black smoke was encircling my head in these rich, ashy tendrils. Like arms from an octopus.
Niko came scrambling up the aisle, checking to see if anyone was left. As I was mostly under a seat, he didn’t see me until he was just about to turn back.
I wanted to tell him I’d be fine. I was happy and comfortable and it was time for me to go to sleep. But it was so far to go, to get to those words and then pull them up to my throat and my lips and then form them. I was too far under.
Niko grabbed my two arms and started pulling.
“Help me!” he shouted. “Kick your legs!”
I tried to move my legs. They were so thick and heavy. It was like I had the legs of an elephant. Like someone had replaced my lower half with a big sack of lead.
Niko was gasping now, the smoke getting thicker and thicker. He grabbed my hair with one hand and smacked me across the face with his other hand.
“Push with your legs or you’re gonna die,” he shouted.
He smacked me across the face! I couldn’t believe it. You see it on the tab but to have someone do it to you was just shocking.
So it worked, that smack. I came up from the sleepiness. I was up from down under. I was awake.
I pushed out from under the seat and stumbled up to my feet. Niko half dragged me through the hail, down the “aisle” that was not an aisle but was actually the space above the seats (because, remember, the bus was on its side).
The hail was still crashing and pounding through the windows. It seemed to have a gait now. Small hail, small hail, then a couple whoppers. Little, little, brutal.
I saw Niko take a big one to the shoulder, but he didn’t even react.
Mrs. Wooly had the front door of her bus pulled right up to the back of ours. Niko pushed me through the emergency door. Mrs. Wooly hauled me up and pushed me up the steps of her bus.
Jake Simonsen then grabbed my arm and pulled me down the aisle and put me into a seat. Then I got dizzy and my vision got all sparky, and before I knew it, I threw up on Jake Simonsen. Football star. King of the beautiful. And the vomit was, I am not kidding you, black like tar. Oatmeal and tar.
“Sorry,” I said, wiping my mouth.
“Doesn’t matter,” he said. “Sit down.”
Mrs. Wooly’s bus was in much better shape than ours. There were giant dents in the ceiling. Her windshield looked nearly opaque, it was so crosshatched with cracks, and most of the back windows were broken from the hail flying in; but it was Air Force One compared to our bus.
Josie was slumped next to a window. Astrid was trying to stop the flow of blood from Josie’s head. Brayden had his tablet out of his backpack and was trying to power up.
Niko started coughing up gunk up in the first seat.
And that was us.
There had been at least fifteen kids on the bus. Now it was Jake, Brayden, Niko, Astrid, Josie, and me.
Mrs. Wooly put the bus in gear and it lurched toward the Greenway.
The hail was changing now. Changing into a heavy, frozen rain. The quiet of the rain was so strong I felt it in my bones. A steady, heavy whoosh.
They say that your ears ring after you listen to something loud, like a rock concert. This was a continuous GONGONGONGONGONG. The quiet hurt as much as the hail.
I started coughing hard. Sort of a cross between coughing and vomiting. Black gunk, gray gunk, brown gunk. My nose was running. My eyes were pouring tears. I could tell my body was trying to get the smoke out of me.
Suddenly everything got orange and bright. The windows and the thin window frames stood out, illuminated against a silhouette of fire and … BOOM, our old bus exploded.
Within seconds the entire behemoth was engulfed in flames.
“Well,” Jake said. “That was close.”
I laughed. That was funny, to me.
Niko just looked at me like I was crazy.
Brayden stood up and pointed out the window at the flaming wreckage that had once been our bus.
“Class A friggin’ lawsuit, my friends,” he said. “Right there.”
“Sit down, Brayden,” Jake said.
Brayden ignored him, and stood, counting us.
“The six of us,” he continued. “We’re suing the Board of Education! Where my dad works, they have plans for this kind of stuff. Emergency plans. There should have been a plan. A drill!”
I looked away from him. Clearly, Brayden was a little crazy at this moment in time but I couldn’t blame him. He had every right to be unhinged.
The bus reached the store. I thought she’d stop it outside and we’d walk in, but no, just as she had before, Mrs. Wooly drove it right through the hole where the glass doors had been and then we were inside the Greenway, in a bus.
Surreal upon surreal upon surreal.
There were no Greenway employees around so I figured they must not have come to work yet.
The elementary and middle school kids were grouped together in the little Pizza Shack restaurant-within-the-store area.
I saw Alex through the bus window and he stepped forward, squinting to try to see me. The bus sputtered to a stop on the shiny linoleum. Mrs. Wooly got off, then Niko, then me. I stumbled over to Alex, my legs still weren’t working completely right, and then I hugged him hard. I got char and vomit all over him but I didn’t care.
He had actually been pretty clean before I hugged him. They all were. The little kids were scared, of course, but Mrs. Wooly had gotten them out of harm’s way in a hurry.
One thing that bears explaining is that the middle school and grammar school in Monument were right next to each other, so for some of the little pocket neighborhoods, like ours, they had one bus collect the kids for the two schools. That’s why there were eighth graders and kindergarteners mixed together on Mrs. Wooly’s bus.
From the five-year-olds to the eighth graders, the kids from her bus looked fine.
Not us. We looked like we’d been in a war.
Mrs. Wooly started barking out instructions.
She sent an eighth grader named Sahalia and a couple little kids to the Pharmacy section of the store to get bandages, first aid cream, that kind of thing. She sent two kindergarteners to get a cart full of water, Gatorade, and cookies.
Niko said he’d go get some thermal blankets to help prevent shock. He was looking at Josie when he said it and I could see why.
Josie was definitely looking worse for the wear. She was sitting slumped on the steps of the bus, keening and rocking back and forth. The bleeding on her forehead had slowed, but the blood was thick and clumpy in her hair and dried on her face in patches. She looked totally terrifying.
The remaining little kids were just standing and staring at Josie, so Mrs. Wooly sent them off to help Sahalia. Then she looked at Astrid.
“Help me get her into the Pizza Shack,” she said.
Together they lifted Josie to her feet and led her to a booth.
Alex and I sat together at one booth. Brayden and Jake and the rest just kind of slumped at their own tables.
We all started talking. It was all along the lines of I can’t believe what just happened. I can’t believe what just happened. I can’t believe what just happened.
My brother kept asking me, “Dean, are you sure you’re okay?” I kept saying I was fine.
But my ears were funny. I heard this rhythmic clattering sound and the boom-boom-boom of the hail was still in my bones.