Somebody on This Bus Is Going to Be Famous (23 page)

“Simon!” Miranda straightens up and calls toward the front. “Kaitlynn has a lot of cuts but I think she's okay. Just stay where you are!” Noticing a change in the noise level, she looks over to see Igor, hanging upside-down with his toes wedged into the seats overhead, chuffing like a monkey. The littles, if not exactly laughing, are at least distracted enough to stop screaming.

“I want to try that!” says Little Al.

Now that it's quieter, Miranda can hear a raspy noise from the seat ahead. Shelly!

• • •

The boy in the wheelchair soon gives place to a woman in a bathrobe, fuzzy green slippers on her feet and a frightened look on her face. “Who are you?”

Jay doesn't hear the question too clearly for the noise of the storm and the wheeze and thud of his own lungs and heart. “Gotta use your phone—the school bus—went off the road—”

“What?” she gasps. “The school bus
wrecked
?”

There is a scuffling behind her, which Jay senses rather than hears. The little overhang on the porch is no shelter at all—why don't they ask him in? A man pushes into the crowded doorway. Even at his present extreme, Jay recognizes Jason Stanley Hall from Bender's yearbook picture.

“What bus?” the man shouts. “When? Where is it?”

“Can I come in?”

He sees the man nod to the woman, and they back up to allow him just enough room to get inside and close the door. Dripping on the welcome mat, he gulps out his story. Mr. Hall's eyes bore into him—green, with startling pale eyelashes that remind Jay of somebody. He's barely begun when the man utters a strangled cry. Then he grabs a jacket and bolts out the door.

Jay wasn't expecting that. You'd think he had a kid on the bus or something.

“Stan!” the woman calls sharply after him. A stampede of emotions charge across her face, but by the time she turns back to Jay, it's empty.

“I need the phone,” he reminds her.

All they have is a cheap cell phone that barely gets a signal, but after a few desperate tries, he gets through to a 911 operator who keeps telling him to stay calm. The call breaks up before he's finished. He feels like throwing the phone across the room but takes a deep breath and gets hold of himself. “I'm not sure she got that. The operator. I'd better run up to the highway and try to flag somebody.”

“Let me wrap your leg first,” the woman says. “It's starting to swell.”

She's pale, with fluffy blond hair and light blue eyes. While he was gasping out his story about a wrecked school bus, she'd stared at him like he was an alien life-form. But the look she gives him now is firm and direct. The sight of his lower right leg, puffing up under his jeans like an overstuffed pillow, makes him sit down and shut up while she goes hunting for supplies. The house is topsy-turvy—stuff pulled out of drawers and closets and stacked up like a garage sale.

As she cuts off the lower leg of his jeans and winds his ankle with strips of gauze, her mouth clamped on three safety pins, Jay notices the boy watching him. He's sitting forward in the wheelchair with a weirdly happy smile on his face, staring hard enough to gobble him up. The kid is so small, with his stick-thin legs and arms, that his age is hard to guess. Leaning so far forward he's almost falling out, he says, “You're Jay. Aren't you?”

• • •

Shelly dreams that someone is strangling her. Or a vampire has her by the neck and is closing in with his fangs. Or maybe it's not a dream. She can't move her head—the more she squirms, the more stuck she gets. No scream can get past the grip on her throat: “arggle” is the best she can do. Her right arm is wedged beside her body, and the other is feeling around but can't make sense of all this woody, twiggy stuff—
branches
? In a
bus
? That squeeze on her throat is tightening…she is shading into unconsciousness, a black frame around her thoughts getting thicker and heavier—“Help!” she shouts, but it comes out “aggh…”

“Shelly!” Miranda's voice, hands under her head, relieving the pressure a bit. “Can you hear me? It looks like a bush came through the window when the bus turned over and your hair is—Igor!”

Shelly hears an answering call.

“See if you can find some scissors, or a knife!”

She's glad it's Miranda. Miranda's a good friend…smart too…

“Shelly! Your neck is caught in a fork of this bush. You're choking, 'cause your weight's pulling you down and your hair's all tangled up in the branches…”

What's she saying…wait? For what? Or was it weight? You're a good one to talk about weight, girlfriend…Did she say bush? In the
bus
?

Somebody is scrambling over the back of the seat, which is now sideways, and everything is upside down and she's just now starting to realize that her throat really,
really
hurts and Star Camp is less than two months away and she can't sing like this…

“Simon had scissors in his backpack,” says Igor. “Wow! She's pretty scratched up!”

What?

Miranda: “See if you can hold her head up.” A pair of hands fumble around the top of her head—how did anyone get up there?—and a sound bites down right next to her ear: chomp, chomp. Like her hair is being chewed off.

Miranda: “These are
terrible
scissors. Like from kindergarten.”

Igor: “First grade. They won't let little kids have anything sharp. You'll have to cut a little at a time.”

The crunch of the scissors is kind of soothing. Shelly could go to sleep if it weren't for the iron clamp on her neck. And the pain. Yes, the pain, which is slowly bearing down on her now along with a rising panic. Does anybody know they're out here?

• • •

Spencer is slipping away even from his dreams. While turning over with the bus, he bounced off the side of the opposite seat just before slamming the window frame headfirst. He doesn't feel anything and appears to be peacefully sleeping. But there's plenty going on inside his skull, none of it good.

Blood vessels have sprung like fountains, and brain cells are dying for lack of oxygen. He shouldn't be asleep. Sleep is the last thing he should do. He needs to wake up, needs to have people asking him questions, snapping their fingers in front of his face, slapping him even—anything to stop his long downward slide into that place where brain cells die and muscles forget how to move. Somebody needs to say
Hey, Spencer!
Wake
up!

But there's nobody to say it.

• • •

The first thing Kaitlynn is aware of is a tingling in her back, then a pressure in her ears, as if all the ideas she's ever had are breaking up and shaking together. The first thing to do is remember who she is, then why she's here, then where she needs to be. As the feeling in her back comes alive, the pieces of herself are jumping, finding each other, snapping together, and aiming upward. Next minute, she's launched.

Up, up,
up
—arrowing straight for the surface, even though it's a long way and the higher she goes, the louder the buzz and the tinglier the tingle—though actually, she realizes now, it's more like pain. Each little quiver on her back is growing spikes and digging in and making her pay for things she doesn't even know she did…Up! Up! and the more she tries to outrun it, the worse it gets. She breaks, at last, upon a watery plain where the steady rain pummels her and the sobs of little children surround her and the outraged cries right beside her are the ones she's making herself.

• • •

Alice's jaw is sore from clamping down on it, trying not to scream. The rain, which had been hammering on the windows with watery fists, has lessened to a steady drumbeat that helps hold the panic down. Alice is trying to worry about Kaitlynn and Shelly and Spencer and everybody else, but pain is wrapping her up in the tight cocoon of herself. It's just one arm, but it's swallowed up her whole body. Tears track down her face and sobs jump in her throat, but she's holding them down. So far. If she gave herself up to them, she'd shake to pieces. She thinks of little Albert in their story, finding courage to hold on—and that makes her think of Ricardo, coming to after smashing into that bridge abutment…

“What's going on!” shouts an indignant voice beside her—Kaitlynn's. She sounds so mad, Alice somehow knows she's going to be okay. “Where's all this
blood
coming from??”

“Kaitlynn!” yells Simon from the front. “Are you okay?”

“NO, I'm not okay! I've got, like, a million cuts on me—is this
glass
?”

That sparks another uproar; Alice sees Igor climbing back toward the front and hears a moan from Matthew—

“Hey!” comes a voice from the back of the bus. “Lissa! Lissa-girl, are you in there?”

She can't believe it. “
Daddy?
”

Her father swings his legs over the emergency door opening and drops into the aisle, climbing over the seats on his hands and knees to get to her. “Sweetheart! Babydoll! You're alive—are you okay? Anything broken?”

“Just an arm—NO!” She stops him just before he can catch her up, jangling bones and all, in a big bear hug.

“Jeez!” He recoils as though stopped by an invisible hand. Then he reaches out to touch her good shoulder. “What can we use for a splint? Do you have anything we can wrap it up with?”

“Sir?” It's Miranda. “Do you happen to have a pocketknife?”

“Sure thing. Here you go—” He fumbles it out of his hip pocket and tosses it to her. “I might need it back, though.” He slips off his jacket and is now unbuttoning his shirt. “I've got to cut some bandages.”

“Daddy!” Alice is whispering. “Did anybody call 911?”

“Yeah, your mom. When that guy showed up at our door. What can we use for a splint?”

“I think we should wait for the ambulance,” she says, still whispering. “Why aren't you gone?”

“We were waiting for the rain to slack off. Who else is hurt in here?” He's looking around distractedly. “Are y'all all accounted for?”

Miranda pops up again. “Could you see about Matthew? And maybe Spencer? And we don't know about Mrs. B—or Crystal—”

“Matthew? Where's Matthew?” He's stretching his neck, searching the forward seats.

“He's toward the back,” Alice says. “Daddy! The ambulance'll be here soon. Hadn't you better go?” He's not supposed to be here, but she can't remember why.

“Plenty of time,” he replies absently, crawling back the way he came. “Whoa! Are you Matthew?” Alice hears a murmur in reply. “I dunno, man, looks like you've lost a lot of blood already…”

“There!” Miranda exclaims triumphantly. “You're free! Careful, Igor. Let's pull her up…hold the branch steady while I get her untangled…”

“Is somebody coming to get us?” wails a little voice from the front.

“Mrs. B's awake!” comes another.

Alice hears a groan from that direction. She turns her head in time to see Shelly rise from between the seats like—well, maybe like a vampire from his coffin. It sure doesn't look like Shelly, her head bristling with tufts of black hair and her face red as a berry. She tries to talk but can't squeeze out a word. Her painful smile twists into a grimace of terror.

“Somebody please come get us,” whimpers a voice.

All the littles start crying again, and Igor throws up his hands. “I give up!” Alice tries to call out to GeeGee, but her voice won't carry.

“Hey!” her dad's voice rings out sharply. “Hey, kid! Wake up! What's his name?” (Matthew mutters a response.) “Spencer!
Listen
to me, man! His eyes aren't right—one pupil's bigger than the other. Bad news—
Spencer!
That's right, stay awake. Stick with us, man—No! Don't check out on me. Open your eyes! Don't do this again, Ricardo.
Open
your
eyes!
”

Ricardo?
Alice wonders. The rain is lighter but still loud enough, with the crying and shouting, that she can barely hear the scream of a siren as it lurches to the top of the hill and abruptly cuts off.

“Daddy?” But her father doesn't seem to hear, either her or the siren. He's holding Spencer up, supporting his head with one hand, putting words directly in his face (“What's your last name, son? Where do you live? What's your mom's maiden name? C'mon, Spencer—focus!”). Smiling, encouraging…

• • •

The bandage helps for the first twenty yards or so. Then it's back to grinding torture for every step until Jay reaches the highway. A patrol car, lights flashing, passes before he can flag it—he could have stomped in frustration. At least somebody knows, meaning his call got through, meaning more help was on its way. He can take it a little easier. But now that the urgency has let up, the pain sweeps in like water under a floodgate. He bites his lip and puts one foot in front of the other, limping.

The patrol car pulls over to the side of the road. Jay notices another vehicle on the opposite shoulder, headlights peering through the gray curtain of rain. A patrolman, just a blur from this distance, seems to be waving his arms. As Jay hobbles closer, he can make out the words the man is yelling: “Are you from the bus?”

Jay nods, noticing that the speed limit sign, which he'd passed thousands of times in his life and never really seen, is now at a cockeyed angle. He points: “It went off right there!”

But the patrolman is no longer facing his way—he's yelling in the other direction. Limping closer, Jay recognizes Bender as though he were somebody he knew a long time ago.

“Are you sure?” the patrolman asks, and Bender is nodding. The cop reaches into his car for a radio and speaks into it urgently: “Dispatcher 7, this is Car 38. I'm at the bus scene on my way to check for injuries. We have an occupied vehicle in Drybed Creek, underwater. Repeat,
underwater
. Please dispatch another ambulance to the scene. Over—”