by Aaron Dries
The passengers continued to scream from the windows. Diana ran down the aisle, not stopping to go around the dead body. Instead the heel of her foot pushed hard against his chest, springing her forward. A swarm of flies scattered.
Jack followed Diana, grabbed the metal bars above his head and swung over the corpse.
Spider bite forgotten and pain lost to panic, Julia made it to the pickup and dove onto the mangled hood. Her hands slid over slivers of windshield, embedding themselves in her palms. She lost her grip on the hood and fell forward. Her head slammed against the doorframe of the bus, cutting open her eyebrow. The gun and utility knife flew from her pocket and clattered amidst broken glass. More bullets rolled across the hood and dropped to the ground. Stunned, Julia looked up, her vision turning red as blood dripped into her eyes. She could see her sister’s screaming face through the gap, yelling at her to hurry.
Dizziness overcame Reggie as she watched her husband disappear into the shed and saw her children rush at the bus. Her eyes were dry, mouth frozen in a gasp as she ran after them. She felt so heavy and was quickly out of breath. Her dress flew about her legs.
Jack landed next to Diana and elbowed her out of the way. She fell on her side and for a moment could see nothing but the foot pedals in the driver’s hub. A towering gear stick cast a faint shadow over her vision. Jack forced himself down the twisted steps on his belly and extended an arm through the gap, his face pushed against the broken door.
“Give me the gun!” he screamed.
Julia’s hands were part flesh, part glass, but they still bundled up the loose bullets, the handgun and utility knife with no regard to cuts and venom. She tossed the bounty through the gap and into Jack’s calloused palm—he grabbed them and disappeared from sight. Julia lost her balance and her hands landed flat against the hood. The broken shards stabbed deeper into her muscles; one sharpened point scraped against the bone of her index finger.
Jack ran from the door, dropping a shotgun cartridge. It landed in the aisle. Diana pushed past him and threw herself towards the gap.
At the rear of the bus Michael followed Sarah, whom he grabbed by the collar. She shook him off.
“Please be careful,” he called after her.
Liz reached the pickup and wrapped her arms around Julia’s kicking legs. Diana had her sister by the arm and pulled, surprised by the ferocity of her strength. “Hold on to me,” she heard Julia call through the door.
Jack was on his knees, utility knife beside his foot, gun in one hand and three remaining bullets of different sizes in the other. He flicked open the chamber and squeezed a bullet between two fingers, lined it up to slip it into the gun. The bullet flew through the air as Sarah bumped him, running to help Diana. It bounced on the floor and rolled out of sight.
“Fuck!” he screamed at her, spittle flying into the air. “You stupid bitch.”
Thirty-Two
Julia was halfway through the gap. The collar of her shirt tore open on a twisted piece of metal. With her bloody, spider-bitten hand, she reached towards her rear pocket in search of the hammer. It was gone, shaken loose when the driver had started to wrestle with her legs. She had no air in her lungs with which to scream, just a rattle in her throat. She glanced up at her sister who was not looking at her, but at the driver in whom they had placed their trust at the beginning of that day, who had hit the little girl in the road and brought them to this horrible place. At the driver who was now crawling up onto the hood.
“Don’t go,” Liz pleaded.
Directly behind the driver’s wide, frightened eyes, the brother slid into Diana’s line of vision—an angry blur of tanned skin and tattoo.
Julia sensed his presence and kicked, one foot connecting with the driver’s jaw. She heard it crack.
Jack tried to push the second bullet into the chamber of the handgun. Sweat dripped from his nose and he wished the faggot would shut up.
Michael was at the back of the bus, screaming, throwing himself against the windows, battering at them for escape.
From the mouth of the shed Wes materialized, a large, loaded shotgun in his hand.
Sarah’s body intertwined with Diana’s; they rolled against one another in an attempt to keep a hold on the little girl’s arm. They butted heads, reeled but didn’t let go.
The second, useless bullet landed on the bloodied ground. Jack fingered the third into the chamber. It didn’t fit.
Jed scrambled with his sister, trying to drag her backward. “Sis, let her go—” Her hold on the girl’s legs was stubborn and Julia spilled back onto the hood when he pulled.
Julia felt her stomach drop, while inside, her sister screamed.
Jack was flat against the floor, searching for the bullet Sarah had knocked from his hands. His finger brushed against it. “I got you, you little shit.”
He rolled onto his back and held the gun over his head. He forced the blunt tip of the bullet against the chamber and pushed. It slid in with an audible crack. He screamed victory as he snapped the chamber into place. “Move, move, move,” he told himself. He threw himself upwards and rushed at the door. With a hard kick he drove Sarah to the floor.
Liz scratched at Jed’s face, pushing him away from her.
He winced. His gaze settled on a hammer on the ground. He picked it up and again attempted to pull his sister away. She was huddled over the young girl.
One of Julia’s hands remained inside the bus, fighting to keep hold, and the other lashed out at her attackers.
Julia could feel the driver’s skin and bones through her shirt. It disgusted her.
Jed held the hammer in both hands and was surprised by how light it felt. He leapt forward and brought it down in a glimmering arc, thunder booming once more. It connected with Julia’s shoulder. She screamed. It was so much worse than the spider, or the glass.
Jack had Sarah pinned under him. He stretched forward, one hand resting on Diana’s fighting shoulder. She refused to let go of her sister’s hand.
Jack pushed his hand through the gap, aimed and pulled the trigger.
Thirty-One
The driver’s head exploded. A spray of blood filled the air. It covered the hood, the broken door. Jack’s face was a mask of dripping scarlet. His own skin was broken in multiple places where button-sized flakes of skull had pierced him.
Reggie witnessed it all. She continued to run a few steps, and then fell. A cloud of dust blew up off the earth and colored her face until she almost seemed a part of the landscape.
Wes, who had been crossing the yard, stopped beside his wife. What he just saw must have been his mind playing tricks on him. The gun in his hand was limp at his side.
“No, don’t think so,” he said to nobody, to the green clouds above.
Reggie’s wail came to an abrupt end, like a record needle spun off the vinyl. “That wasn’t my little girl, Wes,” she moaned. “That wasn’t her.”
He felt weightless. His slow shamble towards the bus was an endless wade through water. Reggie didn’t stand; she crawled, braying her mantra of denial into the dirt.
Jed’s face was splattered with blood.
At his feet was the girl who had been in their shed. The one who had run for the bus but had not made it. The one who had fallen off the hood when the bullet had…what? Killed my sis, he finished.
The explosion echoed in his ears.
Julia rolled onto her back, dirt covering her face. She too was covered in blood, stabbed with bone fragments. A clotted mess clung to her eyelashes. She searched frantically for a gunshot wound, oblivious to the tall shape towering over her holding a hammer in its hand.
What remained of Liz was propped against the broken windshield of the pickup. Her legs were buckled up underneath her, back arched and two jittering arms upturned like split bellied snakes. Attached to her neck was her lower jaw, broken teeth glimmering, an ear spun on a strand of flesh. The rest of her head was gone. Where there should have been eyes and scalp and nose and love and sadness,
there was only space and jets of blood. Jed leaned forward and took the now still hand in his own.
Inside the bus, no one moved. Diana had fallen backward, blood in her eyes. Sarah rolled over, cramps burning through her lower back and shoulders, wet, red matter in her short-cropped hair. The force of the gun threw Jack onto his ass and he sat propped up against the driver’s chair, blood drip-drip-dripping from the tip of his nose.
You did the right thing, Jack-o, said the sweet, comforting voice.
Thirty
You did the right thing, Jack-o, said a voice he had never heard before.
“Did I?” he asked.
“Did you bloody what?” roared his father, who still held him tightly by the arm. His other hand was latched around the back of his neck, squeezing tight. “I ask the questions around here, you got it?”
Jack did not reply. He could not take his eyes off the boy before the window, whose hands were still wrapped in bloodied sheets. The boy was his cousin Charles. He was six years old.
“You speak to me when I speak to you, you little shit.”
“Yes!” Jack yelled back.
“Yes, bloody what?” In his voice one heard exploding turbines, twisted metal.
“Yes, sir, Dad!”
“Now you own up to me, boy, you own up to me or so help me God you’ll get a bigger bloody thrashing than what you already got coming. And trust me, a thrashing’s the least I should be doin’ to you.” His father bent in low, close to his ear. Out of the corner of his eye Jack saw his yellow teeth. “Did you do this to young Charles over there?”
The cousin stopped his screaming, stood and pointed at Jack. As he did the makeshift bandages of his right hand fell away. Revealed were multiple cuts along the lengths of his fingers, through the curves of his fleshy pink palms. Blood pooled and dripped in bright red leaks.
The smells and sensations of what he had done came back to him. He could feel his mother’s sewing scissors—“my good pair” as she often referred to them—in his hand. They had been cold but warmed up the longer and tighter he held them. They were surprisingly heavy too, something he hadn’t expected. In his small hands they looked enormous.
He and Charles had been playing in the backyard while his parents got dinner ready. He couldn’t remember what game they were playing. It was as though his memory were cheesecloth. Football and Frisbee were cast aside, toy soldiers buried in the dirt. It had been Charles who had gone back into the house, snuck into the kitchen and found the scissors in the drawer nearest to the refrigerator.
“I wonder what it’s like to be cut,” Charles had asked.
Jack had always wondered that too.
He remembered how easily the blades slit open the fingers. It had been no harder than cutting through a block of room-temperature butter. The blood had not spurted out as much as he’d hoped, just as for Charles there was not pain instantly, only a hot sensation that grew with every heartbeat. Neither boy got what he was expecting. Charles pulled away, tears swelling and then exploding in his eyes. He was really starting to bleed. Droplets speckled the grass. Jack reached out and grabbed him by the forearm, pulled him in close and lashed out with the scissors.
He had no idea why. Through the mist of his thoughts there was a lighthouse, throwing pale light into the gray air. Only it wasn’t a lighthouse, he realized. It was the scissors in his hand, glinting in the final light of the day, zipping forward and drawing red calligraphy over his cousin’s hands.
Jack had not felt a thing. And that felt good.
“Uncle, it was him, it was!” Charles screamed, his voice at a pitch so high it was verging on impossible. He moved from behind the bed and ran to Jack’s mother, wrapping his arms around her waist.
“Jesus, Charles, you’re gonna go bleed all over my dress,” she said.
“Take him out into the kitchen and wait there for Doc and the boy’s mother.”
“But—” she began, keeping the weeping child at arm’s length. “Oh, now you’re bleeding all over the carpet!”
“Take him now.”
“Want me to take Jack too?”
“No.” His father swooped in low again. “Did you do it, son? You admit it and what you got comin’ won’t hurt half as bad.” Even though he asked he knew the answer, his heart breaking. It hurt so much to see his son turn out so bad. Yes, he hit him when he did wrong but no, he knew he had not made the child the monster he obviously was.
Jack said nothing.
His mother took the child into the kitchen, closing the door behind her. Charles’s screams could still be heard.
He felt his father push him and he landed face first on the bed. He smelled his parents in the blanket. His heartbeat was racing. He expected to hear the dreaded sound of his father’s belt buckle sliding loose as he prepared to tan his hide. Jack even started to push down the back of his shorts to prepare himself for the beating.
“No, boy. Not this time.” His voice was a drawl. “This time you got to learn a tougher lesson so you have the bad smashed out of you. Little boys who cut little boys grow up to be bad men. That scares me, mate. And I’d die of shame before having you grow up to be one of those…shits.”
Jack turned around to face his father. He seemed so tall, his body cut in two by shadow and sunset. In his hands he held the bloodied, soiled scissors. They threw light into his eyes, blinding him. Jack closed his eyes tight.
Snip-snip.
Somewhere in the room there was a fly buzzing about. Its wings droned and then stopped. He felt a shadow fall over him. Then came the voice, soft and kind. He had been longing to hear it again.
You did the right thing, Jack-o.
Twenty-Nine
“Did I?” he replied, turning to face Michael.
Gun smoke drifted through the air.
Sarah attempted to get up. Diana watched the brother scoop his sister up in his large, strong hands. One of them still held the hammer.
His gaze honed in on Diana’s. He was silent.
Blood poured onto his shirt from Liz’s fatal wound. He dropped the corpse and it hit the hood with an undignified thump. It bounced off and slumped over the edge. A stunned Julia watched the huge, wet mass tumble towards her. The loose remains of a tongue slid out of the broken head and slapped against her thigh. The body pinned her to the ground.
His father, who had dropped his gun and rushed to the remains, distracted Jed. Reggie was close enough to see Liz, headless and now being pulled into Wes’s arms. Julia covered her face as the body was lifted off her chest, leaving behind large, red patches. Then the pain settled in. She looked at her hands. They were sliced open. Behind her the mother was screaming.
Wes couldn’t believe what he was holding. This could not be everything he poured his hopes and dreams into, his mistakes and regrets as well. This eviscerated, headless thing could not be the little girl he disciplined too hard and never really loved right. It couldn’t be her. This was just meat. Slaughterhouse throwaways.
No.
It was his daughter and he knew it.
He held her to his chest, letting out a deep, guttural sound. Reggie came to his side, reached out with pudgy fingers and touched Liz. Reggie recoiled, hands coming away red. It was real. She stepped away in shocked silence. Somewhere Christmas music was playing.
Julia knew that getting inside the bus wasn’t an option. She wanted to cry out to Diana, but held herself together. Going to the door would be murder. Her only chance was to make it to the driveway and hope for the best. Pain bled away—she was now a vessel for the life inside her.
The brother leapt onto Julia. His knees drove into her ribcage. She wasn’t sure, but she could have sworn she just heard something snap inside her. There was a definite displacement in her chest, a pressure where there hadn’t been pressure before. But no additional pain. She could see her feet running and the trees embracing her—in her dreams. In reality there was only her open hands scrabbling at the dirt, and a dark shape just out of sight pressing h
is heel against her back.
Yes—you deserve it, you do, Jed thought. He wrestled with her, hammer still in hand. His face was close to hers. There were no words.
Inside, Diana followed her sister’s movement to the front of the bus. Diving to the front windshield to look out, she pushed Sarah out of the way. The old woman landed on the steering wheel and the horn sounded across the landscape.
Michael pulled himself into a ball, wedged himself between two seats.
Reggie’s eyes rolled back in her head. Her knees gave way and she buckled under her own weight, her floral dress rising. A bolt of lightning shot from the sky and split a gum tree somewhere in the valley. Reggie landed on her back, fat legs and soiled panties exposed. The sight of her husband easing Liz’s body onto the ground had been too much, forcing her into shutdown. In her lonely, private dark she saw nothing but Christmas decorations and fairly lights.
Julia raked at the brother’s face and arms until her fingernails cracked. She threw her knee into his balls.
A yellow sun of sickening pain exploded in him. But he didn’t have to move; the girl was still pinned underneath him. He looked up at the bus, through the door, back to Diana.
Sisters. They don’t look alike, but they are sisters. I know it, he said to himself. Without hesitation he raised the hammer, held it with both hands, muscles flexing. He looked down at the girl—the stupid, murdering, pubescent cunt had no business being on his lawn, in his life. He brought the hammer down.
Julia’s eyes were closed before the impact. Bright light in the darkness and when her eyes flickered, everything was blurred. She could smell copper. Another burst of pressure, this time on her nose. Then heat, uncontrollable furnaces roaring. It didn’t occur to her that she was being beaten to death until she heard the sound of her own shattering teeth and felt their spiky dust slitting open the folds of her throat. More explosions in the blur and soon she was drowning. Breathing grew more difficult. Soon there was no more sight. Pain. The fires grew too hot. It was impossible for the adrenalin to keep up with the assault. It was unimaginable and yet she had to comprehend it.
