The Beyond
The first thing Bender notices is the roof, which is now on the side. There’s a big dent in it; he guesses it was made by a tree. A tree probably stopped them from sliding into the creek. They are in a new dimension where down is up—or actually, sideways, for the bus has come to rest at an angle, right side windows mashed into mud and brush, front end angled down. The place where the ceiling curves is now the lowest point of the bus, a trough where everything slides. Rain lashes the opposite windows over his head; wind and water roar all around them, but the interior of the bus is still strangely silent.
“Ow,” says a little voice under him. He’s on top of Simon Killebrew, with Marilu Wong on top of him. “Are you okay?” he whispers to the girl, who dumbly nods.
“Get off me,” sputters Simon.
Bender pushes Marilu until she can steady herself, then grabs the seat to pull himself up. Simon squirms out from under him and slides to the curve of the ceiling like a fried egg. “Do you think we might be dead?” he quavers.
Bender looks around, unsure how to answer that question. The silence, which seemed to be miles deep, is starting to break up in whimpers and moans. The darkness is pulling back from a dim gray light crisscrossed with leafy branches and thrumming rain. Yellow hazard lights pulse against the back window: blink, blink, blink. It’s like a heartbeat. They’re not dead—at least not all of them—but he’s not sure they’re all the way alive.
It feels like some kind of in-between place, where they’ve come to the end of one thing but don’t know how to get to the next thing. The blink of the hazard lights reminds him of that string of dots at the end of a paragraph when the author wants to leave you guessing…
“Bender!” Jay’s head is poking up from the tangle of arms and legs and backpacks in the rear. “You okay?”
“I think so. You?”
“Maybe. My foot feels…I don’t know. How’s Mrs. B? Can you see her?”
Bender squints in the dim light. The driver is tumbled more or less upright in the stairwell, limbs twisted like a puppet’s. Something about her doesn’t look dead, but she’s out like a light. That means…?
“I see her. She’s not moving.”
Jay swears emphatically, then asks, “You know how to get the emergency door open?”
Bender flexes his ankles and knees. They seem to be working. He begins a slow crawl toward the back of the bus, walking sideways along the ceiling, stepping carefully over whimpering kids and moaning kids and kids who remain ominously still. He tries not to recognize faces until he comes to one he can’t help but recognize: Matthew’s, eyes wide open and staring at him from the ceiling.
Funny—he can’t remember Matthew ever looking directly at him. “Hey!” he whispers.
Matthew is between two seats, on top of a window. His eyes flicker downward, at a spear of glass jutting out of his thigh.
Bender takes a deep breath, sucking in every four-letter word he knows. “Um. You…need help pulling that out?”
“Better not.” Matthew’s voice sounds surprisingly calm though even softer than usual. “It’s in the neighborhood of the femoral artery. I could bleed to death.”
“Right.” Bender swallows the dry lump in his throat. “Sure. Don’t go anywhere.”
Matthew smiles thinly. “Okay.”
“Bender!” hisses Jay. “Help me with this door.”
He climbs over the next-to-last seat and grabs the emergency handle. “There’s a second latch…right here…” His fingers go right to the latch as though they still remember from last fall, and the door pops open, making a flap they can crawl under to get out.
“Nice,” says Jay.
“Guys!” It’s Igor, balancing on the upturned seat five rows ahead. “What do we do?”
“How’re you?” Jay calls back. “Anything broken?”
“No—I landed on Miranda.”
Miranda pushes herself up from the corner, hair tumbled and eyes bleary. “At least I’m good for a pillow.”
“We’re going for help,” Bender says, though he wasn’t sure until then exactly what they were going to do. “Y’all see who’s hurt. See if anybody’s got a phone that works. We’ll be back as soon as we can.”
“It’s still raining,” Jay says.
No—it’s pouring. If the emergency door had opened uphill instead of down, the bus would have been a swamp by now. Rain is cascading down the hill, and Bender suddenly remembers what he saw just before the bus left the road.
“My mom! I’ve got to find her!”
“What’ll I do?” Jay asks.
“Run up to the road—flag the first car—”
“I’m not even sure if I can find the road!”
“It’s uphill, you idiot!” Bender climbs through the opening, squeezing under the heavy door. “Come on, everybody says you’re a runner—run for your life!”
He drops to the ground, and a burst of wind almost knocks him flat. He staggers to the lee of the bus, where the overhanging roof offers a little shelter, and tries to get his bearings. It’s about 0.4 miles to the bridge from where they left the road. Near as he can remember, his mother’s SUV had skidded off a little closer to the bridge. If it continued straight, at a thirty-six degree angle from the road (more or less), and nothing stopped the car…she’ll be in the creek now. Oh God—no time to lose. “Oh God,” he prays, and plunges into the watery world.
• • •
After only three steps, Jay realizes there is something wrong with his right foot. Something broken or sprained. Rain streaks his glasses; he rips them off and lurches into a half-crawl, half-climb, his right foot shrieking in pain at every step. He pushes through brush and grass and chest-bumping wind, and it doesn’t feel like he’s making any headway at all. Branches snag his shirt and face, whip his bare arms. After what seems like hours, he trips on a root and sprawls in the mud, drained and disoriented. What now?
Go long, Jay—go long!
Sunlight gleams on his grandfather’s silvery hair and outlines the backward arch of his quarterback arm. “We faked ’em out, boy—clear shot! Get your butt in line: here it comes!”
In his mind’s eye, a football sails overhead. He backpedals, arms out, fingers spread—
Splat! How come the ground here is so muddy? And…flat? Like a path. Like maybe even the old railroad bed he’d discovered only five weeks ago. The one he knows where it goes.
Pass completed! Run for it!
He pulls himself up. The monsoon is slacking off to a downpour. He takes a shaky breath and sets off at a lopsided jog, heavily favoring his left leg. His pace blurs the spatter of rain until it sounds a little like cheering crowds, with Poppy’s voice in his head providing the play-by-play: “Look at him go! He’s at the seventy-yard line! The sixty—the fifty—the forty—can nobody stop this demon of speed?”
Nobody’s stopping me, he thinks. Nobody can stop me.
Pain joins his team, like the block at his side. They could do this together. Half-crippled, half-blind, he runs and runs and runs, each step an electric shock that jumpstarts the next one. He runs as though he will never run again, and maybe he won’t. But never mind: it’s for you, he thinks; for you. “For you!” he cries out loud. And keeps on, to keep going: “You! You! You!”
The gravel road leaps at him, like a rope stretched across the finish line. It almost trips him, but he recaptures his balance. Almost there! He can blurrily make out the bus shed. He turns without hesitation to his left, even though that part of the road goes downhill and the extra jolt of gravity jars his injured foot so badly he could scream. And maybe he does. By the time he reaches the door of the house—on a little porch, under a little roof—it’s already open, and Jay is not surprised to see a boy in a wheelchair framed by the doorway.
• • •
“The letter!” Igor gasps. “I lost my
letter!”
Miranda is looking at him like she just woke up. “What letter?”
“The one you gave me!” He feels frantically around his pockets, searches for his backpack. A stream of water from the cracked emergency door is making its way down the trough where the windows curve into the ceiling. There’s just enough light to see how dark the water is.
“Blood!” he screams. “It’s going to get all bloody!”
As if he’d turned on a faucet with that scary word, the screaming and crying begins, mostly from the littles. Igor can barely hear them for the clamor in his own head. Just a few minutes ago, he was holding it in his very hand—a letter from Bobby Price. To him. He didn’t have time to read anything but the signature: Dad. Now it’s like the man himself is torn away, and he feels like a little kid lost in a mob. “I’ve got to find it!”
Something charges up at him from the depths and cracks him on the head.
It’s Miranda.
Did she just headbutt him? “Ouch,” he says.
She’s rubbing her head too. “Get a grip.” He’s never seen her so mad, not even when she yelled at Shelly. “Forget the stupid letter! We’ve got people hurt here—maybe worse. You can move easier than I can—go see about Matthew and Spencer while I check on the littles.”
Pain restores Igor to his senses. He chokes back his loss, squeezing his hands into fists. Then he climbs up to balance on the seat and look around. The floor—or what’s floor to him now—is like a horizontal ladder, its rungs made of the edge of each seat back. With that image in mind, he climbs it, loping like a monkey from one rung to the next.
Spencer is peacefully nestled beside a broken guitar. There’s a gash on his head that’s bleeding a lot, but it doesn’t look deep. Igor moves on to Matthew—and confronts a bloody slab of glass.
“Don’t touch it,” Matthew says. No way is Igor touching it—in fact, he barely makes it to the emergency door in time to hurl.
• • •
Matthew understands that all he has to do is keep still. It doesn’t hurt yet—his legs feel almost numb. It’s like a matter/antimatter state, the instant before one wipes out the other. He could just go to sleep right now, and maybe not wake up. It could happen. He’s always felt a little not-here anyway. Suppose he never was here, just a dream? He’s thought about that before, but it’s not a comfortable thought because you always had to wonder, whose dream?
He feels his mind start to tip and drift away from the present, as it’s inclined to do when chasing some idea into limbo-land. Except for the glass.
The glass is pinning him down. For the first time, he can’t just float away; he has to stay here. He’s got to concentrate on right here, right now, or…there might not be a here and now for him. “For me,” he whispers. His leg begins to tingle with little pinpricks that will soon command all his attention, mind and body both, pinned to the moments as they pass. Staying alive will command all his attention. “Don’t move anybody unless you have to,” he says to Miranda.
“I know,” she replies, staring at him.
• • •
His face is gray. Miranda is slow to move, not because she’s hurt but because (her brain takes its own sweet time figuring this out) her yellow rain slicker is caught in a crack made by the dented-in roof. Wiggling out of the raincoat takes so much time that Igor completes his mission and passes her on his way to the front with a quick reassurance: “I’m okay now.”
He scrambles forward to check on his brother and the others, reporting back at intervals: “Katie’s leg hurts—may be broken!” “Evan’s scrunched up under the seat—Evan, are you okay?” Pause. “He says he’s okay! Ally, can you get up? Way to go! Now stay right where you are. Where’s Diana…? Are you sure she didn’t come today?”
“Mrs. B’s phone is ringing!” a little voice calls out.
“I can’t get to it,” Igor says. “She’s laying on it.”
“Is she breathing?” Miranda asks.
“I think so. Crystal Applegate’s out cold!”
“Don’t move her!” Matthew warns.
“I know!”
Miranda bites her lip. Her whole body feels like it was run over, but she climbs carefully over the seat in front of her.
“Kaitlynn?” Simon’s voice quavers from the front two seats where Igor is corralling the kids who can move on their own. “Can you hear me, Kaitlynn?”
“I’m headed her way,” Miranda tells him. “Give me a minute. Everybody stay calm!”
The littles seem to take that as permission to panic. A fresh wave of screams rises from the front. “Quiet! Hush!” Igor keeps saying. Miranda climbs over a seat and hears someone whisper, “Help me up.” One arm waves feebly—Alice’s.
“I think my other arm’s broken,” she says when Miranda leans over her. “I stuck it out to keep from crashing into Kaitlynn…she’s under me. Help me up?”
Very carefully, Miranda leans down to tuck her fingers around Alice’s waistband, pulling up while the girl grabs the seat back with her good hand. She chokes off a little scream as her broken arm swings loose, and Miranda can feel tears soaking into her T-shirt. “It really hurts,” Alice whimpers.
“I know.” Miranda is using her gentlest voice. “Can you use your legs? Climb over the seat back here and slide next to the window. The boys went for help—everything will be—”
She’s stooping down to Kaitlynn and suddenly realizes that the blackish water underneath her is actually blood! “How is my friend?” Alice asks between sobs.
“Just a minute…wait just…a minute.” Miranda is feeling around Kaitlynn’s head. The window underneath has shattered and left about a million cuts—but none of them look too deep. She picks up Kaitlynn’s limp wrist, feeling for a pulse. Mom showed her how to do this a few times, but she goes through some long anxious seconds before finding it, strong and fast.
“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!”
Somebody on This Bus Is Going to Be Famous Page 22
