“Sorry,” she said, plopping down next to me. “Sometimes I think I carry way too much in that bag.”
“You think.” I rolled my eyes and laughed, surprised she didn’t pack her entire room. Or, maybe, she did. Who knew.
Nicole squeezed her body in with ours and dropped her bag by her feet onto the floor. “Holy, cow,” she huffed. “Have they heard of AC? I mean, I know it’s morning and all, but it’s still freaking hot on this bus.”
“I know, right?” Chasity gathered her long red hair in her hand and secured it with a rubber band. This time she nearly elbowed me in the chin. “I mean, this is Nevada. They could’ve picked a bus with air conditioning.”
I laughed. “Will you two quit complaining? We’ll be moving soon, and then there will be plenty of air.”
“I hope so.” Chasity began to fan herself with her hands. Not that it made a difference. “Heaven help us on the way home.”
“We’ll be dead by the time we get home,” Nicole answered sarcastically. Her upbeat personality seemed to drain with the heat.
“Don’t say that.” Chasity looked at me and then back at Nicole. “Kiera’s been having her freaky dreams again. You might scare her.” She smiled teasingly.
Nicole leaned forward. “Are you dreaming about zombies again?” She laughed. “I sure wish I had the imagination you have. I don’t even think I dream.”
I just shook my head at them as the bus began to pull away.
8:45 A.M.
The bus did seem to cool off with the warm Nevada air blowing through it. Nicole changed back into her normal self, and she was ready to go.
“Hey, Nicole, switch places with me.” Chasity stood up as Nicole slipped over next to me. She had no clue what Chasity had in mind. But I did. And I didn’t like it.
Chasity’s attention drifted up toward the front of the bus to Luke. He sat in between Amanda Rafferty and Skylar McMahon. Cheerleaders for our football team. It wouldn’t surprise me if they were doing more than cheering for Luke on the sidelines. They had a reputation, and so did he.
Nicole followed my gaze and then looked at me. She motioned the words with her lips, “No way,” without a sound.
I nodded.
She shifted her body in the seat so she faced more toward Chasity. “Please don’t tell me you like him?”
“Who, Luke?” Chasity turned to her and swallowed hard. “Of course not.”
“You’re getting pretty defensive,” Nicole said as she laughed.
I joined her because Chasity was a horrible liar. We knew her. Knew exactly what she was thinking and when she thought it. I swore we should have been triplets.
Yeah, the three of us were that close.
“I can’t believe you like him.” Nicole grinned. “Look at his thin, little legs. They look like —”
“Chicken legs,” I finished the sentence for her.
Nicole looked at me a laughed hysterically. “Yes, exactly!”
“Come on, guys.” Chasity’s cheeks were blushing red. “Yes, I like him. So, cut out the teasing.”
“Okay, Chas, I’ll leave you alone,” Nicole said, but playfulness swirled around in her eyes. She was up to something. “Did you ask him to the senior prom yet?”
“No, of course not,” she gasped. “He doesn’t know I like him, besides, guys are supposed to ask the girls.”
Nicole smacked her lips together. Then she shot up out of the seat, pushing Chasity out of the way, as she headed for the aisle. “Don’t worry, I’ll ask him!”
Chasity sucked in her breath, her eyes nearly popping from their sockets. “No,” she exhaled. She grabbed a hold of the back of Nicole’s shirt and pulled her back to the seat.
I was laughing so hard I couldn’t breathe.
Nicole twisted and turned to get away from her. Then I notice the bus driver’s eyes move toward us in the mirror. Trouble.
“Guys, stop.” I shook Nicole’s shoulder. “The bus driver is looking at us. And the last thing we need is to get detention or something for acting like idiots on the bus.
“Okay, okay,” Nicole finally said. “I’m done. But this is definitely not over.”
Chasity tightened her lips, but let go of Nicole any way and straightened her body up in the seat.
I swore my friends were freaking insane. But I loved them, anyway.
9:01 A.M.
For some unknown reason, Mr. Ferris, our music teacher, and Mrs. Whinstone, our Related Arts teacher, thought singing a song would be a good idea. It could work. Maybe, even make the bus ride seem faster.
Nicole had no problem with this request. She started blurting out, “Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall!”
And everyone else joined in.
I shook my head and laughed. Not a very good song for a bus load of seniors to be singing. But, what the heck, I decided to join in too.
9:05 A.M.
We were now at ninety-four bottles of beer on the wall. Some people already dropped out of the song. But everyone on the bus seemed to be having a blast. They were laughing or singing or doing something crazy.
Nobody, except for me, was actually sitting in their seats. Nicole and Chasity were next to me, but they were standing on the seat dancing while they continued to sing.
I glanced out my window as I sang along with them, unable to keep the tune. But I really didn’t care. We were only doing it for fun, not to enter a singing contest.
We were traveling over a narrow backroad, away from any of the main roads, so there weren’t many cars passing by us. I glanced out the window, unable to avoid noticing the steep embankment down below, thinking how much it would suck if the bus happened to run off the road.
I’d always had a problem with heights, and my recent dreams didn’t make my situation any better.
“Come on, Kiera,” Nicole said to me as she glanced down. “Sing louder.”
9:34 A.M.
Why did I continue to sing this song? My voice turned hoarse, and my mouth had long dried up, but I continued to sing for some unknown reason. We were at sixteen bottles now. Almost done. We only had fifteen more verses to go. And we’re almost to the canyon. Thank god. Being cooped up on this hot bus was killing me.
Everyone suddenly stopped singing and turned toward the front of the bus. A hushed silence filled the air. What were they doing? Why did they stop? I attempted to look over the heads bobbing in front of me, but people were still standing on the seats. I couldn’t see a thing.
A loud horn blared out of nowhere, causing my breath to halt in my throat. Tingles shot down my arms and my stomach dropped to the floor. What’s going on?
Before anything could register, the bus driver slammed on the brakes, throwing us all forward, and the tires squealed underneath us. The people standing, including Chasity and Nicole, flipped over into the seats in front of them as I tossed my hands reflexively to the back of the seat in front of me to brace myself.
Oh, god, what’s happening? Did we hit something? Did something hit us? The questions poured through my mind while I still tried to make sense out of what I saw. But then, I thought of something else. The steep embankment on the side of the road.
My heart plummeted into my stomach. I wanted to stand up and look for Chasity and Nicole, make sure they were okay, but my body felt as if it were concreted to the seat. My legs, my arms, and even my butt seemed to weigh a ton. I couldn’t move anything.
Even though I continued bracing myself against the seat, suddenly, everything, including me, shifted forward with a force we didn’t have the ability to fight. An eerie grinding noise—like metal sliding over metal or tracing your fingernails down a chalkboard, pierced my ears. My face smacked into the back of the seat, my knees pushing deeper and deeper into my chest, cutting off my flow of air. I couldn’t breathe.
I coughed and gagged, doing anything and everything possible to get just one gulp of air. My airway continued to tighten as the pressure bound me to the back of the seat.
Finally, I ma
naged to shift my face to the side, only to be met with a warm, sticky substance. Blood. It was all over the back of the seat when I tried to move. My face, my eyes. They burned, like someone had struck a match and set me on fire. A bright, red-orange light flashed, illuminating the area around me, and then an incredible, almost peaceful, numbing sensation enveloped my body.
Then the darkness took everything away.
9:37 A.M.
Somehow, I managed to open my eyes even though they hurt so bad I wanted to cry. But it didn’t matter, because a black wall of smoke struck my face, cutting my visibility down to zero. I couldn’t see a thing. And the noise. A steady buzzing sound stabbing the inside of my eardrums made me want to curl up into a fetal position and die. All my senses were useless. Broken. I couldn’t get anything to work. This either had to be another one of my stupid dreams, or I’d gone to hell. I wasn’t exactly sure yet.
I moved my hands around in the darkness, searching for someone, something, just to confirm I wasn’t alone. I couldn’t be alone. I just couldn’t. But the darkness, and the heat, it threatened to carry me under. And I still couldn’t breathe.
Suddenly, Chasity manifested from out of the smoke. But she didn’t look the same. Her face...my god...her face. So much blood. Everywhere. No, this couldn’t be my Chasity. But underneath the red and black and the now disfigured face, it had to be her. Her mouth opened, her jaw sagging to the left, like she wanted to scream.
I couldn’t hear her through the buzzing tormenting my ears. I didn’t understand. What was she saying? And why did she look like that?
An orange glow, smaller than before, lit up the darkness in front of me. And that’s when I saw it, when I saw everything.
People and...ugh, I couldn’t even say it. Couldn’t even think it.
Body parts. They were scattered everywhere. My body went numb and bile rose up in my throat. God, someone, please help me. Help us.
Chasity, her name snapped back into my mind. I had to reach her. And I had to find Nicole.
I gritted my teeth, struggling through the pain and agony, to move my arm. I just had to reach her, grab some part of her and pull her over the seat. The floor moved under my feet, like it was shifting again, and I lost her, lost everything.
Again.
9:42 A.M.
I stared at my hands, knowing something was off.
Freakishly off.
My gaze drifted down, past the black soot staining my shirt and shorts, to my legs. What the heck? The soot and ashes only covered my clothes, why not my skin? And how did I get here? Wherever here happened to be.
Nothing made any sense.
Nothing.
I gazed down the hill at the bus. Or what used to be a bus before thick, black smoke swallowed it up. The black mass covered everything, making it nearly invisible. So I tried harder, squeezing my eyes into narrow slits, willing myself to see something. Any kind of movement at all. But everything remained still and eerily quiet.
Bits of the tanker truck that plowed into the side of the bus littered the ground all around me. The once barren land resembled a battlefield, and the reality of what happened buried itself in a dense fog somewhere inside my mind. The fog refused to lift, but the voices inside my head got louder and louder. They screamed and screamed and screamed, crying out for someone to help them.
I squeezed my eyes shut and placed my hands over my ears, wishing the voices would just shut up already. They were killing me from the inside out. I didn’t understand it, didn’t understand what was going on. I spun away from the heavy smoke, the pieces of metal, and fiberglass. Then I opened my eyes, hoping that everything had returned to normal. Thinking all of this was just another kind of nightmare.
Then I noticed him.
The guy silently stood behind me, observing my every move. He had dark eyes, dark hair, and was dressed entirely in black. And he was staring at me blankly. His pale complexion told me he wasn’t from Nevada. He had to be from somewhere up north or something, a place where the sun barely shines. Unless...
My worst fear took over. “Am I dead?” I asked him. My voice trembled in the same rhythm of my body. I couldn’t control either one of them. “Are you like an angel of death or something that’s come to take me away?”
“No,” he answered in a smooth but hard voice. His tight features and unfriendly demeanor remained unchanged. Maybe, he wasn’t an angel after all, but a demon. I’d read stories about them appearing in the desert. But I always thought the people who told them belonged in a nut house. Until now.
“Then who are you?” I continued, becoming more and more hysterical as really bad thoughts began to take over my mind. “What happened down there? And where are my friends?”
The mysterious guy dipped his head down like he felt bad or something. “I’m sorry, you were in an accident.” He glanced back up. His dark eyes were intense and clouded in moisture. “All of your friends are dead.”
9:50 A.M.
“Dead?” My legs suddenly felt weak, and my stomach turned inside out on itself. I dropped to the ground and covered my face with my hands. “That can’t be.” I shook my head back and forth. No, they couldn’t be dead. They just couldn’t. Not my Chasity and Nicole. No, no, no!
“Yes, it’s true.” The guy’s voice softened. “The tanker truck hit your bus head on. And then it exploded.”
I swallowed hard, slowly pulling my hands away from my eyes, and glanced back down at the remains of the bus. “No,” I said the word out loud this time, unable to hold back the hot tears stinging my eyes. “No.”
“Look,” he said, his voice coming closer. “I know it’s hard. But you have to accept this and let them go.”
I swung my head around as my face began to burn. How could he say that? Did this guy not have a trace of empathy in him? These were my friends! “Who are you to tell me I have to accept this and let them go? My friends are down there. Do you understand me?” I jumped to my feet, and then I pushed off of the ground, knowing there had be a way to save them, but the guy grabbed me by the waist and stopped me.
“Let me go!” I cried and screamed and fought like hell, but this guy refused to budge. His strong hands gripped me harder, the tips of his fingers digging into my flesh.
“Stop fighting,” his voice cracked. And then he struggled to pull me to the ground. He lay over top of me, holding me tightly in his arms.
“No,” I screamed louder. “Let me go!” I kicked my feet as fast as I could, doing anything and everything to get him to loosen his grip on me. But nothing worked.
“I can’t do that now,” he said. “It’s too late.”
I stopped struggling and let my arms fall limply to my sides. “What do you mean it’s too late?”
His body stiffened and he finally released me. “You don’t belong in this world anymore,” his words came out as a soft whisper. He gazed down at me with dark intense eyes. “I’m sorry, I made a mistake. But it’s too late now. What I did is irreversible.”
Nausea swept through my insides, questions invading my mind, as I sat up. “Did you cause this accident?” I knew it was dumb, but I had to ask. I knew he couldn’t have been driving the tanker truck. If he had, he would’ve been dead.
“No.” He looked away from me, his features turning hard again. “I brought you back to life. But you’re not a mortal anymore.”
10:01 A.M.
“What do you mean, I’m not mortal anymore?” I kicked the truck mirror across the dusty ground as hot tears trickled down my cheeks. I tried listening to him, but it was hard with all this screaming going on in my head.
“By saving your life I had to make you immortal.” The guy no longer looked at me now. His gaze seemed far off. “It was either that or let you die.”
I crouched down to the ground and placed my hands over my ears. The screaming refused to stop. “I don’t believe you. There is no such thing as an immortal.”
“Believe what you want to believe,” he said, his voice full of frustrati
on. “I don’t have time to argue with you. We have to go before someone sees us.”
“I’m not going anywhere with you.” I narrowed my eyes into tiny slits as I continued holding onto my head.
Suddenly, everything came rolling back.
Chasity and Nicole and everyone else who made it through the initial hit. All of their faces appeared in my mind. They were all screaming and screaming and screaming, crying out for someone to help them.
I remembered trying to reach for Chasity, but the heat and heavy smoke kept carrying me under. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see. But I kept searching through the darkness with my hands for my two best friends.
Chasity.
Nicole.
I didn’t want to leave them.
But then the loud boom shook everything.
I lost them. Oh, god, I lost them. How could I let this happen? No, no, this wasn’t fair.
I squeezed my eyes and let the moisture fall. My head. I raised my hands to my ears, attempting to push away the constant screaming. But it only got louder, more intense. I couldn’t handle any of it. Just as I began falling off the edge of sanity, the guy wrapped his warm hands around my head.
The screams faded and so did I.
Sometime Mid-Afternoon
I woke with a gasp, unable to move anything but my eyes. I focused on the familiarity of my wall in the darkness. The white wallpaper. The light blue stars on the white wallpaper.
I was home. In my bed.
There was no accident. My friends and schoolmates weren’t dead. And the guy in black didn’t exist. It was just a dream. Mom and Dad were two doors down the hall, with Cody next door. My family was here. I was here. And I was safe.
I. Am. Not. Alone.
Taking a deep breath, I closed my eyes and repeated the words again and again.
Just in case I happened to be wrong.
My eyes flashed open. “Wait,” I exhaled. Something wasn’t right.
I pulled my blanket away from my body, and nearly freak out. My fingers trembled so much I could hardly steady them to touch the soot covering my shorts.
Forever Kiera (Other Side of Forever series Book 2) Page 2
