by Aaron Dries
Surrounded by screams.
There was something floating towards her at an unimaginable speed.
A cherub swathed in pink light, sent to guide her to Heaven.
Ten-year-old Suzie Marten was spinning in her leotard to the music from her Walkman. She knew only happiness. Behind her closed eyes she saw her future.
They cheer for her. They laugh. A spotlight lands on her face, tracing the length of her legs. She pirouettes and is beautiful. Both of her parents are there, proud.
There was no slowing down. Just the oncoming bus and then the hard thump. A millisecond before the impact, Liz opened her eyes and fear drew her next breath for her. The first victim of the James Bridge massacre died instantly.
Blood splattered across the windshield in a fountain of red. Liz jammed both feet onto the brake.
Peter slammed into the seat in front of him, busting open his lip. Julia and Diana held on to each other as they fell into the aisle. Sarah reached out to them. Michael saw the accident, heard the lightning crack of the bus hitting the child. Every muscle in his body cramped tight. Steve saw it happen too—he was closest to the driver. In the backseat Jack held himself steady. He grabbed the handlebar, the veins in his arms flexing.
The bus screeched to a halt but the engine still ran; Liz had hit the clutch and thrown the gears into Neutral. The airy ding-ding of the Requested Stop sign went off.
Liz’s vision started to bruise, dark threatening to swallow her up. She fought through it and looked at the exterior left mirror, angled so she could see what death looked like.
There was nobody on the street. No one came running at the sound. There were no rubberneckers because there were no neighbors. Inside the Marten residence Donna slept and would continue to do so for another forty minutes. The nearest house was the size of a fingernail on the horizon.
Liz assumed the noises around her were words, but it all sounded like underwater shouts. “Oh my God,” she said, the words thunder inside her head.
She turned to look at her passengers. They huddled around the rear windows, mouths open in silent Os.
Steve pushed his way through the crowd. His red and blue jersey stained with dark sweat patches. He walked like a drunken man feigning sobriety.
Julia held her stomach. She saw two things at once—an exploded ballerina on the road, and a set of familiar, terrified eyes. Her reflection. Diana’s hands were gripped so tight on her shoulder it was painful. They both watched the man approach the driver, hands outstretched not in surrender, but as a shield.
Jack fell into his seat. “You didn’t see her. You didn’t see her,” he said, his voice just another random noise in the sweaty air.
Shakes gripped Sarah. She pushed her face against the glass, leaving behind a small smudge of lipstick. That was a little girl. She could see the remains of a tutu blowing in the wind.
Steve continued towards the front of the bus, wondering why everyone else was not doing the same. Didn’t they want to get out of here as quickly as possible?
Maybe they felt it too. It—the heat radiating from the driver. She stood, her thin silhouette outlined against the red windshield.
“Open the fucking door,” Steve said, unsure if he was whispering or yelling. “I’m getting off here, we all are.”
Liz stepped into the aisle. She held on to the back of her seat for balance. Her other hand reached out to them, her lifeless fingers hung and flapped. “No,” she said. Louder: “FOR GOD’S SAKE PLEASE DON’T GO!”
Steve stopped, unsure.
All eyes fell on Liz and she looked straight back at them.
They are all so alive, so human. It’s beautiful, she thought. In each of them there’s a bit of me. One of them will hold me and never let go. They aren’t scared of me. Why would they be scared? I brought them all together. They need to love me as much as I need their love. This is fate.
“Please don’t leave me.”
Diana called to her sister who did not respond. She grabbed her by the chin and pulled her close. “We’re getting off. Get up, get up—now!”
“Girls,” said the old woman across from them in an even tone. “Sit down!” Her crucifix dangled from the folds of her shirt. A finger rose to her lips, hushing them. “Wait.”
Liz wiped her face. She held eye contact with the man in the sweat-stained jersey who had come to save her. He was the one. She felt honored. Liz couldn’t remember the last time she had felt so wanted.
“Move or I’m gonna throw you to the fuckin’ floor, woman!” he yelled.
Why are you saying this to me? The Beast had swallowed up all memories of the dead child.
More.
Steve had seen horror movies where people mutated from man to monster in a flurry of bad special effects and cheesy sounds. Watching the driver’s face was like watching one of those scenes. Fear to happiness. Happiness to sorrow. Her face was like watching the dangerous mood of a bush fire.
“No,” Liz said. “Why? Why are you going? I need you to stay.”
Jack stood. He felt pathetic, useless and ignorant. He looked at his hands. They were calm and unmoving. His fingers were threaded with small, white scars.
“Fuck this shit, get outta my way!” Steve yelled.
The passengers flinched as he ran towards the door. They caught the movement of the driver as she bent over and reached behind her seat.
She pulled herself upright and there were screams from everyone but Steve. He only stared. Confused, unafraid. How could he be afraid of something that unreal? The driver wasn’t the bogeyman under the bed, not even his wife, Bev, on a bad day. She was just some skinny nobody who had driven herself into a world of lawsuits and television cameras and, most likely, a stretch of prison-induced labor.
So why was she holding a gun?
And pointing it at him?
He didn’t know it but he was laughing.
Jack threw himself into his seat again, his hands pressed against his ears. Blood surged to his face so fast there was a knife-probing pain between his eyes. Julia, Diana and Sarah dropped low. “This isn’t happening,” Julia whispered.
Peter and Michael forced themselves flat against the floor. Cramped and bent double, they chanced a look down the aisle. Michael tried to swallow but there was no saliva in his mouth. He watched the woman’s face turn from tenderness to desperation.
“W-what?” Steve asked. He didn’t move, only stared.
All was still, a tableau broken by the driver’s quick look at the mirror; she saw the dead child in the concave surface. The revelation stabbed into her chest. The child would never again draw breath into her little lungs. Gone forever and it’s her, Liz’s, fault. Not Liz’s parents, or the drugs, not even The Beast.
Just her.
Liz looked back at her passengers. Why are they looking at me like that? She felt a weight in her hand and saw her father’s gun. It was pointed at the man in front of her. Again, the awoken-sleepwalker sensation filled her. Dreaming shattered into pieces by the fully loaded pistol.
They don’t love me. They hate me. It’s all my fault. My fault.
The solution was simple. It was natural. She knew it would end like this. The time had come.
Liz slipped the gun into her mouth, so far she gagged.
There was a scream from the back of the bus. “No!”
Sarah. Her hands were against her cheeks, head shaking. “Don’t do it,” she said.
The voice echoed inside Liz’s head and took on a life of its own.
Steve looked at the gun the driver pulled from her mouth. Its barrel was so small and he so big. How on earth could something so tiny damage a human being of his size? It was absurd. He jumped for the door. Getting off this bus was all that mattered any more and he was willing to take the gamble—the others could figure it out for themselves. Laying high-priced bets was something Steve was familiar with.
Three steps and there was the bang. The bullet did not hesitate. It slit through the air.
&
nbsp; The left-hand side of Steve’s face was no longer there.
Arterial explosions threw red draperies over the ceiling. There they clung, before slopping to the floor.
“Stay with me,” Liz said.
Eighty-Six
What once was Steve and now meat arced backward through the air. He hit the ground hard. A splinter of skull landed near Michael's hand.
Liz watched the corpse dance. Soon the spasms died, but the blood continued to gush out onto the floor, seeming to have no end.
This is what I would have looked like if I’d shot myself this morning. Or all those other times, she thought. Doing a little tap dance to music nobody else can hear. Going to pulp. Making a darn mess over the carpet that Mom would hate to clean.
“L-l-look wh-what you all d-did,” she sputtered. There was a line of spittle between her upper and lower lips. It shook with every word, threatening to snap.
There were yells at this. Not the shooting, but her accusation. The old woman towards the back dropped her head. There were two young men on the floor near her. Liz looked at them and could see them screaming. They peered at her from under the seats. Their sounds were tortures she could no longer stand to hear.
“Stop it!”
There was silence.
Diana looked across at the old woman. Julia shook her head as her sister reached across the aisle and grabbed Sarah by the crook of the arm, pulling her towards them. Sarah could feel the little hand on her flesh, watched the world turn sideways. She landed on the seat in front of them; her glasses fell to the floor.
Jack wanted to get up and run but didn’t want to end up like the poor bastard on the floor. Another part of him wanted to pound at the windows and scream for help. Did he dare make a run at her? Dare try to knock the gun from her hands and run straight past? He could always drop his shoulder against the emergency exit window near the back of the driver’s hub and escape that way. Instead he remained where he was.
“D-don’t any of y-you move,” she yelled. Then to herself, “Oh gosh-oh gosh-oh gosh, it’s all messy—” The gun dropped. It was so heavy! She snapped it back up towards the evil cockroaches hiding on her bus. It had been these creatures that went and brought all this hell down upon her. This wasn’t how things were supposed to go. Death was peace and the end to all that was horrible and unfair. Not this. It was as though The Beast was all of them. It could pretend so well. It had years of trickery under its belt. She recognized its smell, a secretion that stunk of hatred. She sighed, knowing what she had to do.
The passengers watched the driver stumble back to her seat, could hear the gun clicking in her grasp.
We’re all going to die, Peter realized. On the floor in front of him he could see his notebook. He grabbed it and pulled it up to his nose. It smelled like his bedroom, of safety. I’m eighteen, I can’t die. It’s not possible.
Liz fell into her seat, the gun landing in her lap. She looked at the mirror and could see The Beast, divided into small parts among them all. It wouldn’t dare. They continued to watch. I’ve got to get out of here. Her hands found the steering wheel; vibrations ran up her arm at the touch.
I will beat you.
I do not want to die any more.
The bus started to move, a calm acceleration. Smoke drifted from the dented grill. The windshield wipers sprung to life and cut upturned Christmas trees in the blood. They were on the move.
Part Three: On the Road
“There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.”
- Robert Louis Stevenson
Eighty-Five
Peter was praying on the floor. He held his notebook and promised himself he would never fight with his mother again if he got out of this alive. The experience had changed him, made him see the value in her words. All he had wanted to do was write but he would give it up to see her face again. He smiled, knowing that when the police found the dead girl they would be rescued.
Peter did not know that Suzie Marten’s body would not be found by the police for almost two hours. A haystack-toting pickup will stumble upon mother and daughter on the road. It will take another hour and a half for the police to arrive, the farmer constructing a makeshift barricade around the body out of his cargo. He would spend his time comforting the mother, throwing rocks to keep the crows away and at one point chasing a guinea fowl with a torn-off finger in its mouth through a thicket. The James Bridge police station was unmanned as per usual. The single unit came from Musswellbrook and the ambulance from Maitland. When the driver saw them arrive, he dropped to his knees and wept. A second unit arrived forty-five minutes later, the mother already taken to the hospital. The police would not connect the hit-and-run with the reports of the missing bus until sunset.
Sarah emerged from her cloud of shock. We’re trapped in a bus with a psychopath, she told herself. There’s only one door and it is near her. There is only one emergency exit and it is near her too. The psychopath has a gun. She touched her crucifix. If life were a falling series of dominoes, she thought, then when was this chain reaction put into place? She could trace the evil back to birth if she wanted to. Instead, she only shuddered. She wanted her husband so bad. Wanted to lie in bed with him and wrap her arms around him and kiss him. Bill, now I understand. She never understood until today what it was to know that death could come at any moment. He lives with this feeling every day, every waking moment.
The sisters held each other, speaking in whispers. “I’m so sorry, I’m so-so sorry, I’m so sorry—” Diana said, blubbering. Julia’s reply was nothing but shushes and pleas for quiet. There were two heartbeats inside her now.
With Diana clinging to her and the bitter stink of blood and brains in the air, Julia was disgusted in herself for wishing away her child’s life. Even if her parents kicked her out of the house, she knew she had to live long enough to tell them the truth about why she had been missing so much school, about the sickness that came at her around dawn. Julia imagined the life inside her for the first time. Yes, she would tell her parents, scared but proud. It was a death's oath.
Michael watched Peter bend over in prayer and felt like yelling at him, telling him that he was praying to nothing, that he might as well pray to the floor underneath them. Instead, he pulled himself up off the ground and with tenacious delicacy, eased back into the seat. Michael had never seen a dead body before, only in movies. He could not understand how anything, even the spirit of someone searching for Heaven, could survive that mess of bone and bullet. Prayers had no place here.
Jack watched in rage. Since the bus had lurched into motion, he’d kept his eyes on the driver. He saw her fall into the slumped, fugue state again. It was as though she were falling in and out of a coma. The flickers of movement in her shoulders reminded him of watching dogs trying to run in their sleep.
He felt safe for the moment, although he knew it would not last. How long are we going to sit here and let this woman take over our lives? Not me, not Jack Barker.
The movement of the bus had gently ebbed the stream of dark blood down the aisle. A red sliver of it ran against Jack’s shoe. He wished he could remember where he had seen the dead man before, connect the dots that drew them together. Out of respect, if nothing else. He gave up his life for us after all, right? That bullet could have been for any one of us but he was the one who took it.
Jack was an only child, unmarried and without children. There was nobody that would miss him. It used to make him sad. Now it just made him angry. He led a small, insignificant life but it was his life nonetheless. The driver threatened to take even that away from him just as she had taken away everything from the little girl and the man she killed.
The passengers around him infuriated him too. There wasn’t a respectable Australian amongst the lot. None would stand and fight. Jack was never the type to carry a gun; he lived in James Bridge, not Detroit. But what he would give to be that type today.
Wish all you want, Jack-o, said the voice in his head. You ai
n’t got a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of. You got shit.
Eighty-Four
The Frost family kitchen was empty.
Water dripped from the faucet. The refrigerator hummed. Danish figurines lined the top of the kitchen door architrave, collecting dust. A pair of long-bladed scissors hung from a hook near the sink.
Wes was upstairs in the bathroom. The Kinks and Waterloo Sunset lilted down the hallway from the record player. His wife was in the living room watching television, a magazine across her lap. Daytime soap operas mingled with the music.
There was a filing cabinet in the study. It was full of tax reports, Liz’s and Jed’s old school papers—Reggie held on to them all. Every drawing, every Easter card, kept and forgotten in that room.
Outside, last year’s Christmas cutouts flanked the house. Dead fairy lights in the trees swung low over Santa and his reindeer, a shepherd leading his donkey. It embarrassed Reggie that they were still up, though she could not find the energy to take them down.
The shed was thirty feet from the front door on the left, facing the driveway leading up a hill and out of their private valley. The driveway disappeared into a hollow of trees. Crows loitered in their branches. Reggie considered it an eyesore having a garage in the front yard. “Anyone can see what a shit heap it is if they come to visit.”
“Love, who ever comes down our driveway except us anyway?” Wes would say, waving her away.
Jed Frost was in the shed, still wearing away his knuckles as he wrestled with the punching bag. The eagle tattoo danced on his back.
Jed lived at home, paid no rent. His boyish looks collided with the buzz cut; when he wasn’t smiling he looked threatening. It made him the perfect go-to guy. Three days a week he stacked shelves at the Maitland K-Mart. Girls and co-workers flirted with him and sometimes he flirted back.