He saw it as clearly as he saw the bus in front of him: the kids in the bus, all together, and wherever they were, reality was in danger. A great crack in the sky opened, and all the myriad worlds crashed together, the whole of infinity collapsing upon itself.
Carl heard sirens in the night, and he saw still more possibilities: military men coming for the people on the bus. Capturing, even killing them.
He looked back at the bus, now at the bottom of the river. The sirens grew closer.
Carl turned and ran into the night.
Some time later, he flagged down a passing car.
The passenger side window whirred as it rolled down. Carl leaned over to face the driver, and old man in a lab coat.
"Please, I need help. There was a crash at the bridge. A school bus crashed."
"Get in," the driver said, and the door lock clicked up.
Carl slid into the passenger seat and closed the door, thanking him.
"I'm on my way there right now, in fact. I do some consulting for the government."
"I know," Carl said.
Before Dr. Samuel Juergens could react, Carl whipped the belt he had been holding behind his back around the man's throat. He cinched it tightly and held the man right up against him, straining to hold him until he no longer struggled.
Carl got out of the car and pulled Juergens around to the trunk. He took out the scientist's laptop and stuffed his body inside.
Once back in the car, he cracked open the laptop. He knew exactly how to hack into every database in which he appeared and systematically erase them, then break into every reference to the scientist and put his image in his place.
Once done, he sat for a few moments and examined all the possible timelines in front of him. He still had loose ends to clean up, like making sure no one at the school district who knew his face saw him, but other than that, he thought he could get away without anyone finding out he had been on the bus.
There was still the matter of the kids. He saw it clear as day, at the end of all roads: the kids, the crack in the sky, the end of time and space and every world imaginable.
He had to stop them.
Carl put the car in drive and pulled back onto the road. His next stop was the hospital.
*****
"Kevin," he said, "See that thing there that looks like a microscope?" He pointed to a device at one of the workstations.
"Yeah?"
"I need you to look inside it and describe what you see."
"Okay." Kevin walked to the device and peered inside.
Carl picked up a wrench off one of the nearby tables. He analyzed every possible outcome to what he planned to do next.
"It's just a bunch of flashing lights. Colors."
"Keep looking," Carl said, and edged closer.
"It's flashing...just flashing..."
Carl slipped closer.
"Hey," Zachary said, "Look out!"
Kevin stood quickly. "What are you doing?"
"Nothing," Carl said.
"That won't hurt me," Kevin said, indicating the wrench.
"I know," Carl said. The wrench wasn't for him at all.
"Then what," Kevin paused, putting a hand to his head. "What are you...What...?" He looked back at the device and pointed. "You..." he began, but then stumbled backwards and fell to the ground.
"Kevin!" Zachary ran to him and leaned over him.
Carl swung the wrench, and it struck the back of Zachary's head with a horrible smack.
Zachary rolled onto his back, clutching his head. Before he had a chance to do anything, Carl brought the wrench down onto his face.
"Die this time, you son of a bitch!" Carl shouted, and struck him again.
*****
"Sir?" said a voice from behind him.
Carl turned, and saw Simon, tranquilized, on a gurney.
"What do you want us to do with this...thing?" another soldier asked.
"Prep him for surgery, like I instructed." He had already given the base doctor all the instructions for the part of Simon's brain he wanted removed.
"And once that's over?"
"Once we have what we need, I don't really care. Dump him at the zoo."
The soldier nodded, and wheeled Simon out.
The men had loaded Kevin onto another gurney. Kevin moaned and looked around with dazed eyes.
"Take him to the special room I set up," Carl said.
They wheeled Kevin out. Another pair of men loaded Zachary into a body bag to be taken to the morgue.
"Do not put him with the others," Carl said. "He goes in the incinerator."
The soldier nodded.
Carl put a hand on the man, "I'm not kidding. You don't waste time, you put him in there right away."
"Yes, sir," the soldier said, and they wheeled the body out.
There was a pause, as Carl ran through timelines. One thing troubled him though, an anomaly he had been unable to pin down or add to his calculations.
"Max?" he called, then took a few steps toward the door. He scanned around the corners of the room. "Max? Are you here? Come on out. Max? If you're there, show yourself. It's okay, boy... Max? Are you here right now?"
Finally, unable to produce any response, Carl gave up and walked back to his computer desk.
"Dr. Juergens!" called a deep voice.
"General," he answered.
General Higgins strolled up. Far from the crazy militarist who saw the kids as a threat, the General was an amiable pot-bellied man who had never seen a moment of combat. How he rose to his current rank, Carl had no idea, but he suspected he was someone's family member.
"This is the damnedest thing I've seen in my whole life. These kids, I can't believe what they could do!"
"I told you, General, they're not kids any more. Everyone who came out of that rift is like a walking crack in the universe. Their hopes, their dreams, their fears, all pulling from other realities and bleeding them into this one."
"You said so," the General said, nodding, "But until I saw that girl take apart my men like they were nothing, I didn't believe it. What are we going to do about her, anyway?"
Carl looked troubled. "I'm not sure yet."
"And this other boy, the one who can't be killed?"
"We can keep him disoriented with the imagery I had him look at before, beyond that I have some ideas that I'll have to work on."
The General nodded. "I have to say, Doc, I'm flummoxed. How did you do it?"
"Hm?"
"How did you know what they would do? How did you know when to have us set up for the girl, and so on? How did you work it all out?"
Carl ran through the psych profile he had already created for the General, performed several dozen statistical analyses and examined the outcomes for each response he might give.
"General, some of it I did calculate, but God's honest truth? Most of it I just got damn lucky."
The General laughed and clapped him on the back. "Well, Doc, you're just about the luckiest man I've ever seen."
Carl smiled.
"What about our satellite?" asked the General.
"Only the shell was lost. Easily replaced. The 'guts', the functioning equipment, is safe. Our launch will proceed as scheduled."
"Good, good." He turned to go, but stopped abruptly. "Oh! Any progress locating the driver?"
Carl shook his head. "Carl Macklin. The school district gave us his name but we can't find any identification photos, anything. We're keeping his home under watch, but no one has come back to it. No credit card hits, no cell phone, nothing."
"Out there somewhere living the dream, I guess," the General said.
Carl was taken aback. "Living the...what do you mean?"
"Well you said these kids got their powers from their hopes and dreams, right? Maybe he's living a dream come true right now."
Carl nodded. "Some of them, yes. Some of them from their fears."
"Well anyway, let me know if you learn anything."
"Yes, si
r." Carl turned back to his workstation, but he was a bit chilled by the General's words. After all, how often had he thought of it?
How often had he thought of killing the kids on the bus?
Carl risked another look down the roads into the future, and there it was again: the kids stood together, the sky cracked open, and the world ended.
Impossible! Was all he had done for nothing?
Even worse, Carl knew the crack he saw was in time as well as space. He knew that time itself fractured at that point, and if time could no longer be counted upon, it might already be too late to do anything about it. Cause and effect might no longer be linked. Time could already have fallen apart. Fractures of time could be passing by him like icebergs in the night, and he wouldn't even know it. The world would be like a needle on a broken record, skipping back and forth and back again, with no way to tell. No way at all.
Carl turned on his computer and worked into the night, trying to keep the terror at bay.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
KEVIN
"Home."
"Stay close to me, baby."
Kevin nodded, but his eyes were elsewhere. His mother continued to peruse the various types of cereal, but Kevin knew several aisles back there were toys. He watched her, waiting for the opportune moment to slip away. She held one box in her hand, examining the ingredients list.
"They write these things so you can read them and still have no idea what you're eating," she remarked.
Kevin backed up slowly, while she looked from box to box, then slipped around the corner. He was home free! The toy aisle was just a few back, or so he thought. He looked down one aisle and saw refrigerators lined with frozen goods. Next, shelf after shelf of bread and bagels. Where were they?
After a few more aisles, Kevin began to get worried.
"Where you goin', little boy?" said a gruff voice.
Kevin looked up to see a grizzled man standing above him.
"I'm looking for the toys," Kevin said.
"Oh, they're over here," the man said.
Kevin followed him down the aisle a bit, but then stopped. He didn't like this man.
The man turned back. "You comin'?" he asked.
"My momma," was all Kevin could say.
"Where's your momma, little boy?" the man asked, looking around.
"Umm..." Kevin looked back, but had no idea where she was.
"What's your name?"
"Kevin"
The man leaned over him. "You all by yourself, Kevin?"
Kevin shook his head.
"You sure look like it," the man said, his eyes darting about.
"Momma," Kevin said, "momma I want to go home."
"Your momma ain't here, little boy."
"MOMMA!!" Kevin screamed.
Kevin jolted awake, his arms and legs thrashing. When he realized it had been a nightmare, he lay still and tried to calm his breathing. He had kicked his blankets to the floor, and there was a chill in the air.
His bedroom door opened, and the lights flicked on. Glenda Lloyd stood there, her nightgown draped loosely around her. She wrapped her nightgown around her and came to the bed. Seeing his covers on the floor, she picked them up, untangled them, and pulled them over him.
"Nightmares again?" she asked, sitting on the bed next to him
Kevin nodded.
"Well, you're safe now." She rubbed his shoulder.
"Thanks, mom," he said.
"You're home," she said.
*****
Kevin and Simon had been loaded onto gurneys and were being rolled through the hall. Simon drifted in and out of consciousness, looking up at the men in lab coats wheeling him. Soon, his gurney was handed off to men in surgical masks, who wheeled him through a pair of double doors.
"I saw this," Simon said, dazedly, "on the bus...I saw this..."
Kevin was taken in a different direction, down a long hall and into a small room. He was transferred from the gurney to a hospital bed and strapped down tightly. Kevin's tried to move but his head was still a jumble. It was the lights, the flashing patterns, somehow they had gotten into his head, kept him from thinking straight.
One of the men positioned a monitor above him and activated it.
The same patterns began cycling through on the screen, flashing patterns of shape and color.
"No," Kevin said, "You can't...this won't..."
His jaw went slack, his muscles relaxed. Kevin couldn't move, couldn't even think of moving.
*****
The school bus swerved onto the shoulder of the road and back again. Kevin was near the back, on the right side, his backpack clenched in his arms. Some of the kids were screaming, some calling out, but Kevin was just looking out the windows. Something was outside, in the night.
Except...there was nothing outside.
The bus was moving faster and faster, as the driver tried to escape it.
Except the driver wasn't trying to escape anything at all.
The bus hurtled through worlds never before seen or imagined, and as it did so, the energy of those worlds poured into the kids, infesting their minds and infusing their bodies, changing them.
Except for one.
Kevin clutched his bag, closing his eyes, and as the bus smashed through the railing, all he could think was: I want to go home. I want to go home.
*****
Kevin was halfway across the courtyard when the kid stepped in front of him.
"Excuse me," Kevin said, trying to step around him, but the muscle-bound kid stopped him. "Hey! What's your problem?"
"I don't have a problem," he said.
Kevin tried again to go around him, and was again blocked.
"Get out of my way!" Kevin said.
"Make me," the kid said.
Kevin couldn't understand why some kids had to pick a fight for no reason at all. But here he was, and there was no way to get past this kid without a fight. And the kid was much bigger than Kevin, all muscle. This wasn't going to end well.
Kevin gave the kid a shove, but he might as well have been shoving a wall for all the good it did.
The kid took hold of Kevin's shoulders. "I know where you live," he said, "you live down the street from me. I've seen you."
"So?" Kevin asked, struggling against him with all his might.
The kid gave Kevin a shove that put him on his backside hard. Kevin clambered back up, but not without feeling the pain. He again locked arms with the kid.
"Hey!" called a teacher from across the courtyard. "What's going on over there?"
The kid let go of Kevin quick.
"Nothing!" He gave Kevin a pointed stare.
"Nothing," echoed Kevin.
"Tommy, am I going to have to see you after school again?"
"No, sir!"
Kevin slipped around him while he was distracted and headed for the doors. Before he reached them, however, he felt hands on his back. Tommy had caught up with him, and flipped him around, pushing him up against the brick wall.
"I'm gonna be watching for you, kid," Tommy said. "Whenever you go outside, you better watch out, cuz I'm gonna be there."
He released Kevin, and opened the door.
"If I was you, I'd stay home," he said, and left Kevin standing in the courtyard.
*****
When the patterns on the monitor over his head shut off, it took a moment for Kevin to realize it. He sighed with relief, blinking his eyes. Whenever they closed, an eerie negative image floated before him in the blackness.
"Kevin, I'd like to talk to you for a moment, if that's all right."
Kevin started. He hadn't noticed the man in the lab coat standing beside his bed. He struggled, but he was strapped down too tightly to move.
"I know you...you, you're the..." but he was too confused to string together the thought into a coherent sentence.
"I'm Dr. Juergens," the man said. "You remember."
"Yes," Kevin said.
"Do you remember how you got here, Kevin?"
>
"I was...we were..." Kevin closed his eyes and thought hard. "There was a bunch of us... We were trying to find out what happened..."
"What happened where?"
"On the school bus!" Kevin said. "We were on the bus together."
"The school bus. Yes." The man pushed his wire-rimmed glasses up on his nose. There was a tiny piece of tape holding them together at the bridge. "We've talked about the school bus before."
"We have?"
The man nodded. "Do you remember what happened to the school bus?"
"It crashed," Kevin said immediately.
The man's brow furrowed. "Did it...?"
"Yes," Kevin said. "I remember that. It went off the bridge."
"And how old were you when this happened Kevin?"
"How old?"
"Yes, how old were you when the bus crashed?"
"Twelve or thirteen. I was in junior high."
"So it's been a long time since it happened. You were much younger."
"It's been..." Kevin closed his eyes again. "About ten years, I think. Yeah."
"Hmm," the man seemed doubtful. "But the others you say you were with..."
"The other kids, yeah."
"Try to think, Kevin. We've talked about the other kids, the stories they told you about the bus. Do you remember?"
Kevin nodded. "We all saw something different."
"Forget for a moment what they saw. Tell me how old they were. How long ago did this happen for them."
Kevin closed his eyes and pictured the others: Mia, Simon, Tyler, Becca. He saw them as they had described in their stories...they were all...
"They were in high school," Kevin said. "They were...that doesn't..."
"Why would you be on the same bus as high schoolers?"
"I wasn't..." Kevin was confused.
"And didn't you say your best friend was on the bus?"
"Brandon..."
"How old was Brandon, in his version of the story?"
Kevin struggled to think. He saw Brandon leaping from his seat to look out the window, convinced he'd seen a spaceship. But Brandon wasn't twelve...Brandon had been in high school, too, in his story.
"This doesn't...what's going on? I don't understand."
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