by Tim Curran
Not my fault, not my goddamn fault.
Famous last words.
The kids, fourth and fifth graders, started screaming soon as the bus blew through the orange striped sawhorses and Reed told them to hang on, hang on, but it was sheer pandemonium and he was just glad they were all belted in. It was all just a mistake. The rain had been coming down in gray sheets and visibility was squat, just gray and hazy, raindrops the size of quarters exploding against the windshield. Reed had been maybe going too fast for conditions and instead of turning onto the Broad Street overpass which would have carried them around the northern edge of Bethany and into Elmwood, he had turned two blocks too soon onto Coogan Avenue and down into the sea that was Bethany at high tide.
The bus careened madly as he rode the brake down the hill, Coogan Avenue just as greasy as a skillet. When he rounded the sharp turn near the bottom, almost taking out two parked cars and a fire hydrant, the water opened up before him. The bus hit it doing better than forty-miles-an-hour. Water sprayed up, inundating the bus and making it rock wildly. It tipped first to the left, then the right, steadying itself as the deeper water found it and kept right on going until it struck a flatbed truck abandoned in the street. There it came to rest in that deserted, flooded section of the city, lost from view from above.
The kids were either crying or shouting or just holding tightly to their seats in silent shock.
Reed scrambled out of his seatbelt harness and fell right on his face. “Everyone take it easy,” he said, pulling himself up. “We’re okay now, we’re okay. Is anyone back there hurt?”
Over the sobs and exclamations of surprise that finally leaked out, several children said everyone was okay, okay. Reed went back there to be sure and it was like climbing a low incline going up the aisle. The front of the bus was submerged right up to the hood, water leaking in through the bifold door and flooding the floor near the dash. The back of the bus was up higher, though, so Reed figured they were lucky they’d hit that flatbed before they got into the real deep stuff. What he didn’t know was that the front wheels of the bus had come to rest in a crevice created by a section of pavement that had washed away. The same crevice that had snared the flatbed.
Reed checked on the kids, telling them all to unbelt.
“Are we sinking?” Cal Woltrip asked. “Are we going under?”
“No, of course not,” Reed said.
Thing was, he’d asked himself the same thing, but the bus had sunk as much as it was going to. The front of the cab was flooded now, but that was about as bad as things were going to get, he figured.
Cal looked disappointed.
No surprise there. Reed didn’t know many of the kids on the bus, but he did know two of the boys-Cal and his brother Kyle. Cal was in fifth and Kyle in fourth. They were good boys for the most part, Reed knew, just excessively morbid. They watched too many horror movies and got their biggest thrills by scaring the shit out of other kids. Something Reed sure as hell did not need right now.
Once he saw to the kids, he went up front, feeling that chill water entering his shoes and then lapping up around his shins. He tried the radio and it was dead. Again, no surprise. The engine compartment was flooded and the battery was out of commission along with the rest of the electrical system. Some of the kids had cellphones, but they weren’t working either.
“Help is on the way,” he called back to the kids.
Yeah, my ass it is.
Christ, what a situation. Nobody even knew they were in the city. Last time he’d radioed in they were twenty miles out. So now he was stuck down in this goddamned flooded ghost town with fifteen kids, the oldest of which hadn’t even seen twelve yet. Shit and shit. There were no other adults on board. Lucy Costigan, the coach, had not made the ride back from Park Falls. She’d decided to spend the night there with her sister.
Goddamn bitch, that was just great.
Most days, Reed had nothing but good things to say about Lucy. True, she was a stuck-up bitch generally disliked by the faculty of Fair Street Elementary over in Elmwood Hills. But she was a very attractive stuck-up bitch. She was only twenty four or five, something like that, tall and shapely with long smooth muscled legs that led up to a high, well rounded ass that Reed just couldn’t keep his eyes off. But, Jesus, how was he supposed to? She always wore those tight little shorts with COACH printed across the ass and how were you not supposed to look? Whenever Lucy caught him doing so, she gave him a dirty look, and spun away, her little blonde ponytail bobbing along with her hard little titties.
Reed was thinking if she had been here and the kids weren’t, it would have been just like one of his fantasies where he was stranded somewhere with her. Not exactly like the elevator fantasy-they were trapped alone in the car for like six hours and, well, after a time, they had to do something to relieve the boredom and tension-but it would do in a pinch.
Truth was, Lucy Costigan would never have gotten that desperate.
Even on a deserted island and Reed knew it.
Lucy was shacked up with some rich guy in Elmwood who owned a bunch of car lots in the city. Guy was pushing fifty with thin hair, but he had a full wallet and that’s what Lucy liked. She had a shiny red convertible and a wardrobe unthinkable on her salary. Her sugar daddy bought her the things she wanted and he owned the girl he wanted, put his hands all over those long legs and flat belly, and his dick went around smiling all the time. Unlike Reed, who was the same age as Lucy’s sugar daddy and divorced and hadn’t seen a fine piece of ass like her since-
“Mr. Reed?”
He turned, realizing he’d been fantasizing again about Lucy while unbolting the emergency kit from under the dash. “Yes?” he said, going back with the kit. “What is it?”
It was a girl named Tara Boyle. “How long are we going to be stuck here?”
Until the good Lord sends a boat, he wanted to say, but didn’t. Help would come, sure, but it might take time in the storm. The bus was due back at the school at 6:30, just about sundown, and when it didn’t show, all the parents waiting there for their kids would sound the alarm. But, shit, that was almost an hour away according to Reed’s watch which meant they’d made much better time than he’d figured they would. So either they sat here for a few hours and waited for rescue or he got off his ass and did something about it. Because, realistically, once it got dark, it was going to take time to find the bus. Maybe hours and he didn’t like the idea of being cooped up with these kids that long.
“Not long, honey, don’t worry,” he said. “They’ll be out to get us in a little while.”
He quickly took a head count making sure he still had fifteen kids. He did. That was something. Nobody was injured. That was something else.
“Why did we crash down here?” Tara wanted to know.
Reed swallowed, but a lie managed to work itself up his throat regardless. “I think…I think a car sideswiped us in the rain. Next thing I knew, we went through the barrier and ended up here.”
Oh, it sounded good and who could possibly disprove it? Even after the bus was winched out?
Reed set the emergency kit on an empty seat.
He didn’t know many of the kids. A few of them had rode on his regular daily run, but not many. Cal and Kyle Woltrip, of course. He’d been hauling those two since kindergarten. But the others? Just a few. He recognized Tara Boyle. She was a little princess and a not-so little whiner. Always had been. Her old man owned the Dairy Queen over in Elmwood. Owned lots of things. Chuck Bittner was there. He was the unisex team’s high scorer and an uppity little shit from way back. He’d grow up to be the same stuffed-shirt real estate mogul his old man was. Reed wondered if the kid knew his old man was gay like everyone else in Elmwood did. Bobby Luce was there. Another high scorer, but down to earth, an okay kid. Dependable. Kayla Summers was sitting behind Tara Boyle. Kayla was a good athlete, but she was a crier. Word had it she burst into tears every time she had to do an oral report. She was real quiet and adults made her nervous. Reed
gave her a wide berth. He saw Lacee Henderson, she of the long blonde hair and brilliant blue eyes, who was already striking at ten and would go on, Reed figured, to be a knockout of the Lucy Costigan sort. Hopefully, not that big of a bitch, though. Alicia Kroll. Brian Summers.
The others, Reed simply did not know.
When they’d loaded up that morning at Fairstreet Elementary, he’d smiled to each and every one as they climbed into the bus with their gym bags and Fairstreet Flyers jerseys on. But that had been his only interaction with them, really. Lucy Costigan was their coach and she handled them. All the way to Park Hills she’d sat right behind Reed, driving him nuts. He could almost feel her body heat seeping through the seat, kept imagining those long tanned legs and muscular thighs. Every time she bumped the back of the seat with her knee, his dick had woken up and stretched like a hungry tomcat.
Chuck Bittner, true to form, was telling everyone how his old man was going to raise hell about this.
Reed wanted to tell him that when his old man wasn’t home, he was out raising things in other men’s pants, but he figured he didn’t need to lose his job.
“Okay, kids,” Reed said. “It may take time for them to find us down here in Bethany, so what I’m going to do is to wade out into the water and find help. There’s got to be somebody around. If I don’t see anyone, I’ll head back up the hill to the road, flag a car down.”
“But…but what about us?” Tara Boyle wanted to know.
Sure, kid, Reed thought, get used to saying that because you’ll be saying it your whole life: What about me? What about me? What about me? Way he was seeing it, Tara would have climbed over the bones of the others to save her own ass and the way she probably saw it was that Reed had one job above all others and that was getting her to safety.
Piss on the others.
“Quit whining,” Alicia Kroll told her.
“But I want get out of here.”
“’I want to get out of here’,” Alicia mocked in a petulant voice.
There were a couple stifled laughs.
“Quit worrying, Tara,” Cal told her. “Mr. Reed’ll be back in no time. I’m sure he’ll make it in time. If not…well, we’ll just keep sinking and sinking and-”
“Okay, Cal,” Reed said. “That’ll do.”
“Maybe we should go with you,” Bobby Luce said.
But Reed shook his head. “No, Bobby. I need you kids to stay here and sit tight. That water’s too deep. In fact, I want to put you in charge until I get back and I expect the rest of you to do what Bobby says. If you don’t, you’ll be locking horns with me.” He glared at Chuck Bittner. “And that goes double for you, missy.”
More laughter.
“You better watch it,” Chuck told him.
And, oh, dear God, how Reed would have loved to slap that little shit right across the face, tell him a thing or two about his old man. How he spent his free time. But if the kid hadn’t figured that out yet, then he was just plain stupid. Reed was willing to bet that Chuck’s old man had that queer cowboy movie on DVD. Wouldn’t have surprised him any. Reed had heard there were men fucking in it and that showed you where the world was headed, Sodom and Gomorrah all over again.
“I’m just ribbing you, Chuck.”
Chuck just looked away.
Hard one to figure sometimes. Uppity little braggart one moment, brooding and silent the next. Reed had heard that Chuck’s mom had died a month ago. It didn’t seem to be bothering the kid, though. At least that you could see. But word had it she had left him and his old man years back, wasn’t much but a barfly with an expressway between her legs.
Reed opened the emergency kit and showed Bobby the first aid kit, the flashlights they could use if it got dark. He didn’t bother explaining the road flares or the rest of the equipment. Things went well, he’d be back in twenty minutes anyway.
“So sit tight, kids. I’ll be back in a flash.” He moved to the front of the bus and back into the water. “And nobody goes outside. Stay in your seat or in the back of the bus. And I mean it.”
He took one look back at those faces, some excited and some worried and some genuinely upset, and holding onto the rail, started down the steps into that chill gray water. An empty water bottle went floating by.
There was some laughter in the bus and Bobby told somebody to knock something off.
“Just you wait,” Chuck Bittner said.
Reed stepped into the drink and felt for the street. By the time he found it, the water was up above his bellybutton.
“This is great,” Cal Woltrip was saying. “Just like that movie…Lord of the Flies. We’ll be here for weeks.”
“Yeah, we’ll go savage,” his brother Kyle added. “Who gets to be ‘Piggy’?”
Then Reed was out of earshot, making his way around the bus. Well, this is just going swimmingly, he thought and then giggled despite himself. Flooded empty houses and dark buildings stared back at him. And that dark water lapped around him, filled with unseen things.
2
When Mitch first met Chrissy it was on the public beach up at Black Lake.
He’d just come off a pretty nasty relationship and he hadn’t been doing much but drinking and feeling sorry for himself for weeks, calling in sick a lot at work. Then, one Saturday morning, hungover and feeling pretty much like shit, he’d decided to lay off the booze and the pity parties and drive up to the beach and take a swim.
That’s how he met Chrissy.
Just a little slip of a girl with huge dark eyes and a mischievous grin, glossy dark hair reaching down the center of her back. She was sitting in the sand near the water, trying to build a castle with shovel and pail, using dry sand that kept falling apart on her.
Mitch was walking by and she had said, “Hey, mister! Can you help me with my wall?”
Mitch just stopped, smiled. “Your wall?”
“I’m building a wall.”
“Why are you building a wall? For your castle?”
She shook her head. “To keep the ants out.”
“The ants?”
“The giant ants. I saw ‘em on a movie. Giant ants with big teeth.”
Mitch had looked around, brushing a buzzing fly from his neck. He wanted to tell this little girl that she shouldn’t talk to strangers and all that business, but just looking at her in that little pink swimsuit, he didn’t have the heart. She was sweet and honest and cute…how could he not help her? Of course, right away he was wondering what her mom would say when she saw her little girl talking to this strange man.
“I’m Chrissy,” the girl said. “And I have to build the wall to keep the ants out. If the ants get in, I can’t build the castle. Because the ants will eat everyone.”
“Oh, I get it.”
“What’s your name?”
“Mitch.”
“Oh.”
“Where’s your mom and dad, Chrissy?”
“My mama went up to the stand to get ice cream. She’ll be right back.”
“Your dad?”
“Oh, he’s in heaven,” Chrissy said, filling her bucket.
Mitch had felt a sharp pain in his belly at that. This girl didn’t have a dad and the idea of him being gone, being dead, was just part of her little world. There was something terribly wrong about that.
“Are you gonna help, Mitch?” she said.
Swallowing, feeling emotional depths he’d never knew existed, Mitch kneeled in the sand, wanting to protect this little girl from the pain of life itself. He showed Chrissy how to dip wet sand from the water’s edge and create a wall of blocks, wetting them down and cementing them into place. Chrissy was fascinated by his engineering process. Just a wonderful, easy kid that smelled of sunscreen and wet sand.
“You’re pretty good at this,” she said.
“We used to do it when we were kids.”
“Okay…tell me.”
So as they amassed a wall that was easily three feet in height and four feet in length and topped it with a battery of
sticks and reeds, Mitch found himself talking about building things when he was a kid. How he and Tommy used to build things from sand, clubhouses from scrap wood, how they’d dug forts under the ground and tree houses high in the air. And as he told her about it, he found that he really liked telling her. There was no bullshit to kids, he soon realized. They really were interested in things. They did not pretend interest. Up until that day, Mitch hadn’t given kids much thought. They were little people that skipped up the sidewalk, hollered and screamed like they knew you drank too much the night before, and banged on your door for candy come Halloween.
But suddenly it was all different.
Sitting there, Chrissy just fascinated by him, he wished she were his daughter. That he could take her to carnivals and movies, pick her up after school and cook hot dogs in the backyard for her and all her friends. Regale her with the silly stories of his own youth which she seemed just enrapt by.
About fifteen minutes later, a voice said, “I see you’ve made another friend, Chrissy.”
A tall, striking redhead was standing there and after introductions were made, Mitch learned that her name was Lily.
“I…uh…Chrissy needed some help,” he said, feeling very uncomfortable. “I was just helping her.”
Lily nodded. “I know. I’ve been watching.”
Mitch didn’t say anything.
He supposed Lily had been scoping him out.
“You have to be careful these days,” she said.
“Sure.”
“You’re a real natural with her,” Lily said. “Do you have kids? You must.”
Mitch just shook his head. “No, but I’m having fun. I think I might go buy one.”