Close Encounters of the Bus Kind
[18]
Eva started to scream, but it only came out as a strangled squeak. She suffocated it with both hands, trembling and wrestling with herself until an overwhelming, ringing silence drummed in everyone’s ears.
“You dumb blonde bubble blower. You can’t just get all heroic like that. You better get back here, and safe, as soon as possible. I know you can hear me. You better make it. Or I’ll kick your…favorite volleyballs on your roof.” Eva sniffled and turned away from the group. No one knew what to say after that. Erin felt sick.
In the back of her mind, she always envisioned little horror stories about accidentally leaving a student behind, usually moderated by jokes involving selling off a certain misbehaving kid. The jokes typically didn’t come from her but from around the teachers' lounge and fortunately didn’t involve any of her current charges. Had she just seen someone for the last time?
Gina always played libero. It was a unique position. They had to stay in the back and couldn’t get too aggressive, but they were a vital link on the court. The rest of the team depended on them to be there and, despite her jokes and sarcasm, Gina was swift and tenacious. Others may have been naturally faster, but she never saw anyone else push themselves as hard without taking a break. And Eva and Gina were quite the team, with Eva as the middle blocker, working together.
Early on, she thought she might need to separate them because they would always take snipes at one another. Soon, however, she realized that was just their way of communicating. They’d lived near each other since they were babies.
Erin once caught half of a tale shared between them that Eva babysat Gina, despite the fact they were so close in age. Gina also apparently had this big, mysterious secret plan for what she wanted to do when she got older. Eva would always shut her down whenever she tried to explain it to anyone. If she was to be believed, then it wasn’t worth the time and effort of listening. Erin had always been vaguely, morbidly curious, but it wasn’t her place as their teacher to dig.
Eva bent her knees and tried to find comfort in the position without touching the slimy wall. It seemed impossible. She scrunched her brow and looked around before saying, “What happened to that flopping chair that came out of nowhere?”
Nadia provided the best sweep of light, but the mysterious piece of furniture had disappeared as swiftly as it had shown up. Odessa‘s scrutiny especially focused on the place it had been. Nadia briefly aimed the light toward the ceiling, now well aware of how the creature had come after them several times from above. The only thing up there were blank expanses of darkness that consumed the illumination umbrella and the ragged remains of insulation. No flying chairs. Odessa‘s gaze lingered.
They all took a moment and listened to what sounds persisted around them. Any trace of the horrifying beast and Gina had long receded. Brief, untraceable sounds filled the void. Some came like a whisper but quit the moment anyone noticed and spoke. Erin imagined those were other creatures plotting their demise, but rationally deduced that it had to be the normal deterioration of this place, one broken thing settling against the other. The problem was they had no idea how big this version of the Sears actually was.
There could be so many unknown levels stacked on top of each other, like a tenuous layer cake, that simply walking around risked bringing the whole structure down. She didn’t want to share this speculation with the others because they all had plenty to worry about. And it was only speculation. If this place obeyed any reasonable structure then there wouldn’t be a mess of passageways and entrances to begin with.
She could feel what adrenaline had been driving her until this point begin to fade. Sleep sought to claim her, but she fought back. Her body had been warped and rejuvenated by alien doctors. To go with her amazing flexibility, she should’ve had the energy to run, sprint, and fight for days on end until…
Erin’s head dropped, but she took a short breath and lifted it up. She’d already been dragged under by one Bubsy-cuddling nap, she didn’t need more rest and she wasn’t going to take it until they found Gina and made sure she was safe. Anxiously, she slapped around the handkerchief masking her face from everything sloughing off the dark holes above.
She wanted to do something, she had to do something. Gina led the creature away and it was suggested by her words that they should either run too or wait here for her return. But waiting was the worst part. If they actually found some exit or tripped between the folds in universes and made their way back to their own, then they couldn’t be sure that Gina would be able to follow them or, if they even tried to backtrack to save her, that the way would be there for her… If she could make it back to them.
On the flip side, she might’ve already found her way out and was nervously waiting for them to join her. She said they needed to get away, echoing Luna’s pleas. It could be the worst thing possible to just stay here and sit still. But it wasn’t really her choice.
Erin put it to the group. Gina told them to get away. Do they follow through with that or do they wait for her, knowing that at least Nadia’s phone light could be a beacon to lead her out of the darkness? Even though Gina said that her phone suddenly had 40%, Erin feared that that could’ve been an illusion, or some manipulation, by the monster.
Luna reiterated her expected response and simply encouraged, “Run.” Eva shook her head and set feet. “That idiot is out there. I can’t possibly leave her to her own devices. I know what she said. Stuff that bird, I am staying here.”
Erin worried that this was essentially becoming a vote and, before long, they would again be separated. She contributed, “I can’t abandon Gina, no matter what she said or what she may have wanted. If we go, we need to head in the direction she went.” That sounded like a reasonable compromise.
Following a deep breath, Odessa responded, “We don't know what's going on, but we have to get out of here before anything else happens. We can call for help. We can get police and firemen together to search for her.“
Eva curled her lip back. “Gina is our responsibility. No happy, random second party to shove the responsibility on. If we don’t find her, she just becomes one of those Missing 411 cases that she’s always going on about that she thinks are either because of hungry Bigfoots, aliens, or hollow Earth civilizations. Her mom would never forgive herself. I would never forgive myself.”
A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
Erin held her hands up. “We are not going to go after one another when that monster is the bigger danger. While I still have breath, I promise all of you, with all my heart, we’re not losing anyone, ever. And no matter what we do, we are not blaming one another. Got it?” Odessa flashed Eva a nod. Eva put a hand out, as though this were nothing more than a disagreement over a lost game.
Nadia lamented the fact that she didn’t have quite the rapport and relationships that the other girls did with one another. Erin still had their respect, despite the changes that happened because of their alien abduction.
Nadia was just the one who used to be the guy who drove their bus. Important to Erin in shy, quiet ways, but anonymous in so many others. Luna let out a long low groan which they all noticed but no one commented on. Nadia rubbed the kid’s shoulders and held her close. She had given up on dragging her sister toward whatever direction she seemed to think was safest.
“Tip for anyone who winds up trapped in one of Gina‘s dumb liminal spaces or whatever this is: make sure to pack gallons of Lysol and a tarp, preferably along with some sort of tent,” Eva commented, as she endeavored to make the space around them less nausea-inducing. Use of the hand sanitizer barely rose above the effectiveness of splattering holy water. The girls just made do with what they had to take the pressure off their feet.
Erin allowed herself a series of micro naps while propped up against the least offensive patch of remaining drywall. Odessa braced her feet underneath herself. Nadia could see them physically shaking. As one of the first items of discomfort since her transformation, Nadia noticed a tense warmth in her right thigh that bordered on a knot. She had some trembling too but taking a deep, careful breath through the handkerchief settled it down. Erin still hadn’t felt the first pain of her renewed life, but she could desperately use more water than the sparing amount she accepted from Eva. Considering the current uncertainty, she pushed that need aside and did her best to ignore her drying skin.
Nadia reported that her phone now had 62% left as she spread around as much of the LED glow without blinding anyone. It definitely felt like it was eating through the battery much faster than she would’ve expected for such a small but efficient little light. Similar pen lights she used for inspecting parts of the bus at night managed dozens of hours without taking a hit. Likely caused by some aspect of where they were stuck or the horrifying entities. She kept the other parts of the phone off, even though she was tempted to at least try the connection that Gina was testing before things went crazy.
When they got out of this, Nadia figured that most anything else she might run into normally, like dramas and craziness on a high school campus, would be small potatoes by comparison. Simply worrying about the sales tags and styles of mall clothes and trinkets felt so tiny compared to the wide, terrifying world that seemed to exist beyond.
To kill some time, they started humming songs with as many lyrics as they could remember. Eva started with Harry Styles and one that Nadia vaguely remembered popping up recently on the phones of groups she drove around. Odessa followed it up with some Björk. Meanwhile, each word out of their mouths was annunciated by tense checks in all directions that nothing horrific was being lured by the sound of their voices.
Nadia and Erin recognized little snippets but grimly acknowledged that if they started singing the ones that they knew best then it would badly date their musical aptitude. But Erin was used to that mood, so she hushedly belted out well-worn lyrics by Kate Bush. Nadia actually went for one of the Beach Boys tunes and the entire group faintly joined in. At the end of all the lyrics that she could remember, everyone heard a faint but suspicious sound.
Not whistling this time but something that could definitely be speech. Eva strained and straightened. Each of the girls raised up from the awkward resting position they had settled in, like they were at the starting blocks of a race, ready to outrun some unholy terror.
Unlike the previous instance, this sound resolved as time passed, but it was coming from the area they had been pushed from by the black entity. Nadia told herself that it couldn’t possibly be Gina, because she ran in the other direction. Yet, it was resolving itself as strikingly human… Or an unsettling approximation of one. Moments later, Eva squeezed her face mask and urged Nadia to point the light down the hallway.
The sound was one of the Star Trek themes, one of the old ones. Oddly though, interspaced were lyrics.
Eva softly whispered, with a chuckle, “Oh my gosh, that total dorp.”
Sure enough, emerging out of the dark, there was Gina without her face mask and a hand up to block her eyes from the light. “Oh my gosh, I made it! You have no idea how wild pitch blackness is. If only I had my eyeballs enhanced or polished or whatever Vin Diesel had done in those movies. I hit so many things.” Gina brushed her hair back and looked over at them. She seemed especially grimy, and Nadia couldn’t see the scratch on her head from earlier, but it was definitely Gina.
Eva sprung to her feet and softly asked, “What took you so long, dumb ruts?”
“I had to lose that creature. Maybe there’s something to the kid’s thought on running. I felt like I could run off the entire world. Big nasty didn’t even know where I went. Nor did I. But I haven’t seen a trace of it. All right, so let’s…”
The shadows in the dark shifted and it felt like everything tumbled over Gina. Eva knew to scream before she truly understood what was going on. The monster surrounded Gina on all sides and its tendrils scooped her up into a spinning mouth of serrated, eager teeth. She barely had a moment for breath, let alone enough to yell before vivid, messy noises filled their ears.
All Eva could do was frantically empty her entire canister of mace into the darkness, but it was too late. What remained of Gina fell out of sight, but no one wanted to see it.