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Interlude: A Torrent of Memories

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There were about seventy-five of us who came to this isle. “In ancient days immemorable” is an exaggeration. It was twenty-two years, three months, and eight days, by our old calendar. Longer than any of you have been alive, so perhaps that counts as “time immemorable.” Add a couple leap-days every moon or two and our years translate neatly into the Laval lunar calendar.

We hailed from a land known as Texas. A large, flat realm, where the sky stretches on forever. You’re all now well acquainted with the environment of the central valley. It’s a lot like that, but humid like the Stormheaths. No fumarole or volcanic activity either. Just clumps of trees amidst a near endless plain. You could drive forever, and the scenery would rarely change.

Driving? Hell, you have no frame of reference for that either. Suffice it to say, we were traveling in a convoy. They are like mighty hand carts powered by combustion magic. Forty men could fit in a single bus, and we had a convoy of four of them.

We were a varsity sports team – like a warrior band, returning from ritual combat with a neighboring settlement. Victory was ours, and spirits were high. Half the team was in the lead bus, the other half in the second one. A third bus was entirely luggage and supplies. The fourth group was the cheerleader squad. Cheerleaders – now you surely have not even the slightest frame of reference for that. They dressed in skirts and performed motivational dances. Probably sounds weird unless you grow up accustomed to it. Anyways…

The thing to know about Texas is that the land of your parents’ birth – where your grandparents yet live, God willing, is that these rituals, these sports, are serious business. The war wagons – those buses – were used to ferry adolescents across the plains to and from a house of learning. But more money was spent on our stadium than the entire school combined. Games took priority. Like a ritual for entire settlements.

As team captain, I was sitting in the lead bus, near the front. We had a dedicated bus driver for three of the four buses, while an assistant coach – that’s like a commander who observes the field from the sidelines and plans strategies – was driving the final bus.

“Yo, Mike.”

Hector was calling me from three rows back. He wore vision aids called contacts during our games. During less active hours, he traded those out for a pair of thick glasses. Beyond that he and I both didn’t look too different as youths; Hector was a bit leaner, had a full head of hair for sure. No beards, as those were frowned upon by the local elders. They liked to police how youth looked and behaved. Bit like some of the delta clans come to think of it. Anyway...

“How much longer ‘till we’re back?” Hector asked.

“Couple hours, at least,” I replied. "Even with these straightaways, bus can barely do sixty."

“Getting’ antsy, doing all this sitting around,” Hector said. “Hey, least we sure kicked Waco High’s ass on their turf, yeah?”

I nodded, inattentive.

“Yeah. Looks like it.”

The land in this ancient realm of Texas was flat like Stormlander bread. Even though we rolled across the plains faster than any creature on this isle, journeys to the rival settlements still took hours on the best of days. It’s a big land, part of an even larger country.

A raucous, celebratory air prevailed in the back of the bus. For my part, I spent the trip in silence, staring out the window at a flat landscape lit only by a full moon. I’d just turned eighteen. It was the age of majority in our land, and this was to be one of my last games with the group. I was to travel away from home, all expenses paid, to play for a new team at a great center of learning called the UT.

One thing that stuck out – the constant splat-splat of mosquitos on the glass shield in front of the bus. There are no bugs in this new world, a fact for which you kids do not know how grateful you are – bring lots of diseases. The first sign that anything was going wrong was that the bugs stopped splattering.

No sign presented itself when the paved asphalt of our home world ended, and the wide-open sky of this world began. Realistically, there had to be a fissure, portal, or borderline. As far as anyone could tell, it happened in an instant. For my part, the flat plains were there one moment, we passed a specific signpost advertising our next rest area, and the next moment there was an open sky. Maybe the bus driver saw something, maybe he didn’t; made no attempt to change course either way.

All at once, the bus was falling from a great height. Free fall. Over three dozen broad-shouldered athletes flailing about, flying between seats like missiles, bumping their heads on loose helmets, the ceiling, and each other. If the fall hadn’t been broken by thick branches of a yet-unknown tree, we would’ve hit the hard ground front-end first. Hector and I would’ve both died, flattened against the windshield as the bus folded in like an accordion.

No branches, not even the thickest arms of a whitewood, could hold something the weight of that bus. So, we fell again before long. The worst of the damage was mitigated. Broke every branch on the way down. That glen near Secondhome? It wasn’t always a wide-open clearing.

Chaos reigned. Head Coach Beauregard Murphy, an aged man, fifty something, former quarterback at our same high school, spent the time post-crash yelling at the bus driver. He thought they’d splattered a pedestrian. I wound up landing hard on my right shoulder in the floor of my seat but was otherwise unharmed.

“Hell happened here?” Hector cried, glasses askew as he lay sprawled out across two seats.

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Further back the team was a mess of tangled and broken limbs. Everyone piled on top of each other. And the head coach wouldn’t stop yelling the most exquisite string of curses at the damn driver.

“Everybody listen up,” I yelled. “If you can move without further injuring yourself, calmy exit the bus.”

We had to separate those still healthy from anyone who required medical attention. At that point, we still assumed we’d run off road into a ravine or something. Nobody had a grasp of our surroundings. I thought there were still ambulances that could arrive within thirty minutes, even on the narrowest of country roads.

Hector was on his feet by this point. He made an exaggerated show of dusting himself off. When he looked towards the driver’s seat his eyes went wide behind glacier-thick glasses.

Coach was no longer yelling every curse in the book at the driver. Instead, he screamed more general obscenity-laced warnings towards the front of the bus. The engine was ablaze with a fire so hot it burned blue.

“Get out of the bus, maggots. On the double,” bellowed Coach Murphy.

A faux drill sergeant demeanor was his primary mode of leadership, though I did not recognize its shortcomings at the time.

The driver was already burning. The glass drooped, melting like it was plastic. God, I guess you’ve never even seen plastic. Just, it was melting, okay?

“Everyone who can possibly move, get off the bus,” I said. “Orderly fashion, out the back if possible.”

“You heard the QB.” Hector started shooing everyone towards an emergency exit in the back.

“If you cannot move, we will get you into a position where we can safely move you.” I scanned the chamber.

A few broken arms. Broken legs had to evacuate at a limp. No broken backs or necks, thank God. Plenty of concussions, but nothing that would trap a teammate in this broken, burning wreck.

Coach had yelled out to evacuate again, having already kicked open the frontmost doors and dived out. The fire was too close for anyone beyond the first row or two to try and escape out there. Even one seat back, the heat left minor scaling on my exposed arms. Fried the hair right off.

The bus driver was already ablaze. Didn’t even have time to flail around, panic, or scream. A charred corpse was silhouetted in reddish-blue flame.

We all filed out of the bus. Orderly, but not without fear. I left last. Made one last pass to ensure everyone was gone. I threw as many bookbags, spare sporting equipment, and whatever I could get ahold of out the back. I left when the flames began to creep down the aisle.

“Anyone call an ambulance?” I asked.

I was met with a dozen people checking out their phones.

“No signal,” Hector said.

Off across the field, Coach Murphy was swearing at his phone. So engrossed was the coach that he didn’t seem to notice the tree with white bark, larger than any California redwood, towering at the edge of the new glen our impact had made.

“Coach,” I said. “Coach. Coach Murph! We need to get our bearings.”

Across the glen, a second bus had suffered a more modest crash. It was lopsided in a bus-sized crater, its engine compartment smoldering as it began to overheat.

“The cheerleader’s bus.” I pointed to Hector and a small gaggle of players who looked uninjured. “Help me get them out.”

Always volunteers to help the cheerleaders. Guess it’s just instinctual. All those youthful hormones. But I digress.

“Guys. Guys, we need help!”

A figure I was acquainted with, but not familiar with ran through knee-high ferns towards us.

“Rick?” asked a linebacker.

Richard nodded, quietly hyperventilating. “Our bus. There’s, well, there’s a problem.”

“Evac the cheerleaders,” I told the healthy players. “Hector, you’re with me. Richard, lead the way.”

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Richard Atkins was a new addition to the team. Late transfer in his senior year of high school. This seldom happened, but it certainly didn’t matter at this juncture. Hailed from a family of iterant preachers, just in town for a year at a time. Not a lot of friends, obviously.

We followed Rick to the edge of the glen. Didn’t see the third bus at first.

“Up there,” Rick said.

Hector and I gazed upwards. A bus was spliced halfway into a mighty whitewood. The entire back-half of the bus somehow occupied the same space as the tree. The front half sagged, bouncing as marooned players near the front of the bus moved about. Again, the engine smoldered.

“Help!” Students at the front of the bus cried.

“I jumped out the door.” Richard pointed at the ajar opening up front.

“The rest of you will have to take the leap,” I said.

“Not us,” they said. “Them. Help. By God. Help!”

I strained my ears. Against the rancorous sounds of panic and injury and two ablaze diesel engines, there were a dozen muffled screams. It was distant, like they were either coming from far away, or through a thick layer of concrete.

“In the back!” Passengers at the front of the bus yelled again and again.

The second bus was not full – it was mostly for the auxiliary players who couldn’t fit on the main bus. Many students spaced out – the majority of which often occupied the spacious back seats. Had a prestige component to it.

“They’re still there,” Richard said rather placidly, though his eyes were wide from the shock of it all.

“Hell’re you talking about?” Hector said, then spat up a bit of blood from where he’d bitten his tongue in the fall.

Richard’s eyes were dilated, his voice laced with adrenaline.

“They’re still. In. The back.”

Just then, the snout-nosed compartment where the engine was housed exploded. The same bluish flames moved their way back through the seats cutting off the front exit. The emergency exits further back were spliced with the tree.

“Drop your gear, guys,” Hector yelled, futilely. “Jump out the windows. Hurry!”

Not much we could do; by the time anyone thought to climb the sheer face of the whitewood bark, the flames had fried everything up to the tree trunk. Gravity brought the front half of the bus down eventually. Poor saps entombed within the tree should still be there today.

“Two moons.” Richard said, staring straight upwards.

“What?” I asked, then looked up.

The largest moon that moved parallel to the world-plain was nowhere to be found at this time of year. There was a second moon, appearing full and much smaller than the Earth’s moon we were accustomed to. There was the second moon in crescent phase, much larger than Earth’s own.

The first of the players from the secondary bus managed to wiggle out of the window. A friend of mine since elementary school fell to the ground, knee-pads smoldering. The screams from within the wood were growing faint. Maybe it was hard to hear it all over the roar of flames so close. Or maybe they’d begun to run out of oxygen.

I fell to my knees and threw my hands up towards the impossible twin moons.

“Yo, what the fuck!?”

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