Viral hadn't been in a yellow school bus since he'd attended middle school at Schaumburg Elementary, northwest of Chicago. The green pleather upholstery of the seats reminded him of the army men he positioned along his family's banister as a child. With a flick of his finger he would watch them fall to their death, noble sacrifices for the imagined war in his mind.
He still found it difficult to grasp that he'd been recruited by the FBI to help devise a cure for the coronavirus that had begun to blossom stateside. Well, if he were to be honest with himself, "recruited" would be a generous verb to describe his transition to the FBI. Perhaps the right word would be kidnapped; though Viral had no doubt that were she privy to his thoughts Monica would remind him that she had probable cause to bring him into custody.
Reflecting on the events of the past two days, Viral again felt amazed at the elastic nature of time. The first seventeen years of his life had moved along with the thick viscosity of sludge in a sump pump; but his six months in college, not to mention the 48 hours since the school had closed its doors, had sped past him like a greyhound. It did not seem possible for a life to turn itself inside out so quickly. From his customary Thursday study section in calculus he'd gone to a loft in industrial Providence to a federal holding cell in Delaware, to a woman's college, to the backseat on a school bus in...where the hell was he even now?
He peeked up the aisle from where he sat and saw Monica sitting behind the driver and Dr. Hackman sitting behind her. From the way the side of her mouth moved, Viral could tell she was talking, but since Dr. Hackman's face was in a Nook e-reader Viral concluded it wasn't him to which Monica spoke. Then Viral caught the soles of the work boots poking from the seat across from Monica. Against the window Viral saw a man resting the back of his head. An easy smile spread across his square jaw, and his blue eyes barked their grandeur from more than 15 feet away.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
It took him a couple seconds but Viral finally placed the face of the shit-eating cowboy. He recognized him as the Highway Man in the State Trooper garb who'd heeya'd Slim Jane, the white girl with the green hair and Slim Jim forearm tattoo, in the side of the neck. When he'd asked Monica about the girl's whereabouts she'd belched in his face and told him to keep his blinders on. The woman was as mysterious to Viral as she was since they first met.
When he'd first seen her, Viral assumed Agent Treyna was a glorified intern doing the due diligence for her higher ups who'd been sorting through the evidence at Tyler's burnt-up loft. During her interrogation of him, however, after he'd spoken with his father's attorney Mr. Noogle, Viral noticed that she easily perried the lessons he'd learned from Hostage Negotiation summer camp. Their relationship had veered toward the casual when she sprung him from detention, ordered him a Sonic combo meal, and invited him into her husband's clothes in her apartment. She'd even been in the room while he changed, for Cripe's sake.
He'd felt their union growing stronger the more time he spent alone with her in her car. As he looked back on the morning he realized at no point had he felt closer to Agent Treyna than when she rubbed his back in a sunkissed stairwell telling him to trust her. He recalled wanting nothing more than to follow her up the stairs to the fourth floor of the technical building and higher, all the way into the clouds where she could spoon him on a cumulonimbus feather bed. But then things changed -- starkly. And the only variable Viral could place as the difference between how he and Monica had been and what he and Monica had become was the Gaston-looking herb in the shit-brown uniform whose dimples made Monica swoon.