The world turned to grey water and green blur. The bus, a lumbering yellow whale filled with the chatter of twenty-six sixth-graders, had been humming along the winding mountain road in North Carolina, the steady swish of the wipers a metronome to the drizzle. Leo was halfway through a bag of sour cream and onion chips, sharing with his best friend, Danny, debating whether the smoky haze clinging to the distant valleys was mist or something else.
Then, the red car.
It came from the opposite lane, a streak of crimson chaos, fishtailing wildly on the wet asphalt. It wasn't just speeding; it was unspooling. A chorus of gasps rose in the bus. Mr. Riggs, the driver, shouted a raw, wordless sound and yanked the wheel.
The bus didn't brake; it slewed. The tires lost their purchase on the rain-slicked road with a sickening, final sigh. For a moment, they were weightless, teetering on the crumbling edge of the asphalt, looking down into a steep, wooded ravine. Then gravity took them.
The first impact with the slope was a deafening, metallic shriek. The world inverted. Leo was thrown from his seat, a ragdoll in a washing machine made of screams, tearing metal, and shattering glass. He was weightless, then crushed, then spinning. He saw a sneaker, a backpack exploding its contents, the pale, terrified face of Emily Cho upside down. A violent, jarring slam drove the air from his lungs. Something hard and unyielding—the edge of a seat—caught his left arm with a sickening, wet crack that he felt more than heard, a visceral vibration that shot white-hot lightning through his entire body.
Then, a series of brutal, rolling concussions. The bus was tumbling, shedding pieces of itself, each impact a thunderclap that rattled teeth and bones. The noise was apocalyptic: grinding metal, shattering windows, the unified, high-pitched scream of children, and the terrible, hollow drumming of the bus's frame being crushed by the earth.
It stopped as suddenly as it began. The bus came to rest on its side in a muddy ditch at the bottom of the ravine, surrounded by the smell of torn earth, gasoline, and pine. The engine hissed and died. For a few seconds, there was only the drumming of rain on the ruined roof, now a wall beside them.
Then the sound returned: a low symphony of agony. Moans, whimpers, sharp, hitched cries of "Mommy." The soft, terrible sound of someone vomiting. Leo lay sprawled, half-pinned under a seat-back that had torn loose. His head throbbed. His mouth tasted of blood and dirt. And his left arm… it was a universe of pain. A deep, nauseating throb that pulsed with every heartbeat. He tried to move it, and a white, blinding spike of agony made him cry out, a thin, broken sound lost in the chorus. He cradled it against his chest with his right hand, feeling the wrongness through his jacket—a sharp, unnatural angle just below the elbow.
Tears, hot and involuntary, streamed down his face, mixing with rain and grime. He cried from the pain, from the terror, from the overwhelming, crushing confusion. He wasn't trying to be brave. He was just a broken boy in a broken bus.
Through blurred vision, he looked around. The bus was a tomb of skewed geometry. Light filtered through cracked, mud-spattered windows. He saw Danny a few feet away, clutching a bleeding forehead, his eyes wide and vacant. He saw Mr. Riggs, the driver, hanging limp in his seatbelt, his head at an awful angle.
Then he saw Sarah Milligan.
She was two rows ahead, still mostly in her seat. The impact had sent her sideways, and she lay curled, her face towards him. Her eyes were open, a serene, unseeing blue. A single trickle of blood, dark as wine, ran from her hairline down her temple, but it wasn't the blood that was terrifying. It was the stillness. In the cacophony of pain and fear, Sarah made no sound. She didn't move. She didn't blink against the rain dripping through a crack above her. She was a statue in a storm of chaos.
"Sarah?" Leo's voice was a rasp. No response. The reality of it, that profound stillness, cut through his own pain sharper than any broken bone. She's not getting up.
"Is everyone okay?!" The voice was shrill, trembling with forced authority. It was Miss Perkins, their young science teacher. She was clawing her way up the tilted aisle, her face pale, her glasses gone. A deep gash marred her cheek. "Talk to me! Sound off!"
A weak chorus of "I'm here" and sobs answered her. Leo couldn't find his voice. He watched as Miss Perkins reached Sarah. She shook the girl's shoulder, gently at first, then with more urgency. "Sarah? Honey, talk to me." Her hands went to Sarah's neck, feeling for a pulse. Leo saw the exact moment hope drained from the teacher's face. Her expression crumpled, and she pulled her hand back as if burned, stifling a sob.
"Okay," Miss Perkins whispered, more to herself than to them. She turned, her eyes scanning the wreckage, landing on Leo. "Leo. Your arm."
"It's broken," he managed, the words tasting like chalk.
She nodded, a quick, jerky motion. "We… we need to get out. The bus could… there's gasoline." She was trying to be the adult, but the script was torn. "Can everyone who can move, help those who can't? We need to get to the road."
The practicalities were a nightmare. The door was crumpled shut. The emergency exit windows were shattered, but the openings were jagged teeth of glass ten feet off the ground on the bus's new side. Miss Perkins, with the help of a tall, shocky boy named Jake, managed to kick out the remaining glass in one of the windshield windows, creating a treacherous escape route.
They moved in a daze. Leo used his good arm to pull himself along, biting back screams as his broken limb jostled. Danny, bleeding but functional, helped him, his own hands shaking. They formed a human chain, lifting, pulling, coaxing the walking wounded out into the cold, relentless rain. Some kids had sprained ankles, cuts, deep bruises. One, Leo saw, had a bone in his forearm pressing sickly against the skin. They left Mr. Riggs and Sarah Milligan. Miss Perkins covered Sarah with a jacket, her hands trembling too hard to close the girl's eyes.
Gathered on the muddy slope, twenty-three shivering, traumatized children and one utterly lost teacher stared up at the scar on the mountainside where they'd fallen. The road was invisible, fifty vertical feet of slick, tangled underbrush above them. The rain plastered their hair, soaked their clothes, and diluted the blood on their skin.
"We have to get help," Miss Perkins said, her voice hollow. "We have to get to the road. Flag down a car."
But no cars came. In the distance, from the direction they'd been heading, a column of thick, black smoke rose, staining the grey sky. And as they stood there, listening past the rain, they began to hear other sounds. Not the sounds of rescue. Not sirens. From far off, carried on the wet wind: the faint, popping staccato of gunfire. And once, a long, drawn-out scream that didn't sound like fear, but like something else entirely—a raw, animal noise that cut off abruptly.
Leo stood huddled, cradling his shattered arm. The charisma, the quiet empathy that usually tuned him to the feelings of others, was now a curse. He felt Danny's terror vibrating next to him. He absorbed Miss Perkins's paralyzing helplessness. He felt the collective shock of the group like a physical chill. And underneath it all, beneath his own consuming pain and fear for his family hundreds of miles away, a cold, hard seed of understanding began to grow.
Sarah was gone. Mr. Riggs was gone. The world of permission slips and bus rules and ecology quizzes was gone. The rules had changed somewhere while they were tumbling down the mountain. And now, they were just cold, wet, hurt children, stranded at the bottom of a ravine, with the sound of rain and distant gunfire as their only guides. The long wait for a world that was no longer coming to find them had begun.