flinch. The wheels of the truck threw up gouts of water as they charged forward. The windshield wipers were working madly.
The man still had not moved.
And then they hit him. The impact jarred the truck but slightly and the man was not crushed or tossed aside, he exploded. Like a water balloon filled with ink and putrescence, he literally blew up when they hit him, washing the truck down with black filth.
“Shit,” Mitch breathed. “Holy shit…”
“One down,” Tommy said, winking at him. “But I’m guessing there’s gonna be more.”
Mitch nodded. “Oh yeah, and when it gets dark I got the feeling we’re gonna find out just how many more.”
WORMS
1
Later on, Scott Reed could not be sure what he’d been thinking when he drove the bus straight through the barrier and down into the flooded streets of Bethany. But as it happened, as he saw those barriers smash to kindling and felt the terrible, greasy roll of the bus as it skidded down that curving hill into the water, he kept telling himself it was not his fault. That none of this was his fault. Busing the kids over to Park Falls for that fucking soccer game-and with the Black River Valley at flood stage, every goddamn river in the state bursting its banks-was not his idea. Witcham was going underwater and they wanted him to bus the kids seventy miles back and forth.
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.”
