see our lights and come to investigate.”
“He might have a knife,” Cal said.
“Or an axe,” his brother speculated.
“And he might be hungry. He might want something to eat,” Cal said, his voice dropping a few octaves into its horror host tone again. “I wonder who he is?”
“Some guy that escaped from a mental hospital,” Kyle decided. “Sure, he’s wandering out in the storm. He can probably smell us. And when he smells us, he’s gonna get hungry.”
Cal nodded. “And when he gets hungry, he’s gonna remember that butcher knife in his pocket.”
“Or that bloody axe in his hand.”
“Yeah, and he’s gonna want some meat. Some meat to chop up, red and bloody meat that he can stuff in his mouth. He likes the taste of it. It reminds him of all those kids he ate before they put him away.”
Bobby said, “C’mon already, will you two quit it?”
“And when he’s done eating us, he’s gonna want some souvenirs. Maybe a heart or a skull or something he can stuff in his pocket and chew on?”
“Stop it,” Bobby told the both of them.
Kayla Summers was crying again and a few other kids were fighting back sobs.
“Why don’t you two grow up already?” Lacee Henderson said, getting a little tired of talking Kayla down every time the Woltrip brothers got her all worked up again.
“He’s not coming back,” Tara Boyle said. “Mr. Reed.”
“Sure he is,” Bobby told her.
“But he’s not. If he was, then he would have been back by now.”
“That’s right,” Chuck Bittner said. “I think we should just walk out of here. It’s stupid to wait like this.”
And pretty soon they were all voicing their opinions and what was Bobby to do? He was bigger than the others, so he could probably physically stop a few of them, but not all of them. It just wasn’t possible.
As the other kids argued back and forth, Lacee and Alicia and Kayla were the only ones for staying put. Bobby squeezed his eyes shut and listened to the rain and felt the darkness closing in around them, imagining it to be some malefic fist that would crush the bus to a pulp. It was crazy thinking and not the sort that Bobby indulged in much, but the image presented itself and some morbid streak in his mind liked it, decided it was the perfect thing to torment him with. He tried to shake it out of his head, but it clung there as the worst things always seemed to. Maybe it was this waiting and maybe it was the Woltrip brothers with those terrible stories, but Bobby was frightened. He wasn’t sure of what exactly, but the fear was there: thick and unreasoning and complete.
C’mon, you idiot! You’re not afraid of the dark and the oogie-boogie man now are you?
But at that moment?which, although he was not aware of it, was a defining moment in his young life?he could not honestly say that he did not believe in spooks and spirits and creeping nightmares. God, it was so awfully dark in that bus, your mind just got carried away. Nothing but the sound of all those kids breathing or maybe not breathing at all, just holding their breath and waiting, waiting for something to happen…
And suddenly, with that in mind, Bobby became aware of the fact that nobody was talking.
It was dead silent in the bus.
The Woltrip brothers were not trying to scare the pants off anyone. Chuck Bittner was not bragging about his old man’s money. Tara Boyle was not whining. And, above all, Kayla Summers was not even crying.
There was a tenseness in the bus, an almost electric sense of foreboding like everyone was trying to keep quiet so that maybe if there was someone or something out there, they would not hear them, would not be able to zero in on them. Bobby swallowed. Then swallowed again. It wasn’t just him now. They were all feeling it. Like maybe they were not alone after all. That maybe something really was out there, something hungry and patient and incalculably evil.
Stop it! he told himself.
But he couldn’t.
His guts were tangled in knots and there was sweat beading his brow. Something was happening or about to and he could feel it. Really feel it. A palpable sense of dread, of doom. Though the rain was coming down at a steady rate, he thought he could hear splashing sounds outside. He looked to the windows, but they were speckled with raindrops and beyond them, God, it was miserably dark, unfathomably dark like the inside of a buried coffin.
“I’m scared,” Tara Boyle said.
“Shut up,” Lacee told her. “Be quiet.”
Bobby was thinking weapons now. If there was someone or some thing out there, then how would they defend themselves? For he could feel it right from his balls up to his throat, that inexplicable sense of danger. And more than that, the unshakable feeling that there was someone out there, people maybe, gathering around the bus like jagged-toothed sharks gathering around a sinking ship or buzzards circling a dying man.
There was a sudden thudding sound against the side of the bus and somebody let go with a strangled little cry.
“Who did that?” Bobby said.
But there were no answers. Just those faces barely visible in the gloom.
“Kyle? Cal?”
“No,” Cal said. “It wasn’t us. It came…it came from outside.”
And Bobby believed him, even though he wished it weren’t true. Maybe at any other time he would have been thinking that it was just Mr. Reed coming back with help, but he knew better. This was no help arriving, it was something else entirely.
There was another thud.
Bobby felt Lacee grab his arm and Alicia grab the other one. Something was rattling fiercely in his chest and it took him a moment to realize that it was his own heart. The girls’ hands on him were gripping him so tightly he thought they would snap his arms.
And then outside…a sliding, dragging sound like somebody was pulling themselves along the length of the bus. And on the other side, another thud…then a screeching sound like nails were being dragged along the outside panels.
Kayla Summers said, “It’s…it’s those brain-eating things.”
“Shut up,” Kyle told her. “That was just a movie…”
The tenseness held, was welded into place much as the bodies it came from. Finally, the Fairstreet Flyers were a team…one mind and one body. They were locked together, holding onto one another for dear life. They didn’t know why exactly, but they understood the sudden necessity of it.
Bobby wrenched himself free of the hands on him, knowing that somebody had to do something, somebody had to break this spell before everyone just lost it and started screaming. It was like being in a darkened movie theater, knowing something horrible was about to happen up on the screen. Or being in one of those carnival Halloween spookhouses, walking down a dim corridor and knowing that someone was about to reach out and grab you…
Bobby took hold of the flashlight, his hand shaking. He brought it up and turned it on. The beam of light was absolutely blinding and the moment his eyes adjusted to it, Bobby wished he’d left it off.
Maybe the dark was better.
Because in the dark you could not see those pallid faces peering in through the windows. Those starkly white faces set off by huge, glistening black eyes that were simply empty and dead.
Somebody screamed.
Bobby turned the light off.
There was a sudden knocking at the bifold door. At first just a gentle rapping, then a pounding and finally a hammering.
Whoever those people were, they wanted in.
Suddenly, a million hands were thudding against the outside of the bus, others beating against the door. Fingers scraping against the glass and faces pressed against those windows, hollow-eyed and pulpy.
The kids were crying out, screaming. Some were praying.
But Bobby heard none of it.
Because he was looking at the windshield up in the cab. There was something crawling up it he first took to
