Emmy Laybourne - Sky on Fire

The light from the headlights bounced off it and it was a gleaming shape. Like a ghost.

‘There!’ I said. ‘Something white.’

I wiped at the Plexiglas windshield and squinted out. I saw it was a girl.

She was wearing a white coat, somehow it was not too dirty, and her face was uncovered.

‘Stop! It’s a girl,’ I shouted.

She had long blonde hair. That white-blonde like Max has.

She held up her hands for us to stop. Her hands were bare.

Niko slowed but didn’t stop.

He honked the horn.

‘Niko, you have to stop!’

‘No!’ he shouted. ‘Too risky.’

The girl opened her mouth and I could see she was screaming for us to stop, though I couldn’t hear her.

‘Stop!’ Sahalia shouted.

The little kids joined in, too.

Niko slammed on the brakes. ‘I don’t like it,’ I heard him say.

I opened the door mechanism. ‘Get in!’ I shouted to the girl.

Then I saw them coming.

The darkness started moving, is what it looked like. And then shapes came out of it and I saw they were boys. Teenage boys in camouflage. Their faces had been painted, or maybe they’d used mud.

Three of them rushed at me and I pulled the door shut. They banged on it.

Niko tried to back up, but they’d gotten something behind the bus. I didn’t know what. But he kept trying to reverse and crashing into something over and over. (It was 2 motorcycles.)

Two of them rolled a dead motorcycle in front of the bus.

We were trapped.

One of them, I guess the leader, came in front of the bus and tapped the butt of a rifle against the Plexiglas.

He was wearing a scarf tied around his mouth and a black beret on his head. His eyes were rimmed with red and they looked wild.

‘Who are they?’ Sahalia screamed.

‘Cadets!’ Niko answered. ‘Air Force cadets!’

‘He’s O. He’s O!’ I shouted.

Niko laid on the horn.

‘Get out of the way!’ Niko shouted and immediately started coughing.

‘Out of the way!’ I yelled.

‘Screw you!’ the leader shouted. ‘We want the bus!’

‘Tell them they can come with us,’ Niko said to me. He couldn’t yell loud enough for them to hear, through the mask.

‘You guys can come!’ I shouted. ‘We’re going to the airport.’

‘If they throw down their guns,’ Niko added.

‘If you throw down your guns!’

The leader jammed the butt of his rifle into the glass. ‘They’re killing people at DIA! Don’t you idiots know that?’ he shouted. ‘They’re sorting them into groups and killing people who saw it go down. They don’t want any witnesses!’

I looked at Niko.

Sahalia was behind us.

‘He’s crazy,’ she said. ‘He’s paranoid.’

Three other cadets had come to stand around their leader.

‘He might be crazy,’ I pointed out. ‘But what about the rest of them?’

They were all wearing camouflage fatigues. None of them wore gas masks. I guess the rest of them were either type AB or B.

‘Where’s the girl?’ I wondered aloud.

Then there was a bang and the little kids were screaming.

I turned to see a cadet climbing in one of the back windows. He’d hacked it down with some kind of hatchet.

One of them started kicking in the door.

Niko got up and grabbed his backpack, which I know had the gun in it.

But before he could get the gun out, the cadet got the door open and they were inside.

‘Jesus!’ the leader shouted. ‘This bus is stocked!’

He let out a crazy, happy whoop and picked Sahalia up and kissed her on the mouth. She squirmed away as Niko shouted. ‘Get your hands off her!’

The leader smacked Niko across the face.

Niko’s mask came off a little bit and the guy grabbed it, holding it off his face.

‘Stop it!’ I screamed. ‘He’ll die!’

I kicked him and he let the mask go and turned on me.

He grabbed me by my jacket.

‘I tell you what, you tell me everything I want to know and I’ll let your driver keep his gas mask. How’s that?’

Niko was gasping through the air mask. Sahalia was on the floor in the aisle. She started pulling Josie out of the aisle, away from us.

The other cadets were coming up the steps now. They were high-fiving one another, happy about their conquest.

‘First off, what’s with him?’ the leader asked, nodding at Josie.

‘Him?’ I stalled. My mind hiccupped – he thought Josie was a boy – okay, I would go with that. ‘He’s type O and we had to—’

‘And that guy?’ he cut me off, nodding toward Brayden.

‘Brayden? He got shot,’ I said. ‘We’re taking him to the airport to find a doctor.’

‘Jesus Christ!’ he yelled and I saw his cadets jump. ‘Didn’t you hear what I said? They’re killing people at the airport. They’re out to get us all. Brayden here is dead. He’s as good as dead.’

Was that true? I didn’t think so. This guy was clearly crazy.

Sahalia started to sob. I do not know why she did that. It drew the leader’s notice.

‘Aw, did you have a little something for Brayden? Don’t cry, baby. Payton will watch out for you.’

He put his hand down and touched her on her face.

‘I’ll take good care of you, honey. You can be my special girl.’

Niko tried to get forward so he could, I don’t know, jump on the guy, but the cadets near the door stopped him.

‘How’d your bus not get skunked?’ Payton demanded.

‘Skunked?’

He rolled his eyes.

‘The white fuzz. It grows on rubber. Eats the tyres. Where’d you get the bus?’

‘We were locked inside a store with the bus,’ I said. ‘We sealed in the air, so it wasn’t exposed—’

‘So you left a big sealed-in store, filled with food and water, to try to get Brayden here to Denver?’

‘Yeah.’ I shrugged.

‘And how long you been on the road?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘How many hours you been on the road? After twenty-four hours, tyres start to skunk.’

‘We left the store around 10 a.m. yesterday—’

‘Sweet! They still got some play left in ’em. Last question…’ he said, turning back to me. ‘Where’s the store?’

I caught Niko’s eye and he shook his head just a bit.

‘The King Soopers,’ I lied.

‘Which one?’

‘In Castle Rock.’

‘Which. Effin’. One?’

‘The one… the one…’

‘You’re a LIAR!’ he shouted.

Then he ripped me across the face. I don’t think it would have cut me if he hadn’t been wearing a ring.

It felt like fire across my face and then there was blood on my gloves and running down my neck.

Batiste shouted it out: ‘We came from the Greenway in Monument,’ he yelled. ‘The Greenway in Monument, Colorado.’

Payton laughed. ‘Now that I believe!’ He smiled at Batiste. ‘All right, boys, we’re going to Monument!’

‘Brayden will die!’ Sahalia screamed. ‘He’s going to die if we don’t get to Denver!’

Payton pulled her to him.

‘You give me a kiss and I’ll get him there, honey.’

Her eyes got really big and scared. She leaned up on her tiptoes and kissed his filthy cheek.

I was afraid he’d grab her and kiss her hard. Or worse.

Instead he put his hand up to his cheek.

‘Mmmmmm, sweetness,’ Payton said. ‘You’re nothing but a little thing, aren’t you?’ He put his finger under her chin and made her look up at him.

Sahalia is some kind of magnet for jerks, I think.

‘For you, little girl, I’m gonna save Brayden! Doolies!’ Payton shouted. ‘We have to save this boy.’

‘Sir, yes, sir!’ the cadets shouted.

‘We’re gonna take him to Denver.’

Then he grabbed me by the jacket and shoved me into the aisle.