Tim Curran - Resurrection

“Not long, honey, don’t worry,” he said. “They’ll be out to get us in a little while.”

He quickly took a head count making sure he still had fifteen kids. He did. That was something. Nobody was injured. That was something else.

“Why did we crash down here?” Tara wanted to know.

Reed swallowed, but a lie managed to work itself up his throat regardless. “I think…I think a car sideswiped us in the rain. Next thing I knew, we went through the barrier and ended up here.”

Oh, it sounded good and who could possibly disprove it? Even after the bus was winched out?

Reed set the emergency kit on an empty seat.

He didn’t know many of the kids. A few of them had rode on his regular daily run, but not many. Cal and Kyle Woltrip, of course. He’d been hauling those two since kindergarten. But the others? Just a few. He recognized Tara Boyle. She was a little princess and a not-so little whiner. Always had been. Her old man owned the Dairy Queen over in Elmwood. Owned lots of things. Chuck Bittner was there. He was the unisex team’s high scorer and an uppity little shit from way back. He’d grow up to be the same stuffed-shirt real estate mogul his old man was. Reed wondered if the kid knew his old man was gay like everyone else in Elmwood did. Bobby Luce was there. Another high scorer, but down to earth, an okay kid. Dependable. Kayla Summers was sitting behind Tara Boyle. Kayla was a good athlete, but she was a crier. Word had it she burst into tears every time she had to do an oral report. She was real quiet and adults made her nervous. Reed gave her a wide berth. He saw Lacee Henderson, she of the long blonde hair and brilliant blue eyes, who was already striking at ten and would go on, Reed figured, to be a knockout of the Lucy Costigan sort. Hopefully, not that big of a bitch, though. Alicia Kroll. Brian Summers.

The others, Reed simply did not know.

When they’d loaded up that morning at Fairstreet Elementary, he’d smiled to each and every one as they climbed into the bus with their gym bags and Fairstreet Flyers jerseys on. But that had been his only interaction with them, really. Lucy Costigan was their coach and she handled them. All the way to Park Hills she’d sat right behind Reed, driving him nuts. He could almost feel her body heat seeping through the seat, kept imagining those long tanned legs and muscular thighs. Every time she bumped the back of the seat with her knee, his dick had woken up and stretched like a hungry tomcat.

Chuck Bittner, true to form, was telling everyone how his old man was going to raise hell about this.

Reed wanted to tell him that when his old man wasn’t home, he was out raising things in other men’s pants, but he figured he didn’t need to lose his job.

“Okay, kids,” Reed said. “It may take time for them to find us down here in Bethany, so what I’m going to do is to wade out into the water and find help. There’s got to be somebody around. If I don’t see anyone, I’ll head back up the hill to the road, flag a car down.”

“But…but what about us?” Tara Boyle wanted to know.

Sure, kid, Reed thought, get used to saying that because you’ll be saying it your whole life: What about me? What about me? What about me? Way he was seeing it, Tara would have climbed over the bones of the others to save her own ass and the way she probably saw it was that Reed had one job above all others and that was getting her to safety.

Piss on the others.

“Quit whining,” Alicia Kroll told her.

“But I want get out of here.”

“’I want to get out of here’,” Alicia mocked in a petulant voice.

There were a couple stifled laughs.

“Quit worrying, Tara,” Cal told her. “Mr. Reed’ll be back in no time. I’m sure he’ll make it in time. If not…well, we’ll just keep sinking and sinking and-”

“Okay, Cal,” Reed said. “That’ll do.”

“Maybe we should go with you,” Bobby Luce said.

But Reed shook his head. “No, Bobby. I need you kids to stay here and sit tight. That water’s too deep. In fact, I want to put you in charge until I get back and I expect the rest of you to do what Bobby says. If you don’t, you’ll be locking horns with me.” He glared at Chuck Bittner. “And that goes double for you, missy.”

More laughter.

“You better watch it,” Chuck told him.

And, oh, dear God, how Reed would have loved to slap that little shit right across the face, tell him a thing or two about his old man. How he spent his free time. But if the kid hadn’t figured that out yet, then he was just plain stupid. Reed was willing to bet that Chuck’s old man had that queer cowboy movie on DVD. Wouldn’t have surprised him any. Reed had heard there were men fucking in it and that showed you where the world was headed, Sodom and Gomorrah all over again.

“I’m just ribbing you, Chuck.”

Chuck just looked away.

Hard one to figure sometimes. Uppity little braggart one moment, brooding and silent the next. Reed had heard that Chuck’s mom had died a month ago. It didn’t seem to be bothering the kid, though. At least that you could see. But word had it she had left him and his old man years back, wasn’t much but a barfly with an expressway between her legs.

Reed opened the emergency kit and showed Bobby the first aid kit, the flashlights they could use if it got dark. He didn’t bother explaining the road flares or the rest of the equipment. Things went well, he’d be back in twenty minutes anyway.

“So sit tight, kids. I’ll be back in a flash.” He moved to the front of the bus and back into the water. “And nobody goes outside. Stay in your seat or in the back of the bus. And I mean it.”

He took one look back at those faces, some excited and some worried and some genuinely upset, and holding onto the rail, started down the steps into that chill gray water. An empty water bottle went floating by.

There was some laughter in the bus and Bobby told somebody to knock something off.

“Just you wait,” Chuck Bittner said.

Reed stepped into the drink and felt for the street. By the time he found it, the water was up above his bellybutton.

“This is great,” Cal Woltrip was saying. “Just like that movie…Lord of the Flies. We’ll be here for weeks.”

“Yeah, we’ll go savage,” his brother Kyle added. “Who gets to be ‘Piggy’?”

Then Reed was out of earshot, making his way around the bus. Well, this is just going swimmingly, he thought and then giggled despite himself. Flooded empty houses and dark buildings stared back at him. And that dark water lapped around him, filled with unseen things.

When Mitch first met Chrissy it was on the public beach up at Black Lake.

He’d just come off a pretty nasty relationship and he hadn’t been doing much but drinking and feeling sorry for himself for weeks, calling in sick a lot at work. Then, one Saturday morning, hungover and feeling pretty much like shit, he’d decided to lay off the booze and the pity parties and drive up to the beach and take a swim.

That’s how he met Chrissy.

Just a little slip of a girl with huge dark eyes and a mischievous grin, glossy dark hair reaching down the center of her back. She was sitting in the sand near the water, trying to build a castle with shovel and pail, using dry sand that kept falling apart on her.

Mitch was walking by and she had said, “Hey, mister! Can you help me with my wall?”

Mitch just stopped, smiled. “Your wall?”

“I’m building a wall.”

“Why are you building a wall? For your castle?”

She shook her head. “To keep the ants out.”

“The ants?”

“The giant ants. I saw ‘em on a movie. Giant ants with big teeth.”