Issue #110

Mario braced himself against the seat in front of him as the bus hit another crater-sized hole in the road. Half of the other kids on the bus screamed and hollered, the trip somehow becoming both the entertaining and terrifying. Coach stood up, trying to pretend that he wasn’t bothered by the abrupt motions of the bus. After a few moments, he broke down and reached up to take hold of one of the side rails.

“Look you guys, I don’t think this should be this big of a deal,” he said as he barely kept himself from toppling over backwards. “You all just need to shut up during the diving portion of the meet. All your noise is distracting him, and it makes us all look bad.”

There was snickering all over the bus as Mark, the diver, sat with his back turned, sullenly, to all of them. Mario thought the whole thing was being blown out of proportion. If the guy couldn’t perform because of a little distraction, maybe he shouldn’t be doing it. They weren’t serving tea and biscuits here.

“Did you see that creeper guy in the stands?” Brody asked, as the bus jumped and they bumped into each other again.

“What guy?”

“Up in the top row, behind their team. I’m pretty sure he was there alone. I couldn’t see his face with that hood pulled up over his head, but who just sits there alone, watching a swim meet?”

“A parent?”

“If someone here was his kid, you’d never guess he gave a shit about any of them.”

The bus drove out onto Mason’s Bridge. Mario glanced out of the window, and down at the river at the bottom of the deep valley below. It was at least a hundred feet, and the bridge anymore looked like a stiff breeze might take it apart.

“I mean, who does that?” Brody was still going on about the guy in the stands. How was Mario supposed to know. Maybe the guy’s kid just sucked.

The bus dipped and rocked to the side. Mario placed a hand against the window to brace himself, and it took a few moments for him to realize that he had been holding his breath, clenching his body as he had been bracing for some catastrophic impact.

“Jesus, you are such a baby!” Brody sneered at him. “Would you try and relax?”

The wind picked up as he said this, and hit the bus so hard that it felt like something had actually landed on the roof. They swerved to the left, and for an elongated moment, Mario feared that they were about to start fishtailing. Then, the bus seemed to lift up slightly, and the vibrations from the tires abruptly ceased. He felt a sudden sickness in his stomach at the familiar sensation.

It was what it felt like when an airplane took off.

He looked out the window again, in time to see the ground now dropping away from them, before vanishing into the dark. The driver was screaming, and everyone seemed overly slow to figure out what had just happened, until the bus was savagely jerked and turned until it was completely upright.

Mario fell back against his seat, rolled up and over it and down to the next one behind him. He flipped over, and looked over the back of the seat, at the rear emergency exit that was now directly below him. Before he could get a better grip on the vinyl cover, the bus jerked again, and he slid off, drifting across the aisle to bounce off the next row of seats, dropping down and tumbling over, before he crashed onto the rear door. He kept enough of his senses to roll out of the way and behind the rear bench, knowing that other kids must be falling towards him as well.

From the outside, he heard the sound of a shriek, loud and animal-like, and only barely drowning out the cries from the inside of the bus. He heard a scream of tearing metal, and looked up to see giant, elongated talons now penetrating through the roof and squeezing, pulling more of the bus apart as it shook them mercilessly.

“Do you hear that?” Brody asked. Mario thought the question idiotic as firs,t but then he thought he might have understood what Brody was referring to. It seemed like a second cry, another creature like this one. The bus was shaken even harder than before, lifted up briefly before dropping back down, hitting the ground with a deafening crash and skidding to a halt.

After what felt like an hour, Mario pushed himself up into a crouched position. He reached out to push the emergency exit open and, one by one, they staggered out. He felt pain shoot up his leg and blood dripping down his neck as the others joined him, all staring up into the sky.

The thing that had attacked them looked like some kind of reptile, or bird of prey, big enough that it might have been able to pick up an entire house, let alone the bus. Mario blinked at the sight of the thing, wondering why it had let them go when he spotted the second one, nearly identical to the first, swooping down from the darkness above, teeth and claws bared in full attack mode. The two things collided, and the force of their bodies impacting caused him to stagger back, even from such a great distance. They grappled with each other and swiped out with their claws as their wings beat the air, keeping them aloft, high above them.

The second one continued circling around its opponent, darting in for quick attacks, and Mario could hear the frustration in the cries from the first. They all stood there, in awe of the battle unfolding above.

It ended so quickly, he almost didn’t have time to register it. The second beast, who he had somehow already dubbed as their protector, flew in to take hold of the other thing’s throat, ripping and pulling flesh and bone with it. The thing didn’t even cry out as it fell, plummeting down somewhere, off in the woods.

Mario watched as the giant bird took several lazy orbits before starting to descend. He wondered vaguely if they were going to be attacked again but in a swirling mass of shadows and light, the thing shrunk, like a retreating shadow collapsing in on itself and, as it touched down on hard pavement, he found himself looking at nothing but the figure of a man, standing alone in the middle of the road.

He heard Brody take in a sharp breath behind him as he started jabbing Mario in the back.

“That’s him!” he hissed. “The guy at the meet, that’s the guy!”

Mario gazed at the man, mouth slackening open at the thought of what he had just transformed from. From the distance of his vantage point, the man seemed to smirk, maybe waving at them as he pulled his overcoat more tightly around himself He turned to leave, retreating away on foot, until he was lost within the dense cover of night.