Monument 13

13

Payton kneels down and slaps me across the face. It stings, but it sure does bring be back. Our bus crashed in a massive hail storm. Our driver, mr. Reeds, is dead under the steering wheel, and the elementary school driver, Mrs. Wooly, was about to pick up the lower school kids. She only made it through the kindergarteners, but the rest of the lower schoolers are all at home, toughing the hail storm out. Mrs. Wooly drove right up to our overturned bus and tried to get us all out. I am stuck under a fallen bus chair, and I'm hallucinating from breathing in too much of the gas. Payton pulls me out from under the chair and drags me across the bus. I scamper across the space between the two busses, and avoid the hail balls. One is as big as my head-- no kidding. Mrs. Wooly's windshield is a mess of cracks, like a massive spiderweb, but the bus is heaven compared to ours. The kindergarteners are already in Greenways, and Mrs. Wooly leads us in too. Our bus explodes in the distance. We run through the broken, plexiglass door. There are only six of us eighth graders left-- Alison Acuna(my best friend), Payton Roe(the quiet, really popular boy I sit next to in class but don't talk to much), Molly Faulk(the popular, helpless girl), Otis O'sullivan(the six-foot-four kinda-popular boy who's actually really nice and is my best guy friend), Scarlett Pemberton(the kinda-popular, wears-lots-of-makeup type), and me, Lily Annabelle Ayres, the not-so-popular, probably most resourceful one of the group.
"I'm going to go find help, maybe get us some new school busses and drive us home," says mrs. Wooly once the hail calms. She walks through the front gate. "Oh, and Otis is in charge. I'll be back in a half an hour to an hour probably. Get the little kids some snacks and try to get the Pizza Shack ovens working. Maybe you can have a hot lunch!" With that, mrs. Wooly leaves us. We grab bean bag chairs from the Home Improvement section and set up the little kids with juice and pizza. Suddenly, we hear a huge metal screeching. All of us rush to the front gates. They're closing. We roll several things under them-- you know, trying to prop them open-- but they just roll out of the way. And with a loud clank we're locked in. And everyone else is locked out. The little kids begin to scream and yell and cry,
"I wanna go home!"
"Where's my mama?"
"What's happening?"
That kind of thing.
We were assigned little buddies this year, and mine is Lila-- fortunately she is still alive. She clutches to me and I kneel down and hug her, holding her tight and promising everything will be alright.
"Lily?"
"Yes, Lila?"
"Do you think mrs. Wooly will be back soon?"
I can't lie.
"I don't know, Lila," I respond. "I don't know."

We find sleeping bags and inflatable mattresses, sheets, pillows and fluffy pajamas. I count the little ones before we go to bed. There are seven of them, out of a busfull. Lila Kennedy (my buddy), Jasmine Wick (she's Alison's buddy, and we call her Wicked. She's mean, but the hail storm seemed to traumatize her, and she likes Molly so much more than Alison she seems to be Molly's buddy now), Benjamin Wolf (Payton's buddy), Stephen Reval (some kid who is now apparently Otis's buddy), Lindsay Jefferson (another kid who is now Scarlett's buddy), and twins Henry and Ida Quigley, (who are now apparently Alison's buddies but she's not very good with little children so they're probably going to become my responsibility). I assign them each a bed, and make them memorize its place so we're not all sleeping in other peoples beds every night, and we go to sleep.
The next morning I find Otis awake, prodding at a flat screen television and changing the channels to the news. I push the fluffy covers off me and go to sit next to him. I'm only five foot seven, actually pretty tall for an eighth grade girl, but at six four I look pretty short in comparison. He looks over at me.
"Listen."
So I do.
"This is an important announcement," says a man in a blue suit, "The biggest volcano ever, over two miles high, erupted in Taiwan last Saturday."
Three days ago.
"This volcano triggered a mass tsunami-- the biggest tsunami on record, over half a mile high and traveling over 600 miles an hour. Just two days ago it crashed into all the towns and cities within a fifty mile radius of the harbor, including New York City, Cape Cod, Boston, and Atlantic City."
Otis and I just sit there, staring at the TV in shock. They then showed various clips from the tsunami, one of the Empire State Building getting blown over and then the screen went black. I look at Otis and we make eye contact, thinking the same thing.
"We have to wake the others," I say quietly. Otis nods.
"But not the little ones."
We pick our way through the array of air mattresses to wake only the big kids. We then spend the morning watching the TV relap over the story again and again and we watch in mute silence. Then, we go back to bed. After all, it's only four in the morning. And then I'm being rocked awake. Not by someone. Not something. I was being thrown around the room like everybody else. Apparently that's what happens when you're about to experience an 9.4 earthquake. We all run to Pizza Shack and grab a table leg, which were bolted to the ground. I can hear everything falling off shelves around us, the glass breaking, the plastic cracking, everything. I grip the table leg as the first hit slows. I knew it before anything else happened. I knew it was a foreshock. I was being thrown around and it was only a foreshock.
"Guys!" I yell, "Don't get out from under the tables!"
"Why?" snorts Molly, "The Earthquake's ove-" but she is cut off with an even worse shaking, throwing and jolting. I would've yelled "see?!" but my jaw was slamming against itself and my teeth ached. Scarlett, who happens to be under the same table as me, and I cling to each other, steadying each other as the earthquake slows. Otis finds the TV, now all mangled up from the earthquake, but the sound still works. He turns the knob at the bottom and the news comes on. A blue blob is standing/sitting in the middle of the screen.
"What you've just experienced is the biggest earthquake ever on record. We've-"
The sentence is cut short with a new voice.
"This is an emergency. News just came in from NORAD's headquarters. A gas tank has been broken, resulting in a gas leakage. We advise all to seal up their windows and doors. And do not come out of your house until further notice."
The TV keeps playing but we all look at each other.
"We have to block the gates," Otis says. "Alison and Scarlett, get duct tape. Lily and Molly, get plastic sheeting. Payton, you help me seal the gates."
We all run in different directions. Despite all her annoyingness (is that a word?) Molly is actually quite nice. We grab shower curtains and several tons of boxes of plastic wrap from the department asle. We then run down the hall to the front gates. I pass up the first shower curtain to Otis. He takes it and some bright blue duct tape from Alison, and tightly tapes the shower curtain to the wall above the middle gate. Payton is manning one of the side gates, and Scarlett the other. Once the shower curtains are sealed, we pass up the plastic wrap and re-seal the whole thing over. We don't want any air to get in. Once we believe that the gates are sealed nicely, we come to the problem of air conditioning. The air conditioning sucks all the air in from the outside. We run to the storeroom, where there are stairs leading to a large red hatch in the ceiling. Alison comes with oil slick and a pry and we pry the hatch open. Sure enough the air conditioning is on the ceiling. And so is Molly. I didn't even notice she was missing. She is sitting on the roof, her legs swinging over the edge, watching the sky. I turn to see what she is watching, and there, right from NORAD's compound, is black smoke. It streaks up into the sky like an inkblot, or like gravity was reversed for black paint, pouring it up into the sky. Scarlett comes with a sledgehammer and hands it to Otis, the tallest (and probably the strongest), who begins to pound at the air vent, trying to break it. Suddenly, the sky goes red, and the air does too. And everybody is pitched into chaos.

****

A/N

Hi guys. So I'm not the best writer but I hoped you like it :) Please comment on how I did. Also, I wrote a bunch of this book a couple months ago, so the writing will get gradually better as the book goes on. Sorry about that. Also, this might seem weirdly similar to the first chapter of Monument 14. I didn't know how to start it differently than the actual book to make them end up in the same place. But the next chapters will be different. Anyway, please comment your thoughts and I hope you enjoyed :)