FABLE

Chapter Eighteen

I'm on the bus again, dreaming the same old dream I've been stuck on since the accident.

Everything starts off the same.

The bus winds through the late afternoon sunlight, jagged cliffs and sparkling sea far below.

Evan's on my right, looking out the window. Mia's on my left, sharing the iPod earphones.

Our favourite Fable song, Deja Vu, blasts into our ears.

Usually at this point in the dream, Mrs. Blythe starts teaching math on a huge chalkboard at the front of the bus. Which leads to me pulling the glassy seaweed out of Evan's hair, and him vomiting up seawater, and everyone on the bus turning around and Mia whispering to me before I wake up.

Tonight, however, the dream doesn't run its usual course.

Tonight, the dream is different.

Tonight, I'm not dreaming.

I'm remembering.

Just as it happened on that day, Mia reaches over and turns up the sound on my iPod.

She mouths out the words to Deja Vu, her long dark hair swinging as she mimics Alastaire's guitar solo.

She catches me glancing over at Evan, and she gives me a quick wink, which makes me blush.

I look down in my lap, waiting for my face to stop burning. Out the corner of my eye I can just see his sunlit profile as he looks down at the glittering waves far below. I wonder whether she's right about him asking me to the Freshman Formal after our field trip. The three of us have been friends since the start of middle school, but recently he's been treating me differently.

I wonder.

Mia takes my hand and squeezes it tight as the next song starts.

We hold hands through the song, as the music connecting us builds up louder and louder and the bus winds higher and higher up the cliffs.

The song has just reached its crescendo when the day abruptly shatters.

It starts with a shock of intense vibrations buzzing up through the floor of the bus, soft at first then more powerful. The entire bus shudders as something rains down on the metal roof.

I pull my headphone out of my ear as Mia does the same, and the music is replaced by bloodcurdling screams. The driver has slammed on the brakes; a loud metallic screeching cuts through the din.

I slam hard against Evan.

Mia is thrown into the aisle. She's just pulling herself back into her seat when a massive boulder the size of a car slams into the side of the bus.

Landslide.

Things move very quickly from that point.

For a split second I think I see a shadowy shape, maybe a person, standing in the road in front of the bus. My mind is racing too fast to make sense of it, and it's gone in an instant, buried under a hail of rocks.

Shards of glass fly through the air all around us as the bus swerves out of control across the road. It only takes a moment for us to crash through the safety rails and plummet over the side of the cliff.

I see the ocean below, closing in fast.

I'm suddenly weightless; my seat drops away below me. It's as we're plummeting through the air, the sea rising up to meet us, that I feel Evan's arms wrap around me and hold me down.

The bus strikes water.

His mouth is against my ear, and he whispers something. I can't hear it over the sound of the churning water engulfing the bus.

Everything is moving too fast, but I have just enough time to collect my racing thoughts. The bus is sinking into the ocean. We're trapped on the bus. We're all going to die.

Water is rushing in through the broken windows, and I hear groaning metal as the front of the bus sinks faster, and the back of the bus begins to rise into the air.

We're being pulled front-first beneath the waves.

The aisle tilts until we're at a steep angle, and a new round of screaming breaks out.

I see a boy at the front of the bus fall out of his seat and hit the front screen.

The bus driver is on his hands and knees scrambling out of his seat, his face covered in blood. Other kids hang on to the rails and dangle in the aisle as the floor tilts sideways and becomes a wall.

The only thing keeping me pinned down safely is the seat in front of me, and Evan's arms.

A few rows below me a girl clings onto a handrail as she dangles in the air. I never learned her name, even though we're in the same class. She's screaming for her mother, over and over. A fair-haired boy near the front of the bus is shouting at her as he clings to his seat.

The shrieking and sobbing meld into a single wail, until one scream cuts through the rest.

One moment Mia's next to me in her seat. The next moment she's gone. With no seat in front of her to hold her in place, she falls down the long aisle. In seconds she's lying against the glass front window of the bus, her head haloed in blood fanning out into the rising seawater. She's not moving.

I feel a scream building up in the back of my throat but I can't release it.

It's not possible. This can't be happening.

Seawater is filling up the bus quickly now.

Mia's floating in the water, rising along with it as it swallows the first row, then the second row of seats.

I'm so deep in shock that I feel like I'm dead already.

I go limp in Evan's arms. I watch the water creeping up the aisle towards us. More and more of my classmates are in the water, which is turning red - from Mia's blood, and their own. A girl with a long piece of glass sticking out of her eye socket is clawing at the seat above her.

I don't know what they're all screaming for. What they're climbing for.

It's hopeless.

Evan's arms wrap tighter around me and he turns around in his seat, moving me with him. His back against the seat, he places his feet against the emergency glass at the back of the bus - and in one swift motion kicks it out.

In the split second before the glass shatters and water surges in, he hurls me forward.

My whole body reels as I'm thrown upwards into the freezing water outside the bus. Shards of glass swirl around me.

The torrent sweeps Evan down the aisle, away from me, into darkness, and he's gone. Just like that. Maybe he meant to follow me, I think, but the water is rushing into the bus too quickly now; it's sinking too fast.

Down, down, down into the darkness while I float suspended watching the bus rush away towards the seabed.

I need to swim up to the surface, but my arms aren't working. It's probably got something to do with the stabbing pain in my chest, like a hot blade jammed between my ribs. Blood blossoms in the water around me.

I give up.

Before I pass out, all I can see is red.