Chapter 74: Fun Falls Flat

“Well you see, buddy, it is like this,” the tire man said to the bus driver loud enough that I could hear him. “Your wheels weren’t made to take the load of the bus without a tire on them. That’s why they run two tires back there case one goes flat. When both your tires went, your wheels flattened right out like you see them now. Aren’t a standard lug pattern I can pick up anywhere around here neither. Seem they gone got them some artsy type who had them made special for this bus line. We can get you towed on into town right now no problem. This is the lawyers won’t let you have no passengers inside. Probably better not let no one back in the bus either. When we lifted it up to take us a look see, something got pulled loose. Don’t know right what it was, but it gone and took out some wires, coolant lines and the air brakes. It’s probably a safe bet if you go trying to fire up that engine you’ll probably burn the whole thing up.”

The bus driver summed it all up with “shit!”

I agree whole heartedly.

The tow truck driver came over and said, “If you want, I can give my brother a call. He runs some school bus routes through here. Might have one coming this way that we can load these kids to take into town where they can get warm. They don’t look the sort to be used to this kind of cold.”

When I looked around me I saw almost everyone was on their cells making calls. The girls wearing skirts were in a cluster of friends, trying to keep themselves out of the wind. The boys in jeans were off running in place or doing jumping jacks. Eventually someone had their phone cranking out some music which got the various girls dancing to as they tried to warm up. I am pretty sure that the whole time the men were checking the bus I only saw maybe seven other vehicles come past. It was odd since this wasn’t some narrow old two-lane country route. It was four lanes with an extra wide turn lane even though there didn’t seem to be anywhere to turn off.

At a bit past eight in the morning shouldn’t this road have a lot more traffic on it with that big multi-car wreck on the Interstate stopping traffic in both directions?

Before I was able to really think about the lack of traffic I got a message on my goggles.

“Activate goggles. Monitor body temperatures. Dangerous storm moving in quickly toward location.”

“Pink banana dog sled” I whispered and watched the goggles start coming to life.

I pretended to just be looking around while the goggles showed everyone like I was seeing them through one of those thermal cameras. Greens were ok; reds were warmer than normal, blues colder. Everyone dressed in the thermal underwear and ski gear showed their bodies were a little warm, but their hands were showing a bit cold since we didn’t have any gloves. Kids in jeans showed their legs were a bit cooler than their bodies, but their trunks were fine because of the ski jackets. I was surprised to see that most of the girls in skirts showed that their legs were only a bit cold, but their trunks were fine since they were wearing the ski jackets too, or at least a few shirts.

I had no idea why I got the message to check everyone when they didn’t look like they were having any problems. If it got really windy, we could all just huddle beside the bus or we could all huddle around the kids that didn’t get dressed in the clothes they gave us. Nothing was happening now except it was cold with clear skies. Once the sun came up over the valley we were told that it should warm up into the thirties.

I kept checking that everyone looked to be warm enough as the various adults made phone calls to find out when we were getting picked up. The best I could tell the bus company was trying to get someone out this way with another bus. It sounded like they didn’t have any at the yard that were ready to go all the way to the resort. Someone was going to attempt to get one ready as fast as they could. In the mean time they were sending out two new wheels with tires already on them. I overheard the bus driver telling the tow truck driver that the bus company was aware of this design flaw. They never had any records of the damage the tire man said he saw. Seems as soon as the bus in the yard was ready they would send it and have one from the resort come back down to try to get us as well. Hopefully we would have someone here in around two hours.

I couldn’t hear the call the tow truck driver got, but he didn’t look to have good news.

“That was my brother giving me a call back. Said he to say he was real sorry, but he can’t do anything to help you folks out. All the buses were told to stay close to town because the weatherman got it really wrong, again. A rapidly formed nor’easter is heading inland towards us pretty dang fast. If they close the schools he has to take all the kids back home,” I heard him tell the chaperones and teachers. “He called over to my other cousin’s shuttle bus service. Their dispatchers told them finish their runs and return to the yard. Seems everyone went on standby in a hurry. Weather like this doesn’t happen up here all that much. When it does, no one wants to get trapped out in it.”

I wasn’t the only one that heard the two men. Phones started coming back out to check the weather. My goggles gave me the advantage. They changed from thermal imaging to overlaying arrows showing the wind speeds, temperature drops and estimated snow falls per hour. It was really coming in very fast, a lot faster than anything I have seen before.

“Unnatural storm. Suspect weather witch. Someone able to force weather change. Mostly small localized area. Very powerful to create storm so large,” a small message said in the corner.

Pulling out my cell phone I texted Paula, Steve, and Jane at the same time asking them what was going on with the weather. I got a similar reply from Paula. A weather witch, whatever that was. Jane shot me a link. It brought me up to a page having various myths, legends, and tales about people rumored to be able to control the weather. Some of the stories mentioned seeing a very unique looking woman in areas where major weather events happened. Wherever she was seen, there was a very sudden change in the weather with no warning at all. Reports showed storms with F5 tornados coming out of perfectly clear skies in the middle of a heat wave. The same was said for blizzards and floods. In particular there were a lot of references from the Viking Age where a woman was always seen up on high peaks in areas where the Vikings were approaching coastal villages. The stories told of sudden high winds, rough seas, and intense storms coming out of nowhere to prevent the Vikings from approaching those villages. Any attempts to come near land would find the viking ships caught by the storm to be slammed into the rocks and cliffs. A link Paula sent me took me to a similar site with lore about how someone hired weather witches and the deals made for their services. To discourage those seeking to settle petty arguments or get revenge on another, a very large offering was required to gain an audience with a weather witch. Fees for minor disturbances mentioned first born children, a person’s soul, or fabled magical items. The greater the request, the more rare the item.

Did things like the heart of a yeti, hair from an albino whale, the last feather from a phoenix, snatched out at very last the instant before it was consume by fire, even exist? How could someone even verify if a testicle was from a Pharaoh’s third wife’s primary eunuch? Are fairy tales really much more than stories told to children to scare them into behaving? Can I even dispute that these things or weather witches really exist after meeting that succubus girl at blind camp? What exactly am I now? I can pull lightning to me from miles away.

“Be careful,” came a text from Steve. “Lore indicates that a storm this powerful and covering so much area requires a very specific and very expensive payment. Someone very well versed in the occult is seeking something or somebody very difficult to find. Snow traps and delays all humans regardless of technological advancements. It is also provides a very good insulator to keep targets trapped and alive.”

My goggles got a message saying, “Storm headed right at you. High probability you are target. Don’t attempt to intervene. Reprogramming the place within your head to shield you from any who can detect you as you are now.”

All of the sudden I sort of heard something and then felt a lot of pain in my head. It hurt so bad that I think I may have blacked out a bit. I woke to find I was leaning up against the side of the bus with a chaperone and kids staring down at me as a teacher checking my pulse.

I stirred and asked, “What happened? Why am I sitting by the bus?”

“You screamed out in pain and then collapsed. Your heart was really racing,” the teacher told me. “It is back to normal now. How do you feel?”

I didn’t have a headache or anything anymore, but felt something was different. Closing my eyes I looked at the place in my head. It was still blue. My shield was working too. I couldn’t find anything that was changed in me even though I knew it had.

Standing up slowly I said, “I think I am fine now. My head just started really hurting like the first time I got light in my eyes before I found out that I was super light sensitive. It doesn’t hurt now and I haven’t had anything like happen that since I got out of clinic that wasn’t caused something off with my goggles.”

I was made to do the whole drunk test routine of leaning back, with one leg up in the air and then touch my nose with opposite fingers as I recited each letter of the alphabet backwards.

Shit! This is a bitch! Cops can say anyone is drunk with this test even if they pass it with flying colors.

When the teacher and two chaperones decided I was not drunk, and probably ok to boot, I was told I could go back to waiting again with everyone else. I have no idea how long I was out, but it was long enough that I could see the sky was filled with a mix of light and dark grey clouds that were blocking out the sun. It looked like one of the time-lapse videos they show on the weather channel sometimes. The wind had picked up too, even though I was not feeling the cold from it.

“Sorry, ain’t nothing more I can do for you here. Going to head on out before this weather moves on in,” the tire man said.

Before the tire man was even to his truck, the tow truck driver was setting the bus down on the side of the road. He said pretty much the same thing. The weather was moving in. He could take the bus on into town, but if it got really bad there wouldn’t be anywhere else for us to take shelter. He had shut off all the fuel lines, pumps and disconnected the battery so if we had to get in the bus it wouldn’t have a chance of catching fire.

The bus driver asked, “Is it safe to get in the bus with the airbrake lines severed?”

“I called in to your mechanic. He told me this model requires air pressure to release the brakes. I hit the emergency release to dump the rest of the air from the lines to be sure it set the brakes. They are sending a tow truck from your yard to come pick it up. You won’t have any heat, but it is out of the wind if you have to take shelter. Watch out for the wind though. It can get really gusty down through here. Shouldn’t blow you over, but we have had trucks blown off the road on this stretch of highway.”

When there was big gust of wind with sleet in it, the tow truck driver rushed off toward his truck. I had been watching closely for cars or trucks on the road. There wasn’t a single one. Not even places that had been warmed up by one passing by recently.

Ok. Something is definitely going on. There is no way there isn’t someone driving on this road. We had cars going both ways until right before the tires blew. Now nothing.

I took out my phone to text Paula, Steve, and Jane again.

“It looks like someone shot both tires out on the right side with big bullets. We were told that parts fell off when they lifted the bus up. We got on this road because of accident on interstate. I haven’t seen a single cars or truck for a while. It is a four-lane stretch with a big wide turn lane,” I sent them.

I got back, “Response team coming from D.C. was stopped by fake roadblock. Told bridge collapsed. Team from north slowed by funeral procession. All aircraft grounded.”

“Someone took over all of the satellites that can look at this area. Locked out the alphabet agencies. Bridge was demolished professionally, not collapsed. Access roads on north being blocked a mile ahead of funeral procession. Main road blocked one mile north of bus. Looking for alternatives,” Paula texted.

I expected another text or something, but there was nothing.

Maybe they are busy trying to figure this out.

Then I heard different kids cussing and complaining that they lost cell service seconds later. All of the carriers had dropped. No bars, nothing. I wished I had kept the heavily modified phone I had to dump after being picked up by Tia and Tara’s father for questioning. I was sure it would have a signal two miles down inside a nuclear bomb shelter dug out of solid granite. Closing my eyes I started looking at the power poles along the side of the road to see if the phone cables on them had any energy. They were dead. I had myself only see the power lines and then tried to trace them to where they were cut. The wires stopped at the demolished bridge to the south. To the north they just ended at a transformer connected to nothing.

Makes some weird sense. Someone going to this much trouble has to make it look believable to anyone coming out to investigate everything later. If the bridge is gone and power lines near it got pulled off the pole, then maybe that happened when the bridge collapsed.

“Fuck it is cold,” one of the guys wearing jeans said.

Another told him, “It is your own fault man. They said wear these clothes just in case something happened where we had to be in the cold. You didn’t wear yours. Serves you right.”

As the boy got teased by the kids around him, it started to snow. No one seemed that concerned at the few flurries or that the flakes were the size of quarters. Well that was until the wind picked way up right as the snow started coming down so fast that it was piling up against the sides of our shoes. Within minutes someone said this was a full whiteout condition.

The teachers and chaperones snapped out of their fog so start rounding up us to get us on the bus. Every passing minute the snow seemed to be coming down even faster with the wind blowing over the bus at us. Everyone, but me, was fighting to get to the bus, fighting hard to gain every single inch against the wind. Out of nowhere it hit me that there was a real risk for kids on the trip dying in this blizzard. Making it so that I was only seeing each snowflake as a tiny, nearly transparent white pixel in my goggles, I started looking around to see where everyone was.

Not surprisingly, the male jocks were already kicking back on the bus. The smaller guys and about half the girls were still fighting their way to the bus. Most were getting there alright. A good twenty feet back I saw a group of boys and girls just standing around. All of them would have been the “popular” kids in eighth grade. In high school they were just annoying. Turns out that in my high school, being snotty, self-important, and mean to everyone outside their clique didn’t make them popular with anyone but themselves. The biggest part of the group was about five feet ahead of the rest. No way were any of them going to make it to the bus at the slow pace they were moving.

None of them went to my middle school, but I knew their type. Not a single one of them wanted to be bothered to do more than the minimum required in gym class to pass. Gave the least possible effort in school required to keep their parents off their backs.

Fortunately, for them, there were two girls from the softball team coming towards me a lot more easily than most of the other kids.

“Hey. I know they are assholes, but some girls and guys are way back behind us that won’t be able to get to the bus themselves, even if they could be bothered to even try. I know I am too scrawny to do much to help them, but I have to try anyway. My goggles are blocking most of the light reflecting from the snow so I can see them pretty well. Not a one of them are wearing any of the snow gear except maybe the jacket,” I told the two girls.

They took my offered hands without saying anything. I let them think it was the wind at our backs that let us get all the way to the group so quickly. When I reached for one of the “popular” girl’s hands she pulled it away like mine was diseased.

“Get your hands off me you fucktard steampunk wannabe creep,” she screamed at me. “Go hold hands with one of your dyke sluts.”

You can’t slap the shit out of her David no matter how much she really deserves it, or needs it to knock some sense into her.

Getting right up in her face, I yelled out, “If you don’t get your stupid, bottle blonde, stuck up, snotty, unpopular bitch ass on the bus you are going to freeze to death out here. If the animals don’t get you then maybe they will find your corpse sometime in the spring. Look. I don’t want anything to do with any of you annoying fuckers either, but I damn sure aren’t going to leave you out here to die. I would slap some sense into you, but there is no way I can carry your ass to the bus. You aren’t ruining my trip because no one in your family every beat your blindingly white ass until it was a deep, hot red whenever you really deserved it. So get the fuck over yourself already. If I wasn’t wearing these goggles, no one would even know you were still all the way out here. You do know that your boyfriend doesn’t even give a shit about you. He left you to fend for yourself.”

I didn’t wait for her to respond as I grabbed her hand so that my pinkie and ring finger were locked behind her wrist. My other hand grabbed the nearest hand I saw, which turned out to be a guy, and pulled. I knew the sudden steel grip I had on them both was definitely enhanced by the place in my head. The two softball players had yelled out toward the bus for their teammates. Two more girls followed the sounds of their teammate’s voices to find us. Both of the girls that showed up were the biggest of any of us. With them pushing the snotty snobs from behind, I was able to pull much harder than my scrawny body could do before I was hit by lightning. I don’t think anyone was even going to question it. Still, I needed to have it seem explainable to them. Carefully I also pushed just enough energy through two I was pulling to get them over to the bus. It didn’t stop their muscles from hurting; it just made sure they had barely enough energy to keep moving to the bus. When we finally inside the bus I let both of their hands go. The girl who I had to scream at went down a few rows to the boy I was sure was her boyfriend.

“As as as as as sssssss huh huh huh huh huh oh oh oh oh ol ole,” she said through chattering teeth. “Luh luh luh luh le le le le ef ef ef ef ef ef ef eft muh muh muh muh muh muh e e e e e e. Suh suh suh suh kuh kuh kuh kuh kuh kuh oh oh old. Wa wa wa wa wa wa war war war muh muh muh e e e e. Uh uhp puh puh puh”

She tried to say something else, but it wouldn’t come out. I saw her kick a leg over the boys to sit in his lap. As soon as the cold and wet from her legs permeated through his jeans, he pushed her away.

“God damn! You fucking are cold and wet! Get the hell off me. Come back when you are hot and wet,” he said continuing to push her away from him.

She had really been shaking when she got up and then just stopped.

Out of nowhere a message appeared on my goggles, “HYPOTHERMIC. DANGER. NEED BODY HEAT TO WARM UP. SKIN ON SKIN.”

I don’t know if it got pushed into my head by the “man in the machine” or I leaned it when I was ignoring everyone. Wherever it came from, I was working without having to think about anything I was doing. I grabbed the girl from behind and pulling her down into a row with empty seats. I kept right on moving to where one the extremely obese girls from school was sitting. She was covered in sweat, and had pulled off her jacket and ski pants, now only wearing panties and a long sweat soaked t-shirt.

I guess they didn’t have thermals in her size.

I grabbed the big girls ski pants and jacket as I hurried to where I had pushed the freezing girl into a seat. Still not processing even why I was doing it, in seconds I was standing there completely naked, my clothes tossed onto a seat on the other side of the aisle. I turned the girl to have her back to the window as I started fighting to get the girl’s soaked coat off. The whole time she babbled incoherently.

“What the fuck is that freak doing?” someone yelled out as I felt a hand grab my arm.

There was no way anyone on this bus had the strength to pull me away, or stop me, so I kept working to get the girl naked.

“She is hypothermic and will die if her body is not warmed up soon. Her boyfriend tossed her aside when she made him cold and no one else looks to want to help her, so I am,” I said hoping it was loud enough for someone to hear.

Someone did hear me. Hands came over the seats from the front, and back, to help me get the girl’s jacket off.

Damn dumb blonde airhead is only wearing a fucking thin tank top and no bra?

Her tank top was pulled off by whoever was pulling her jacket away. The extra-large jacket I had grabbed was being put behind her as I roughly jerked her skirt and panties down.