For a moment, the bus was very quiet. It seemed to be lying on one side, the right side, her side. The light was not very good and the air was thick and still and full of the smell of burned rubber.
She tried to move and found that she still could, which caused a surge of excitement. Her body was still working, she was still alive. She pushed up slowly and heard jingling and ripping sounds. Then, a boy fell onto the curtain and jammed his knee into her side. Through the taut veil of plastic above her, she saw another boy's denim-clad butt and a vague, contorted face. Will,she thought, and with a grunt, pushed up against the body, but could not move it.
“Please, get off,” she demanded, her voice muffled.
Stella was in pain. She thought for a minute she was going to panic, but she closed her eyes and made that go away. She could not bring her hand around to feel her shoulder, but she thought it might be bleeding, and her blouse seemed to be ripped. She could feel gravel or something sharp against her bare skin.
Outside, she heard some voices, men talking, one man yelling. They seemed far away. Then a door squealed open. The knee on her chest drew up and a foot came down hard on her ankle, pressing it into the frame of the seat in front. She screamed; that really hurt.
“Sorry,” a boy said, and the foot was lifted. She saw shadows moving over her, clumsy, dazed, pressing against the plastic curtain. Will's face seemed to blur and fade, and he was gone. The curtain lay lightly around her. Something sighed, a brake cylinder maybe, or a boy. She rolled enough to finally touch her shoulder and lifted her hand against the curtain to see a bit of blood there, not a lot. Light filtered around the seat back behind her. Someone had opened the bus's rear emergency door, and maybe a ceiling hatch as well.
“We'd better get you out of there,” a man called congenially. “Everybody hear me?”
Stella lay on her back now against the gravel and the dirt and the side of the bus. She rolled over completely and did a kind of knee-up, arm-up between the seats, which were jammed together closer than they had been before the crash. A feathery, leafy branch somehow got into her mouth and she spit it out, then finished wriggling until she was on her knees.
She had cuts all over, but none of them were bleeding a lot. Stella flailed against the plastic curtain until someone pulled it away with a jingle of hooks.
“Who's in here? LaShawna? You in here?” A man's voice, deep and distinct.
And someone else, “Celia? Hugh Davis? Johnny? Johnny Lee?”
“It's me,” Stella said. “I'm here.”
Then she heard LaShawna call out. The girl began crying. “My leg is hurt,” she wailed.
“We're going to get you, LaShawna. Be brave. Help is coming.”
Someone cursed loud and long at someone else.
“You just back off. You stay away from here. This is horrible, but you back off.”
“You drove us the fuck off the road!”
“You went into a skid.”
“Well, what the hell else could I do? There were cars all over the road. Jesus, we need an ambulance. Call an ambulance.”
Stella wondered if perhaps she should just stay where she was for the time being, in the half-dark, and nobody knowing she was there.
Suddenly, someone was pulling on her arm, tugging her out from between the seats and into the space between the top of the seats and the roof of the bus, now a kind of hallway with windows on the floor. It was Will. He crouched and peered at her like a frazzle-haired monkey, his face smeared with blood.
“We can go now,” he said.
“Where?” Stella asked.
“It's people coming for us. Humans. They want to rescue us. But we can leave.”
“We have to help.”
“What can we do?” Will asked.
“We have to help.”
For a passing moment, she wanted to smear her hand on his face. Her ears felt hot.
Will shook his head and scrambled in a half-hunch to the front of the bus. He looked for a moment as if he were just going to climb out through a window, but then two pairs of arms stretched down, and he glanced back at Stella. A sour look came to his face.
“There's a girl back there; she's okay,” he said. “Take care of her, but leave me alone.”
Stella sat by the side of the long two-lane highway with her face in her hands. She had banged her head pretty hard in the wreck and now it throbbed. She peeked between her fingers at the adults walking around the bus. About twenty minutes had passed since the crash.
Will lay beside her, hand tossed casually over his eyes as if he were taking a nap. He had ripped his pants and a long scratch showed through. Otherwise, they both seemed to be okay.
Celia and LaShawna and the three other boys were already sitting in the backs of two cars, not the escort cars. Both of the escort cars had run off into a culvert and were pretty banged up—crumpled grilles, steam hissing, trunk lids popped.
She thought she heard the two security guards on the other side of the bus, and possibly the bus driver as well.
Parked by the side of the road about a hundred yards behind were two law enforcement vehicles. She could not see the insignia but their emergency lights were blinking. Why weren't they helping out, getting ready to take the children back to the school?
Would there be an EMAC van coming soon, or an ambulance?
A black man in a rumpled brown suit approached Stella and Will. “The other girls and boys are pretty badly bruised, but they're going to be fine. LaShawna is fine. Her leg is okay, thank God.”
Stella peered up at him doubtfully. She did not know who he was.
“I'm John Hamilton,” he said. “I'm LaShawna's daddy. We've got to leave here. You have to come with us.”
Will sat up, his cheeks almost mahogany from the combination of sun and defiance. “Why?” he said. “Are you taking us to another school?”
“We have to get you to a doctor for checkups. The closest safe place is about fifty miles from here.” He pointed back down the road. “Not back to the school. My daughter will never go there again, not while I'm alive.”
“What's Sandia?” Stella asked John, on impulse.
“It's some mountains,” John said, with a startled expression, and swallowed something that must have been bitter. “Come on, let's get going. I think there's room.”
A third car pulled up, and John talked to the driver, a middle-aged woman with large turquoise rings on her fingers and brilliant orange hair. They seemed to know each other.
John came back. He was irritated.
“You'll go with her,” he said. “Her name is Jobeth Hayden. She's a mom, too. We thought her daughter might be here, but she isn't.”
“You ran the buses off the road?” Stella asked.
“We tried to slow down the lead car and take you off the bus. We thought we could do it safely. I don't know how it happened, but one of their cars spun out and the bus plowed into it and everyone went off the road. Cars all over. We're damned lucky.”
Will had retrieved his battered and torn paperback book from the dirt and clutched it in his hand. He peered at the rip in his jeans, and the scratch. Then he stared back down the road at the cars with the emergency lights. “I'll just go by myself.”
“No, son,” John Hamilton said firmly, and he suddenly seemed very large. “You'll die out here, and you won't hitch any rides because they'll know what you are.”
“They'll arrest me,” Will said, pointing at the blinking lights.
“No, they won't. They're from New Mexico.”
Hamilton did not explain why that was significant. Will stared at Hamilton and his face wrinkled in either anger or frustration.
“We're responsible,” Hamilton said quietly. “Please, come with us.” Even more quietly, focusing on Will, his voice deep, almost sleepy, Hamilton said again, “Please.”
Will stumbled as he took a step, and John helped him to the car with the orange-haired woman, Jobeth.
On the way, they came close to the red Buick that carried Celia, Felice, LaShawna, and two of the boys. LaShawna leaned back in the rear seat, in the shadow of the car roof, eyes closed. Felice sat upright beside her. Celia stuck her head out the window. “What-KUK a ride!” she crowed. A white bandage looped around her head. She had blood on her scalp and in her hair and she clutched a plastic bottle of 7-Up and a sandwich. “I guess no more school, huh?”