My chest hurts. The pain is the first thing I become aware of as reality crashes into me, every breath I draw an endless torture. Bright yellow light, so hot it burns the back of my eyes, keeps me squinting in suspense. My hands curl, sharp points scraping the inside of my palm, drawing blood. I can feel the warm liquid tracing rivers down my forearm. It takes me a moment to realize that it had been my own nails that had committed the wound. Struggling into a sitting position, I reach with clumsy arms to wipe the sleep from my blurred vision. My movements are heavy and discoordinated, my motions unruly and not entirely my own. It was as if each part of me had a mind of its own that I couldn’t quite discern, each movement a jerky action that ripped at exposed tendons in my arms and legs.

Despite rubbing viciously at my eyes, my vision remained foggy and each of my senses seemed to work at only part of their intended functionality and in no relation to one another! Even my thoughts felt unusually cloudy, as if I were looking through a fairground mirror where everything was distorted and unnatural. Something was very, very wrong with me. Trying to speak, I open my mouth wide and exhale. No words, only a dragged out, low, harsh to my ears, grating, moan escaped from my parted lips. Joints creaking, I stagger to a sitting position and leaning down to escape the nausea let out another horrified grunt, this time caused by the horrific appearance of my own hands. The pointed nails and torn at pasty skin fascinated me almost as much as the open veins and visible muscles pumping up my arms did. What happened to me?

Lifting my eyes, I notice the man standing huddled in one corner. His face was streaked by tears and he was shaking increasingly, every twitching spasm of his limbs growing increasingly in frequency and in violence. His face was pale, although not as sickly as my own gray pallor; I may not be able to see my reflection on the stone walls but if my hands and bare chest are anything to go by I suppose I must look rather frightening. The man in the white coat uttered a high pitched squeaking noise from the back of his throat as I raised one disproportionately long arm in his direction. “Stay away from me!” He howled, dashing away to the closed wooden door. “Keep away! Keep away you-” he tripped and fell to the floor in a jumble of limbs, “you MONSTER!” Finished speaking, he charged up a flight of stairs as I dragged myself behind.

I don't know why I followed him. Perhaps I just couldn’t stand being in a room by myself. Alone with only my own dreadful company.

Finally out of the stairwell, I lumber down one hall after another looking into room after room and pushing open heavy oak doors. At last, I found him sprawled out on a bed, hands dropped dramatically over his face and hair spiky with sweat. Standing over him, I trace my hands as gently as I possibly could across his beautiful facial features. Tracing his bushy white eyebrows and clear wrinkled skin. My hand next to his pale, fair skin shows to my disagreement just how yellow and crumbling my own complexion really is. My hand jerks away from him, cutting a long gash across his cheek. The man in the white coat awoke to my startled expression inches from his own and blood dripping from my tapered fingertips. An unearthly howl escaped his mouth, a truly wild cry of unbridled fear. Again, he staggered away. Out of sight, yet not gone from mind.

Before I could take the first step towards following him out the entryway and into the courtyard, I spotted a terrible face glaring at me from the other end of the room. The figure had stooped shoulders and a hooked nose. One arm seemed to hang lower than the other and it's greasy hair clung in unattractive clumps to the side of its misshapen, shrunken head. Springing back out of fright, I tried to hide behind the bed, ducked down to avoid the horrible thing’s haunting glare. To my surprise, it copied my movements down to the expression and that is when I realized.

The vinyl seat of the school bus vibrated at a frequency that seemed specifically engineered to make my uterus claw its way out of my body.

I pressed my metal travel mug harder against my lower stomach, desperately hoping the trapped heat of the hot chocolate would penetrate through my hoodie and numb the white-hot spikes radiating across my abdomen. It wasn’t working. Another wave of cramps cascaded through me, and I leaned my forehead against the cold, smudged window, watching the blur of pine trees slide past. 

I just wanted to be home. I wanted a heating pad, three ibuprofen, and twelve hours of uninterrupted sleep. Instead, I was stuck on school sponsored fieldtrip, surrounded by the ambient noise of a dozen other kids from varying grades, the rhythmic thump of someone’s music leaking from their headphones, the high-pitched giggles of two middle schoolers three rows up, and the quiet crunching of an elementary kid enjoying a bag of potato chips.

I closed my eyes, trying to breathe through the pain. Inhale for four. Hold. Exhale for four. It was going to be a long, long day.

Then, the world tilted.

My stomach slammed violently into the hard plastic armrest as the bus swerved, tires shrieking a horrific, high-pitched protest against the asphalt.

"Woah!" someone yelled from the back.

The travel mug flew from my hands, scalding hot chocolate splashing across my jeans, but I didn’t register the pain. The bus fishtailed violently. Bags slid down the aisle, shoes squeaked against the floor, and the giggles from the front instantly transformed into sharp, terrified screams.

I gripped the edges of my seat, fingers tight enough to puncture vinyl covering. 

All I could see through the cracked, grime-streaked windshield was reality warping into a nightmare, as the massive yellow hood of the bus dove sharply, violently, off the crumbling asphalt. It dipped like the bow of a sinking ship, aiming straight into the maw of a steep, densely wooded ravine. Trees that had been a distant blur a second ago suddenly rushed forward, looming like jagged teeth.

The brakes, I thought, a sudden, cold dread slithering through my gut and wrapping around my ribs like an icy fist. Why isn't he hitting the brakes?

My eyes darted toward the driver’s seat, but gravity was already betraying us. We weren't slowing down. If anything, the pull of gravity down the incline was dragging us faster, the engine roaring in a strained, mechanical panic as we gained momentum.

Then came the impact. A deafening, metallic crunch echoed through the very bones of the chassis as the undercarriage slammed hard into solid rock. The violent jolt rattled my teeth and threw me against the frame. Right beside my head, the thick window pane buckled. A second later it shattered into a glittering spiderweb of silver fractures before exploding inward with a concussive pop.

There was no escaping it. Shards of glass rained down like a beautiful, lethal hailstorm, cutting through the dusty air.

The world tilted on its axis. The universe spun in a chaotic blur of green foliage, yellow metal, and gray sky. The sickening, low groan of metal tearing against metal vibrated through the floorboards. For one agonizing, suspended heartbeat, my stomach leaped into my throat, accompanying the horrifying, weightless sensation of airborne suspension.

And then, with the force of a falling mountain, everything went black.

The silence came first.

It wasn’t a peaceful quiet; it was a heavy, suffocating stillness. My lungs expanded, dragging in air that tasted distinctly of burning rubber. Every square inch of my body throbbed with a dull, echoing ache, but the sharpest point was the agonizing, localized fire blooming in my lower abdomen.

I blinked, my vision swimming through a heavy haze of gray smoke and floating dust motes. The world was sideways. I was no longer sitting; I was jammed awkwardly against the reinforced metal wall of the bus, my legs tangled in the twisted frame of the seat ahead of me.

Then, audio snapped back into reality. A high-pitched wail broke the silence. I craned my neck to find its source. After a few seconds of twisting, I caught sight of the tiny first-grade boy who always sat near the front, screaming in pure, unadulterated shock. Above his cries, the sharp, chaotic bickering of twins Chloe and Zoey cut through the smoke. "You stepped on my arm! Get off me!" 

"I can't see! Chloe, I can't breathe!"

"Everybody stay exactly where you are!" A sharp, authoritative voice cut through the panic from the middle of the bus, only a few rows behind me. It belonged to an older girl, a senior I’d seen in the hallways but never spoken to.

Already on her feet, she balanced precariously on the tilted aisle. A nasty gash was bleeding near her hairline, but her hands were steady as she reached down to haul a crying elementary kid out of a crumpled row. "Niall! Leon! I need eyes on the back. Who's moving?"

"I'm up," a second voice hollered in response. A loud curse accompanied a heavy thud as Leon, a junior I recognised from varsity sports,  shoved his way down the mutilated aisle. "Niall? Niall, talk to me."

"I'm good, man. I'm okay," a boy’s voice, Niall’s, choked out, coughing through the dust. "I’m trying the emergency door; the back door. It's stuck."

I shifted my weight, attempting to free myself from the vise-like metal pinning me to the chair, frantically reaching for my backpack, which was wedged beneath the crumpled vinyl seat in front of me. I pulled at the straps, my fingers trembling, scraping my knuckles against torn metal until the bag popped free. I zipped open the front pocket, my heart hammering against my ribs.

My small floral zipper pouch was there. I opened it. Four pads. Three tampons. That was it. That was all I had for what was supposed to be a six hour bus ride, with supplies waiting on the other end.

"Hey. You're Brooklyn, right?"

I flinched, snapping the backpack shut so hard the zipper bit into my thumb.

Looming over me was Sadie. I’d noticed her around school before, she was in the year above me and always wore the same vintage denim jacket.  Now that jacket was torn at the shoulder, and a smudge of black grease was smeared across her cheekbone, but her dark eyes were piercingly clear. She clutched at the hand of her brother, a little elementary-aged boy, named Toby.

As I struggled to free my legs she let go of Toby's hand and stepped down into my crumpled row, steadying herself against the metal wall as she leaned across me. Before I could stammer out a protest, she grasped my ankle and guided it from between the seats.

"The metal edges in here are sharp," Sadie said, her voice low and a little shaky. She looked directly into my eyes, her face mere inches from my own. "Be careful what you lean against."

My heart did a violent, erratic flip that had absolutely nothing to do with the adrenaline of the crash.

"I—thanks," I breathed, my voice quavering.

"Can you stand?" she asked, offering me a calloused hand which I took, pressing my arm against my throbbing abdomen as she hauled me out of my seat's wreckage.

"We need to get out," Sadie continued, stating the obvious, turning her head toward the front of the bus where Jean was trying to force the crumpled frame of the main door open. "The engine is hissing, and we're resting at one hell of an angle. Brooklyn, do you have your bag? Good. Let’s help Jean."

The emergency door didn't give way with a clean pop; it groaned, a sickening shriek of tortured steel as Leon threw his entire varsity-built shoulder into the frame. On the third hit, the latch finally sheared off, the door flying open, and hitting the uneven ground outside with an echoing thud, letting in a sudden, violent rush of freezing mountain air that instantly began to chase away the choking gray smoke.

"Go, go, go!" Jean barked from the now clear exit, one hand pressed tightly against the bleeding gash on her forehead. "Big kids grab a little kid. Don't go back for your stuff, it's not worth it."

The evacuation proceeded as an uncoordinated blur of panicked adrenaline. Leon scooped up little Sam, who was still crying silently, clutching his jacket like a lifeline. Niall took charge of the bickering twins, Chloe and Zoey, practically throwing them from the bus in his desperation to get them safely away.

Sadie kept her hand firmly locked around Toby’s wrist, but her eyes darted back to me. "Brooklyn, stay right behind us. Keep your hand on my shoulder if you think you’re going to lose your balance."

Nodding numbly, I clutched my floral pouch inside my jacket pocket like a talisman, my other hand clinging to the strap of my tiny backpack. 

Abdomen throbbing, I scrambled over the overturned seats. The angle of the bus was alarming; every time a piece of metal groaned underneath my uggs, it felt like the entire chassis was going to slip another fifty feet along the  jagged incline on which we rested.

When I finally hit the dirt outside, I staggered haphazardly forward, desperate to be as far as possible from the wreckage.

Dense, dark pine trees crowded the steep, downward heading slope on my right. Up above, past the jagged line of the cliff we had just plunged over, the mountain pass highway seemed impossibly distant. No way to climb back up.

Straightening desperately, I listened for sirens, looked for flashing lights, anything but the sound of the dying bus engine and other kids' desperate cries.

"Everyone over by that flat boulder!" A command rang through the clearing, the voice echoing in my ears even after they’d stopped talking. 

“Come on, everyone,” Jean added, "Sadie is right. Sit down so we can get organised. Someone should scavenge for any blankets or first-aid kits from the storage undercarriage before that engine fluid catches fire."

Sadie guided Toby to the boulder, forcing him to sit, before she turned back to face the wreckage. Her face was set in a tight, cynical expression as she regarded the steep incline we had just tumbled down.

"No one saw us go over.” She muttered to herself, sharing a look with Leon. “The wildlife center wasn’t expecting us until late tomorrow, and the hotel won’t care if we don’t show up tonight.”

Her point was clear. No one would realize anything was wrong, for a very long time.

Before I could say anything, a cry from the underside of the bus cut through the air. Niall was kneeling near the rear wheel well, his hands covered in dark, amber fluid. He looked up at Leon, his eyes like mini moons behind his soot-smeared glasses.

"Hey!" Niall hollered, his voice dropping to a tense register. "Come look at this. You guys!"

Leon’s trainers crunched over the damp, frozen shale as he jogged toward the back of the bus. I hesitated for a fraction of a second, but a dull, deep ache flared in my pelvis again, reminding me that staying stationary meant letting the cold breeze freeze my cramping muscles into one solid block of stone so, clutching at the straps of my backpack, I followed a few paces behind him.

As I hurried after the boys, I could feel Sadie’s dark eyes tracking us, her posture stiffening into an alert, cautious guard.

"What's wrong with it?" Leon asked, skidding to a halt on the loose gravel, and kneeling by  Niall’s side. "Is it going to blow or something?"

"No, it’s not explosive, it's hydraulic fluid," Niall explained, showing Leon the thick, viscous amber liquid his fingers were dripping with. "And that’s the brake reservoir,” he continued, pointing at a jumble of bent components, “it’s been totally drained. Look at the line, Leon. Look at the distribution block. It's been, like, sliced through or something."

Leon bent closer to the bus’s frame, careful to avoid touching the jagged edges. Although he blocked most of the pale morning light, I managed to squeeze in just enough to look over his shoulder. The smell of burning rubber was stronger down here, combining unpleasantly with the sharp, chemical stench of leaked oil.

My mind, upon hearing Niall’s theory, flashed instantly to Chapter Two of The Case of the Decapitated Bowler Hat. In the crime novel, Detective Andre Moore had spent over three pages examining the carriage wheels of a ruined Victorian steam coach, uttering a line I’d been enamored with enough to memorize: “Nature tears with jagged claws, Peter. Man strikes with a straight edge.”

I leaned in closer, ignoring the bite of the wind against my bare ankles where my sweatpants had ridden up, curious to see what they were looking at. 

Sure enough, dangling just above the rear axle, was the rubber brake hose. I supposed it could have been torn away by a jagged piece of granite or maybe it snapped under the pressure of the tumble, but the end of the hose was perfectly flat; it was a clean, precise, diagonal shear.

"The rocks must have sheared it when we hit the lip of the highway," Sadie offered, startling me. I hadn't realized she’d come up behind me. "We hit hard."

"I suppose it might have," Niall argued, sounding doubtful, and pointed a grease-stained finger at the metal collar where the hose met the frame. "But look at the scoring on the rubber, Sadie. This wasn't a rock. Rocks leave jagged rips and tears; I’ve seen it plenty of times at my mother’s auto repair shop. This line was scored with a utility blade. I guess the pressure held just long enough for the driver to pump the brakes a few times before the line completely blew out."

Leon placed a hand on Niall’s shoulder, casting a weary glance at the middle schoolers. He lowered his voice to a careful whisper. “So… you’re saying this,” he waved a hand at the wreckage, “wasn’t an accident at all?”

At his question, I felt a suffocating weight drop into the pit of my stomach.

It wasn't an accident.

My panicked footfalls fall heavy, with each step my feet sinking deeper into the thick mud of the trench floor. Already half blinded by the condensation from my breath on the gasmask’s lenses, combined with the intense piercing sensation from where the yellow monster of a cloud had touched my bare skin, I staggered without direction following Matt’s heavy breathing. A hiss escapes my lips as the soft part of my thigh hits something sharp, the brutal throb sending me to my knees. Even through the agony I feel in my eyes and lungs as the gas begins to take effect, I can perceive the slow trickle of blood down my leg. 

Reaching out, desperate to escape the fast-closing mass of scrambling bodies surging behind me as my fellow comrades attempt to flee from the gas cloud, my hand blindly falls on the stiff face of a mutilated soldier. At some point during the scramble, I must have lost a glove because I could feel the waxy texture of his skin beneath my hand. I fell back, desperate to forget the sensation of touching those raised welts along his nose and eyes where the gas had done its damage. Staggering to my feet once more I am assaulted by the abrupt urge to tear off my gas mask and breathe normally; to escape the overwhelming claustrophobia I suddenly feel and simply allow the fight to leave me. Wrestling with instinct, I stumble forward blindly, until strong hands grasp my arms and haul me away.