1
The slide of the gun was pulled and released in one quick motion, giving its distinctive metallic sound as it snapped back and automatically chambered the first bullet.
Outside the car, another snowfall was heavily dotting the car’s windshield and hood as well as the ground around them; a pothole-ridden parking lot, partially illuminated by the bright interior lights of a convenience store.
Scanning the area revealed an empty street, and on the far side, away from the road, a small one-story veterans’ hall—dark and empty, surrounded by an undisturbed snowy field. Behind them, a single streetlamp, two blocks away, provided a shower of light upon a tiny building, the town’s only bus stop.
“Let’s go!”
“Wait!” A nineteen-year-old sporting a dark ski mask stared through the back window toward the stop. A distant cloud of billowing heat rose from the tail end of the bus. Only the back half was visible on the other side of the small building. Between them, thousands of snowflakes drifted gently down from the darkened sky above, some passing through the glow from the distant streetlamp as they fell.
“What the hell are you waiting for?”
“The bus, man!”
“So what?”
“Wait till it leaves!”
“What? Hell no! Go now!”
“What if they see me?”
The driver, another teenager, glanced back and shook his head. “Ain’t no one gonna see you at this distance. Just go!”
The first teenager hesitated, contemplating, before his adrenaline finally won out.
“Fine! Turn the car and get ready.”
* * *
The warmth inside the store was welcoming. Beneath a ceiling of old fluorescent lights, most still working, the modest store packed a surprising amount of shelf space within its meager walls, despite some remaining empty.
Near the front, a television was affixed to the wall just below the ceiling, displaying the local news.
Behind the counter, the cashier smiled politely at the woman and small boy before him while bagging their items. Two bottles of water, a bag of potato chips, and a tiny box of painkillers.
The man, presumably the owner, repeated the amount displayed on the register and took the money without comment, briefly noting the second customer in line behind the woman, who was patiently watching the TV overhead, and carrying a small four-pack of beer.
The man in line looked quietly at the mayhem playing out across the large screen. Thousands had gathered in downtown Philadelphia to protest. Signs bobbed up and down while throngs of people chanted and marched forward in a surging wave of anger.
The picture moved, panning to another section of street, where perhaps a dozen had descended upon an empty police car, beating and smashing its side windows while others climbed on top to stomp and crush the vehicle’s red-and-blue lights. A Molotov cocktail was thrown against the side of a nearby building and exploded into flame, causing the mob to roar and cheer.
The customer in line was the only one watching, silent and staring. Neither the owner nor the woman and her son bothered to look up.
It was almost a daily occurrence. Citizens rising up in anger. Yelling, marching, and destroying. This one appeared to be a crowd of city workers furious over labor conditions. The night before was in downtown New York.
His thoughts were interrupted by a chime when the outside door was suddenly pushed open, followed by a brief blast of frigid air. And with it, a young man with wide brown eyes staring through two large holes in his ski mask.
Behind the counter, the owner glanced up momentarily and then froze when a gun appeared in the hand of the teenager, who briskly scanned the store for anyone else, but found only the three in front of him.
Noting the look on the owner’s face, the woman turned and gasped, clumsily stumbling backward in an effort to shield her son. The thug’s eyes narrowed and focused past her.
Mere seconds had passed when behind the thug a bottle was retrieved from its carton and smashed down over the hand gripping the gun, breaking the bone in an audible crack.
The masked teenager screamed and dropped the gun. In a panic, he scrambled backward and lost his balance, falling to the floor. The eyes behind the mask were wild and changed their focus from searching for the gun to searching for an exit. Whirling around to find the glass doors behind him, the teenager immediately pushed forward and lunged outside, on one good hand and both knees.
Over the icy concrete, he struggled to his feet and bolted clumsily for the waiting car. Flinging its door open, he jumped in, screaming.
Inside, the cashier retrieved a revolver from a shelf below the counter, then, after watching the car rocket from the parking lot, turned to his male customer with a stunned expression. The man was still holding the bottle in his hand, while the woman at the counter stood immobile, still clutching her son behind her.
Without a word, the man placed the beer bottle back into the cardboard holder and glanced at the gun on the floor. Bending over, he picked it up, then stepped past the trembling woman to place both items on the counter and retrieve his wallet.
He held out a bill to find the owner staring at him incredulously, before simply shaking his head and motioning for him to take the item.
The customer nodded in appreciation and picked the carton back up, leaving the gun on the counter. Without comment, he turned and pushed through the glass doors, back into the snowy night air.
* * *
The first bottle was empty by the time he reached the stop. With crunching snow beneath every step, he slid it back into the carton and opened another.
Upon reaching the idling bus, he gently tapped the base of his second bottle against the vehicle’s tall glass door, which was promptly opened from the inside.
The driver frowned from his seat. “No open containers.”
The man, sporting a heavy two-day shadow, stared at the driver and nodded. He scanned the area surrounding the tiny station and found a trash can. He approached it, finished the second beer, and discarded both empty bottles.
He returned and looked to the driver for approval, and the driver motioned him up the steps.
The last to reboard were the mother and son, the woman staring in silence as they retook their seats.
The man looked out his window, into the darkness at the shadowed outlines of their surroundings. One of the houses on the far side of the street was still illuminated by what looked to be a living room window. The rest of the buildings lay dark and appeared as muted shapes obscured beyond the increasingly dense snowfall.
He paid little attention. His thoughts were elsewhere. On his destination … when he was interrupted in his seat.
It was the woman. The mother. Of the boy, who was perhaps seven or eight and peering cautiously at them over his seat’s headrest.
The woman was standing over him, appearing flustered. Unsure of what to say.
“I just,” she stammered, “wanted to say thank you.”
The man’s expression was wholly unconcerned, but he nodded receptively while the driver put the bus into gear and slowly accelerated.
“No problem.”
2
The trip through southern Minnesota was met by even harsher weather, blanketing the landscape in thick white snow, the only exception being the dark tire tracks directly in front of them, traversing the lonely two-lane highway before disappearing ahead into a flurry of white flakes, all brightly illuminated by the bus’s headlights.
The driver steadily slowed as the visibility decreased, and he was barely able to see the headlights of oncoming traffic as they approached and sped past. Grumbling under his breath at their recklessness, the older man leaned forward with both hands firmly gripping the oversized steering wheel. His old eyes intent and undeterred.
Before long, several faint red lights appeared through the bitter gale as a square, boxed pattern, gradually revealing the multiple taillights of a large semitruck as the bus steadily closed in.
The driver glanced into his overhead mirror at his handful of passengers, all lulled to sleep by the bus’s interior heat and the powerful vehicle’s slow, methodic rumble.
Traffic began to move, and the bus began to accelerate again, passing a neon-green sign that read NARROW BRIDGE AHEAD.
Even from a distance, it was clear the driver of the oncoming vehicle was traveling too fast for the conditions. Too fast to notice the road abruptly narrowing at the aging girder bridge. Unaware or unconcerned that, unlike asphalt, metal bridges could not trap heat. Instead, the girders iced rapidly in extreme weather, pulling heat from what little asphalt there was and allowing snow to thicken over its surface. Just enough to prevent traction above a certain weight and speed.
It was the tires from the oncoming SUV that met those conditions under a sudden stomp of the brakes. Causing the vehicle to slide—suddenly and uncontrollably—across the narrow road’s double yellow line and into the lane of the approaching semitruck directly ahead of the bus.
The truck’s driver was as crisp as one could expect at three in the morning. Reacting reflexively, he attempted to remain in his lane by forcing the nose of the truck through the diminishing space left between the sliding SUV and the bridge’s right-side railing.
Almost instantly, the semitruck’s cargo trailer pitched violently, causing a slow-motion slide across the width of the entire bridge, and leaving no escape for the large bus immediately behind him.
In an instant, the bus driver was nearly standing on his brake, in an uncontrolled slide as he fell back into his seat and rapidly pumped his foot up and down upon the pedal, applying quick, repeated jolts of momentary traction. It was the proper braking procedure, but it was not enough.
At thirty-five miles per hour, the sheer weight and momentum of the passenger bus could not be stopped, and it plowed headlong into the cargo trailer. Smashing into it as though it were a brick wall, and the bus a slow and unstoppable train. The giant windshield was obliterated on impact, and the rear of the trailer shoved violently forward and through the bridge’s protective side railing.
Inside the bus, the passengers screamed as they were jolted from their slumber into a scene of panic and chaos. Two near the front shrieked at the swirling carnage in front of them before a blast of bright sparks and shattered windshield imploded, raining a curtain of pebbles over the first several rows of seats in glittering destruction.
Then came the sound. Through the destroyed windshield came a thunderous bang as the bus continued its violent slide, followed by the screeching of heavy metal of thick girders as they twisted, snapped, and finally tore loose.
The giant vehicle stopped, and for a moment teetered over the edge.
All breathing stopped. Briefly.
Before the bus’s two front wheels gave way and eased forward over the edge. Causing the undercarriage to scrape mercilessly over the bridge’s asphalt and slowly extend out into open air. Sliding, gradually at first … then quickly, and then all at once, plummeting just over twenty feet to the frozen river below.
3
The screaming resumed. And continued throughout the fall. Through the bus’s entire plunge and sudden impact, where it was met by an explosion of ice and water through the missing front windshield.
The driver, strapped in his seat, was pinned by the force of the icy water. And behind him, horrified passengers screamed at the wall of oncoming water before them.
The first half of the bus was filled in seconds by near-frozen water swirling with glass, while just outside, a thick layer of ice from the frozen river could now be seen surrounding the vehicle. It scraped against the glass until several windows shattered inward, creating a second deluge into the bus’s interior.
The roiling water reached the mother and son, who were both paralyzed and buckled where they sat, only beginning to fumble with their tangled belts when besieged by the river water.
Able to free herself, the mother turned to search for her son—desperate and frantic—only to see him immediately disappear from view.
She stood up, screaming his name, and quickly found him in the arms of the man from the store, who now pulled the boy up and over the headrest as if he weighed nothing, thrusting him up the rising floorboard toward the back of the bus. He then grabbed the woman and did the same, pushing her forward in front of him and yelling over her shoulder at an older couple struggling at the rear.
“Get one of those windows open! Above the ice!”
The older man, perhaps in his sixties, stared back in panic. As if trying to understand.
“The window! Get it open! Now!”
The man’s eyes focused and he jumped, using each headrest to pull himself up the narrow aisle until he reached the last row of seats and lunged over both seat cushions on the left-hand side to grab the two bright red metal handles. He yanked as hard as he could, then pushed.
Nothing.
He pushed again, harder. Watching as the ice outside crept insidiously from window to window. Closing in on the same window he was trying to open.
“Other side!”
The stranger behind the mother and son continued shouting as he pushed forward, even while they repeatedly slipped and fell back into him.
The older man now raced to the opposite side and yanked the window handles up. This time throwing his weight against the glass and sending the large pane flying out.
“Go!” the stranger ordered. “Get out and help pull them through!”
The older man didn’t hesitate. He scrambled out and onto the river’s frozen surface. Slipping at first, he managed to spin around and grab his wife’s outstretched hands.
Copyright © 2023 by Michael C. Grumley
