Blood. There was blood all over my jeans and shirt and it was leaking through my fingertips. Before I found out what it was, I leapt (as best as I could leap under the circumstances) out from under the bus and kept on running until I hit something solid. Conan rushed to my side and nursed the side of my face that hit the tree in front of me. Well, since I had been running into squishy people all day long, eventually I would have to run into something that was actually hard.
Anyway, Conan was absolute frantic trying to find out what happened. After stuttering it out for about ten minutes, he sat down to try to understand what I had just told him. I understood his need for that comfort and I waited for him to respond. Meanwhile, I pressed my palm against my chest and held my breath, trying to slow my adrenaline rushed heart. The effort was useless, because it got a jumpstart all over again a single moment later.
Conan burst out laughing. I think that startled me more than anything else, because it came in a big, loud burst that didn’t really sound like Conan at first. Before I could make a break away from the psychotic Conan, he grabbed my arm and wrenched me forward.
“Nick, you’re an idiot,” was the first thing he said to explain himself. He let go of my arm and I just stood there, bewildered.
“What?”
“I said that you’re an idiot. It’s probably some dead animal I mowed over or one that got fried when I got the car going. That’s all.”
“But there’s just one tiny problem with your theory,” I said while meeting his gaze. Now it was my turn to make someone look like an idiot.
“Oh? What could that possibly be?” He was trying to keep his cool on, I could see, but in my opinion it wasn’t working so well. I started to pace and put on my best “Sherlock Holmes” face for the effort. Then I lost my cool.
“What kind of animal that big would crawl under the bus!” I screamed. Conan face paled and his hand went shakily to his mouth. I was trying to slow my breathing down, because I was really upset that when I realized that I could be right.
Conan turned to the bus and sighed deeply. He’d decided to go in and check for himself. I waited for him, hoping to God that he would immerge with some decapitated animal instead of a human head. The object in question sure did feel like a human head though.
While I was waiting, I had a visitor. “Brian, where have you been? I’ve been looking for you everywhere!” It had only been a few hours, but I missed Brian already so much.
He turned to face me, and that’s when I noticed that he didn’t look so good. His face was pale and worn, making him look older than he really was and the bags under his eyes looked not from one night of restless sleep, but of many. In other words, he looked rather shoddy. He looked at me rather warily and I could tell that he was less than pleased to see me on all accounts.
Before I could do more than gape at him, he had turned his attention to the scene under the car and I did as well. Conan was slowly working his way from the back, since I couldn’t remember exactly where I’d discovered the problem. I turned to look over my right shoulder and saw Brian’s eyes widen at the scene in front of him. His hand clutched his heart spastically and he started to hyperventilate on top of that.
“What’s wrong!” I screamed at his blank, pale face. My hands gripped his shoulders and I shook him with half of my might. All of it would have surely sprained his neck.
A pale blue fingernail pointed at Conan, who at the present moment, had gotten his belly caught in the under part of the car and was too occupied with pulling it out to notice our conversation. I waited for Brian to say something, but he just stood there shacking violently and generally not responding to my voice. Before I wasn’t really worried because Brian had done something similar in the past when he was really nervous for a show. He wouldn’t talk to anyone, and that’s what I thought he was doing now. But this charade had been going on much longer than usual.
“Get…” he started. When he stopped for what appeared to me as a long while, I prompted him to continue.
“Go on, get what? It’s okay, you can tell me, I can keep secrets today.” I expected at least a tiny laugh out of that, but his lips didn’t move. He just continued staring, now unblinking, at the figure squashed under the car.
Suddenly he decided to end his first sentence. “…him out…” he said, which wasn’t really an ending at all. Even so I was a little slow that morning I understood what he was trying to say. “Get Conan out!” was what he meant. I figured that it must have been something so life threatening and important that I raced to the bus at top speed. Unfortunately, I tripped over my white Nikes I had taken off before inspecting the underneath of the car and sprawling heavily to the ground below. I heard Conan scream and I knew I was too late.
The muffled sound of Brian falling to his knees caused me to turn around for a moment. His poor arm, which had been pointing to the bus the whole time, flopped to his side like a battery that suddenly quit on a discman. I turned my attention back to the bus and my battered body. I’d landed roughly on the right side of my chest and I was scraped from the navel up. My arms sprawled in front of me when I fell, but that didn’t stop the scrapes that followed the impact. Everything stung terribly, since they were all similar to rug burns, but, nevertheless, I was going to help my older friend Conan out of whatever predicament he was in. He was obviously not seriously harmed yet because he was still screaming at full power.
Plugging my ears, I stumbled forward and managed to get a hold of one of Conan’s flailing arms. Pulling him out proved to be difficult because Conan was indeed very stuck. I couldn’t see his head either, and even so I was pulling at his arm, his legs came out first. While I was struggling, I felt something grip my stomach roughly and I smiled. So Brian had decided to help me after all.
With both of us pulling using all of our might, we nearly ripped Conan’s arm off. He seemed to be okay; even so his head was soaked with blood. I checked for a wound but I couldn’t find any, therefore the blood was not his. I remembered the blood that was on my hands and realized that Conan must have discovered the dead animal under the bus. It must have been hideously mutilated because I’d seen Conan drive past flattened carcasses on the highway with barely a glance of acknowledgement. He was our bus driver, he had been for a really long time, and therefore he should be used to anything by now.
Conan’s head looked really gross with all of that animal blood all over it, so I went back inside of the bus (wary of the fact that a dead animal was decaying beneath me) and grabbed a pot full of luke warm water. I told Conan to dunk his head in it and he did, but he wouldn’t say anything to me or Brian. Come to think of it, Brian didn’t really say much either. And on top of that, he looked deep in thought, a rarer expression on him I’ve never seen. I was very tempted to stick a “Caution: Genius at work” sign on his forehead, because he really looked like he was close to boiling over the brainiac point. Still I decided not to say or do anything because Brian looked capable of breaking like a glass vase at an angle on the edge of a table.
I happened to gather a glance inside the bucket that Conan dunked his head into and nearly threw my lunch to the call of the wild. Drowned maggots were floating in dark red blood; therefore the carcass must have been quite fresh, like from the night before. I had to know what it was.
When the guys came back, I had to explain everything to them because as usual, they were clueless. The funny thing was that they didn’t look shocked at all, except when I mentioned the fact that Conan was so traumatized that he wasn’t talking to anyone. Also, I decided to ditch my earlier idea of finding out for myself what it was, because just a couple of maggots turned my stomach and that was nothing compared to a carcass chock full of fresh, squirming maggots.
Kevin told me told go inside and rest while they figured out what to do and who should dig the carcass out from under the bus. I was about to suggest hiring someone to do it for us when I received a brilliant idea from the Man above.
Smacking Kevin on the back, I leaned so that I returned into his vision. “Hey Kevin, buddy old pal, I have a great idea!”
Kevin’s fluffy eyebrows crept up on his forehead. “Oh?” he said.
“Why don’t we send HOWIE to do it!” I smacked Kevin on the back again for no particular reason while the rest of the guys thought about it.
“Sure I’ll go.” Howie shrugged his shoulders and took a step forward. Why that little…I’d show him. Perhaps he didn’t think that whatever was under the car was so bad. Well, I’m sure if it made Conan ill; it must be something so gut-wrenchingly horrible that Howie would puke every time I mentioned the word ”bus”.
“Nick, why don’t you get me some gloves from that hardware store,” he pointed to a large warehouse half a block down, “and I’ll get started on this right away.” All of the other guys nodded eagerly, like they were glad to get rid of me. Well, I’m certainly not a pushover and I was going to try my luck once again.
“Does anybody want to come with me?” A collection of simultaneous “no’s” followed. I told you they were trying to get rid of me. “I might get lost in a big store like that and Howie’ll never get his gloves.”
“As for help then Nick,” Brian snapped, looking up suddenly from his position on the ground. I hadn’t noticed that he didn’t move the entire time he was there. Brian was really starting to creep me out and I didn’t want to upset him any more, so I high-tailed it out of there. So much for that idea.
I found the gloves in under five minutes because they were having a sale (a glove sale, of all things imaginable) and bought twenty pairs so that they couldn’t ask me to go back and get some more. Waiting in line was the hardest part, but the lady in front of me let me go first because I told her my wife was going to have a baby any second and I needed to drive her to the hospital. She didn’t even ask about the gloves.
When I came back, Howie wasn’t under the car as promised. They were all standing huddled around Brian, who was still on the ground. I made as little noise as possible as I walked over there, because I wanted to hear some of what they were saying. Unfortunately Howie caught me before I could hear anything.
“What are you guys doing? Howie you’re supposed to be under that bus, now git!” I exclaimed, throwing the gloves at Howie. He made no attempt to catch them, and I knew he wouldn’t be able to catch them if he tried. But that wasn’t the problem. The guys were just standing there and staring at me, like I was a different species. They weren’t moving or speaking. Well, neither was I, but I was in shock somewhat.
AJ was the first to speak. “Nick we have a crisis.”
This looked bad. “Huh?” was my intelligent reply.
“But we still need the gloves,” a flat, alien voice piped up. It was Brian; he was standing in the middle of them. The guys’ protective barrier broke up and Brian looked me in the eyes.
“Brian tell me what happened! What’s wrong?” I was starting to panic. We were all only this serious when someone died.
“Leighanne broke up with me.” Uh huh, yeah I knew that. I crossed my arms and waited for him to say something more. When he didn’t, I prompted him with hand gestures. Somehow I knew that he had more to say.
“She broke my heart,” he stated, just as flat as before. I was starting to squirm in my boots. Something was wrong.
Then he threw something shiny at me. It came so fast, but I still had time to scream and run back twenty paces. When I saw that he wasn’t going to move any more than that, I moved back to pick up the object.
It was a knife, totally soaked with blood. Despite the fact that I was totally repulsed by the sight of it, I picked it up and held it in my hand. The blood was dried onto it.
Then Brian spoke again and I still wish he hadn’t said anything at all. “I killed Leighanne.”
Chapter 48
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