“Any changes in your health history in the past day?” Dr. O’Donnell said, once Rosa and Eddie had hospital gowns on and IVs started.
“I’m a little dehydrated,” Eddie said.
She gave him an inscrutable look, then said to Nicole, “Let’s bolus him at a half liter of normal saline over thirty minutes. We’ll just piggyback.” Nicole nodded and retrieved a saline bag, hung it on an IV pole, and attached the tubing to the needle in his arm.
Dr. O’Donnell and Nicole worked together to put electrodes on them. Rosa took longer because of her hair. Trevor pulled the bed rails into position with a loud clickclickclickclick.
“Dang, Trev,” Eddie said. “That is seriously too loud for my head.”
Then Reg nodded at Brad, and Brad beamed, and they hooked him up as well as Friesta Bauer.
Dr. O’Donnell glanced at Reg, then took a breath and said, “Both Brad and Friesta will be able to see what’s going on in the simulation. I’ll get you started but Brad’s the monitor, so once we’re under way, if someone talks it will be him. You’ll hear his voice, but you won’t find that odd.”
“Why would he be talking?” Eddie said.
“To help the simulation,” Reg said. “Or just if he thinks he can clarify anything, since he’s been through this once.”
Brad nodded from his chair.
Eddie opened his mouth, but Dr. O’Donnell gave them an injection, and Reg switched a screen on, starting another video montage. The light hurt Eddie’s eyes, but that wasn’t why his head was swimming. He was confused, but didn’t know what he was confused about. On the screen rain came down, drops, then sheets, then torrents. Eddie saw a river, maybe thirty yards wide, rain driving craters into its surface. It was deep, and he could hear its urgent rush.
“He’s gonna have a tough day,” Dr. O’Donnell whispered. “A hangover and then this?”
On-screen the video flipped from image to image: a yellow church bus with “Trinity AMC” painted on the side, a two-lane highway, the faces of smiling people in choir robes. Other traffic—trucks, a police cruiser—again the swollen river. Dr. O’Donnell put the Ping-Pong balls over their eyes. Reg threw Ping-Pong balls at us once. Eddie remembered that. “What is it with you people and Ping-Pong balls?” he said.
Then he heard the thrum of a motorcycle over the roar of the river, and saw the back of the yellow church bus, glimpsed heads bobbing inside, and caught a snatch of singing. And then he was on the motorcycle. Eddie could feel the seat between his legs, the stirrups under his feet, and the warm press of a girl behind him, her arms wrapped around his waist. The pavement was slick so he slowed down.
He was Eddie Toivonen. He was riding a motorcycle. He saw a bus full of people slide off the road, across the muddy shoulder, and into a raging river.
Eddie pulled over and Rosa jumped off the bike. They pulled their helmets off, and instantly rain was running down their faces and staining her dark hair darker. Ahead of them a police car pulled over, wallowed for a moment on the shoulder, and an officer jumped out.
Great muddy gouges from the bus’s tires cut the bank. Beyond it, the bus settled in the river a dozen yards downstream, snagged on something under the water. It shuddered, then came to a rest, pointing upstream. The water was already up to the bottom of the lettering on the bus, which meant the floor inside was already wet. People were shouting, faces pressed to the windows, fogging them.
Eddie kicked off his shoes while he shrugged out of his leather jacket.
“Eddie, I can’t swim,” Rosa said. “Oh god, I can’t swim.”
You can’t help, Brad’s voice said. You weren’t prepared, Rosa, and now you’re failing.
“I can swim.” Eddie trotted up a few yards, toward the police officer. The water would carry him downstream fast—he needed to start higher if he was going to intercept the bus.
The cop stepped forward. “Stay on the bank. I radioed for help already,” he said in Brad’s voice.
“The bus will get swept away,” Eddie said.
The police officer shook his head. “It’s way too dangerous to go in the river. Besides, they might make it to shore on their own.” He popped his trunk and took out an orange-and-white-striped barricade.
“They got shaken up and they’re scared,” Rosa said.
You shouldn’t talk, Rosa, the voice said, and it was the cop’s voice, but the cop wasn’t talking. You have nothing to add.
“Screw you, stupid voice,” Rosa said. “Can you get out?” she bellowed, her hands cupped to her mouth.
“Door’s stuck,” the driver shouted.
“Break a window!” Eddie shouted. “Kick out a window!”
“Or just lower it,” Rosa said.
A woman near the back dropped the top half of her window and shoved her head and shoulders through, but the opening was too small to crawl out, and the bottom didn’t open.
“There’s an emergency exit!” Rosa shouted at Eddie, then turned and yelled at the driver. “There’s an emergency exit!”
“It’ll let the water in!” the woman shouted, the rain driving down onto her short dreadlocks, making them writhe.
The driver had his window open, too. “Call for help!”
“I did!” the cop shouted. He’d set up the barricade and was dragging a second into place, blocking access to the bank. “Now we wait.”
“We don’t wait,” Eddie said. “When that bus sweeps away it’ll tip and sink.”
“But I’m in charge,” the officer said. “And I’m giving you a direct order. Stay on the bank.”
“Their best chance is to get out now.”
The woman with the locs and another woman kicked out the bottom of her window, but they couldn’t bend the frame out of the way. More people rushed to the window, pulling at the metal with desperate hands. The bus listed toward the bank. Inside, people screamed and backed away from the window. Even with the weight redistributed, the bus stayed tilted.
“Break the front windshield and bring them up the center aisle,” Rosa shouted.
Eddie studied the current. When he picked his way forward, the officer stepped in front of him and jutted a finger in his face. “Stay here!”
“Why are you being a jerk?” Eddie said. “I’m trying to save those people.”
“I am in charge here!” he shouted. He was wearing a hat with a little brim, and water sheeted off it like he was behind his own private waterfall. Then he grabbed Eddie’s arm.
“Get your hand off me.”
The man squeezed Eddie’s arm harder and tried to haul him away from the water. Rosa ran at him.
“Stay back!” he shouted. “You’ll fall down the bank and get hurt, just like you almost fell down the steps at the dorm. You don’t want that, do you?”
She stopped. Eddie twisted free of the cop, kicked over the barricade, and dropped, feetfirst, into the river.
The water pulled at him, trying to drag him under. He struck out hard for a point ahead of the bus. He caught spray in the face from the churning water, and rain pelted his face.
The bus was huge and yellow above him in the water. The current pitched him hard, and his hands slid down the side, scrabbling for a hold, then caught the frame of the driver’s window. He pulled himself onto the hood and punched both heels at the windshield. It cracked and the shock traveled up his legs to his spine. Inside, the driver picked up a fire extinguisher and drove it into the web he’d made, breaking the glass, then clearing it with the extinguisher. The driver laid his jacket over the edge.
The water in the bus was knee deep. The choir—eleven people—sat stiff in their seats so the bus wouldn’t tilt farther. A couple of them were a little bloodied up, but they weren’t panicking. All in all, one tough church choir.
“Go!” the driver shouted. “Anybody who can. Go, go, go!”
A man crawled out onto the hood, trying to steady himself on its slick surface, but he slid off the side. Everyone’s heads snapped to the windows as he swept past the bus, then struck out for shore. He’d wind up pretty far downstream, but Eddie thought he’d make it. The woman with dreadlocks, another younger woman, and the driver crawled out the front and started swimming, too.
Which left Eddie with eight people. And the woman on the back bench, sitting in the middle, was really large. Stricken, he met her eyes. There wouldn’t be time to get everyone, and she would be last. She wouldn’t make it and she knew it. She gave him a calm smile that made him desperate to save her.
“You,” he barked at an older woman. She wrapped her arms around his neck and when they eased into the water her triceps floated out to the side. She kicked for all she was worth, though, and they landed, coughing and sputtering, a hundred yards downstream. Rosa was already there. She waded in and took the woman from him, helping her up the bank. Eddie stopped long enough to strip his sodden jeans and shirt off and went back in.
The third time back the cop was waiting by the bank, by Rosa and a mat of reeds she’d constructed to keep people out of the mud.
“Get out of there!” he called. “You’re facing charges! You’re just like your old man!”
Eddie didn’t waste any air on him. The bus was sinking. The woman he was carting had taken a lungful of water, and he didn’t think she could make it up the bank herself, so he carried her to where Rosa could grab her. The police officer came at him, but Rosa stuck her foot out and sent the guy sprawling headlong in the mud.
“Oops,” she said. “It’s slippery along here.” Eddie shot her a grin before he dove back in.
Eddie made three more trips, and the cop stayed away from him, biding his time. There was no point intervening if Eddie was going to drown. The bus wasn’t that far away, but the current was deadly and it was still raining a steady drumbeat. There were two more people—a rangy woman in her seventies, and the big lady. And Eddie was exhausted. He caught his breath on the bank for a moment, palms cupping his knees.
“Eddie,” Rosa said. “You should stop.”
He dove back in, fought the river, and this time hit farther back on the bus. It was harder to control his muscles, but when he pulled himself up to the windshield, the rangy woman was waiting. He didn’t look at the large lady on the back bench.
Eddie and his charge struggled against the current, and when his foot finally hit a rock, he pitched forward and they both slammed into the bank. But Rosa was there, helping, pulling the woman out, and then she had his wrist and hauled him out and he let her. Eddie lay on his belly, exhausted, and coughed out water. He felt like a stripped tire, or a toothless gear.
His head was turned toward the river. The water would override the hood any moment and flood the bus. It would slam into the lady in the back and dislodge the bus, which would break free. And before she drowned she would be spinning loose in the world, all alone in a two-degrees-above-zero universe.
He hauled himself to his feet and trudged up the bank, past the silent, mud-caked cop. It would take him longer this time to work his way to the middle of the river. He was spent.
He dove in.
The water tugged at him, and the wind shifted so the rain was full in his face. He fought the gray sky and the gray river for the yellow arc of bus, thinking of the big woman. She wasn’t afraid, and that made him desperate to save her.
By the time he reached the hood it was covered, and water was pouring over the edge of the dashboard, a thin waterfall but a fast one. The woman on the back bench was sitting in water to her waist, humming.
She stood up and plodded to the front of the bus, her skirt sticking to her legs. Eddie sat in the driver’s seat and rested while she walked forward.
“A white boy in his underpants.” She shook her head, then smiled at him, and it was a great smile. “Who’s carrying whom?”
“I don’t know,” he said. She grabbed the dash and hauled herself up, and he put his shoulder low, bent his legs, and heaved her out onto the hood. Eddie hoisted himself up, but then she came flying back and they fell into the aisle as the river overtopped the hood and rushed in. Eddie grabbed a pole and she grabbed a seat as the water pressed past them and slammed the far wall and the bus rocked and tilted and pulled loose from whatever had snagged it below.
They began to spin.
“We’ve got to get out of here!” he shouted. She was already working her way forward, eyeing the gap where the windshield had been. And then the water was to the ceiling and there was no more air. Eddie pushed her as she swam, and she was through the opening and he followed her, out and up. He broke the surface, pulled in a lungful of air, then grabbed her arm and set out for the bank. Behind them the bus turned in slow circles as it careened downstream.
The wind ran across the current so the waves chopped into their faces. The woman helped all she could—she kicked, but it rocked them and they lost as much in sideways movement as they gained going forward. Eddie’s eyes stung and he couldn’t see. He wasn’t even sure they were heading for the bank. What direction had the bus been facing when they swam out of it? He thought they might be swimming straight upstream, and would keep going till they drowned—or reached the headwaters.
They were going to drown.
He heard coughing over the wind, and then—fragments of a song. It was the choir, on the shore. Eddie and the woman turned together toward the music, and pushed harder.
And then he saw Rosa, standing in the water, leaning out for him. The driver was holding her waist, and the rangy woman was holding his. The choir was lined up in the river, reaching for them. But they were too far away. Eddie dug deeper, but there was nothing left. Three feet closer and Rosa could have snagged them.
Rosa tugged at her shirt.
“Hey!” the cop said in Brad’s voice, “Stop it! That would be embarrassing.”
She pulled her shirt off and wrapped it around her wrist and cast it out to Eddie, and he lunged and caught the edge. He worked hand over hand until he reached her, and then the driver had him and the lady holding on to him, and the choir reeled them in. They were still singing.
They laid them on the reed mat, Eddie and the big lady, and they looked at each other and smiled with their eyes, because everything else was too tired.
Rosa kissed his cheek.
“Your shirt ripped,” the police officer said, “and you don’t have another one.”
Rosa walked to the back of the motorcycle and began rummaging in the storage compartment.
“Are you kidding?” she said. “I definitely do. And it’s cute.” She pulled out a blue top, eyed it, and it changed to red. “There.” She slipped it on.