Earlier: Yellow School Bus, London
J ack remained still.
Aching and loudly pronouncing his pain had become a luxury at this time. His body had numbed to nothingness and given in. Strangely enough, he couldn’t remember suffering so much in death last time.
Why can’t I get done with this, he thought. If I’m going to die why can’t someone just pull the plug? Why should I suffer, withering away?
He had no doubt about the others’ deaths now. None of them talked or screamed or called for him. He was the last man standing.
Probably the last mad man standing.
But then he realized that the world around him wasn’t that silent. Not really.
Besides the jittering panic of the world outside the bus, he could hear faint voices. In his head or real? He wasn’t sure.
What he suspected was that the voice enticed him to stay alive.
Even in death, there was something to care about. And for some odd reason, he cared about the voices.
Faint and distant, as if they were a memory of the past begging to surface.
He closed his eyes and concentrated. He could hear them clearer now.
Children in the far distance.
Singing?
Not really. They were chanting something, and they did it all together, so much that it brought more cacophony to his ears than a desired melody.
Their voices came from different directions, he could tell. Some groups sang in unison while others lagged a fraction of a second behind, then the third and fourth parts lagged even more. A succession of hallucinations overwhelmed his dying senses.
In a weird way, they kept him alert and alive.
Squeezing his eyes shut as if holding onto these precious voices and stopping it from fading away, he could make out different accents. Not just lags, but Dutch accents, Asian accents, Arabic, and Hispanic among others.
The more he listened, the more he could breathe.
In fact, the voices grew loud enough that they seemed to have hammered through his skull and filled the bloody void inside the yellow bus.
He felt elevated.
The closest description was a church’s choir, but only more Disney-like. The children seemed happy and recited with passion. As if conjuring a spirit, yet not a malevolent one, but a benevolent wraith of love—and childhood hopes.
Jack found himself remembering his childhood, running through the colorful grass in Wonderland. Mushrooms all over the place. Purple and pink and blue and lime-green mushrooms that looked upon him with love, not dangerous ones like in the world outside now. A canopy of trees and plants bent all over him, protecting him and watching him play with friends.
He was holding hands with this... friend.
She had warm hands. Full of heart. Full of madness. Beautiful and larger than life.
While dying now in the bus, Jack realized he didn’t want to give in. Kill a man once and he’d call it a sad ending to a movie. Kill him twice, now you’ve got an unnecessary sequel.
Instead of dying twice, maybe the second death was his chance to live again.
The children’s chanting grew stronger. He could feel it as if they were on the bus with him. Finally, he could hear them. Not chanting but reading a book. Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll.
If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.
Jack laughed, not with his lips, but with his mind’s eye.
We’re all mad here!
The children recited those two sentences every once in a while. It seemed that the more they read, the more the voices united. The more it became coherently accessible. All races, all languages, no matter the distance, conjuring some kind of magic with a purpose he couldn’t fathom.
The memory from his past returned. The girl with warm hands. Alice Pleasant Wonder.
“You’re a pleasant wonder, no kidding,” Jack had smiled at her, running under the canopy of mushrooms.
“Nah,” she said. “I’m more than that.”
A plant bent over and hissed in Jack’s ears, “You take care of this one, Jack.”
“Aye,” he nodded at the plant. A tiger lily as large as an elephant. Talking plants had been the norm in Jack’s childhood. “I will.”
But then Jack had stopped.
Alice next to him looked perplexed, following his gaze.
Jack was staring at a dark man in the middle of Wonderland. Darkness stood out like an intense pain back then. With purple and blue skies and green lands, black was the sheep that never belonged.
Jack’s memory began to blur. It faded slowly, from outside in, like a huge circle shrinking. The last disappearing part was the dark man in the middle.
Who was he?
In the yellow bus again, Jack spat blood from his mouth. Blood that he would have choked on and died if the children hadn’t been singing.
He suddenly got it.
He understood why the children read the book.
They were keeping him alive.
Not actually him.
They were keeping Lewis alive.
“Jack,” Lewis said to him. “I’m here. You’re going to make it. Hang on.”
Was this happening or was it part of his memory from the past. He realized it was really happening.
“How did you survive?” Jack asked between splatters of blood.
“The children, Jack,” Lewis rested a warm hand onto his chest. “Can you hear them?”
Jack nodded.
“They’re keeping me alive by reading my book all over the world.”
“What? How? Why?”
“It’s always been my last resort, in case all else fails in the Wonderland War,” Lewis explained. “If the children of the world unite and read the book, I stay alive, and the Jabberwocky loses--hopefully.”
Not that Jack fully comprehended, but he felt a sting in his heart when they mentioned the Jabberwocky losing. Or was he just coming back to life?
“You see, Jack,” Lewis explains. “When the Jabberwocky and I returned from the Looking Glass, and I realized his intentions were to possess the children of the world so he can control the universe, I decided to write a book.”
“Alice in Wonderland?”
“And Through the Looking Glass,” Lewis nodded. “I wanted to write a book that lasts forever in the minds of the children,” Lewis kneeled close to Jack’s face. “You know why Alice in Wonderland is the second most sold book in history after the Bible?”
Jack knew jackshit about that at the moment.
“Because I have planned it,” Lewis says. “If I created a wonderful book that promotes wonderful madness and hope in children and they kept reading it for almost two centuries, the Jabberwocky had no chance.”
Jack was impressed, but why did the word Jabberwocky bring that sting in his heart over and over again. Why did it scare him so much?
“Now that Black Chess was about to win,“ Fabiola said. He hadn’t realized she survived the bus as well. “We had to resort to the one last trick.”
“To make the children read,” Jack said, feeling better as if he weren’t dying. “If the book reading keeps Lewis alive why are we alive too, Fabiola?”
“We’re his friends,” she said. “Besides if the children read further they can keep the world alive, but we’re not sure yet.”
Jack propped himself on his elbows and looked around. The bus was a bloody mess but Lewis and Fabiola’s wounds have subsided. So were his.
The children’s voices filled the air like a magical hymn or a bedtime story that wasn’t meant to put you to sleep but resurrect you from boredom and numbness and darkness.
He wanted to ask where Constance was, but a nagging question distracted him. “But who made the children read, Lewis?”