8

“Does that look like a twenty-five-mile-an-hour wind to you?” Tyler shouted as the wind began to rattle the bus even harder.

“Twenty-five is the average,” Ethan explained. “Dust storms can move faster.”

The driver locked the doors and turned off all the bus lights. Tyler figured he did that as a safety precaution. He remembered the firefighter safety speaker saying this prevented other cars from seeing the headlights and misjudging where the bus was on the road.

Pull aside. Stay alive. Tyler hoped if anyone came along on the highway, they would know to do that in a dust storm and not accidentally hit the bus.

“The sky’s all black and gray, smoky-looking,” L.J. said. “Like something big exploded, like Chernobyl.”

“I think you mean Hiroshima,” Ethan said.

Of course Ethan would know to correct him. Ethan loved history. Did L.J. even know that about him? A good friend would know things like that, Tyler thought.

“But it’s not quite like the photos of Hiroshima,” Ethan went on. “That explosion looked more like a cauliflower, and you could see the top of it where the smoke ended, but this dust cloud looks a mile wide. See how it takes over the sky?”

The enormous gray cloud rolled toward them, as thick as pollution from a factory.

“How can a dust cloud get that big?” L.J. asked. Everyone looked to Mr. Dwyer.

“Well, the strong winds cause a downdraft in an area of land with sand or topsoil,” Mr. Dwyer explained, going into teaching-mode. “So the dirt and sand lifts right off the ground—sometimes up as high as five hundred feet and a mile wide. Experts call these storms black blizzards because the dust clouds get so dark.”

“What do we do once it gets here?” Julia asked.

“Yeah, what else can we do to protect ourselves?” Ethan said, looking expectantly at their teacher. “We don’t have much time.”

Mr. Dwyer scratched his beard again. “Well, we’ve already covered up,” he started. “I think all we can do now is sit tight and hope for the best.”

The cloud drew closer, but it moved slowly, kicking more dust and dirt into the air. The light from the afternoon sun was getting blocked out more and more.

Tyler’s ears popped again. Then he heard a high-pitched howling noise in the distance.

“What was that?” Julia asked, clutching at her seat as she tried to peer out the windows. “It sounded like a coyote.”

“It was just the wind,” Tyler told her. It had to be the wind.

The bus swayed and creaked. Dirt and debris began smacking the sides of the bus and the windows. The eerie darkness kept rolling toward them like a fog.

Tyler had once gone to a football game at the University of Phoenix stadium, where the Cardinals played, and the way that retractable roof slowly opened up was kind of how the dust storm moved. But the stadium’s retractable roof didn’t get right in your face and burn your eyes and throw debris at you.

Then, all at once, the cloud was upon them—and they were shrouded in darkness.