“This is when the world ends. This is when a man opens his suitcase. I remember falling. The mountain heaving. The bus flipped over. The metal screamed. The tunnel had collapsed and the sudden stop was padded by bodies. A jumble of bodies in the aisles, in the seats, finding my face pressed against window glass, my neck bent. So many people died right then—most of us were dead. I don’t know minutes from hours. The terrible pressure. The dark. Movement against my shin—someone else was alive, but the movement stopped. Blood rushing to my head, the pain intolerable. Screams in the darkness. Moaning—like animals moaning, panicked, not like the sounds people make.
“A few who were alive turned on their cell phones and held them out like flashlights. There was room for some of us to move, a few of us who were unhurt, who started picking through the dead. I remember panicking then—it was the only moment I panicked, understanding that I was buried in dead people. I screamed but my screams sounded distant, like I was under water and listening to someone else scream. I remember hands grabbing my legs and pulling me free. I remember screaming until a man’s face appeared in the bluish-white glow of a cell phone and calmed me. This man’s name was Stewart—I can still see Stewart’s face hovering in blue light when I close my eyes. He asked if I was hurt and when I said I was, he asked how bad and where. I told him I thought my leg was broken and his response was, ‘Then you can still help us—’
“We separated the living from the dead. Working in the dark for what must have been hours, reaching out and touching a cold hand, cold faces. Only eight of us lived. We worked until we could no longer hear the voices and didn’t dare to speak until the distant cries from people we couldn’t reach fell silent. The bus was crumpled in a way that left enough room to huddle together near the steering wheel. The glow of cell phones—faces so covered with blood that I couldn’t see who these people were. Stewart told us to turn out the lights, to conserve the batteries, but in the dark the dead crawled around us so we kept the lights on. Someone had a radio, but all we could hear was static. An increasing stink of gasoline. A woman named Tabitha screamed for God to kill her. She dug out her eyes and chewed on her tongue. We watched her bleed to death in the faint glow of our cell phones. The batteries on the cell phones ran out one by one and we lost our lights. Another man, Jacob, began to sing—a rich baritone voice that was like a thread in the dark. We were left with nothing but our voices. I heard Stewart—he was rummaging through what backpacks and bags he could reach, trying to gather together whatever we could eat or drink. He divvied what we had, rationed it out to us. He tried to convince us all to go to the bathroom in the same corner—in a shallow pocket you could crawl to on your belly between two bodies, but no one listened to him and soon our little space was fouled. Stewart was certain that someone was digging through the rocks to find us and we’d listen and hear slides and shifts in the stones and convince ourselves that help was coming, that if we could just hold on we would be rescued. He begged us to be intelligent, to conserve our energy, to conserve our water. He talked about his daughters and his wife and tried to get us all talking about who was waiting for us, to give us all hope. At some point we stopped hearing Stewart’s voice.
“Time dissolves. I’d sleep and I’d wake up but I don’t know for how long or how often. I’d stop hearing someone’s voice or someone’s breathing and I’d think they died only to hear them say something or hear them shift and know they were still alive. There were six of us, after Stewart and Tabitha. We hung on by playing games—word association games. I wondered where the old woman who clicked her tongue was, or the mother and her child—they would have been right near me in the crash and so maybe they were alive, too—and I’d scream and start pulling at the bodies around me, trying to dig through to them, thinking someone else might still be alive, but the others would say, ‘What do you think of when I say the word sunshine?’ And I’d say, ‘a park,’ or ‘the ocean,’ and then I would have to say, ‘Jacob, what do you think about when I say the word ocean?’ and Jacob would answer until we were telling each other about the beach and we weren’t buried alive at all but were in the sun, or in a park having a picnic, or swimming in the ocean.
“It was only later—long after we’d eaten through our sack lunches and drank through all the water and bottles of pop and thermoses of coffee, long after we grew thin and agonized from hunger and after burning thirst made us desperate—that we gave up hope of a rescue and began tearing at the bus walls with small bursts of our failing energy, listening to the shifting of concrete and stone, hoping we would die in a sudden rush of weight. Instead, a path opened. One of us, a woman named Elizabeth, felt a slight breeze that she thought was one of the dead men breathing, but when she reached out her hand through one of the broken bus windows, she found that her arm could fit through the unexpected gap in the stone. She climbed out the bus window. When she spoke her voice was distant and we thought it was a trick of our ears, but she said there was enough room to crawl. Too narrow for a few of us to fit through—they tried and plugged the hole, wriggling back into the bus, but I was thin, I was one of the ones who could push through the broken window, slicing open my breasts and my abdomen and my thigh on a shard of glass. Once I crawled through, the narrow path opened wider. There were only three of us who could fit through—Elizabeth ahead of us, and a man named Steven in front of me. I was the last. I remember hearing the others screaming after us when we left them. They cursed us. They damned us. They begged us to come back, to stay with them. Pitch-black rock, scraped and bruised, gouged by rebar in the shattered concrete, bleeding. I remember crawling, what seemed like hours of work to only move an inch or two inches. I remember thinking that one of the people we’d left behind would catch up with me, that I would feel their hands grab my foot and pull me back, but no one touched me and eventually their voices faded. We crawled like worms through the earth.
“Elizabeth led us, picking our path. We slept several times. We found a car that had been buried, the windshield broken in. Steven found a bottle of Mountain Dew in the cup holder and we drank—the sweetest I’ve ever tasted. We slept together near that car, but Elizabeth woke us and picked a new path. Eventually I felt heat rising and felt that the stones were becoming smooth. A sharp, noxious odor of soot and char. I heard Elizabeth scream—a sound that in the dark was like the voice of horror but I now know as the sound of joy. I saw daylight. From the mountain down across the lake of fire where the city had once been, fields of fire and black tumbles, a landscape of ash. Loosely standing skeletal husks that were once skyscrapers, a leveled landscape. We didn’t understand. We crawled down the mountainside, keeping ourselves from tumbling by holding on to the roots of trees. We made our way down to the river and drank the poisoned water. We ate the poisoned mud on the banks. We slept huddled together on the shore.