Bus 713

I awoke on a bus. My head pounded and felt like a well used snare drum. Where am I? I remembered nothing. I had a tattoo on my wrist, 713. It was dark and the air was acrid, full of sulfur and ash. It smelled of death. I closed my eyes and rubbed my face. I was not alone. There were perhaps ten or fifteen others on the bus. Most were middle aged men like myself, but there were a few women and one child. Some of them were blindfolded. Others were secured to their seats with handcuffs. No one was talking. It was silent. Our lullaby was the hum of the engine.

I drifted in and out of consciousness. I woke the following morning to anxious whispers and a blood curdling scream. The driver had turned in her seat, raised her shotgun, and squeezed her trigger. A woman was cradling her daughter. The woman began sobbing uncontrollably. The driver tapped a sign hanging above her head: “Absolutely NO talking.” As the woman's sobbing continued, the driver tapped the sign vehemently and began to once again raise her weapon. The sobs subsided as quickly as they began. The woman continued to cradle her daughter. Her face was now contorted into a look of silent screams. Tears streamed down her face. Minutes passed like hours.

An older woman removed something from her neck and managed to pass it to the young woman without notice by our psychopathic driver. It was a small, golden locket. It was heart shaped and worse for wear, but it clearly held significant meaning. It had once belonged to the woman’s great grandmother. The great grandmother, great grandfather and four of their five young children were imprisoned, gassed and burned at Auschwitz in 1943.

The view from the bus windows was bleak. It was destruction of a massive scale. Had they finally done it? Had the bastards dropped their bombs and doomed us all? The view from my window seemed to confirm this thought. In that moment, I thought of my wrist. My eyes looked at my wrist. Number 713. What does that mean? I really did not think it mattered much, not anymore. Turning my attention back towards the window, my eyes seek a landmark that no longer exists. I can not tell where we are. I am no longer frightened, but I am still somewhat disoriented. Devastation and fire stretch to the horizon and beyond. The highway, once smooth, now lay in tatters. It was lined with abandoned vehicles and discarded belongings. It could be Kansas, or Florida for all I knew. If roads seemed to have a tendency to look the same before, they damn sure were all similar now.

It was late afternoon, I think, on the second day. A man towards the front of the bus began thrashing about. He had been handcuffed and blindfolded since I woke up. Most likely, a lot longer than that. The driver tapped her sign. The man continued to thrash violently. The bus driver raised a finger and ordered me, without speaking a word, to the front of the bus. She handed me a small key and gruffly muttered the word off. This cold, sadistic motherfucker, with one word, indicated that I was to unlock his handcuffs and throw him from the bus. What choice did I have? I walked slowly back to him, not saying a word. He never said a word. I will never forget the sound.

Sleep has become oddly easy for me these past few days. I have always struggled with insomnia. When sleep did come, it was fraught with terrible nightmares. Sleep has since become my escape. It is only now when I am awake that I encounter nightmares. I mention sleep, because for the past few days, I have dreamed I was in a lab. Perhaps it was a prison. I remember some shouting at night and the smell of chemicals. The shouting would eventually cease. The smell would not. The light was cold and sterile and the walls were constructed of concrete. There was very little noise, apart from the occasional shouting in the dark and there were never any faces. Eye contact was not allowed and that was not a request. Many adhered to this rule, some did not. You would, from time to time, come across literal bits and pieces of those that did not maintain silence and eventually, you would never see them, or any part of them ever again.

Asleep once, I overheard a few orderlies conversing and they referred to the place as “The Network.” Whatever that meant. All I knew was that it was a dreary place full of pain and misery. It was a life without meaning. A faint heartbeat with an empty pulse.

When I am awake, I am a passenger on a silent bus full of misery, perhaps forever doomed to travel the wastes in desperation. In my sleep, I am number 713. Just another of the many prisoners of The Network, another place silent, and full of death and misery. I am expected to live in silence, avoiding eye contact. I silently and aimlessly navigate The Network in search of a long lost golden and now worse for wear locket, in the shape of a heart.

The locket bit was new to the dream. Before the incident with the young woman and her daughter, we were in search of an ancient manuscript some referred to as The Holy Bible. Years earlier, when the dreams first began, I was given a single key and was left to wander down an endless hall, trying my lone key in every lock, of every door, as far as the eye could see, but to no avail. The key and its lock have yet to be reunited.

I was roused from my slumber by a violent jolt. For a long second I thought I might finally be dead and then the blinding light and intense heat hit me. A dormant bomb had been detonated twenty miles away and what we had experienced was the shock wave. The bus was punted sideways and anyone unlucky enough to not be secured to their seat suddenly found themselves thrown about like rag dolls. The bus came to a rest in a smoldering heap of twisted metal. My drumbeat of a headache had returned. It looked like a war scene, because it was a war scene. Of our original fourteen, four of us managed to survive. The driver was gone, as was the heart shaped locket. It had been torn from the neck of the grieving young mother. The remaining bits of its tarnished chain dangled nervously from her neck. The woman, unfortunately, was not one of the survivors.

The four of us nomadically wandered the wasteland once known as the state of Iowa. At a small makeshift camp, we encountered a child gnawing on a bone. We wandered for what seemed like a long time. There were countless signs of death and destruction, but few signs of any life or mercy. It is of some comfort to me, to consider and hope that at least most of them likely did not suffer in their deaths. On the fourth day of wandering we came to a clearing. Under any other circumstance, on any other day before the bombs fell, it would have been the town of Sunnydale. Today it was a blown to hell, hazy and irritated shitheap. Further up what was left of the road, perhaps a mile or so, we stumbled across what was left of a supermarket. It was dusk, which did not say much due to the constant dust and haze, but with nightfall due soon, it was home sweet home for the night. We were all tired and hungry and hopeful there was still something useful lying around inside.

We were not disappointed as the store was still rife with goods. It was all almost certainly contaminated with radiation, but we were left with little choice and we ate and drank until we had our fill. I had been feeling sick since I first woke up on the bus anyway. I figured at this point there was not much left to lose, nor long to live. We ate and wandered up and down the dark, eerie aisles of this once vibrantly lit and bustling supermarket. Eventually, we said our goodnights, parted, and went off to find our respective places to rest for the night. Sleep came fairly quickly tonight and was complete with my regular dream.

I once again awoke on a bus. People were shouting and laughing. The sun was shining and it was a beautiful, picturesque morning. The birds were out and singing their songs. A group of schoolchildren were waiting to cross the street, excited for their field trip to the newly opened aquarium. The driver announced the next stop and above her head was a large placard; BUS 713. I wondered to myself, “What the hell? Did I fall asleep again?” Apparently, this voice was not inside my head after all, as I got a rather harsh look from a young mother with her young daughter. The child was clutching a dog eared copy of The Cat in The Hat. Her mother was wearing a beautiful heart shaped gold locket.

I could not help but laugh as I stepped off the bus. It was a beautiful day and that was just another ugly nightmare. There was an unusual spring in my step as I strode to the door of the office building. It usually felt like a drab, shitty place, not unlike a prison. Today felt different. Hopeful. I opened the door and expected to see the security guard behind his desk, sipping his coffee, but instead I walked into a long, dark hallway. I turned and reached for the door and was flabbergasted to see the hall extended endlessly behind me. The door was gone. I was angry. I was sad. I began to cry and then I hear myself begin to shout. All I heard after that was silence. All I saw was black.

I returned to consciousness in a small room staring into a mirror. I was tethered to some sort of machine via electrodes and IV’s. I heard murmuring and footsteps and found myself face to face with bus driver, in actuality, a doctor at The Network. She told me that this was a simulation and that all that is left of the old world, is in fact simulated. The Network is in charge of the simulations. Its purpose is to seek out relics of the old world. This time around we sought a heart shaped locket. Our ancient homeworld text is fragmented and encoded. The missing relics that are gathered, allow us to decipher additional passages of our ancient text and help us find our way to our home planet. We live the same days over and over again. We repeat the same simulation until the goal is met. If the goal is never met? This is your eternity. This is your purgatory. Welcome to what humans call “hell.”

Earth was never meant to be more to us than a large scavenger hunt. It is not our home. The silence we observe is necessary due to our advanced and sensitive hearing. We are unable to vocalize words. We emit high frequency tones. An unfortunate downside to this, is that these tones have a tendency to incite psychopathic behavior in those of us more vulnerable to the tones. Each and every time mankind destroys itself, we are there. In fact, we are among your kind every day and have been since, well, I’ll keep that a secret for the time being.

Oh, and UFO’s make for a great story, but before the bombs fell, I usually drove a BMW.