The Other Side

"Why are you showing me this?" I said.

"Because, it's hilarious!" said Oen.

On his computer screen was a shirtless toddler, wearing a Santa hat and holding up a piece of paper with a picture of a bearded man and the words, I Love Satan. All of it, written in red crayon. The '˜N' was backwards.

We were in, our friend, Derek Ball's basement, our usual gathering place. Half an hour before, I had received a phone call from Justin Oen in which he exclaimed that I had to come to Derek's house immediately. He said that I had no choice in the matter, and to bring a coat, my plastic lightsaber, a flashlight, my Zippo lighter, and my video camera. I didn't know what Oen had in mind but I gathered up these items and now, here I was in Derek's basement staring at a picture of a 5-year-old girl who was either a minion of the dark lord or dyslexic.

"Umm, ok," I said.

"And because it's a perfect segue into my plan for tonight."

If I were smart, I would have gone home upon hearing this sentence.

"I found -- the bus from Hell!" On the last part of his sentence, he raised his voice to add emphasis.

"Ok."

"That bus that's out in the woods over in -- umm -- "

"Chesterville," I said.

"Right!" He seemed pretty excited about his idea.

"So?"

"We're going to check it out," he said proudly.

"Oen, that's just an abandoned bus," I said.

"Mat! Mat! Mat! Do you know where that bus came from?" I shook my head. "Nobody does!" he continued. "It came out of nowhere. It just appeared there one day," he yelled at me.

"I think the owner bought it from the school when they had to get rid of all those buses. He uses it for storage or something," said Derek from the couch. "My friend's uncle owns the woods."

"Will you shut up with your crazy stories, Derek?!" Oen said. "I'm trying to have serious discussion here."

"A school bus from Hell is your idea of a serious conversation," Derek said. "What exactly would a school bus from Hell do? Is it taking kids to -- ?" Derek was cut off mid-sentence by a ham sandwich hitting him in the face.

"Great, Derek! Now, you ruined my sandwich," Oen said.

"You threw it at me!" Derek yelled back.

"You almost caught it with your mouth, you fat bastard," Oen said. "You're so fat, when you jump in the air you get stuck!"

"Why did you ask me to bring a lightsaber?" I asked.

"For protection, dumbass," said Oen.

After ten minutes of Oen "persuading" us, mostly by threatening to throw more sandwiches at us, we were standing in front of our "supplies." They included: Three flashlights, two Zippo lighters (mine and Derek's), one plastic lightsaber (mine), a rosary (my girlfriend's), my video camera (mine), my Swiss army knife (mine), a roll of duct tape (Derek's) and a bottle of coke (mine).

"So -- " Derek said. "SHOTGUN!"

We threw the supplies into a duffel bag and drove to Chesterville, which is about a twenty minute drive. Ten minutes, if Oen is driving. Four minutes, if Oen is driving my car.

Chapter 2: Bridgework

So, four minutes later, we were parked about a hundred yards away from the entrance of the woods, and I was still struggling with my seatbelt.

"Did you have to hit every pot hole on the way?" I asked.

"Relax, man. I was just testing your suspension," said Oen as he put on a black baseball cap that had the words: "Back off, man. I'm a scientist" printed on it.

Derek got out and I handed him the duffel bag from the back seat.

"It's a '˜98 Corolla. It's not supposed to be high performance," I said.

"You actually packed the lightsaber?" said Derek, looking into the duffel bag.

"It -- I -- " I didn't really have a response for him.

Oen walked ahead to the entrance of the woods.

"It's almost midnight," Derek said, looking at his watch. We stood at the car and watched Oen. "I have work in nine hours."

"Yeah, but when Oen gets in his adventure mood -- "

"It usually means we're about to do something really stupid," said Derek.

"And here we are at an abandoned school bus," I said. It was the stupidest thing that I could think of possibly doing that night.

"What the hell are you guys waiting for? Come on!" he yelled to us from the entrance. We had parked so far from the woods, because Oen didn't want to be suspicious. I was pretty sure his yelling was not going to make us any stealthier.

Nevertheless, we began to walk toward him.

"Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt your gay love-fest, but we do have some work to do," he said.

Let me explain a little bit about my friend, Justin Oen. It's not that he's an asshole; he's just the kind of person who doesn't really have any kind of social filter between his brain and his mouth. Also, he's kind of an asshole. But, anyone who spends more than an hour with him just sort of gets used to it. I know this sounds stupid, but the way Derek and I see Justin is the same way you might notice somebody has a weird tooth in the front of their mouth. At first, it's the only thing you can see about them, but once you start talking to the person, you realize they have lots of other teeth, and even a face! Also, Justin's teeth used to look really weird, but we didn't notice that; we were too busy focusing on his personality. And after we got used to that, we found out he has a sort of obsession with the supernatural.

So, we started walking toward the bus. Derek fished the camcorder out of the duffel bag and handed it to me. I focused the view on the stone bridge that led over the stream, just before the bus. For some reason, this scene actually did start to freak me out a little bit. There was just a silence in the air that made me think of an old cemetery, a silence that had something lurking behind it.

A splash from the water. It made us all jump. I waved the camera in Oen's direction. On the tape, a splash can be heard and a greenish blur appears on screen, before Derek can be heard yelling, "Shit! Run!" Then, the camera shakes for about a full minute pointing straight at my feet until the car door opens and we jump inside.

"What are we doing?" said Derek. "There was a splash and we all run away like we're being chased by a chainsaw serial killer?"

"Yeah, we have the lightsaber. What are we worried about?" I said.

"Man, that place is a lot scarier at night," Oen said.

"You've been to the bus in the day time?" asked Derek.

"Well, no. I've seen it, but I've never gone as far as the bridge." He paused here as if he wasn't sure whether or not he wanted to say what he was thinking. "That place just -- feels wrong."

The odd thing was that I knew exactly what he meant. I would say it was something about the air or the silence, but neither of those were quite right. As soon as we got to the bridge, I just felt like I was somewhere I shouldn't be. Somewhere nobody should ever be.

"That's crazy. We just freaked ourselves out," I lied. I knew that both Derek and Oen heard the lie in my voice, but it pushed them on nonetheless. If I hadn't spoken those words, if I had told the truth about how I felt when I stepped onto that bridge, maybe none of it would have happened. Maybe, we would have gone home and never come back.

If only --

So, we went back to the bridge. I immediately felt out-of-place again.

No, it was this place that was off. This bus shouldn't be here. This bridge shouldn't be here.

We crossed the bridge and stepped up to the bus.

Chapter 3: Another One Rides the Bus

"Now what do we do?" I asked.

"Now we go home and make brownies," Oen said, and he went for the door. He reached up to touch the glass and jerked his hand back suddenly.

"What's wrong?" Derek said.

"It's freezing," Oen answered.

"Well, it's really cold out."

"No, I mean it's -- Feel it, Derek."

Derek reached his hand towards the bus and I was surprised to see him pull it back too. I touched the black "S" on the side of the bus. I jerked my hand back and understood. When my fingertips touched the side, they felt like they were being flash-frozen. I looked at my hands and watched as the fresh frost on my fingertips melted.

"What do you think the owner stores in there?" Derek said staring at the bus.

"Oh, if I had a ham sandwich right now," Oen said threateningly to Derek.

"Guys, why isn't there any frost on the bus?" I asked, more to myself then to them.

We all stared at it, as if we were looking for something that would explain it. Again, I got that feeling of displacement, like we were somewhere no one should be.

Like we were nowhere at all.

"I told you guys -- it's a hell bus," Oen said. But, he didn't have the same enthusiasm in his voice as he did earlier. I glanced at my watch. It had stopped. This was rather odd, considering that I had a digital watch. The display still shone brightly, but the numbers had stopped moving at 12:03:34 AM.

I had decided that I was going home. I'd had enough of this Hell-bus, and its Hell-bridge, and my Hell-watch. Nothing was going to stop me from going back Hell-home.

I looked over at Oen to see him kicking the Hell-door.

"What the hell are you doing?" I said.

"I'm kicking the door with my foot, Mat. I thought that was kind of obvious."

"Why?" I said, completely shocked by this idea.

"To get inside. You're not a puzzle-solver, are you?"

"I don't think you're going to be able to get in," Derek said. I was thinking the same thing. And as I nodded my head in agreement, the door folded inward and opened.

Derek was always the smartest of our little group. Why the hell did he have to be wrong about this?

"Oh, you're lucky I don't have a ham sandwich," Oen said to him as he took the camcorder from me.

"Will you shut up about that? We are not going inside," I said.

With that, Oen walked up the steps. Derek followed. I filed in behind them.

The first thing I noticed was the temperature, which dropped what I would estimate to be about 80 degrees, but I'm not good with temperatures. Derek put it closer to dropping 30 degrees. Oen just says it got hella cold.

The second thing I noticed was that from the inside all the windows were solid black. It looked like all the light had just disappeared from outside the bus, except for the moonlight still shining in from the door.

"Ha! I told you," Oen exclaimed. "What's he storing, Derek? Huh? School bus seats? Cause, other than us, that's all that's on the bus!" As if to punctuate his sentence, the door to the bus slammed shut, and we were thrust into complete darkness.

The bus's engine roared to life. It sounded like a jet engine starting up inches away from my ears. Then, I felt the bus jerk forward as if somebody had floored the gas pedal. I fell to the ground.

A beam of light came from just behind me, Derek's flashlight. It landed on the back of the driver's seat. I expected to see no one there, the bus just driving itself. I wish that was as weird as it would get, a bus driving itself. But, unfortunately, that's not what I saw.

The light only shined on the driver's seat for a split second before, I assume, Derek fell over from another sudden jerk, this time from the bus stopping, but I wish I hadn't seen what I did.

One hand was resting on the gearshift lever, another on the steering wheel. Both looked like bare muscle, little slivers of dead flesh hanging off of them. They were slightly blackened, and looked like the driver was very severely burned just moments ago, judging by the smoke that was rising off of his flesh. His hands ended in sharp points that looked like little bits of bone sticking out of the end of his fingers. Then, the light disappeared.

Derek tried to stabilize the light on the chair again, but this time it was empty. Good thing, too. If I had seen that thing's face, its eyes (if it had eyes) staring into mine, I would have gone insane. My mind would have melted and dripped out of my nose. Derek and Oen would have had to carry me out of the bus while I simultaneously laughed, cried, vomited, and soiled myself. Thank God I didn't have to see that thing's face.

"Oh, shit. Oh, shit. Shit. Shit. Shit." Oen from behind me.

"Did you see its hands?" I heard Derek's voice say.

The bus shook like it had been hit with a wrecking ball. We fell over again. I was getting to know the sticky floor of this bus a little too well. The bus shook again. And again.

And again.

And again.

Then, it stopped. And the deafening sound of a million desperate hands pounding on the windows broke the silence.

"Derek," I said. "Hand me the lightsaber."

We stood up. Derek tossed me the lightsaber. My hands were so sweaty that I dropped it at first. In fact, all of me was sweaty. The temperature must have gone up 1,000 degrees. Derek later described it as 100 degrees. Oen described it as "Hot as a crotch."

Then, I picked the lightsaber up from the ground. Blue, like Luke's in Empire. I knew that it wasn't going to help me, but I felt a lot more secure with something in my hands. Something that was at least weapon-shaped.

With a lightsaber in one hand and a flashlight in the other, I walked over to the door. It shook as thousands of hands hammered on it from the outside.

"Mat, will you get the hell away from there!" It wasn't a polite suggestion. It was a command from Oen.

Derek opened up my Swiss Army knife.

Why didn't I think of that?

I shined the flashlight over to the driver's seat again. Blood was trickling down the gearshift lever. Smudges of a dark brown were smeared on the steering wheel. As I leaned closer, I wasn't surprised to recognize the foul smell as feces.

The seat itself was melted to almost nothing but springs. The back of the seat had a round hole in it that also looked like it had melted.

The rear view mirror had that same darkness that the other windows had.

"Are you recording all of this?" I shouted over the pounding fists. Oen shouted back, "Yep, I'm getting all of it. I dropped the camera a couple of times when we were driving, but I think it's still working fine."

I shined my light on the windows. Yep, still black. Still can't see what's outside.

"So, what's the plan?" Oen said.

"What are you talking about? This was your idea. You tell me what the plan is!" I shouted back to him. I didn't shine the light back to look at his face, but I doubt he was coming up with a plan.

"Do you think we can open a window?" Derek said. "Just to see what's out there?"

"And for a breeze. It's hot as a crotch in here," Oen said.

The windows wouldn't budge. We tried every window. Nothing. They felt like they were welded shut. And in this temperature, that seemed pretty likely anyway.

"Ok, that plan didn't work," Derek said.

"We'll have to open the door," said Oen.

"Are you insane?" I said, listening to the pounding hands outside.

"Yes," he replied and walked to the door. Derek grabbed his arm.

"No! I'm not letting you get us all killed by whatever's out there!"

"Derek, let go of my arm."

"If you would take a second to think instead of just charging in and doing the stupidest thing you can come up with -- "

"Don't make me ham sandwich bitch slap you again!"

"Will you shut up about that stupid sandwich?!" I shouted.

Oen shook Derek's grip off of his arm and started towards the door. Derek jumped up and tackled Oen to the ground, taking me with him. Oen elbowed Derek in the gut, while Derek kicked me in the shin. I hate getting roped into fights.

Oen rolled Derek off of him, and got up again. Derek grabbed his ankles and Oen hit the floor again. I tried to crawl away and Oen stepped on my fingers. I don't think either of them realized that they were fighting me too, but they were kicking my ass. Both of them were standing again, facing each other. Oen threw a kick to Derek's side, but Derek caught it and tripped Oen with a kick that was nothing short of something you would see in Mortal Kombat.

Derek was actually quite limber for a person of his weight. Oen's foot flew out from under him and he landed on my back. He kicked up and hit Derek in the pelvis. Derek buckled and fell to the ground. Oen got back up and stepped over me, onto the fingers of my other hand and proceeded to the door. Derek was up again and running towards him. I limped after him. And we both made it there just as Oen pulled the lever to open the door and revealed -- Nothing. There was nobody outside. The hammering on the windows had stopped the very second that the door had flown open and outside there was nobody. We stood there for a moment and then leapt off the bus.

We landed in a heap outside the bus. The door slammed shut behind us, and I pictured a cartoon bartender yelling, "And stay out!" The temperature had dropped 200 or 1,000 degrees. Hard to say, exactly

I glanced down at my watch. Still stuck at 12:03:34 AM. Oh well, at least it was over.

If only --

Chapter 4: The Tape

We took off at a dead sprint to the car. I was in front. I no longer had the lightsaber, but I heard it turn on from behind me. We crossed the bridge. I heard splashing from behind me, like large feet were stomping up the stream. I could see the car now. I sprinted even harder. I was almost at the entrance of the woods. Almost free. But, something stepped in my way.

The creature must have been ten feet tall. Its entire body looked like it was made up of black splintery twigs, except for its head which looked like a big black rock with sharp edges. It stared at me from shiny solid black eyes. The thing swung its sharp claws at me and did a side-flip out of the way --

Except my side flip was really just me just tripping and rolling onto the ground. Either way, I dodged the creature's attack.

Derek and Oen ran past me. I got up and began running harder and faster than I ever have in my life. I dared not look behind me at the creature that could have been breathing down my neck.

I finally made it back to the car. Oen was in the driver's seat. He had flipped on the headlights, and they were staring wide-eyed in front of the car. I jumped into the back seat and looked in that direction.

Nothing. The headlights shined brightly on an opening that led deep into the Chesterville woods. I could just barely see the bus, but no monster.

"Oen, drive!" I said. I don't know if I yelled it or whispered it, but at that moment there was nothing I wanted more than to be far away from that place.

He threw the car into reverse and backed up at full speed to the road. When the car got to the road, he spun it around and threw it into gear, going full speed down the road, back to Derek's house.

I fished my girlfriend's rosary out of my coat pocket and tried to put around my neck, but it wouldn't fit over my head. The crucifix hung down between my eyes.

"What the hell was that?!" Oen screamed.

Derek looked back at me.

"I think you're supposed to wrap it around your fingers," he said.

I took it off of my head and did so.

"What the hell was that?!" Oen repeated. "Did you guys see that thing?!"

"Yeah, I saw it," I said. "And I saw you running right past me."

"You looked like you had everything under control," he said.

"I fell on the ground next to a giant monster," I yelled at him.

"Yeah, but it looked pretty cool. Your side-flip move," he said.

"It was basically a roll in the air, and I fell over!"

"Which was awesome."

When we got back to Derek's house, I opened up my Coca-Cola and sat down on the couch in his basement. Oen was plugging the camcorder into his laptop.

"What are you doing?" asked Derek. "Do you really want to relive that right now?"

"I just have to see if that thing was real," he said.

He went through various screens and startup programs before he opened the videos. Several of the videos, I had recorded at home, but I saw that Oen had recorded one long continuous shot of our night at the bus.

I glanced down at my watch again. The display was still frozen. The buttons weren't working, so I couldn't reset the time.

"Does anyone know what time it is?" I asked.

"My cell phone's upstairs," said Oen. I went upstairs to check the time. I picked up his cell phone and looked at the display. A picture of himself and a girl I didn't recognize was the display picture. The time was 12:03 AM. I waited for a couple of minutes and it didn't change. So, I went back downstairs.

"Guys, I think that bus broke all of our -- " I stopped mid-sentence to stare at the screen.

On-screen, we were already inside the bus, but the windows were perfectly clear and you could see the woods outside. Oen had the night-vision on, so everything had a green tint to it.

"What's he storing, Derek? Huh? School bus seats? Cause, other than us, that's all that's on the bus!" from the tape. The view shifted to the seats, which were full of people. The entire bus was full of people who all had that severely burned look that the driver had. Holes were burned into their faces and chests. Some of them had eyes that bulged slightly out of their sockets. Some of them had empty eye-sockets. They looked like year old corpses that had all been thrown onto a fire. All of them were staring directly at us, lipless mouths in the shape of furious scowls. Then, the bus door closed, and the engine roared to life. The camera shifted towards the front of the bus, where I saw the same awful hands on the steering wheel and the shifter, still smoking, with little bits of bone sticking out of the ends of his fingers. Then, the first jerk. The camera hit the ground and slid away. At first, all you could see on the screen were bare feet of the rotting passengers on the bus, nerve endings and bits of flesh hanging off the legs.

Oen, presumably, got the camera back at this point, and shifted the view back to the driver's seat. Derek's light passed the seat for just a moment, and you could see the hands bleeding on the shifter and smoke rising from the seat where it was melting away. Then, another jerk. And the camera falls again, this time turning upside down and landing in a position in which you can see the three of us laying on the ground struggling to get to our feet.

Oen got the camera again and pointed it at the driver's seat, which was now empty. In fact, all the seats were now empty. The camera was focused for a moment on my terrified face, but turned to the window as the bus shook.

Outside, you could see the giant spindly-limb creature slamming into the side of the bus again and again. Then, he stepped away, in the direction where would meet him later.

A crowd began to swarm around the bus, all burning rotting corpses like the ones that were on the bus a moment ago. Except some of these were worn down all the way to bone, with the vaguest trace of muscle tissue clinging to their bones. They began pounding on the windows, bits of blood, flesh, and muscle splattering the windows with every strike.

The camera moved around and revealed that the entire bus was surrounded by swarms and swarms of these things, going on for miles and every direction. And the trees were all gone. Instead, we were in a kind of desert plain. A black mountain was off in the distance; it looked like it was made of the same material that the twig-creature was. The sky outside was full of fire and smoke. There seemed to be nothing, but death outside of the bus. It was such a horrifying sight that, while watching the video, I had the urge to vomit.

It was almost impossible to hear anything we were saying but after a moment, "Yep, I'm getting all of it. I dropped the camera a couple of times when we were driving, but I think it's still working fine," can be heard.

Then, we were all trying to open up windows. Every time we moved into the seats to go for a window, the crowd would gravitate to us and claw at the windows to attack us. All I could think while watching this part is: Thank God those things weren't still in the seats, while we were doing this.

Moments later, the camera was on the ground again towards the front of the bus, yet somehow still functioning, and Derek and Oen were on-screen fighting. Yet, it was clear in the video that I was the one getting more beaten up than they were.

Oen got up and grabbed the camera making his way to the door. Outside, were hundreds of hands slamming on the door, vicious faces looking into the camera. Blood trickled all the way down the door. He slid the door open and on-screen we saw exactly what we saw when we were there: Nothing. The creatures disappeared the second the door opened. The tape ended there.

None of us said anything for a long time. Finally, Oen broke the silence.

"What the hell happened out there?" He didn't have any of that usual confidence in his voice. He sounded like a little boy who just found out Santa Claus was really just his dad in a costume.

"I gotta go home," I said. "I have to sleep this off."

"Are you sure you really want to sleep right after watching this?" said Derek.

He had a good point.

"What do you suggest?" I asked him.

"We could go to Taco Bell," Derek said. "And never talk about this video ever again."

"Ahh! I just had Taco Bell last night," Oen said.

Chapter 5: Taco Bell has Terrible Service

Despite Oen's protest, we arrived in the Taco bell parking lot twenty minutes later (I assume it was twenty minutes, because my damn watch was still broken.)

"Now, Derek when we go inside, you can't order an entire cow. So, you'll have to just get a few hundred burritos," said Oen.

We walked in and found no one at the counter.

"What good is a twenty-four hour Taco Bell, if there's no one at the counter to take your order," said Oen.

A crash from behind the counter, the sound of pans falling from a high shelf.

We all stared at each other for a long moment.

"Is anyone back there?" I yelled. "Hello?"

Another crash.

"Do you think they're being robbed?" Derek whispered.

Oen leapt over the counter, ignoring the door that led to the other side.

"Oen, what are you doing?" I whispered.

"Why are you whispering?" he said, and disappeared around a corner.

We walked to the other side of the counter.

Another crash.

"Oen, we shouldn't be back here," I said.

"You're whispering again," he said.

"I don't want whoever's back here to hear us," I whispered.

Derek tapped on my shoulder and pointed toward the drive-through window. A sticky patch of blood dripped down the wall, a small puddle forming underneath it.

"Oen, we have to call the police," Derek whispered.

"What?" Oen said, louder than was necessary.

"We have to call the police!"

"What?" he yelled.

Another crash. It was coming from one of the back rooms. Oen picked up his pace a little bit and got to the door of the room it was coming from.

He threw open the door just as a stack of plastic trays was falling to the floor. On a high metal shelf in the room, one of the rotting bus creatures was eating a rat. It was dressed in a bloody Taco Bell uniform, the bus creature, not the rat.

We all watched for a moment, while the creature sucked in the rat's tail like a piece of spaghetti. Then, it turned to look at us.

The thing was male, as far as I could tell. But, its face was so mutilated that determining a sex was impossible. It had the same rotting flesh as the things from the bus, red and smoking. Stringy bits of dead muscle hung from the creature's face. My mind went to a thousand 1950's horror movies.

The Thing came from Chesterville, The Chesterville Monsters, Attack of the Chesterville Chesters.

So, Chester jumped down from the top shelf and Oen slammed the door just in time to hit it in the face.

As we ran back toward the front, a hand hit the inside of an office door. Blood splattered the window. The face of another Chester creature appeared next to its hand. On seeing us, it smashed through the window with its shoulder. Blood splashed the floor, soaking Chester's Taco Bell uniform. The other Chester creature broke through the door and ran toward us.

This time we all leapt over the counter. My foot caught the edge of the counter, and I hit the ground.

Chester leapt the counter as well apparently also catching his foot, and his stomach area landed on the back of my head. He grabbed at my head and I shoved him off. I began to run to the door when he caught my ankle, and pulled me down. A yellowed eye hung out of its socket. Chester's brown teeth were bared, ready to bite into my ankle.

He looked into my eyes with a malicious grin, as if to let me know that I was facing my last moments, and his head exploded.

Derek stood above me with a chair. It looked rather heavy and I was surprised that he was able to swing hard enough to vaporize Chester's head.

The other Chester crawled over the counter, and a second one appeared in the bathroom doorway.

Derek helped me to my feet, and we ran back out to the car. Oen started it up and we drove off with the Chesters sprinting after us. As I watched them, the Chester on the right turned and attacked the Chester on the left, tackling him to the ground and pounding his fists into the other's face. We turned a corner and I lost sight of them. As we drove, more of the Chester creatures ran out of houses and attempted to chase our car.

"What the hell?!" Oen yelled. "Why?! What?!! What the hell?!"

"We must have screwed something up when we went to the bus," I said. "Opened up the door to another world."

"Why would the doorway to another world be in a bus?" Oen said.

"Why was Dante's doorway to Hell in Florence?" Derek said.

We stared at him.

"Dante's Inferno," he said.

We stared at him again.

"It was an epic poem," he said.

I turned to face the front.

"It was a story about a man who finds an entrance to Hell in Florence," he said. He sighed, sounding somewhat frustrated that we hadn't understood his reference to early 14th century poetry. "My point is the bus probably has nothing to do with it. To the other side, it's just place to cross over, and they crossed the Bridge to our side.

Something struck me as he said this.

"What if we didn't open up a door," I said. "What if we just went through it? What if this is the Other Side?"

"No, that sounds stupid. We probably just opened up a door," Oen said.

"Why was that thing," Chester, "wearing a Taco Bell uniform?" I asked.

The roads were empty except for us and the occasional Chester chasing after us, I didn't remember seeing anyone on the way there either. I looked at my watch again.

Damn it. Why am I still wearing this thing?

I looked up just in time to see something step in front of the car and explode against the windshield.

The car screeched to a halt.

"Shit," said Oen from the driver's seat.

I looked at the windshield splattered with blood and wondered just how fast we had been driving.

Oen still had a death-grip on the steering wheel. His knuckles were turning white.

I stepped out of the car and walked around to the front. Immediately, I noticed the smoking red flesh and rotting muscles.

"Hey, it's just another Chester," I said.

"A what?" said Derek, now walking up. Oen was still in the driver's seat not moving.

"Umm, one of those bus-zombies," I said.

"Chester?"

"Chesterville monster. Chester -- " He looked at me with one eyebrow raised. "Shut up." I said. "Oen, it's just a bus-zombie." Oen put his head on the steering wheel, and then got up and stepped out of the car.

"Jeez! Are all these things hemophiliacs?" said Derek. We both turned to stare at him. He looked up, and then rolled his eyes.

"It's a disease where you body can't form blood clots properly, so you bleed a lot," he said. We both looked back at the Chester creature. Derek sighed, apparently a little frustrated that we didn't get his reference to a rare blood disease.

"Where are all the real people?" I said, looking around.

Derek looked up at me and said, "What if these are the real people?"

I didn't understand what he was saying.

"What if we did go to the other side? And these things are like replacements for the other people in the world."

Oen said, "So, you mean, we came to another world, that's exactly like ours, except all the people have been replaced with -- "

"Chesters," he finished. "Maybe. We haven't seen any real people since we got here. The roads are all empty."

"Not exactly," said Oen staring at the smoking corpse of the late Chester T. Creature.

"And it all started after we went to the bus. What if we went through a portal to Hell?" Derek said.

I stepped away from them and got out my cell phone. I tried calling my girlfriend. No answer. My mom. No answer. My Dad. No answer. I looked down at the display. The time was frozen at 12:03 AM.

"Hey, guys. There's something else," I said.

I told them about my watch and the phones. We looked at Derek for an answer; he didn't seem to have one.

"Maybe, the bus disrupts electronic devices," said Oen.

"But, I can make phone calls," I said. "Nobody answers, but I can make them."

"Maybe, it just messes with time keeping functions of electronics," said Derek.

"But, why?" I said.

He shrugged.

"Let's get moving," I said. "We may not be safe here."

Chapter 6: Everyone Goes Insane

Some time later, we were back in Derek's basement. Derek had started the video again and was going frame by frame through the entire thing.

"What are you doing?" I asked him.

"I want to watch after the bus starts driving. If we went somewhere else, I want to see the transition."

I knew that by "somewhere else" he meant "the Other Side." I wished he would keep his terminology consistent, damn it. That would be like calling the "Chester" a "bus monster" all over again.

On the screen, just like last time, when the bus jerked forward, the camera fell to the ground.

"Damn it to Hell!" said Derek. "Why can't you record?" Derek yelled at Oen. It seemed like an overreaction. I'm not in the habit of defending Oen, but I felt he was getting his head chewed off for something menial.

"Hey, screw you, man! Who cares about your stupid '˜Other Side' bullshit!" he yelled back.

They both seemed to be getting out of control. I stepped back and knocked over my Coca-Cola bottle.

"AAARRRGGHH!!! DAMN IT!" I screamed. I was livid. I'd never felt so furious in all my life. My two friends were screaming at each other for stupid things, and now my damn Coca-Cola bottle is empty!

I picked up one of the small plastic chairs in Derek's basement and tossed it against a wall. The chair knocked out some of the wall plaster and left two medium-sized holes where the legs had hit it.

Derek stared at me.

"YOU JUST RUINED MY WALL!"

"I SPILLED MY COKE!"

"WHO CARES!?"

"IT WAS MY LAST COKE!

"Guys," Oen yelled. We looked over at him. "I think we are in another world."

"IT'S CALLED THE OTHER SIDE, DAMN IT!" I yelled at him.

"No, Mat. He's right," said Derek. "Look at how angry we're getting. This -- other side must be affecting us."

"WHA -- My Coke bottle -- " I trailed off. I felt like an idiot. My Coke spilled on the floor, so I threw a chair across the room? "Guys, I think you might be onto something."

"That explains the aggression that the Chesters all have for us," Derek said.

"And when we were driving away from the Taco Bell, and the two were following us, I saw one turn and attack the other," I said.

"So, why didn't Oen show any change?" I said.

"Hey, shut up," he said.

"He must already be such an asshole, that this world doesn't affect him," Derek responded.

"Guys, I was affected."

"That makes sense," I said to Derek.

"Guys, I was," Oen said.

"How do we get out?" I said.

"Well, the bus driver took us here," he said. "Maybe if we get back on the bus, he would take us back," Derek said.

"That sounds like a pretty flimsy plan," said Oen.

It did sound like a flimsy plan.

"Well, our options right now are: Stay here and probably be murdered by vicious Hell spawn creatures named Chester, or go to the bus and try to get back home."

"First, we should get some sleep," I yawned.

"No, if a few hours here made us that aggressive, then we should leave as soon as possible," Derek said.

Before he got to the word "aggressive," I was asleep.

Chapter 7: Farm Living

I awoke later. I have no idea how much later. Just later. I looked over and saw that Derek and Oen had both fallen asleep as well.

Derek's going to be late for work, I thought.

As I sat there, the night came back to me, piece by piece. My eyes grew wide.

"Guys!" I said.

They awoke with a start. They apparently took a moment to remember what had happened the night before as well.

"We have to go back to the bus," I said.

A few minutes later, we had packed a duffel bag with supplies and we walked outside.

It wasn't a particularly bright morning, cloudy and overcast. The sky had the look of an impending thunderstorm, but there was no rain coming down.

I, for one, was a little surprised that time had even changed. I glanced down at my watch again. It was still stuck at 12:03:34 AM.

Four minutes later, we were in the field next to the Chesterville woods. We waited in the car for a few minutes staring at the bus that had given us such Hell.

"We should have brought a bomb," Oen said. I agreed with him actually, not that any of us knew how to make a bomb. Maybe, after we got back to the other side, I would come back with a bomb. Where do they sell bombs?

I got out of the car first, and heard rushing footsteps. I looked over to the house in front of the woods, and saw that a Chester was sprinting towards me at full speed. I just had time to register that he was wearing overalls and bloodstained long underwear, before his shoulder hit me in the stomach. We went flying over the hood of my car. Meaty, blood-covered fists hit me in the face, over and over again. I heard the far away sound of a car door opening. My vision was starting to go all white. Oen pulled Chester off of me and tossed him against the car.

Slowly, my vision came back. Oen was above me. Looking down. Was I on the ground? How had I gotten here? Are you ok? The sound of Oen's voice from far away. Mat, are you ok? Behind Oen, I saw Chester. His arms were raised; he was holding something. I realized it was a knife, just a second too late. It plunged down and stabbed Oen in the back.

Derek tackled Chester to the ground. If only he had been a second faster. He grabbed the knife that had fallen on the ground, and stabbed Chester in the chest -- er.

Chester kept struggling, punching blindly. His movements slowed, and eventually stopped. He had tried to kill Derek up to the very last second of his life. No remorse, no mercy, just anger.

For less than a second, I almost pitied the creature, doomed to a miserable life of pure anger. Every second of its existence, absolute misery.

But, then I thought about Oen. I looked down at him. Blood had soaked the back of his shirt. It looked like one giant wound.

"Oen?" I said. "Oen, get up." Tears were streaming down my face. "Hey, man. Justin, get up!" I felt my eyes burning. My one thought was that I couldn't leave him here, in this world. We would take him back to his family. He deserved that much. He had saved my life.

I looked over at Derek. Through tears that blurred my vision, I saw Derek on the ground, leaning against the car. He was crying too.

Chapter 8: Bus Drivers are Creepy

A grunt from the ground next to me. I looked down at Oen. He was moving.

"Oen?!" I said. Derek looked over.

"Is he alive? Oen!" Derek took the knife. For a split second, I thought that he was going to attack him. Another symptom of this world, angry at him for dying. But, he only cut open Oen's shirt. After wiping some of the blood away, I saw the ragged flesh where Chester had stabbed him in the shoulder. Blood continued to pour out of the deep wound. I took Oen's shirt, now in two pieces, and tied it around the wound to keep him from bleeding to death. Oen screamed as I did this.

"Oen, can you stand?" Derek said. Oen was hyperventilating. Derek grabbed a bottle of water and splashed it onto Oen's face. That seemed to bring him back.

"Can you stand?" Derek repeated.

"I -- Ahh! I don't know." He slowly got to his feet. I slung his good arm over my shoulders and we made our way toward the bus. Derek followed behind. When we got to the bridge, I looked down into the water and saw what looked like lava rapidly flowing downstream. Human skulls and dismembered limbs floated on the lava's surface.

We kept walking. I tried not to imagine the twisted limbs floating down the river of fire.

I heard a splash from behind us. I turned and saw the black spindly-limbed creature that had almost killed me. It was climbing out of the river of fire. It looked taller than it was before, at least twenty feet tall. It's eyes were now a glowing orange, that looked like the lava of the river.

"YOU SHALL NOT LEAVE!" it roared at us. It had a voice that was so loud that it made my knees shake.

Derek kicked at the bus door. It wasn't budging. The monster started stomping toward us.

"YOU SHALL NOT LEAVE!" It was coming closer. It reached up to slash at us.

"Mat, it's open!" yelled Derek, and we piled into the bus, as the creature slashed at the open door. Derek pulled the lever that closed the door, and we were once again thrust into total darkness. All the windows were black.

The bus was being slammed into. Hard. The thing outside was hitting the bus so hard that I could feel it going up on two wheels.

"Derek, when's this thing gonna drive?!" I said.

The bus suddenly roared to life and took off so hard that not only did I fall over, but I was thrown to the back of the bus. I got the sensation that we were moving very fast. Oen screamed. He must have hit his shoulder. Maybe he was just scared.

The bus was flooded with red light. I saw flames outside the windows. Oen screamed again. This time I felt like screaming too.

At the front of the bus, the Driver stood up from his seat. His face was hideous. It was roughly the size and shape of a human skull with bits of muscle and tendons hanging off everywhere. His eyes had black irises and red veins made spiderwebs. His teeth were bared in the most furious scowl I had ever seen. I had been wrong about his hands before. While there was one broken bone that stuck out of the back of his left hand, his fingertips were, in fact, large red claws. They looked like hunting knives attached to his palms. He was wearing a wide-brimmed black hat that touched the ceiling of the bus, and a tattered black leather coat that stretched down to his feet. Maggots poured out of the pockets as if there was a hose dispensing them. He squished them as he stepped forward.

"GET OFF OF MY BUS!" he screamed at us. "YOU DON'T BELONG ON MY BUS!"

We were still moving extremely fast, though no one was in the driver's seat.

"We're just trying to go home," I heard myself say. I don't even know if I said it out loud or just whispered it.

The Driver was in front of me in an instant. His hand was on my throat, lifting me to the top of the bus. I couldn't breathe. I saw the world turning white for the second time in a few minutes.

"GET!" He slammed my head against the top of the bus. "OFF!" Slam. "OF MY!" Slam. "BUUUUSSSSS!!!" He tossed me to the front of the bus, like a rag doll.

He started to walk back to the front.

There are two guys in the back of the bus that you can beat up for awhile too, you know.

I looked into the empty driver's seat. I had an idea.

I got up and sat down in the driver's seat. Outside the windshield, I saw images flying by at high speed. Flames, black mountains, more flames, rocks, dead trees, etc.

"AAARARRGGGHHH!!!! GET OUT OF MY SEAT!!!!" he screamed, the sound was so loud that the windows exploded. All that was left was the windshield, which now had a massive crack going corner to corner. His hand closed around my throat. I could feel his claws piercing my skin. Hot, sticky blood was already dripping down onto my chest. I slammed my foot down on the brake.

The Driver flew through the windshield. At first, I thought he had gone flying, but I saw that he was hanging on to the front of the bus. I had hit the brake; we should have been stopped, but it looked as if he was being sucked out of the bus.

He reached up and began to pull himself back in.

"THIS IS MY BUS!" he screamed. Clearly, he had some sharing problems.

He reached forward to grab at my leg, when something came from behind me. It was the lightsaber. It flew right past my ear and hit the Driver in the knuckles. That was just enough to loosen his grip, he was sucked away from the bus and completely out of sight. I slammed on the brake again. This time the bus really did stop.

I slammed into the steering wheel and bounced into the air. I fell back down to the ground. Derek and Oen had slid up to the front as well. I couldn't see. Blood was running down my front. The world was blurry. I saw Derek reach over and hit the lever to open the door. I felt myself being carried. It looked like Oen was helping. It was night time outside. That didn't make any sense. We had left in the morning. The world went black.

Chapter 9: The Ninth Chapter

I opened my eyes. Something was different. The world seemed clearer. We were somewhere else now. Not on the bus. But, I still felt like we were moving.

"Derek, I think he's awake," I heard Oen say. "Mat, are you ok?" I looked at his shoulder.

"Oen, you're bleeding," I said.

"Yeah, I'll be fine," he said.

"Did you throw my lightsaber at him?"

"Yeah."

I tried to shake my head, failed, then just looked up at him instead.

"Now, he's armed with a lightsaber," I said, and the world faded to black again.

This time when I opened my eyes, I was in Derek's basement. The world wasn't as fuzzy, but my head was killing me.

"Mat, can you hear me?" It was Oen again. "How many fingers am I holding up?"

"You're flipping me off," I said.

"Well, he can see fine," Oen said.

I looked down at myself. Bloody pants, no shirt.

"Couldn't wait to get my shirt off, huh?" I said to Oen.

"And he remembers you," said Derek.

"Well, you're fat." said Oen.

"Why am I not in a hospital?" I said.

Derek explained, "The way you were bleeding, we didn't think you had time, with the closest hospital being 45 minutes away from here. So, we came back here and got some ice and towels and put pressure on the wound to prevent -- "

"Derek, you don't need to tell me everything that happened. Am I going to survive?"

"Yeah, your bleeding stopped after about fifteen minutes of alternating between ice and -- "

"I'm gonna live. Got it," I said. I'm sure Derek had a very interesting tale to tell, but my head was pounding (probably from all the blood loss) and I wasn't in the mood to hear any big words just now.

Then something struck me.

"Did we make it back?" I said, sitting up too fast. "Are we in our own world?"

"It looks like it," said Oen. "No monsters attacked us on the way out."

"Have you seen any real people yet?" I asked.

"Yeah, the pizza delivery guy seemed like a zombie at first, but most of the Dominoes kids like that."

"You ordered pizza?" I said. Oen paused for a moment and looked from Derek to me.

"Um -- no. Well, Derek said you were going to be alright and I hadn't eaten since the day before. I mean we never got our Taco Bell," he said.

I stood up and looked at my bloody shirt next to the couch. It was soaked. I was surprised that I could still stand.

I walked over to the pizza box and opened it. I was struck with horror the second my eyes saw what was in the box.

"Oen!" I said.

"What?"

"I hate mushrooms on my pizza!"

I glanced down at my watch.

01:30:46 AM.

I looked over at Derek and Justin, who were now brutally slaying zombies in the video game, Left 4 Dead.

"Guys," I said. "How long was I out?"

Derek looked back at me and simultaneously shot a zombie in the head on-screen.

"About an hour and a half," he said.

"That means that from the time we stepped on the bus -- "

"Yeah, time stopped. And when we got back off, it started back in the same place we left off," Derek said.

"Yeah, we figured this out an hour ago. Get with the program, Mat," said Oen without turning around. His character was pushed to the ground and now being eaten alive. I noticed Oen's shoulder was wrapped up tightly and looked like it had stopped bleeding.

"Damn it, Oen!" Derek said. "Mat, can you get over here and kill some zombies. Oen keeps getting eaten."

We spent the rest of the night killing zombies.