Missed the Bus

Author's Note: This story was not inspired by the prompt. It is part of a larger novel I'm working on that just so happened to fit. I hope you enjoy it!

The alarm clock screamed its usual bleep-bleep-bleep and Liam reached for the snooze button. This would happen twice more before he forced his eyes open, ready to take on the world—or as ready as any twelve-year-old could be. 

“Liam! Time for school!” his mother yelled from the hallway side of his door. He grumbles something unintelligible in response and rolled over to cautiously invite the sunlight into his eyes. “Twenty minutes!” his mother reminded him as she rapped once on his door with the bottom of her fist, rattling the door slightly. 

Liam drags himself out of bed and begins to embrace this new Monday as the many before it—with instant disdain. Now fully awake, he quickly converts the list in his mind into action: pants, shirt, socks, shoes. He stepped in front of the mirror hanging on the back of his door to work his hair into the usual spiked-but-casual style.

“Boy. You must help me,” a voice whispered.

“Whoa!” Liam exclaimed, spinning quickly to see where the voice had come from.

“Okay, who’s there?” he said aloud. No answer. He breathed out “weeeird,” quietly as goosebumps arose on the back of his neck. A moment passed and he turned back to the mirror.

“Boy! Listen!” the voice echoed loudly in his head, startling him to the floor. His bedroom curtain was moving as if it had been kissed by a breeze.

“M-oooooom!” he yelled, “there’s a ghost in my room!” His mother called back; something about missing the bus and he’d be walking if he didn’t get his butt in gear. Another moment passed and he worked up the courage to rise from the safety of the floor and began to leave his room.

As Liam opens the door, a flash of orange light engulfs him and suddenly he is… somewhere else. He’s nowhere, and everywhere. He knows this but doesn’t understand how he knows it.

“Must be a dream,” he thought.

Everything around him is white except a small orange blur in the distance. It reminds him of one of those television crime dramas where the person’s face is pixelated out. The orange blur begins to move closer to him very quickly.

“Boy. You must listen,” the voice in the blur says as it begins to take shape. It’s a person, but not quite. A girl, but not quite. She was unlike any girl he’d ever seen. Her bright orange hair was pulled tight in a ponytail and her ears were sitting too high, almost at her temples, and slightly pointed. Her eyes were the same fiery red-orange as her hair. She was taller than he, but not by much.

“What... is going on?” he said to the voice.

“There is no time,” the voice said, “remember what I’m about to tell you. When you leave your domicile, you must retrieve the Lionstone.”

“Lionstone? What—I don’t—"

“NO TIME BOY! IT IS IMPERATIVE THAT YOU FIND THE LIONSTONE! THE FUTURE OF OUR WORLD WILL DEPEND ON IT!”

“Whoa, okay. I’m just—what,” he paused to inspect his surroundings for something—anything—familiar, “where am I?” He’s standing, but there is no floor and no ceiling. The space has distance and depth, but there are no walls or shadows. It is finite, but also infinite. Suddenly the orange-haired girl grabs him by his shoulders and begins to shake him.

“THERE’S NO TIME—”

“LIAM!” his mother’s voice powered through. He awoke to find himself lying back in his bed, staring up at his mother's grimaced face. “What on Earth is the matter with you? Did you sleep in your school clothes? Ugh.”

“What?! No, no, I was up. I got ready,” he said as he sat up, forgetting the very strange orange-haired girl.

“And so, what, you just decided to take a quick nap then? I mean, really, Liam?” she scolded. “It doesn’t matter now. Congratulations, you missed the bus, now you gotta hoof it.”

“EEERRRG!” Liam plopped backwards onto the bed once more.

“Hey, you got nobody to blame but yourself."

But that wasn't true. It was the orange-haired-girl’s fault. He’d have been at the bus stop with plenty of time if she hadn’t rudely zapped him away to another dimension.

“Can’t you just drive me there?” he asked.

“and what, let your sister miss her bus too? I don’t think so buddy. This is your mess, you clean it up,” she replied on her way out of the room.

He jumped out of bed and grabbed his backpack and flew down the stairs. Two minutes later he was on his bike. As he reached the end of his driveway, the memory of the orange-haired-girl flashed into his mind suddenly. What was it she had said?

“Ha-ha! Retrieve the Lionstone my child,” he mocked aloud, “what a weird dream,” as he pressed his weight onto the pedals. It is seven miles to the school, but there is a bike trail through the woods that cuts it down to three. He reaches the end of Lake Hill Road just in time for the green light and darts across the intersection, hops the curb at the sidewalk and into the tree line.

He would not make it to the other side.

On Borleen Avenue, a tall blonde man walks into a barber shop. He takes a ticket from the number station and sits in the third chair from the left, picking up a magazine from the table. It’s a copy of Popular Mechanics from three months ago. He does not read it. He simply opens the magazine to a random page and places it face up in his lap. 

There are two individuals in the shop besides the blonde man; the barber and a very young dark haired man receiving a fashionable business cut. The blonde man waits patiently as the young dark haired man is released from the chair, pays the barber twenty dollars and leaves smiling, apparently satisfied with his new look.

The blonde man rises from his seat, places the magazine back on the table and moves to reverse the Yes! We’re Open sign—exchanging it for one that says Out to Lunch, as he locks the door. The barber takes off his white apron and places it on a hook on the wall.

Through a faded green door, in the back of the shop, in a small room, the blonde and the barber go inside and face each other. The blonde man presses a button on the wall and a secret hatch opens in the floor between them. A disc begins to rise from the hatch, stopping at about waste level. The barber reaches his right hand up and around his own head, fingers pointing outward. The blonde does the same.

Their fingers begin to dig into their foreheads, pulling up and back as they go. Soon the tops of their skulls are removed, exposing bright blue glowing brains. Electricity begins to spark around the room. Little blue lightning bolts shoot out of their brains lightly kissing the walls, ceiling, and floor. 

A small fleshy finger-like probe begins to surface through the front of the blonde man’s brain and the tip glows bright red. Another in the barber’s brain does the same and now a bright crimson beam of light connects them. The two of them simultaneously place their hands onto the silver disc. Their mouths open and a steel blue glow emerges from within.

“Have you found the boy?” a voice echoes, but only the two of them can hear it.

“Yes. He is being detained as we speak,” the barber and the blonde man respond in unison.

“Good. Bring him here. We have much work to do.”

“Sir, I'm not sure that is wise. The boy's commander will notice him missing very soon and we can’t be seen transporting him here. Authorities on this planet can be… aggressive.”

“Well, then don’t be seen,” the voice is frustrated. Too long they have waited.

“Yes. Of course, sir. There is something else. She is here. She has made contact with the boy.”

“Valain is of no consequence," the voice growled. "She cannot stop us now. If she gets in your way, eliminate her.”

“Yes sir," the two men respond in unison.

The barber and the blonde man remove their hands from the disc and once again the blonde presses the button on the wall. The disc retracts to its hidden home under the floor as the fleshy lasers retreat back into their brains and they place their scalps neatly back into place.

"How do you know Valain is here?" the barber asks.

"The boy. He believes we are working with her. He repeatedly expresses regret for 'not listening to the orange-haired girl'. He has asked to speak with her," the blonde scoffs.

"guffa-guffa-guffa," the barber's laugh is something between a cough and a gurgle, "Absurd. Has he offered any information on this planet's defense systems?"

"Nothing."

"Hmpf! This species and their 'thoughts'. They bury them like seeds they never intend to grow. How selfish!"

"Agreed," the blonde man replies. "Their brains are just too primitive," and they let out a guffa-guffa-guffa in unison as they head through the door and back into the barber shop.

There's another customer waiting at the door. The blonde man walks toward the door and the barber puts his apron back on.

"Alrighty, Jimmy, you take care now, tell the missus I said thanks for that pie," the barber says aloud as the blonde man opens the door for the customer and flips the sign.

"You got it Bill," Jimmy replies, "see you next week," and the bell above the door sings its happy jing-a-ling song as he exits the shop. Across the street, in the protective shadow of an alleyway, an orange haired-girl watches him leave. 

Imagine the dark. Not the regular dark like you might have seen in the middle of the night after stirring from a nightmare you can no longer remember. Imagine the really dark. The kind of blackness that can hardly be described. Like closing your eyes as tight as you can and then darker still. Imagine a place so completely black that you could hold your own hand in front of your face and still not see it.

In most dark places, even something as small as the space under a door can provide one with enough light to be aware of the objects around them. You could turn out the lights in your room and after your eyes adjust, you’d still be able to find your way to the hall, even if the lights in the hall were also out. The tiniest beam may reflect off of, say, a bedpost, and illuminate the ceiling and in turn bounce a trillion particles to every conceivable corner of the room at 670 million miles per hour. If you could run this fast, you could run around the entire Earth seven times and be back before your mother even noticed.

You see, light acts as both a particle and a wave, so it can both be reflected and refracted; it can reverse direction and flow around an object at the same time and can find its way into the darkest place through even the smallest crack. Unless, of course, there are no cracks.

If you ever find yourself in a place so hopeless, three things begin to happen. First, you search desperately for a hint of light. Finding none, second, you begin to literally listen for the light. After all, you have spent your entire life associating the light with certain familiar sounds, such as the sunlight with a bird’s song or the click of a switch during that early morning bathroom break. After a while you may convince yourself that any sound you hear must surely bring light with it shortly. For example, the scurry of tiny feet provokes images of a mouse so you imagine you’ve seen a mouse and the only way this could have happened is if the mouse had reflected some light back to your eye. Then you begin to think the scurrying sounded too heavy or too fast and you realize it couldn’t have been a mouse so there’s no way the light you imagined was real. Thirdly, as your bargaining gives way to acceptance, you begin to question whether the light had ever existed at all.

As Liam awoke, he was immediately aware of this kind of dark. His eyes were open, but no sight to be seen. He was sitting, although it was not apparent what he was sitting on. A chair? Or a box? A table perhaps? Impossible to tell. Whatever it was, he seemed to be part of it somehow. When he moved the object seemed to move as well. I’m tied to something, he thought. His hands were beginning to go numb from the restraints around his wrists. His head was pounding! He shivered as he felt something crawling down the side of his face. A trickle of sweat, or blood, or both. 

“Hello?” he called to the dark, “is anyone there?” The dark answered with voices in the distance. As they began to get closer, he could hear footsteps and he tried to make sense of his predicament.

The last thing he could remember he had been riding his bike through the shortcut in the woods across from Lake Hill Road. Last summer he had discovered there was an old but sturdy footbridge across the narrow creek in the woods. The path had grown over with brush and briars from many years of disuse; a problem which he and his friends quickly corrected after just a few trips.

The footsteps grew louder and suddenly a door flew open. The light flooded into the room, striking every surface instantly, washing away the desperately fleeing dark. Hope had returned! And with it, for the moment Liam knew only this: there exists, now, the possibility of escape...