Page 227 of The Wicked

“Dog, come on, there are kids here! Stop fucking around and talk to them. Don’t make shit worse!” Devil yelled at him.

“Shit is already worse! Shit is fucked; shit is all over the roof of this fucking bus, calling the angel of death to come for a fucking wine and bread feast with our skin and blood as fucking starters. I ain’t about to be delusional right now, and the fucking kids shouldn’t have to be either.”

“Z,” Devil called to me. “Listen to me, if you know there’s a way—a chance that we can come out of this alive, please just focus and get to work, okay? Ignore that fuckhead.”

“Oh, I’m the fuckhead now, huh?”

“Dog, you do your part, and let her do hers, don’t be the fucking prick, all right? Look at how scared those kids are. Do something about it.”

“The fuck am I supposed to do?” Dog exclaimed.

“Figure it out!”

“Don’t fucking yell at me! I’m already panicking, and my shit is not together right now; you feel me? Your yelling and commanding and the fucking beeping sound from that thing are doing a shit ton of bad to my fucking nerves,” Dog let out tightly.

I looked over at him to see that he was pacing up and down the small length of the bus, and had, at some point, made a small bandage with a torn piece of his shirt to tie off the bullet graze wound on his arm.

“Dog,” I called, and hysterical brown eyes looked down at me. “Just—breathe, please.”

“The fucking irony. In a few minutes, I won’t be breathing anymore!”

“Dog, fucking breathe!”

“Okay!” he snapped as he stopped pacing and took a deep breath before letting it out. After doing it several times, he sighed. “Fuck… okay… okay… I’m calm. Zahra, you’re calm; Devil, you’re calm; children, you’re all calm; everybody is calm. We’re not on the road; we’re in some fucked-up escape room, and to escape it, we have to be calm.”

“That’s right,” Devil said. “Engage the kids, and Zahra, please concentrate.”

I didn’t know if what I did was a nod or a shake of my head, but I knew my hand had gone back to the beeping device littered with wires, light red, dark red, blue, white, yellow, all wired into the control panel that displayed the beeping red light.

I closed my eyes, trying to level my breathing and manage the noise around me.

The first thing I saw was a gloved hand over mine. A warm chest pressed against my back, and hot breath fanned my ear as he spoke.

“The first thing you do is never to panic; if you panic, you’re fucked—”

I snapped my eyes open and shook my head.

“Okay,” I breathed out. “I was trained for this a couple of years back. All wires here have a purpose.”

“As they should,” Dog said.

“There’s one for stopping the time, another for speeding it up, another for turning off the device and stopping the bomb, another for slowing the clock, another for setting it off—”

“That’s the one we don’t want.”

“Dog.” Devil’s voice spelled warning.

“Fine, Jesus, I’ll talk to the children.”

I saw him walking to the front of the bus from the corner of my eye. I looked at the passenger seats, all eyes on Dog like they were waiting for him to try to talk them out of what he had already fucked up by saying they were all fucked.

“Okay, kids, I’m gonna be real with you. You’ve seen my worst side in the span of minutes, my panic? Yeah, I figure there’s no need to stand here and shit-talk you with rainbows and bumblebees of promises.”

“That’s starting off great,” Devil muttered.

Surprisingly, some cries died down; but they still looked scared.

Dog cleared his throat, looking around. “There comes a time in every man’s life when he has to face death.”