Baryon Asymmetry

Hal the bus driver quickly noticed something was wrong.

Susie, age eleven, did not get on the bus. She had attended George Washington Elementary since she was five. She was a good girl from a good family. In all those years, the only day she and her parents hadn’t been at the bus stop was the day her dog died. Hal worried she was ill.

At the next stop, half were absent. The remaining three were the Johnson siblings, ages six through ten. The youngest wiped the last of his tears on his shirt. The middle child was bleary and wore his shirt backward. The eldest had neglected to brush her hair and did not greet Hal. Instead, she hissed to the youngest, “You said you wanted to.”

Children were also missing at the third and fourth stops. The fifth stop was only for one child, seven-year-old Christopher. He stood alone, backpack resting in the dirt. The early morning sun already shined in his face, and he squinted at the bus as it rounded the bend. His mouth hung slightly open, revealing the gap between his teeth. He wore only one shoe.

Hal pushed the doors open, forcing a smile. “Well howdy, Christopher. Where’s Mom today?”

Christopher boarded the bus, shrugging and dragging the bag. “She had to leave early. But it’s okay. I know how to walk to the bus stop.”

He tried to sound light. “But that’s a mile walk down the hill, Christopher.”

“I know how to walk,” the child repeated. He moved back to his seat.

Hal’s throat was tight and dry. He pulled the door shut and grabbed the BC. “Anyone else feeling a little off today?” he pressed the accelerator and the bus jolted forward. The children were quiet. The camouflage hills skimmed past, rolling and turning in mechanic repetition.

Diane’s voice crackled, “Got them Monday blues, Hal?”

“If I do, I ain’t the only one. Half the kids ain’t here.”

Her raspy laugh drifted over the radio waves. “Funny, I was thinking the same thing. Four stops in, quarter of 'em didn’t show. Think there’s another flu going around?”

“Must be. Cedric, what’s it like on your route?”

Silence a moment. Hal slowed to the next stop. Here all children were present, but again, no parents. The three children ascended the stairs and ignored Hal as they passed. He shut the doors and continued.

“Cedric didn’t clock in,” Diane said. “Saw he hadn’t when I showed up. And I was late.”

“Who’s on Bus Three, then?”

“Me,” a voice said. “Filling in for Cedric.”

“Who’s ‘me?’” said Hal.

“Traffic’s lighter this morning,” Diane remarked. “At least out on the main drag.”

“Wait a second, Diane. Who’s on Bus Three?”

“I didn’t hear. Did they say? It’s probably Tony. He took my route a month ago, I think.”

“Yeah, he did, but that didn’t sound like Tony.”

Still no response from Bus Three. Hal glanced in the rearview. The children whispered. Words drifted to the front intermittently, disjointed and senseless. This was the quietest ride in months. Almost as bad as the week the flu broke out back in December. More than half the kids had been laid up coughing their lungs out.

The turnout for the rest of the stops was similar. By the time he reached George Washington Road and the school was in sight, the bus was half full. The wheels ground over the dirt road. The children jittered in their seats without comment. Hal’s eyes darted between the road and the rearview. His stomach hurt.

The gate came into clearer view at the roundabout. There was only one teacher there. The bus whined to a stop and Hal pushed the doors open. It was Jones, the assistant principal. Deep shadows beneath her eyes. Silver hair untidy, shirt wrinkled. She put one foot on the bottom step but seemed to think better of it. Instead she gripped the sides of the doors with white fingers.

“Hal,” she said. “I need you to hold onto the kids for a few minutes.”

“What’s going on?”

“We have an alarming shortage of teachers today.”

“How many is alarming?”

“Upwards of two hundred,” she croaked, so low he thought he’d misheard.

“How many?”

She shook her head, unwilling to repeat the unspeakable. “Look, I’ve got a couple teachers on the way to take the kids off the bus. But everyone who was assigned line-duty this morning is out.”

“Did anyone hear about Cedric?”

“I have to go, Hal. Just wait a few minutes, please.”

“Ellen—!” She was gone, trotting back through the gate and up the hill toward the school. He slid the doors shut and glanced in the rearview, expecting questions. But the children had fallen silent. They stared at him from behind their seats.

* * *

The children were led into the school by teachers who did not typically do the leading. Frank Ellis was one of those teachers, Bonnie McMahon was another.

Frank’s experience with children was limited to his two years of teaching art to nine and ten-year-olds fifteen years ago. He had been summoned by Ellen Jones today because she was desperate, which she did not try to conceal in her call. He had planned to paint today, but he planned to paint every day. And besides, there was something in the weather that made his knuckles sore. It might be good to have a change of atmosphere. So he’d made the drive to the school, and was given line-duty with Bonnie.

Bonnie shouted at a child to stop throwing rocks. Frank didn’t know Bonnie well. She was a large woman with beady eyes. She taught mathematics. She hadn’t spoken to him.

A child suddenly broke from the rest and ran onto the field, chasing an opalescent rock his friend had thrown. Bonnie followed, demanding he return to the line. He bent, picked up the rock, and wiped the dirt from it. He turned and said, “Don’t do that again, Cal.”

“Please keep walking, boys,” Frank called. They seemed not to hear him but rejoined the line anyway. Bonnie fell back and watched the rear of the line. Frank glanced back once. Bus One had rolled away; Bus Two pulled to a hissing stop.

* * *

“What? Is this a fucking joke?”

Principal Nash slammed his laptop shut and rose, flapping the tails of his suit coat. He glared at Miss Aldrich while he adjusted his tie and came round the desk. “I’m not having this today, Miss Aldrich, I simply won’t have it. First the teachers, now an entire bus? I tell you, this should not be an issue. We’ve got twice as many teachers as we do students, for Christ’s sake!”

She followed him out to the main office where he signed a paper on a clipboard presented by one secretary and received a fresh cup of coffee from another. Miss Aldrich said, “We’ve only just received word from Mr. Brannigan. He says Bus Three hasn’t arrived. And it’s now twenty minutes late.”

“The children from the other two buses—how many are accounted for?”

“Little more than half.”

He charged down the hallway. The smell of construction paper and power-cleaned carpets. The gray floor and long white walls sloping in a declivity toward the entrance doors. He burst through them while Miss Aldrich wrapped her maroon scarf about her neck, nearly dropping the stack of papers in one arm. She procured a cell phone from her jacket pocket and observed it helplessly.

“This is outrageous,” Nash cried, halting suddenly in the thin cool morning. From the top of the hill, the roundabout was visible beyond the gates, and it was severely lacking a particular yellow bus. Mr. Brannigan, a dumpy bloodhound of a man, stood watching the horizon and periodically heaving a despondent sigh. He seemed to feel Nash and Aldrich nearby. He turned and hollered, “No sight of em!”

Nash said turned to Miss Aldrich. “They’ve tried phoning the driver.”

“Of course.”

“Where are the others?”

“The others whom?”

“The other drivers, Miss Aldrich! The two that decided to arrive today, those ones, where are they?”

“I believe they’re in the lounge.”

He flapped a hand until she stepped aside. He barreled back inside and up the rise of the hall and round a corner. He burst into the lounge and the overwhelming aroma of coffee. Two drivers sat in ratty armchairs on either side of the coffee table. One was an older man, balding guy with stubble and a denim jacket. He was staring at his coffee, but looked up with great expectation when Nash arrived.

“Principal,” he said. “Any word on Bus Three?”

Nash ground his teeth. “I was rather hoping you could inform me, actually, uh—”

“Hal,” the driver said. As if that should be obvious.

“Yes, Hal.”

“We don’t know what happened,” said the other driver. A rough New England woman with laugh-wrinkles at the corners of her eyes and big, calloused hands. “I came in a minute late, saw Cedric hadn’t clocked in.”

“Cedric is…”

“Bus Three’s driver.” Again, as if he should know that. “Someone else was driving.”

“Who, exactly?”

“He said on the BC he was filling in for Cedric, but nothing else,” Hal said. “Has anyone seen the bus?”

Nash thought he might strangle these drivers. He felt his eyes bulging from his head. “No, Hal, nobody has seen the bus. Why else would I be here asking you for information?” He glanced at Miss Aldrich, who had found something interesting in the wall. Hal and the butch glared at him with dim wariness. “Look. Just stay here until we find this bus. Then we can see who exactly is driving it. Won’t that be nice?”

And back down the hall. To Miss Aldrich, “Has someone checked the time-in sheets for the drivers this morning?”

“Only two names—those two back there.”

Nash flew past a classroom where the students played ring-around-the-rosy. He was fifteen feet gone before he froze in his tracks and cocked his head to the side. He turned and looked down the hall at the door. Miss Aldrich said, “Something wrong?”

“Did I just—”

He approached the door, pressing down the front of his coat. He gazed inside. Yes, the children were dancing in a circle. But where was their teacher? He looked at the door. Mr. Urie’s Classroom.

“Miss Aldrich, where is Mr. Urie today?”

She consulted her cell phone for half a minute while he watched the circle revolve. Yes, they were dancing ring-around-the-rosy. He could hear the muffled chant through the glass. But nobody was falling down. And where was their teacher?

“Mr. Urie was absent today, Mr. Nash.”

“Who’s filling in for him?”

“Mrs. Smith.”

“Then where the hell is she?”

Miss Aldrich looked past his shoulder, then covered her mouth with her phone. “Oh.”

Nash shoved the door open and put on his Principal Face. “Hello, kids!”

He faltered. They ignored him. Or they didn’t hear him. That was it. They kept dancing and singing and now it was much louder, so they hadn’t heard him. They kept singing.

“Ring around the rosy, pocketful of posy!”

Ashes, ashes, an absent part of him thought.

“Ring around the rosy, pocketful of posy!”

Where were the ashes?

“Children!” he shouted. They came to a stop. “Children,” he said again, resuming Principal Face. “Children, where is Mrs. Smith?”

“She went for a ride,” said one girl. Nash didn’t know her. Petite, blonde pigtails. Big blue eyes.

“Where did she go for a ride?” The children glanced at one another. But nobody spoke. Principal Nash felt Miss Aldrich stir beside him. He was suddenly nervous to look away from the children. Still nobody answered, so he said again, “Children, where did Mrs. Smith go? Did she have to take a phone call?”

“Yes,” said the boy next to the girl.

Nash couldn’t stifle a laugh. He hated how high-pitched it sounded. He took another step into the room, and it was like threatening a pack of wolves. Bright-eyed, innocent wolves that, in tandem with him, stepped closer into their circle, tightening it. They did not avert their gazes or blink. Their movement was practically instinctive in its immediacy.

“Children,” he cautioned. “What have you got in your circle?”

* * *

Bus Three came round the bend on two wheels. Righting itself, it kept its speed and roared over the damp asphalt. Rain speckled the windshield and made the yellow paint gleam. The clouds grumbled behind the bus.

If some poor soul followed the bus, they’d have seen the back door hanging open, slapping the bus’s rear. They would have seen a wall of darkness in the door, thick shadow obscuring the inside.

But within, dozens of small children sat grouped three, four, five to a seat. Silent and still, they stared ahead as if the safety of the drive depended on their focus, not the driver’s.

Only two children stood: at the back, at the open door. From within there was no view of the road, only an open doorway filled with darkness. The standing children watched it with focus equivalent to their seated cohorts. One of the standing children tapped its finger once, twice, thrice against the doorframe. A rhythm. The children listened to the screams.

Then they reached into the darkness and pulled from it a squirming child, draped in baggy clothing that the standing children tore away. The child blubbered. They gave it fresh clothes from beneath the nearest seat and directed it to an open space at the front of the bus. The child sat naked, clutching its new clothes in its lap. A child with the face of authority, suddenly annihilated.

It recognized none of the children as students of George Washington Elementary. Here a frazzled, silver-haired girl. There a chubby little boy with knobby hands. Across the aisle, a broad, beady-eyed girl with a wide mouth. Behind, a dumpy, droopy-eyed boy.

“Where are all the adults?” the gray child whimpered. “What happened to all the adults?”

The driver shrugged, an old man bent so far forward that only his scalp was visible. He heaved a sigh and said, “There was an imbalance.”