The Task Is To Survive

Headless Corpse and the Haunted Bus: A Post-Apocalyptic Discovery

A headless corpse lay right in the water. I even flinched, because it seemed like the headless body was moving and trying to get up. But it immediately became clear that the flowing water was swaying the dead man's arm. I moved upstream from the corpse and finally fell to the water. I drank for a long time. It seemed like my thirst would never be quenched. But finally, I pulled away and straightened up, satisfied. One problem less.

Now I had to cross the river and get to the apartment. The bridges were destroyed, but the Klyazma River is quite shallow, and below the bridges it's knee-deep. I headed toward the ford. As I passed the frozen bus, I thought I heard a sound coming from inside again. I took off my shoes, waded into the shallow water, crept closer, and pressed my ear to the tinted glass. Yes! Sounds from inside the bus! I even managed to make out some vague voices! I tapped the glass with my foot and shouted:

- Is anyone alive?

I peered into the dark, opaque glass, but couldn't see anything. Damn those tinted windows! I pressed my face against the glass, pressing my palms to my eyes, trying to see anything. Then I jerked back—from the other side, her face pressed against the glass, a girl was staring at me! She was saying something, but the sound didn't carry; her mouth just opened silently. Then she rapped the glass with her palm, and I distinctly heard the thud.

"Wait, I'll break the glass!" I shouted at her.

The girl nodded, confirming she understood. I ran along the riverbank and found a heavy boulder. It was the second time that day that I had to break a bus window. This time it was quicker. After the first blow, the dark glass cracked, and after the fifth, it shattered into tiny glass chips, revealing a round hole.

"Hey, where are you? Come out!" I pushed the stone aside and peered inside the hole. "Ugh, it stinks in here!"

The bus reeked of rotten meat, spoiled blood, urine, and feces. I almost threw up. How could anyone survive in such air? A girl of about fourteen or fifteen crawled out of a round hole in the window. She had a scratched face and a broken, swollen nose, but that wasn't what struck me. The rescued woman was wearing very strange, old-fashioned clothing: a long black skirt that reached to the ground, and a white, long-sleeved, lace-collared shirt, now stained with dried blood.

– Finally! Fresh air! We almost suffocated in there!

Following the first girl, others in similarly unusual outfits began to climb out of the bus. A second, a third, a fourth... Just how many were there inside?! Some of the freed girls began greedily drinking water from the river, while others hurried away behind the cars to relieve themselves.

– Where are you all from?

“From the girls’ boarding school at the Khotkovo Pokrovsky Convent,” a fair-haired girl of about fifteen answered for everyone, hastily tying a scarf on her disheveled long hair.

"We're from Sergiev Posad," added her friend, whose white shirt was torn from the collar to the waist and also stained with dried blood. "We were going to Moscow for the Orthodox exhibition."

"From Sergiev Posad? Why not the Yaroslavl Highway?" I had a more or less clear idea of ​​the Moscow region's map and was therefore surprised.

The girl followed my gaze, blushed, and quickly turned away, trying to wrap her torn shirt around herself. The first girl to get off the bus answered for her friend.

"We were driving along Yaroslavsky, but there was a huge traffic jam there. Valentina Pavlovna and the driver discussed it and decided to go around it."

I looked at the front of the bus, flattened like an accordion. It was unlikely the driver and the passengers in the front seats had a chance of surviving this horrific crash.

"Is that all of them? Or is anyone else still alive?" I asked the group of girls.

They looked at each other and quickly began to remember who was missing.

"Everyone made it out alive. Liza Svyatova, though, was still inside. But she's been unconscious for a long time and probably died too. When the bus crashed, Liza was wounded, covered in blood and broken. We tried to help her, but she was stuck upside down. Liza asked us to keep her head elevated so she wouldn't die from a brain hemorrhage. But that evening, she lost consciousness anyway, even though we continued to help her."

All the girls stood in a crowd, silently waiting for something. None of the rescued girls had any desire to climb back into the dark, death-filled bus and check whether their classmate was alive or not. Everyone looked at me expectantly, somehow believing that I should be the one checking on their wounded friend.

"Okay, I'll check it myself!" I decided and climbed inside.

It was dark inside and smelled incredibly foul. After the crash, the ventilation had failed, and three dozen girls had spent the entire day in the heat, trapped inside the bus. Almost immediately, I saw bodies—bloody and piled high in a jumble of broken seats. But one body was separate from the others, hanging high above the ground, almost at the very back of the bus, its leg caught unnaturally in a dislodged seat. The trapped girl's face and upper torso were hidden by the darkness and the sagging hem of her long skirt.

I sighed heavily and climbed up, clinging to the unstable, rickety seats. Once, I almost fell when a mount broke under my weight, sending the heavy two-seater crashing down onto a jumble of mangled bodies. But finally, though it took me a while, I managed to reach the back rows. It was unbearably stuffy here; the heat and heavy air were starting to make me feel nauseous. Bracing my foot against the inactive light fixture, I crawled closer to the girl hanging upside down and tried to free her trapped leg. How had she gotten like this... I tried to straighten the girl's leg and turn it sideways. Then, suddenly, the wounded girl groaned. She's alive! Okay, now I need to lift the body and carefully pry the foot trapped in the trap. It worked! Throwing the body of the girl, freed from the deadly trap, over my shoulder, I began to descend. Finally, he and the rescued girl got out.