“What the hell is this?" Alain Dupont thought as he walked toward the ditch, even though he already knew the answer. It was his lame way of hoping for a different turn of events, that it wouldn’t be what he feared. A smell of sulfur wafted from the school bus, but Dupont later realized it was the smell of burning blood. Concentration camp survivors said that what remained from their time in those horrible places was the atmosphere of death that prevailed, the smell of people burning. Alain Dupont was far from being one of them. To be honest, he had more in common with their tormentors than with the survivors. Unfortunately, that was what had also stuck with him from that horrific accident—the atmosphere of death and the smell of burning blood.
Then he stopped dead in his tracks when he fi
