Chapter 4: The Bus of Bleeding Saints

The bus had been blue once.

Jonah could tell from the strips of paint still clinging beneath the grime, from the ghost of a school district logo peeled half away on the side, from the cheerful yellow handrails inside that now looked obscene under the stuttering red glow of the emergency lights. Blue like summer field trips and bored children smearing fingerprints on glass. Blue like something that had belonged to a city with schedules, taxes, and parents waiting at curbs.

Now it rolled down Colfax with thirty-seven strangers packed shoulder to shoulder, every window fogged by breath and fear, its engine coughing like an old smoker drowning in his own lungs.

Outside, Denver had begun to rot into something else.

Not collapse. Collapse Jonah understood. He had seen buildings burn, cars folded around people, winter alleys where overdoses went stiff before sunrise. Collapse had rules. Weight. Fire. Bleeding. Screaming. You could triage collapse.

This was mutation.

The avenue stretched ahead in the headlights, but it no longer kept straight. Asphalt bulged in waves, painted lane markers twisting into pale vein-like lines that pulsed when the bus rolled over them. Parking meters leaned toward the street as if watching them pass. The brick fronts of pawnshops and liquor stores had grown patches of black moss that breathed in slow, wet swells. Every so often, a stoplight blinked an impossible color—violet, bone-white, a deep surgical green—and everyone on the bus flinched as if the light itself might reach inside and choose one of them.

Jonah stood in the aisle behind the driver, one hand braced against the ceiling rail, the other gripping the hatchet he had taken from the fire cabinet. His knuckles had split open sometime in the last hour. He didn’t remember when. Blood dried in dark crescents under his nails.

“How far?” called the driver.

Her name was Marisol Vega, and she had the posture of a woman who had spent twenty years refusing to be intimidated by drunk passengers, bad traffic, and men who thought volume counted as authority. Her gray-streaked hair was braided tight against her skull. A rosary swung from the rearview mirror, knocking against a cracked plastic charm shaped like a Broncos helmet.

“Union Station Safe Zone’s still the closest,” Jonah said.

He checked the glowing map only he seemed willing to stare at for more than a second. It hung in his vision like a migraine aura, streets overlaid with red smears, yellow pulses, tiny points of blue labeled PROVISIONAL SANCTUARY. The nearest blue point sat four miles northwest. It might as well have been the moon.

CITYWIDE TUTORIAL QUEST: SEEK SANCTUARY

Reach a recognized Safe Zone before midnight.

Time Remaining: 02:11:43

Failure Penalty: NIGHT TAX

No one liked saying those last two words out loud. Not after the System had spoken them into every skull in Denver in a voice too calm to be human.

A kid near the back started crying again. Not a baby. Maybe seven. Thin, hiccuping sobs muffled against someone’s coat.

“Is that thing still following us?” a man asked.

Jonah didn’t turn. “Which thing?”

No one laughed.

The man—red beard, office shirt torn at the collar, name badge still clipped to his belt—pressed his face to the window and instantly recoiled. “Jesus. Jesus, Mary, and—”

A wet scrape came from the left side of the bus.

Everyone on that side screamed.

Something dragged claws along the metal panels, long and leisurely, as if testing the flavor of the paint. Jonah pivoted, hatchet up. Through the streaked glass he saw only a smear of motion keeping pace with them. Low. Too low for a man. Too fast for a dog.

Then a head rose beside the window.

It had been a dog, maybe, before the sky split and the rules changed. Its muzzle had peeled back to expose too many teeth, layered like broken porcelain. The skin over its skull was gone in patches, and black feather-like growths sprouted along its spine. Its eyes were lidless white coins. It ran on six limbs, two of them sprouting from its ribs and striking sparks off the pavement.

The child’s sobbing became a shriek.

Jonah lunged down the aisle. “Away from the windows! Everybody down!”

“You said they couldn’t get in!” someone shouted.

“I said glass slows things down!”

The carrion hound hit the window with the sound of a cinder block dropped into a bathtub. Safety glass spiderwebbed inward. A woman in a nurse’s scrub top threw herself over the crying boy. Shards popped loose and tinkled across her back.

Jonah reached the window as the hound slammed into it again. Its jaws punched through the fractured glass, snapping blindly. Rotten breath flooded the bus—hot meat, sewer water, and the copper stink of old blood. People crushed backward, trampling bags and feet. The hound’s teeth caught the sleeve of a teenage boy in a letterman jacket and yanked.

“No!” the boy screamed, bracing both sneakers against the seat frame.

Jonah brought the hatchet down.

The blade bit into the hound’s snout with a meaty crack. Black blood sprayed the aisle, sizzling where it hit the rubber floor. The hound released the boy’s sleeve and snapped at Jonah instead. He jerked back, but teeth grazed his forearm, carving three burning lines through his jacket and skin.

Pain flashed white.

Status Effect Applied: Carrion Fever I

Onset: 00:09:59

“Of course,” Jonah snarled.

The hound shoved harder, shoulders compressing through the broken window in a way bones had no business allowing. The scrub nurse struck it with a metal water bottle. Once. Twice. Her face was gray with terror, but she kept swinging.

“Aim for the eyes!” Jonah shouted.

“It doesn’t have normal eyes!”

“Then aim for the wrong ones!”

She screamed and drove the bottle into one white orb. It burst like a grape full of ink.

The hound convulsed. Jonah hooked the hatchet blade under its jaw and threw his weight backward. For one terrible second, he felt its strength through the handle, felt something alive and hungry and offended by resistance. Then Marisol swerved the bus hard right.

The hound lost its footing. Its body slammed against a parked sedan, bounced, and vanished beneath the rear wheels.

The bus lurched over it.

A wet crunch rolled under their feet.

Silence followed except for the engine and the crying boy.

Jonah stayed crouched, breathing hard, watching the ruined window. Cold air knifed through the opening. The city’s smell poured in—smoke, ozone, ruptured gas lines, and something fungal growing too quickly in the dark.

The teenage boy clutched his torn sleeve. “It touched me. It touched me.”

“Let me see.” Jonah grabbed his arm.

“Get off!”

“Let. Me. See.”

The old paramedic voice came out before Jonah could soften it. Flat. Commanding. The boy froze. Jonah peeled the fabric back and found bruised skin, no broken surface.

“You’re clean.”

“You don’t know that.”

Jonah looked at the countdown hovering near his own wrist, the notification still blinking at the edge of sight. “I know enough.”

He shoved down the sleeve and stood. His wounded forearm throbbed. Dark lines were already crawling outward from the scratches, thin as ink in water.

The scrub nurse saw. Her eyes widened. “You’re infected.”

“Not yet.”

“That is not medically reassuring.”

“Good thing the medical system got replaced by murder pop-ups.”

She gave a breathless, disbelieving laugh that nearly broke into a sob. “I’m Priya.”

“Jonah.”

“Were you EMS?”

He wiped the hatchet on the back of a seat. “Something like that.”

Priya looked at the blood on his sleeve, then at his face, and whatever she saw there made her stop asking.

At the front, Marisol leaned over the wheel. “Road’s getting worse.”

Jonah moved back toward her. The floor rocked under him as the bus climbed a swelling ridge in the asphalt. Ahead, Colfax dipped into darkness. Streetlights had gone out for three blocks, but that wasn’t the problem.

The problem was the people.

They stood in the street shoulder to shoulder, maybe fifty of them, facing away from the bus.

“Are they alive?” Marisol asked.

Jonah stared through the windshield.

The figures wore Denver clothes—hoodies, business jackets, pajama pants, one man in cycling gear still wearing a cracked helmet. Their arms hung loose. Their heads tilted back, all at the same angle, exposing throats to the split-open sky.

Above them, something black fluttered between rooftops.

Not birds. Shadows shaped like torn cloth, folding and unfolding without bodies. They dipped low over the standing people. Whenever one passed through a person’s upturned face, that person shuddered and exhaled a plume of pale mist.

Then their skin sagged a little tighter against their bones.

“Turn,” Jonah said.

“Where?”

“Anywhere.”

Marisol spun the wheel. The bus groaned as she forced it onto a side street too narrow for comfort. A mailbox exploded under the bumper. People shouted as branches scraped the roof.

Behind them, every standing figure lowered their head at once.

Jonah felt it before he saw it. Attention, cold and heavy, pressing between his shoulder blades.

The first of the people began to run.

Not like humans. Their knees bent wrong. Arms flailed bonelessly. They came after the bus with mouths stretched open, pale mist leaking from between their teeth.

“Floor it,” Jonah said.

“What do you think I’m doing, knitting?” Marisol barked.

The bus surged down the residential street. Houses slid by on both sides, their lawns buckled with roots that hadn’t existed an hour ago. A cottonwood tree had grown through the roof of a Subaru, its branches hung with little red sacs that pulsed like hearts. In one yard, a plastic deer decoration turned its head to watch them pass.

A man near the front began praying in Spanish. Another snapped, “Shut up, shut up,” until Marisol reached back without looking and smacked the side of his head.

“You shut up. Let him talk to whoever answers.”

The infected mob gained behind them.

Jonah could see them in the side mirror, their silhouettes flickering beneath intermittent streetlights. The shadows fluttered above them, herding them forward like shepherd dogs made of night.

His forearm burned deeper. The notification pulsed.

Carrion Fever I

Time to systemic spread: 00:07:12

Recommended treatment: Cleanse, cauterize, or acquire relevant Skill.

Acquire relevant Skill.

“Yeah,” Jonah muttered. “I’ll stop by the Skill store.”

“What?” Priya asked behind him.

“Nothing.”

“You’re sweating.”

“It’s August.”

“It’s forty-eight degrees in here.”

He didn’t answer.

The System had given everyone a brand on the inside of the wrist when the sky opened. Jonah’s had looked like a black clock face at first, thin lines burned under the skin. Then the tutorial message. Then the hounds. Then the bus. He had been moving ever since because movement was the only thing keeping thought away.

If he stopped, he would see the ambulance again.

Rain on the windshield. A minivan folded around a pole. His partner Elise shouting for a backboard. The little girl’s hand slipping out of his glove while he compressed her father’s chest because protocol said the father had the better odds. The father died anyway. The little girl had still been warm when Jonah went back.

Brutal math. That was all triage was, stripped of the comforting language. Count the living. Count the minutes. Spend yourself where it bought the most future.

The bus hit something in the road and bounced hard enough to lift people out of their seats.

“I need directions!” Marisol shouted.

Jonah blinked sweat from his eyes and focused on the System map. “Left on York. Then north. We can cut toward downtown through—”

The windshield filled with a wall of flesh.

Marisol screamed and stomped the brake.

The bus fishtailed. People slammed forward. Jonah caught the rail with one hand and Priya with the other before she pitched past him. The front bumper stopped three feet from a thing that squatted across the intersection.

It had been assembled out of roadkill.

Dozens of animal bodies fused together into a mound the size of a delivery van—dogs, raccoons, pigeons, something that might have been a deer, all stitched by black sinew and twitching tails. Heads jutted at random from the mass, jaws chattering. Antlers scraped sparks from the pavement. Wings beat uselessly from wet fur. In the center, a human face pushed out upside down, eyes open and pleading.

“Help,” the face whispered through lips full of gravel.

Then the entire mound charged.

Marisol threw the bus into reverse.

The transmission shrieked. The mob behind them flooded into the street, blocking retreat.

“We’re boxed!” someone yelled.

Jonah’s gaze snapped left. A narrow alley between a dispensary and an apartment building. Too narrow for the bus. Maybe not too narrow if they didn’t care what survived on the sides.

“There!” He pointed.

Marisol glanced once. “You’re insane.”

“Tonight, yes.”

She bared her teeth. “Everybody hold on!”

The carrion mound hit the bus as Marisol cranked the wheel. Metal screamed. The impact spun them sideways. Windows burst along the right side in glittering sheets. A man flew from his seat and struck a pole with a sickening thud. The bus plowed into the alley mouth, brick grinding both sides, mirrors snapping off, paint peeling in long curls.

For five seconds, the world became noise.

Brick on steel. People screaming. The engine roaring. The wet slap of something trying to climb the rear.

Then they exploded out the far end of the alley into a parking lot and struck a row of concrete barriers.

The bus stopped.

Jonah didn’t fall so much as the bus rose up and hit him. His shoulder slammed into the fare box. His teeth clicked together. The hatchet skittered away.

For a moment, everything went muffled.

Red lights strobed. Steam hissed from the front. Someone groaned. Someone else kept saying, “My leg, my leg, my leg,” in a soft amazed voice.

Jonah pushed himself upright.

The windshield was cracked opaque. Marisol slumped over the wheel, blood running from her hairline. Priya was on her knees beside the aisle, already crawling toward the injured with professional horror on her face.

“Status!” Jonah shouted.

No one answered cleanly. Panic came instead.

“Open the doors!”

“Don’t open the doors!”

“Where’s my son?”

“Something’s on the roof!”

Jonah grabbed the hatchet from under a seat and staggered to Marisol. Two fingers to the carotid. Pulse. Strong. He shook her shoulder.

“Marisol.”

Her eyes snapped open. “I don’t get paid enough.”

“You’re bleeding.”

“So’s everybody.” She looked through the cracked windshield. “Engine?”

The bus coughed black smoke.

“Maybe,” Jonah said.

A scream tore from the back.

Jonah turned.

The man who had hit the pole lay half in the aisle, half under a seat. His name badge said GREG. A shard of metal from the window frame had punched into his upper thigh. Blood pumped around it in rhythmic surges, bright arterial red that painted the floor in spreading fans.

Priya reached him first and pressed both hands over the wound. Blood welled between her fingers instantly.

“Femoral!” she shouted.

The word sliced through Jonah like a siren tone.

He was moving before thinking. He dropped beside Greg, knees splashing in blood.

“Tourniquet!”

“With what?” Priya snapped.

Jonah ripped the belt from Greg’s waist. Too flimsy. He tore off his own. “Above the wound. High and tight.”