Tales From A Bus, jwilson136 [best e reader for academics .TXT] 📗

bus, while certainly a lot cleaner than the outside seemed very dark and the sun light seemed to be fighting a loosing battle with the dirt on the outside of the windows to see if the interior was to be bright or dim. The driver of this unsettling vehicle was a man that looked like he came not from the sixties but rather from some home for the lost souls. His jacket was a dark navy almost black colour and the supposedly blue shirt that went underneath hadn’t seen water since it grew in the fields as cotton. A dusty cap sat on his head and it hung dangerously over to one side. On the cap was a small metal badge that sparkled brightly in stark contrast to both him and t he bus he drove. The badge was imprinted with the words ‘Purple Bus Tours’.
“This the tour bus ?”, I asked.
He didn’t answer only slowly turned his head (without moving his body) to look me up and down. Eventually a hand raised and he beckoned me on.
“This is for free, right ?” I asked.
Again he said nothing only nodding his head after giving the matter serious consideration. I walked onto the bus and mounted the stairs.
The top floor was fairly full of people with only one or two seats being completely free of people. I found a window seat and plonked down in it. Thinking better of looking around the bus at my fellow companions I contented myself with looking out the window. The bus shuddered a few times and then began to gradually move forward. It was then that the old feeling of loosing touch with reality began to wash over me. At first I wasn’t so sure but after getting used to the feeling I convinced myself that what I was actually experiencing was a flash back (a free one..marvellous).
Acid has the strange but excellent habit of hiding itself in your fat cells for years and sometimes even decades. When ever your body gets round to burning off those fat cells it can release the acid a give you another unexpected mini-trip. While these ‘flahback’ must have really scared the shit out of some of those drug taking hippies I knew all about them and had already experienced one so figured it was no big deal. The more I thought about this the more it made sense; the blurred sign, the look of the driver, the noise of the breaks, especially the face that I thought I saw in the front of the bus. Yeah I figured, flashback. I sat back in my seat and smiled as waves of reality washed away from the shore.
One of the waves must have been a one in foutreen freak tidal ones as I sat bolt upright in my seat with the feeling that something was wrong. I was still on the bus and we were still moving but something was just out of place. For a start there no one was talking, of all the people on the bus none of them made a sound. I looked to my left where some woman had sat down unnoticed to me. She looked odd. Tall thin woman but he head seemed all wrong for her body. Her legs, hips, shoulders and arms were all micro-thin but her head, well her head was....it was fat. She had a big fat head on her body. The thought of this ‘fat head’ I would normally have found highly amusing but I didn’t now. In fact I found it decidedly unfunny and quite unsettling. I looked towards the front of the bus and I saw a man in his mid-forties with a similar looking ailment, except this time he had a tiny head on broad shoulders. I began to feel very unsure of everything. The air on the bus seemed to have suddenly run short and I was having trouble breathing. Perspiration formed on my forehead and within seconds all down my fucking back was wet with the sweat. I was just thinking about standing up and getting the hell of the bus when I heard a strange humming sound.
At first I wasn’t sure exactly where the humming was coming from but when I calmed down (as much as a stressed out junkie having a flash-back can clam down) I realised that it was coming from the woman sharing my seat. I wanted to turn and look at her but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. I looked out the window and waited for the ‘rush’ to pass.
There are many ways you can always tell an experienced drug taker from a first time virgin but the best way is to give them both some acid and see how each copes. Acid does very strange things to your mind, you see and hear things that aren’t there and the most simple thing can be both terrible and fascinating. It is not a logical drug but to remain in control and avoid crossing over into the land of the ‘bad trip’ you have to use logic. As in; ‘that can’t be lion because were not in the zoo and they don’t run wild here’ or ‘that can’t be the devil coz He’s down in hell concerning Himself with more important things than me’. This is what keeps you sane while on such a mind bending drug. I’ll admit that even I, an experienced drug taker, was at that point very close to flipping out but I fell back on logic. ‘There is no reason for that woman to hum on the bus and therefore she is not humming.’ I’d like to say that I would have convinced my mind of this if I hadn’t looked out the window, but I did and I think at that point I realised that maybe it was more than your average flashback.
The bus seemed to be moving at an incredible speed. Streets and building flashed by just as coloured blurs and nothing more and it was impossible to make out any detail. The noise of the engine roared in my ears and it felt as if they were about to bleed with the pressure but above the noise I could still hear the woman humming. But now it seemed as if others had joined in with her. I tried to carry on looking out the window but the outside world, now nothing more than a blur with a vaguely purple tinge was making my stomach turn so I looked back at the woman sitting beside me.
There was no doubt in my mind now that she was humming, as was the man in front (small head to his big shoulders) and all the other passengers on the bus. I looked from one person to the next and saw that they all were looking straight ahead and had that same vacant look I had first noticed on the face of the woman sitting beside me. Then I noticed that they all looked slightly odd. I saw what I thought at first to be a young boy and then discovered that he had the face of a full grown man (beard and all), there was an nigger down near the back who appeared to have white hands and a white neck, fuck sake there was even a man with tits ! I knew that I had to get off the bus there and then.
“Excuse me” I half shouted to the woman beside me but she didn’t make an move to convince me that she was going to move. I didn’t wait to ask her a second time and stood up to push past her. I couldn’t move her so had to climb over her instead, it made my stomach turn to even think about touching her but it was either that and stay on the bus. Staying on the bus was an option that I was not fucking willing to consider so I started my climb. While I was half way through the process with the engine bursting my ears and the whole bus humming along she started to rock forward (they all did) and as she rocked forward and back on her seat pinning me to the back of the seat in front I noticed that there was a wide scar that ran right round her neck. The flesh around the scar was not fully healed, in fact it looked like it was only a few days or maybe a week or two old. It was still raw red and the smell that came from her as she rocked forward again tipped me fully over the edge. I screamed and scrambled to break myself free of this the sickest lover’s embrace I had ever been in. I was in full scale panic and my back leg got caught in some part of the seat and I fell flat on my face.
I was only my feet quicker that I would have thought possible and moving quickly towards the stairway when the humming and the rocking suddenly stopped. The whole sick crew on the bus placed both hands on the hand rails in front of them and then they all turned their attention to me for the briefest of seconds and then the bus suddenly stopped.
Stopped is maybe too weak a word for what I am trying to say. It stopped dead in it’s tracks. I was thrown towards the front of the bus at an incredible speed and hit my head hard off the barrier at the very front. I ended up in a semi sitting position at the front of the bus, the perfect place for a view of what happened next.
The shock force of the sudden stop threw all the passengers in the bus first forward and then as the bus stopped they all went back. At the pinnacle of their trajectory back there were several sickening crackling sounds and then I swear to fucking God all their heads snapped off and fell into the lap of the person behind them. It was at this stage that I lost my lunch, I somehow new what was going to happen next but when I actually saw it I am not ashamed to say that I lost full control of both my bowels and my bladder. Each of the ‘people’ on the bus slowly and blindly reached down into their laps and took a hold of the head that sat there on then placed it on their own shoulders. When the heads were reattached they was the same sickening cracking sound but this time it was backwards. One ‘man’, I’m not sure if it was a he or a she but it had a male head, had placed the head on backwards and was busying itself turning the head around. Another, this one had a female body, was on it’s hands and knees on the bus searching for it’s new head that had rolled off it’s lap and onto the floor with a heavy ‘thud’. And yet another thing, was walking towards the front of the bus, towards where I was with no head at all.
Situations like this, while not that this was an everyday situation you’ll know what I mean when I say that it was a life threatening situations. The mind reacts either superfast or not at all. Mine was moving superfast and it took me only seconds to realise that the thing coming towards me was coming from the vacant seat directly behind where I’d been sitting. It had not gotten a head coz’ I had kept my own and I guessed that it was pretty pissed at this. Whatever about how quick the mind reacts it’s useless if the body cannot obey and it seemed like an age before I was able to