Chapter 1: The Brass Section
The first football game of the season is an away game, an hour away from home.
Everybody is psyched up, ready to play.
A kid starts singing "99 Bottles." She falls asleep after bottle number 29.
The bus stops, the girl wakes up, everybody gets off.
They play, they march, they rock.
They move into the stands.
Ten minutes into the game, there is a storm warning. They must all go back to the bus to go home.
So they do.
They wait. The bus driver is not there.
They wait some more. The bus driver is still not there.
The band director pulls the door open and tells them to stay in there. They can clearly hear the thunder and rain. The band director leaves to search for the missing bus driver.
They wait, they worry. It has been thirty minutes since the beginning.
A trombone player puts on music, and starts dancing wildly. Tension is loosened, and several kids laugh.
Eventually, he stops, and it's all too quiet.
"What if the band director's lost? It's really rainy."
"She'll come back."
"What happened to the bus driver?"
"He'll come back too. It's his responsibility."
The silence is stifling.
A baritone player starts playing the first song of the set, called Mars by Gustav Holst.
The other baritone player smacks him and tells him to stop.
It's quiet again. The only sounds you can hear are the thunder and rain.
"Want to share ghost stories?"
"Sure, why not?"
"The shortest horror story in the world goes like this: The last man on Earth sat in a room. Suddenly, there was a knock."
It takes a moment for the meaning to sink in, and the band collectively shivers.
"What if we're the last people on Earth?"
A mellophone player rolls her eyes. "As if."
Suddenly, there is a knock.
