The bus stopped and its door opened. Nobody got off the bus. Nobody was going anywhere this late on Christmas Eve. Nobody except for three teenagers who'd been waiting on a bench for fifteen minutes.
Adam got up and picked up the unresponsive Chase, who had gone to sleep almost as soon as he finished eating. He started to get on the bus, but then looked back. Bree was still sitting on the bench, shivering and crossing her arms uncooperatively.
"On or off, kids," the mustached driver muttered.
"Come on, Bree," Adam said, jerking his head towards the bus, "don't you want to get home before midnight? We're gonna miss Grandma Dooley's homemade fruit cake."
"Oh the horror," Bree grumbled, but got up and followed Adam into the bus.
"How far does this bus go?" Bree asked.
The driver told her while Adam selected a seat and put Chase in it. There was only one other passenger, a scruffy man, snoring loudly in the back of the bus. It was unlikely that he was going to get off the bus until someone made him.
Bree sat down next to Adam. The bus driver shut the door and the bus rolled away.
"We're going to have to switch buses at some point," Bree told Adam after they'd been riding for several minutes, "Probably more than once."
"What's wrong with this one?" Adam wanted to know.
"It doesn't go all the way to Mission Creek," Bree explained.
"Bree, we don't want to go to Mission Creek. We want to go home."
Bree opened her mouth to explain that they lived in Mission Creek, but it didn't seem worth the effort.
"This is the only bus we've got," Bree said, "We'll just ride it as far as it goes, then find another one."
"Well at least nothing else can get in our way," Adam commented, "I mean, after you've had a fight with a biker gang in a diner, what else can possibly happen?"
"Adam, you really shouldn't say things like that," Bree told him.
"Why not?" Adam asked.
Before Bree could answer, the bus tires screeched on the icy road. The bus swung sideways, fishtailing. They were on a downward slant, not quite a hill, but close enough. When the driver braked, the ice took over and the bus kept right on sliding. The sound of Bree and Adam screaming got Chase's attention. Thinking quickly, Chase screamed too. It didn't help.
The bus slid and hopped off the road, plunging down suddenly, barely staying upright as it plowed through a series of small bushes on its way to the bottom of what seemed to be a ravine by the side of the road. Adam, Bree and Chase tumbled forward to a point near the driver's seat.
"Is that ice?" Chase squeaked, gazing through the windshield, "that looks like ice down there!"
"Oh good," Adam said brightly, "That will break the fall."
"Adam!" Chase snapped, "Ice means water. That's a lake we're sliding into!"
"So why don't you just stop the bus?" Adam wanted to know.
"Our bionics are switched off!" Bree shouted over the roar of the bus eating its way through various frozen plants, "Remember?"
"So turn them back on," Adam suggested.
"I can't!" Chase said, "'Off' means 'off', Adam. Unless you set a timer, which I didn't. Even if I did, it wouldn't do us any good because the time is not now!"
Adam fought his way across the aisle to where Chase was clinging to the back of a seat. He picked Chase up by the collar and looked him straight in the eye.
"Chase," Adam said slowly, "the time is now."
"I can't do anything," Chase told him in a pained voice, "I'm sorry, Adam."
And with that, the front end of the bus met with the ice. It hit with tremendous force, throwing all of them to the floor. A terrific CRACK! split the air and the front of the bus lurched and began to fill with icy water. The water slurped, gurgled and hissed its way through the cracks, pressuring the windshield eagerly.
Adam caught both Bree and Chase and tossed them towards the other end of the bus. He then took hold of the unconscious driver, who was nearer his size, and dragged him back too. Once beyond the reach of the water, Adam seemed to run out of momentum.
"Bree! Chase!" he didn't get an immediate response from either of them, so he shook Bree, who was closest to where he'd sunk into a sitting position, "Bree, answer me!"
Bree moaned and turned her head slightly. She opened her eyes, blinked, closed them again.
"Bree!"
"Oh... what happened?" Bree asked, sitting up, "Ow, my head..." she broke into a moment of hysterical screaming which had much to do with the darkness and the water and the creaking sounds the bus was making and perhaps some other things Adam couldn't translate into words.
"Bree, stop it!" Adam took her by the shoulders and shook her, even as she kept screaming hysterically, "Stop or I'll start screaming too! Bree, stop it!" he slapped her as gently as he could.
She slapped him right back. And much harder. It stung. But she also stopped screaming.
"This is no time to lose your head," Adam told her firmly, adding after a moment, "That time was two minutes ago. Where were you?"
"I have a better question," Bree said, "Where's Chase?"
"Oh he's back there somewhere," Adam said, gesturing vaguely, "I threw him just like you."
"Found him," Bree said, after looking around a bit, "You wedged him between the back seat and the seat in front of it. Hey, Chase, wake up. We've got hero stuff to do."
"Ow...," was Chase's response to this, "Who threw me?"
"Who do you think?" Bree demanded, "Who on this bus would throw you?"
"But... Adam doesn't have his super strength," Chase mumbled in protest, sitting up gingerly, "He couldn't have thrown me all the way to the back of the bus."
"Well I did!" Adam said fiercely, "And you'll have the bruises in the morning to prove it."
"But how...," Chase broke off as the lights came on, "Oh."
"Oh?" Bree demanded, "What 'oh'?!"
"Don't yell," Chase pleaded, "It makes my ears ring."
"What are you talking about, Chase?" Bree spat, but more quietly, "You don't have super hearing any more than Adam has super strength."
"That's the point," Chase told her slowly, "We do. At least a little bit. Don't you get it? My override app glitched. Our abilities are still partially functional."
"But that's-..." Bree trailed off.
"Not possible? Yeah, I know," Chase rubbed the back of his neck, "You remember the time I shrunk Adam down to the size of a small mouse? That wasn't possible either."
"What do you mean?" Adam asked, "It happened, didn't it? So clearly it must have been possible, otherwise it wouldn't have happened."
"That's my point exactly," Chase muttered.
"But you said-"
"Adam," Chase interrupted, "Don't strain yourself."
"I hate to interrupt," Bree said in a tone of voice that meant the exact opposite, "But... WE ARE IN A BUS THAT IS RAPIDLY FILLING WITH WATER!"
"So what's your point?" Adam asked curiously.
"Oh nothing," Bree replied sweetly, "I just think we should get out before we find out if you would shrink in the wash."
"Ooh, I've always wanted to know that," Adam said, but Bree caught him by the arm before he could test the theory.
"Later. First, see if you can get the emergency exit to open," Chase said quickly, before Bree let Adam go just to see what would happen.
"Oh I dunno, Chase. Do you think this is really an emergency?" Adam asked.
"This bus is about to become a submarine! Yes! This... this is an emergency!" Bree practically screamed, which caused Chase to flinch and cover one ear.
"That seemed unnecessary," Chase commented as Adam clambered over him to get to the exit at the back.
"But it made me feel better," Bree replied, having no sympathy for Chase's sensitive ears.
"Guys...," Adam said, "the door's stuck. Now what?"
"Try prying it open," Chase suggested.
"What if it doesn't work?" Bree whispered to Chase, "What if Adam's not strong enough?"
"Then maybe we should all learn to breathe under water," Chase replied with a shrug.
"Chase!" Adam cried, nearly panicked now, "The door won't open! I can't get it to budge!"
There was a moment of fractured silence in which they all struggled not to cry or scream. Then Bree suddenly tapped Chase on the shoulder.
"If Adam's strength is working a little, maybe you can use your magnetism app to help him. If it works a little and Adam's strength works a little, maybe together you can get the door open."
"Can't hurt to try," Chase said, getting up a little unsteadily.
Bree wasn't so sure that was true, but she didn't say so. She felt very left out. What good were super speed and vocal manipulation when you were in a bus that was sinking to the bottom of a lake?
"Ow!" Adam protested, "Quit pushing."
"Okay, okay," Chase said passively, "You ready?"
"I'm ready," Adam replied, then hesitantly asked, "What are we doing?"
"Just... when I tell you, push on the door as hard as you can, okay?" Chase told him.
"Well okay, but it didn't work before. I don't see why it would now."
"Just do it," Chase snapped, "Activating magnetism app... I hope."
The bus lurched as the ice beneath it cracked further. Chase swayed and put a hand out to grab the back of a seat. He reached for the door with his other hand.
"Now, Adam," he hissed between his teeth.
"What?"
"NOW!"
"Oh. Well why didn't you say so?"
"Guys...," Bree said, scooting away from the near-frozen water that was rapidly slithering its way to the back of the tilted bus, "You might wanna hurry it up!"
"If you want fast, you'll have to do this yourself," Adam said.
"Adam!" Chase yelped, because Adam had stopped helping him to respond to Bree.
"Oh!" Adam exclaimed, then put his shoulder into forcing the door open, "Sorry."
"It's working!" Bree cried, shifting nervously from one foot to another and trying to see the door past Adam and Chase, "It's working!"
All of a sudden, the door popped loose. It didn't open exactly. It just flew away from the bus. With a startled cry, Adam tottered for a moment, and then plunged out of the bus and into the water.
"Adam!" Chase screamed, lunging after his brother.
"Chase!" Bree dove for Chase and grabbed his feet before he went into the drink too.
"Yeow!" Adam cried, using Chase as a ladder to climb back into the bus, "Cold, cold, cold, cold!"
Shivering, Adam crawled into the bus, stopping just short of the icy pool forming in the aisle. Chase, now also wet and slightly flattened from Adam climbing over him, stayed where he was.
"We're going to have to go through the water to get out," Bree realized aloud, "We'd freeze before we found a house with a telephone."
They had been driving through one of those patches of nowhere that occur from time to time, even when you're technically still in a town. They were miles from anywhere. And Adam was soaked through, ice was already forming in his hair.
"See, this is what happens when you say 'what could happen'," Chase told Adam.
Adam looked at him and tried to think of a retort, but he was too cold and shivering too much, so he just gave Chase a half-hearted kick in the leg and hoped it would be translated into some kind of response.
"Chase," Bree said before anything of the kind could happen, "What are we gonna do?"