Ch 12: Greyhoundoom Bus #4
The feeling of pure satisfaction and pride at seeing the look on Zach's face as he handed me the normal badge was one for the history books. He gave me an incredulous congratulations, gave a short speech that I didn't listen to about my future as a trainer and where it would get me, and then dismissed me. I was so lost in thought at the idea of contacting my parents after all these months and letting them know that I'd gotten my first badge. The receptionist seemed to want to stop me for something as I exited through the waiting room's lobby doors, but I payed her no mind as I booked it out of there, relieved at the thought that I would never have to deal with that smug gym leader again. My next plan of action was clear: heal up my weakened team at the Pokemon Center next door.
Inside the center, the standard procedure with Nurse Joy followed as I sent my whole team to the back to get some Immediate Care so I could be well on my way. Nurse Joy had me sit in the waiting room and told me it shouldn't take long. I did as told, sitting in the corner beside the reading table covered with magazines titled things like Benefits of Miltank's Milk or Get a Body like Machoke in 2 Weeks!
I scanned the center, remembering the man in all black who had attacked me in the Gord in the middle of the night. I did not see him, and it seemed to be a slow day for trainers, seeing as I was the only one in the waiting room besides that girl with the hat in the far corner skimming through her own magazine that looked a little like-
"Eliza?" I said automatically. The head that had been partially obscured by a rather unfashionable pink cowboy hat raised, and a pretty face that looked bothered to be interrupted from her reading caught my eyes.
"Oh, hey. Adam, I think?" I nodded. "You found Duggie's Ruins, I assume."
"I did. Caught a Kabutops in there. It almost killed me."
That comment made Eliza smile, though she tried to hide it with a brush of her hand to adjust her hat for no reason.
"I just love rock Pokemon," Eliza admitted. "I used to hate them because they weren't pretty like the fairy Pokemon. But as I've gotten older, I've come to appreciate their durability, their strength. Fairy Pokemon look beautiful on the outside, but they tend to be frail glass cannons who fall apart easily. Rock Pokemon are tough; they don't let themselves break. I wish I could be more like that sometimes."
"I always thought you were plenty tough," I told her, watching her face to read her reaction. At first, she gave another little smirk, appearing flattered. Then she seemed to become aware that she was letting her guard down, and she forcefully put the walls back up by forcing herself to stop smiling, stop looking at me, and I swear I even saw her shoulders tense up.
"I just beat Zach," I brought up, surprised that I had almost just forgotten about my latest accomplishment.
"He is the easiest gym leader. Took you long enough."
"So which gym is the best one to go to from here, since you seem to have all the answers?"
Eliza took pause and shut her eyes, going over the roadmaps in her head of the island. I was unfamiliar with the terrain beyond my hometown of Lunaris and the surrounding Gord Woods. I was aware there was a lake and a vendor's market in the Gord, and that there was a cave called Duggie's Ruins to the west of Peltagrow City, but all of these locations flowed along the western edge of Ilragorn Island, and I hadn't paid attention in Geography class enough to know too much about the towns and areas to the east of the island.
"I guess the closest gym from here would be Wintervale City's," Eliza finally announced.
"Do you happen to know the fastest way to get there?" I wondered.
"I'm pretty sure there's a bus that goes from Peltagrow to Wintervale," she answered. "Just go to the Greyhoundoom Bus Service Station, it's on the north side of the city. I think it takes a couple of days, and it's not the most luxurious experience, but it gets you there."
"Have you ever taken it before?" I asked, wanting to know if she had actual experience with it or if this was a kind of tourist trap for trainers to get mugged or something.
"Uh, no, but my old boyfriend did."
"You're not with him anymore?"
"That's why I said old boyfriend."
"You could just be saying that he's an older guy, I'm not assuming."
"No, he's not an older guy. He's just a piece of shit."
"And why is he a piece of shit?"
My mind flashed back to that day in the basement of this very center where Eliza had to introduce herself to the class and she had stated that she had followed a boy to this city and was winging it.
"Let's just say he was too aggressive. On his Pokemon, and on me." And with that, Eliza's body language was clearly done with the conversation, and I could see her disconnecting and returning to her magazine, or at least pretending to.
"You know, I don't know much about your story, or what's going on in your life. But, if you're looking for a change in scenery or something, I'm just going to put it out there right now that you're more than welcome to join me on-"
"Thanks," Eliza interrupted flatly. "But no thanks. I've done that before. It didn't work out."
I nodded understandably; it was all I could think to do. I waited several more minutes in silence just staring blankly at a magazine until Nurse Joy called my name to recover my Kabutops, Drapion, and Tropius.
On my way out, I caught Eliza's eyes one last time. And I swear, she had those puppy dog eyes that little siblings do when you return home from being out at the funnest place in the world all day without thinking to bring them along. But she stayed put in her chair, and simply returned the silent nod I gave her as I left that center while hearing Nurse Joy order a Chansey to stop stalling on her workload.
Eliza had been right about the bus service, just like she had been about Duggie's Ruins. It was a solid hour walk through Peltagrow City, which I had never had the chance to really explore in the past. There was a Peltagrow Park farther up the city, with a fountain that housed a solid gold Seel spewing water straight up into the sky from its mouth and descending into the wishing well area of the fountain that the children of the city played in while the sun was at its highest. There was a coffee shop on the corner of Elm Street where a well-trained Lillipup was tied to a stop sign outside of it, sitting and waiting for its owner to reclaim it after purchasing a coffee. But the most interesting sight that I saw on my walk to the station were two police officers searching a local citizen's car using a leashed Houndoom that was sniffing the contents of the car while the citizen was pleading with one of the cops.
Inside the service station, I purchased a ticket for the next available bus. The ticket clerk informed me that I was a very lucky man, as I had just made the last bus going out that day, which would be arriving within 10 minutes of my purchase.
I spotted a series of payphones by the front doors of the station, and thinking I had enough time for a quick call, I rushed to pull together some loose change from my backpack and dialed my home phone number, surprised that I still remembered it after not calling in so long.
At the fourth ring, my father's familiar voice spoke into my ear. "Hello?"
"Dad! It's Adam." I said, and although I didn't want to smile, I involuntarily did. I guess I missed my jerk dad a little bit after all.
"Oh, Adam. Good to hear from you. You missed your brother's birthday party, he was just here to visit. We all had such a wonderful time, there were so many of your old school friends here for your brother even, everyone was so glad to see him. He left already, otherwise I would've told you to come down." Dad greeted me as if I was a work colleague and not the son that he hadn't heard from in quite a while.
The last thing I wanted to hear right now was anything about Evan, but I still had to be polite and respectful to Dad. "Oh, well, sorry to miss it. I just thought I'd let you and Mom know I got my first gym badge today."
There was a pause. I thought the line had gotten disconnected for a moment but then: "Adam, it's been 4 months, and you only have 1 badge?"
My heart sank into my stomach, where it felt like both of them just got a good solid punch from a Hitmonchan.
"I mean, don't get me wrong, Adam, I'm of course happy for you. Your mother and I always are. But you've been gone this long and only 1 badge? You can do better, son."
I wanted to ask him what I was doing wrong, what I could do to make him as excited to talk to me as he is to talk to Evan, but a voice over the intercom broke my concentration to inform everyone that Bus #4, the one I would be taking, was arriving shortly.
I hung up the payphone without saying anything and turned away to wait along the long road known as Route 15, where about 10 other people of various ages and appearances were gathered, waiting for the bus to take them to Wintervale for their own reasons.
As Bus #4 pulled up to a stop, me and the 10 others got on. I had expected it to be a normal sized yellow bus like the kind that picks up kids for school, but it was actually one of the city kind, with small chrome seats lining both sides of the bus. The bus driver, an elderly man who looked overworked and in need of rest, didn't even acknowledge any of us as we piled in.
The jolly man sitting beside me introduced himself as Cletus, and he was a perceptive one, taking special interest in the contents of my backpack and delighting himself to examine my Pokedex as I explained to him all of its capabilities: movesets, basic Pokemon knowledge, recording option. Cletus was fascinated by me being a trainer since he himself used to be a trainer, but he never had the passion to stick through it, and as he got older, he found himself dedicating more and more time to raising a family and his career than Pokemon.
"And you're going to Wintervale to get another badge there of course," Cletus guessed correctly, holding my normal badge up so it hit the light coming in through the windows, as if testing its authenticity.
"That's right," I responded. "Hey, I have a question, seeing as you used to train."
"Shoot."
"Do you know why there's only 4 gyms on Ilragorn?" I wondered. "Since usually in all the shows I watched as a kid about trainers, and all the books about it, there's always 8 gyms. But as soon as I start battling and talking with trainers over at the market in the Gord, I find out there's only 4 gyms."
"Well," Cletus scratched at his chin and took a moment to reflect before answering. "To be honest, Pokemon trainers and battling in general is a bit of a dying art here in Ilragorn. Hell, we're lucky we still got an Elite 4." Cletus let out a heavy laugh, his big belly shaking with raucous laughter. "There were a lot more trainers when I was your age, kid. Oh, believe me, we had 8 gyms. But with more people, that means more criminals. And there was a crime war going on back in those days between two gangs. Team Anonymous, who are still pretty active these days from what I hear, they're the ones who wear all black. And then there was another criminal syndicate called The Family, but they all either got arrested or put down by Anonymous, more likely. Those two were always going at each other, putting towns and children and innocent people in the crossfire every day. Oh, things were way worse back then."
But I guess to answer your question - there's only 4 gyms 'cause we honestly don't have that many trainers on this island too proficient in battling, let alone proficient at one specific type. We got our normal gym ran by that polite young man Zach over in Peltagrow, that's one...oh, and of course the woman who runs the poison gym in Wintervale...then there's Goldenrod, I forget about that one every time…" Cletus then drifted, lost in his memory of trying to recollect the fourth gym.
"And Snake's Canyon," I reminded Cletus, who thanked me for remembering. Hard to forget the only one Evan would talk about whenever he would stop home to bask in the ass-kissing of my parents and half the kids in school in Lunaris.
What I took most from Cletus' rant was that I finally had at least some idea of who the fuck had attacked me in the middle of the night in the Gord so long ago: a member of Team Anonymous. I mean, in the back of my head I always kind of knew it was probably a member of one of those illegal organizations instead of just some random psycho trainer trying to mug me, but now I knew which syndicate it was. Would that help me in ever trying to find the bastard? Not likely, no. But it felt nice to know.
I let Cletus drone on about his family life, which he did seem to be just as genuinely interested in talking about as his old love for Pokemon battling. He had one of those voices that put a smooth finish to every word and could talk solo for long periods of time, lulling me into relaxing too much and slumping more and more into my seat until I eventually just fell asleep while Cletus was describing how exciting it was to grocery shop with his infant daughter and son at the same time.
I woke up to the sounds of 10 screaming people, and Cletus shaking the shit out of my shoulders, disturbing from a deep sleep that I didn't even know I had needed.
For some reason, the bus driver, the old man who looked as tired as I apparently had been, was swerving erratically left and right all over Route 15, sometimes changing direction so hard that several people went flying off of their bus seats and skidded around the dirty gum-covered floors of the bus, screaming hysterically for him to not stop, but to go even faster.
"What the fuck's going on?" I couldn't help but shout as I reached out and grabbed onto the rail to my left so that I wouldn't go flying off my seat and onto the floor. Unfortunately, Cletus did not have as good as a reaction time as I did, and the heavyset man who I had thought of as a very good man went flying 6 feet straight ahead of him. His body only started to sail downwards just as his face went headfirst into the metal seat directly across from his at an angle so that all of the weight went onto the side of his neck. A distinct crack was heard even with all the screaming, and I knew that Cletus would not see his family again.
Terrified, I instinctively reached with my free hand in between my legs for my backpack where I had set it when I first sat down, but grabbed nothing. It was missing. Where the fuck was my backpack?
"I don't want to die! I don't want to die!" a shrill woman's voice was crying from the back of the bus. Someone was trying to calm her down to little effect.
"Don't got no choice!" the bus driver was shouting, I'm not sure to us, or to himself. "Gotta keep going! They're trying to get in, the fuckers!"
I was looking around wildly for my backpack with my pokeballs and money in it. Had I been robbed while asleep? Did Cletus do it? And now he lay there on the floor of the bus, limp, with his neck twisted at a painful angle. The bus swerved hard again, and this time we hit something. A tree on the side of the road, or was it a road sign? It was enough. I was one of the last ones who was still holding onto one of the guardrails and hadn't gone flying onto the floors yet, but this was my breaking point. I didn't so much let go of the rail as gravity wrenched me to the floor.
That was when the windows started shattering as if bullets were being shot into the bus, but instead of the cause being bullets, it was birds. Ugly, black, green, and gray birds with red feathered patterns circling their blank white eyes. They were clearly Unfezants, but normal Unfezants are not aggressive enough to attack a bus, cause the driver to crash, and then start assaulting the bus by flying through the windows. What the fuck?
The first Unfezant darted straight toward Cletus and began pecking at his ear, drawing blood, eating. I wanted to vomit right there. A second and third whizzed for the bus driver, who had the bulletproof glass as a somewhat protective barrier, but the birds just flew straight over the glass and entered the bus drivers personal area, where he was attempting to unbuckle himself and slap at the birds, but the Unfezants took turns plucking at his feeble old hands or at his eyes and lips to keep the man from successfully unbuckling himself.
"They're getting in! Oh my God, they're getting in!"
"Is anyone a trainer!?"
"Aiiighhhhhh, it's in my shirt!"
A fourth Unfezant flew in the bus through one of the broken windows and this one had managed to fly straight into a skinny man's oversized hoodie, and he was beating on his hoodie as hard as he could, crying tears of pain as the bird was doing god knows what to his stomach underneath the shirt, but his white I Luv Peltagrow hoodie was slowly beginning to turn red from being plucked at underneath. No one was helping him, the other passengers remained on the floor of the bus, shielding themselves or screaming or just staring in plain shock at the mess they were in.
I began crawling hastily across the bus floor, my head swinging like the bus had been, left and right, left and right, searching the floors and the bus seats for my backpack. It had to still be in here. It must have just gone skidding along the floor at the start of the Unfezants attacking the bus and wound up a corner in the front or the back. Please be the front.
Two more Unfezants flew into the bus through the shattered windows, and another decided to make an entrance by smashing through the back emergency exit door, to the horror of the woman who didn't want to die. All three birds darted straight toward the closest people to them, and began plucking at each one with its sharp beak, or swatting at people with its strong wings, or I even caught one slicing at someone's eyes with the talons on its feet. Nobody had a single Pokemon on them to try to fight these things. Nobody had a gun. Where was my backpack!?
There! In the corner, just 10 feet in front of me and right under the first row of seats, my familiar red backpack lay there, zipped up tight. I kept crawling toward my backpack with a newfound intensity, adrenaline surging through me as I knew the solution to this problem lay just several feet-
Two Unfezants I had not seen or heard enter the bus both grabbed at the legs of my jeans with their talons and used their wings to begin trying to drag me backward, and likely out of the bus. Heart pumping and full of fear in a way I had not felt since that Arbok woke me up hissing and attacking, I flapped my outstretched arms to grab at something, anything to give me some leverage against the birds. There was nothing in the bus but seats, and screaming people, and their own useless backpacks and purses, and mine, so close yet so far away.
"Let gooo! Let go!" I screamed, but the Unfezants were fucking strong. More importantly, they were relentless, and one of them finally ceased pulling on my jeans but instead began doing to me what so many of the others were doing: going for the face.
It got a good few first surprise hits, plucking at my nose and chipping a bit of my skin off my cheeks with quick nibbles, the adrenaline surged straight through me again, and all I knew in that moment was that I needed this bird to die, or else me and all of these people here were going to die. It was either this thing, or me. With the second Unfezant focused on just trying to fly me away by my leg to little success, the first one began trying to pluck my eyes out.
I am right handed, and maybe that might explain why it felt so wrong, but I had no choice but to use my left hand to do what I needed to do. My left hand cupped the Unfezant trying to eat my face around the neck, and then tightened into a fist, a painfully closed fist. The kind of tight where you squeeze your palm so tight it hurts your hand, and then amplify it by 3. The kind of tight where you need whatever it is you're holding to stop breathing fast. Squeezing the life out of one Unfezant with my left hand, with my right I swatted and batted at the other one, trYing to buy me some time.
The bird being choked was clawing at my left arm and elbow with its feet, cutting my flesh and leaving deep marks, but that only made me squeeze tighter.
Another window shattered, and another bird entered the bus. My eyes darted to it, daring it to come over here and take me on too, but the bird instead went straight for Cletus, who remained unmoving as the bird started jabbing at his neck sharply.
I felt the last breath of life leave the Unfezant I was choking, and its legs stopped kicking. I tossed it away, disgusted, and its lifeless body went skidding along the floor, coming to a stop against the side of the bus, underneath the front seats. The second one, the one that had managed to stab through my right jeans several times into my leg, I finally managed to get some leverage on, and I reeled my left, free leg back, and got a good hard kick right in the Unfezants face, and hearing that old familiar crack again.
I got up, stumbled to my backpack with haste, and wrenched it open as most of the Unfezants that had entered the bus had stopped to take notice of me. They were an eerie sight: 8 birds covered in blood and staring straight at you with blank white eyes. I found the pokeball I was looking for, recognizing it by the feel, and summoned Kabutops right in the middle of the packed bus.
It didn't take long. Kabutops made short work of the Unfezants with use of its scythes and Rock Tombs, dispatching of every one of them with a single move. None of them even made it out of the bus alive, and believe me, a few of them tried.
None of the passengers besides Cletus had died, nor did the elderly bus driver, who actually seemed to be internally ecstatic about the events since he wouldn't let go of talks of suing somebody and getting what's coming to him. The police that arrived at the scene asked if anyone knew anything about Cletus besides the info they gathered from his wallet, and I did my best to tell the police anything relevant about his background. The police wondered what brought on the Unfezants attack, asking passengers if the bus driver antagonized them in any way, but everyone unanimously agreed that the birds had just attacked unprovoked.
The Greyhoundoom Bus Service gave everyone a discount to a nearby motel at a town not too far from where they crashed called Celmont, and the bus driver stated that his company was not accountable for any Pokemon attacks sustained while with them. No one was satisfied with this, but it was either take a quick break at this Celmont place, or hitchhike back to Peltagrow from Route 15 when we'd already traveled who knows how long, because the road to Wintervale was still quite a distance.