Bus to Danger, Radioactive Demolition Site

        I was attending a party at my boss’s house, and decided to sleep over as we were leaving on a bus early in the morning for a department trip. The bus was a large charter bus, very plush and comfortable. I was sitting in the lower section just behind the bus driver (which, oddly, was on the right side of the bus rather than the left.) I had been talking when suddenly the bus bounced and canted to the right. The bus driver had been turned completely around in his seat involved in the conversation. It had been making me nervous, but the bounce panicked me.

        “Watch the road, please!”

        The bus’s left side had been driven up onto a low platform and the driver struggled to keep the bus moving. There didn’t seem to be any choice but to drive off the platform and let the bottom edge of the bus support the weight as we slid back down to street level. The driver, however, kept on the platform, smashing newspaper vending machines and benches aside until we came up to another set of stairs down. We bumped down on the front tire, but the bus was so long that we still scraped the side until the back wheels also came down the stairs.

        The bus driver sighed in relief when we were finally going level, and then hit the cruise control. The bus was silent.

        “Wow, that was stressful,” the bus driver stated, then got up and headed back down the aisle to the bathroom!

        The bus suddenly got very noisy as we scraped our way down a ramp and into a subway station. My boss stood up to tell everyone to brace themselves against the seat in front of them and I jumped out of my seat to pull the handle of the emergency brake and grab the steering wheel to keep us from going off the platform onto the rails. I managed to avoid a clump of people and pulled myself far enough forward to also press the regular brake. I didn’t think we would stop before we hit the wall we were headed for. I found myself hoping there was an airbag for the driver, as I had no time to put on the seatbelt. I figured from the rate of slowing that we would hit the wall about 15 miles an hour. I turned the bus a little at the last second so the opposite corner would hit first.

        I still got tossed against the shattering window.

        I dreamed I was inspecting the ruins of one of our schools with the thought of recycling some of the IT infrastructure. For some reason Fawn Lynn had come with me, and she was roaming around the ruins of the health office. I was on the phone with my boss and he was telling me to go to certain locations and report what I was seeing. When I was on about the fourth such jaunt I spotted several dozen trucks loaded with some sort of white rocks coming up the drive.

        I asked what they were.

        “Oh, the site is radioactive, so they’re going to bury it soon.”

        “Radioactive! Why am I out here then?”

        The line disconnected and filled with static. I ran over to the office area, calling for Fawn Lynn. She meowed back at me, but wouldn’t come out of the cabinet she was hiding in. I found a plastic bucket with vents in the lid and dumped out its contents, figuring the plastic wouldn’t hold too much radiation. I managed to grab Fawn and get her in the bucket and then high tailed it out of there. I ran to the waiting ambulances. After their Geiger counters registered that I was covered in radioactive dust, we started the de-contamination process. Helpers took my clothing and began shaving all my and Fawn’s hair off. Poor old lady. She was not too thrilled about that and the helper gave me the electric razor so that I could shave the poor cat. I cringed as a crane loader buried my car under a few tons of crushed rock.