The Valley of Dry Bones

In the front of the bus there is a pile of snacks, Takis and Twinkies and pretzels and things, and a lot of bottled water wrapped in plastic. In the rear of the bus are buckets with chemicals in them, to go to the bathroom in. Through the roof of the bus the men have driven a pipe that reaches up to the air.
          At a stop sign the men with masks had boarded. They shot the driver and the big man who was supposed to protect them. They threw their bodies out onto the road. They took the childrens’ phones. They drove the bus way, way out of town, past what seemed like endless fields of ancient cemeteries and into a place of yellow dirt with tractors and other tall machines. When the younger children started to cry the men slapped them.
          The men drove the bus down a yellow hill. It bumped around and the kids knocked their heads. When the men left they said, Be good children, your parents love you, it will be just a few days. They hammered in the pipe and then the machines with their big scoops poured yellow dirt and pebbles onto the bus and buried the children alive. There was no light at all.
          Within minutes some of the older boys were talking about breaking through the windows, digging out through the earth up to the surface and running for help. But if they did that they would be shot, others said. They must have people on guard for that. The older boys argued an alternate logic: They buried us so the satellites can’t find us. They won’t come back here until they have to, until they have their money.
          At the end of this discussion no one broke any window. The children waited through the night. From the dirt outside the bus they heard scritching-scratchings. When they were hungry they ate snacks. At some point it must have been the next day, and the day after that. Now and then they were sure they heard digging—they were rescued!—but it was never anything. Some of the younger girls, who grouped themselves in the very back of the bus, closest to the surface maybe, said they heard yelling or screaming, but only for a little while, and only once.
          Eventually there was too much filth so they moved the buckets to the front and what was left of the food and water to the back. Someone broke a window and the dirt sloped in. It was dark, and no one knew what to think, and a lot of kids were crying.
          It must have been days. Then one of the girls says, listen, and we all shut up and hear the sound of digging, digging, digging. Clear and indisputable this time, digging. The bus even shifts a bit to one side.
          One of the littlest ones goes hysterical. An older boy covers the kid’s mouth with his big hand but the little one bites through it and the older boy drops him to the corrugated floor. We know what the dispute is about: it was about who heard the sound of digging coming from above us and those of us who had heard it coming from below.
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