April 12 - Bill's Story

The sidewalks were packed but Bill had a preternatural ability to tap into the flow of the crowd and navigate his way through it like water, leaving him free to focus on checking email on his iPhone.
As he got further and further away from the subway station, the crowd thinned and he could concentrate more and more on email without having to worry about running into anyone. All around him, the crowd melted away as did the noise and all distractions as he fired off quick replies to some emails and saved others for later. He didn't have to pay attention. His feet knew the way.
He finished another email and then saw one from his boss that had the subject heading: Your report.
His heart actually skipped a beat. This was it.
He opened it and skimmed it quickly and his heart plummeted and his fingers trembled as he reread the message more closely and learned that there were some major discrepancies in the data in the report he'd just filed. His results didn't gibe with what was being reported in other departments and these problems were problems that were serious.
His mouth was dry, his heart was pounding, and he started hyperventilating. The figures, which he'd double, triple, quadruple-checked and vetted in every way possible represented the culmination of six months of focused research on the part of everyone in his division and now his boss was saying it was all wrong.
He read the email again and again and then again but the words never changed. Finally he stopped and told himself to take a moment and calm down.
He rubbed his eyes, leaned his head back, and took a deep breath. And then another. And another. Then he took a look around.
He was lost, extremely lost. And alone. Not only that, but he didn't even recognize where he was. There were no other pedestrians in sight and no traffic at all on the streets. He turned all the way around. Nothing about his surroundings made any sense. All the buildings were bombed out and abandoned and the sky was reddish orange.
He looked back where he'd come from and the landscape was the same as far as he could see: bombed out buildings, piles of smoldering rubble, and a hazy, fiery sky.
He checked his iPhone but the GPS wasn't working, and he wasn't able to get online either, so he turned it off and restarted it. Nothing.
When he looked up again, there was a city bus that hadn't been there before idling up the block. He walked up to it and the door opened. Some of the seats were empty. Some of them were full. Some of the passengers were wearing sunglasses, some surgical masks, and some headphones. None of them were talking.
He got on, the doors closed, and the bus started moving. As soon as it did, the passengers took off their sunglasses, surgical masks, and headphones, and started moaning and laughing and babbling in a language Bill didn't recognize. He looked around and saw that some passengers had no eyes, some had no ears, and some had no mouth. Many of them were missing fingers or appeared to have two or more fingers fused together. A few were missing arms. None of them acknowledged Bill. They jabbered away to each other, and the bus picked up speed.
Bill didn't move, looking only out the corners of his eyes as the bus moved faster and faster and his co-passengers became more and more animated. As the bus traveled further, the burned out cityscape was gradually replaced by desert, and after several more minutes the city was gone.
The passenger next to Bill was quiet. Where her eyes should have been there was just smooth skin. Bill took a deep breath and tapped her on the shoulder. "Excuse me," he whispered. "Excuse me."
She turned her head to face him.
"Where? Where are we going?"
A shrill, high-pitched scream was her reply. Bill tried to make her be quiet, but she shrieked and shrieked, and soon every other passenger descended on Bill, babbling at him, groping at him with smooth fingers and amputated nubs touching him all over his face, arms, chest, and legs. Their breath was putrid--rotten cheese and garbage. Bill opened his mouth to scream but he couldn't breath.
The bus stopped and the other passengers abruptly forgot about Bill and filed off quietly.
Bill gulped air and wiped away tears and jerked his head back and forth. The bus was empty. Even the driver had gotten off.
Bill looked out his window at what looked like the largest and most rickety roller coaster ever imagined. The passengers from his bus were putting on helmets, picking up tools before climbing the roller coaster to join hundreds of others like them who were already working on it.
Bill got off the bus and tried his iPhone again. Still nothing.
He looked again at the roller coast. It was dozens of stories high and must have gone on for miles, twisting in and out of itself like vines. Everywhere he looked there were bus people working on it.
Back on the ground, a man knocked on the counter of what looked like a ticket window and got Bill's attention.
He walked over to the window tentatively and looked at the man. He had no mouth and no ears, and he held his hand out. After a moment's consideration, Bill reached out to shake it, but the man shook his head and pointed at Bill's other hand, the one holding the iPhone, and gave him a hand it over gesture. Bill reluctantly gave it to the man who tossed it into a trash can that was overflowing with Blackberries, iPhones, and other gadgets. Then he reached under the counter and came up with a hammer that he held out for Bill as he motioned at the roller coaster.
Bill looked at the roller coaster and at all the people climbing it and working on it. Then he took the tool, found a free spot, and started climbing.