A continuation of 'The Journey of the Bones'. Enjoy!
***
They left the next morning.
“Are you sure you have everything?” Ruby asked as she locked the door.
“For the hundredth time, yes,” Ben groaned, annoyed. “Would you stop asking me that?”
“Sorry, I just don’t want to be halfway through this God-awful expedition and realize we forgot something important.” She hid the key under the welcome mat and they both started walking away from the house.
“Please, with your OCD, we couldn’t forget anything even if we wanted to.”
“I don’t have OCD, Ben. That’s a matter of the brain, and we don’t have brains.”
“Whatever. Let’s just get to the bus station.”
The siblings walked in silence for a while, sometimes shifting the backpack straps on their thin shoulders. Some little skeletons toddled in their front yards with a mom or a dad watching, still dressed in their pajamas, drinking the first of many morning coffees. Ruby and Ben didn’t look at them as they passed, trying to avoid being asked questions about where they were going. Eventually they reached the neighborhood limit and paused. Down the road was the bus depot, getting ready to open.
“Okay. Gloves on, hoods up,” Ruby said, taking a pair of gloves out from the pocket of her backpack. Ben did the same, sighing.
“I wish we had a car,” he mumbled.
“Mom took the car, remember? And we don’t have enough money to rent one, let alone buy one, anyway.”
She put up her hood.
“Then I wish we didn’t have to hide every time we left the frickin’ neighborhood.”
“Ben.” Ruby gave him a look. “I know it’s annoying, but humans are better off not knowing about creatures like us.”
“We’re their bones. That should count for something!”
“Good God, Ben, just shut up and hide your face.”
Grumbling, he did what he was told. They walked quickly to the bus depot, which had just opened. Ben stayed outside while Ruby paid for two bus tickets. They sat in the outdoor waiting area, backpacks in their laps. A couple of humans joined them later, and they lowered their heads.
When a bus was ready for departure, Ruby and Ben followed the humans up the metal steps and handed the driver their tickets. The siblings went straight to the back and sat next to a window, placing their bags at their feet. They felt the bus lurch before it started rolling down the road towards the town. Ben looked out the window behind them and sighed as their neighborhood faded away.
“This is going to be the longest and farthest we’ve ever been from home,” he said morosely, turning back around.
Ruby put an arm around his shoulders.
“I know. But if we find mom quickly, we’ll be able to come right back here,” she reassured him.
“The goblins won’t make it that easy for us. I told you, they hate skeletons.”
“Why do they hate us, anyway?”
“I don’t know; it was something dad said once.”
The atmosphere around them suddenly became icy. Ruby’s face became stony and impassive as she took her arm away from Ben’s shoulders.
“Right. Dad.”
She crossed her arms and looked out the window. Ben stared at her for a moment before looking at the floor and tugging his hood farther over his face.
“Idiot,” he muttered to himself.
***
Around noon the bus reached a rest stop next to a highway. The trip so far had been uneventful, humans getting on and off at the odd stops along the way. Ruby and Ben sat at an outdoor table close to the bus, munching on the trail mix they’d packed.
“I swear, the best part of this snack is the raisins,” Ben said, grinning.
“Ew, really?” Ruby made a face. “I made sure mine had no raisins. I can’t stand them.”
“Sis, we don’t have tongues, how can you not stand them?”
“I just don’t like the texture. It’s weird.”
“You’re weird.”
“Thank you, you’re so sweet.”
“I rest my case.”
The tension from earlier had faded and they both silently decided not to bring it up again. They were stressed enough as it was, and they didn’t need anything else adding to it. When Ruby was halfway finished with her trail mix, she sealed it and put it back in her bag and took out the map. She opened it and laid it out on the table.
“Why look at it now?” Ben asked, putting his snack away. “We’re not there yet.”
“I know. I just wanted to memorize our path for when we do get there.”
Ben shook his head and rested it on the table.
“Just like when we were in school. You always had to read ahead before the teacher even assigned the work.”
Ruby glared at him.
“While you just sat there and doodled, never realizing there even was an assignment until a day or two before it was due.”
“I didn’t pay attention because they weren’t teaching anything interesting!”
“Oh, so, learning about how creature homes and communities came to only be seen by creatures and not humans wasn’t interesting?”
“No.” Ben looked up at her. “Every creature knows that story by the time they’re in frickin’ kindergarten.”
“Okay, fine.” Ruby folded the map and stuffed it in her bag. She looked back up at him and folded her arms. “Why don’t you tell me that story, since you already know it?”
“Alright, I will.” Ben sat up straight and placed his hands on his knees. “Several hundreds of years ago, many species of creatures appealed to the most powerful witches of the time. They were being persecuted by humans who wanted nothing more than to kill them all. The witches, having been harassed themselves, agreed to fix the problem. So they cast a spell that spanned the globe, causing their homes to disappear from the eyes of humans. If a human tried to enter an area where creatures lived, the spell would make them forget why they were there in the first place. The creatures stayed within their respective communities for generations after that. After all, if humans can’t see where they live, then they have nothing to worry about.”
The siblings were silent for a while. Ruby sighed and gave Ben a look.
“I guess you do know that story,” she conceded.
Ben smiled, triumphant, as he leaned back in his chair. Then he sat up, puzzled.
“Hey, where’s the bus?” he asked.
The bus was seemingly no longer in the parking lot.
“Oh, God, no,” Ruby said, jumping from her seat. “It can’t be gone.”
She ran around the entire parking lot, frantically searching for any sign of the bus. Sadly, it was nowhere in sight.
“Okay, so…,” Ben said slowly, coming up behind a hyperventilating Ruby, “How much farther is it to the port town we need to be at?”
Ruby ran her gloved hands over her face and didn’t respond for a few minutes. Then she turned around and faced her brother, trying to keep it together.
“We still have about 30 miles to go. Had we still been on the bus, we would have made it to the port town within a day, but now it’s going to take at least two, maybe two and a half.”
“Oh, well, that’s just great.” Ben threw his hands up. “We’re going to have to walk, which means we’re going to have to camp, which we didn’t prepare for at all…at this point, we might as well just give ourselves up to the wild dogs.”
Ruby growled and grabbed the front of her brother’s sweater, pulling him up to her level.
“How the hell can you be sarcastic in a situation like this!?” she hissed.
Ben glared at her.
“Freaking out about it certainly isn’t frickin’ helping,” he snapped.
“Don’t make me break your femur.”
“Please, the worst you could do to me is break my coccyx.”
The siblings glared at each other for a moment, seething. Then Ruby forcefully pushed Ben away, causing him to fall on his said extremity. While he grumbled about that, his sister stomped back over to their table and picked up her backpack. She quickly put it on and started walking towards the road. Ben scrambled up, grabbed his backpack, and started after her.
“Wait for me, why don’t you,” he called out, sloppily shouldering his bag.
“No time for that,” she stated, “We need to hoof it if we’re going to make it to the port town within two days. So keep up, twerp.”
“Seriously? ‘Twerp?’ That is the pettiest of petty insults you could have ever said.”
Ruby didn’t respond, and kept moving fast. If Ben had had eyes, he was sure he would have rolled them. He managed to get beside her and match her pace, though with some difficulty.
They didn’t speak for the next several hours.
