10:40 By Kelvin P. Bik
10:40 Synopsis: Learned and self-controlled, a teen awakens to find himself inexplicably lost in a barren land. He is alone, or so he thinks. Many things are planned for him: by enemies he does not know and by friends he cannot recognise. How then is he to find a way home without knowing who he is or where he must go?
Text copyright © Kelvin Bik, 2014. All rights reserved. Cover design copyright © Kelvin Bik, 2014. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture references are from the Holy Bible, English Standard Version (ESV) Copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers. Quotations designated (NIV 1984) are from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by Biblica, Inc®. All rights reserved worldwide.
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For my Father in heaven Hallowed be Your name forever.
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If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light about me be night,� even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is bright as the day, for darkness is as light with you. Psalm 139:11-12
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01 It was the silence that stirred Joshua. He woke with a start. Dazed, even confused, he wondered where he was, even who he was. His father used to tease him about the mind fog every time Josh woke up. “Your spirit takes forever to come home,” laughed David as he scrubbed his son’s palm-sized face. Even the pain of the facial scourge did little to awaken Josh; like his father said, it was as if Josh had somehow drifted away whenever he slept, and nothing, save perhaps time, restored his soul. It happened so frequently that as a child, Josh had once insisted – to his mother Evelyn’s horror and to David’s amusement – that he would never sleep again. That night, Josh had adamantly rubbed his eyes till they turned red, and pinched and punched himself when bedtime came, so that sleep wouldn’t come again to steal him. “Don’t be stupid!” Ma cried in frustration after the “scene”, as she called it, went on for half an hour. “Nothing is gonna hurt you. You just sleep and you just wake up like a normal person!” Josh bit his lower lip and gazed at her, his calf-like eyes stinging. Couldn’t she understand that he didn’t want this? That he wanted to be normal? But he wasn’t. Even Pa didn’t understand. He just smiled like everything was a joke. Nothing mattered really to David. Oh, he tried to be nice to Josh, but most of the time, his “niceness” made Josh wonder if it would take a real-life monster screeching and threatening to kill tiny Josh before David would take his “silly” concerns seriously. Then again, David would never have a chance now to change, would he? **** Josh struck his right temple with his fist. “Wake up, oh wake up!” he prayed. Bus. He was on a bus. But why the silence? Why weren’t they moving? Then again, why the deadness in the air? Where was the growl of the engine, the hollow venting of air from the air-conditioner? Josh struck his head again. Something was wrong, something stranger than usual. “Am I at the station?” The thought stung him. He scrambled to pack everything into his backpack, his philosophy book, for instance. (“Was I even reading?”) He stumbled down the steps of the double-decker bus, his glance toward the back registering that he was alone. Below, the lights were somewhat dimmer. (“Were they always this dim?”) No one. The bus lights made tiny metallic flecks on the floor shine, and unbidden, a quote, perhaps a quote, came: “We all are but stardust.” 10:40 (By Kelvin Bik)
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The doors were open. Josh glanced at the driver’s seat. No one. No sound. No motion. He made his exit, leaping almost off the bus, as if something drove him with an unearthly panic. He stumbled. A sharp pain contorted his ankle and twisted his face. For a moment, he appeared like the mad spirit in Edvard Munch's The Scream. He thrust his hands forth to break his fall. His backpack swung off his right shoulder. It flew out of his control. The ground was gritty. Josh could taste blood on his lower lip. “Don’t pick him up, don’t pick him!” He looked up, dazed, expecting to see someone. No one.
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02 Joshua couldn’t tell how long it took before his mind returned. He adjusted his glasses, which were crooked. He felt the roughness of the ground with palms that stung. (“Did I fall? Did I?”) The light that bathed him was orange, the lazy yet comforting hue of street lamps. Beyond that was darkness. Josh could make out the shadowed outlines of the bus. The lights within had gone out. He was neither at the bus interchange, nor at a bus stop. In fact, the road looked unfamiliar, a thought that disquieted him. He had always been quite certain of where he was; the bus route home passed through some quiet streets but the landmarks were always… Josh shook his head. The landmarks were… He couldn’t remember. He ought to recall, but nothing was there. He reached for his bag, nearly invisible since it was black but still as solid and comforting as ever. Josh grabbed hold of it like a life preserver and picked himself up. (“Wasn’t someone coming after me?”) His legs felt sore, but it was his right ankle that made him wince. Trying to stay balanced, he dug out his old-style smartphone from his pocket. The screen glowed to life. “10:40 PM,” it read. Josh might have been concerned. He had left school at least an hour ago. By normal standards, his bus would be close to his neighbourhood by now, not that strange place. Instead, his mind seized on another phone message: “No network”. “Shoot!” he exclaimed. He rebooted his phone, knowing it was faster than the miserable “scan for new network” command which took ages to search the airwaves and even then, was never guaranteed to work. Clasping the resurrecting phone, Josh glanced around, wiping his bloodied lip with the back of his other hand. “Hullo!” he shouted. There was no answer. In fact, for some reason, Josh couldn’t hear anything besides himself. No crickets, no traffic, no wind. “Hullo!” he cried out louder that time. His voice sounded hoarse and jarring to himself as it penetrated the wilderness. Some faint memory stirred within, a story his Pa once told him as a child about how someone took a bus at night, fell asleep and woke up suddenly to find no one, not even the driver. But with Pa, of course, a punchline was to come: “So he got off and looked. Then suddenly, the bus jerked. Wah, like a zombie! Haha. Then that poor guy, he heard some breathless voices, ‘Come help us… come join us.’ He nearly wetted his pants,
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man… So he ran, and the voices went, ‘Eh, don’t like that leh, come help push.’ And it turned out that the driver and the other passengers were behind the spoilt bus, trying to push it off the road!” Josh cracked a smile. Ma had disapproved, he recalled. It was “too morbid”, she had pronounced. “You’ll give him nightmares!” Pa looked exceedingly sheepish and bowed his head like a naughty schoolboy, but when Ma looked away, he had quickly given Josh a wink. With a grin, Josh limped to the back of the bus, but nope, he was alone. Then again, he might have freaked out to find humans labouring in the dark. His hand glowed pink and alien-like. The phone he held was stirring back to life. “10:40,” it read. “No network.” “Shoot!”
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