It was intoxicating, and the overwhelming majority agreed to blurt it out until morning—just to catch them and deal with the criminals. How to punish them—wasn’t even what mattered; the main thing was to catch them, and then we’d see. It was somewhere around midnight. The bus stood swallowed in darkness. It nearly blended in with the trees growing along the roadside.
You could hear the wind rustling the bare branches. In the dark, a car sped by, its tires whispering over the asphalt. Carefully, as if testing itself again, the rain started to drizzle—and soon it began pounding on the bus roof with confidence…