Day 2,469

I woke up a few seconds before the bus hit the water, the impact drove my head against the window and I heard something crack before everything went dark. When I woke up again I saw dark shapes moving about in the water outside, unable to properly see what they were through the spiderweb fracturing of the glass.

It still felt like we were falling, even though I could clearly see the riverbed through the windscreen, and everything started to spin whenever I tried to move my head. I ended up lying down with my head tilted so I could see part of the aisle still, not that there was anyone in my line of sight.

I remember distantly thinking how strange it was that a bus full of people was suddenly reduced to nobody but me and how there was no water leaking through the glass that continued to break beneath my head. If it wasn't for the searing pain and dizziness whenever I tried to move I would have assumed I was dreaming.

Dreaming would explain the hands that pressed against the glass from the outside, hands that I was convinced belonged to the missing passengers who were now trying to save me from their fate. It would have been easy to call it a hallucination if they hadn't found handprints on the other side of the windows when they eventually managed to recover the bus.

Nobody quite knows how I managed to survive down there long enough to be recovered but they did find everyone else. They never left, I was just too concussed to see properly but they'd all died either on impact or shortly after, leaving me the sole survivor.

I'm still convinced that they're out there in the water and that they kept me alive.

I just don't know why.