Standing fifty feet away, looking kind of spooked...

Mrs. Bradbury’s third grade class stepped into Dover Memorial Mortuary at the worst possible time. Due to a freak acronym mixup, the annual field trip to the Dover Museum of Modern Art had been switched to a trip to the local mortuary. Jimmy and Veronica, two of Bradbury’s favorite students, rounded the corner into the crematorium and were blinded by a sudden flare of the furnace. The class was greeted by creepy old Mr. Miranda, who worked the fires. As the middle-aged man leaned over to comfort a particularly scared third-grader, he tripped over a slight crack in the linoleum tile. With a scream and another flare, the man suddenly disappeared behind a curtain of flames. Mrs. Bradbury scurried to the control switch with as much speed as possible for the eighty year old widow. Alas, by the time she reached the board of shining buttons the screams had subsided. Shock and dismay swirling around the room, Jimmy edged near the furnace and saw nothing of the mortuary worker but a small pile of ashes mixed in with the previous inhabitant. The elderly teacher ushered her children out of the room, shielding her mouth and nose from the recent death as she did so. Authorities finally arrived at the scene nearly forty-five minutes later and after they cleared the death as a horrific accident, the lead man let the children zoom off in their dilapidated bus. Steve, the newest driver for Dover Scholastic Buses, who had just come off a long night, was  slightly hung over and seriously tired. The high-school dropout started to doze off as the 37 children in the back of the bus murmured about what just happened. Tires screeched and a child wailed when Steve came to, but it was too late, the bus was already careening of the cliffs and into the sea but there was nothing anyone could do.