After his parrot companion flies away, a rough and tough pirate experiences anxiety on his first day as a school bus driver, echoing some of the concerns expressed by the young students in his care.

Cousins Dante, Malia, and Ivan are happy to be back in their home town. But then their school bus takes a wrong turn and they end up on 13th Street! There are new monsters to fight -- fire-breathing ferrets. At least they have their friend Susana and their bus driver to help them. Will the gang ever make it to their first day of class?

Twelve-year-old Jordan and his friend Evan are picked up by a different school bus, driven by a shadowy figure, a bus where all the other children are bizarrely deformed, except for one girl at the back, and when the children see their reflections in thedirty windows they start to scream--but what will happen when they get off the bus at school?

Aaron can barely see anything without his glasses, which he just stepped on, so when he sees a monster crawl out from under the hood of the bus and begin to tear the engine apart he can not understand why none of the other children can see it--terrified he forces the bus to stop, but when he gets off things only get worse.

Black Creek middle school football players are happy after a win at a rival school, but the bus that picks them up for the trip home is not the same as the one that brought them, and it is driven by a shadowy figure behind a plastic wall--but when the busstops to pick up a passenger it turns out to be their dead coach and the terrified team does not know if he there to doom or save them from the School Bus of Horrors.

When the other children on the school bus run away, a little girl wonders if there was a monster on the bus.

"There's just one rule on Sid's bus: no fuss. But then the children and animals climb on board, things get out of control! This story includes age-appropriate text and a reading comprehension activity to support emerging readers"--