By ELVA RAMIREZ and ALISON GENDAR
The courageous school bus driver who saved a bleeding little girl after she was cut down by a stray bullet in the Bronx says he's not a hero - just a protective father. "The baby said, 'Mommy, am I going to die?' " Alberto Colon, a father of four, recalled yesterday. "I said, 'No! You are going to be fine.' "

Colon, 42, was idling at a red light on the Grand Concourse and E. 170th St. in the Bronx shortly after 3 p.m. Thursday when gunfire explode nearby. He watched as 10-year-old Mayelin Mejia - a classmate of his 9-year-old son, Joed, at Public School 64 - clutched her stomach and fell to the ground.

After racing to the fifth-grader's side, Colon wrapped her in his white shirt and placed her gently in the back of his blue SUV. Mayelin's petrified mother jumped in beside her.

Colon sped four blocks to Bronx-Lebanon Hospital and then rushed Mayelin through the hallways, cradling the girl in his arms. Her yellow blouse and blue pants were covered in blood. "The doctor was telling me that if it wasn't for me, she wouldn't be here right now," Colon said.

"I would appreciate if something happened to my kids there would be someone out there to be their guardian angel."

Mayelin was in stable condition yesterday, according to family members, who praised Colon for his quick actions. "She is better, thank God," said her concerned father, Leonardo Mejia, 46. "I don't want to leave her side."

Colon was so worried that Mayelin wasn't going to survive that he and his wife visited her family in the hospital three times Thursday night. He waited until late yesterday to tell his children - Joed, Orlando, 5, Joselyne, 13, and Jonathan, 15 - that he had saved Mayelin's life. When his kids called him a hero, he disagreed.

"I'm not a hero. I'm just a father," he said inside the family's Mount Eden apartment. "I must have been her guardian angel to be there at that time."

Police released a photo of the suspected shooter, 17-year-old Carlos Arauz of the Bronx, and asked the public to help cops track him down. The gunman was apparently firing at Emanuel Owens, 18, when he shot Mayelin. Owens was wounded in his hip and shoulder. He was taken to Lincoln Hospital, where he was in stable condition yesterday.

Owens told cops that he and Arauz had been feuding, and his friends had warned him that Arauz was looking for him Thursday, police sources said.

Moments before the shooting, Owens told cops he saw Arauz "pacing back and forth, and [Arauz] just started chasing him and shooting," a source said.

Police asked anyone with information about Arauz to call Crime Stoppers at (800) 577-TIPS.