The Midnight Bus

I didn’t get into college, so I took a job driving a city bus. Once I finished training, I started working the night shift with Uncle Tim. He had always been the kind of guy who followed every rule. But that night, he wouldn’t let me pick up a single passenger. He even made me keep the bus dark the entire route. Uncle Tim died shortly after that incident. A few days later, someone told me something that made my blood run cold. Uncle Tim had actually been dead for quite some time. So who the hell had been riding with me that night? Chapter 1 It was supposed to be just another night shift. I was driving the bus with my uncle riding along, same as usual. But the second we pulled out, something felt off. The terminal lobby, which was usually brightly lit, was completely dark. Even the streetlights outside had gone out. I thought it was weird, but I didn’t dwell on it. As we left the terminal, I spotted a hunched figure standing across the street beneath one of the dead streetlights. When the person saw the bus, they slowly raised a hand. I was about to pull over when Uncle Tim suddenly grabbed my shoulder hard from behind. His voice was shaking. “Ryan, don’t stop. Keep driving.” I winced. “Ow!” I had no idea what had gotten into him. But when Uncle Tim told me to do something in that tone, I wasn’t about to argue. So I kept going. As we passed the streetlight, I couldn’t resist taking a look. It was a woman. She wore a pale yellow floral dress, and her long hair hung down her back. I couldn’t make out her face, but even from a distance, there was something polished and elegant about her. As I approached the intersection, I turned on my signal and glanced at the rearview mirror. The woman had raised her head. She was pointing at me. A strange feeling settled in my stomach. She wasn’t that far behind us, and I started feeling bad about leaving her there. “Uncle Tim, why don’t we let her on? It’s late. She’s probably just trying to get home.” He shot me a glare. “I said keep driving!” Uncle Tim was usually one of the most easygoing people I knew. If he was snapping at me like that, I knew better than to push it. I made the turn and kept going. It was already after eleven. The streets were practically deserted, and we passed several stops without seeing a single passenger. The weather was unpredictable. One minute, it was hot enough to roast you alive. The next, rain was coming down in sheets. I cranked the windshield wipers all the way up and could still barely see the road. As we approached the next stop, I saw someone standing beneath the bus stop sign. I reached for the turn signal. Suddenly, pain shot through my wrist. Uncle Tim had grabbed me again. His hand was ice-cold. “Don’t stop. Keep going.” I stared at him. “What? There’s someone waiting!” “Drive! Now!” Before I could react, he reached over and shut off my turn signal himself. I still had no clue what was going on. Feeling guilty about leaving someone stranded in the pouring rain, I gave the horn a quick tap as we passed. Then I glanced back. Every hair on my body stood on end. A pale yellow floral dress. Long black hair. It was her. The woman from outside the terminal. No freaking way. How was she here? My heart nearly jumped out of my chest. This was the fourth stop. We were more than three miles from the terminal. I hadn’t stopped once, and I had been driving right at the speed limit the entire way. There was no way she could have gotten here ahead of us. So how the hell had she done it? A chill crawled up my spine. I looked in the mirror again. The bus stop was empty. Had the rain messed with my eyes? I turned toward Uncle Tim. He must have seen her too, because he looked just as shaken as I felt. “Stop looking,” he snapped. “Turn off the lights and drive. Whatever you do, don’t stop.” I wasn’t going to pretend I was brave. Anyone would have been scared out of their mind after seeing something like that in the middle of the night. My thoughts were all over the place. Luckily, there wasn’t anyone waiting at the next few stops. I just kept my foot on the gas, wanting to get out of there as fast as possible. I was so focused on driving that I didn’t notice something else. Every streetlight along the entire route was dark. By the time we came around toward the terminal again, I was ready to pull back into the depot. Uncle Tim stopped me. “Keep going. Head southeast.” I gave him a confused look. But at that point, I wasn’t about to question him. I turned the bus in the direction he told me to go. Every time I checked the rearview mirror, I could see her following us. I never saw her run or even take a single step, yet somehow, she was always there whenever I looked back. She just kept pointing at me. My whole body started shaking. Even my foot on the gas pedal wouldn’t stay steady. Uncle Tim didn’t say a word. His expression had gone grim. We kept driving until the road ended completely. There was nowhere left to go. Only then did he tell me to stop. “Ryan, you stay on this bus.” His voice was deadly serious. “And no matter what you see, you keep your mouth shut. You understand me?” The look on his face scared me more than anything else had that night. I nodded stiffly. Chapter 2 Then I saw Uncle Tim reach under one of the seats and pull out an old box. It was made of woven wicker, darkened with age and worn smooth around the edges. It looked like something that had been passed down through the family for decades. I was wondering what was inside when he opened the box and pulled out two plain white candles. They weren’t ordinary candles, either. They looked like the kind people used at funerals or graveside services. My grandmother had always said you shouldn’t keep funeral candles around unless you had a reason. They were supposed to bring bad luck. Yet Uncle Tim was carrying them around on the bus. Judging by the size of the box, he had plenty more. That made me even more uneasy. Why would a city bus driver carry stuff like this around? Unless... Unless he kept it specifically for situations like this. Then Uncle Tim took out three sticks of incense. I didn’t dare ask what he was doing. I just watched as he walked to the front of the bus. He motioned for me to shut everything down. I turned off the lights and killed the engine. We were way out in the middle of nowhere. There wasn’t a single house or building in sight. As soon as the lights went out, everything disappeared into darkness. Rain pounded against the windows while the wind howled around the bus. The sound made the whole thing even creepier. Uncle Tim crouched outside with his back to me. He muttered a few words under his breath, but I couldn’t make them out over the storm. Then he pulled out a lighter and tried to light the candles. I stared through the windshield. There was no way those things were going to stay lit in weather like this. But they did. Two tiny flames appeared in the darkness. They flickered wildly in the wind, faint and eerie, like something out of an old ghost story. They should have gone out immediately. Instead, they started burning brighter. Uncle Tim set the three sticks of incense behind the candles in a straight row, then climbed back onto the bus. Once he was inside, some of the tension seemed to leave his face. He even lit a cigarette, completely ignoring the no-smoking rule. “You spend enough nights driving empty roads, sooner or later you’re going to run into something you can’t explain,” he said. “The trick is not to mess with it. You leave it alone, and hopefully it leaves you alone.” He nodded toward the candles outside. “That’s what those are for.” I stared at him, not quite sure what to say. I had never believed in ghosts. As far as I was concerned, haunted roads, restless spirits, and things hiding in the dark belonged in campfire stories. But watching those candles burn steadily in the middle of a downpour made me question that pretty fast. Maybe all those crazy stories old people told weren’t completely made up. “We’ll give it another minute,” Uncle Tim said. “If nothing changes, we’re good. Then we’ll head back, get some sleep, and forget about finishing the route tonight.” He tossed me a cigarette. I copied him, lit it, and took a drag. The smoke hit the back of my throat so hard that my eyes immediately started watering. I bent over coughing. Uncle Tim burst out laughing. For the first time all night, it felt like the worst was finally behind us. Then his laughter stopped. Just like that. A second later, I heard him suck in a sharp breath. I looked toward the front of the bus. The flames on both candles had turned green. My stomach dropped. Then I noticed the incense. Two of the sticks had burned almost all the way down. The third had barely burned at all. Uncle Tim went completely still. “Ryan,” he said quietly, “I don’t think we’re getting home tonight.” I knew the old superstition. My grandmother used to talk about things like that when I was a kid. If three sticks of incense burned unevenly, with two disappearing fast while the third stayed almost untouched, it meant whatever you were trying to appease hadn’t accepted your offering. It meant you were in trouble. I had always thought it was nonsense. Now I was staring right at it. For a moment, my mind went completely blank. Then something hit me. Uncle Tim had lit the incense less than thirty seconds ago. Thirty seconds. There was no possible way two sticks could have burned down that much. “Uncle Tim, what do we do? Are we going to die?” “Shut up!” he snapped. “Don’t say that out loud.” His voice was harsh, but I could see his hand shaking. That scared me more than anything else. Whatever was happening, Uncle Tim was afraid too. I was young, and there was still a lot I didn’t know about the world. But I knew my uncle. He wouldn’t lie to me about something like this. He motioned for me to get out of the driver’s seat and took my place. Then he pulled an access card from his pocket and tapped it against the control panel. A computerized voice came through the speakers. “Authorization confirmed. Speed limiter disabled. Please operate the vehicle with caution.” Uncle Tim had special clearance from the transit company. He was a military veteran, and whenever something went wrong that regular drivers weren’t trained to handle, the company called him in. Because of that, they had issued him an override card that could disable the bus’s speed limiter. I swear I had never ridden in anything that fast in my life. Especially not a city bus. The second the automated message ended, Uncle Tim floored it. The bus shot forward so hard that I was thrown back against my seat. It was a full-size city bus, but Uncle Tim handled it like a sports car. He swung it around in one smooth turn, straightened the wheel, and slammed his foot down on the gas. The speedometer climbed past sixty miles an hour within seconds. “Uncle Tim, slow down! I’m getting sick!” “Then be sick!” he shouted. “Better sick than dead!” There was something vicious in his voice. But somehow, I had the disturbing feeling that those words weren’t really meant for me. Chapter 3 Uncle Tim tore down the road in the bus. Luckily, there was almost no traffic at that hour. The terminal was normally a twenty-minute drive away, but somehow, he made it there in seven. I was already getting ready to jump off when I realized he wasn’t slowing down. He shot straight past the entrance. “Uncle Tim! What are you doing? Where are we going?” “Stop talking and look behind us! Tell me if there’s anything back there!” I quickly turned around. Someone was sitting in the very back row of the bus. A pale yellow dress. Long black hair. It was her. The same woman from before. I froze. I was so terrified that I forgot to even tell Uncle Tim what I had seen. When he didn’t hear me answer, he seemed to understand anyway. Instead of continuing straight, he suddenly jerked the wheel. The several-ton bus swung around so violently that the back end skidded across the pavement. The next second, we shot forward again. My stomach lurched. I felt like everything I had eaten that night was about to come right back up. By the time I finally managed to hold it down and lift my head, we were passing the terminal again. And this time, I saw her clearly. The woman was standing right outside the entrance. She stared straight at me without the slightest expression on her face. My jaw dropped. Cold sweat broke out all over my body, and I gripped the seat so tightly that my fingers hurt. From the front, Uncle Tim shouted, “Don’t look at her! Don’t look! Just pretend you didn’t see anything!” Then he pressed the gas even harder. By the time I came back to my senses, we were already outside the city. Everything around us looked more and more deserted, and I was about ready to cry. “Uncle Tim, what are we supposed to do?” He ignored me. Instead, he lit another cigarette and took such a deep drag that nearly a third of it burned away at once. The bus finally slowed down a little. My stomach settled with it, but I didn’t dare look out the windows anymore. I was terrified of what I might see. We continued down a rough concrete road full of cracks and potholes until a warning beep suddenly sounded. I knew that noise. It was the low-battery warning on the electric bus. I checked the time. It was already two thirty in the morning. My stomach dropped again. It felt like I had only been out of it for a moment, yet almost three hours had passed. “Uncle Tim...” “We keep going as long as we can,” he said. “We just have to make it until sunrise.” The thought made me want to give up. It was still at least two hours before the roosters would start crowing at dawn. How were we supposed to make it until then? I stopped talking. It wasn’t because I didn’t want to say anything. I just had no idea what to say. Of all the things that could happen on my first night on the job, I had to get stuck in this nightmare. I was actually wondering whether I should try something I had seen in an old horror movie when the bus suddenly stopped. I looked ahead. The road split into three directions, and an old man was struggling up the hill with a beat-up wooden handcart. “Uncle Tim, there’s someone up ahead...” Before I could finish, Uncle Tim was already out of the bus. He walked over and helped the old man push the cart uphill. Once they reached the top, the man thanked him over and over. “Thank you. It’s good to know there are still decent people in this world.” Uncle Tim nodded. “Sir, do you happen to have a pair of scissors with you?” Scissors? Why would Uncle Tim need those? There were already scissors in the emergency tool kit on the bus. But the moment the old man heard the question, his expression changed. His face went cold. Then he turned and looked directly toward the bus. It was almost as if he knew I was sitting inside. “You’re heading to Easton Village?” he asked. “Yes.” The old man sighed. “Then you’d better be careful.” That was all he said. He turned to leave, but before he did, he actually pulled out a pair of scissors and handed them to Uncle Tim. They were just ordinary scissors. At least, that was what they looked like to me. But Uncle Tim accepted them like the old man had just saved his life. He thanked him again and again, so grateful that he looked ready to drop to his knees. I couldn’t understand any of it. When Uncle Tim climbed back onto the bus, his whole body was trembling. It wasn’t from the cold. He was scared. That only made me more confused. What could possibly frighten a man who had spent ten years in the military this badly? Even when the candles turned green and the incense burned wrong, he hadn’t looked like this. Uncle Tim didn’t explain. He simply handed me the scissors. “Hold on to these. Don’t let go. When you get home, leave them by the front door.” I did exactly what he said. And strangely enough, the moment I took the scissors, that icy feeling that had been hanging over me all night disappeared. Warmth slowly spread through my body. Within minutes, I was so warm that I took off my jacket and still felt hot. Uncle Tim eased off the gas and drove slowly down the road. Then, at last, I heard it. A rooster crowed somewhere in the distance. The tight knot in my chest finally loosened.