Baked Scribe Flashback : Always On The Bus
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“I don’t understand what you’re so worked up about.” Dean snatched the paper away from Hilton and looked over the article again. “She was killed by a mugger, what’s the big deal?”
Hilton took hold of Dean’s wrist and turned it down so that the paper was lying flat between them, and pointed at the picture of the victim.
“She sits across from me on the bus every night.”
“You mean she sat across from you on the bus every night.”
“No.”
“She used to sit across from—”
“Look at the date. This happened over a week ago.”
“Yeah, so?”
“I just saw her last night.”
Dean stared at him for several moments that drew out like hours before shaking his head and turning back towards the kitchen.
“That’s it?” Hilton asked. “You’ve got nothing to say so that’s it? You’re just going to walk away?”
Dean turned back to face him. “All right, I think you’re a fucking loon, is that what you wanted to hear me say?”
“If that’s what you honestly think than yes, I want—”
“You come up to me talking about dead people riding on the bus with you, what were you expecting me to say?
“I’m not crazy.”
“Well, I’m sure most other crazy people have thought that at one time or another.”
He would just have to prove it to him, beyond any possibility of debate or denial. So the next night, even though he knew full well that this was a mistake, he ended up on the number sixty five bus, tapping his knee with his phone, ready to get photographic proof of how sane he actually was.
Two hours, every night he rode the bus, occupying the same seat, paying each time the bus restarted it’s route so that the drivers wouldn’t give him a hard time. This went on for a week to no avail. He was getting ready to give up on the whole venture, to concede his grip on reality, that he had simply seen another woman who looked eerily similar. That explanation should fly. He was ready to give up the search as soon as he got to his stop when he saw the woman again.
He had just gotten off the bus. No one boarded as he stepped off and the bus had been nearly empty. Still, as he glanced back over his shoulder to watch it pulling away from the curb he saw her, sitting right across from where he had just been. He tried chasing it down, screaming and waving his arms but the driver either didn’t see him or didn’t care.
The next night, he spent four hours on the sixty five. He was starting to fall asleep in his seat, almost out of loose change when he saw her. It was out of the corner of his eye and was as if she had just appeared out of nowhere and he turned back to face her, turning slowly so as to not alarm her. She remained facing forward, not acknowledging his existence or presence.
The woman was wearing a simple, flimsy looking dress of faded green. It was definitely the woman from the newspaper article, he was sure of that much. After all this time spent, he had finally found her and now that he was here, in the moment, he found himself floundering to decide what to do. He felt drawn to her for reasons he couldn’t explain, even to himself. The urge to reach across the aisle and caress the exposed skin of her arm, the base of her neck, he actually had to sit on his hands to keep them from roving.
The bus jostled as it hit a bump in the road, tossing him against the side wall. He glanced out the window for a moment and saw her out there, now walking down a darkened alley. It couldn’t have been her though, the bus hadn’t stopped. He could still see her in the reflection in the window, sitting there in her seat. It occurred to him suddenly that she was actually looking at him
Staring at him, eyes black as the night sky outside.
Hilton jumped in his seat and turned back. She was gone, the seat now occupied by a nurse on her way to or from work. He shook his head and yanked on the pull-chain, requesting the next stop. The bus had barely slowed before he shouldered his way through the back doors and stepped out onto the street.
The alley was just a few blocks back. He ignored the glances and comments from people he passed, even though he recognized his rudeness as he jostled through the crowd.
“Why are you so obsessed with this?” the voice inside his head was his own, admonishing him in a tone that suggested that he should know better to leave well enough alone. Still, his feet carried him on.
A cold breeze flowed over him as he stuck his head around the corner, peering down the alley. He could see no one, even though there was almost nowhere in the alley to hide. A construction site on the next block over had sealed off the other end, making it a dead end. There were no doors into the surrounding buildings, only ladders to fire escapes, too high to be used from the street level. There wasn’t even a dumpster to hide behind.
Still, there was no sign of her. He supposed it had to make sense, if what he was thinking was true, if the implications of what he had seen was correct, wouldn’t she have the ability to appear and disappear at will? Would she truly be tethered to the laws of this universe? Or would she be somehow above what dictated reality to all of them?
Hilton began turning around in circles, looking through the shadows cast by the streetlights to try and see her. He couldn’t even hear the traffic from the street anymore, just his own sharp intakes of breath as he searched for her, needed her. The walls around him began to blur, spin on their own accord until he realized that he had stopped moving altogether.
She stood before him, eyes fixed on his for the first time. He looked into her eyes in the flash of that moment, felt every ounce of her pain and rage, amplified a hundred fold. He clapped his hands to his ears, which were already starting to ooze what he had to assume was blood.
She stepped forward, as if for an embrace, opened her mouth and screamed.
Hilton staggered back as if he had been struck. His arms were pulled back and he vaguely felt the bones snapping. He felt pressure like two invisible thumbs on his eyes, pushing further in until he felt the cornea flex and start to break. He saw streaky light and darkness before falling to his knees, now realizing that her screams were now inter-mingling with his own. The world went dark and muffled, as if a sack had been pulled over his head.
He looked down, realizing that he was watching his own feet as they were walking down the center of the number sixty five bus. The other passengers seemed oblivious to his presence as he passed. The world outside the bus seemed to no longer exist, an impenetrable fog bank. All there was for him now was this bus.
He also had the alley, and any others that he could manage to draw there.
He took a seat across from a young attractive passenger. In time, he would figure out how to reveal himself to them.
These passengers could all be his.
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