Midnight Bus to Nowhere

The bus hummed like a caged animal, sniffing along the rain-slicked road, headlights licking the blacktop. A young woman clutched the rail near the front, swaying with the mechanical pulse of the beast beneath her feet.

“One return,” she said, her voice slicing through the lull of rubber on wet asphalt.

I glanced at her—twenty-something, bright-eyed but spent. The look you get when life has knocked you around early and left you standing in the rain with nowhere to go.

She wanted the next stop—the end of the world as far as this route was concerned. A fifteen-minute uphill hike through a land of indifference. A place that once held something—houses, shops, the bones of an old civilization—but was now just trees and government-mandated serenity.

But people still went up there. They always had.

The city spread below like a neon fever dream, a mirage of warmth and purpose. Lovers thought it was romantic.

The drunks saw it as a place to piss without consequence. I just saw another damn shift grinding its way to the finish line.

I had once been a man with prospects. I met Annie at the county office when I still believed in things.

She had red hair, a riot of color in an otherwise gray world. We traded smiles, love notes on Post-Its, and stolen moments in the breakroom.

Then the job, my position, dried up.

The job driving a bus came next. Annie said I looked good in the uniform. She was wrong.

The company stripped the job to its skeleton. No change. No small kindnesses. Cameras in the cab, eyes in the walls, the sterile tyranny of policy. Annie saw it happen—saw me become something smaller.

Then I came home one night and found her with another man. I pretended I didn’t. It seemed easier. And she stayed, but only in the way a ghost haunts.

Years passed. Then that girl.

She had no money. No change. Rules were rules. I shut the door on her.

They found her hours later. Tortured, beaten, unmade by hands I didn’t see and don’t want to imagine. They never caught the bastard. But people need someone to blame. The bus driver who left her in the dark was good enough.

I kept driving. Kept watching.

Then another girl, on this night. She counted her change and came up short.

She smiled that same helpless smile.

“Get on,” I said, handing her the ticket. The doors hissed shut like an exhausted sigh.