Sneaky Flash Fiction #2: The Last Bus

Thanks to the Fictionistas’ prompt: “A person of a different size than most people is in conflict with a runaway over a camera that takes pictures of ghosts.”

Alice hated the night shift, 8pm until 3am. She especially hated the final half hour. She was convinced the clock on the wall deliberately dragged its hands, doubling, tripling, sextupling the time it took for a single minute to pass.

In daylight, she enjoyed her job, mostly, despite all the changes from Head Office over the past couple of years. The emails from Head Office always began with some lofty goal, a sentence about increasing efficiency, or streamlining the service, or cost-cutting, but they all ended with some form of erosion, of services, facilities, jobs. Those emails were about taking things away that would never be brought back.

Alice and the other remaining employees especially resented the loss of the depot’s 24-hour status. Head Office had decided to close the depot entirely after the departure of the last bus around 3am, for a full 90 minutes, when the early shift arrived.

This meant forcing anyone left in the waiting room at 3am to leave, to go and wander around in the dark and the cold for an hour and a half, to try not to freeze to death in that time, or to be hit by a car, or to be taken by whatever predators prowled the interstate. On winter nights like this the depot seemed like the only warm, bright place left on the planet and people were understandably reluctant to exit the glass doors.

But Head Office said they must.

Tonight, there was only one passenger, sprawled deep asleep across three plastic seats. From her high stool behind the ticket counter, Alice watched him breathe for a minute or so, noting his thin coat, scuffed dress shoes, small backpack. He looked ill-prepared for a long journey–and anyone who stopped at this depot had a long way to go before they reached their final destination.

Alice looked at the clock again. It was time. “Sir,” she said. “Sir.”

No reaction.

Alice sighed. This was the part she really hated, dropping down from her special stool, the stool that placed her eye level to eye level with the passengers, and down onto her two legs, which did not. She opened the office door and approached the passenger.

“Sir,” she said, much louder. “Sir, your bus is nearly here.”

The young man groaned, shifted, and the black plastic object he’d been clutching in his hands clattered to the floor. It was a digital camera, of the type people had before they had phones, with a viewing screen on the back. It skidded beneath the seats. 

Alice reached for it. As she picked it up her finger glanced across the shutter button, the lightest of touches, and it emitted a loud click. Alice jumped. The back screen glowed into life, an image, not as expected of the bus depot floor and chair legs, but a clear shot through the main glass doors, showing a bus pulling into the parking lot.

The bus that wasn’t due for another five minutes.

The young man sat up, blinking. When he saw Alice staring at the camera he said “Fuck. Did you take a photo?”

“I didn’t mean to.”

“Yeah, it’s kinda––uh––trigger-happy.”

Alice looked at the picture, her brain trying to make sense of the details. The bus was not a bus. It was bigger, somehow, made of a metal that absorbed light rather than reflecting it. And the driver wasn’t Andy, who she was expecting tonight. The photo didn’t show the man’s face clearly but there was something disconcerting about his lower jaw, caught in the light.

There were too many teeth in his mouth.

“Where did you get this?”

“I–uh–“ the young man looked at his inappropriate shoes. “I screwed up.” 

“Have you tried to get rid of it?” 

“Several times. But it keeps ending up back in my bag.”

She raised the camera and pointed it at the back wall.

“No, don’t—“

She did. This time the image was again of the front doors, but there was a figure standing directly outside, leering in. This time, Alice noted, he had too many fingers.

“Is this some AI bullshit?”

The young man shook his head. “It’s real.”

Outside, along the highway, two pinpricks of light bit through the darkness. The bus would be here any minute. 

“Go,” she said, gesturing towards the rear exit. 

He went.

Alice, head high, walked out through the front doors.

It was a cold, clear night, the asphalt shimmering with ground frost. Alice could hear the engine now, a harsh clattering within. Something off.

She positioned herself in the middle of the bus bay, the bright light behind her. Andy, and all the other regular drivers, knew she was only 42 inches tall, but this stranger, coming in too fast from the highway, might reasonably assume the silhouetted figure in front of him was of a more average height and brake accordingly—too late.

The bus that was not a bus, all glaring lights and smoke and heat, roared towards her. She faced it down until the very last second and then dropped onto the frosty ground, small as her superpower. As gnarled metal passed inches over her head she tossed the camera under the spinning wheels and heard a satisfying crunch of plastic just as the bus bounced off the curb and then folded on itself, cracking and splintering and caving with a squeal of metal and the toothsome, fingerous abomination in the driver’s seat.

Alice closed her eyes until she was sure it was over. She hated the night shift, 8pm until 3am.  But over the years, during those dark hours, she’d learned a few tricks. She opened her eyes, breathed deeply. Off in the distance, she could see headlights. Andy. The real thing.

She glanced at the clock in the waiting room. Its hands—finally—stood at a hard right angle. 3am. Time to go home.