black, pierced by halogen street lamps. “Mom sent it,” I tell him.
“She’s dead,” he says to me.
“I know, but she sent it.”
“Your mom is dead. She’s been dead a long time. Who sent this ticket?” His voice is getting loud, and I look at him. We stare at each other for a long time, and other people in the cafeteria are staring too.
I snatch the ticket out of his hand and put it back in the envelope. “My mom sent it.”
“From the grave, she sent it,” he says loudly.
“I shouldn’t have said anything,” I tell him, shoving the envelope into my jacket.
We don’t say anything for a few minutes, and I can’t even look at him.
“I just worry is all,” he says.
I sit staring at my food, and then I look up at him. “I’m not your kid.”
“I don’t know what I would do if something happened,” he says, and he sounds kind of panicked. “You know what I mean.”
“Nothing’s going to happen, Wade.” I watch him as he starts to gather his trash onto his tray.
“Yeah, I hope not,” he says again, and then he’s walking away toward the trash cans with his tray.
Leaving work early is weird. The whole world is dormant, night houses dark as tombs. Whole neighborhoods exist in suspended animation, cars parked with headlights dark, anticipating drug runs. I don’t know this world, with the bus tires thundering over the cross-town bridge. The city beyond is a bioluminescent alien landscape, twinkling in the night, becoming stars against the invisible horizon.
I get off the bus and walk across the street to my building with the world still sleeping, the streetlights buzzing and flickering as the bus rumbles down the road back to the station downtown. Somewhere, someone’s phone is ringing. Someone’s phone is always ringing here. I get up two flights of stairs before I really start listening to the phone ringing. I stop, looking up at the infinite stairs climbing and climbing, rotating around their rectangular shaft toward the roof. The phone rings again, a jangling that ignites memories in my brain. Neurons spark, ignite, and establish connections.
I start to run. I take the stairs three at a time, leaping up them, grabbing at the banister and pulling myself along as the phone rings a second and third time, then a fourth. I reach the fifth floor as it rings again and again as I’m running down the hallway, my shoes slapping the naked concrete floor. Don’t hang up, please don’t hang up.
I hear another ring as I struggle with the key, tears forming in my eyes. After a few more rings, the door bursts open to let me in, but by then the answering machine clicks and begins recording. I stand, frozen in the doorway, plaster still falling from where the door knob hit the wall. Silence. I sprint across the living room and grab the receiver and press it to my ear. “Mom, mom!” I yell into it, but there’s nothing. Then, the dial tone begins.
It’s eleven fifty-five when I step off the Route Nine bus at the station. The ticket counter is closed and the station is empty. I sit down on the bench near the restrooms and wait. I don’t know how long I wait. Maybe ten minutes. I look up at the clock, and I must have missed the Zero. I look around, and I can see no sign that buses even exist.
A few more minutes pass. Then, far down the road, I can hear the roar of a diesel engine. The speaker system in the station crackles to life the way it does when a bus comes in. “Route Zero,” the automated voice says, echoing off the concrete walls and the plastic chairs in the station. “Home,” it says. Outside, the bus glides past the windows, brakes hissing, squealing, and coming to rest at the departure area. Against the far wall, the vending machines light up the way they do when one of the late-night buses comes in, ready to dispense chips and soda. I stand up and go outside to where the bus sits rumbling and lowering to allow passengers off, but no one gets off. The speakers outside the building crackle again. “Route Zero,” the voice says, “Home.”
I could go home, I tell myself. I could go home now and no one would blame me. I approach the door and look inside. The driver smiles. “Going home?” he asks me.
I stand looking around the platform for another bus, or another person, or any sign that the world outside the bus station is real. I pull the ticket out and look at it.
“This is Route Zero,” says the driver. “You got the right bus?”
I look up at him again, and he chuckles. “I guess,” I tell him.
“Well get in,” he says.
I step up onto the rumbling bus and hand him the ticket, and then I go directly to the back, not looking at any of the other passengers. The driver shuts the door once I sit down in the back row.
Once we leave the station it’s just like any other bus route. We’re thundering over pot holes and bouncing over railroads. Other passengers occupy a few of the seats ahead of me like ghosts. There’s an old woman sitting on the other end of the back row leaning against her suitcase, and she’s staring out at the passing city. I watch her for a few seconds, and then she turns her head to look at me. “First time going home?” she asks me.
I nod and watch her open her purse. “The ticket came in the mail,” I tell her.
“They always do,” she says quietly, and then she smiles at me. She has a photo in her hand. “This here is my son,” she says, handing it over, and I take it. “That’s who I’m seeing.”
I stare at the young man in the photo, and it’s an old photo. “He sent you the ticket?”
“He sure did. He always does, you know.” I look over at her and she points to the photo in my hand. “One day, I’ll be on my last ride. I won’t ever have to come back.”
I look down at the man in the picture again. “Is he…?”
“Yes, honey, he’s dead. Been dead since the war.” She sighs and I hand her the picture. She looks out the window again at the passing neon signs and billboards and brick buildings full of sleeping people as the bus bounces over a rough part of the road. “You know, the day the man came to my door to tell me Johnny died was the worst day of my life.” She laughed a little. “Mostly,” she continued, “Mostly because I knew I was stuck with his father with no children to act as a buffer. He was the youngest; hadn’t even moved out or gone to college yet when he went off to war.”
She sighs and sits back against the seat.
“Mom sent me the ticket,” I tell her, and she nods.
“You and I get off at the same stop, then,” she says, and she winks at me. “End of the line.”
I sit quietly for a while, listening to the sound of the road and the bus and looking out the window on my side, looking out at a neighborhood I’d never seen. Route Zero, I thought to myself. I turn to look at the old woman again. “Do you suppose we’re dead?”
She laughs. “Oh hardly,” she says. She sighs. “Sometimes, though, you don’t have to come back. Some people go once and never have to return. Others, like me,” she sighed, “We still have business to attend to, so we have to come back.”
More silence, and then I ask, “What’s home?” In my mind, home is a house with a fence and a tire swing, and Mom baking or gardening or fixing the car. Home is a lonely dot on a map, hardly a town.
“You’ll know when you get there,” she tells me.
“But what does it mean when they tell us we’re going home?”
She smiles out her window. “It means home,” she says, mostly to herself.
After a while, the city is gone, replaced by complete darkness outside the fluorescent confines of the bus. I think of my mom. I think of how she was in those last days, in a bed. It’s a bed with buttons like a space ship, and she’s looking at me, the heart monitor beeping.
I must have fallen asleep, because the bus is slowing down. The driver’s eyeing me in the mirror as the bus comes to a stop. “Last stop before I head back,” he says.
I look outside, and it’s totally black.
“Home,” he says.
“Oh.” I struggle out of my seat. The other passengers are gone except for the old woman, w
ho is standing up and hauling her suitcase out of the seat beside her.
“Come on,” she says. “It’s our stop.” She looks over at me. “Oh honey, you didn’t even bring a change of clothes?”
“I guess not,” I tell her.
“Well,” she says to me, starting down the aisle with her suitcase banging against the seats. “Not that it matters much.”
The driver nods at me as I step down to the pavement. “Staying this time, Daphne?” he calls to the old woman.
“No, not this time,” she says. “It’s another round trip ticket.”
He waves to us. “See you on the way back,” he says, and then the doors close and the bus starts down the road again, taillights fading and eventually going out.
I look around, and all I can see is the moon high, high above, but it shines on nothing. I can’t see the ground.
“Alright,” Daphne says somewhere in the darkness. “Here’s where you and I go our separate ways.”
“You don’t mean I have to find my way alone in the dark?”
“That’s what I mean,” she says, and she laughs. Her voice is vanishing into the blackness. “Just start walking. You’ll know when you’re there.” Then, she’s gone.
I look behind me and I see a sign, the only thing the moonlight touches. It says HOME and points with an arrow in the direction the bus went, so I take a step. There’s ground, but the light from the moon doesn’t touch it. I start walking away from the sign. For a long time, it’s just me and the moon.
Maybe the world is gone, I think to myself. I listen, and I can’t hear anything. Maybe I’m deaf, now. Or maybe, just maybe, this whole thing is a trick. I wonder if the bus driver and Daphne and even Wade thought this all up, ending in darkness and the end of the world.
I don’t know where I am, I tell myself, and the words are huge in my mind. I’m lost, and I have no way of navigating. I think of Daphne’s words. Just start walking.
There’s no texture to the ground anymore. It’s just flat, like concrete. I’ve got my hands out in front of me, but there’s nothing to grab. Help me, I think; someone help me. Then, I think: I wish I had a map and a flashlight, but then I realize that a map of this place would be totally black. Home, I think again, and I start laughing. My voice is the only sound in the world, and it echoes like a sound stage. I look up at the moon, and I realize it’s not really the moon. Keep walking, I tell myself, and so I do.
Then, as I’m walking, the darkness lifts a little. The moon fades into the sky. I can see the horizon far away and the first blue and yellow colors of morning, and I walk a little faster. The world around me begins to change. There’s grass under my feet, now. I see leaves and trees, too, and fences. I look up, and I stumble and catch myself, gasping and staring ahead of me. The sun is coming up behind the silhouette of a house up ahead.
I know where I am, but I can’t even believe it.
The address on the mailbox at the gate matches the envelope I’ve got shoved in my jacket. There’s a path leading from where I’m standing all the way to the porch, and I start running again, my feet slapping the ground and my heartbeat thundering in my ears. The sun is brighter now, shining on all the windows, beaming down on Mom’s garden and the tree with the tire swing. Up on the porch, I look around, and it’s just like I remember it. Mom’s toolbox is in the corner against the brick wall of the house, and the porch swing hangs from the rafters of the porch roof. Potted plants line the steps. Mom, I think, and I peer inside the living room window, but I can’t see in.
I open the front door and go inside. I can smell food, but the house is empty. The furniture is all gone, packed away somewhere. I move through the rooms and into the kitchen, but there’s nothing, just the memory of meatloaf and red velvet cake and biscuits.
“Mom?” My voice echoes off the bare walls. I open the back door and look out onto the yard. In the distance, the sky getting dark again. It’s going to rain. “Mom?”
“I’m here.” I turn to see a figure in the doorway to the dining room, and I know it’s her when she moves, the first rays of sunlight illuminating her face.
“Mom,” I whisper. My heart is still pounding. My cells become electric.
She smiles and comes over to stand beside me in the doorway and we look out at the sky. The first drops of rain paint the patio a darker gray where they land. “Am I dead?” I ask her as rain falls at last, washing over the garden and the yard and into the creek behind the house.
She puts her arm around me, and she sighs. “No, Honey,” she says after a minute. “You’re not dead. You’re just home, that’s all.” She takes my hand, and we walk out into the rain.
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About the Author
Roman is not my legal name, but it's the name I've chosen to call myself because it sounds much more interesting than my real name. I was born nearly thirty years ago in the Midwestern frontier. I am an indie author, which makes me part of a very large group of authors who write independently of traditional publication. I have a lot of respect for authors who are able to publish traditionally, because it's a difficult business to break into that way. It takes a great deal of talent and determination.
That being said, I believe that I am also among some of the most beautiful and innovative minds of my generation just by being an author, and especially by doing so independently. If you are an indie author, kudos to you. You are doing something most people assume is impossible.
A special thank you to Cris Broyles. His guidance during the editing process helped me make the necessary changes to this text. Without him, you would not be reading The Last Bus Home at all. Thank you. Cris.
The Last Bus Home is dedicated to my mother, Janet Sue Arnold.
Also by Roman Theodore Brandt:
Drive
Ghosts
Michael
Midnight at the Bowling Alley
Country Roads are Why I Moved Away
Table of Contents
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