My sister’s the one that told me about the Kill Bus. It was a stupid name for what was going to be a silly ghost story, but Vicki was excited about it, and we’d both gotten old enough that the times that we actually talked without fighting were few and far between. When I first asked her where she was going that night…on a weekend when our parents were away and we were both supposed to be staying home…I was doing it just to fuck with her. I wasn’t going to tattle on her for going out with her boyfriend, and she knew that, but the power the secret gave me was too much to resist. Usually she’d have just threatened me or called me a booger and coughed up part of her weekend allowance, but this time she didn’t do either. Instead she looked around at me, her eyes bright and dancing, and said her and Tim were going with some of his friends “to find the Kill Bus”, and when I asked her what the hell that was, she actually grinned and started telling me.
There are a couple of different versions of the story. The one Tim heard was that the bus had originally been a real bus carrying a load of criminally insane killers from an old, closing institution to its new replacement. One of the inmates got free, caused the bus to crash and burn, killing everyone inside it. After that, a ghost bus came back, haunting lonely roads all over the country. Lame, right?
The other version, the version I found yesterday on the internet, was that it wasn’t a bus at all, at least not originally. It used to be a horse-drawn carriage, and before that, some kind of giant beast that roamed the lands and took people that crossed its path. That version made it sound less like a ghost and more like some kind of animal that just evolved over time to fit what people were used to and understood. Maybe so it could trick them easier.
Because that’s what it does. It drives around on quiet roads at night. Supposedly, you don’t see it if you’re in a car yourself. You have to be out on foot, like you’re hitchhiking I guess. Even then, your odds of seeing it are super slim. I don’t know if there’s only one of them or not, but its not like they’re everywhere, or even common, and its not like some ghost story where you have to go to a specific place and do a specific thing. The Kill Bus is always moving, going from place to place, and never staying still for long.
I frowned at her. “Then why are you guys going out to look for it? Going to stand out in the dark like dumbasses for a few hours? Good luck with that.”
Vicki’s expression darkened slightly, but she rolled her eyes and went on. “A, we’re going to be partying while we wait. B, Tim wants to do it. And C, Tim’s friend Jeff actually saw it a few nights ago.”
My eyes widened slightly. “You’re drinking tonight? I’m going to need an extra 20 for that.”
She glared at me. “Bullshit.”
I shook my head. “Bullshit nothing. They find out you not only snuck out but went out boozing with Tim and his sketch friends, I’ll catch a ton of shit for not ratting you out.” I smirked at her. “Got to make it worth my while.”
Grimacing, she nodded. “Fine, you little turd.” She pulled out her phone and checked herself in the camera. “But remember, if they call, I’m just asleep.” Vicki smiled slightly into the phone. “That’s Tim. He’s pulling up outside.”
She was turning to leave when I stopped her. “Vic, why do they call it the Kill Bus?”
Some of her prior excitement and good cheer was back when she looked at me and smiled. “I don’t know, Tumble. I guess because if it gets ya, it kills ya.” She stretched her face into a macabre scowl before laughing and heading for the door. “Back before midnight. Probably.”
But she wasn’t. She didn’t come home by midnight, or one or two, and when I woke up the next morning, she still wasn’t home. I tried her cell phone, but there was no answer. I weighed calling our parents, but decided I’d give her til noon. If she didn’t show up by then, I’d have to tell, rat or no rat.
It was about 11:30 when I heard the door open and Vicki walked in.
I knew something wasn’t right immediately. My first thought was that she had been in an accident or a fight. Her clothes were torn and dirty, and she had a blank look on her face that reminded me of videos I’d seen of people that were in shock. I asked her if she was okay, but she ignored me, moving slowly, almost haltingly, over to Mom’s recliner and sitting down.
“Vic, what the hell? Are you sick or something?”
She blinked at that and looked over in my direction. The lack of recognition scared me worse than the dirt on her jeans or the blood on her elbow. “Vicki? I…I’m calling 911. You need a doctor or something.” I started to get up from the sofa when she raised her hand.
“No…Don’t do that. I don’t need help.” Her voice was dry and hoarse-sounding—so raw that it hurt to hear it. She was at least meeting my eyes now.
I stared at her. “You look like you do. Um…do you know who I am?”
She smiled a little. “Of course. You’re Tumble.”
I smiled back, slightly relieved. My name is Terry, but since I was little, Vicki (and sometimes our parents) would call me Terry Tumbleweed, or Tumble for short. It was apparently from when I was a toddler. I would always follow my big sister around, and somehow they started saying I just went wherever she went, like a little tumbleweed. Never really made sense to me, but it stuck, and this was one time when I was glad it had. If she remembered that, she remembered me, and maybe that meant she wasn’t that hurt after all.
I still got up from the sofa and moved over toward her though. Crouching down beside her, I gently put my hand on her arm. “What happened to you? Do you remember?”
I felt her stiffen under my fingers as her bottom lip began to tremble. “I…yeah, I think so.”
My stomach was turning to ice now. This was something bad. It had to be for her to be acting like this. A new thought crept into my mind as the cold in my belly slid up to my chest. “Did someone hurt you? Like did someone do something to you?”
When she looked at me, a tear slid down her left cheek. I dreaded what she was about to say. She was going to confirm it, and who the fuck hurt my…Was it Tim? Was it fucking Tim or one of his stupid buddies? I’d fucking…
“No…Not like how you mean.”
I sucked in a relieved breath. “Oh. Well shit. What then? Can you tell me?” When she just sat silently staring at me, softly crying, for another few moments, I added, “You were going out to find the Kill Bus, remember?”
Another shudder from her and then a small nod.
“Oh yeah. We found it.”
I stared at her, unable to hide my confusion and disbelief. “You found it? You found the ghost bus?”
She looked away, her cheek jumping slightly as she shook her head. “No, not a ghost. It’s very real. We went out…Tim took us all out to the backroads. Me, Jeff and Jeff’s sister Bethany. She’s home from college right now. I don’t know exactly where…but we parked and got out. W-we drank a little, danced to the radio, but nothing happened. No bus or anything. I think Jeff and Beth wanted to go back into town, but Tim was mad. He wanted to find the thing.
“So…so we all split up. The plan was that he was going to drop us all off, about a mile apart. We’d wait outside for like thirty minutes and then he’d come pick us all back up. I didn’t like that, and neither did they, but Tim was insistent, so we g-gave in. Oh God.” Vicki wiped her nose with the back of her hand. She was shaking more now, but her voice grew stronger as she sank into the rhythm of telling me what happened. “He dropped me off last. Said he was going to park and wait alone up the road a ways. Gave me his flashlight, but it didn’t help much. It was still cold and dark and spooky being out on that road all alone. I was only out there a few minutes when I saw headlights coming toward me. I thought it was Tim. That he’d circled back around. But it wasn’t. It was the Bus.”
When I started school, when you were still a baby, I went to this preschool, right? I don’t remember what it was called, but it had this cartoon raccoon on the side of the van that picked the kids up. It…It wasn’t a good place. The people that ran it were mean to the kids. Scary mean. I got so I was terrified whenever I saw that van pull up, saw that grinning raccoon staring out at me. I was little, so I don’t remember the name, but I always remembered that raccoon.
The Kill Bus was like one of those old school buses we used to have with the flat front. Instead of yellow paint, it was a dead, pale gray, and instead of words saying what school it belonged to, it just had that fucking raccoon painted on the side of it, staring out at me and laughing. I think a part of me knew that wasn’t possible. That none of it was right. That I needed to be running away, not walking closer when the door squealed open.
But that part of me seemed very quiet and far away. I thought I could hear music coming from inside that bus, but it was so faint I wanted to get closer to hear it better. I reached the doorway—the inside was dimly lit, and from there I could see the four steps up and the leather seat behind the big steering wheel. Everything was covered in moisture, like steam or sweat or dew, and I found myself wondering where the driver had gone. Despite the strangeness of it all, I was still about to step up into the bus—my hand was already grabbing the edge of the door—but that’s when I realized what I was feeling. Not painted metal, rubber or chrome. But something indefinably different. Hard, but not unyielding. Warm and almost…alive.
I pulled back as I looked over at the outer wall of the Bus where my hand had been. Up close I could see it wasn’t painted metal at all. It was…It was scales. Scales the color of a storm cloud that seemed to drink in the light from my flashlight without any real reflection at all. I had the funny and scary idea that I was standing next to a dragon, and then the thought fled as I heard someone speaking to me.
“Getting on, Miss?”
Sucking in a breath, I turned to look at the bespectacled man leaning out to look at me from around the corner of the bus’s center aisle. He was wearing a uniform, which I guess made him the bus driver, and he was smiling at me, his eyes friendly and curious behind his thick, owl-like glasses. “I need to be moving on soon, but I’m happy to let you on if you like.”
Again, that small voice screamed at me to stop, but it seemed tiny and silly now. This was just a bus…a magical bus, maybe…but still just a nice bus with a nice man. And if it was a magical bus, wasn’t that all the more reason to go on and see it? Find out where that music was coming from? When would I ever get another chance like this? Telling it now, I see how insane that all is, but with him smiling at me and that music playing…it made all the sense in the world.
So I stepped onto the bus and the door slid closed behind me.
It was as I climbed the last of the steps to the floor that I realized how bad I’d messed up. I could see the rest of the man now. He…he wasn’t a man at all. He had no legs…his lower half just trailed away from his shirt and vest…the part that had been visible before I got on…and turned into a thick, ropy cord of red meat that writhed back fifteen feet or so before heading down. That first fifteen feet ran between things that, at first glance, looked like bus seats—old fashioned ones of vinyl and steel. But when you really looked at them, you saw maybe they weren’t that at all. Maybe the metal was the ashy bones of something’s teeth, and the vinyl was just skin that had been stretched tight or caught there from some prior meal. I know that sounds strange, but it all makes sense when you’re there.
Because you’re not in a bus, you see. You’re in the mouth of whatever the Kill Bus really is. Past those first few seats that weren’t seats, the man that wasn’t a man, everything trailed downward, farther down than the bus or the ground should have allowed, down a longer mouth filled with hooked teeth and whipping tongues that became a throat filled with jagged edges and green, flittering lights as it went on and on down into the dark.
I met the eyes of the driver and his smile wasn’t friendly anymore. And when he shot out a hand and grabbed me, I screamed in pain and fear, not just from how much his grip burned and ached, but because he was pulling me. Pulling me down into the belly of that thing.
Vicki’s eyes were free-flowing with tears now, and she couldn’t look at me as she went on. “I-I think it’s like a shark. Like, you can see the fin right? Except at a distance, maybe it blends in with the water or it looks like a wave. And even when you get close enough to see, you aren’t seeing the whole thing. You aren’t seeing the monster underneath.” She shuddered. “I-I think it ate me. I think it pokes it mouth into our world and finds people alone and it eats them, and I think that’s what it did to me.” Puffing out a long breath, she wiped at her eyes. “I know how that all sounds. And I don’t remember anything after that thing put its hands on me, not really. Just like a memory of a dream, you know? But I think it pulled me down into its belly, and its belly was filled with music that wasn’t music at all. It was screams. And it ate me right up, melted me down to nothing.” She did turn to me now, her eyes wide and pleading. “But that can’t be right, can it? Because I’m right here.” Glancing around, she grabbed my arm and gave it a squeeze. “Aren’t I?”
I tried to comfort her as best I could, but that just looked like me reassuring her that yes, she was herself and yes, she was home. After a few minutes, she said she was very tired and wanted to go sleep awhile. I thought about trying to push the issue, to find out something from her that actually made sense, ask her if any of the others had seen anything, or how she’d even gotten home…but I didn’t have the stomach for it. She was too upset. And maybe after she woke up she’d be able to see things more clearly.
She slept the rest of the afternoon, and by that evening I was falling asleep myself. Heading to my room, I set the alarm for eight o’clock. A couple hours for a nap and then I’d wake Vicki up and figure out what to do next.
I had strange dreams, and when I woke up, it was from a nightmare where a giant angler fish was chasing me through some endless, murky deep. Everything was quiet, and there were still twelve minutes until my alarm was set to go off. I thought about going back to sleep, but a distant squeaking noise caught my attention. A squeak and then a bang. Squeak and bang. The image of the kitchen screen door blowing in the wind came to my mind, though it was strange I’d hear it from so far away.
Still groggy, I got up and headed for the kitchen. I saw why I’d heard the noise so clearly. The door leading to the outside was wide open, making the sound of the gently banging screen door carry throughout the house. Frowning, I headed to the door and started to shut it when I realized our parents’ car was outside. They’d made it home. I almost turned around to go find them, already starting to form some version of what I could tell them about what Vicki had told me. Some version that wouldn’t freak them out while still letting them know that something was very, very wrong.
But…what was that next to the car?
Turning on the outside light, the dark streaks leading away from the concrete and into the grass jumped into color, dark red smeared into a puddle before heading off in a trail. Was that blood? It was near the passenger side door, and a few feet farther back, there was another, larger pool and smear that also led off across the grass. Heart thudding, I pictured someone attacking my mother as she got out of the car. Attacking her and then my father as he came around to try and help. Hurting them badly and then dragging them off to…where?
My eyes followed the invisible trajectory of the blood trails out into the dark, and far away, down the road and partially obscured by trees, I could make out red taillights and a hulking black shape out there in the night. It looked like a large bus.
“Hi Tumble.”
I turned as the knife plunged toward me, and that movement made the blade go into my shoulder instead of the side of my neck. Vicki was already trying to pull it free as I let out a squeal of pain, but it took her two tugs, which gave me enough time to get my hands up and shove her away even as I stumbled backwards toward the door.
I slammed it shut a moment before she hit the other side—the initial body blow followed by several scraping hits as she raked the knife across the wood. “Let me in, Tumble. Let me take you to Mom and Dad. Let me take you all for a ride.”
“N-No. You’re crazy. Stay away!”
She snickered on the other side of the door. “You sound scared, Tumble. No need to be scared. Just let me show it to you. There’s so much of it and you need to see it. It’s really something.”
Crying, I beat my fist against the door in a mixture of anger and fear and despair. “No! Just go away! Just go!”
“I can’t just leave my baby br…”
A shrill sound pierced the night. I thought it might be a bird’s cry at first—maybe the screech of an owl, though I’d never heard one to compare. When it blew again, I realized I was wrong. It was the bus blowing its horn.
“Sorry, Tumble. I guess I have to go for now.” I felt a shudder of relief, though I knew I couldn’t trust anything she said. She might go and try to get in another way. I let out a scream as she slammed against the door again. “But don’t worry. I’ll come back for you someday. Wherever you go, I’ll always find my little tumbleweed.”
I got the cordless phone and locked myself in the bathroom. She never tried to get in, and when the cops arrived, they didn’t find any sign of her. I was questioned constantly for the next few days—our parents were gone, and the blood definitely pointed to something happening to them. That, combined with my sister and her friends having disappeared and my crazy story, made them wonder if I hadn’t just gone on some kind of demented killing spree.
But that’s when they started getting reports from other places. Vicki’s boyfriend Tim had a best friend that lived in Louisiana. He’d gone missing three days after I’d called the police. And Jeff and Bethany’s mother? They tracked her down where she was stationed overseas. Germany, I think. Except when they found where she was supposed to be, she wasn’t there.
In all of the years since, I’ve never gotten any answers. No one has ever been found, and I’m no closer to knowing what really took my family now than I was the night it all happened. For a long time that bothered me, but eventually I began to see it as a blessing. A way of…if not forgetting all the fear and pain…at least moving past it. And for the last few years, I've felt less haunted by it.
But the past few nights, I keep waking up, not in bed, but outside. I knew right away something was wrong—I’ve never sleptwalked, and I’ve lived my life very carefully. I never go out alone after dark and keep my doors double-locked at night. All the windows are nailed shut and I even put a chair against the knob of my bedroom door. The idea that I would navigate all that in my sleep to go stand out barefoot in the cold? It seems unlikely, but that just makes it more troubling.
What’s worse is that last night, as I woke up in freezing, ankle-deep ditch water just five feet from the road, I thought I could hear something in the distance. Faint and fragile on the chilly air, I could still almost make out parts of a song. And in spite of everything, a part of me wanted to hear more.
I loved my family, especially Vicki. And I’m sorry for what happened to them. I miss them and mourn them every day. But the thing that keeps me awake now isn’t my guilt or my grief. It isn’t even my fear that my sister is finally making good on her promise to find me again.
It’s the whisper in my heart that says when the Kill Bus finally comes around again, I’ll be ready. When the music plays, I’ll come running. And when Vicki reaches out her hand and asks me if I want to come aboard?
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