WARNING 18+ FOR GRAPHIC DESCRIPTIONS OF VIOLENCE & GORE
She was the last to leave the firm that night, per usual. If asked, she couldn’t quiet put her finger on the last time she ate dinner with her son. Maybe three months prior. She had her reservations leaving her fourteen year old alone for such lengths of time, but he got good grades, was always home at the same time as her, and was honestly blossoming into a great cook. He never complained either, offering relief for her slight guilt. He’s better than me at my age, she once thought. Maybe even better than me now. From the elevator to the glass doors between the lobby and the lot, she kept her focus forward. Only once had she made eye contact with the security guard. The man was striking and even smiled at her, yet she refused herself the temptation. She couldn’t even find the time for dinner with her son.
Every night the lawyer took the local bus. It was a straight shoot from the stairs of the firm’s building to her bus stop, depending on the many varieties of lively the path could become certain nights of the week. It was Friday night, and the entire block lay desolate. Usually the weekend was when she apologized for bumping into a waiter serving diners eating outdoors or ignored the dogs begging for affection from a stranger. Tonight, not even the moon was out. A sheer, grey fog wained over her path. The nearest streetlight was barley peaking through. The click of her heels bounced off the empty street and between the empty buildings.
As she passed under the first circle of light, looking back and forth at nothing besides thick darkness, her mind wandered into the minefield of her latest case. Wayland Potter. Fifty-nine years old. Arrested on three counts of statitory rape, four counts of first degree murder, tampering with evidence, and the list goes on and on. The victims were found in his crawlspace, alongside the body of his wife- missing parts. Some rotted worse than others. With the evidence collected, it was hard to believe the wife had no idea about her husbands afflictions. The lawyer thought to herself, maybe there’s an angle there.
She stepped off the curb, across the white gapped lines, and onto the next block. Her heals echoed down the empty road she passed. She started thinking about how her son’s night might be playing out. What he might’ve made for dinner, if he skipped brushing his teeth, the chain on the door hanging vertically- unlatched. Benny Clark. Henry Baker. Donovon Moone. Their eyes, some of their eyes, penetrating the shallow dirt piled above them, looking up at her from under Wayland’s crawlspace. Their faces becoming that of her sons. The second circle of light engulfed her, then disappeared into the fog behind her.
Attorney was always the dream, defense was something she tacked on later. The cases she got stuck with weren’t even a foresight. At least, not at the beginning. She took on much lighter cases from time-to-time, only she found that defending the obviously guilty was her forte after her big break with the Litski case.
The lawyer came under the third streetlight- the last one before her stop- except now she registered another set of heels clicking behind hers. Her top teeth heavily clenched to the bottom row as if losing their grasp and convinced herself to pear over her shoulder. She had assumed herself alone. From under the fog, she could make out the glossiness of someone’s eyes growing closer. The streetlight soon after exposed a lanky man in a brown dusty vest and matching corduroy dress pants. His legs swung forward, his stride only ending once the tips of his shoes touched the light, a dull reflection at their tips. His face stayed in the fog.
"Can I help you?" the lawyer inquired.
"Can you point me in the right direction?" the man replied with a thick rasp. As he spoke, the smell of weeks-old cigarette buds secreted from his direction, enveloped in a hot breath.
"Maybe," she said, surveying what she could see of his person. "But did you really need to-"
He cut her off, repeating his question. He sounded displeased in repeating himself.
"Where are you looking for?"
"Nowhere."
She rolled her eyes, "Nowhere?"
“NOWHERE AT ALL”
The lawyer scoffed and turned back toward her path, “I don’t have time for this, I have a bus to ca-”
The bus sat illuminated under the fourth streetlight. She felt much further away moments ago. Entertaining the man not a moment more, she rushed towards the bus, refusing herself a look back. I couldn’t even make out his face, she assessed among many other scattered thoughts. Only her heals clicked against the pavement now, running so fast she tripped on herself at the bus doors. Waiting for them to open, she kept her attention back down toward the path to her firm. Any light further than the closest three streetlights ceased to exist. The man was either gone or hiding. The bus doors still didn’t open. The lawyer banged on the plaxiglass as she held her sights on the streetlights, hoping that if he was still there, he might accidentally reveal himself beneath one. Finally, the driver caved and the lawyer hurried up the stairs.
“Hey Al-” she began until she met the unblinking stare of a different driver than she expected.
Usually the weekends were when she would sit in the front seat and chat with the driver Albert about his granddaughters. She had been wondering how Alison’s soccer tryouts had gone but being stared down by a complete stranger, she understood she wouldn’t learn the answer that night.
“Hi,” she restarted. “Is Albert sick?”
She hoped the collective of bus drivers all knew each other, why each other was where they were, and how each other was doing. The same blank stare remained. The gray man seemed almost frozen, his mustache lying still above his lips, his nostrils never flaring, and his gut never rising once for breath.
She decided to smile and continue to her weekend spot. Damningly, it was the seat behind the new driver. Turning towards the aisle, she found a woman lying in the seat and a lot more unfamiliar faces on the bus than she expected. Only moments ago the night was devoid of life. With haste, she ducked her head and made way for the rear of the bus, only slowing down at what looked like a sheet flowing from one seat to the next. The lawyer stepped across it and, after a few wide steps, isolated herself to the back. It was finally sinking in how strangely the night was playing out. As unnoticibly as possible, she searched in her bag for her earbuds. After getting them in and her playlist on, she couldn’t stop herself from studying the backs of the other passengers’ heads.
The one before her to the right wore pearls and all black, while the one in front of her to the left wore their hair slicked back and a white dress shirt. There was a mother and her child up in the front. The man with the sheet flooding from his seat laid his discoloring bald head upon the window. In one seat, a pair non-verbally declined to touch shoulders with one another. She skimmed past a few others in the front, noticing every passenger before her stared forward, biting each and every one of their tongues.
Even though the town was typically livelier on the weekends, the lawyer was fortunate to find that left more space on the bus- typically. If there ever were weekend passengers, they’d cling to the backseat before she could. Because it was the weekend, it would usually be groups so loud, Albert would turn the radio off just to hold his and her conversation. The time read 10:43 and she determined it to be too late to give this peculiar night any more of her attention. She’d be home in about ten minutes, see her son is safe, run a hot bath for herself, and wake up tomorrow, well rested, ready to take her routine from the top.
The music distracted her for a song or two before her eyes left the rain dripping down the back window and wandered around the bus. She didn’t think that she’d seen the other passenger’s as much as flinch, not even in her peripherals. No answer could come to mind as to why there was a sheet running between two of the seats. The bus’s walls and ceiling were dirtier than what was custom and rust seemed to saturate a bulk of the aisle.
She knew it was the same bus because sometimes on the weeknights when she would sit in the back, her gaze would stumble across a sticker of a grunge band’s smiley face emblem stuck to the back of the third row seat. It was still there, however, the sticker seemed withered. Almost as if a few years back someone had tried to rip it off, failing and leaving it fading into the leather.
She looked up to the light up sign near the driver’s seat, usually displaying what stop they’d stop at next. Instead, purple cubic dots spread down the screen, empty of words, blinking to the right in single file. Her ribs swiftly condensed her organs together and she bit into her lower lip, taking and holding a breath. The bus hasn’t stopped, she told herself, unsure whether it was a question or an answer. About eight minutes had passed and this was a local bus for a town no bigger than thirteen miles. She took out her earbuds and fixated on the passenger wearing pearls.
“Ma’am?” the lawyer murmured, her voice slightly cracking.
Receiving no reaction, she persisted.
“Excuse me? With the pearls?”
The woman’s shoulders slightly rose and her muscles clenched. Confused, the lawyer’s hand staggered reaching for the woman’s shoulder.
“Ma’am, are you okay?”
The tip of her finger wained in the air, white noise ringing throughout the bus, when finally it touched the black sleeve of the woman’s dress. The woman’s neck crackled as her head spun towards the lawyer whose hand shot back to her side. Fragments of her mouth were apparent inside the concaved bits of ripped and torn skin which covered her face. Wet blood stuck to it and at the center, small bits of some broken teeth- some holding on by a thread- emerged through red mushed meat and skin pulling inwards, folding above the only visible eye left. The woman let out a small gurgling grown from somewhere in her bludgeoned face.
“Ma’am?” the lawyer whimpered as she pulled herself back into her seat. The woman’s attention stayed locked on the lawyer and still, her body faced forward, hands placed neatly on her lap. Unable to remove her eyes from the woman’s face, the lawyer extended her hand to the other passenger in front of her.
Her hand squeezed their shoulder and she begged them to help the woman, beginning to shake the person. When they didn’t respond, she rotated to face them, stopping her shaking and noticing their head beginning to tip back and forth before it hung back. All the way back. Her concentration left the bludgeoned woman’s aid and she realized the person wasn’t tipping their head back, rather their neck was peeling off from under the shirts neckline. Crimson leaked onto the white shirt the passenger wore, seeping to their chest. Strings of flesh tore and held onto the base of the person’s head as their head jerked back, gravity only weighing harder on it. She watched breathless as the head pulled further from the person’s body. The final string connecting the head snapped, sending the head into the petrified lawyer’s seat, blood splattering onto her hand and onto her work attire. More leaked from where the head had been severed and pooled on the bus floor beneath it, cascading off the side of the leather like the rain drops down the back window.
The lawyer’s jaw began to quiver and her face felt tighter as her vision blurred with tears, washing the detached head out of her sights. It felt like a hook latched to her chest and pulled her up. She held onto the seats for balance as she rushed to the front, perfectly stepping over the white sheet. The lawyer barley made it to the end of the aisle before bile rushed up her throat and filled her mouth, hot and tasting of a vegetable medley. It splattered at her feet, right next to the bus driver and she couldn’t stop it for a moment. When it subsided, she wiped her mouth and couldn’t bring herself to move. Disassociating from the situation at hand, the lawyer scrutinized the droplets of spit up scattered across the shoes she bought herself two weeks ago as an expensive reward for winning the Cameron Marshall case.
She counted to four internally, took a deep breath, and turned towards the passengers. They each looked directly at her - those that could. From the lady in pearls with the bludgeoned face to the one lying in the lawyer’s usual weekend seat, guts spilling from her stomach to the floor. Every one of them was dead or inches from it. She screeched again, so forcefully a pulsing burn came with it up her throat although it could’ve been a residual burn from the stomach acid. Tearing her burrowed nails from the leather bus seats, the lawyer went for the bus door handle, clenched her fist together and pulled. The handle wouldn’t move with her.
“That won’t work,” the gravelly voice of the bus driver groaned from behind her.
He was so close to her that she felt the smack of his lips, the click of his tongue, and the breeze of his cold breath on her ear. She stumbled to the bus doors and flattened herself against them to put as much distance between them as she could. Closing her eyes, she imagined she could be even flatter, maybe even thin enough to slip through the closed doors.
“Please don’t kill me,” she begged. “I have a son. He’s waiting for me. Please, I need-”
“You think I’m the one killing?” the driver cut her off, his tone never rising nor falling.
She opened her eyes and he continued, “You think I did this. Look.”
“Then who-”
“Look,” he repeated, gesturing towards the passengers.
The lawyer stared at the bus driver, finally breathing steadily again. Tears had stopped streaming down her face, leaving it hot and flushed. She noticed behind him, trees continued to pass meanwhile his gray hands sat at his lap, the wheel untouched. Disregarding her disbelief, she hoisted herself up the bus steps by the railing and swallowed the spit in her mouth.
Leisurely, the lawyer dragged her focus to the boy in the front seat. To the boys dirt drenched shoes and up his legs, noticing a drop of blood amongst the patches of dirt. Then another. To his shorts, brown and encrusted with dry mud splotches. Then a cluster of blood droplets. To the t-shirt he wore, with white and blue stripes and dried blood drenching it like a bib. She forced herself to continue to his jaw, then his lips, then his hooded brown eye. She forced herself to look away, back at the floor. Back at the vomit sprinkled across her new shoes. It didn’t help, she saw his eye.
“Benny Clarke?” her head shot back up.
“Benny Clarke!”
Then quickly she looked to who held a firm grasp on the boys arm. Cynthia Clarke, the boys mother, whose throat was slashed and shirt drenched similarly to her son’s. More blood spat from her neck and pooled in her lap, further staining the orange, floral nightie she dawned. Prior to her sons murder, Cynthia joined a local group for mother’s rallying that the police do better in the search for the already two missing boys. After one of the mothers and her sons had a strange interaction with Wayland Potter at the supermarket, the group put him on high alert and even tried to influence the police into investigating the man further. They refused to take the “hysterical” mothers seriously and not long after, her son Benjamin went missing. Cynthia had taken her own life before the case was anywhere near the lawyers desk.
In the seat across from them, a woman laid out with her torso sliced open and still intact intestines piling onto the dirt flaked floor beside her. The woman, dazed, was still very aware of the lawyer.
“Lydia Marshall,” the lawyer mumbled, bewildered.
She remembered Lydia in this position, in this nightgown and robe, with the same wounds to her abdomen, lying out on her husband’s couch. Crime scene photos sprawled across her desk from following the maid finding Lydia and fingers quickly pointing at the husband. They’d been married a year and were expecting their first born, when Cameron Marshall, a celebrated romance author, seemingly snapped. Underwear found in Cameron’s car suggested that he had been having an affair. DNA confirmed the underwear belonged to one of Lydia’s close friends, whose finger prints were already in the system. There were no witnesses to his alibi of “running errands” either. Eventually, enough evidence, including the murder weapon being found in his house, was reason enough for police to arrest him. The lawyer was lucky most evidence besides the murder weapon was heavily reliant on the theory that Cameron had killed Lydia to cut his loose ends and run off with his lover. The lawyer lead with the fact that no finger prints were found on the weapon and that since the murder took place inside the house, it would be less risky for the assailant to leave the weapon at the scene of the crime than take it.
She found it difficult to prove Cameron’s whereabouts the day of the murder and her other alternative ideas as to what happened were falling short, so the lawyer exploited the idea that there was more potential for the lover to have committed the act. She used her previous statements to build into the idea that there was no evidence of a break in because the killer was someone who could come and go as they please- someone Lydia might even let into the house. Luckily, the lover had also left state during the time of the trial. The lawyer made sure Cameron agreed to a phone search and messages were retrieved between him and his lover in which said lover begged multiple times for a contemplative Cameron to leave his wife. He reminded her of the pregnancy. It seemed a risky move, given some of things Cameron said on the stand, yet the lawyer somehow convinced the jury of his innocence.
She remembers him saying, “That was my child in there.”
Lydia groaned, slowly tracing her fingers around the ends of inflamed flesh near her wound, condemning the lawyer back to the present. The lawyer brought her hand to her mouth, hoping she didn’t get sick again. She couldn’t stand to look at the woman any longer and instead looked to the couple sharing a seat, two rows back. She pretended Lydia wasn’t right beside her, holding her bloodied hands out for help as far as she could.
Out of the pair, one carried two gunshot wounds to the neck while the other had one at the center of their temple. Instantly, the lawyer recognized who they were.
“Louise Archibald and Teddy Moose.”
Louise was twenty four, working towards her masters in child psychology. Teddy was 26 and had spent the past seven years working towards his own landscaping company. A waitress on her way home for the night was fiddling with her keychain at her car door when she heard two gun shots go off. The waitress dropped her keys and left them, running back inside the diner she worked at to call for help. From inside, her and the other workers, who were even brought in to testify, heard the third and final one. For some time, police speculated multiple suspects until one piece of evidence helped them to connect the couple’s attack to a string of murders that had occured in neighboring states over the past year. This was the case that finally found the infamous Clark Woodsy sitting in jail, for six first-degree murder charges, one attempted, one kidnapping and a few other minor charges. Luckily, she only had to worry about getting him off for Louise and Teddy’s murder. She already had the fact that their’s was the only one to take place in state on her side, while two murders took place in Oregon and three in Nevada.
When each restaurant worker came to the stand the lawyer led with the question, “Is the man that shot off the gun in this room today?”
The reason she brought four of the seven workers in as witnesses was because when they locked the doors to the restaurant, they all told the police a man came up to the door, kept punching and banging into it, screaming for them to come outside only minutes after the gun shots had gone off. Each worker had a different answer, none of them being a yes. The moment she believes won her the case was when she read one of their testimonies, to police, aloud to the jury.
“He was wearing a hat but it seemed like he was bald and had a tattoo peaking out from under his shirt on the right side of his neck. The mirror windows on the door are blurry so thats the best glimpse I got.”
Clark in fact had no tattoo on his neck.
“What a distinct feature to be so sure of looking through a blurry window.”
The prosecutor didn’t even dare bring in the waitress who dropped her keys to testify as she told law enforcement she ran and didn’t even think to look back. The lawyer made a quick point to bring that up in court, without Teddy and Louise present.
Sitting in front of her, the couple didn’t hold each other, they didn’t blink, their mouths didn’t hang open and their chests didn’t rise, they merely stared at her, blood leaking from their wounds.
Her eyes sank, noticing the sheet at the bottom of the pairs seat leading to the seat across the aisle. The lawyer now ascertained that the sheet was tied around the bald man’s neck. That’s why he lie, limp against the window- drool with disintegrating mixtures of blood within it clasping to the glass and connecting to his mouth. When he noticed she was looking at him, the only thing he could do was bang his head against the glass, sparingly, as if he was letting all his weight crash into it. Vernon Pierce.
He frequented the local gay bar, Infinity, with his friends. His prescence was customary at the bar and when police were investigating the incident almost every staff member knew the man by name. The accused was a married ex-marine man, Robert Brunes, who was left with a partially paralyzed hand after that night outside of Infinity. The lawyer was defending for Robert. Vernon was pressing charges against him for sexual harassment and assault.
Robert claimed he had “only stepped outside for a smoke”.
“It was the closest bar to my house.”
Once the prosecutor noted how Robert hadn’t pressed charges within the three months since the night at Infinity, she decided that her best bet was focusing on Vernon’s toxicology report after he was detained. Continuously, she sprinkled in how his had an unreliable account of the evening. Vernon’s blood alcohol level of 0.22% is what won the lawyer the case. Four months after the case, Vernon was found by his roommate, having taken his life in their apartment three days earlier. Something again didn’t sit right within Vernon’s close circle and although an investigation was prompted, it seemed police were putting in little effort, taking less than a week to close the case. One of the woman in the building described seeing a man very similar to Robert’s description on the day of Vernon’s death going up the main staircase. Currently, that lead lay dead in the mud.
Vernon slammed his head against the window, the hardest he had so far. The next time he raised his head, little droplets of blood were revealed to be sticking to the glass. With what energy he had, he went to do it again and the lawyer had to look away. She restrained herself, staring head on at the person in the back- headless.
Sam Millson and Tommy Gulf had attended a high school party and Tommy was the designated driver, only Sam didn't survive the drive home. Tommy, at a four way stop, found his car wedged beneath the underbelly of a cargo truck. He had ducked in time. Sam was partially decapitated. Sam's life didn't end until the police had to remove him from between the truck's back end and the car's front. Tommy stated on the stand that he could still remember Sam blinking after the fact.
The lawyer was representing the driver of the cargo truck, Morris Coggins, who failed his breathlizer test. However, the lawyer believed that just this once she might be defending an honest man.
“Why was there no toxicology report done on Tommy?” the lawyer canvassed.
Tommy happened to be the son of the county Sheriff. She demanded the jury rationalize that one driver was a teenage boy driving home from a party with no toxicology report in existence. The other one was a, on the clock, bus driver whose breathalyzer came out to 06%. Barely below the BAC limit. On the stand, a police officer swore on his children that he completed the proper procedures, including a breathalyzer test, on Tommy.
“Then where is it Officer Whitman?”
Morris walked. She felt there was drapes still over everything, as now no one would press charges against Tommy. No one would be held accountable for Sam’s death.
Months later, randomly Morris showed up at the lawyers office. Over the course of the trial the man was heart broken, terrified of what was happening to his little girl without him. He was a single parent, like the lawyer. He looked more gray than ever at this point, sitting across from her, unshaven and sloppily dressed.
“I lost my daughter anyway,” Morris said, breaking the silence that had set in after the initial hellos and how are you’s had passed minutes earlier.
“In reality, that teenage boy was drunk. And in reality, I had finished off a… few fireball shooters minutes before leaving that gas station.”
The lawyer’s heart cringed.
Morris sobbed in front of her for an infinite three minutes, one of which the lawyer contemplated letting it all out with him. She forced herself to keep composure and the man eventually fled from her firm, apologizing frantically on his way out. Never to return. She blamed it on that kid, not Morris. Clearly, Tommy’s car was wedged beneath the truck. It was a foolish case to bring to light without the proper evidence, even with a suspicious, albeit true narrative. Was Sam destined to die that night? she reflected.
Lastly, the lawyer looked to the woman in the black formal dress and pearls. Her funeral clothes. While two arrests had been made for the murder of Wendy Cavanaugh, the lawyer was only defending Jobe Nicholls. At the time, the lawyer considered Jobe to be the worst person she had ever worked for. Nowadays, this kind of label seemed vague and unattainable to her, although in those early attorney years, she’d never come across such a case.
Wendy met Phil on a dating app. She had no clue what him and his room-mate were planning for her. Every inch of the case had been pre-meditated. The lawyer couldn’t even think of what they’d done to the woman, who would be the same age as her today. The images of Phil and Jobe’s crimes only flashed past one another in her imagination. Days of Wendy’s life bending together, deteriorating into disassociation, starvation, and filth.
Alas, she remembers the things she said during trial.
“Jobe had no clue Phil was planning to kidnap the girl.”
“Jobe didn’t lay a hand on her unless Phil held a gun to his head.”
“None of Mr. Nicholl’s DNA was found anywhere near the area where Wendy was, and basically nowhere in this case besides-”
Of course in Phil’s trial, his team would try the same tactic. It didn’t get quiet as far. Jobe was acquitted of all but tampering with the her remains, and for the first time, the lawyer had done something she imagined possible.
Her foot tapped into the sheet, as she was still standing near Vernon. She was grateful to hear he’d stopped banging his head against the window. In her peripheral, she saw his entire body had shifted towards her. His neck was extended out, straining the already blood clotted veins pursing out of his flesh, and his eyes were wide and bloodshot. The man’s jaw slacked open and out flooded a soft wheezing breath.
Without giving everyone on the bus her full attention, she cautiously intended to face herself toward the front of the bus.
“Look what you did Leslie,” a voice from the front exclaimed. Cynthia Clarke’s words were gargled in blood.
The lawyer shook her head back and forth, rejecting the idea that she had anything to do with this.
“Look what you did Leslie,” Vernon said from beside her. His voice resembled a whistle and hardly any sound he made was viable.
“Look what you did Leslie,” a voice called from near Sam’s headless body, yet she didn’t see anyone.
Then she remembered their head she left on her seat, face down in a pool of their own blood.
She closed her eyes to collect herself, only for a second, and when she opened them, everyone was now standing. Even Lydia, her guts all sliding out of her at once, holding onto her by threads. The lights began to buzz lowly in the background as they short circuited every other second.
“Look at what you did,” they all repeated, some with blood spewing out alongside words. Some, like Wendy, were completely unintelligible. Sam’s head wailed from within their puddle.
They all mimicked each other, even when she refused to open her eyes. The bus swayed minorly and even then she didn’t budge. She could hear them all shuffling toward her, begging herself to open her eyes. She kept them closed as she felt them enter her space, heavily breathing on her and repeating their cries.
Mostly all of their breath was cold and wreaked of rot. Wetness dripped onto her exposed arm, from where she’d rolled up her sleeves, finding its way down to the tip of her finger. It was sticky and warm despite their body temperatures, and she could feel some of it pooling onto her shirt. When some spoke, the particles she could only assume were blood and not spit stuck to her face. She guided her hand with the leather seats, digging her nails past the flesh, hoping to find the bus doors. Their cries grew more desperate, hungry, and blood curdling, overwhelming Leslie who still hadn’t opened her eyes.
The back of her hand grazed a forehead that was only up to her mid torso. She stopped moving and left it there, lingering on the slight frost burn she felt pressing her skin against Benny’s.
"Please," she whined, her skull tightening. She wanted her eyes to close further, to teleport her away in the darkness. Alternativetaly, colors bounced off the shade of her eyelids and tears broke out through a crack. "Please, I didn't want to."
"Look at what you did," they screamed.
Chewing the walls of her mouth to the point she could've made it to the other side, she opened her eyes, and the passengers were gone. The lights were flickering with full autonomy, free of an on and off switch- from mortal control. The man from under the streetlight looked out the back window. Only her and him remained. He wore the same brown dress pants and vest. His shoes were still dark and clean and she mental noted that he was completely dry. They were the only two left. Even the bus driver had dissipated. Looking out the window, Leslie saw the bus was still on the same dark path as before, and it seemed the bus was perfectly centered in the road. The steering wheel even moved as if someone still had a grip on it. She started to taste the small bit of blood leaking into her mouth from where she bit her cheek.
"Where are we going?" Leslie yelled at the man.
He did not reply to her. She kept her composure, not allowing herself to sob in front of him.
"Who are you? What's going on?" she plead, unsure whether to expect any explanation.
Somewhere in the middle of the bus, she plummeted into one of the seats. Suddenly, she laughed. She was only shocked at herself for a moment, till she laughed again. The bus felt perfectly still as her laughter rang throughout.
"Am I crazy?" she giggled and sniffled, wiping her nose with her palm.
Like the others, she repeated herself, this time screaming it with rage. She saw the man twitch at this and quickly sprang to her feet, beginning a steady journey to the man.
"That's exactly it, right? I'm crazy," she added, as confidence entered her bloodstream.
Leslie came up behind him, landing her hand on his shoulder. It felt dusty. "All of this shit has finally got to me, huh?"
The light flickered, and he was facing her, his hand on hers on his shoulder. His pitch-white eyes and teeth revealed themselves to Leslie as he answered her question.
"It's about to."
The lights turned off and when they came back on she could see everyone had returned in the reflection of the bus's back window and the man in brown was gone. Leslie just stood there, staring at herself, trying not to give attention to the spirits behind her so desperately begging her for it. Her eyes traced the outline of her face and stared at the yellow dotted lines fading into the void. A tear trickled down her cheek as she thought of her son for a split second before sighing.
"I'm sorry."
The victims grabbed Leslie, some digging their nails in, piercing her skin, and others wrapping their fingers around her throat. Fingernails dug into her cornea, and teeth bit into her ankle. Her blood finally reached the bus floor while the people she denied justice to ripped her to shreds. There was no fighting the pain ringing in all parts her body, on some level she believed she deserved it.
She worried what might happen to her son. She thought of where she might go when she died. She wondered if she was already dead. The lawyer could only dream of when the bus might stop, if it ever did.