03:00

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Midnight in the city. He shifted in his seat on the back of the bus. His hands digging into the subtly grime covered pseudo cushions he sat upon, he stared out the window.

They said the city never sleeps, the unearthly orange glow of the streetlights confirmed it, forming a highway in the darkness where the shadows fled. Still, there was a quiet about the night and a strange way where every single sound made by the creaking vehicle which was carrying him onwards echoed out beneath the starless grey sky.

He found his body pressed slightly uncomfortably against the left window as the bus turned, off the highway and onto another long straight road. The lights were dimmer, the blackness closer and endless, broken only by the occasional hanging branch or overgrown leaf hanging out from behind its veil.

On and on the bus travelled, the seats swaying up and down in an almost rhythmic fashion, down that long winding road. Its two headlights forming two ovalish pools of brightness before the slow moving vehicle. A spot of brightness in a world of nothing. The darkness closed in on the bus, and so did time.

He awoke to find himself alone on the bus. He was the only passenger. Rubbing his bleary eyes he checked his watch. 3:00 a.m. He looked beyond the glass and saw the moon in the sky, but nothing else.

The moon. The road. The bus. The constant lights.

The bus no longer bobbed up and down, but he could feel the hum of the engine, and could see the streetlamps passing by. He looked through the windscreen of the bus and saw the road stretching out into forever, disappearing as the gloom swallowed it up, the edge of darkness never closer than it was before though the bus steadily travelled forwards.

It isn't, his mind whispered to him.

Something was definitely wrong, bus services didn't run at this time anyway, and though he had probably missed his stop, he was sure that he would have at least picked something familiar out in the landscape.

The landscape. There was none, none that he could see. Just the moon, the streetlamps and the road; the latter two long blended and blurred into insignificance, till they became as constant as the moon itself. Unchanging.

He rose unsurely from his seat, tottering as he stood more from uncertainty than the fresh tingling sensation of cramped limbs. Pushing past two empty seats and a pole, he paused halfway down the aisle, his footsteps sounding hollowly against the floor, dominating the relative silence of the bus.

"Hello...?" he called out to the bus driver hidden from his view and got no reply. He stood there, straining for any sound beyond the by now all too familiar. The engine kept humming as panic and fear slowly began to grow within him.

Hesitantly he took another step forward, and his foot impacted the floor like an anvil. His heart beat furiously in his chest, and he waited. Silence.

As he crept his way forward very soon he began to make out a figure hunched over the steering wheel. It didn't move, but only kept it's eyes forward, staring straight into the road ahead. He couldn't make anything out in the distance either.

He would've called out, but again his mind screamed at him that something was wrong. Even so, he found himself right behind it and reached out a hand. He stopped short of it's shoulder and paused. He stood there, almost as if in a trance, caught between his fear of what would happen, and struggling against his need to end his predicament. Suddenly it became very clear in his mind that his situation was certainly very out of the ordinary.

Uncertainty and trepidation blossomed into fear and full blown panic as he stumbled away. Away from that thing which he was certain was not human, as far away as he could. Back, back to where he had been, the seat at the back. He shivered as he settled back into the cramped space, sitting upright in his seat he watched the unchanging nothing beyond the window and the moon far and beyond, ever changing but still the same. And as the cold descended on him, he found his eyes tiring, the dread and gloom creeping up on him ever so slowly. He huddled up in his sweater, pulling the folds tighter around him.

Five minutes, ten minutes, an hour, it did not matter. His watch had stopped working at 3:01 a.m. and there was no one to tell him how much time had passed. The moon would not. The sun would not. He reached to scratch his back, but then realised that his arm could not move, and so he closed his eyes and went to sleep, surrendering to the dark even as he felt the chilling numbness spread throughout his limbs.

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So I cheated, hah wrote this quite some time back.

Maybe it's because I haven't been writing for too long, but what came so easily to me and looked not very good seems a lot better I suppose.

I wrote this story after being inspired by a half remembered legend of a "twilight zone" where travellers on random highways in australia or malaysia ended up driving on a road that never ended.

My hero doesn't face his monster, partly because he isn't a hero. He's just a poor soul, like you or me. Sadly, most of us aren't hero material. Deal with it. :D