The Des Moines police didn't know what to charge me with. I was found wandering Interstate 80 at five in the morning, soaking wet and coughing up black silt. The problem wasn't that I was 200 miles from where I’d stood four hours earlier. The problem was the medical exam. My lungs were filled with water from a lake that hasn't existed since the early 90s.
It started at midnight in Chicago. My mom had called, her voice a jagged whisper—my dad had a stroke. I was stranded at the terminal, the last westbound Greyhound already gone.
I sat on a cold bench under flickering blue lights until a man in a stone-washed denim jacket sat next to me. He checked a heavy brass wristwatch and sighed. "Late as usual," he muttered. "The 1992 Midnight Express never was on time."
Before I could ask what he meant, two dim, yellow headlights cut through the fog. It was an old MCI Classic—silver sides, corrugated metal, and a destination sign that flickered in a shaky orange glow: LINCOLN, NE.
The doors hissed open like a dying breath. I stepped into the cabin, and the temperature dropped forty degrees. It smelled of mothballs and damp earth.
The bus was full. Every seat was occupied by people staring straight ahead. They were dressed in neon windbreakers and high-waisted jeans, their skin the color of a fish’s belly—pale and translucent.
I sat in the back. I tried to catch the eye of a girl across from me wearing a pink windbreaker. As we hit a pothole, her head lolled back. Her Walkman headphones weren't just on her ears; they were fused into her skin. I closed my eyes, praying it was just exhaustion.
I must have drifted off. When I woke, the silence was absolute. We weren't on the highway. We were parked on a crumbling embankment at the edge of a black, mirror-still lake.
The seat next to me was empty. The entire bus was empty. The driver’s seat was a rusted skeleton of springs. The floorboards were covered in thick, black mud. I was sitting in a rotting wreck that looked like it had been underwater for decades.
I scrambled out, my boots sinking into the muck. That’s when I heard the splashing.
They were in the lake. Dozens of them. The passengers weren't swimming; they were bobbing, their heads staying above the surface as they turned in unison toward me.
"Join us, Elias," a thousand hollow voices whispered in my brain. "We’re finally home."
They started wading toward the shore with slow, jerky movements. I didn't wait. I ran into the forest, hearing the wet slap-slap-slap of bare, bloated feet hitting the mud behind me.
I looked in the mirror this morning. My skin is turning a dull, bloodless grey. Every time I breathe, I taste silt and weeds. I think the bus is still coming. I think I'm finally on the manifest.