The last bus had long gone when 17-year-old Jamie bounced out of the Golden Fleece pub and staggered towards the village of Oakridge and his bed. Homing pigeon instincts usually kicked in to take him safely along the three kilometres of country roads.
This night, a howling wind and sleeting rain stabbed him like knives. Twice he tripped and stopped to steady himself. Then he got so befuddled he slipped and slithered and spun round and round and he couldn’t work out where he was and what was up and what was down. He ended up in a ditch.
Next thing he knew there were bright lights and the hissing of hydraulic doors swishing opening. A bus was waiting for him.
Jamie crawled aboard. It was a single-decker and he slumped onto the first seat he saw. The CCTV camera scrutinised him and when all was well, the bus drove away to pick up its next passenger.
In Oakridge, the people tell a tale. On certain nights long after the last bus has gone they have been woken by the roar of a bus coming down the street. When they go to their window they see a brilliantly-lighted single-decker approaching with neither driver nor passengers. It goes careering to the corner of the road and then vanishes.
Next morning, after the sun had risen in a cloudless sky, a man walking his dog found the broken body of a teenager in a ditch two hundred metres from the Golden Fleece.
Words: Richard Rooney
Illustration: A.I.
Flash Fiction 250
Flash Fiction 250 