Horror - Short

This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are fictitious and any similarities to actual persons, locations, or events is coincidental. This work cannot be used to train artificial intelligence programs.  No AI tools were used in the writing of this story.

All rights reserved. Wheels on the Bus Copyright © Eddie Generous 2026

WHEELS ON THE BUS

It wasn’t easy being the little brother, especially when big brother was such a show off, such a big shot. Fuck him.

Damp and heavy snow landed and momentarily stuck to the windows of the bus as it cut through the dreary evening. It was a Greyhound, the newest one Larry Slider had ever been in, and that said a little something. Larry knew about buses, riding them anyway.

Dark at a quarter after four didn’t hurt his chances. Being as small as possible and as memorable as a Saturday night home alone, jerking it to a skin flick, well that helped too. He chose a corner seat at the back, the one across from the door to the closet toilet, the spot that always managed to stink, even when nobody had gone in there yet. Stink didn’t hurt either, it would keep bodies away and eyes averted.

In that plush seat, so new he doubted anyone had even puked on it, he hunkered and tried to listen to his workout playlist. A list he’d put together three months earlier when life had options, possibilities, hope even; hope plausible enough that he might just show his brother that he wasn’t a loser.

Born more than a decade prior to Larry, the product of focused copulation, Roderick basked in the warm glow of two supportive and healthy parents in their mid-forties. Niles, Pa, Slider, had a defect hiding somewhere amongst his gooey gene map. The defect didn’t show until Roderick was already achieving at law school. At home with Ma and Pa Slider, Larry learned the glorious and colorful world of mental instability in a legal guardian.

Nobody really understood what happened at first, nobody ever found out exactly, but Niles Slider’s hens skipped the farm and took the coop with them when they left. The man got loud. Something about mind-reading government officials that had the country’s logging crews under control. He explained this to his eight-year-old son. The theory usually surfaced while the pair hid in the dark farmhouse, holding hands in the closet. Larry believed everything his father told him. His father gave him a hat made of tinfoil, both figuratively and literally.

Blocking: a fine hobby for anyone with too much memory and too few birthday cakes or trips to Disneyland. Larry blocked things. Blocking was great…when it held.

—

His closet reeked of mothballs and leather. Larry sat on the floor, balled up tight, as if hiding behind one’s own knees offered a reliable form of coverage. Niles let go of his son’s hand and stood, it was abrupt and uncommon. Sitting in the closet with his father wasn’t abnormal, but silence and a stoppage in physical contact were abnormal.

A string dangled from the ceiling and Niles yanked it. The light lit, bouncing from Larry’s tinfoil hat back to his father’s eyes. The aging man saw something, felt something, knew something, but Larry didn’t understand. He picked up on the fear and acted accordingly—how one ended up in a closet holding hands with his father in the first place.

“I knew it,” Niles whispered. “Whoever you are, I want my son back.”

Uncertain if his father just lost track, Larry whispered, “Pa, I’m here.”

“Liar!

This time Larry didn’t know what to do, so he sat there. The fierce glow under that simple yellow bulb made the boy uncomfortable and he balled as small as possible. Niles put on a math-thinking expression. The figures were adding to something immeasurable and insane, no doubt. “Ah-ha!” he said and Larry lifted his head. “You can’t get me, if I get me.”

Conditioning and age didn’t matter, those words didn’t sound right. Niles rooted into the pockets of his heavy canvas duster—the jacket he wore every day for the final six months of his life. Larry hoped, somehow, he’d forget the search or misplace his pockets, but no, he found the object of desire.

“You can’t get me, if I get me,” he said again, and according to the carving knife in his hand, he meant business.

Blood sprayed onto Larry’s face like hot cream shot from a cow’s tit as his father dragged the knife along his own throat. The man stood tall and lifted his arms, that blood trailing into the shadows beneath his coat. Then he put his hands up as if he recognized the mistake and wanted to reverse it, or at least, to staunch the bleeding. It was too late. The man fell onto Larry.

Three hours trapped, screams muffled by dead, fatherly weight, before Ma woke up and found them.

—

Larry leaned his head against the cold glass of the bus window. It was slow going, but he was out of the city and that was good. They stopped in the next suburb—only six kilometers from A to B—and waited. He watched a woman through the window, shouting at her teenaged son while a man stood next to her, sneering. It took him back to when Ma married Terry Macy and he moved into the loft above the garage.

Terry Macy took the role of father figure to heart and attempted re-enactments of his own childhood. Stand straight, fly right, obey your elders, top of the class marks, or else. The belt had a Harley Davidson brand carved into the leather.

“You little cocksucker!” Terry Macy would say, his balding, vein-ridden head, sweaty and red. “You think you’ll ever get a goddamn job without a diploma? Tap dancing Christ, I won’t be paying a cent for a loser kid to sit around jerking it to titty rags when he’s failing science. You need that course to graduate.” He’d suck in a heavy breath and then snap went Harley Davidson. “Why can’t you be more like your brother? He doesn’t sit around dog fucking.” Harley Davidson said…snap, snap, snap. “Lazy losers get nowhere!”

Soon as he could, Larry ran. He stayed in the shelters until a social worker found him and forced him into a group home. The group home was tight and they forced him back to Terry Macy and the Harley Davidson belt.

“Fuck you!” Larry said as he threw a rock through the Harley Davidson shop window, a place out by the movie theaters. He was drunk and wanted the trouble. He waited while the sirens drew closer. He picked up another rock and bonked it off the hood of a cop cruiser.

“On the ground, motherfucker!”

Larry flipped the man off and ate dirt after about two heartbeats.

Only 16, they had to let him go. After processing, a fat faced stinker of a cop dropped Larry off at Ma’s house. Terry Macy refused to pick him up from the station, late as it was, but waited in the dark, standing behind the door just inside the loft, Harley Davidson poised and ready.

Terry Macy watched the boy pull off his shirt and then pants. Terry Macy moved. No leather this time. The buckle end, the business end, thwapt in a way that made that leather feel like pinches from Grandma.

Larry screamed and bruised and bled. Two weeks later, he was in juvenile detention for breaking the window of a gas station kiosk and stealing a pack of Player’s Light King Size and a black Bic lighter.

—

Larry’s stomach grumbled while the bus idled. Only one more town over, but he had to risk it. A bag of jerky and a microwave burrito from the convenience store.

Six hours until the bus crossed into the Yukon. All that space, nobody would find him. He’d become a goddamned mountain man. Life like an Eskimo, it couldn’t be that hard.

Behind the till, a small television aired a news feed, he couldn’t see the screen but what he heard sank his guts to his shoes. He grabbed two cans of Red Bull from the small cooler next to the chocolate bars and stepped close, leaning around the bin of pull tickets, and tried to make enough noise so that the cashier would turn from the TV before—there was his face, the mug shot taken during his last arrest.

“Don’t want no trouble,” the cashier said without turning around, “I already called, saw you through the bus window. Don’t kill me.”

Sirens squealed outside. Larry was in a daze. He grabbed his goods and broke for the door. “Fuck,” he whispered as the cold air sliced at his lungs. He couldn’t take that bus to the Yukon, but there were other ways, hell, there were other buses. Average looking white dude could get anywhere in Canada—if they didn’t nab him right there and then.

—

As a man, Larry liked to blame all of his problems on his past, blacking out the meat and potatoes, yet holding onto the feeling of tragedy. But maybe who he became wasn’t his fault. If it wasn’t for his father and the man’s demented thoughts, he wouldn’t be on the run, and his brother wouldn’t be blank-staring at a wall from his bedroom floor, dead.

A week earlier, Roderick called Larry, asking if they could meet. It was an odd request. Larry and his brother lived on the opposite sides of the tracks. It wasn’t close either, one was miles onto the good and the other miles onto the bad.

But Larry had hope. He could be a better person, could excel like his brother had, given a second chance. Visions of brotherly love and mending the torn relationship, Larry wanted to become close with his brother, his niece, his nephew, and sister-in-law. The visions ventured so far as to create a scenario where Roderick found Larry a halfway decent job, one he could stick out and learn to love for years. Maybe someday he’d buy a house—nothing as big as his brother’s, mind you, but a place to call home.

A little after 8:00 PM, a fresh downpour of December rain melted much of the snow. Larry rode from the nearest bus stop and rushed two blocks to his brother’s six-bedroom home, looking haggard, but feeling optimistic.

Sitting down in the Slider family den, Larry looked deep into the short glass of expensive rye so smooth it was as if everything he’d ever drank until then was mule piss. He rotated the glass in his hand, watching the ice cubes dance in the amber liquid while he listened, waiting for his chance to burst in and apologize, to accept any conditions his brother might have about fixing a future.

On and on the man talked. He refilled Larry’s glass twice. The position didn’t come up, the offer to help didn’t come up. Hope didn’t stick around very long at all.

“Let me get to it,” Roderick said as he stood behind the red leather wingback in his study. “I’m looking to step into a bench judge position.”

Larry set down his tumbler, blinking. This wasn’t about olive branches at all. This wasn’t the lucky helping the unlucky. This wasn’t a peace pipe, not even a Styrofoam lifesaver tossed overboard to save a drowning man.

“I need you out of my life and somewhere you’ll never again get the chance to besmirch my good name. You’ve proven yourself to be garbage over and over, and I won’t allow you to ruin my career with your petty criminal persona.”

Larry didn’t see red, he saw black.

Larry got to his feet and told Roderick exactly what he thought of the man and his great big house and his stupid fucking judgeship. Roderick, looking a bit stunned—perhaps that anyone would dare—told Larry to get out of his house, city, family, and existence. After breaking his glass and taking a few gulps from the rye bottle, Larry did.

He caught the next bus, entered his apartment, grabbed the bag of cocaine he’d planned on cutting and slanging to kick off his better life, and went upstairs to apartment G. The Cobra .380 was small but looked new enough that it would do the exact befitting damage.

“Watch you with that ’un. Match rounds to Bigsby’s deal, if they get ‘em. ‘Member him?”

Larry did remember and maybe at another time would’ve said thanks but no thanks to a gun linked to an armed robbery resulting in the death of a counter clerk and two little girls in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Two hours later, he waited outside his brother’s home. One light at a time, the place darkened. People always locked the main doors, especially the wealthy pricks like Roderick, but they never seemed to think about the contractor skimping on a chintzy electric garage door opener. A few jiggles, a few tugs and that door tracked backward, allowing Larry to roll in unnoticed.

The alarm on the wall blinked, Larry tried three different sets of numbers until he successfully punched his mother’s birthday, disarming the house. The angry, irrational thoughts came back in a boiling flood. The fact that he’d daydreamed his cocksucking brother as some fucking savior was the worst of it. The house was nearly full dark and Larry moved with quiet steps. The first two bedrooms he checked were vacant, maybe waiting for a visitor, possibly another baby, who knew, who cared. The next was the little boy’s room, Alexander. Larry loomed over the sleeping figure, beams of light from the streetlamps illuminating his shape beneath the comforter. Larry wasn’t mad at Alexander, so he didn’t want to see his dying visage. He grabbed a pillow and let off one shot, through the fluff, through the skull, through the bed, and so on.

It didn’t go as he’d hoped.

It was too loud.

Susan, Roderick’s trophy wife, was the first mole to pop her head out a door. Larry was on the move by then and put two shots into her chest. Blood and silicone burst a second before she went down. Clementine, the girl child, exited her room rubbing at her sleepy eyes. She was a much smaller target, and unsure of how much ammunition he had, Larry strode forward and pressed the hot muzzle to the little girl’s forehead. Her eyes widened and she tried to jerk away, but the pop was faster. Her brains and bits of skull blew out the back of her head like a smashed watermelon.

Roderick had to have heard, but the coward he was, stayed in his bedroom. Larry stomped, a madman’s grin spreading across his face. His father never had the crazy where it met happiness, but Larry found that intersection and danced in it.

He flicked the light switch after opening the final door, hoping to bask in the glow of his brother’s fear. Not letdown. The moons aligned. The man looked like he saw a ghost.

Roderick jumped out of bed and tried to run, three bullets entered his back in a small cluster. Larry almost skipped with joy when he rounded the bed to look at the body. His brother reached up to him, reached for help…just as Larry had. The smile slipped and Larry closed his eyes as he emptied the clip into his brother.

Moving, Larry rummaged through drawers looking for cash and non-descript valuables. Between wallets, piggy banks, and a small wad in the underwear drawer, Larry collected nearly $500. The jewelry looked too good, so good it might as well have a GPS built in. Nobody would buy it, not from him. He took Roderick’s credit card though, figured if he used it before anyone knew the man was dead, it wouldn’t be a problem. After catching his reflection in the dresser mirror, he decided to borrow some of his brother’s clothes, too.

—

Outside the convenience store, sunrise was about ready to roll into the sky, but heavy clouds hung, blocking the harshest of the light. Looking left, Larry saw the bright blue and red flashers rounding a corner, so he jetted to the right. The snow was thick, wet, and slippery. He skidded around a corner, dropping to a knee before he could continue. His right hand stung with cold as he ran as a Red Bull can rolled into the street. He pushed the other can into his pocket, along with the jerky and the smooshed burrito.

Sirens drew closer. Larry focused on a playground in the distance, beyond that, a forest. A car pulled up and parked just down the street from where he ran, he wondered how far he’d get in a stolen car, a lot further than on foot—no doubt about that. He pushed, his chest ached, but the car jerked from the curb, as if also needing to avoid those approaching sirens.

“Prick!” Larry said, the word bookended by gasps. Too busy watching his getaway car get away from him, he didn’t notice a deep dip in the sidewalk. He stumbled. His arms flailed and his head nailed a snowy bench. Pain lashed, but it was short lived. He was up. Whipping around the corner next to the stop sign, a school bus, painted dark blue, jerked to a halt on squeaking brakes.

The door swung open. “Holy smokes, buddy, you all right?” asked a smiley middle-aged man at the wheel of the bus.

The sirens sounded as if they called his name: “Laaay-Reee-Laaay-Reeeeeeeee…”

“They for you, buddy? You’d better get in.” The driver was nodding, eyebrows high enough to touch his bangs.

No other options, Larry said, “Thanks,” and ran up the slick black stairs.

“No problem, buddy,” the driver said as he jerked the bus forward.

Only a few seats remained vacant. Lumpy heaps of cloth rose on most of the brown benches, but six others had passengers. None smiled, all looked beaten and dejected. 

“Where’s this bus going?” Larry asked over his shoulder as he moved toward a seat only halfway occupied by a heap of lumpy cotton.

“Away from those cops. I’m sure you don’t mind that, now do ya, buddy?” the driver said, a few passengers sniggered.

“Sure, but where?”

“It’s a secret. You like secrets, buddy?” The smile was Stretch Armstronging the driver’s face. “Won’t snow where we’re going. Bet you’ll like that, buddy!”

A young female passenger moaned.

“What, like Florida or Arizona? Where?”

The driver cackled like a stoned witch. “No, buddy, not Florida or Arizona. But out of Canada. Cops won’t touch you if you’re out of Canada, eh Buddy?”

Guy was nuts, but leaving Canada worked, so long as he could avoid trouble at the border, which was unlikely, but it was a problem for later. He pulled the burrito from his pocket and tore the wrapper. He took a bite and maggots oozed from the opening, pouring onto his lips in a busy scatter. He threw the thing and screamed, spat little white nuggets of life. A man across the aisle scrunched his face.

“Jesus,” Larry whispered and wiped his mouth, and then rubbed his head. He felt a deep gash, was surprised when it didn’t hurt, even when the road bumped and his fingers prodded accidentally. Larry tried again, “Hey, seriously, where we going?”

The bus driver looked into the mirror and made the key locking his lips gesture.

Larry turned to look through the back window. It was blacked out. The side windows were too, not tinted like he’d thought earlier, but black. Larry stood up and was about to speak, but sat back down next to the mound of white. He tugged at the cloth. It slid and pooled in a heap on the bench seat.

“Are we there yet?” It was a small boy with a battered face and a neck bent so far sideways there was no chance of meaningful connection to the rest of his body. “I think I gotta pee,” he said.

Larry popped from the seat then. “What the fuck?” he whispered.

“Hey, buddy, watch the swears, we got kids onboard, okay buddy?” the driver was still smiling that rubber smile.

In the seat behind his, one of the shrouds or cocoons or whatever the hell they were began falling and an elderly lady leaned forward. “What’d ya do?” she asked, her voice playful, but hoarse. She was green and scabby. Yellow shit oozed out from around her eyes.

“What?” Larry said, taking a handful of steps in reverse, up the aisle, toward the driver.

“To get on this bus, what’d ya do?”

Somewhere he missed something. A hand reached out from another white hump and grabbed his arm. There were six fingers, long as knitting needles and nearly as skinny but for the knobby spindle knuckles.

Larry gasped and wrenched free.

“I fed my kids a bottle of rubbing alcohol. Once they passed out, I put ‘em in the tub and played Dunk Dunk Went Kermit the Frog.” The green woman howled laughter for two seconds before stopping abruptly. “You have kids?”

Larry shook his head, still walking backward.

“Hey, buddy, better sit down. You don’t want me to tell you again, buddy,” the driver said, his smile opening to reveal teeth like barbed wire ends.

“Man, let me off. I don’t…let me off,” Larry said after he’d turned away from the driver but didn’t start back to his seat.

“I will, buddy, but you gotta sit down!”

The way that voice boomed put Larry’s shuffling feet into motion. One of the cotton humps began hitching, as if whoever was under there was sobbing. Larry went all the way to the back and tested the emergency door.

“Nice try, buddy!” the driver shouted, tone full of mirth.

Larry fell into an empty seat. “Where the hell are we going?” he shouted and put his head in his hands, prodded the gulley at the back. It was so deep and…was that his brain? Could he feel his brain?

“Bingo, buddy, you guessed it!”

The green woman laughed. “Where the Hell did you think we were going?”

The driver bellowed at this and a handful of moans and snivels carried the background tune. Through the front window, a blinding red light poured into the bus as the driver geared down, pulling up to the end of the line.

—

Officers Bitz and Officer Wilson looked down at the body of Larry Slider, a man suspected of murdering his brother’s family.

“Don’t get any easier than that, do it?” Officer Wilson asked after fetching the wallet from the dead man’s pants.

“Looks like he slipped, huh?” Officer Bitz asked.

“I’d say.”

“Going full-on, slipped, and cracked his skull off that there bench.”

“Call it in, too friggin’ cold out out here.”

Officer Bitz leaned down close to the body. “Got what you deserved.”

“Punched himself a one-way ticket,” Officer Wilson said, rubbing his hands together for warmth.

XX