The Greyhound — Fexingo Horror

At the Palomino Diner off Route 12 in Wyoming, a man boards Luna's bus at 3:17 a.m. in the middle of a December blizzard. He doesn't speak, doesn't blink, and he smells of stale coffee and something metallic. As the bus pulls away, Luna notices the diner's lights go out one by one, even though it's supposed to stay open until dawn. The man sits in the second row, staring straight ahead, and somewh...

It's late October, just past midnight, when Luna pulls the Greyhound into the lot of a small-town cemetery. A woman in a black coat boards without a ticket, smelling of wet earth and wilted flowers. She takes a seat near the back, and Luna can't stop checking the rearview. The woman's face keeps changing—older, younger, another face entirely. She speaks in a whisper about a pact made fifty years a...

Route 395, two hours east of Bakersfield. A closed laundromat with a single working machine. A woman in a pink bathrobe who boards the Greyhound at 3:17 AM. Her hands are clean but the water in the machine was not. She asks Luna to wait for the cycle to finish. She says the stains belong to someone else. She carries a plastic bag that drips onto the aisle floor. The bus idles. The dashboard clock...

It's late October, just past midnight, and Luna is driving a Greyhound through central Wyoming when she stops at the Cinder Creek Rest Area — a concrete shelter with bad lights and a payphone that rings without being fed a quarter. A woman in a red coat boards, smelling like wet ash and pine resin, and sits two rows behind the driver's seat. She talks in a low, precise voice about a house she used...

It's 3 AM on a wet July night in 1997 when Luna pulls the Greyhound into the Blue Moon Trailer Park outside of Yuma, Arizona. A woman in a housecoat boards, carrying nothing but a plastic bag and a story about a photograph that keeps changing. The photograph shows a man she doesn't remember marrying, a house she's never seen, and a child with her own eyes but a different smile. Luna listens as the...

It's 3 AM on a July night, somewhere west of Bonneville. Luna picks up a teenage girl at the Salt Flats Overlook, no bags, no jacket, just a pair of sunglasses she won't take off. The girl says she's fine, says she's just headed to Ely, says she doesn't need to call anyone. But every time Luna glances in the rearview, the girl is staring at her own reflection in the window, whispering something th...

Night shift on the Greyhound, somewhere between El Paso and nowhere. A boy boards at a dust-coated station in Salton, New Mexico, just before midnight. He doesn't speak, doesn't move, doesn't seem to breathe right. Luna notices his shoes are wrong—too clean for the desert, soles worn uneven as if he's been walking in circles for years. She tries to make conversation, but he only stares ahead, his...

It's 3 AM in October 2019, somewhere between Waco and Austin on the stretch of 35 that runs past the Little Creek Motel. A man boards the bus wearing a blue suit, no luggage, no phone. He sits in the back row and begins to whisper to someone who isn't there—a conversation that spans decades, a grief that never left the room where it started. Luna tries to ignore the way his reflection never matche...

Episode 59 of The Greyhound. It's a humid August night on a lonely stretch of Oklahoma highway, and Luna picks up a single passenger at the Moonflower Trailer Park outside of Nowhere, Oklahoma. The man is quiet, polite, and carries a small cardboard box tied with string. He doesn't say where he's going—just that he needs to get as far from the park as possible. As the miles roll by, Luna notices t...

A cold October night on the Greyhound, somewhere between Elmira and nowhere. A man in a patched coat boards at the Iron Bridge rest stop, carrying nothing but a dented thermos and a story about a child he lost on that bridge twelve years ago. He speaks to Luna in fragments—about the sound the ice made, about the girl who waved from the middle of the span, about the footprints that led nowhere. But...

It's the last run of the night, somewhere outside of Lubbock, Texas, in the thin dry heat of late August. A girl in a faded sunflower dress boards at the Prairie View Motel. She doesn't have a ticket, doesn't say a word, just hands over a worn two-dollar bill and takes the seat directly behind Luna. The rearview shows her face, pale and still, her hands folded in her lap. She never blinks. She nev...

Luna picks up a single passenger at the Burnt Oak Motel off Route 80 in Illinois, just past midnight in late October. The woman is middle-aged, coat buttoned high, no luggage, no ticket. She asks to go to a town that was razed for a highway bypass in 1973. Luna lets her ride anyway. The rest is the story of how a voice on the back seat talks about a daughter who never came home from a gas station...

A Route 9 night run through eastern Colorado. Luna picks up a young girl from the Shady Pines Trailer Park outside Lamar around 2 a.m. The girl carries a duffel bag and a story about a well behind her home. She says no one else in town will talk about it — not the old well, not the sound that comes up from it at night, not what happened to her older brother after he looked inside. Luna listens, wa...

It's October 1987, just past midnight on Route 43, and I'm pulling into the Red Clover Motel lot to wait out a fog bank. A girl in a yellow raincoat boards—maybe twelve, maybe younger—and asks for a ride to a town that doesn't exist on any map. She carries a stuffed rabbit with button eyes, and she tells me she's been waiting a long time. As the fog closes in, she starts to hum a nursery rhyme I h...

It's a humid July night in 1998 outside of Fyffe, Nebraska, when a man boards Luna's bus at a grain elevator that hasn't been operational for thirty years. He carries a canvas satchel and smells of wheat dust and something metallic. He doesn't speak — he just stares at the back of her seat in the rearview mirror. As the miles stretch on, the bus begins to fill with the sound of rustling grain, eve...

It's February on the I-5 corridor, well past midnight, and Luna picks up a single passenger from the abandoned Pine Grove Motor Lodge outside Yreka, California. The man boards with no luggage, no coat, just a motel key in his hand and a story about room 6 that he needs to tell someone before sunrise. As the bus rolls south through the Siskiyou foothills, he describes the couple in the room next do...

It's late autumn, just past midnight, on a two-lane stretch of Kansas highway. Luna pulls over at the old grain elevator junction to check a rattle under the hood. That's where she finds him — standing in the cone of the headlights, no coat, no bag, no expression. He boards without a word, takes a seat halfway back, and for the next forty miles does nothing but stare at his own reflection in the d...

It's 3 AM on a frozen stretch of US-191 in Utah, just north of the ghost town of Cisco. I'm at the Last Chance Diner, the only light for thirty miles, when a boy walks in out of the blizzard—no coat, no shoes, no tracks behind him. He sits at the counter and orders a glass of water, but the glass is empty and he's just staring at me. He can't remember how he got here. He doesn't know his own name....

It's the tail end of November, 2019, and Luna is running a late-night route through eastern Kentucky when she picks up a woman at a trailer park that shouldn't exist anymore—razed in a fire three years prior. The woman knows Luna's name, knows the exact date her grandmother died, and smells of woodsmoke and something sweet. She carries a cardboard box tied with twine and asks to be let off at a cr...

It was 3 a.m. in mid-October when Luna pulled into a dusty truck stop outside of Gila Bend, Arizona. A man in a black suit boarded, smelling of frankincense and diesel. He told her about the wedding he was fleeing, the service that had gone wrong, the bride who had not come back to life. As the bus rolled through the desert, the radio began to play a song no station should have had at that hour. L...

It's late October, just past two in the morning, and Luna is driving the Greyhound through the high desert of eastern Oregon. At the Desert Rose Motel in a town called Prineville Junction, a girl boards—maybe fifteen, wearing a thin yellow dress that's too light for the cold. She doesn't have a ticket, just a folded piece of paper with an address scrawled in pencil. She sits three rows back, stari...

It's three in the morning on a wet August night in 1992 when Luna pulls the Greyhound into the Wolf Creek truck stop off Route 7 in eastern Oklahoma. A woman boards, soaked through, no luggage, no ticket, no shoes. She settles into seat 12B and doesn't speak. But she leaves a trail of creek water that keeps spreading long after her clothes should have dried. The driver on the next shift says he sa...

Summer of 2021, 3:17 AM, a man in a gray suit boards Luna's bus outside the Alabaster Motel in Niland, California. He carries no luggage. He smells of wet plaster. He asks for a ticket to a town that does not exist. Luna drives. The ride is 97 miles of desert highway, and the man speaks exactly once more—to ask a question that rewrites what Luna knows about her own route. This is not a ghost story...

It's two in the morning on a rain-slicked stretch of US-30 in eastern Ohio when Luna picks up a lone fare outside the VFW in Stone Creek. The man is in his late seventies, dressed in a creased dress uniform from a war that ended before Luna was born. He says he's going to Arlington—but as the miles pass, the details he shares about his life start to fray at the edges. He mentions a wife who's been...

Luna tells the story of a cold October night on Route 17, when a woman in a grey coat boarded the bus at the Whitewood Cemetery gate. She was dry-eyed and calm, and she carried a cardboard box tied with kitchen twine. She sat in the second row and never looked away from the rearview mirror. Luna didn't ask what was in the box — she knew better. But the woman told her anyway. A story about grief, a...