The Greyhound — Fexingo Horror

July 2023, just past midnight on a Greyhound pulling away from the Shady Pines Motel outside Flagstaff, Arizona. Luna picks up a single passenger: a man in a pressed linen suit with no luggage, no phone, and a name he gives as Elias. He sits in the back row, never looks out the window, and speaks to her only once, through the rearview mirror, about a stretch of road he calls the Fault Line. She he...

It was February of 2019, and the last bus out of Colby, Kansas, was running twenty minutes late. Luna picked up a single passenger at the empty station: an older woman in a long coat, carrying a worn leather suitcase and a name tag from a conference that ended ten years ago. She didn't want to go anywhere in particular—just away. As the miles passed, her story peeled back like old wallpaper: a hus...

November 1999. A small bus stop outside a Georgia town called Peachtree Hollow. The last run of the night, and Luna picks up a woman in a flower-print dress carrying a cardboard box. She says she's going to see her sister in Savannah. She doesn't speak for the first hour. Then she starts talking about what happened to her husband. Then she asks Luna to pull over. And Luna does. But what she sees i...

It's late autumn on the Greyhound run through eastern Kentucky. I pick up a man at Jericho Pass—a gravel turnout with a payphone nobody uses. He smells like wet wool and cigarettes, sits three rows back, recites mile markers before we pass them. Tells me about the highway that didn't used to be there. The bridge that was built twice. The town of four thousand that vanished into a sinkhole in 1929—...

In the late autumn of 2019, on a Greyhound bound for nowhere in particular, Luna picked up a woman at a roadside crossing in central Montana. The woman had no luggage, no ticket, and a name that didn't belong to her. She sat in the back row, humming a song that wasn't on any radio. Over the next hour, the bus began to change—the seats grew cold, the windows fogged from the inside, and the highway...

A night run through the Nevada desert, late October, the bus nearly empty. Luna picks up a single passenger at a forgotten junction called Sandstone—a man in a blue work shirt who smells of creosote and dust. He doesn't speak. He doesn't move. But the shadows behind his seat stretch wrong, and the rearview mirror shows a face that is not his own. A story about what the road gives you and what it t...

It's late October, 2018, and Luna is driving the 2:15 AM run from Omaha to Cheyenne. At a forgotten pull-off called White River Overlook—a gravel parking lot with a single picnic table and a sign warning about mountain lions—a woman in her fifties boards holding an old-fashioned leather suitcase and a pair of pruning shears. She sits three rows back, humming something tuneless, and when Luna glanc...

A night in early October, somewhere between Barstow and Kingman, Luna pulls over at a roadside motel where a woman stands alone under a dead neon sign. She looks familiar—like someone Luna used to know, or maybe like someone nobody ever really knew. The woman boards the bus without a ticket, without a bag, and without speaking a single word. But her eyes say everything. They say she has been waiti...

It's August 1998 on a Greyhound crossing the Missouri flatlands, two in the morning. The driver pulls into the Clearwater Rest Stop, a place that shouldn't exist — a burned-out gas station with orange light still spilling from the windows. A man boards. He's wearing a railroad jacket two sizes too big, hands tucked into the pockets. He doesn't buy a ticket. He takes the seat directly behind the dr...

A winter night in 2007. I was driving the Salt Lake-to-Reno run when a woman boarded in Elko carrying nothing but a rusted lunchbox. She sat in seat 17, said nothing, and stared straight ahead. At four in the morning, the bus broke down outside a diner that shouldn't have been there. She walked in without me, and when I followed, the place was empty except for a jukebox playing a song I'd never he...

Somewhere between Rockwell and nowhere, on a stretch of I-80 that never sees the sun, Luna picks up a woman who has been waiting at a rest stop for three nights. She is dry-eyed, hollow, and she tells a story about a house at the edge of town—a house that swallows people whole. Not by force, but by forgiveness. She was the fifth wife of a man who built a family room that didn't have windows, and w...

It's the summer of 2018, on a sweltering night in July, when Luna stops the Greyhound at a rest area outside Tallulah, Louisiana. An old woman in a faded floral dress boards, carrying no luggage, and sits behind the driver's seat. She doesn't speak. But the rearview mirror shows her mouth moving, forming words that never reach Luna's ears. No one else on the bus sees her. When Luna confronts the w...

At a lonely bus stop outside the Amana Colonies in Iowa, Luna picks up a teenage girl named Ruth in the middle of a snowless December night. Ruth wears old-fashioned clothes and speaks of a farmhouse that burned down in 1974. She's waiting for someone who never came. As they drive deeper into the countryside, Luna notices the bus clock has stopped, the radio emits only static, and the fields outsi...

In the fall of 2019, Luna picks up a late-night fare at a near-empty rest stop off I-35 in Oklahoma. The woman wears a blue dress with no shoes, carries no bag, and speaks as though she has been waiting a very long time. What she tells Luna about the land, the well on her family's property, and the thing that lives at the bottom of it, is not a ghost story she heard—it is a story she survived. By...

Luna pulls into a rest stop outside Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, just past three in the morning. The diner is empty except for a waitress who's been working the same shift for forty years and a man in a booth by the window who never orders anything. He's there every night, she says, always the same booth, always watching the highway. Luna sits down across from him. He tells her a story about...

A late-night run to Point Pleasant, West Virginia, in the dead of winter. Luna picks up a single passenger outside the Mothman Museum — a boy of maybe twelve, soaking wet, clutching a toy spaceship. He claims he's waiting for his father, who disappeared in the TNT area twenty-two years ago. The boy has the exact date. The exact face from the museum photos. Luna makes the mistake of checking the ba...

On a rain-slicked October night in 2019, Luna pulls her Greyhound into the nearly empty lot of a 24-hour diner just outside Elko, Nevada. A woman in a white dress boards with no luggage and no ticket. She asks Luna two questions: 'How far does this go?' and 'Do you ever stop feeling like something is watching you?' The conversation that follows weaves through 300 miles of two-lane blacktop, past a...