Chapter 85 Part 1: Arrived at the Station

The moment the door opened, that smell washed over them.

The smell of plastic seats baked by the sun, the smell of sweat on the handrails, the smell of disinfectant from repeatedly mopped floors, and a faint metallic smell from the air-conditioning vents.

These smells layered together—familiar to anyone who had ever squeezed onto a bus during rush hour.

Mu Yingying stood at the door.

Little Frost stopped the bike, her jaw tightening.

“…This smell is wrong.”

She said.

“It’s not the smell itself that’s wrong.”

Mu Yingying added.

“It’s too right. So right it’s absurd.”

It had been a few years in the ruins.

They had seen corpses, seen Weirdness, and all kinds of strange things.

But this smell of a pre-Doomsday bus running normally—that was too wrong.

It shouldn’t be here in the ruins.

Its presence here was more unsettling than a pile of bodies.

White Peace had already stepped onto the bus.

Her bare feet touched the bus steps, making no sound.

Little Frost pushed the bicycle up the steps.

The step was a bit high—when she lifted the bike, White Night in the basket jolted, her body swaying.

The basket entered the cabin.

Mu Yingying was the last one on.

As she boarded, the door slapped shut.

The bus was very quiet.

The windows were clean to an extreme.

Sunlight filtered through the glass, casting square patches of light inside the cabin—on passengers’ shoulders, on the seats, on the handrails.

Gentle sunlight, but outside the windows was ruin.

No.

Looking out from inside the bus, it wasn’t ruin.

Little Frost stood near the door and glanced outside through the window.

She froze.

Outside the window was a bustling street.

A pre-Doomsday street.

Pedestrians came and went on the sidewalk.

A schoolboy with a backpack took a few running steps, the bag bouncing on his back.

A mother pushing a stroller stopped to lean down and play with the child inside.

An elderly man carrying a plastic bag walked very slowly.

A taxi was parked by the road, its red empty sign lit.

The neon signs of street shops were lit one by one, electronic screens cycling through ads.

The sky wasn’t fully dark yet—a gray-blue dusk.

Little Frost turned her head and looked out through the bus door’s glass.

Outside the door was ruin.

Collapsed storefronts, an electric pole lying in the street, no people, no living thing at all.

Little Frost said, “Inside the bus and outside the bus are completely different worlds.”

White Peace said, “What you see through the window is a slice of the moment Doomsday came. This layer of glass has sealed that moment completely inside.”

Mu Yingying squeezed to the window and looked for herself.

Outside on the street, someone was crossing the road.

A woman in a light trench coat, carrying a shopping bag with a bunch of flowers stuffed inside.

She was walking across the street at a normal pace.

She didn’t know what was about to happen.

Mu Yingying watched her, her throat moving.

That woman was different from a real corpse.

Inside the window, she was alive.

She lifted a hand to brush back her wind-tousled hair.

She glanced at her watch.

She quickened her step toward the crosswalk signal opposite.

For a moment, her gaze even flicked toward the bus, but she didn’t see the people inside clearly.

She was probably thinking, the bus is coming, I need to get across.

Then she died.

But that moment never came.

She was forever frozen in the moment of crossing the road.

Mu Yingying looked away.

“This is fucking creepy,” she said quietly.

Little Frost looked back at the door.

The door was closed.

She reached out and tried the handle.

The handle pressed down, but she couldn’t push it open.

It wasn’t locked.

There was a force outside the door, like a whole wall of silent water, sealing the door shut from the outside.

“Once you’re on this bus,” Little Frost said, “unless you ride it to the end, you probably can’t get off.”

Little Frost turned to look inside the cabin.

The bus was full of passengers.

Everyone was looking down at their phones.

That relaxed posture of giving yourself completely to your phone in a swaying bus—everyone who had ever been through rush hour recognized it.

The person by the window had half their face buried in the crook of their arm, sleeping without a care.

In the last row, the light of a landscape phone screen flickered as a little character inside a game ran around.

On the priority seat, a foot tapped a slow, light beat.

A young man in a cheap white shirt stared at his phone, one collar button undone, a black laptop bag with worn edges at his feet.

A middle-aged man in glasses, impeccably suited, his phone screen lit.

A young mother holding a child clutched the baby in her arms while holding up her phone with one hand.

At the very back of the bus, near the door, sat an old man in sanitation worker’s uniform. He didn’t have a phone; he held a plastic bag in his arms.

At the front, the driver’s seat.

The driver sat there.

Lao Chen.

His badge hung on his chest, with a photo taken when he was young, and a clear number for his years of service next to his name.

Both hands gripped the steering wheel.

His right foot pressed the brake pedal.

His whole body was frozen.

An expression of focused calm, like someone who had just finished something important.

He was pressing the brake.

To keep the passengers from pitching forward.

White Peace stopped in the aisle in the middle of the bus.

She looked around.

Every passenger’s phone screen showed the time frozen at the same second.

She said, “This bus was moving when Doomsday happened.

“When Doomsday came, the driver saw in the rearview mirror that the sky behind him was collapsing—a whole piece of the sky falling down like shattered glass.

“He knew there was no escape. Stepping on the accelerator was useless, turning the wheel was useless.

“He used that last second to press the brake all the way down.

“Forty-one passengers died instantly when the shockwave swept through.

“No one pitched forward. No one was thrown out.

“That one press of the brake.

“Lingering Thoughts sealed this bus in that second.”

Mu Yingying listened, then slowly circled around to the young man in the cheap white shirt.

The young man kept his head down, his phone screen lit.

On the screen was a call log.

Call duration: forty-seven seconds.

The caller ID showed only one character:

Mom.

Mu Yingying saw the hand holding the phone.

His knuckles were white from the grip, veins bulging on the back of his hand.

His whole body was rigid, his shoulders hunched slightly forward, like someone had punched him in the chest and he still hadn’t recovered.

Mu Yingying glanced at his face.

His eye sockets were red, but there were no tears. A row of deep teeth marks on his lower lip, fresh from biting.

She leaned down and looked closer at his phone screen.

First, a text message: he had been fired.

Then, he had started composing a message to his mother.

“Mom, I’m working late—”

Mu Yingying straightened up.

“This guy…”

Little Frost walked over, glanced at the worn laptop bag at the young man’s feet, then at the fake cuff sewn onto his shirt sleeve—washed so many times the fake edge was already curling up.

“He lost his job today,” Little Frost said, her voice very low.

Mu Yingying didn’t respond.

She took a couple more steps back and looked at the middle-aged man with glasses.

His phone screen was also lit.

Not a chat app.

It was a shopping app.

There was only one item in the cart: a pair of pink girls’ sandals with a butterfly knot.

Below the product page was the order confirmation button.

The button was highlighted.

He was about to tap it.

He hadn’t tapped it yet.

Mu Yingying glanced at the sandals’ size.

It was probably for a little girl around four or five years old.