The light of the service station created a circle of warmth and movement amid the darkness of the cold winter night. Weary travelers pulled in from the highway, gathering like moths around a grimy bulb to refill the petrol tank, stretch aching muscles and hunch over a cup of coffee for a few minutes in the all-night café.
None of these travelers noticed a lonely figure who avoided the bright light waiting among the semitrailers parked at the edge of the tarmac. Only when a bus halted nearby, it’s air brakes hissing, the gravel crushed and crackling under the massive wheels, did the figure stir and creep to the corner of an enormous prime mover to watch as the passengers stepped down and wandered, yawning, into the café.
An elderly man was the last to leave. He lowered an arthritic leg gingerly from the bottom step, leaning heavily on the driver waiting patiently below as he stepped onto the dirty, oily concrete the bus had come to rest on. With this man safely on solid ground, the driver pushed the door closed and headed off towards the lights of the café in the wake of his passengers. Moments later, the figure emerged from the darkness amongst the prime movers and semitrailers and tried tentatively to open the door of the bus, but it wouldn’t open. The figure admitted defeat and retreated into the shadows.
Twenty minutes later the driver returned, leading the informal line of travelers at his back. With a quick twist of his key, the door folded open and he stood aside to let the passengers board the vehicle. The stragglers would be a few moments yet so he climbed aboard, easing into the seat as the remaining passengers came in ones and twos. He didn’t notice a woman step from the shadow of a removal van and close up behind a pair of sleepy teenagers. She mounted the steps, careful to keep the tell-tale knapsack concealed as best she could and continued down the bus, casually checking the webbed pockets behind each seat until she found an empty one. She slipped into the seat, and then leaned forward, taking an age to tie and re-tie her shoe laces to occupy her mind until the bus was to set into motion.
The front door sighed as it closed. The bus lurched forward, to pause briefly at the edge of the highway. A car flew past, leaving the road behind it suddenly black and empty. The driver of the bus mumbled some words under his breath, muttering that people get them selves killed driving at such speeds as the sedan that had just sped past. The driver then gunned the engine, commanding its throaty roar. The bus pulled away from the road-house into the sea of darkness that led them to the next stop.
Only then did the woman sit up and permit herself a smile. In the seat directly diagonal from her were a pair of noisy Chinese tourists, one male and the other female, probably husband and wife. They talked constantly throughout the night. The woman was irritated by this, but knew that if she said something, she risked revealing her presence on the bus. The last bus that she caught, she got kicked off because she didn’t realize that the bus she had boarded was full, so she sat in the isle, only to be spotted by the driver and kicked off at the next road-house.
This time, she had successfully completed her journey of bus jumping to arrive at her destination. As the bus grumbled on, the street light became denser, and the shadowed figure new that she was near her journeys end, the center of the city. The bus wound its was through the streets of the many suburbs to arrive at a small bus terminal in the heart of all the suburbs, Helena City. The driver carefully guided the bus into the terminal, and one of its few unloading bays.
The driver eased out of his seat, flipping the switch for the door at the same time. From the front of the bus the driver called out to his passengers in a tone that could be heard at the back of the bus, but also wasn’t excessively loud:
“Welcome to Helena City! Please ensure that the area around your seats is clean and all rubbish has been put into the bin. Thank you for traveling with Sea Side Coaches.” With this, the driver disembarked the bus with the passengers following to the bins at the side of the bus. As the driver opened the doors at the side, the passengers began to identify and remove their luggage from the bus.
The shadowed figure remained in her seat until she could be the last in the cue to disembark the bus. She stood up and followed the crowed off the bus with her inconspicuous pack following behind her, attached securely to her back.
It was 6 am when the bus arrived at the terminal, and the sun had not as yet risen into the currently foggy sky. It was still considerably cold, so the shadowed figure pulled the hood of her jacket and walked inside the terminal building. The sliding doors moved to the side to allow this newcomer to enter. As she walked in, she spotted a café in the far corner. She walked over and sat in one of the seats at a table furthest from the counter. She placed her back pack on the floor with a thud, allowing it to collapse on to its own back.
One of the attendants had spotted the new coming figure in the brown jumper with the hood over her head, and reluctantly made her way over to take her order. In a half-sleep slightly graveled voice, the figure placed her order of bacon and eggs on toast along with a cappuccino. The waitress wrote this down on her notepad and asked if there was anything else. The figure had responded with a simple “no” to her question.
-----*****-----
The story is not yet complete. This is merely part of the first chapter. Want to add your thoughts to the story? Got any ideas for it? Go to my website. It is dedicated to the creation of this story, and eventually, a series.
Check it out at:
http://untitled.forumotion.com/_________________
You only answer deep within your own mind, consciously, you've forgotten it. That's the way the human mind works. Whenever something is to unpleasant, to shameful to comprehend, we reject it, we erase it from our memories. But the entrant is always there... Nothing is ever really forgotten.
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Subject: Shadows 
Fri May 30, 2008 11:20 am
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