The Last Bus

Lao Zhou was in his eighth year driving the #43 last bus when he met the woman who boarded at the seventh stop every night.

The #43 started at the train station and cut through most of the old city. The last run left at 11:40 PM and reached the terminal well past midnight. After all those years, Zhou had every streetlight and every pothole along the route carved into his bones. He didn't need to check his watch—just a glance at the lights slipping past the windshield told him whether he was running late.

The last bus never had many riders. Sometimes a factory worker getting off the night shift, sometimes a drunk college kid, sometimes an out-of-towner dragging a suitcase from the station. But they all got off before the final stretch. By the last three stops, the bus was usually empty except for Zhou himself.

Three months ago, on a night in October, a woman got on at the North Market stop. Zhou remembered the date because his son had called to say he'd failed his math midterm. She looked about forty, wore a gray wool coat, and carried a dark blue cloth bag—bulging, the contents a mystery. She kept her head down when she tapped her transit card, and all Zhou caught was a strip of graying roots.

She walked to the very back row and sat by the window.

Zhou thought nothing of it. The last bus drew all kinds.

She was there the next night. Same stop. Same time. Same coat, same bag, same window seat in the back.

The night after that. And the night after that. By the tenth night, Zhou began to notice.

Not because she stood out—quite the opposite. She was so quiet you could almost forget she was there. But she showed up every single night, rain or wind, sitting perfectly still in the back row, face turned to the window. Zhou would catch glimpses of her in the rearview mirror. She never looked down, never checked a phone, never dozed off. She just sat upright, watching the city slide by, like a tree.

Zhou noticed something else: she never got off early.

The #43 terminal sat at the edge of town, on a patch of empty land. Five years ago, a housing complex called Textile Village had stood there—rows of concrete apartment blocks built for the workers of the now-defunct textile mill. When the mill shut down, the village was demolished. The developer who'd promised to build something new vanished, and the land had been abandoned ever since. Weeds pushed through the cracked asphalt, waist-high by midsummer. There were no streetlights. Only Zhou's headlights cut two pale beams across the darkness, catching the silhouettes of a few gnarled locust trees in the distance.

The woman got off at the terminal. Every night, she walked into that empty land, bag in hand, swallowed by the dark. Every night, as Zhou swung the bus around, he found himself glancing toward the void. Nothing. Just black.

He wanted to ask. But he stopped himself. After decades behind the wheel, Zhou had learned one thing: don't pry into passengers' business. Everyone had their own road to walk. His job was to get them from one place to another. That was all.

But three months is a long time, and curiosity is a stubborn thing. It lodged itself under his skin like a pebble in a shoe, rubbing a little rawer each night.

Then came a rainy December evening, drizzle fine as sewing needles. The woman got on at the seventh stop as always. Her wool coat was soaked through on one side, hair plastered to her forehead, the frame of her folding umbrella already bent out of shape. Zhou looked at her in the rearview and thought: nobody goes out in this weather unless they have to. She must live close by.

The terminal arrived. She stood and walked toward the front. As she passed the driver's seat, Zhou finally spoke.

"Do you live around here?"

She paused. For a second, she seemed unsure whether the question was meant for her. Then she turned her head slightly, and Zhou saw her face clearly for the first time. An ordinary face—wrinkles, sunspots, small eyes, but bright.

"Mm," she nodded.

"This area..." Zhou said. "It was torn down years ago. Where do you live?"

She didn't answer. She smiled, faintly—the way a puff of warm breath looks on a winter morning, there and gone before you can see it. Then she stepped off the bus, opened that crooked umbrella, and walked toward the empty land.

Zhou killed the engine and pulled the handbrake. He didn't know why. A man who'd been driving buses for thirty years had long outgrown the age of curiosity. But the rain tapping against the windshield that night—tap, tap, tap—was so irritating, so insistent, he couldn't help himself.

He put on his jacket and followed.

The rain wasn't heavy, but it was dense. The dirt paths across the vacant lot had turned soft and slick. Zhou's phone flashlight carved a thin, pale tunnel through the rain, barely reaching ahead. He spotted her about fifty meters away, a gray shape dissolving in the dark, like an old photograph bleached by water.

She stopped under the largest locust tree.

Zhou stopped too, ducking behind a crumbling wall about ten meters back. His heart was pounding harder than it did after eight hours of driving. He felt like an idiot—a man in his fifties chasing a passenger through the mud in the middle of the night, all because of some stupid, inexplicable itch.

The woman stood under the tree for half a minute. Then she bent down, pulled something out of her cloth bag, and placed it beside the tree's roots. Zhou shifted his angle, let the flashlight sweep across—a pair of cloth shoes. Black fabric, hand-stitched soles. The kind someone had made with their own hands.

She straightened up and stood in the rain a moment longer. Then she turned and walked away—not back the way she'd come, but toward the other side of the lot, where a narrow path led to a cluster of old buildings that hadn't been demolished yet. A few scattered lights glowed in the distance.

Zhou didn't follow.

When her figure had completely dissolved into the rain, he walked to the locust tree. His phone light fell on the base—more than one pair of shoes. Seven, maybe eight pairs, arranged in a neat row. Every single toe pointed in the same direction: toward the heart of the empty land, where Textile Village used to stand.

Raindrops pocked the dark fabric, spreading in dark circles. Zhou crouched down. The shoes were all new—or at least never worn. Soles spotless, no dirt, no wear. Different sizes. Some for men, some for women. A few small ones, children's sizes.

When he stood up, his knee cracked. The rain kept coming, the locust leaves rustling overhead. Zhou switched off his flashlight and stood in the dark for a moment.

He remembered when Textile Village was still there, when the #43's terminal was right outside the complex gates. Every evening, crowds of women getting off the mill shift would swarm onto the bus, loud and lively, filling the cabin with the smell of sweat and laundry soap. Those girls would be in their fifties now.

Back then, the terminal wasn't a wasteland. Back then, people sat in the shade of that locust tree, children chased each other around it, a vendor sold watermelons from a wooden cart. Back then, the bus was full—full of bodies, full of noise, full of days so thick and warm you could bite into them.

Zhou walked back to the bus and started the engine. The wipers swept back and forth across the glass, clearing the rain only to have it blur again. He put it in gear and drove back to the depot.

The woman came again the next night. Same stop. Same time. Same window seat. She walked past Zhou without a word, and he said nothing.

The bus reached the terminal. She got off and walked into the empty land. As Zhou turned the bus around, he caught a last glimpse in the rearview—her gray back, vanishing behind the old locust tree.

He parked at the depot, killed the headlights, and sat in the driver's seat a while. The engine's leftover heat slowly bled away. The cabin grew cold. Zhou took a sip from his thermos, put it back in the cup holder, and turned the key.

Before stepping off, he glanced at the back row. Empty.

Zhou locked the doors and headed home. The rain had stopped long ago. The moon had come out at some point, spilling pale light everywhere.

He walked a few steps, then looked back. The bus sat quietly in the parking lot, moonlight pooling on its roof like a dusting of flour. Tomorrow night at 11:40, the #43 last bus would pull out of the train station right on time. The woman would board at the North Market stop, ride to the end of the line, walk into that empty place where nobody lived, and leave another pair of new shoes under the locust tree.

Zhou shoved his hands into his pockets and kept walking. He was thinking about that small pair at the edge of the row—the children's shoes—and whether the rain might have ruined them.