I ran toward the open bus door with everything I had. There was no time to think.
The moment I climbed on, the door slid shut behind me. Before I could even catch my breath, I turned to look out the window. It didn't matter. The blinding light had already poured inside, swallowing everything in my field of vision. Too bright to see anything. There was nothing in the world but that light.
I squeezed my eyes shut and sank to the floor. The brightness came with pain. But my eyelids were nowhere near thick enough to block it out.
What was strange was the silence. I'd just watched countless fireballs screaming down from the sky — and now there was nothing. No sound at all.
If they'd hit the ground, the shockwaves and explosions should have turned everything above the surface to ash. But aside from the blinding light, there was only stillness. I couldn't make sense of it.
It felt like being sealed inside a vacuum. Come to think of it, even my own breathing and heartbeat seemed to echo only inside my body. The terrifying roar from outside — the bus seemed to be blocking all of it.
I wanted to open my eyes and see what was happening, but I couldn't. The light refused to show me anything.
Eyes still shut, I stood and felt my way through the bus. In the split second before I'd jumped on, I'd caught a glimpse of something — a bed, a table, maybe.
My hand found something solid. A table. And beside it, a place to sit. I lowered myself onto it and tried to breathe.
What the hell is happening?
No matter how hard I thought about it, I couldn't make sense of any of this. If an asteroid had actually hit, I'd already be dead.
So what was that?
No impact. No explosion. Just light, filling the world. What kind of phenomenon even was this?
I sat there with my eyes closed, trying to calm the shock and confusion churning through me. My body wasn't cooperating. It knew it was in danger — cold sweat kept running down my skin, and my heartbeat hammered through my entire chest.
*Oh…*
A wave of dizziness hit me hard. The world seemed to spin even in the dark behind my eyelids. The white light slowly dimmed to gray, then to black, and then—
I opened my eyes.
Wait — were they still closed?
Where—
Oh.
The bus.
Pitch dark.
Why am I face-down on the floor?
I shot upright. It came back to me all at once. The fireballs. The blinding light.
Before, it had been too bright to see anything. Now it was too dark to see anything. I had no idea what was happening, and all I'd experienced were two extremes — blinding white, then absolute black.
I pulled out my phone to use the flashlight.
*Huh?*
It was off. Wouldn't turn on.
*Damn it.*
I started feeling my way around the bus.
*There has to be a power switch somewhere.*
The moment I thought it, my hand found a cluster of switches near the entrance. I started pressing them at random.
One of them flooded the interior with light. Must have been the main overhead switch.
The inside of the bus was cozier than I'd expected. It looked almost exactly like the camper vans I'd seen on YouTube.
*How did he build this out of that old wreck?*
I shook my head in quiet amazement at Grandpa's skill and looked around. A large double bed sat at the far end. In front of it were two small doors, one on each side. I went over and opened them — one was a bathroom with a shower, the other was a storage room.
Turning back toward the entrance, I saw the big table and bench seat. That's where I'd been sitting. Next to the entrance was a small sink and some shelving.
My eyes drifted to the windows.
They stopped there.
Outside every window was pure, absolute darkness.
Nothing.
I moved to the driver's seat and tried the headlights. No response. I looked for the ignition key — it was already in. I turned it to accessory mode. The headlights came on.
Through the slightly open storage room door, I could see a sliver of the yard outside, lit up by the headlights.
Aside from the darkness, everything looked exactly the same as always.
I thought about stepping outside to check. I dropped that idea immediately.
Something was moving out there.
No —
*Things* were moving out there.
*What… what is that?*
I considered killing the headlights, but then I'd be completely blind. I left them on.
Instead, I switched off the interior lights. From outside, no one would be able to see in.
I crouched low in the seat and watched through the window.
Dark shapes moved through the yard — appearing, disappearing, reappearing. The storage room door was only cracked open, so my view was narrow.
*What are those things?*
They moved upright. Bipedal. I thought for a second they might be people, but they were too tall. Way too tall. I couldn't begin to identify what they were.
Then the fear hit me like a physical blow.
One of the shapes had turned toward the storage room door. It was looking through the gap. Straight at me.
Two eyes. Staring.
Two red eyes. Not human.
I dropped to the floor of the bus. My whole body locked up. I couldn't move.
*Oh…*
I couldn't even lift my head. The thing outside seemed to be walking toward me.
I lay there on the floor for a long time, paralyzed. But I heard nothing. Felt no vibration. No footsteps.
*Am I dreaming?*
I'd seen those eyes. I was sure of it. But the whole thing was so unreal that I was starting to doubt my own memory.
I couldn't stay down forever. Slowly, I raised my head and looked toward the front windshield.
The shape was gone.
I let out a breath and carefully got up, moving to the bench seat. I sat down and turned my head —
"Holy—!"
Right there. At the window beside me. Those two red eyes, staring in.
I nearly blacked out. Somehow my body had already moved — I was at the far end of the bus, pressed against the bed, before I even registered it.
*When did I—?*
I'd heard that people in life-threatening situations could tap into something beyond their normal limits. Apparently that was real.
I pulled the blanket over myself, leaving just my eyes uncovered. Like I used to do as a kid watching something scary on TV. Maybe it looked ridiculous — a grown man hiding under a blanket. But when real fear takes hold, adults and kids are exactly the same.
Huddled there with the blanket over my head, I actually felt safer. Like one thin layer of fabric could hold back everything in the world.
Once my breathing steadied a little, I peeked out from under the blanket and carefully pulled the curtain aside on the window nearest the bed. There were three windows in the sleeping area, all with heavy curtains drawn. I checked each one.
Nothing outside. Nothing visible.
I worked up the nerve to move back toward the main area, toward the window where I'd seen those eyes.
*Oh god.*
They were still there.
But something was off. The creature seemed to be looking in — except it didn't seem to actually see anything inside. It was like someone standing outside a tinted window, staring at their own reflection.
I moved closer.
The thing had its face pressed against the glass, studying itself. That's what it looked like. Like it was fascinated by its own reflection.
The fear was still there, but something else was rising underneath it — some irrational, sourceless courage pushing up from somewhere deep.
A terrifying creature was right in front of me, and my body moved anyway. I didn't understand it. I went back to the bench seat and sat down carefully.
The fear was fading. Curiosity was filling the space it left behind.
I sat there with only a pane of glass between us and studied the thing's face up close.
It wasn't human. The shape was vaguely humanoid, but the eyes were red, the nose was nearly flat, and the mouth — it split wide, all the way back to below the ears.
I stared at it.
It was a monster.
Then I noticed the yard beyond the storage room door, lit by the headlights. There were more of them. Not just one or two moving around.
All different ones.
I couldn't believe what I was seeing. These creatures were beyond anything I could explain — and even watching them with my own eyes, I couldn't fully accept that they were real.
In that moment, I understood just how small and fragile human knowledge really was. Everything we thought we knew. Everything I thought I knew.
Then a massive sound hit from outside.
It was like the vacuum seal had broken — all the noise that had been held back came crashing in at once.
The instant it did, the creature at my window vanished. Gone. Not walking away — just gone. It moved in flickers, like it was skipping through space, visible for a fraction of a second at a time, and then it wasn't there anymore.
The shapes in the yard disappeared too. All of them, as if they'd been called somewhere. The quiet returned.
I didn't have the nerve to step outside. As long as I stayed in the bus, I didn't think they could see me. But how long could I stay in here?
I tried the sink. Nothing came out.
*Right… camper vans have some kind of switch for the water pump…*
I had a vague memory of seeing it in a video. I went back to the switch panel near the entrance.
The interior was dark, so I flipped the main lights on just long enough to find a smaller lamp switch, then turned the main lights back off. Too much light made me uneasy.
There were a lot of switches. Ventilation fan, various lights, refrigerator power, water pump, air conditioning, space heater — all kinds of things. I found the water pump switch and flipped it. A faint mechanical hum started up, and a moment later, water trickled out of the faucet — low pressure, but there. I turned it off and kept looking around.
The refrigerator switch was already on. Now that I thought about it, I'd been hearing that low hum the whole time.
*Where is it?*
I pulled on what looked like a cabinet handle.
*Oh.*
The refrigerator. It didn't look anything like a refrigerator door.
Inside: not exactly a full stock, but something. A small pack of pork belly. One sausage. One bottle of water. One can of beer. A cucumber. A banana.
*Feels generous and disappointing at the same time.*
I opened the cabinet next to it.
One pack of instant rice. Soy sauce. Cooking oil. One can of tuna. One pack of seasoned seaweed. And… that was it.
I had no idea how long that would last, but at least there was food. That was something.
A drawer nearby held basic utensils and a few kitchen tools.
Whatever the case — I was starting to understand why Grandpa had told me to come here. I still didn't know how he'd known something like this was going to happen. But at the very least, he'd called me here to keep me alive.
I needed to survive.
I had no information about what was happening outside. But I knew at least this much: something had appeared — something not human. Monsters. Whether they were hostile, I couldn't say yet. I hadn't seen them hurt anyone.
But I didn't think they'd traveled here to make friends.
And I didn't know if what I'd seen was the only kind of creature out there.
First — survive.
If I could help someone — help them.
And then —
I needed to find Grandpa.
I wanted to see him. Ask him.
*How did you know? And what do I do now?*
That's when something appeared at the storage room door outside.
A small hand.