Epilogue Episode 2.1: The Bus Driver

Epilogue is a series of short stories following the final moments of different people in a singular location at the end of the world. In season two, the end of the world comes to Hong Kong.

In the first episode of this second season, we are introduced to a bus driver who never aspired to greatness, thrust into a situation that demands it.

Want to read or listen to the rest of Epilogue’s second season? Subscribe to Premium here.

Shum’s bus travelled down the packed city street at a crawl. It was still early morning and already Hong Kong had come alive like a massive hive of ants, everyone set to their task for the day. Except, unlike an ants nest, visitors were very much welcome in Hong Kong. They depended on tourists and passersby for much of their economy. 

That was why Shum’s bus was packed to the brim not just with locals, but a not insignificant number of western tourists as well. In minutes, the bus had gone from empty to a jammed together pack of ill-matching sardines - the locals, looking nonplussed or even bored while the westerners looked uncomfortable or even worried. Shum knew that most of them weren’t used to the density of the population and how that was physically represented in the curb-to-curb cars on the street and wall-to-wall people in his bus. So long as they didn’t make it his problem, Shum didn’t begrudge them their frivolous worry - and to their credit, it was rare that anyone did make a problem for Shum.

Shum had gotten used to the comfortable monotony of his job. He simply got to focus on the task at hand and tune out everything else. It was the kind of work that suited him well. Simple and with low stakes. Arguably, he had a duty of care to his passengers. He had to ensure their safety. But that was hardly different to driving on one’s own. He didn’t have the high drama environment of a hectic office or the life-or-death intensity of a surgical ward to deal with.

Shum had never wanted that for himself. He had never considered that such stakes may find him no matter how much he actively avoided them. 

The day had started so simply. The same as any other. Then came the rumble.

A sound like churning, rolling thunder ripped explosively across the street. Buildings and vehicles alike lost their windows as the shockwave detonated the glass and sent shards catapulting around like projectiles.

Shum’s bus wasn’t spared. In microseconds, before Shum could even parse what was happening, his windows were gone and so were many of his passengers. The interior of the bus was slick with blood, coated like a scene in a Tarantino movie. 

Shum’s passengers had been sliced open like market beef, or skewered by blades of glass that still protruded from their bodies. Some had nearly, if not fully, lost limbs or had their heads severed at the neck. Shum didn’t even have time to scream before his vision swam and he lost control of the bus.

He crashed into the side of the street, crushing a handful of pedestrians between his bus and the side of a building. The bus slammed into sturdy concrete as pieces of people were squeezed into the gaping hole where his windscreen had once been.

Even as he blacked out, Shum had yet to realise that it hadn’t been the crash that blew out the glass but the same shockwave that had massacred his passengers and taken out every other window with them. He hadn’t realised he was covered in numerous wounds of varying depths and that he had come perilously close to be eviscerated by the shower of glass that had blown past him.

It still took him several minutes to process any of what had just occurred when he groggily returned to consciousness in the moments that followed, slumped over a warped and twisted steering wheel. He had heard that pain would sharpen the mind, but his whole body was wracked with a hundred different types of pain and none of them were making the carnage around him make sense.

Without moving, he called back to the passengers behind him. “Is anyone alive? Is anyone okay?”

When he got no response, he switched to stumbling English instead. Still, nobody said anything. With dawning horror, he realised that even if anyone was speaking he simply couldn’t hear them. There was a wet sensation around Shum’s ears and, other than a high-pitched ringing, everything was deadly silent. He would have expected the sounds of groans and screams, creaking metal and cracking stone - the whistling of steam from a damaged engine. Instead, there was just the ringing and silence. He couldn’t hear.

Struggling not to hyperventilate, Shum slowly lifted himself away from his seat. He found he couldn’t exit the cabin around him. Instead, he was forced to clamber out of the jagged portal that used to be his window. He nearly passed out again from how much it hurt. He was already in so much pain he wasn’t even sure if he had been cut by the few remaining shards of glass protruding from the window’s edges. 

On wobbling legs, he struggled down the length of the bus, leaning against its side. The streets, once packed with people and cars were now populated mostly by bodies and scrap metal. Shum could see other survivors like himself, stumbling or crawling over debris. To his alarm though, they were in the minority.

Shum couldn’t understand what had happened. An earthquake? A storm? A bomb? His frantic mind couldn’t hang onto any of those thoughts long enough to decide. He was controlled by the pain and the fear. 

He rounded the edge of the bus and made his way over to the twisted back door. It took him several times longer to make the journey than it would have in good condition. The small length of the bus felt more like a long hike or hurrying down a chain of city blocks. It was only a few metres, but it was so hard.

Shum forced his way into the back of his bus through the dilapidated door. It was the only thing that felt easier than he would have expected. The door was flimsy, but he was broken. Perhaps it evened out, but the ease of which he broke into the vehicle that he had always trusted to see him and his passengers to safety was unnerving in its own special way.

The back of the bus was a microcosm of the world beyond. Battered bodies, shattered glass and structural damage. Even at a glance, Shum could tell that there was no helping the majority of the passengers. You couldn’t save the dead.

He wasn’t sure he could save the living either. Shum wasn’t a doctor or a firefighter. He wasn’t trained for emergencies. He was not a hero. He had never aspired to be anything more than what he was: an ordinary person. He shipped his living cargo from point A to point B and he had always been content with that. 

But reality cared little for his aspirations or lack thereof. He was an ordinary person, yes. But he had been placed in an exceptional situation. There was little choice but to rise to the occasion as best he could. That was how Shum had always lived his life. Moving from one objective to the next. His only duty of care was the safe arrival of his remaining passengers to their new destination: survival.

Painstakingly, he moved through his remaining passengers. Looking at this disaster in familiar terms, Shum found he could think more clearly. He could remember things if he looked at things in terms of tasks to be completed. He knew very little of first aid, but he knew that you should move as little as possible. He knew that you had to put pressure on wounds to stop blood flow. He even remembered that you shouldn’t remove things that had impaled you.

Shum struggled from passenger to passenger. He didn’t speak. Chances were nobody could hear him. He couldn’t hear them. Instead, Shum communicated through action. He moved feeble hands to wounds and pressed down, not moving away until the passenger left their limbs where they were placed. Where some tried to pull glass from their body; he took their hands gently and moved them away, shaking his head. The act made the world spin in his eyes, but he ignored it with surprising ease. He had a job to do. He was focused on the task.

Once Shum reached the furthest end of the bus, right near his driver’s seat, he started to cycle back through. He would repeat that simple lap, doing his best to keep the remaining passengers alive until someone more capable arrived to lend them aid. A doctor. A firefighter. Some sort of hero.

Shum had no idea that, in the eyes of his passengers, that was him.

A second, different rumbling came. A deafening, constant sound. Like the roughest of churning seas had decided to declare war on the land and swallow it. A shadow fell over the bus like some eldritch giant loomed above Hong Kong.

Neither description was far from the truth. Neither was noticed by Shum, whose fading consciousness was laser focused on his monotonous task. An ordinary man just doing his job, in his own eyes. A heroic figure in those of his passengers.

And, soon after, nothing at all.