The bullet that struck Chester Thornton Hayes was not the cause of his death. Nor was Mister Hayes the intended target of the errant 9mm slug. He was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time and intercepted 7.45 grams of lead traveling at 990 feet per second.

Without any warning, Chester felt the searing burn of a bullet boring a neat hole through the right side of his abdomen, just above the belt line and below his ribcage. It struck no vital organs before exiting his back. Under other circumstances, the resulting wound would have been readily treatable by modern medicine, leaving the unlucky Mister Hayes with no more than two puckered scars and an enormous hospital bill. But such was not the case. No.

Surprise played a significant role in Chester’s demise. Only seconds before, he’d been standing at his accustomed bus stop after a long day’s work. His feet ached. The possibility of being shot did not enter his tired thoughts. Then came the shock of the bullet passing through his body, and the sick, sinking feeling that followed.

The horizon tilted. Chester Thornton Hayes stumbled. Trying to regain his balance only made things worse. Never an agile man, his feet tangled. He fell backward, arms flailing at the sky. He might have survived the combination of the bullet and the fall if it weren’t for the bus stop bench his neck met on the way to the concrete sidewalk. The impact shattered Chester’s C3 vertebrae, severed his spinal cord, and rendered him very much deceased.

Hours later, the now very dead Mister Hayes opened his eyes. He blinked. He raised his upper body from the cold concrete and propped himself on his elbows. From this low vantage point, he surveyed his surroundings. What he beheld did not inspire confidence or comfort.

Above his head, a streetlamp cast a silver cone over his splayed body and the empty bus stop. More cones of light receded east and west along the deserted industrial street. Sitting utterly alone on a city sidewalk late at night struck him suddenly as very unwise. He rose to his feet as quickly as his bulk allowed. That is when he noticed the hole in his jacket and the bloodstain on his shirt. He poked a finger through the hole and wiggled it.

A single desire filled this entire being. He wanted to be home, snug inside his small apartment. He’d always thought the place depressing and lonely, which it was, but now he wanted it more than anything else in life.

Probably too late for a bus.

He rolled his wrist to check the time. No watch. Slapped his pockets. No wallet, phone, keys, or loose change. Nothing. Cold pulses of fear flowed simultaneously up and down his spine, colliding with and wriggling past each other.

Home, I want to be home. Now.

Chester set off at a brisk pace, determined, a man with a clear destination. He covered exactly twenty-five strides before colliding with an invisible barrier. The impact knocked him flat on his back. Oddly, striking the concrete sidewalk caused him no pain.

He scrambled to his feet and lunged forward. A short lunge. His groping hands slapped against a rubbery wall. His eyes saw nothing except the empty sidewalk that led away to a vanishing point. Chester pushed against the barrier with a strength fed by desperation. The invisible surface flexed and then rebounded. Chester’s hands were flung back, repulsed like magnets turned the wrong way.

Chester Thornton Hayes took a deep breath. He tried to push down the panic that chattered in his brain.

Know the problem before you attempt the solution.

This was his mantra and his method. The descriptor methodical appeared frequently in his DynaTech performance evaluations. The word gave him pride. Dear old DynaTech, his beloved employer, just across the vast empty parking lot behind the deserted bus stop. What would his superiors think of him now, trapped like a hungry insect thwarted by plastic wrap? The thought goaded him into action.

He touched the barrier gently, exploring its surface. The invisible wall ran higher than he could jump which in all fairness was not very high. He moved sideways, left the sidewalk, crossed over the curb, and stepped into the street. The obstacle curved, forcing Chester to walk and grope in a circle. The circumference of the curve seemed to be uniform.

His engineer brain drew a diagram based on the data gathered by his hands. A circle with a radius of twenty-five paces. There had to be an epicenter, the midpoint where all radii intersected. Chester looked over his shoulder, measured an imagined distance, and found himself staring at the bus stop. His methodical mind fell to pieces. He gave up on the wall, stumbled to the bus stop bench, and slumped down.

Chester Thornton Hayes sat for a very long time. He did not sleep. He did not feel hunger or thirst. Dawn lightened the eastern horizon. The first early delivery trucks rumbled past the bus stop. Then he saw a bus, the number seventy-one, his bus. Far down the street, tiny workers clambered out and the bus lurched closer. Two stops to go. One. Chester rose to his feet.

The bus plowed to a halt, blotting out the dawn sky. Air brakes hissed dust from the gutter and folding doors swung open. DynaTech workers clambered from the bus and streamed across the parking lot. A woman stopped inches from Chester. She fished a smartphone from her purse and used it as a mirror to check her makeup. He could smell her. Hair products, the coffee-toothpaste stink of her mouth. The woman dropped her phone into her purse and strode forward, passing through Chester’s portly chest and out his back.

A scream erupted in his throat and lodged there. Only two steps away, the doors of the bus gaped wide. Panic stabbed Chester into motion. He lunged forward, just slipping between the closing doors before they slammed shut.

A sense of deliverance rushed through him. He stood in the aisle of the bus, a smile on his face, one raised hand gripping the familiar rubber loop. The bus pulled away from the curb, heading further out of the city, but who cared? He could ride it to the end of the line, anywhere but that horrible bus stop from hell.

His deliverance lasted less than five seconds, the time it took the bus to travel 62.5 linear feet. An invisible membrane engulfed Chester’s body, flinging him down the aisle of the bus at ten miles per hour. The rubbery barrier catapulted Chester through the back of the bus with no harm done to the bus or himself. He dropped into an awkward heap on the morning pavement. The bus continued down the street. Two delivery trucks and a taxi drove through his non-corporeal body before he managed to scramble over the curb and back to the relative safety of the bus stop.

Chester Thornton Hayes slumped onto the empty bench, crushed under the weight of a stark reality he could not escape. His mind wavered and quailed, but it was still the mind of an engineer. Data had been gathered. The resulting facts must be faced.

He was dead. Worse than dead, a ghost. A ghost haunting a lonely bus stop in an insignificant town. And for how long? Was this his eternity? He struggled to remember various dogmas, searching for a loophole.

The purgatory angle might give him an out, but escaping limbo required living folks to pray for the departed loved one. Chester had no immediate family and no close friends, certainly none that would bother praying for his immortal soul. And he wasn’t Catholic. Who else did the limbo thing? Right, the Mormons, but he wasn’t one of those, either.

Time ticked past. Another bus lumbered to a stop at the curb. A small mob of DynaTech employees swarmed out of the folded doors. Chester leaped to his feet, waved his dead arms, and wailed a ghostly wail. Nothing. Not a quiver. Not one of the livings so much as noticed him. Which, come to think of it, was not much different from when he was alive.

The DynaTech minions hurried across the parking lot. The bus pulled away. Chester cast himself down atop the now familiar bench. Screwed, he was so screwed. Hell would be far better than this. Bring on the lakes of fire.

He experienced a momentary glimpse of eternity. Long, empty avenues retreated to vanishing points and kept right on going. Forever. His human mind rebelled and ran screaming in the opposite direction. A lesson in the primer for the newly deceased: the dead cling to hope at least as tightly as the living.

Chester wracked his addled brain, searching for anything to fight off the panic that threatened to swallow him whole. Reincarnation, that might do it. Sure, the Buddhists, or was it the Hindus? There was a fixed timeline, some exact number of days, then you got booted into a new life.

The thing has a name. Think, man! Bingo? No, that’s stupid. Bardo, that’s what it’s called.

Any decent engineer requires a baseline, the starting point for any event. Faced with the only possibility his brain could comprehend without shriveling, Chester hung his engineer’s hat on reincarnation. A theoretical hat hook at best, but an engineer, even a dead one, had to start somewhere. He had a zero point. Now he needed more data.

The final bus of the morning appeared in the distance. His last chance before the evening rush home. He drew in a deep breath or tried to. Nothing happened. He drew in a deep mental breath.

You’ve got thirty seconds, tops. Make one of them notice you. You’re a ghost. Scare somebody.

He leaped to his feet. For the first time, he noticed he had no shoes. The bus swung to the curb. The doors opened. No time to ponder missing footwear. The living appeared. Chester screamed, he wailed, he cavorted and leered. No reaction. Not one of the humans so much as blinked. He raced after the retreating crowd, desperate for one more chance. That’s when he made a discovery.

Chester lurched forward into the very same space occupied by a middle-aged woman. He felt a quick wave of warmth, the faint pulse of living blood. The woman veered right as if dodging an insect. Lusting for an opportunity, Chester dodged with her. He felt the woman cringe. Her shudder became his joy. She zigged left. He zagged in tandem. Another pang of her fear, and his corresponding spasm of delight.

Zigzag, zagzig, he matched the woman’s frantic steps, soaking up her mounting terror. Then the barrier put an end to his chase. He bounced off the invisible wall and fell backward. The woman scampered away, hellbent on reaching the DynaTech portal.

Chester sat flat on his ass and watched the woman disappear. His face broke into a grin, the happy smile of a child on Christmas morning. Eight hours lay before him, enough time to examine what he had learned. Come quitting time, he’d be ready for them.

At the gloaming of the day, Chester paced the perimeter of his invisible cage, naked as a newborn baby. His belly sagged over his wrinkled scrotum. Varicose veins road mapped his spindly legs.

Across the parking lot, DynaTech opened its doors, expelling the first scrum of tired workers. Chester bounced on the balls of his feet. Rolls of flesh jiggled in the dying light.

The first worker breached the barrier, a young man in the prime of life. Chester pounced. Ah, the sensation of warm flesh and pounding blood. The young man skittered sideways. Crowing a maniacal laugh, Chester let him go.

He leaped into the next body, occupied the poor soul, and sent it reeling. Then another and another. The humans ran madly to and fro as Chester chased and herded them. The living blundered about like a covey of quail, bumped into each other, scampered this way and that in a frantic attempt to reach the bus.

The bus driver stared through the open doors, not comprehending the bedlam. He slammed his hand into the center of the steering wheel. An air horn boomed above the chaos, again and again. The human rabble converged on the sound, a melee now. They pushed and jostled their way aboard the bus with fearful looks cast over their shoulders.

The doors slammed shut. The driver gunned the engine. The bus groaned away from the curb. Frightened faces lined the windows, wide eyes staring back at the empty bus stop.

The terrorized passengers could not see the naked man who collapsed on the bench. Gales of laughter contorted Chester’s body. He threw back his head and howled with an unearthly joy. Nothing in life had ever brought him so much satisfaction. His warbling yowl filled the dying day.

Night would pass and with it the coming of a new day. Chester would be here, ready and waiting. They could count on it.

I am Chester the Ghost, haunter of the DynaTech bus stop. They will remember me. Oh yes, they will remember and fear me. Screw reincarnation, I have a purpose!

Six weeks later, after receiving numerous complaints, the city transit department took action. Workers arrived at the scene. Over the course of two days, they moved the DynaTech bus stop one hundred feet to the east.

*  *  *

Marco Etheridge is a writer of prose, an occasional playwright, and a part-time poet. He lives and writes in Vienna, Austria. His work has been featured in over one hundred reviews and journals across Canada, Australia, the UK, and the USA. “The Wrong Name” is Marco’s latest collection of short fiction. When he isn’t crafting stories, Marco is a contributing editor for a new ‘Zine called Hotch Potch.

Author website:  https://www.marcoetheridgefiction.com/