Chapter 2: The Road to Nowhere

Chapter 2: The Road to Nowhere

The first hour had been noisy, filled with the usual high school cacophony of shared earbuds, shouted jokes, and the crinkling of snack bags. The second hour was quieter. By the third, a heavy, unnatural silence had fallen over the bus, thick and oppressive as the fog that still refused to burn off outside.

Travis stared out the window, his knee a dull, throbbing metronome counting out their inexplicable journey. The world beyond the glass was a hypnotic, maddening loop. A dense stretch of woods, dark and foreboding, would give way to an identical-looking road. Then, the trees would thin, and they’d be flanked by an endless, rustling sea of corn. Then, the woods would reclaim the view. They’d passed the same gnarled oak with a tire swing hanging from its branch at least four times.

He wasn’t the only one who noticed. Mark, the loudmouth from class, had been keeping a tally on a crumpled piece of paper.

What unsettled Travis more, however, were the owls. In the shadowed depths of the woods, perched on low branches in the middle of the day, dozens of them sat unnervingly still. Great Horned Owls, their feathery tufts like devil’s horns, their huge, yellow eyes unblinking. They watched the bus pass with a collective, predatory focus that made the skin on Travis’s arms crawl. It wasn't natural.

Beside him, Grace sat ramrod straight, her face a mask of bored indifference. But her knuckles were white where she gripped her phone, and her thumb was tracing frantic, useless circles on the blank screen. Her other hand was at her throat, her fingers worrying the small silver locket so much he was surprised it hadn't snapped off its chain.

“You see them, right?” Travis murmured, his voice low.

Grace didn’t turn her head. “See what?”

“The owls. They’re everywhere. They’re not supposed to be out during the day like this. Not like this.”

She gave a small, almost imperceptible shake of her head, a silent plea for him not to give voice to the strangeness, as if speaking it would make it more real. “They’re just birds, Brewer.”

But her denial was paper-thin. He saw her eyes flick towards the window, just for a second, before returning to the useless screen in her hands.

The tension on the bus finally snapped. Mark stood up, his face flushed with frustration, and stomped down the aisle to the front.

“Mrs. ClearField, this is insane,” he said, his voice loud in the quiet bus. “My GPS hasn’t worked for hours, but I know we’ve passed that same weird tree at least five times. Where are you taking us? This isn’t a ‘scenic route,’ it’s a circle.”

Mrs. ClearField, who had been staring straight ahead with a placid, unnerving smile, slowly turned. The smile didn't reach her eyes. Her voice, when she spoke, was as cold and sharp as broken glass.

“Sit down, Mark. The journey is part of the lesson. The lesson is about patience. You are failing.”

“Failing? This is crazy!” another student called out from the back.

The bus driver’s head moved slightly. His gaze found Mark’s in the wide rearview mirror. The man hadn’t said a word the entire trip, but the sheer malevolence in that brief look was enough. A palpable wave of menace rolled down the length of the bus. Mark visibly flinched, his bravado deflating like a punctured tire. Wordlessly, he retreated to his seat.

The message was clear. They were not passengers. They were cargo.

The woods finally receded for good, giving way to corn. The fields stretched from the edge of the road to the horizon on both sides, a claustrophobic canyon of green and gold stalks that seemed to drink the light from the sickly yellow sky. The corn was too tall, too lush for late autumn. It should have been harvested weeks ago.

The bus slowed, its engine groaning as if tired from the endless journey. Travis leaned closer to the window, his breath fogging the cool glass. Grace, her pretense of calm shattered by the confrontation with Mrs. ClearField, was now openly staring out the window, her fear a tangible thing in the small space between them.

And then they saw it.

About a hundred yards into the field on their right stood a lone scarecrow. It was a classic, almost cliché figure—a cross of weathered wood dressed in tattered flannel and overalls, its head a lumpy burlap sack with crudely painted features. It was the kind of thing you’d see in a Halloween store.

But something was wrong. It was too… present. It held a stillness that felt more like a coiled predator than an inanimate object.

“What the hell is that?” Travis whispered.

The bus crawled along, the rustling of the corn a constant, whispering hiss against the silence. As they drew parallel to the scarecrow, Travis felt the blood freeze in his veins.

The burlap head, with its stitched-on, maniacal grin, began to turn.

It wasn't the wind. There was no wind. The movement was slow, deliberate, a grinding, wooden creak they could almost feel through the floor of the bus. Its painted black eyes, soulless and empty, swiveled on its stick neck to follow their progress. It watched them. It saw them.

A choked gasp escaped Grace’s lips. Her manicured hand shot out and clamped onto Travis’s forearm, her nails digging into his skin. Her mask of cool superiority was gone, vaporized. In its place was raw, undiluted terror. Her green eyes were wide, locked on the thing in the field.

Travis couldn’t look away. The scarecrow’s head tracked them until the bus had passed, its painted smile seeming to widen, a black maw in the fading light. Then, just as they were about to lose sight of it, it stopped. It faced the road, a silent, malevolent sentinel guarding its domain.

He turned to Grace. Her face was pale, her breathing shallow. She was still clutching his arm, her grip iron-tight. Their eyes met, and in that shared moment of impossible horror, the chasm between the jock and the cheerleader vanished. They were just two teenagers, trapped on a road to nowhere, who had just seen something that shouldn't exist.

Travis looked around the bus. The other students were slumped in their seats, either asleep or lost in their own misery. No one else had seen it. The knowledge was a cold, isolating weight.

They were alone in this.

The bus rumbled on, deeper and deeper into the endless corn. The hostile teacher, the silent driver, the nine-hour lie—it all clicked into a terrifying new context. This wasn’t a field trip. It was a delivery. And the grinning thing in the field was waiting for them.