Chapter 8: Erased

Chapter 8: Erased

The stack of cash sat on the red vinyl tabletop, a vulgar monument to their erased lives. Outside the diner window, the sun began to dip below the rooftops of Mercy Hollows, painting the undersides of the clouds in shades of bruised orange and purple. The sickly yellow of the sky was finally bleeding away into a more familiar dusk, but it offered no comfort.

Without a word, Grace reached out and took the money. Her hand, caked in dried blood, left a faint, dark smear on the top bill. She folded the wad and pushed it into the pocket of her torn leggings. The act was mechanical, devoid of greed or relief. It was simply the next required step in a nightmare that refused to end.

They slid out of the booth. Travis’s calf muscle felt like a bundle of shredded wires, and he leaned heavily on the table to stand. Every eye in the diner followed their slow, painful exit, the gazes still holding that same placid, soul-chilling indifference. The bell above the door chimed softly as they stepped back onto the street, leaving the false warmth of the diner behind.

The north road was a straight, empty ribbon of asphalt that shot out of town and vanished into the encroaching sea of corn. They walked, a two-person funeral procession for themselves. The silence between them was no longer one of shared terror, but of shared annihilation. What was there to say? The Sheriff’s words echoed in the empty spaces: No one remembers you. You don't fit anymore.

Travis looked down at his letterman jacket. The proud chenille ‘W’ for his high school was matted with filth and gore. It was a relic from a dead civilization, an artifact of a life he could no longer prove he had ever lived.

They found the bus stop easily. It was nothing more than a rusted metal pole with a faded, barely-legible sign. It stood alone on a patch of gravel, besieged on three sides by the towering, whispering walls of corn. As the last sliver of the sun disappeared, plunging the world into a deep twilight, a profound loneliness settled over them. They were adrift in a hostile ocean, and this pathetic pole was their only raft.

Grace sank to the ground, her back against the post, and drew her knees to her chest. Her hand went to her throat, her fingers wrapping around the small, silver locket she always wore. She didn’t fidget with it now. She just held it, her knuckles white, as if it were the last solid thing in the universe.

Travis remained standing, watching the empty road, his body a tight coil of pain and dread. He was listening for an engine, for the rumble of an approaching vehicle.

But the bus made no sound.

One moment the road was empty; the next, it was there. It glided out of the deep twilight shadows like a ship emerging from fog, its headlights off. It was an old-fashioned coach, with rounded corners and fluted chrome sides, reminiscent of the pristine, ghostly cars parked in town. It hissed to a stop before them, the sound of its air brakes startlingly loud in the dead quiet. The doors folded open with a sigh.

The driver was a silhouette, a gaunt shape behind the enormous steering wheel, his face lost in the deep shadow of a driver’s cap, just like the one who had brought them here. The interior of the bus was empty, the seats upholstered in a clean, dark red fabric. A single, dim light glowed from the ceiling.

This wasn’t a rescue. It was a transfer. An exchange from one cell to another.

Grace looked up at Travis, her green eyes asking a question for which there was no answer. He just gave a slight, grim nod. There was no other choice. This was the path they had been given.

She rose stiffly and climbed the steps. Travis followed, his bad leg protesting with every movement. The doors hissed shut behind him, sealing them inside. The air was sterile, cold, and smelled faintly of ozone.

The bus pulled away from the curb with an unnatural smoothness, accelerating into the night. Travis and Grace took a seat together in the middle, the worn vinyl cool against their skin. Through the window, they watched Mercy Hollows slide by—the silent cinema, the empty town square, the warm, mocking lights of the diner. They passed the last house, and then the town was gone, consumed by the darkness and the endless, rustling corn.

The journey was a mirror image of the one that had brought them here. A straight road cutting through an infinite field under a starless sky. There were no turns, no other cars, no signs of civilization. Just the rhythmic hum of the bus and the hypnotic rush of cornstalks past the window. They were in the god’s domain again, but this time they were its sanctioned ghosts, permitted to leave but never to truly escape.

The crushing weight of their new reality settled in Travis’s chest, heavy and suffocating. They were nothing. They were no one. Their pasts had been scooped out, leaving them hollow. The Sheriff’s final warning circled in his mind: Your reality is your own now. Try to force it on anyone else, and it will break.

He looked at Grace. She was staring out the window, but her eyes were unfocused, seeing nothing but the ghosts of their friends in the dark glass. The ice queen, the survivor, the traumatized girl—all of it was being sanded away by this placid, moving void, leaving behind an emptiness that terrified him more than any scarecrow.

An act of defiance, small and desperate, sparked within him. A refusal to simply vanish. A refusal to let the Abattoir, the Crimson Baptism, the Hollow Sheriff be the final, unwritten words of their lives.

He reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone. He had tried it in the town, and it had been a dead brick. Now, he pressed the power button, not with hope, but with a grim sense of purpose.

The screen flickered to life.

The carrier logo appeared, then his home screen. Grace’s head turned, her eyes focusing on the small rectangle of light in his hand. At the top of the screen, where the signal bars should have been, were the words: NO SERVICE.

Of course. Connection to the world they knew was severed forever. But the device still worked. It had power. It had memory.

He thumbed open the simple note-taking app. A blank white page glowed in the darkness of the bus. His thumbs, smeared with grime and dried blood, hovered over the virtual keyboard.

What could he write? Where could he even begin?

He started with the only truth that mattered now.

My name is Travis Brewer. The girl next to me is Grace Caldwell.

His thumbs began to move faster, tapping out a frantic, desperate rhythm against the glass. The words poured out, clumsy and raw, a torrent of horror and memory.

We were students at Northgate High. We were on a field trip. They told us it was to a farm. They lied.

The bus drove on, hurtling through the endless night. Outside was the oppressive kingdom of the Cornfield God. Inside was the quiet, humming silence of their mobile prison. And in the center of it all, lit by the ghostly glow of a phone screen, two erased teenagers fought their own extinction, one frantic, whispered word at a time. Their journey wasn't over. They were fugitives from reality itself, and this desperate, fragmented story was their only weapon.