"Have you seen my child?"
A voice drifted past Little Gu's ears. In his line of sight, the woman in the red raincoat in the distance turned her head, as though she had glanced right at him.
A cold shiver ran through him, and Little Gu involuntarily took two steps back.
"What's wrong?" The doctor stood up, concerned, and reached out to steady Little Gu. A strange smell clung to him.
"It's nothing, nothing." Little Gu glanced back. Now that he was closer, he realized that the doctor seemed to be wearing absolutely nothing underneath his white coat.
His expression went through a spectacular series of changes in an instant. Little Gu waved his hands frantically and sidestepped the doctor.
"That's good, then." The white coat kept its smile in place and stood beside Little Gu for a moment before returning to his seat.
Forcing out a thin smile, Little Gu clasped his hands together, goosebumps rising on the backs of them. "That guy's a complete pervert. What kind of people have I run into tonight?"
Little Gu wanted to get off the bus and leave, but the moment he thought about the red raincoat woman waiting for him at the station, he hesitated all over again.
Between a pervert and a vengeful ghost, he weighed his options and decided staying on the bus was probably safer. At least the passengers around him were strange but still human.
Along the way, Huang Ling's phone rang several more times. The man on the other end kept asking where she was — even after Huang Ling told him her location, a few minutes later he would call again to ask where she was.
After this went on several times, Huang Ling figured the man was just being deliberately difficult and switched her phone off altogether.
"You promised me so many times and never once followed through, and now you suddenly know how to repent?" Huang Ling seemed to have suffered a great deal of grievance. Through their conversation, Little Gu had gathered a rough picture of her situation — her husband was unemployed, technically a "freelancer" he called it, and the family depended entirely on Huang Ling to get by.
With the phone switched off, the bus fell quiet again. Occasionally the sound of a child's coughing could be heard.
The heavy rain had drowned the city. Bus Route 104 sped along a seemingly endless road, and nobody knew where it would ultimately end up.
"We're clearly traveling through the city, so why does it feel like we're getting farther and farther from it? Not a trace of life in sight — everything looks so desolate."
The lights of every building outside had gone dark, making the surroundings feel almost foreign.
A few minutes later, the Liwan Mall stop arrived. In the cold, synthetic voice of the automated announcement, the bus opened both its front and back doors.
Little Gu leaned against the glass and took a look. The raincoat woman was standing at the edge of the platform, silently watching the bus.
"Next time she'll probably be standing right at the door. Maybe I should wait for her to get on before I get off?" Little Gu was still working through his escape plan when a quarrel suddenly erupted from the other side of the platform.
They were making quite a commotion — the woman's voice was shrill, the man sounded hysterical, and it seemed like physical blows were being exchanged.
Little Gu craned his neck toward the station. He saw a man and a woman pressed tightly together, clinging to each other while arguing furiously.
The man wanted to get on the bus, but the woman was doing everything in her power to hold him back — scratching, biting, absolutely refusing to let him board.
"What is the deal with these two?" Little Gu hunched his shoulders. "They're fighting this badly — so why haven't they separated? Are they stuck together?"
The bus waited for a full minute before finally pulling away, the man having failed to board thanks to the woman's frantic efforts.
The vehicle started up and slowly rolled out of the bus stop.