Seer Frights

Don't Ride Route 13

The 7:15 bus. Route 13. Two kids who don’t know each other. One wrong turn.

There is no driver.

The city’s first autonomous bus — a sleek prototype that was never supposed to carry passengers — has quietly replaced the evening Route 13 run. Nobody announced it. Nobody approved it. The bus drives itself, the doors seal on their own, and the route it’s following hasn’t existed since 1998.

Two kids and a handful of passengers are trapped inside a sealed machine retracing a dead man’s last route — and the streets outside the windows aren’t on any map.

Genre Horror

Author B. Carter

Series Seer Frights

Buy Build

. . .

The bus depot was empty at 4 AM. Fourteen buses in their bays, dark and still. Every one powered down.

Except Bay 9.

The AV-9 was sealed. Doors locked. Screens black. No one had ever ridden this bus.

But the seat behind the driver’s console was warm.

Not heated. Not sun-warm. Four in the morning, no windows. Just warm, the way a chair is warm when someone has just stood up.

On the dashcam, a single frame captured at 3:47 AM. A smudge of light in the driver’s mirror. It could have been a reflection. Could have been a lens flare. But it was in the shape of someone sitting in that warm seat, facing forward. As if checking the route one more time.

Who’s Who

Meet the passengers on the 7:15.

Maya Chen

The one who noticed the route was wrong. Planner, three colored pens, phone full of 111 photos of her late grandmother she never backed up. Sits fourth row, window, left — same seat every time. Notices when patterns break.

Marcus Washington

The one who wouldn’t stop talking. Fresh cut, dark hoodie, headphones that aren’t connected to anything, pen-drumming on every surface in the back row. Lives with Uncle Earl above the barbershop. Treats the bus like his living room. Braver than anyone expected, including him.

Mrs. Gladys Park

The one who remembered. Quilted tote bag, butterscotch candy, thermos of tea. Retired postal worker. Been riding Route 13 for twenty years. Was on the bus the night Frank didn’t make it.

Victor Olvera

The one who built the road. Frank’s grandson. Systems engineer at Meridian Transit Systems. Mapped every block of the old Route 13 and fed it into the bus’s memory. A memorial in code. Didn’t mean for it to come alive.

The AV-9

The bus. Autonomous, electric, sealed. No wheel, no driver, no way out. It was supposed to drive the current Route 13. Instead, it drives Frank’s route — every turn, every stop, every pause — because someone who loved the driver programmed it to remember.

Frank Olvera

The one who drove the bus. Twenty-eight years, Route 13, every day. Kept butterscotch in his shirt pocket. Died behind the wheel on November 3, 1998. Even when his heart was stopping, he was being careful.

Read a Snippet

She looked toward the front of the bus — not at the road, not at the other passengers, but at the space where the driver should be. She’d been looking at her phone for the first three stops. She hadn’t looked up front. Now she did.

There was no driver.

Not “the driver stepped away.” Not “the driver is behind a partition.” There was no driver’s seat. The entire front of the bus was different — where the steering wheel and the pedals and the rearview mirror and the heavy vinyl seat should have been, there was a curved white console. Smooth, seamless, like a kitchen countertop. A touchscreen, dark except for a faint blue glow. A camera array mounted on a slim brushed-steel pole. A small speaker recessed into the panel. No wheel. No pedals. No mirror. No human.

The bus was driving itself.

Maya sat up straight. She looked at the other passengers. Mrs. Park was sipping from her thermos, looking out the window with the calm contentment of a woman who’d been riding this bus for twenty years and expected nothing surprising. Tyler was typing. The woman with the stroller was scrolling her phone. The teenagers were in their phones. The Back Row Kid had his eyes closed, mouth moving, deep in a beat.

Nobody had noticed. Or nobody cared.

She reached for her phone. Her hand was steady — it was always steady when something was wrong. She didn’t panic. She catalogued. She observed and recorded and filed. Panic was for people who didn’t have systems. Maya had systems.