CHAPTER 4 – Dead Rules

The bus lurched like a living thing picking up speed.

I gripped the edge of the seat until my fingers hurt. The world outside the fogged windows smeared into white, then… changed.

Through the grime, I caught flashes.

Not city streets. Not anything I recognized.

A burned-out forest, trees like black spears against a gray sky.

The twisted skeleton of a skyscraper, half-collapsed, lights dead.

A stretch of highway choked with rusted cars, all of them frozen mid‑crash.

Each image flickered past too fast to really register, like flipping through channels on some apocalyptic TV.

Then just fog again. Endless, white, swallowing, whatever lay beyond the glass.

I pressed my palm to the cold window. It pushed back with the faintest give, like the fog outside wasn’t air, but something thicker.

“Don’t bother,” a voice said behind me. “There’s nowhere to jump to.”

I turned.

The gruff man from before—thick shoulders, faded flannel shirt, stubble shadowing his jaw—had moved to the seat across the aisle. His eyes were bloodshot but sharp, the kind of look people got from too many graveyard shifts and not enough sleep. Or too many rounds on a death bus.

He jerked his chin toward the window. “Just more dead worlds out there. You don’t want to visit without an invite.”

My throat clicked. “Dead worlds?”

“Levels,” he said. “Stages. The game calls them cute things. Castle this. Carnival that.” He snorted. “It’s still the same: in, suffer, maybe survive, out. Repeat till you’re lucky or interesting enough to earn something permanent.”

“Permanent,” I echoed faintly. “Like… permanent death?”

A humorless smile flickered over his face. “If you’re boring? Yeah.”

My stomach swooped. “No,” I said. “No, I—this is a coma. Or a… psychotic break. I got hit by a car, and my brain spewed horror tropes at me because that’s all I fed it for the last ten years.”

“Cute theory, princess,” he said, unimpressed. “You died.”

The word “princess” scraped across my nerves.

“I am not—”

He held up a hand. “Everyone thinks that at first. Denial. Shock. Anger. Bargaining. Bit of crying. Then you stop wasting time and pay attention, or you get erased in the first five minutes of a round.” He jerked his chin toward the front. “Don’t make the bus do extra work.”

“I just—” My breath hitched. “I didn’t even get to—”

Say goodbye. Finish my manuscript. Prove I wasn’t pathetic.

The thought lodged behind my teeth.

“You died,” he repeated, more gently than I expected. “Car. Street. Lights. Splat. This is… after. Each stop is a round. You go in. The Game gives you an ‘Objective.’” He made quotes in the air. “You reach it, you get back on. You don’t…” He dragged a thumb across his throat.

My hands started to shake.

“So it’s Hell,” I whispered.

He grimaced. “Hell’s in ‘recycle mode,’ remember?” he said, quoting the intercom. “They got bored with just fire and brimstone. Now we get this shit instead.”

I laughed. It came out high and cracked. “Of course. Of course, Hell has a content problem.”

He shrugged heavy shoulders. “Audience likes variety.”

I wrapped my arms around myself, squeezing so tight my ribs ached. “What audience?” I demanded. “Who the hell is watching this? And why would anyone want to?”

He looked at me like I’d asked why the sky was up.

“Everyone not here,” he said. “The Game runs on eyes. Scores. Reactions. Otherwise they’d just stuff us back in the dirt.”

“Princess,” I repeated, tasting the word. It scratched across the part of me that had always felt like the opposite—background extra, not the main character. “Stop calling me that.”

He snorted. “What, you want ‘newbie’? ‘Meat’?”

“How about Willa?” My voice came out sharper than I intended.

He grunted, maybe in approval. “Fine. Willa. I’m Grant. Third time through. Lucky me.”

“Third—” I broke off, chest tight. “Why would you…" how are you still…?”

“Stubborn,” he said simply. “Good at ducking.” His gaze flicked to the front of the bus. “Bad at dying interestingly, apparently.”

I stared at him. At his tired eyes. At the way, he hunched like the weight of three lifetimes sat on his shoulders.

My brain was a mess. None of this made sense, and at the same time… it did. Too well.

Horror logic.

“You expect me to just accept that?” I whispered. “That I’m dead, this is the Game, and I’m supposed to dance like a wind-up toy until your invisible audience gets off on watching me suffer?”

Grant’s gaze softened the tiniest bit. “I expect you to decide fast if you want to play or not,” he said. “Screaming ‘it’s not fair’ doesn’t help. Trust me. We’ve all tried.”

My vision blurred.

Low-status Willa. Quiet Willa. Workhorse, background Willa.

I’d spent years swallowing my anger, making myself smaller so people around me felt bigger. Ethan. My sister. Supervisors who piled extra work on me because I “didn’t complain.”

Now, there was nowhere to put the anger. No socially acceptable box. Just this man, this bus, this game.

“I am not,” I said slowly, “going to be their entertainment. I won’t.”

Grant opened his mouth to argue.

The dark man—my reluctant grim reaper—spoke first.

“She will,” he said, not even turning around.

I snapped my head toward him. “Excuse me?”

He still stood near the front, one hand loosely gripping the pole, as if the bus throwing us around meant nothing to him. He glanced back over his shoulder, eyes cold, assessing.

“You don’t have a choice,” he said. “None of us do.”

“I can refuse,” I insisted because the alternative was lying down and taking it, and I’d done enough of that for one lifetime. “I can—sit here. Stay on the bus. Opt out.”

“Then you die,” he repeated, as if we hadn’t already had this conversation. “Permanently. No more bus. No more anything. Just… off.”

“Maybe I want that,” I snapped. “Maybe I’ve had enough of—of this.”

Of betrayal. Of working and breaking and never being enough.

He watched me, unreadable, as the bus shuddered through another invisible turn.

Grant snorted softly. “Nobody really wants that,” he muttered. “Not at first, anyway.”

The bus rattled. Outside, the fog thickened, swallowing even the flickers of ruined landscapes.

I pressed my lips together, fighting the tremor in them.

Someone else, a lanky man two rows ahead, patted the empty seat beside him. “You can sit here,” he offered, trying for a smile. “First time’s rough. You’ll get used to it.”

Used to dying.

My stomach heaved.

Before I could respond, the dark man shifted.

He moved only a few inches, but it changed the geometry of the space—the empty seat next to *him* is now the easiest, most natural spot for me to land if I stood up.

It wasn’t overt. He didn’t look at me. He didn’t say anything.

But the message was clear: over here.

My chest tightened for reasons I didn’t want to examine.

Grant huffed under his breath. “Hybrid’s already picked you,” he muttered. “Lucky you.”

“Hybrid?” I whispered.

Grant jerked his chin toward the front. “Don’t worry about it yet. Worry about not getting erased in the first round.”

Before I could demand more clarity, the intercom sputtered back to life, vibrating the metal frame.

[ATTENTION, PLAYERS,] it crooned, more chipper than any morning DJ. [PLEASE DIRECT YOUR EYES TO THE FRONT OF THE BUS FOR TODAY’S RULES.]

I didn’t want to. But my gaze snapped up anyway, dragged like a puppet’s.

New text scrolled on a panel above the fogged windshield. Not the destination sign—something below it, glowing in sickly yellow.

[RULES OF PLAY:]

[ONE: SURVIVE THE WORLD TO RIDE AGAIN.]

My fingers dug into the seat.

[TWO: ROMANCE AND BETRAYAL ARE PERMITTED. BONUS POINTS FOR DRAMA.]

A nervous laugh broke out somewhere in the back, and it immediately cut off.

[THREE: NON-CONSENSUAL HARM WILL BE PUNISHED BY THE GAME.]

I swallowed. “Non-consensual harm.” That… was a line. At least. A small, jagged one.

[FOUR: AUDIENCE SCORES PERFORMANCE. HIGH RATINGS MAY EARN… REWARDS.]

That trailing ellipsis dripped promise and threat in equal measure.

Around the bus, translucent, almost invisible bars flickered into view above a few heads—like health bars in a video game but labeled with nothing. Just faint color and length.

Above mine, a short bar glowed, maybe a third full.

Above the dark man, it pulsed longer, brighter. Almost full.

As I watched, the bar above my head ticked up a hair. So did his.

“Oh, great,” I muttered. “We’re getting… ratings.”

Grant snorted. “Told you. Audience. They like your little tantrum.” He jerked his chin at the front. “And they like him.”

The dark man’s bar pulsed brighter than all the others. Champion. Favorite. Pet monster.

I forced myself to breathe.

Survive the world. Don’t get erased. Don’t become their toy.

The bus engine roared.

We burst out of the fog.

For the first time, I saw where we were going.

Outside the front window, a blood-red moon hung low, staining the world in rust and shadow. Jagged black spires clawed at the sky—a castle, massive and gothic and wrong, perched on a cliff above a forest of bare, twisted trees.

The bus hurtled down a narrow, cobbled road toward iron gates taller than any building I’d ever lived in. Torchlight flickered in the distance. Something howled—not a dog, not a wolf. Something worse.

The bus screeched as it braked.

My teeth clicked together. My stomach slammed into my spine.

We jolted to a stop.

The doors hissed open.

Cold, metallic night air slithered in, carrying the scent of damp stone, old blood, and something sweet and rotten underneath.

The intercom’s voice purred through the bus one last time.

[ROUND ONE: DRACULA CASTLE.]

[OBJECTIVE: SURVIVE UNTIL DAWN.]

My newly marked ring finger burned like a brand.

And then there was nothing left to do but stand up and step into my own worst nightmare.