Hexed (a short, absurdist story)
WARNING: I'm not good at writing fiction [1], so the plot is mine but to save time, the story is partly AI-generated. [2][3][4]
Greg Brawinski’s skull felt cramped, like it contained more than just his brain. Between the upcoming Series B funding round and the stabbing feeling behind his left eye, he was barely aware of his legs moving. He stepped off the curb onto 4th Street without looking.
A horn shrieked --a flat blare in the morning air-- followed by the squeal of brakes.
Greg froze. The dented and rusted bumper of a transit bus came to a halt less than a meter from his knees. Inertia made the bus lean forward, bowing toward him like a predator about to pounce, before it veered back.
Greg’s heart hammered against his ribs. His eyesight was blurry, and pareidolia set in: the rectangular headlights weren't just lights; they were narrow, murderous eyes staring down at him in a rage. Just under the right headlight, in flaking white paint, was the identification number: 57005. The two zeros sat directly beneath the right light, trailing down the bumper like a pair of prison teardrop tattoos.
An ominous thought popped into Greg's mind: I will be your death... It didn't feel like his own thought. It felt pushed into his head.
The bus driver yelled something through the open side window, waved a furious arm, and swerved around him. Greg stepped back onto the curb and just stood there for a minute, trembling, trying to shake the terrible feeling that he had just been marked.
Over the next few weeks, the headache spread. And the bus was everywhere. He saw it from his office window, waiting at a red light three floors below. He saw it in his rearview mirror on the highway at 9 PM. He saw it idling right in front of his favorite coffee shop, its engine running in a low, rhythmic hum. And every time, the ominous feeling grew stronger.
He all but stopped sleeping. His software startup was mere weeks away from going public, but while his co-founders obsessed over valuation metrics, Greg spent his nights staring at the ceiling. A bus was a fifteen-ton piece of kinetic energy. It was patient; it wouldn't get tired, and if it hit him, he would die.
So Greg decided to eliminate the threat.
The front desk at the Municipal Transport Depot smelled of industrial floor wax. "You want to buy it?" the clerk asked, blinking behind thick glasses. "Sir, that's the oldest bus in our fleet. A 1998 diesel chunk of junk. We didn't even fix the damage done to it after it was involved in an accident that killed two senior citizens, three weeks ago. It’s scheduled to be decommissioned next month."
"I’ll give you twenty thousand dollars," Greg said. "Cash. Today." The clerk paused, then raised his eyebrows. "You know it's really not worth... I mean... Okay. Our depot manager has been trying to auction it off, so it shouldn't be a problem."
As the clerk tapped away at a dirty keyboard and talked to someone on the phone, Greg leaned over the counter and spotted a bright yellow requisition slip sitting on the desk. It was an order for a new electric bus to replace the fleet line. At the top of the page, printed in bold ink, was the requisition code: R57005. A cold sweat broke out on Greg's neck. It looked like a serial number, but it felt like a threat.
It took almost an hour for the clerk to get approval from his bosses and draw up the paperwork. Greg signed the bill of sale with a shaking hand, handed over the cashier's check, and took the title for the bus.
"Twenty thousand dollars?!" Jamie didn't just yell; her voice cracked with disbelief. She stood in their living room, clutching the bank printout. "You spent twenty thousand dollars of our personal savings on a retired city bus?"
"It’s a strategic asset, Jamie," Greg said, pacing restlessly. He felt a steady stabbing behind his eyes, seemingly in sync with his heartbeat. He hid his trembling hand in his trouser pocket; Jamie might interpret the tremble as nervousness. "You don't understand the risk vector here. It had to be removed from circulation," he added as authoritatively as he could.
"It's a bus, Greg! You don't even drive to work! Yesterday you stood in the hallway at the office and asked standard questions to Dave like he was a temp -- he's been your co-founder for six years! You're talking about 'risk vectors' while you haven't slept in three weeks, and you're dumping our life savings into junk!"
"When the IPO hits at the end of next month, we'll have ten million dollars," he tried to downplay the purchase, his temper flaring through the haze of pain. "Twenty grand is a rounding error! I am protecting us."
"You aren't protecting us, Greg. You're losing your mind," she whispered as she welled up. "Please... go see a doctor. Get a scan. Let someone look at you."
"I don't need a doctor, I need this threat neutralized!"
She looked at him for a long moment, horror replacing her anger. They didn't share a bed that night.
With the bus sitting in a rented storage yard, Greg faced a new problem. Selling it to a scrap yard wasn't safe: what if the frame was melted down and forged into a girder that collapsed on him? Or what if the brakes were salvaged, put onto another vehicle, and failed while he was crossing the street? The bus had to be annihilated. Completely. Irreversibly.
At 3 AM, his eyes bloodshot and burning, Greg found the answer on a geology forum: Mount Yasur. An active, accessible stratovolcano in the South Pacific.
He booked an ocean freight container, hired a heavy crane service, and transferred the remaining $62,000 in their savings account to a logistics firm in Vanuatu -- a nameless entity that operated on crypto and didn't ask questions about cargo manifests.
When Jamie found the empty bank account three days later, she didn't scream. She packed two suitcases, hesitated briefly before she pulled off her wedding ring, and left it on the kitchen island next to a sticky note with the phone number of a local neurologist.
"If you walk out that door, you’re throwing away an empire!" Greg shouted after her, his vision blurring from the pain in his forehead.
Jamie paused at the door, turning back with a look of quiet, heartbroken exhaustion. "I'm not leaving because of the money, Greg. I'm leaving because you're disappearing, and you'd rather destroy everything than admit you're sick."
"I am just choosing to live..." Greg mumbled to the closing door.
A few weeks later, the heat was suffocating. Greg stood next to the bus at the edge of the flat basalt plain, staring up at the jagged rim of Mount Yasur’s crater. The air smelled of sulfur and from beyond the ridge, the roar of the volcanic vent echoed like distant thunder.
Greg climbed into the driver’s seat. Even after only a short exposure to the air, the dashboard was covered in a thin layer of red dust. He turned the key. The diesel engine sprang to life, spitting thick, black smoke from the exhaust. He revved the engine, the square headlights staring toward the outer slope.
"This is it," Greg whispered. He pushed the gear shift into drive, wedged a heavy stone onto the accelerator, and pulled his hand back. The bus lunged forward, gathering speed across the plain toward the rim.
Greg got up from the driver's seat, preparing to jump out of the accordion doors. He reached for the toggle on the dash to open it. Nothing happened. He flicked the switch back and forth frantically -- no hiss of air, no movement. The mechanism was dead.
In a flash of clarity, the prophecy popped into his mind: I will be your death... The bus hadn't been hunting him. He had bought it. He had shipped it across the globe. He had driven it to the mouth of hell himself. And as the last nail in his coffin: he had closed its door without thinking! The bus hadn't come for him: he had built his own trap.
"No!" Greg screamed.
He immediately knew it was too late to remove the stone from the accelerator; the speed was already too high, the volcano's rim too close. So he threw his entire weight against the accordion doors in a desperate attempt to force himself out. The doors didn't budge. Again, shoulder first, pain shooting down his arm. No change.
The edge of the basalt plain was rushing toward him, the inner rim of the volcano mere meters away. His eyes caught the faded red handle above the door frame: EMERGENCY RELEASE. He grabbed it and yanked down with everything he had. The pneumatic line hissed, releasing the pressure, and the doors popped loose.
Greg hurled himself out of the rolling bus, hitting the sharp volcanic slag at almost thirty miles an hour. He tumbled, skin tearing, rocks gouging his chest, stopping just short of the rim.
A split second later, the bus crested the outer lip of the crater and tipped forward into the funnel.
It didn't soar; it tumbled into the steep pit, rolling heavy end-over-end down the crater wall. Metal crumpled, glass shattered, and side panels peeled away as fifteen tons of steel smashed against the volcanic rock on its violent descent. At the bottom of the funnel, inside the red-hot vent, the bus plunged into the molten magma. A tongue of fire and black smoke erupted, swallowing the frame whole.
Greg lay on his stomach in the volcanic ash, gasping for air, bleeding, his clothes scorched. He let out a ragged, almost hysterical laugh. He had beaten it. He was safe.
The IPO was a smashing success. On paper, Greg was now worth twelve million dollars.
He sat in the sleek, minimalist office of his longtime friend, Dr. Mark Brown. Despite his sudden wealth, Greg looked ghastly. Pale. The headache hadn't gone away; in fact, it had only gotten worse. Rubbing his temples had become a habit.
"I don't get it, Mark," Greg muttered, staring at the floor. "The threat is gone. I eliminated the asset. Why do I still feel like I'm dying?"
Dr. Brown sighed, sliding a folder across the mahogany desk. "Greg... the MRI and lab results came back."
Greg looked up. "And?"
"It’s an aggressive glioblastoma. It’s been pressing against your optic nerve for months. That’s what’s been causing the visual distortions, the headaches... The paranoia..." His voice cracked slightly. "At this stage, standard treatments won't touch it anymore. You'd have maybe three months."
Greg sat frozen in disbelief. "Three mo... There’s nothing you can do?"
"There is one thing," Dr. Brown said quickly. "A specialized experimental gene therapy trial in Boston. The early data is... miraculous. It could eradicate the tumor."
Greg’s heart leaped. "Then sign me up! Please!"
"That’s the problem; it’s experimental, so insurance won't cover a dime. We need to move quickly because glioblastomas grow incredibly fast. I already called in some favors at the clinic that is doing the trial. But they require seventy-five thousand dollars upfront to reserve a spot in the trial. Is that something you can... afford?" Dr. Brown looked at Greg intently, gauging his response.
Greg blinked. Seventy-five thousand dollars. He had a mind for numbers and immediately realized: twenty thousand for the bus, plus sixty-two thousand for the shipping and the crane. $82,000. That's what he had used from their savings. The money was gone. Dissolved at the bottom of a big, bubbling cauldron in the South Pacific. And his IPO shares were locked up in a standard six-month post-offering hold; he couldn't liquidate a single dollar of his new fortune until winter.
Greg sat in stunned silence. His hand trembled as he reached out and pulled the medical summary form toward him. At the top right corner of the diagnostic report, printed in bold red ink, was the internal hospital case reference code: UR57005.
There was that number again. Greg stared at it, searching for a hidden meaning.
5 = S, 7 = T ... no. No, this isn't leetspeak.
Focus. He looked closer. Decimal 57005, in hexadecimal, maybe?
57005 modulo 16 is... 13, that's D...
Greg closed his eyes and mumbled as he did the mental arithmetic. His brain was broken but still brilliant.
57005 is... D E A D.
He dropped the paper. I will be your death... A choked sound escaped his throat, soulless and hollow, as the headache flared one last time behind his eyes.
[1] Based on the number of upvotes for my earlier postings, even my ability to write non-fiction is open to debate. 😉
[2] My wife is a poet. She's threatening to divorce me. 😉
[3] If you can't do it the way it should be done, then you should do it the way it can be done.
[4] I ran this text through several AI detectors. The first one reported it as 100% AI-generated (it wasn’t; not 100%). I then revised the text, mostly just removing colorful, cinematic, repetitive, and redundant adjectives. After that, five different AI detectors estimated that between 0% and 83% of the text was AI-generated. The guesstimates (let’s just call them what they are) were fairly evenly spaced across that range.