THE NIGHT BUS DOESN'T STOP DOWNTOWN

More armored transit cops poured out, like clowns from a circus car. They lugged riot shields and pushed into the crowd to form a barricade.

"Get your asses outta here!" Morgan's cop shouted.

The passengers jogged forward. They all wore rubber gloves; a few wore paper masks. They bounced down the steps and ran the gap.

Morgan waited, reluctant to squeeze in line. He followed the bus driver, last man out. The cops closed ranks around him.

"Almost there," a cop shouted.

Then an older man stumbled on the steps.

"Move him," the new driver shrilled, as if he'd snorted helium. "Move him or I'm leaving now."

Two cops squeezed past Morgan, grabbed the old man and threw him up the steps. The other cops backed in, shields low, shoving at the crowd.

A woman in the crowd thrust a swaddled bundle at Morgan. "Please take her, mister."

A transit cop jammed his shield into the woman's shoulder. She staggered but pushed back right away. The cop hit her with his shield again, hard in the face. She dropped the bundle.

The woman cried out, a wordless sob, and dropped to her knees. She caught the bundle as it hit the pavement and her knuckles grated on the asphalt. Chunks of flesh and green pus arced upward, spraying Morgan's legs and chest.

The steps cleared, but a transit cop, a sergeant by his stripes, blocked Morgan's path. "Show me your hands and face," he barked. "Got to know you're clean."

Morgan did as told.

The sergeant ran some sort of scanner over Morgan's hands, then around his head. He nodded. "Okay."

Morgan leaned close, voice trembling. "What's that for?"

"Stupid question," the cop said. "Don't you know you'll catch it sure, pus gets on your skin?"

As the transfer bus rolled away, Morgan sat alone, wrapped in plastic tarps. He shut his eyes and drew a breath, trying to make sense of what had happened.

***

Morgan woke to the beep of his cell-phone alarm. The tarps and his fellow passengers had disappeared. So had the metal grates on the windows. The sign behind the driver listed holiday scheduling again. Outside the bus, halogen and incandescent lights chased away the darkness.

"Coming up to Third and Pike," the driver called.

Morgan's transfer point. He hustled forward, still sorting through the details of his disturbing dream. Something bumped against his ankle as he climbed down to the sidewalk.

He settled against a building, dug the object from his cuff. It looked and felt like the butt of one of the unfiltered Camels his father used to smoke. He brought it close to study it under the hard-yellow streetlight.

A human finger, pasty white and swollen, nail torn to the quick and skin ragged about the stump.

Morgan's hand quivered. He squeezed, a reflex motion. A greasy bit of meat slid from the bone and oozed across his palm, coating his unprotected skin in green and luminescent pus.

K.C. Ball lives in Seattle, Washington. Her short stories have appeared here at Every Day Fiction, as well as various online and print publications, including Analog, Lightspeed, Flash Fiction Online and Murky Depths, the award-winning British fantasy magazine. K.C. won the L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future award in 2009. She is a 2010 graduate of Clarion West writers' workshop and an active member of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America. Her novel, Lifting Up Veronica, is currently being serialized by Every Day Novels. Snapshots from a Black Hole & Other Oddities, a collection of her short stories, was released in January 2012 by Hydra House Books.