No Immediate Risk

Prologue:

Within the Canadian Justice System, ‘the underlying principle of the NCRMD defense remains that a person is not held criminally responsible if, at the time of the offence, they had a mental disorder that rendered them incapable of appreciating the nature of their actions or knowing they were wrong. The verdict is neither a conviction nor an acquittal, but results in management by a provincial or territorial Review Board focused on public safety and the accused's treatment needs.’

***

July 30, 2008

The Greyhound bus moved along the TransCanada highway like a steady heartbeat through the prairie night. The hum of the tires filled the dark, low and hypnotic, the kind of sound that swallowed time. Eli Porter sat by the window, half-awake, Discman playing, his reflection fading in and out with the lights of distant farmhouses. It was after midnight, and the rest of the passengers slept in postures of surrender – heads tilted back, mouths open, faces slackened into trust.

He liked that sound, that rhythm of travel. It meant motion, escape, something between one place and the next. The glass was cold beneath his temple, and the sky beyond was a lidless black. He was on his way home now – a couple of provinces, a couple of nights on buses and borrowed couches. His duffel bag was packed light: a hoodie that still smelled like motor oil, a book he swore he’d finish this time, and a gift for his little sister – something small and silly he picked up at a truck stop.

***

February 6, 2001

I haven’t been sleeping much. There’s a hum under everything lately – streetlights, the fridge, even the walls. I asked maintenance about it and they said they couldn’t hear a thing. Maybe I’m just tired. Maybe the shift work at the church is catching up to me.

I tried to call the clinic today. The woman said the next available appointment with a psychiatrist was in May. I thanked her, because that’s what you do.

***

Eli Porter was twenty-two, the kind of young man who still carried the last traces of boyhood in his grin. He worked the summer circuit, a carnival barker with a voice that could slice through the roar of the midway – part salesman, part showman, part poet of cheap thrills. He’d toss a ring onto a milk bottle with a flick of his wrist just to prove it could be done, wink at the kids watching, and shout, “Step right up! Everyone’s a winner tonight!”

He had the lean build of someone who worked with his hands – stringing lights, hoisting tents, fixing the generator when it sputtered at dusk. His shirts were always rolled at the sleeves, his forearms tanned and strong. Dust and sugar from the cotton candy stand clung to him by nightfall, but he didn’t mind. It was part of the life – the noise, the lights, the small towns that blurred together like a string of colored bulbs.

He was saving up for something bigger. He told people he’d go back to school one day, maybe study mechanics, maybe business. But mostly, he talked about his mom – how she’d cry every time he left home and pack sandwiches like he was still ten. He’d promised her he’d be careful, that he’d come home soon.

***

March 10, 2005

I heard something last night. Not just the hum – the words. Faint, behind the radiator, like someone whispering through the pipes. I turned off the heat but it didn’t stop. I called the mental health helpline this morning. The person on the phone said to try grounding exercises, breathing. They were kind, but I could tell they wanted to hang up.

I don’t blame them. I sound crazy even to myself.

***

He was born small, one month too soon. Slow to speak, slow to walk. His mother was a math teacher, his father a custodian – good people who believed that hard work could fix anything. And for a long time, it did. Daniel Han grew stronger, studied engineering, learned to build order from chaos. He met his love, Anna, at a factory in Beijing. They married, moved to Canada in 2001, excited to start their new life. A better life. He worked quietly – church custodian, night janitor, gas station attendant – never complaining, always on time. People called him gentle. Reliable.

Then, slowly, something began to change.

Dan began to hear a voice. It came like a thought that wasn’t his own, soft at first, promising meaning where life had begun to feel hollow. He prayed harder, thinking it was God. The voice told him he was chosen, that danger was near – aliens were among us – that he must stay vigilant. He stopped sleeping. He walked the streets at night, muttering prayers. His wife begged him to go see a doctor, but the waitlist was long and the fear of hospitals was deeper than reason. He wasn’t from here. The language barrier didn’t help matters. When he tried once to tell them about the voice, the system marked him “no immediate risk” and sent him home. He didn’t know he was sick. He only knew he was trying to be faithful.

***

There was a gentleness in Eli, a kind of easy warmth that made strangers talk to him like they’d known him for years. He never mocked anyone who couldn’t win the game. He’d give a kid a free turn when no one was looking. People liked Eli. He wasn’t loud, not the center of any room, but steady – a grin that came easy, eyes that met yours straight. He’d give up the last of his change if someone else’s tank was running dry. The kind of “good boy” everyone says they don’t make like that anymore.

The bus driver coughed, adjusting the radio. Eli shifted in his seat. He took off his headphones for a moment and listened to the world as it really was – the engine, the breathing, the faint rattle of something loose in the overhead rack. The bus slowed, the engine dropping to a low groan. He rubbed his eyes. Through the glass he saw only the blurred outline of a lone figure at the side of the road. The driver braked, and the lights washed over the man – a dark shape, standing as still as a post, a small duffel bag at his feet.

***

March 28, 2006

The voice is back. It’s getting clearer. It’s not coming through the pipes anymore. Sometimes it’s outside, sometimes it’s in my head. The words are soft, but they make sense. They say I’m chosen. That should scare me, but it doesn’t. Mostly, it feels like relief. Someone finally sees me.

***

Dan used to know where his thoughts began. Now he wasn’t so sure. A rustle in the corner of the room turns into jumbled words before he’s sure he has heard anything at all. The refrigerator hums. The pipes tick. The old clock on the wall coughs once, then settles. Ordinary sounds. But they’ve started talking to each other when he isn’t looking directly at them.

He keeps the curtains in the tiny, one bedroom apartment closed. Every time he forgets and parts them, someone is there – not a person, exactly, but a presence, a weight pressing from the other side of the glass. The neighbors pretend not to see, but he knows they’ve joined in. Their porch lights blink in patterns. Their dogs bark only when he opens the door. He’s afraid of dogs.

The world is conspiring in small, polite ways. The newspaper headlines rearrange themselves by morning. The bus ads show him messages no one else can read. He tries to tell himself it’s exhaustion. He hasn’t been sleeping much. But sleep doesn’t feel safe. The whisper waits there. It isn’t a voice – it’s the thought before the thought, the reason that comes before the question.

When he walks outside, the trees lean in. Their shadows stretch too far across the pavement, clawing for his feet. Even the wind seems to carry fragments of the whisper, pushing it against his ear until he can almost make out the words: they’re coming for you because you know.

He stops walking after that. Stops calling friends. He sits by the window instead, hands folded, watching the light change. The whisper grows calm, almost kind. It tells him there’s a pattern, a purpose. That he’s the only one awake enough to see it. By the time night falls, he feels something close to peace. Everything fits. The world has been explained, finally. All that’s left is to follow the instruction waiting behind the whisper.

***

April 15, 2007

I told the walk-in doctor about the voices. He gave me a number to call for mental health services. They said the waitlist is long. Six to nine months for an assessment. I’ve started writing the words down when I hear them. They come to me at night. They say there’s a plan. That I have a role. That the noise isn’t noise – it’s communication. Sometimes I believe them.

***

Eli was tired tonight. He’d just finished a stint in Edmonton, heading home for a few weeks of rest. His duffel was under the seat, his headphones on – head tilted to the window, rap music blared in his ears. He was dreaming of home-cooked meals and his mom’s warm hug waiting at the station. He was halfway between worlds.

The man – of some sort of Asian descent – stepped aboard without looking up. He nodded to the driver, said nothing, and moved down the aisle. There was nothing seemingly strange about him – just a kind of vacancy, a quiet absence where expression should have been. The man took the empty seat beside Eli, stowed his bag beneath his seat and settled in.

Eli turned slightly toward the window again, a polite nod that didn’t quite happen. The seat between them was close enough that their sleeves brushed when the bus turned. He felt a small discomfort then – like a change in air pressure. The bus closed the doors with a depressurized hiss, shifting gears until they picked up speed. The headlights carved tunnels of white into the dark highway.

He tried to rest. But something about the man beside him kept him hovering just above sleep – the rhythm of his breath, uneven and deliberate, like someone whispering to themselves but too softly to make sense. Eli told himself not to care. People were strange, and night travel made them stranger. Still, he couldn’t stop noticing: the man’s hands, motionless on his knees. The stillness of his shoulders. The faintest tremor beneath his calm. Eli closed his eyes. He told himself he was fine as he drifted off to the lull of the bus tires.

***

June 8, 2008

The voice is stronger now. It used to whisper, but lately, it fills the whole room. It tells me there’s something coming – an infestation, not of insects but of them. Aliens. Not like in movies – more subtle. They hide inside people, behind the eyes. You can tell by the way their necks breathe.

I told the psychiatrist about it, but she just asked if I’d been taking my pills. I said, mostly yes. She nodded like that was the end of it. But I can see things now – flickers in people’s faces, a shimmer like heat. That can’t be the pills. That’s something real. The voice says I was chosen because I’m calm, because I listen. That most people would panic, but I’ll do what needs to be done.

***

Dan drops into the vacant seat beside a young man who can’t be more than twenty. The boy dozes against the window, the low pulse of his music sealing him off from the world. For a moment, the man envies him – the blindness, the safety of not knowing how fragile that peace really is. The whisper blends in with the sound of the tires.

He had not meant to take the late bus. He hadn’t meant to take any bus at all. But the voice had told him there was something waiting, something that needed to be seen. He had obeyed, as he always did when the whisper demanded.

It had begun quietly, days before. A static hum beneath the ordinary sounds of life: a fridge motor, a radio, the shuffle of other people’s shoes. The hum spoke sometimes. It used his own voice, though softer, patient, reasoning. Was it God? He didn’t know. But, when it came, he could not think. He could only listen.

***

June 29, 2008

I tried to sleep. The pillow smelled of fabric and dust, but it would not calm me. The sheets writhe like they are alive, moving beneath my fingers. I whispered prayers - half aloud, half to myself. They do not answer. Only the voice speaks. Soon. The time has come.

I walked the streets again. Windows reflected faces that weren’t quite right. Mouths curved too sharply, eyes too wide. Their steps are too light, too rehearsed. And in every corner, the faint flicker – a shape moving against reason. I must be patient. Watch. Wait.

I wrote it down today. Carefully, every instruction from the whisper. They are patterns, signs. A map hidden in plain words. I understand the plan. The voice promised clarity. I follow it like a river flows to the sea.

I practiced last night with the knife in my hand. Cold steel against my palm. Smooth. Quiet. Precise. It belongs to me. No one else can see. No one else can stop what must be done.

I am faithful. I am vigilant. I wait for the signal. Soon, they will understand the order. And I will not hesitate. The world tonight is still. The voice of God is pleased.

***

Now the bus rumbled like that hum. Every vibration passed through the seat into his bones. Dan felt the sound building in his chest, a living thing breathing with him. The lights above were too bright, the air too thin. He watched the young man beside him through the reflection in the window. The face flickered in and out of sight with the rhythm of passing poles. It was a trick of light, maybe, or maybe the kid’s shape wasn’t fixed. The whisper said, look closer.

He blinked and the young man was gone. No – still there, only different. The jaw too sharp, the eyes too bright, like an image overexposed. The voice said,

"You see it now."

Dan felt confused. He pressed his palms together, hard enough that the tendons stood out.

Not again, he thought. Please not again.

He closed his eyes and tried to pray, but the words came out twisted. He couldn’t remember the right order of them. He saw letters drifting, rearranging, floating into nonsense. The whisper soothed him: It’s all right. This time, you will finish it.

He opened his eyes. Outside, the prairie fields rolled endlessly, silver under moonlight. Inside, every sound seemed to fade except the heartbeat of the engine. The driver was only a shadow at the front. The other passengers might have been statues. The boy shifted in his seat, the movement startling in its suddenness, a small jerk of life in an otherwise frozen world. The man flinched. For a moment, he thought the boy had spoken his name, though he didn’t remember telling anyone what it was. He turned toward the window again. His reflection stared back: hollow eyes, thin mouth, pale under the humming lights. The boy’s reflection overlapped his own, face within face, one swallowing the other each time the telephone poles flashed past. He felt the world narrowing to that rhythm, that pulse of light and dark. It seemed to breathe with him: in, out, in, out.

He whispered, “Not you.”

No one noticed.

The whisper inside answered softly, "Yes. Him."

The man closed his eyes again. The hum was a black hole, sucking at him.

He doesn’t know you can hear me," it says.

He looks straight ahead. The boy shifts, the faint scent of soap and sleep coming off him. The whisper repeats itself, quieter now, almost tender:

"He can’t hear what you hear."

The whisper hushes him:

"Wait. Watch."

So, he waits. He watches.

The lights overhead hum, each flicker briefly rewriting the world - the aisle, the faces in rows, the smear of night beyond the glass. With every flash, Dan's vision distorts. The window shifts into a mirror; the mirror stretches into a tunnel. For an instant, his reflection fuses with the boy’s, their eyes aligning in a single frame. The voice seizes on that moment, calling it a sign - proof that their paths were meant to cross, that all the miles behind them were just prelude. He tries to sort out his jumbled thoughts, but his mind was echoing too loud for reason to hold.

The boy’s chest rises and falls with the rhythm of the bus, slow and unguarded. To the man, it sounds exactly like the pulse of the earth beneath them. He feels a warmth move behind his ribs, half awe, half terror. The whisper grows softer until it’s only breath:

"Soon you will understand why I brought you here."

Dan sits very still, hands folded in his lap, afraid to move and break the pattern. Outside, the highway unrolls endlessly, black and silver, like film through a projector. He tells himself this is what faith must feel like – the terrible calm before revelation.

***

Eli woke suddenly, as though someone had whispered his name directly into his ear. The bus still moved, steady and low, but the sound had changed. It no longer felt like motion – it felt like a trap. The air pressed inward, thick with something unseen. He blinked at the window. The glass showed nothing now, only the black weight of night. His reflection floated there for a moment, pale and uncertain, before fading entirely.

The man beside him hadn’t moved. He sat perfectly still, hands folded tight, eyes fixed straight ahead. But there was something new in the stillness – something intent, alert. The kind of stillness a wild animal has just before deciding to attack.

Eli swallowed, his throat dry. “Hey,” he said, the word small, cautious.

No response.

He tried again, louder this time, “Hey, you okay?”

The man didn’t turn. His breathing was coming in slow, uneven bursts. Every few seconds, a small tremor rippled through him, barely visible but enough to make Eli’s skin tighten. He thought about moving to another seat, but the bus was almost full. The other passengers were slumped in sleep, oblivious. The driver was a dark silhouette up front, one hand on the wheel, the other resting near the radio. Too far away. Eli shifted slightly, hugging his backpack closer, an unconscious shield. The man’s sleeve brushed against his again – cold, rough fabric, dry against his skin.

The lights above flickered once, twice. He glanced up at the long row of overhead bulbs. They hummed with faint electricity, like wasps caught in a jar. Each time they dimmed, the shadows deepened. Each time they brightened, the man seemed a little nearer. Eli’s pulse quickened. The rational part of him said, he’s just tired, you’re imagining it. But another part – a deeper, older instinct – was already cataloguing every exit, every sound, every twitch of movement.

He turned his gaze toward the aisle. The woman who’d been whispering on her phone was gone from her seat – maybe at the back, maybe asleep under her coat. A man with a ball cap snored softly, oblivious. No one else seemed to feel it – the unease that had settled like a thick layer of dust in the air. He looked out the window again. The world was reduced to road and darkness, and the faint reflection of himself sitting beside someone who was no longer entirely there.

The hum of the engine deepened. The smell of metal and rubber filled his lungs. He felt the edge of panic rising but had nowhere to put it. The man’s lips had stopped moving. He turned his head slowly, the motion stiff and deliberate. His black, vacuous eyes found Eli’s. And in that instant, Eli knew – without understanding how – that whatever was about to happen had already begun.

***

The bus felt wrong. He could not name it – yet every sense told him it had changed. The hum of the engine had shifted pitch, the air had thickened, and the lights above no longer flickered randomly. They pulsed, in sync with something in his chest, something that did not belong entirely to him. Dan pressed his hands to his knees, fingertips trembling. The whisper had grown louder, insistent, but not angry – just…guiding.

“They will not believe until they are washed in the Lamb’s blood.”

He looked at the young man beside him. In the reflection of the window, the face was too bright, too precise, like a photograph printed over and over until the edges blurred. It was impossible to look away. The whisper told him what to do. The world narrowed. He saw only the aisle, the boy, the reflection. All else – other passengers, distant houses, the night sky – had evaporated into stillness. Time was a thread stretched taut across his mind.

He imagined it: a single thread of action and consequence. One motion, one choice, and everything would be okay again, the whisper said.

“You were chosen to make clean what is unclean.”

His breathing slowed, measuring itself against the pulse in the engine, against the pulse in his chest. He felt a weight lift, a quiet sense of inevitability. He could see the shapes of people shifting in and out of perception, but the boy remained fixed. The stillness beside him was absolute, magnetic. He could not look away. He did not want to.

The whisper sang again: “Drink, for this is the covenant between us.”

He tilted his head slightly. The world aligned into that single, sharp focus: the reflection, the boy, the hum, and the rhythm of the engine. In the silence, he smiled faintly. No one would ever truly understand, he thought. No one could. The bus continued forward. And in that calm, the God in Dan's mind had delivered his judgment.

***

At first there was only confusion. A sound behind him, a tremor in the air that didn’t belong to the road or the tires. Eli turned, half-awake, expecting a question, a jostle, anything ordinary. But the look in the stranger’s eyes stopped him cold – a look that didn’t see him at all, only through him, as if Eli were something transparent, already fading. For one weightless heartbeat he tried to speak, but the words caught against the thick silence pressing between them. The bus kept moving, steady and indifferent, carrying them both forward.

Then came the knowing – the impossible, choking certainty that he was trapped in a moment that would not let him leave. Every sense sharpened. The smell of diesel and the dry air through the vents. The rhythm of the wheels, now monstrous in its steadiness. The way no one else seemed to notice. He understood that the world could turn against you in an instant, that ordinary faces could hide something vast and wrong. He tried to breathe through the rising pulse in his ears, through the scream that stayed locked in his chest.

In that instant – when the knife came slashing downwards, severing his carotid artery, his thoughts flashed not to escape but to home. In his final moments, through blinding agony, Eli clung to that, the one thing that could not be marred by the darkness – to his mother’s kitchen light, to laughter over cheap takeout, to the small, solid moments of an ordinary life.

Then, within moments, the blinding, white, hot pain faded to aching coldness. The darkness reached out with long, cold tentacles and wrapped around him - engulfed him. Then, mercifully, Eli remembered no more.

***

The whisper filled the space behind his eyes. Not words, exactly – only a certainty, a command shaped like faith. He understood what it wanted. The bus’s hum faded, and the rest of the world went very still.

Abraham did not question.

The words pulsed behind his eyes until they became his own thoughts. He told himself it wasn’t cruelty, only faith – the will of God moving through a weary servant. The noise would stop, the trembling would ease, the world would finally make sense – it was the only way to quiet the whispers.

The man reached into his coat pocket and found the smooth, cool handle of his Buck knife. In one swift and decided moment, he plunged the six inch steel into Eli’s neck and started to saw through the neck tendons and flesh. Instant death. The boy’s blood rained onto the seat, spraying the man’s face and chest. The man wiped the blood from his eyes with his sleeve and licked blood from his lips.

“The life is in the blood. It flows where I have willed it.”

A sickening gurgle rose up from the young man, and the bus driver turned with a backwards glance. In horror, he saw the man he had just picked up sitting in the seat next to a now headless passenger. The man was covered in blood holding the young man's severed head in his lap. Then struck dumb with horror, the driver watched the man with vacant eyes lift the head, look into its glassy eyes and begin to eat it.

“What the fuck!?” the bus driver yelled.

He yanked the wheel hard, forcing the bus to the shoulder, and his hands moved with the precision of long habit. His eyes darted over the controls. Without a second to lose, he reached for the emergency brake, gripping the steering wheel in a desperate attempt to hold the bus steady. His heart was pounding like a jackhammer, echoing the chaos around him. He grabbed his work phone from the dashboard, thumbs fumbling over the keypad, dialing 911 with a trembling insistence.

“This is fleet member 171! MAY DAY! MAY DAY! THIS IS A FUCKING EMERGENCY! Passengers need to get the hell off! One man is dead! The other passengers are in grave danger! Please, hurry!” His voice was hoarse, urgent, almost swallowed by the noise of shouting on the bus.

By now, passengers had jolted awake, their faces pale with shock and panic in the dim overhead light. Confusion erupted into chaos. Screams tore through the bus, mingling with the hiss of tires and the metallic groan of brakes. People shoved toward the doors, tumbling into one another, hearts hammering so loudly it nearly drowned out the noise outside. The night was impossibly loud – the wind, the road, the echoes of panic – every sound magnified, every movement jagged with terror.

The stranger remained sitting in his seat on the bus, leaning in the shadows, utterly still. His bloodied grin was wide, unnatural, something that didn’t belong in the human spectrum. Skin stretched over teeth. Silence itself seemed to bend around him, making the noise outside feel distant, unreal.

The passengers froze, staring, caught between the urge to flee and the paralyzing recognition that he existed outside any rules they knew. It wasn’t what he held – or didn’t hold – that terrified them. It was the dead, vacuous look in his eyes that erased everything else. Wide and manic, the windows to his soul held a darkness that made it impossible to look away, impossible to forget. In that frozen, breathless moment, the bus and the night, the screams and the chaos – all of it – were subordinate to him.

He was God’s messenger.

Time itself seemed to pause, waiting for the inevitable, leaving only the passengers’ mounting dread and the impossible presence of a man untouchable, untethered, and entirely outside the world of reason. The passengers had spilled onto the shoulder of the road, trembling, voices cracking with panic. Their breath came in sharp, uneven gasps, hearts hammering as they pressed together in small, protective clusters. Most of them didn’t dare glance back.

But the bus wasn’t empty. Through the front windshield, they could see him – the stranger – moving with a terrifying calm. In the driver’s seat, hands steady on the wheel, eyes scanning the dash panel, he was searching for a way to make the bus his own. His composure was unnatural, almost ritualistic, and it made the blood drain from every face watching.

To everyone’s horror, the crazed man began ritualistically dismembering the young man’s corpse. Slashing and sawing, he reached into the body cavity to remove various organs and held them above his head with a bloodied grimace of utter madness. Outside, the terrified passengers whispered frantic instructions to one another, urging each other to stay back, to not provoke him. Their terror was tangible – visible in trembling hands, wide eyes, and the shallow, panicked rhythm of their breathing.

Through the panic, the driver forced himself to think ahead: stabilize the bus, protect the passengers, contain the situation as best he could until help arrived. Gravel crunched beneath the bus driver’s shoes as he moved, circling to keep the passengers at a safe distance. His voice trembled, but his mind was razor-sharp - the air brake lines were now depressurized and tires slashed to keep the bus from driving away. A few of the other men were armed with tire irons and tools ready to do what they had to. The monster was going nowhere.

Every second stretched, all ears straining for the sound of sirens approaching, each passenger carrying the weight of what had just happened and what could be coming next. Outside, some people stood frozen in shock, some shaking with terror and for a moment the driver sobbed, knowing that each one of them was now on borrowed time.

***

Feb. 6, 2017 - Hearing Room 3

She hadn’t slept. She rarely did the night before these hearings. The same Winnipeg courthouse, the same pale walls, the same echo of shoes in the corridor – it all smelled like bureaucracy and bleach. A clerk ushered her in, polite but distant, as if grief were something contagious.

Rose Porter took her seat in the back row of the courtroom. The air felt heavy, stale with old coffee and old sorrow. In front of her sat the man who had brutally murdered her 22 year old son. He looked older now – thinner, grayer. There was no wildness in him anymore. Only stillness. Medication had done that, they said. Stabilized him.

The doctors spoke first. Their voices were calm, professional. They used phrases like “no longer poses an immediate threat” and “compliant with treatment.” Each word landed with the precision of a hammer, flattening everything it touched.

She stared at her hands. Her nails had bitten crescents into her palms. They said he was ready to live on his own. That his insight had improved. That he was remorseful.

Remorseful.

She wanted to stand up, to ask if remorse could breathe life back into her son’s chest, if medication could erase the image of her headless child’s dead body that haunted her every time she closed her eyes. But instead, she sat still. Because she knew how it went – the system was not built for her grief. 'The Record" had no place for a mother’s pain.

When the court had delivered its decision – not criminally responsible – she didn’t cry. Not there. She only nodded once, tightly, as if agreeing to something she could never accept. Outside, the winter wind slapped her cheeks raw. Reporters waited near the steps, microphones raised, eyes expectant.

“Do you have any comment, Mrs. Porter?” someone asked.

She looked past them, toward the horizon and said quietly,

“Daniel Han has to live for the rest of his life with what he’s done. I get to live without my child. Tell me which one of us is free.”

Then she walked away, the sound of her boots crunching the snow, the courthouse shrinking behind her — bile welled up, closing her throat as hate for this callous, sick monster consumed her.

"Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, nor hell a fury like a woman scorned," Rose thought.

This was not over.

***

2017 Psychiatric Board Memorandum - Seven years later

Case Summary: Han, Daniel – Male, 46 years old. Seven years post-incident.

"The patient presents as calm, compliant, and remorseful. No evidence of active psychosis observed. Insight appears partial but functional. He expresses sustained adherence to treatment and medication and demonstrates understanding of his illness."

Dr. Joshua Holloway notes, “Mr. Han has developed a mature awareness of his mental health condition. He recognizes his delusional framework as an illness. His risk to the community is considered minimal if medication compliance is maintained.”

Decision: Absolute Release – Community Living without Monitoring.

Status: No Immediate Risk to Public Safety.

***

February 10, 2017

The news broke on a Tuesday morning, quiet as a throat clearing: “ Manitoba Criminal Review Board Chair Grants Absolute Discharge to Former Accused Greyhound Cannibal.” The article was short. Clinical. A handful of paragraphs about “completed rehabilitation,” “compassionate care,” and “successful reintegration into society.”

But for Rose Porter, mother of the boy carved out of the world on that bus so many summers ago, the words detonated inside her chest.

She read them again. And again. No jail. No supervision. No monitoring. “Low risk,” they had said, as if risk were something measurable on a kitchen scale. As if the night of her son’s gruesome murder hadn’t rewritten the geography of her life forever.

For eight agonizing years, Rose Porter had sat through hearings listening to “experts” talk about “episodes,” “delusions,” “treatment compliance,” and “the promise of recovery” for a monster that had publicly and viciously desecrated the body of her only son. They spoke in gentle tones, the way people do when discussing the weather, or dessert. None of them ever said her son’s name the way she did – slowly, reverently, like a prayer with underlying promise.

That night, she walked into Eli’s bedroom. The posters were faded now; the bedspread smelled only faintly like detergent and a boy who used to sweat through his shirts at soccer practice. She sat at the edge of the bed and let the silence settle around her.

“An eye for an eye,” she whispered, running her fingers lightly over a corner of his football jersey.

Not out of rage. Not even out of hatred. But out of a cold, almost serene understanding: if the law had chosen to forget her son, then she would become it's lasting memory. The man who took the life of her child had been given back his freedom.

She would take something back, too.

Outside, the streetlights flickered against the dark – low, electric, humming faintly like the highway that had carried her son to his last night on earth. And justice, she realized, is just a stranger’s justification of a situation. Someone’s politically-biased choice. In this knowing, Rose would now become the exact point where justice and revenge touched hands in the dark.

***

July 12, 2017

Daniel Han found the job posting in the Winnipeg classifieds, tucked between listings for farmhands and warehouse clerks: Greyhound Bus Driver wanted. Long routes. Nights and weekends.

He hesitated only a moment before folding the paper neatly, as if that small act could make the decision tidy, moral, forgiven. Seven years, they’d said. He’d done everything right – took the pills, met the doctors, prayed, stayed quiet. The words 'no immediate risk' were now his freedom papers.

On-the-job training started the next week. The office was quiet, the route maps spread across the table like veins. He memorized each turn, each stop, the towns that would blur past his window. The world was letting him back in.

***

August 20, 2018 - Office of Dr. Joshua Holloway, Chairman of the Manitoba Review Board

The government building had gone still for the night. The kind of stillness that only came after a day full of hearings, the weight of voices, testimony, and arguments all evaporated into hums of old fluorescent lights. Dr. Josh Holloway sat at his desk overlooking the city, tie loosened, the glow of his monitor flattening the papers into pale stacks, as lifeless as the hours he’d spent reviewing them.

The last memo blinked on the screen: Case Review: Absolute Discharge Granted to Daniel Han. Han had been previously granted the freedom to live in the community, but conditions included partial supervision while taking medication for schizophrenia and full disclosure of his address to authorities and his medical team. An 'absolute discharge' meant that now all restrictions have been lifted, with no supervision necessary.

He rubbed the bridge of his nose and closed the file. Something was niggling away in the back of his brain. He couldn’t quite place it. That was when the phone rang. It being such a late hour, he almost didn’t answer.

“Hello?”

“Daddy?”

Lexi’s voice, soft and hurried, still had that slight lilt she’d had since childhood, like every sentence might end in laughter.

“Hey, sweetheart. Everything okay?”

“Yeah, I’m good. I just wanted to let you know I’m coming in tonight. I caught the late bus from Saskatoon. I should be at the Greyhound station around one, maybe a bit after. Can you pick me up?”

He smiled despite the hour. “Of course. What’s the occasion? You could’ve flown, you know.”

“I like the bus,” she said. “It gives me time to think.”

Josh leaned back in his chair, the leather creaking. The sound of typing from an adjacent office drifted through the wall, someone else burning through overtime. He looked at the clock: 9:17pm.

“Alright,” he said. “Text me when you’re close. I’ll be there.”

“Thanks, Dad. Love you.”

“Love you too, kiddo.”

The line went dead, leaving only the hum of the overhead lights. Josh set the receiver down and stared at it longer than he’d meant to. A memory had lodged somewhere behind his ribs, an echo of something half-remembered, half-buried under years of hearings and headlines. He opened the bottom drawer of his desk and, almost without thinking, pulled out an old folder stamped Porter/Han – 2008 Greyhound Bus Incident. He remembered the review, the debates, the public uproar when they had granted Daniel Han his unconditional release nearly two years earlier. The press had called him 'The Greyhound Cannibal'.

Josh exhaled, telling himself it was coincidence. Different bus. Different decade. Still, as he shut off the lights and reached for his coat, this important man never once imagined that his final moments would unfold as he stepped off the elevator beneath the humming lights of a deserted underground parking lot in a blur of motion, a flash of steel - his blood spreading in a slow, silent blanket of dark red across the cold, unforgiving concrete. The last thing he heard in those final moments was Rose Porter’s whisper in his ear before he lost his head.

“Time to catch her bus.”

***

She had lived inside that night for twelve years, but the years themselves mattered less than the ache that filled each one. When the government official stepped off the elevator and into the covered lot, Rose Porter had tasted bile-coated rage; the cold in her palms, the photograph of Eli like a warm kiss against her ribs, the absurd, primal clarity of the only thought that had kept her above ground since her son’s murder.

A tooth for a tooth.

A head for a head in this case, she thought wryly. Up close the shrink didn’t look that important. His face was small and ordinary, a man of creases and tired smiles. The knife in her hand was a part of her indigenous ancestry – the elk bone handle carved intricately. A ceremonial blade. Whatever had driven her to rehearsal and planning also taught her one last cruel lesson: this killing would change her. The thought landed on her like a stone. It was something she was prepared to accept.

After it was done, she wiped palms, slicked with blood off on an old towel, tucked the knife away in a small, black duffel bag along with Josh Holloway’s severed head and left with quiet steps. The silence around her felt lighter than before, as if the air itself understood what she had done. She did not feel absolved. But, she had to admit, she did feel marginally better.

***

12:09 A.M. – that same night

At a remote prairie bus stop, Eli’s mother waited, black duffel bag at her feet. The wind tugged at her coat and hair, whispering across the open fields. She had memorized the Winnipeg Greyhound's bus route by heart. Her fingers stroked the cold metal inside her satchel, and for a moment she simply breathed, letting the crisp night air fill her lungs.

Rose hadn’t ridden a Greyhound in years - not since that day. But tonight, she would. Tonight, she would meet the man who had split her world in two and remind him what it felt like to be taken, to be hunted. She told herself it was a public service.

A mother’s justice.

The prairie stretched endless and pale around her. On the distant horizon, a silver bus approached, its lights carving twin paths through the dark. She drew her shawl close, eyes steady, heartbeat measuring the distance between them. Behind the wheel, Daniel Han drove on, the hum of the engine steady, the past locked away in a glove box he never opened. Through the windshield, he spotted a lone figure by the roadside – a cloaked woman, waiting, motionless, a black, duffel bag at her feet.

Dan flicked on the right blinker and slowed. The bus sighed to a stop, its headlights white-washing her. He waited patiently for the dark haired woman, in her late thirties, to board. He watched in the rear view mirror as she moved sideways down the center aisle, eventually selecting a seat next to a pretty, young blonde woman. Each day was a gift. He would never forget the second chance at life he’d been given.

Neither would Rose Porter.

“Hi, I’m Rose,” he overheard her say to the girl as he put the bus in gear and began to drive on.

“Hi. I’m Lexi.”

THE END.

References:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-38945061

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/tim-mclean-bus-will-baker-absolute-discharge-1.3984https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Tim_McLean141

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Tim_McLean

Congreve, William. The Mourning Bride: A Tragedy. London: Printed for Jacob Tonson, 1697.