You Think Everyone on These Crowded Streets is Human?

Part 1: The Rules of the Road

Some stories are told in the dead of night, whispered over the rumble of a diesel engine, tasting of cheap cigarettes and the vast, lonely darkness of the open road. This is one of them.

Years ago, I was in love with a girl from Ya'an, a city in Sichuan province famous for three things: its rain, its fish, and its women. The local fish has a peculiar bone in its head shaped like a small, perfect sword. It’s said to ward off evil, and old long-haul truckers, the ones who drive the haunted backroads of China, will do anything to get one to hang in their cab. My girlfriend would press one of these bone swords into my hand every time I left, a small, crystalline talisman against a darkness I was too young to understand.

It was on one of those trips that I met the man who told me this story. His name was Tiger, a veteran trucker who had spent his life crisscrossing the Xinjiang Autonomous Region. We were sharing a smoke when he started talking about his early days, back when he was just a kid learning the ropes.

“The Southern Frontier of Xinjiang is a different world,” he began, his voice raspy. "It's not like the North, with its grasslands and lakes. The South is the Gobi Desert. It’s rock mountains that claw at the sky and sand that swallows everything. It’s a place that can break a man’s mind."

His mentor back then was an old army motorist named Master Bai, a man who had spent twenty years supplying the high-altitude outposts in the Kunlun Mountains. "The Kunlun is a sacred place," Master Bai used to say. "No place for mortals." He spoke of impossible cold, of ghosts in the ice, and of a time his truck broke down beside a fractured glacier. Peering into the deep, blue ice, he saw them: hundreds of dead soldiers, frozen solid. They were standing in perfect formation, their expressions peaceful, their uniforms from a bygone revolutionary era. Every time he passed that spot, he’d leave a few cigarettes on the ice as an offering, believing them to be eternal sentinels for the nation.

It was Master Bai who taught Tiger the real rules of the road—the ones that keep you alive when the world stops making sense.

“Always keep a pocketful of coins,” he’d instructed. “They’ve passed through thousands of hands, absorbing human energy, the warmth of the living. If you feel something’s wrong, you scatter them on the road. It keeps things at bay.”

“Sometimes,” he continued, “you’ll hit a

guǐ dǎ qiáng—a Ghost Wall. The road ahead will just… disappear. That’s not always a bad thing. It might be a warning. Something is trying to stop you from driving off a cliff or into a trap. But what you have to fear is the chàlù guǐ, the Forked-Road Ghost.”

Tiger’s blood ran cold as Master Bai explained. “You’ll be on a road you know, a single, straight path. And suddenly, there will be a fork. Two roads where there should only be one. That’s not a choice. It’s a death sentence. An evil spirit is using an illusion to trick you. Both paths lead to the abyss. You stop the truck. You don't move. You wait for the sun.”

But the most terrifying thing, he said, the one that offered almost no chance of survival, was when a monster gets on your truck.

Part 2: The Thing on the Jeep

“I was unlucky enough to meet one on my very first solo night drive,” Tiger told me, his eyes distant.

“The desert sky was unnaturally clear, the moon a perfect, cold circle. The moonlight on the Gobi gave it the appearance of a fresh snowfield, beautiful and deeply, profoundly lonely. Sometimes, strange lights would bloom and die in the mountains—silent, kaleidoscopic fireworks. Master Bai said it was secret military work, bases hidden deep in the ranges. ‘They keep monsters locked up in some of those places,’ he’d said with a straight face. ‘Sometimes, they get out.’”

“Then, a fog began to roll in,” he said. “A freak occurrence in a place so dry. A bad omen. And through it, I saw a shadow. Another vehicle.”

After days of crushing solitude, any sign of human life felt like a miracle. It was an old Beijing Jeep, moving slowly. Tiger honked his horn, a joyous, stupid sound in the immense silence, and started to accelerate, eager to overtake them, to wave, to see another face.

“Guangzi,” a quiet voice said beside him. Master Bai was awake, a lit cigarette glowing in the dark cab. His face was a mask of stone. “Stop the truck. Or we both die.”

“What? Why?” Tiger stammered.

“Its lights are off,” Master Bai said.

And he was right. In the dead of night, the Jeep was running completely dark. A chill that had nothing to do with the desert night crawled up his spine.

“Flick on the high beams,” Bai commanded, his voice tight. “Look at the back of their vehicle. Where the spare tire should be. Tell me what you see.”

Tiger did as he was told. A wave of brilliant white light cut through the fog, illuminating the rear of the Jeep. His breath caught in his throat. Crouched on the back, the size of a large cat, was an animal. It had been pressed against the rear window, peering inside, but as the light hit it, its head swiveled around. Its eyes glowed a furious, piercing red. Even through the distance, he felt its intelligent gaze lock onto his, a cold stare that seemed to see right into his soul. He slammed on the brakes.

They sat there, engine idling, as the ghost Jeep slowly, silently veered off the road. It drove onto the barren Gobi, moving with a lifeless, unnatural calm until the desert swallowed it whole.

“What was that?” Tiger finally managed to whisper.

“An old fox,” Master Bai said, finally taking a long drag from his cigarette. “A spirit. It got on their truck. Those people in the car are already dead. If we’d followed them, we’d be dead too.”

“What do you mean… it got on their truck?”

“You think the car was being driven by a person?” Master Bai scoffed. “The fox was in control. It mesmerizes its victims, pilots their bodies, and drives them out into the wasteland. Once it’s deep enough in the desert, it… takes over. The person is gone. Forever.”

Tiger’s scalp tingled. “Takes over? To do what?”

Master Bai looked at him, a strange, knowing pity in his eyes. “To become human, of course.” He gestured vaguely toward the civilized world they’d left behind. “Haven’t you ever noticed? Some people just seem like animals. People who chatter like ducks, people with the cunning cruelty of a wolf, people as dumb and slow as pigs.”

He fell silent for a long moment, the only sound the hum of the engine. Then he delivered the words that have haunted Tiger ever since, the words I hear whenever I’m in a crowded city, surrounded by the hustle and bustle of strangers.

“You think,” he said with a sad, crooked smile, “that everyone on these crowded streets… is human?”