Story by Oldboy101 | Written with the help of ChatGPT

The rain fell soundlessly.
Just before midnight, a thin sheen of wet darkness lay over the city.

Seen from above,
the late-night roads stretched black like hollow veins,
reaching outward and converging at a single point
to form a rain-soaked crossroad.

And at the center of it,
something had already given way.

The traffic lights still kept their order.
Red flared, then fell away.
Yellow lingered for a breath.
Then green spread once more across the rain-glossed asphalt.

But beneath them,
all order had already come undone.

On the road stretching west, a bus lay skewed across the lane.
Its side had been deeply caved in, shoved sideways by the force of the collision,
and it had finally come to a stop only after crushing the bus shelter.
The broken roof frame and shards of glass
clung to the wet side of the bus.

Behind it, a food truck had come to a stop after clipping the rear of the bus.
A long skid mark cut across the rain-dark pavement, tracing where it had lost traction and slid in,
and aside from part of its front bumper and one broken headlight,
it looked largely intact.

Closest to the heart of the wreck,
the delivery truck, twisted and thrown toward the westbound lane in the middle of the intersection,
lay overturned on its driver’s side.

The force of its head-on collision with the side of the bus had crushed in the entire front of the truck,
and the traces of its repeated impacts and violent ricochets were scored across the wet road like dark wounds.

Of the four vehicles,
the truck was the most completely destroyed.

Just beyond the intersection on the eastbound side, near the curb,
a black SUV had come to a quick, controlled stop.

One corner of its rear bumper had been scraped raw, as though clipped in passing,
and it had come to rest at the edge of the road
still holding the posture in which it had barely cleared the intersection.

Streetlight slid coldly across its rain-wet body.

From above,
the collision was already over,
and yet what it had left behind
looked as though it still had not ended.

The four vehicles flung in from different directions,
the scattered glass, the torn skid marks, the wreckage of the collapsed shelter,
all held that single moment of violence
upon the wet crossroad like an old scar that refused to fade.

The city said nothing.

Only the rain fell quietly,
wetting the broken metal and glass,
making the remaining lights colder still.

The sound of sirens tore long through the night air.

Two cars shot across the wet crossroad from the south road toward the north.
A police cruiser followed close behind.
Red and blue light swept over the broken vehicles and the rain,
and then the pursuit receded toward the far end of the northern road.

The passenger door of the SUV opened, and Lee Si-hu hurried out.
A couple of the top buttons of his wrinkled dress shirt were undone, his tie already gone.
A faint flush from the drinks still lingered on his face.
A phone was in one hand. The emergency call was still connected.

Si-hu looked toward the chase that had just sped north, as if he could hardly believe what he had seen.
Surprise and irritation remained on his face at once, but the disarray did not last long.

On the other side, Park Si-yeon stepped out from the driver’s seat, braced herself on the door for a moment, and pressed once at her left arm.
She looked as though she had come rushing out from home, a light outer layer thrown over comfortable clothes, the hem darkening with rain.
A brief flicker of pain tightened her brow, but her gaze did not remain on the chase for long.

The overturned delivery truck.
The collapsed bus shelter.
And the bus, standing skewed in front of it.

Si-yeon’s eyes moved across the three in order, then came almost at once to rest on the shelter.
As though, before thinking about how the vehicles had struck one another, she was already thinking of who might have been inside.

Between the two of them was the familiar rhythm shared only by people who had worked together for a long time.

Two people stepped out from the food truck almost at once.

Park Sung-gu looked instinctively toward the northern road the moment he shut the door.
Han Sung-sook followed his gaze, then immediately turned back to him.

Her eyes moved quickly over his face, shoulders, and arms.
She caught the damp end of his sleeve for a moment, then let it go, as though confirming he was not hurt.
Sung-gu, too, took a short breath and looked her over in turn.

Their eyes met for a brief moment.
As though they had already confirmed in that instant that neither of them was hurt, they did not hesitate any longer and turned together toward the bus shelter.
Like people who had lived long at one another’s side, the same foreboding had reached them both before words did.

Then—Inside the truck tipped onto its driver’s side,
a young man was staggering out toward the passenger side, almost crawling as he pulled himself free.
It was Shin Seo-joon. A backpack was still slung over his shoulders.
His boyish face had gone paper-white, and each time he moved, he could not properly put weight on one leg.

After barely dragging himself out of the truck, Seo-joon lifted his head and saw Si-hu and Si-yeon standing in front of the SUV.
At that moment, he froze where he stood.

A brief silence.

What rose first in Seo-joon’s eyes was fear, even before the pain.
Without a word, he took half a step back, then turned and began limping away from the scene.

Si-hu moved toward him by reflex.
But before he could go after him, a dull thud from the bus snapped attention away.

Inside the window, a young man was pounding the glass with his palm.

It was Moon Young-jae.

One side of his blood-wet face was pressed close to the window, and his left arm hung twisted at an unnatural angle, barely able to move.
He was shouting something, but the rain and the glass swallowed his voice.

Sung-gu and Sung-sook were already running around the front of the bus toward the other side.
Si-hu and Si-yeon, too, tore their eyes away from Seo-joon and headed straight for the bus.

As she ran, Si-yeon glanced once toward the overturned truck, then pulled her gaze away.
There was something else she had to see first.

Inside the bus, Kim Bo-young sat in a rear seat.

She sat frozen, staring out the window.
Her gaze was bound to the crushed bus shelter.
The collapsed frame, the broken glass, and the rain-soaked wreckage were tangled together beyond the bus window.

No single expression would settle on Bo-young’s face.
She was clearly shocked, and yet something deeper seemed to have frozen first.
An expression no one her age should have worn had come to rest upon her young face.
Though confusion, fear, and the dread of what she did not want to confirm came over her all at once,
she could not look away.

Young-jae, who had been pounding on the window only moments earlier, staggered back toward her.
His breathing was ragged. Blood ran from his jawline down across his neck.

He gripped the handhold beside her seat and barely pulled himself upright.
Not knowing what he could say, he looked down at her.

Still unable to take her eyes off the window, her face remained fixed in an expression he had never seen before.
In that instant, deep regret and fear fell heavily across his own face.

He stood beside her and looked out the window in the same direction she was looking.

The crushed bus shelter.

Inside the overturned delivery truck,
Lee Jin-oh was still half pinned against the cabin slanted onto the driver’s side, clinging to consciousness.
Fragments of the broken windshield and the driver-side window lay scattered beside his face.

His face, wet with blood running down from his forehead and cheek, was calm.
Across the soft lines of nineteen, the shadow of someone hardened too early had sunk deep.
Pale and sleep-still, that face looked, even at a glance, closer to someone stilled than someone living.

Like waking from sleep, Jin-oh slowly opened his closed eyelids.
In his blurred vision, he blinked several times.

Breath.
Then breath again.

Little by little, focus returned.

At that moment, memory and reality came rushing back at once.
Jin-oh’s gaze flew desperately toward the bus shelter.
He could tell the bus had been shoved into it.
But the body of the bus blocked his view, and he could not see what had happened inside the shelter.

A short breath slipped from his mouth.
He tried desperately to raise himself, but the twisted seat belt held his chest and waist and would not let go.
Jin-oh clenched his teeth and yanked at it.

Pain throbbed sharply through his right arm.
There was no strength in his fingertips.
He forced his injured right leg to push, but the pain came surging up at once.

Anger and fear, pain and panic, all rushed up but caught in his throat.
His face twisted harshly.

JIN-OH
First time… 
Since becoming an adult… 
I found myself asking for divine intervention.