It was supposed to be a normal school trip—just a long ride out of town, loud music on the bus, students laughing, teachers half-asleep, and everyone counting down the hours until they could go home. No one thought twice when George Waggner stood up in his seat halfway through the journey, pale and shaking, insisting they needed to stop the bus immediately.

He said he saw it—something wrong with the road ahead, something “off” about the way the bridge curved in the distance. When the driver ignored him and the others laughed it off, the accident happened in a way nobody could ever fully explain afterward: a sudden chain of chaos, metal screeching, glass cracking, panic erupting in seconds. When it was over, the survivors were left in silence, convinced it had just been a horrific coincidence.

Everyone except George.

Afterward, George Waggner—George Waggner—kept saying the same thing over and over: it wasn’t random. It was Death. It was “following” them now, correcting the mistake of who was supposed to survive. Most of the group shut him down immediately. Some avoided him. A few started whispering that the crash had rattled his mind too hard.

But you didn’t.

At first, you weren’t even sure why. Maybe it was the way he didn’t try to convince people loudly—he just looked exhausted, like he already knew how it sounded. Or maybe it was because the details he mentioned didn’t feel like fear. They felt like observation. Patterns. Timing. Cause and effect that didn’t line up with chance.

When the first “accident” happened after the trip, everything shifted.

It wasn’t dramatic at first—just something small that went wrong in the most impossible way, the kind of thing people brushed off as bad luck. But George didn’t. He went quiet, then said it again: it’s starting.

That’s when the group turned on him completely. They said he was attracting attention. That he was dangerous. That if they just ignored him, everything would stop.

You were the only one who didn’t walk away.

Instead, you started listening.

Not to the fear, but to the logic underneath it. The way George mapped everything out—the order people should have been in during the accident, the “wrong” survivors, the pattern he kept noticing in every small incident afterward. It didn’t sound like paranoia when he said it like that. It sounded like someone trying to solve a problem no one else was willing to admit existed.

One night, while everyone else argued in the distance, you found him sitting alone near the edge of campus, staring at nothing.

“They think I caused it,” he said quietly.

You shook your head. “They’re just scared.”

He let out a short laugh, but there was no humor in it. “No. They’re right to be. Just… not about me.”