A Rural Bus Route Becomes the Fault Line Between 1955 and 1995
Dubuque, Iowa, United States, 20 December 2025 – Bus Number 43: The Midday Run opens on an ordinary morning in August 1955, as Greyhound driver Raymond Olsen begins a familiar 5:30 a.m. route from Dubuque to Elkader. The run is a modest “milk route” through northeast Iowa farmland, carrying a cross-section of mid-century American life: farmers, a pastor, a schoolteacher, a young widow, a runaway teenager, a pregnant mother seeking a divorce, and other small-town passengers with quiet burdens and private hopes.
Bus Number 43 never completes that routine trip. Ten miles south of Elkader, the vehicle enters an impossible column of white light rising from the highway. Inside, sound vanishes, time stretches into something unrecognizable, and each passenger becomes aware of a profound, cellular-level change taking place within the body. When the bus emerges, the landscape appears familiar, but parking meters, road signs, automobiles, and faces tell a different story. The year outside the windows is now 1995.
The bus, the driver, and thirteen passengers have not aged a day. The world around them has moved forward by forty years.
From Two-Lane Blacktop to Courtrooms, Laboratories, and Global Headlines
Once Bus Number 43 rolls into Elkader’s main street in 1995, the story widens beyond the highway. Law enforcement, medical professionals, and eventually federal authorities attempt to process an event that defies every known law of physics. As officials examine 1955 tickets, IDs, and newspapers against a 1995 calendar, a quiet local anomaly rapidly becomes a national, and then international, question.
Subsequent chapters follow the displaced passengers into secure facilities, courtrooms, press conferences, and international institutions. Sections such as “The Facility,” “The Tests,” “The Plan,” “The Break,” “The Press Conference,” “The Return Home,” “Des Moines,” “The WHO Meeting,” and “The UN Testimony” trace how a localized incident on an Iowa highway evolves into a global debate about scientific ethics, state power, bodily autonomy, and the risks of treating human beings as data points rather than citizens.
Investigations reveal that the passengers’ bodies now exhibit measurable differences: enhanced cellular efficiency, accelerated regeneration, and unusual resilience. Some passengers, including pregnant women, become the focus of intense medical and political interest. Legal teams assemble, coalitions form, protesters gather, and media outlets follow every development, transforming a simple bus manifest into a list of contested lives.
Ordinary People Forced Into Extraordinary Roles
Although the premise involves an inexplicable temporal event, Bus Number 43: The Midday Run remains grounded in character-driven storytelling. The narrative continually returns to the original group from the Dubuque–Elkader route:
- Raymond Olsen, a forty-three-year-old driver whose sense of duty collides with guilt over the fate of his passengers.
- Grace Holbrook and her young son Timothy, caught between a broken 1950s marriage and a future that now no longer matches their ages.
- Eleanor Schmidt, a schoolteacher whose sharpened mental clarity after the light pushes her into new kinds of moral and intellectual responsibility.
- Clara Holst and Betty-Lou Mae, young women who boarded the bus as runaways from personal trauma and now must confront a future in which the past has been both erased and preserved.
- Diane Baker, a widow who steps into a world where grief has officially aged forty years, while personal loss remains as immediate as the day of the accident.
Across chapters spanning Iowa towns, medical labs, safe houses, protests, and international hearings, the novel explores how these individuals respond when time “gifts” them four untouched decades at the cost of everyone and everything left behind. Questions of parenthood, faith, bodily autonomy, consent, and responsibility unfold against the backdrop of scientific curiosity and governmental control.
It’s All About Time, Ethics, Faith, and the Politics of “Miracles”
The book uses speculative elements to examine questions often framed in contemporary public discourse:
- What happens when institutions see altered human bodies as resources first and people second?
- How does a community respond when a group returns from the past unchanged, yet carrying potential advantages, and unknown risks, for the future?
- What does “home” mean when family members, relationships, and entire towns have aged forty years without those who were taken?
- How should faith traditions, legal systems, and medical ethics adapt when confronted with undeniable evidence that time has not behaved as expected?
By following the passengers from the initial column of light through hearings, negotiations, births, medical crises, and international scrutiny, the narrative presents a long arc of consequence rather than a single “event story.” The focus remains on human cost: the emotional, relational, and spiritual aftermath of being preserved while the rest of the world moves on.
Get Ready To Meet the Author
Earl D. Coobs grew up in northeast Iowa, in the same rolling hills and small-town communities that shape the novel’s early chapters. A five-decade career as a professional truck driver took him across the United States, where long stretches on the highway were spent listening to audiobooks from multiple genres. Over time, those miles and stories formed the foundation for his own fiction.
Now retired and living in southeast Georgia, Coobs channels years on the road into narratives that combine everyday working lives with larger speculative questions. Bus Number 43: The Midday Run represents the culmination of decades of observation, imagination, and reflection on how ordinary people respond when confronted with extraordinary events.
Media Information
- Title: Bus Number 43: The Midday Run
- Author: Earl D. Coobs
- Genre: Speculative / Literary Fiction
- Primary Setting: Northeast Iowa (1955 and 1995)
Phone Number: 4066974492
Email: coobscartage@yahoo.com
Website: https://authorearlcoobs.com/
Company Details
Organization: Author Earl D Coobs
Contact Person: Earl D Coobs
Website: https://authorearlcoobs.com/
Email: Send Email
City: Dubuque
State: Iowa
Country: United States
Release Id: 22122539380