One second of nothing.
No pain. No sound. No Olivia. Just a void so complete it almost feels like mercy.
Then the world snaps back.
I gasp. My hands fly to my chest, expecting shattered ribs, punctured lungs, the wet cave of everything destroyed. My fingers find only my shirt. My heartbeat. My own breathing, ragged and too fast.
The car. I'm in the car. Engine humming. Eminem playing.
Olivia is mid-sentence beside me, something light and teasing, completely unaware that I just died in a field of daffodils and watched her come apart in three pieces and felt her blood soak into my knees.
I look around wildly. We're past the crossroads already. On the offroad path. The narrow one. The wrong one.
"Clyde?" She's looking at me now. Concern replacing the tease. "You okay? You look pale."
That was a dream. Has to be. Some kind of waking nightmare, stress manifesting as horror, my brain doing what overworked brains do. My therapist mentioned intrusive thoughts once. This was that. This was just that.
"Fine," I say. "Just zoned out."
She watches me a beat longer than I'd like. Then she lets it go.
The music plays. We argue. Eminem versus Billie Eilish, the same argument, the same words, the same outcome. She switches to Billie. The mood goes darker. I grip the wheel and tell myself it's fine. Tell myself it was a nightmare. Tell myself the road ahead is just a road.
But the déjà vu doesn't stop. It builds. Every kilometer feels like walking toward something I've already walked toward. Every bend in the road looks like a bend I've already taken.
My hands start shaking around the forty minute mark.
An hour in, Olivia puts her phone down and looks at me properly. "Okay. What's wrong."
Not a question. Military wife. She doesn't ask, she states.
"Nothing."
"You've been white-knuckling that steering wheel for an hour."
"I'm fine."
She doesn't push. But she doesn't look away either, watching me from the corner of her eye the way she does when she's decided to wait me out. She can do it too. Six years of service. She can outwait anyone.
I check my watch. 6:32 PM.
Ice in my stomach. Five minutes.
"I need to stop," I say, and pull over before she can respond.
"What? Why?"
"Bathroom. Two seconds." Weak. Transparent. She sees right through it but doesn't say so.
"Okay," she says carefully.
I get out. The late afternoon sun is sinking, painting everything gold and amber. Beautiful. Indifferent. I walk away from the car with my heart slamming against my ribs, scanning the terrain, looking for — something. Anything. Some way to change what I know is coming.
That's when I see it.
Open wasteland. No daffodils. No ornate fence. Just empty tundra stretching to the horizon and a simple low barrier separating road from nothing. Not dangerous. Not decorative. Just a barrier.
An idea hits me. Desperate. Maybe insane.
"Olivia!" I call back. "Come look at this!"
Car door opens. Her footsteps on gravel. She comes around the front of the car with her eyebrows up.
"Why are you acting so weird?"
"Just come here."
I hop over the low fence without thinking, reach back for her hand. She hesitates, that small smile forming.
"Since when do you break rules, Officer Martinez?"
"Since I married you."
She takes my hand and climbs over. I pull her close the moment her feet hit the ground. Breathe her in. Hair and warmth and everything real. My arms around her waist, her body solid against mine.
Nothing is going to happen. I changed it. We're not near the daffodils, not near that fence. This is different ground. Different outcome.
I check my watch.
6:37 PM.
The explosion doesn't build. Doesn't warn. It simply detonates - one catastrophic event from somewhere down the road, a sound so total it stops being sound and becomes pressure. The ground lurches. The air turns solid for half a second and then the shockwave rolls across the wasteland and hits us like a wall.
"CLYDE--"
The fence tears free.
Not ornate iron this time. Chain-link. Topped with razor wire, those coiled spirals of sharpened steel that look industrial and mundane right up until the moment an explosion rips the posts from the ground and sends the whole thing spinning through the air like an unraveling machine.
The razor wire uncoils as it spins. Tentacles. Reaching.
I try to push Olivia down. My hands find her shoulders.
Not fast enough.
The wire finds her head first. Wraps around her skull above the ears, the barbs biting in — not cutting, not yet, just gripping-- and then the momentum of the spinning fence pulls taut and the wire tightens like a closing fist.
The top of her head comes off.
Clean as a lid. The entire crown of her skull, still wrapped in razor wire, separates from the rest and continues its arc with the fence. What remains is open. Exposed. The gray-pink surface of her brain glistens in the afternoon light, white fragments of skull standing up from it like broken crockery, dark blood beginning to pump from the severed vessels in rhythmic spurts that pattern the air in front of her face.
She's still standing.
Still looking at me. Eyes wide. Mouth opening and closing. No sound coming out. Her brain is trying to process something her body no longer has the architecture to survive, sending signals down pathways that are already shutting off one by one.
Then the fence finishes its rotation and the razor wire still coiled around her torso pulls taut.
It saws through her chest cavity from the front. The ribs don't break so much as split — a sound like green wood cracking — the bones splintering outward as the wire tightens. Her chest opens like something unfastened. Her heart is still beating inside it, still working, still trying, pumping blood out through the gaps between her ribs in steady arcs that reach my face from a meter away.
Then it falls out.
Tumbles free from the open cavity like something dropped off a shelf. Hits the ground and keeps contracting. Thump-thump. Thump-thump. Each beat weaker than the last, each contraction pushing a smaller jet of blood into the tundra soil. Her lungs follow, collapsing flat as they hit the air. Her liver. Her stomach. Her intestines unspooling in a slow cascade that piles at her feet as her body folds backward and stops being upright.
Her heart gives one last contraction.
Then goes still.
Then the wire finds me.
It wraps around my groin - I feel the barbs before I understand what's happening — and pulls. The pain erases everything. White-hot. Total. I look down and there is only blood, too much blood, the wire has taken something that cannot be replaced and left a wound that pumps with every heartbeat in a rhythm that is already slowing because there is not enough left to pump.
I fall to my knees.
Press my hands to the wound. Useless. I know it's useless. There's a part of my brain that's still a cop, still trained, still running through procedure, and even that part knows this is not survivable.
Through the tunneling vision I see her heart on the ground. Still. Already going cold.
At least she went first. At least she didn't have to see -
Something hits me in the chest.
The carved wooden caribou from our dashboard. The one we bought at that tourist trap in Anchorage, the one with the real antlers that I thought was tacky and she thought was charming. The explosion has turned it into a missile. It hits me sternum-first and the antlers -sharp, harder than they have any right to be -- punch through bone and into my heart.
I feel the muscle tear. Feel the chambers rupture. Feel my blood, what's left of it, begin to fill my chest from the inside.
I try to breathe. Get a wet gurgle.
The last thing I see is the sunset. That gold and amber light painting the wasteland in colors that have no right to be this beautiful right now.
My last thought is her laugh. In the car. Light and free and full of everything.
Then nothing.
Just darkness.
Just the end.
And then light.