One second of nothing.
Then Eminem. Then the road. Then her voice forming words I have heard five times now.
"Take that one. It's shorter. My boss uses this route all the time when he drives from Alaska instead of flying. Trust me."
"Let's just stay on the highway," I say.
My voice comes out normal. Pleasant, even. I don't recognise it as mine.
Olivia blinks. "Oh. Okay." A small shrug. "Sure, whatever you want."
I keep driving straight. Main highway. Well paved, clearly marked, exactly where it's supposed to be. The offroad path slides past on the right and disappears behind us and I feel nothing about that one way or the other.
I feel nothing about most things now.
"So," Olivia says after a moment, filling a silence that has stretched a beat too long. "How's the shoulder feeling? You were favoring it this morning."
I don't remember favoring my shoulder this morning. I don't remember this morning at all, not really, not as anything other than something that has already happened four times before in slightly different configurations.
"Fine," I say. "Good. It's good."
"Okay." She looks at me a beat too long. "You feeling alright? You seem kind of"
"I'm great."
The word comes out flat. Wrong. Like a word I learned the shape of without ever learning what it meant.
She turns back to the window. The silence resumes, but it has a texture to it now, the particular awkwardness of two people in a small space who both know something is off and have decided, separately, not to say so directly.
"The scenery's nice," she offers, ten minutes later.
"Yeah."
"Lots of trees."
"Yeah."
"Clyde, are you going to give me more than one word at a time for the rest of this drive?"
I check the clock without meaning to. 4:48 PM.
"Sorry," I say. "Just thinking."
"About?"
Everything. Nothing. The fact that none of this feels real anymore, hasn't felt real in longer than I can track, the road and the trees and her voice all arriving through some kind of glass that I cannot find the edges of. The fact that I have done this exact conversation in slightly different words five times and every single time it has ended the same way regardless of what I tried.
"Work stuff," I say. "Sorry. Ignore me."
"Wait are you actually nervous" She exclaimed as she laughed out loud waiting for my reaction.
She studies me for a moment longer than is comfortable, then seems to decide to let it go, the way you let go of a thread that isn't worth pulling on a honeymoon. She reaches for her phone and changes the music. Billie Eilish. The mood goes darker, more atmospheric, and we sit inside that mood without speaking for a long while.
An hour passes like this. Small attempts at conversation from her, each one met with something flat and minimal from me. Weather. The hotel. A funny story about her sister that she starts and then trails off halfway through when she realizes I am not really listening.
"You know what," she says eventually, not unkindly, "you can just tell me if you want quiet. I don't need a play by play of the Yukon."
"Sorry," I say again. The word has started to feel like the only one I have left.
She smiles a little. Reaches over and pats my knee once, like she's decided to be charitable about whatever mood I'm in. "It's fine. Big trip. Lots of adrenaline. You're allowed to be weird."
I don't tell her how right and how wrong that is at the same time.
The clock reads 6:30 PM.
"Are you hungry?" she asks. "We could stop somewhere up ahead, I saw a sign for a diner a while back."
"Sure," I say. "Whatever you want."
The same words she gave me an hour ago, handed back to her without irony, without anything really behind them at all. She doesn't seem to notice the echo. Or maybe she does and decides not to mention it.
"There's a turn coming up for it I think," she says, checking her phone. "Should be on the right in a"
6:37 PM.
The explosion arrives without warning of any kind, the way it always does, the way it has every single time regardless of what road we're on or how fast we're going or what either of us is saying when it happens. There is no countdown this time. No two hours minutes of frantic driving, no two hours minutes of awareness. Just her voice, mid-sentence, and then a flash of white light filling the windshield from somewhere to our right where the offroad path runs parallel to the highway not nearly as far away as I had let myself believe.
The blast radius was always going to reach the highway too. I understand this in the half second between the flash and the impact, understand it the way you understand a fact you already knew but had chosen not to examine. This dream had a pattern after all, and I had no idea what it was.
The shockwave hits the car broadside.
It does not roll us. Does not flip us. It simply crushes the passenger side inward in a single violent collapse, the door and the frame folding into the cabin like the car has been struck by something far larger and far heavier than air pressure has any right to be. The metal does not bend gracefully. It crumples in jagged angles, and one of those angles finds Olivia exactly where she sits.
The door frame catches her at the temple.
I am close enough, turned enough toward her in that last half second, to see it happen in a clarity that does not belong to something moving this fast. The metal does not just strike her skull, it presses into it, the force of the collapsing door finding the soft orbital bone first. Her left eye comes free of its socket entirely, forced out by the inward pressure of the crumpling frame, hanging for one suspended instant by nothing but the optic nerve before that too gives way and it drops into her lap, rolling once against the fabric of her seat before coming to rest.
Her right eye does not survive what follows either. The same collapsing metal that took the left one continues its arc and the socket on that side simply caves, the bone giving way under pressure that does not stop to register what it is destroying, and that eye does not come free so much as it is pulped where it sits, dark fluid running down her cheek mixed with blood that is already coming from a dozen other places at once.I see as her head bleeds out and her brain matter is spilled all over me.
The car continues forward under its own momentum even as the passenger compartment finishes its collapse, and the loss of structural integrity sends us drifting hard right, off the shoulder, toward the metal guardrail running alongside this stretch of highway. We hit it at speed. The guardrail does not give the way the police barrier did in other loops.
This one holds, rigid and unmoving, and the car wraps around it instead, the front end folding back toward the cabin in a single catastrophic crumple that drives the engine block backward into the space where my legs used to have room. I feel my ribs go first. Then something deeper, something that tears free inside my chest with a sensation unlike anything before it, wet and total and final. I look at her one more time before the world starts to gray. What's left of her face is turned toward me. Two empty sockets where her eyes used to be, blood still moving in slow runnels down skin that has already gone the particular pale of something that is no longer using its blood for anything.
"Sorry," I say again, to no one, to her, to whatever is left of her to hear it. Then I am bleeding out, slow and total, watching the gold light through a windshield that has somehow stayed mostly intact, watching it dim at the edges first and then everywhere at once.
Then nothing.
Then light.