One second of nothing.
Then nothing else. Not Eminem. Not the road, not yet, not in any way I recognise as the road. Just a soft gray weight pressing down on me, the particular heaviness of sleep that has not finished deciding to let go.
I do not open my eyes.
I do not understand, not yet, that I am supposed to be somewhere else. The crossroads, her voice, the same six words I have heard seven times now. None of it arrives. My body has woken up inside whatever comes after the offroad path this time, and it has woken up still wanting to sleep.
I drift.
Distantly, voices. Clinical and low, but outdoors, carried on wind. The smell of gasoline and dust and something sharper underneath it, antiseptic, out of place against the open air.
I do not think: I have died seven times.
I think: just a little longer.
And I sleep again, inside whatever this is, for a length of time I cannot measure.
When I surface properly, the light is wrong in a different way than I expect. Not fluorescent. Open sky, the gold-amber slide of late afternoon, and somewhere above me the angled white underside of an awning, a portable canopy snapped up over the spot where I'm lying.
My head throbs in a way that has its own architecture, a deep structural ache that sits behind my left eye and pulses with my heartbeat. I try to bring a hand to my face and find it weighted down by something. An IV line. Tape across my skin. I am on some kind of stretcher, raised off the gravel shoulder on collapsible legs, the wrecked car visible past the edge of the canopy, hood crumpled, one headlight hanging from its socket by a cable.
"Clyde?"
Olivia's voice. Close. To my right.
I turn my head, slowly, and the ache flares into something sharper. She's crouched beside the stretcher, still in her travel clothes, a small bandage over a cut on her own forehead but otherwise whole, otherwise fine, her hand already reaching for mine the moment my eyes find hers.
"Hey," she says. Soft. Relieved. "Hey, you're awake."
I do not understand where I am.
"What happened," I manage. My voice comes out wrong, dry and slow, like the words have to be located individually before I can use them.
"You fell asleep at the wheel." She says it carefully, watching my face for a reaction she's clearly worried about. "We got hit. Another car came around the bend too fast and clipped us and we went off the road. You hit your head pretty badly. The paramedics said concussion. I'm completely fine, I promise, just a cut."
None of this is familiar.
I search for the crossroads in my memory and find it there, distant and strange, like something I read about rather than something I lived. The daffodils. The fence. I cannot place why those images carry weight, why looking at them sideways makes my chest tighten with something that has no clear cause.
Beyond the canopy, two paramedics work near a rolling case set up on the open tailgate of their response vehicle, a portable setup of supplies laid out the way field medics organize things when there's no hospital nearby and the nearest one is hours away. A second IV bag hangs from a collapsible pole jammed into the gravel beside my stretcher. A tray of instruments sits on a折りfold-out table at the foot of the stretcher, scissors and clamps and gauze laid out in careful rows, weighted down against the wind with a strip of tape.
"How long," I ask.
"The crash was about an hour ago. They worked on you right here, they didn't want to move you with a head injury that fresh, and there's nowhere close enough to take you anyway." She squeezes my hand. "You've been in and out since. They said that's normal."
An hour. I do not know why that number sits wrong in my stomach.
"You should rest," she says. "I'm right here. I'm not going anywhere."
I want to ask her something. Cannot find the shape of the question. My eyes find my own wrist, where someone has strapped a thin plastic watch back onto me after the crash, the face of it cracked but still ticking.
6:06 PM.
The number does nothing. Sits there, flat and meaningless, the way numbers do when you have not yet remembered why they should matter.
I let my eyes close again.
I drift in and out. Each time I surface, Olivia is there, exactly where she was, her hand finding mine again as if she's never quite let it go.
"You don't have to stay awake with me," I tell her once, my voice a little clearer.
"I want to."
One of the paramedics checks the monitor clipped to my finger at some point, makes a note on a clipboard, says something reassuring about vitals that I do not retain. The world around me starts to resolve into specifics. The canopy snapping gently in the wind. The wrecked car twenty feet away, undercarriage still ticking as it cools. The fold-out table of instruments at the foot of the stretcher, close enough that the wind occasionally lifts the corner of the gauze.
"What time is it," I ask. The question arrives with a weight I do not understand yet.
Olivia glances at her phone. "6:34."
Something in me goes very still.
6:34.
The number lands differently this time. Lands with a force that does not match its size, and for the first time since I opened my eyes on this stretcher, something underneath the fog starts to surface. A road. A field. A fence I cannot place but suddenly do not want to think about. A countdown I have run seven times before and somehow, impossibly, forgot to run this time, slept straight through the only thing that has ever mattered.
"Olivia."
"Yeah?"
I try to sit up. The IV line pulls taut. The world tilts hard. "We need to"
"Hey, hey, lie back, you're going to pull the line."
"Listen to me." My voice comes out raw, too loud for the open air around us. "Something is going to happen. I don't know how to explain it but you need to get away from this spot, you need to"
"Clyde, you have a concussion, you're not making"
6:37 PM.
The explosion does not arrive the way it has the previous seven times.
There is no flash through a windshield, no field of daffodils. There is only the ground itself convulsing beneath the stretcher's collapsible legs, the entire roadside shuddering as the shockwave finds us from somewhere down the route, the canopy above us tearing free of its frame and cartwheeling off into the brush.
The IV pole beside the stretcher tips.
The bag ruptures as it falls, the line tearing free from the port, and the fluid inside, the second bag, the one the paramedic mentioned only as something to manage the swelling, doesn't simply spill into the gravel. The shockwave's pressure change does something to the chemistry of it that has no business happening, a violent reaction in the open air as it meets the dust and whatever else is suspended in the blast wind, and what comes off it is a fine caustic mist that drifts directly into Olivia's face where she is still leaning over the stretcher toward me.
"Olivia, GET BACK"
Too late.
The mist finds her eyes first. She recoils, hands flying to her face, and I watch her skin where it makes contact begin to redden immediately, an angry chemical flush spreading from her cheeks outward. Her breathing changes within seconds, a thin, reedy whistle replacing the normal rhythm of it, her throat beginning to close from the inside as whatever compound this was turns, in the open blast air, into something that swells everything else instead.
She drops to her knees on the gravel beside the stretcher, both hands at her own throat, eyes wide and streaming, mouth working uselessly around air that will not go where it needs to go.
"NO. NO, LIV, LOOK AT ME"
I cannot reach her properly. The IV line tethers me, the head injury has stolen half my balance, and I half fall, half lower myself off the stretcher toward her, my hands finding her shoulders as her body begins to seize, small at first, then total, her spine arching against a convulsion that has nothing to do with choice.
The second explosion comes while she is still seizing.
The shockwave reaches the fold-out table at the foot of the stretcher and sends it tumbling, the careful rows of steel instruments scattering across the gravel, and a single pair of surgical scissors, caught by the blast and the table's collapse together, travels the open distance at a velocity no hand ever gave it.
It enters my left eye.
The pain is total and immediate, white and absolute, blotting out everything else for one suspended second, and I feel the specific wrongness of metal where nothing metal should ever be, the orbit of my own skull suddenly occupied by something that does not belong there.
Through my remaining eye, blurred with my own blood and hers, I watch Olivia stop seizing.
Watch her body go slack against the gravel, her face still flushed and swollen, her mouth still open around a breath that never arrives.
Her eyes find mine. One last time. Whatever recognition is left in them does not have room for fear anymore, only the particular blankness of a person whose body has already moved past the point of fighting.
Then she's still.
I press my hand against my ruined eye, against the scissors still seated there, and feel blood running freely down my wrist, down my forearm, more than a single wound should produce. Somewhere beneath the immediate horror of my eye, something else is happening, something internal, a pressure building behind my ribs that I recognise distantly as my own blood finding somewhere it should not be.
The third explosion comes.
I do not feel it the way I have felt the others. By the time the final shockwave reaches the roadside, I am already on the gravel beside her, my hand still in hers, watching the wide open sky blur and double through my one working eye.
"I'm sorry," I say. Or try to. I am not certain the words make it out properly anymore.
The sky goes gray at the edges. Then darker. Then nothing.
Then light.