I jolted upright, gasping for air that suddenly filled my lungs. My hands flew to my chest, expecting to feel shattered ribs, punctured lungs, the wet cave of my destroyed torso—
Nothing.
I was in the car. The engine was humming. Eminem was playing through the speakers.
"What the—"
I looked around wildly. We were at the crossroads. The same crossroads. And Olivia was turning to me, her mouth already opening to speak.
"Take that one," she said, pointing to the offroad path. "It's shorter. My boss uses this route all the time when he drives from Alaska to the mainland instead of flying. Trust me."
The words hit me like ice water. Exact words. The exact same inflection. I'd heard this before. I'd lived this before.
The daffodils. The fence. Her body in three pieces. The organs spilling out like—
No. No, that was a dream. A nightmare. Some kind of pre-wedding anxiety manifesting as a horrific daydream. People get those, right? Intrusive thoughts. My therapist had mentioned them once, back when I was dealing with the stress of the force.
"Clyde?" Olivia was looking at me with concern. "You okay? You look pale."
"Yeah," I said, forcing a smile. "Yeah, I'm fine. Just... zoned out for a second."
I turned onto the offroad path, just like before. Because what else was I going to do? The other option was to tell my wife that I'd just experienced a vivid hallucination of her being sliced into three pieces by a flying fence, and that seemed like a great way to start our honeymoon.
The music played. We argued about Eminem versus Billie Eilish. And with every passing minute, the sense of déjà vu grew stronger, more oppressive, like a weight pressing down on my chest.
This isn't real, I told myself. You're just anxious. It's normal. Everything is fine.
But as we approached the area—that specific stretch of road—my hands started to shake on the steering wheel.
I had to do something. Anything. I couldn't just let it play out the same way.
"I need to stop," I said abruptly, pulling the car over.
Olivia looked at me, surprised. "What? Why?"
"I need to... relieve myself. Real quick." It was a weak excuse, but it was all I had.
"Oh. Okay." She settled back into her seat, reaching for her phone.
I got out of the car, my heart hammering in my chest. The late afternoon sun was sinking toward the horizon. I checked my watch without thinking.
6:32 PM.
My blood ran cold. Five minutes. In five minutes, if this was real, if this wasn't just some insane delusion—
I stumbled away from the car, looking for a bush, any excuse to justify stopping. But my mind was racing, trying to think, to plan, to scheme some way out of this.
That's when I saw it.
Not daffodils this time. Just wasteland. Beautiful, empty, barren wasteland stretching out toward the horizon, painted gold by the setting sun. No fence. No flowers. Just open space.
An idea struck me. Desperate, maybe insane, but an idea nonetheless.
"Hey!" I shouted back toward the car. "Olivia! Come look at this!"
I heard the car door open. Heard her footsteps approaching. She came around the front of the car, eyeing me suspiciously.
"Clyde, what are you—why are you acting so weird?"
There was a low fence here too—just a simple barrier, nothing like the ornate monstrosity from my vision. Without thinking, without letting my cop brain that always followed the rules object, I hopped over it.
"Come on," I said, reaching back for her hand. "I want to show you something."
She hesitated, then smiled and took my hand, climbing over after me. "Since when do you break rules, Officer Martinez?"
"Since I married you," I said, and pulled her close. I kissed her forehead, breathing in the scent of her hair, feeling the warmth of her body against mine. Real. Solid. Alive.
See? I told myself. Nothing's going to happen. You changed it. You—
I checked my watch.
6:37 PM.
The explosion came from the same direction as before, but this time I heard it—really heard it. A massive detonation that made the ground shake beneath our feet. The pressure wave was visible in the air, rippling toward us like a shockwave in water.
"CLYDE!" Olivia screamed, understanding flooding her military-trained mind before mine could even process the danger.
The fence—the simple, harmless fence I'd thought would save us—tore free from its moorings with a shriek of protesting metal. But this fence wasn't decorative wrought iron. It was chain-link topped with razor wire, and as it lifted into the air, those coiled spirals of sharpened steel unraveled like the tentacles of some mechanical monster.
Time seemed to slow as the fence spun toward us.
I tried to push Olivia down, tried to shield her, but the razor wire caught her first. It wrapped around her head like a crown of thorns, the barbed edges biting deep into her skull. I watched in horror as it tightened, cutting through skin and bone with sickening ease.
The top of her head came off.
Just... came off.
Like opening a jar, the entire crown of her skull separated from the rest, still wrapped in razor wire as the fence continued its deadly rotation. I could see inside. Could see the gray and pink of her brain, the white of skull fragments, the dark red blood that began to pump out in rhythmic spurts.
Olivia was still standing. Still looking at me. Her eyes were wide with shock, her mouth opening and closing, trying to form words that would never come.
Then she fell backward, and as she did, the razor wire that had wrapped around her torso pulled taut.
I watched—God help me, I watched—as it sawed through her chest cavity. Her ribcage split open like a grotesque flower, the bones cracking and splintering. Her heart, still beating, still trying desperately to pump blood through a body that was rapidly ceasing to be, tumbled out of the cavity like a ball rolling off a table.
It hit the ground with a wet thump and kept beating. Kept contracting. A steady rhythm: thump-thump, thump-thump, thump-thump—slower now, weaker, but still going.
Her lungs followed, collapsing in on themselves as they hit the air. Her liver, her stomach, her intestines—everything just spilled out in a cascade of organs and blood and things that should never see sunlight.
But I barely registered any of that because the fence was still moving, still spinning, and the razor wire had found me too.
I felt it wrap around my groin—felt the barbs dig in—and then pull.
The pain was unlike anything I'd ever experienced. White-hot and all-consuming, radiating out from my core in waves that made me want to vomit, to scream, to die. I looked down and saw blood, so much blood, pouring from where my manhood had been. The razor wire had torn it away entirely, leaving nothing but a ragged wound that pumped blood with each frantic beat of my heart.
I fell to my knees, my hands instinctively going to the wound, trying uselessly to stop the bleeding. But it was too much. Too fast. My vision was already starting to tunnel.
Through the haze of pain, I saw Olivia's heart finally stop beating. Saw it give one last, weak contraction, and then go still.
At least she went first, I thought deliriously. At least she didn't have to see—
The second impact hit before I could finish the thought.
Something from the car—one of the ornamental dashboard pieces we'd bought at that tourist trap in Anchorage, a carved wooden caribou with real antlers—came flying through the air like a missile. The explosion must have launched it from inside the vehicle.
It hit me in the chest with enough force to knock me flat on my back. The antlers—sharp, pointed, harder than they had any right to be—punched through my sternum and into my heart.
I felt it. Felt the muscle tear. Felt the chambers rupture. Felt my blood, already depleted from the wound below, begin to fill my chest cavity.
I tried to breathe but only managed a wet, gurgling gasp. Blood filled my mouth, hot and thick and choking.
My vision was dimming now, darkness creeping in from all sides. The last thing I saw was the sunset, that beautiful golden light painting the wasteland in shades of amber and red.
Red like blood.
Red like death.
Red like—
Darkness.
Nothing.
An end that felt eternal.
And then—
Light.