One second of nothing.
Then I'm screaming.
Not gasping. Not jolting awake with a sharp breath. Screaming - raw and animal, torn from somewhere deeper than my throat. My hands claw at my chest, my groin, expecting wounds that aren't there, pain that has vanished but hasn't really, because I can still feel it. The phantom sensation of razor wire pulling. Antlers punching through sternum. Her heart hitting the ground and beating anyway.
Thump-thump. Thump-thump.
Still going in my head even now.
"Clyde!" Olivia's voice. Sharp. Alarmed. "Clyde, what's wrong?"
The car. I'm in the car. Driving. Steering wheel in my hands and I am driving and the road is right there and -
The vehicle lurches right. My body convulses without permission, hands jerking the wheel hard. Tires scream against asphalt. Olivia grabs the dashboard.
"CLYDE! HONEY, CAREFUL -"
She lunges across the console. Her hands find the wheel, pulling against mine, trying to straighten us out. But I can't help her. Can't coordinate my own limbs. My foot hits the accelerator then the brake then nothing, no pattern, no control, sobs tearing through me in waves that feel structural, like something load-bearing is coming apart.
"Pull over! Clyde, PULL OVER!"
Through the blur I see the guardrail. End of a straightaway. Coming up fast.
Olivia yanks the wheel left. The car fishtails. Tires scream. We slide sideways and hit the guardrail with a crunch of metal that throws me into the door. My head cracks against the window. Fresh real pain on top of phantom pain and for a second I can't tell which is which.
Then stillness. Just the hiss of the radiator and my own ragged breathing.
"Clyde." Her hands are on my face. Turning me toward her. Checking for damage. Her eyes are wide and frightened - not for herself. For me. "Baby, talk to me. What's happening? Are you hurt?"
I try. I open my mouth and what comes out isn't words. It's just sound. Broken and incoherent and nowhere close to explaining two loops of watching her die in ways that shouldn't be possible.
She's going to think I've lost my mind.
Maybe I have.
"Okay." Her voice shifts. That calm, controlled register she learned in the military, the one that means she's scared but has decided to be useful instead. "Okay. You're having a panic attack. Just breathe with me. In through your nose -"
But I can't. Can't breathe, can't think, can't stop seeing her heart on the ground still contracting, thump-thump, weaker, weaker, still.
"I'm calling for help." She already has her phone out. Hands shaking now too, her own fear breaking through the professional mask. "Just hold on."
I hear her talking. Emergency. My husband. Panic attack. We crashed. Location somewhere along the offroad path, Yukon, mile marker she has to squint to read.
Time does something strange after that. Stretches. Compresses. I don't know if it's five minutes or fifty before the siren arrives.
A police cruiser pulls up behind us, red and blue painting the dusk. The officer who gets out is young. Late twenties maybe. Royal Canadian Mounted Police, uniform crisp, expression concerned in that careful professional way I recognize from my own rookie years on the force.
He bends to the driver's window.
"Ma'am? Sir? I'm Officer Chen. Are either of you injured?"
"My husband." Olivia's voice cracks on the word. "I don't know what's wrong. He just started — and we almost -" Her own tears arrive now, the stress finally overwhelming the control she's been hol
ding onto.
"It's alright," Chen says. Same calm voice I've used a hundred times myself. "I'm going to call for an ambulance. Sir, can you hear me?"
I nod. Still can't speak properly. My sobs have quieted to shuddering gasps but the tears won't stop and my whole body feels like it's vibrating at the wrong frequency.
Chen steps back, reaches for his radio. "Dispatch, this is Unit 47. I need an ambulance at -"
I check my watch. Automatic. Compulsive.
6:35 PM.
Two minutes.
"Officer." My voice comes out wrecked. Raw. "You need to leave. Right now. Both of you. Get in the car and drive away, please---"
He turns back. Confused. "Sir, I understand you're distressed but I can't leave until —"
"PLEASE." The word tears out of me. "Just go. All of us. We need to move, we need to —"
6:37 PM.
The explosion arrives on schedule. Same direction. Same distance. Same devastating totality. The shockwave rolls across the landscape and rocks both vehicles hard enough to make Chen stumble backward, arms windmilling.
His hand goes to his hip. Training. Instinct. The sudden chaos triggering every drill at once.
His finger catches on something. The safety stra
p. His belt. It doesn't matter.
The gun slips.
Falls.
Hits the ground.
Fires.
The sound is wrong. Intimate. Not the massive detonation from down the road but the close, sharp crack of a handgun going off right next to us. I see the trajectory before it resolves. See exactly where the angle takes it. Up. Through the open driver's window. Directly at —
"NO -"
I lunge across the console. My fingers find her shoulder.
Not fast enough.
The bullet enters her left temple. Small entry. Neat. The kind of wound that looks almost minor until you see the exit. The right side of her head opens outward -bone and matter and blood spraying across the passenger window in a fan that coats the glass completely. Her body jerks once. Hard. Then goes completely slack, slumping sideways into the seat like every structural thing inside her has simply switched off.
Because it has.
"Olivia." I grab her. Pull her toward me. My hands come away red and wet and there is matter on my fingers that I cannot look at directly. "No. No, not again, please not again -"
Her eyes are open. Half open. Already going glassy, that particular unfocus that I know now, that I will always know, the specific way her eyes look when she is no longer behind them.
Chen is screaming something. White-faced. Scrambling for his weapon. "Oh God, oh Jesus, I didn't - the gun just -"
I don't hear him. I'm pressing my forehead to hers. Feeling her blood on my face. Smelling copper and her shampoo mixed together in a combination that should not exist.
"I'm sorry," I whisper. Voice gone. Just air shaped into words. "I tried to warn them. I tried to change it. I don't know how to stop this."
Pain arrives. Sharp. Right side of my skull, just above the ear. I reach up and my fingers come back red. When I lunged across the console my head connected with something — gear shift, door frame, doesn't matter. Blood runs warm down the side of my face.
The world tilts.
Chen is at the window now, reaching in, his face a ruin of guilt and horror. "Sir! Sir, stay with me! The ambulance is -"
But I'm already going. Already sinking into the dark I've come to recognise. Not fighting it this time. Not clawing back toward consciousness or Olivia or any of it.
Just letting go.
His voice follows me down, desperate, begging me to hold on.
I don't want to hold
on.
The third wave hits and takes everything with it.
Then nothing.
Just darkness.
Just the end.