One second of nothing.
Then Eminem. Then the road. Then her voice.
"Take that one. It's shorter. My boss uses this route all the time when he drives from Alaska instead of flying. Trust me."
I don't think. Don't plan. Don't weigh anything against anything else.
My foot finds the accelerator and presses it to the floor.
Not away. Not back toward Alaska. Forward. Down her route. Down the offroad path she suggested, the narrow one cutting northeast through nothing. If the explosion happens regardless of where we are then distance in any direction is the only variable I can control and I am going to control it with everything this engine has.
The car lunges. The speedometer climbs.
80. 100. 120.
"Clyde." Olivia grabs the dashboard. "Clyde, slow down."
I don't slow down.
140. 160.
"CLYDE."
The offroad path was not built for this. The surface is uneven, patched gravel and cracked asphalt, and at 160 kilometers per hour every imperfection becomes a launch point. The car bucks and shudders. Something underneath scrapes against a ridge and throws sparks visible even in daylight. The steering wheel vibrates in my hands with a violence that travels up my arms and into my teeth.
I hold it steady. Keep the accelerator pinned.
170. 180.
Olivia has stopped shouting. I register this distantly. She has pressed herself back into the passenger seat, both hands white on the grab handle above the door, body rigid. Not frozen with cold. Frozen with the particular stillness of someone who has concluded that any movement at all might make it worse.
She is looking at me.
I do not look back.
The wilderness blurs past. Trees and tundra and rock faces compressing into streaks of color, the world narrowing to just the road ahead and the numbers on the speedometer and the clock I cannot stop checking.
4:41 PM.
Almost two hours. Two hours to put as much of the Yukon between us and that crossroads as this damaged, protesting vehicle will allow.
190. 195.
The engine is screaming now. Not the normal sound of a working engine pushed hard but something higher, something with an edge of wrongness, a sound that means components are operating outside every parameter they were designed for. Smoke begins to curl from under the hood. Thin at first. Then less thin.
Olivia makes a sound. Small. Not a word. Just something from her chest she cannot suppress.
I do not register it.
My mind is running calculations with no reliable inputs. If the explosion has a blast radius of X and we are now Y kilometers away then the shockwave force at our position would be Z. But I don't know X. Don't know the yield, the source, the nature of whatever detonates at 6:37 PM every single time without fail. All I have is distance and speed and the desperate arithmetic of a man who has watched his wife die twice.
An hour in, she tries.
Her hand leaves the grab handle. Crosses the console. Finds my arm just below the elbow, fingers wrapping around it, grip firm and warm and real.
"Clyde." Her voice is different now. Not panicked. Not demanding. Something quieter and more frightened than either. "Please. Whatever is happening. Whatever you think is going to happen. Just talk to me. Please."
The words reach me from a very long way away.
I am aware of her hand on my arm the way you are aware of weather through glass. Present. Real. Not touching anything essential. My foot does not lift from the accelerator. My eyes do not leave the road. Whatever she is feeling right now it cannot be as important as the clock and the distance and the numbers.
She waits. A long time. Longer than most people would.
Then her hand withdraws.
She presses herself back against the door and says nothing else and the silence between us is a different kind of silence than before. Before it was shock. Now it is a conclusion she has reached about her husband that she is keeping entirely to herself.
6:28 PM.
Nine minutes.
200 kilometers per hour. The car shaking itself toward dissolution, smoke thickening over the hood, the engine's scream reaching frequencies I have never heard from a road vehicle. Sparks trail behind us in the rearview mirror like a comet tail.
6:33 PM.
Four minutes. We are far. We have to be far enough.
6:36 PM.
One minute. Olivia is utterly still beside me. Not looking at me. Looking at the road ahead with an expression I do not have the capacity to read.
6:37 PM.
The first explosion.
Even from here it is enormous. A flash that turns the rearview mirror into a rectangle of white light. A sound that arrives seconds later, low and total, felt in the sternum more than heard. The ground trembles under the wheels.
I keep driving.
The first shockwave reaches us diminished. A pressure change more than a physical force. Enough to make the car skip once but not enough to lose control. I correct. Keep the accelerator down.
It worked. The distance worked. We are through the first one.
Then the second explosion.
Bigger. Closer. A secondary detonation from somewhere between us and ground zero and the shockwave it produces is not diminished at all. It arrives full force and it hits the car like a wall.
The passenger side takes the worst of it.
The door tears free at the hinges. Two hours of high speed vibration have already stressed every bolt and joint and the shockwave finishes the job. The explosive decompression of the car's interior catches Olivia before the seatbelt can and she is gone, pulled out through the space where the door was into 200 kilometer per hour air.
I scream her name.
The car without her weight swings violently right. The front right tire blows from the stress and the car drops and begins to spin and there is nothing to be done about any of it.
Through the spinning windshield I see her hit the ground.
Once. Twice. Three times. The speed she was traveling at when the door went means each impact is separated by distance, each one a separate event, each one taking something else. By the time she stops moving she is thirty meters off the road and the stillness of her body has a quality I recognise now the way you recognise a word in your own language.
The car comes to rest against a rock face. I am intact. Bleeding from somewhere on my scalp. But intact.
I get out.
Run to her.
She is breathing. Just. Shallow and wet and rattling with things that should not be inside a chest. Blood from her nose, her ears. Her neck at an angle that makes the rest of the inventory unnecessary. I have known what a broken cervical spine looks like since the academy.
I drop to my knees and take her hand. Still warm.
Her eyes find mine. One moment. Recognition in them and pain and something that breaks me completely because it looks like she is sorry for me.
"Clyde," she breathes. Blood on her lips with the word. Just my name. The last thing she has.
Then the light goes out.
I sit with her hand in both of mine and watch the mushroom cloud paint the sky orange and understand something with total clarity for the first time.
It does not matter what I do.
It does not matter how fast I drive or which direction or how many kilometers I put between us and that crossroads. She dies. Every time. Only she dies. I walk away intact every single loop and she pays the price for everything I try.
I throw my head back and the sound that comes out of me is not a scream. It is something older than that.
The third explosion comes five minutes later.
I do not run from it.
The shockwave takes me where I kneel beside her and it is the last thing I feel.
Then nothing.
Then light.