One second of nothing.
Then Eminem. Then the road. Then her voice already forming the words I have heard four 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."
I don't take it.
My hands wrench the wheel hard right instead, cutting across both lanes toward the metal guardrail on the opposite shoulder. The car hits it at full speed and the railing buckles and screams and tears free from its moorings and we punch through it in a shower of sparks and bent metal, the front end crumpling just enough to remind me that physics still exists before the engine catches and pulls us forward.
Backward. Away. Back the way we came.
"CLYDE WHAT ARE YOU DOING."
I floor it.
The speedometer climbs. The damaged front end pulls left and I fight it. The Yukon wilderness blurs past on both sides and I keep my eyes on the road behind us, now ahead of us, the ribbon of asphalt that leads anywhere that is not 6:37 PM at that crossroads.
Olivia is gripping the dashboard with both hands. Rigid. Staring at me like she has never seen me before and is not certain she wants to.
"Talk to me. Right now. Clyde. RIGHT NOW."
I say nothing.
She stops asking after the third time gets no answer. Presses herself back into the seat. Goes quiet in the way she goes quiet when she has decided something and is waiting to act on it.
Ten minutes in I see the lights.
Red and blue in the rearview mirror. One cruiser, closing fast, siren cutting through the sound of the engine and the wind and Billie Eilish still playing from the speakers because nobody thought to turn that song off.
I do not slow down.
The cruiser pulls alongside me. The officer inside is gesturing hard, mouthing words I can lip read without trying. Pull over. Now. His face is the particular shade of controlled fury that belongs to people whose authority has just been casually ignored at 180 kilometers per hour on a public road.
I look at him for exactly one second.
Then I look back at the road.
He drops back. Gets on his radio. Within four minutes there is a second cruiser and then a third, the three of them forming a moving corridor around my car, lights strobing, sirens layering over each other into a wall of sound that Olivia is pressing her hands over her ears against.
"Clyde." Her voice has gone very flat. Very still. The voice she uses when she has moved past fear into something colder. "You need to stop this car."
I check the clock. 5:02 PM.
An hour and thirty five minutes.
I do not stop the car.
The police are on the radio, I can hear fragments of it from the cruiser running parallel on my left, the officer's window down, shouting across the gap between our vehicles. Spike strip ahead. Roadblock. Last warning. The procedural language of people who are very serious and have run out of patience and have tools at their disposal that I do not.
Olivia reaches over and puts her hand on my arm.
Not grabbing. Not pulling. Just placing it there. Warm and deliberate.
"Whatever is happening," she says quietly, underneath the sirens, underneath everything. "I am right here. Okay? I am right here."
The words arrive from very far away.
I feel them land somewhere. Register them the way you register sunlight through a window when you are already somewhere else entirely. Real. Present. Not enough.
My foot does not lift.
Her hand withdraws.
We hit the spike strip at 6:19 PM doing 190 kilometers per hour and all four tires blow simultaneously, the car dropping hard onto its rims, metal screaming against asphalt, sparks sheeting out from all four corners in continuous orange curtains. The car fishtails violently but does not spin out. The rims bite into the road surface and slow us by force and by 6:24 PM we have come to a grinding, shuddering stop on a straight stretch of road with three police cruisers boxing us in and eight officers deploying behind open doors with weapons drawn.
"DRIVER. HANDS WHERE WE CAN SEE THEM. NOW."
I put my hands on the wheel.
Olivia is very still beside me. Not looking at the officers. Looking at me. Her expression is something I do not have a word for. Not anger. Not fear. Something past both of those that I have never seen on her face before and hope to never see again except that hope is complicated now.
"Hands out the window! NOW!"
I put my hands out the window.
I check the clock. 6:24 PM.
Thirteen minutes.
The officers approach in pairs, weapons still up, moving with the careful choreography of people who have trained for exactly this scenario. Two reach my door. Two reach Olivia's. The remaining four hold their positions behind the cruisers, one of them already on the radio calling in the situation.
My door opens. Hands find my arms. I am pulled out and turned and pressed against the side of the car and the cold metal of cuffs closes around my wrists before I have taken a full breath of outside air.
"Sir, you are under arrest for reckless driving, criminal damage to public property, failure to stop for police, and"
I stop listening.
I am looking at the sky. At the particular quality of the late afternoon light, that gold and amber that belongs only to this hour in this place, painting everything in colors that have nothing to do with what is about to happen.
6:31 PM.
Six minutes.
The officer processing me is thorough. Professional. Young, maybe, but focused. He does not notice that I have stopped responding to anything he says. Does not notice that I am counting down rather than listening. Does not notice that I keep looking east, toward the source, toward the place where something catastrophic is building toward its inevitable moment.
Olivia is out of the car now. Another officer talking to her, tone gentler than the ones dealing with me, her hands free, her face doing something complicated as she answers questions and glances at me and answers more questions.
Our eyes meet across the roof of the car.
She holds my gaze for a long moment.
Then she looks away.
6:35 PM.
Two minutes.
"Sir, I need you to focus. Can you tell me why you"
"Get everyone away from here." My voice comes out strange. Flat and certain in a way that makes the officer pause. "Please. Everyone needs to get in the cars and drive west. Right now. As fast as they can."
The officer looks at me. "Sir."
"I know how this sounds. I know exactly how this sounds. Please just"
6:37 PM.
The first explosion detonates.
It is the same as it always is. The flash. The sound arriving late. The ground shuddering under eight sets of feet and four sets of tires. Officers grabbing for their vehicles, for each other, training and instinct firing simultaneously in every direction.
The shockwave rolls across the landscape.
It hits all three cars at once.
The two police cruisers running parallel absorb it differently than my car does. The nearest one, the one on my left, takes the wave broadside and the vehicle lifts. Not dramatically. Just enough. Just enough that when it comes back down the trajectory has changed and it is moving now, sliding on the shockwave's momentum, the massive front end swinging toward me with a speed and mass that the officer still holding my arm has exactly no time to process.
I see it coming.
The cruiser's front end connects with my head at the level of the roof of my own car.
The world does not go dark. That is the thing. That is the part that is wrong and impossible and belongs to whatever this loop has become. The world does not go dark because my head does not go with the cruiser when it continues its arc. My head separates at the neck from the sheer force of the impact, the momentum of that much metal moving that fast, and it hits the asphalt three meters away and comes to rest facing upward.
Facing her.
My body is still standing. I see as my body stands there with my esophagus is extended and naked, blood seems to be coming out of it like water out of a fountain. Somehow. For three, four seconds, the body that was Clyde Martinez stands against the side of the car with its wrists cuffed behind it and no head and blood pumping from the stump of the neck in rhythmic arcs that slow almost immediately as the heart begins to understand what has happened.
Then it drops.
But I am still here.
Watching from the ground. From the wrong angle. From three meters away and facing up at a sky that is still that same gold and amber, completely indifferent.
Olivia is twenty feet away. She has not been hit. The shockwave threw her backward against the second cruiser and she slid down it and she is sitting on the ground now, dazed, bleeding from a cut above her eyebrow, staring at the place where I was standing.
Staring at what is left of me.
Her mouth is open. No sound coming out. Her military training has encountered something it was not designed for and it has simply stopped, every system offline, every response unavailable.
I watch her find my head on the asphalt.
Watch the moment she understands what she is looking at.
I cannot speak. Cannot move. Cannot do anything except exist in this wrong and broken way, present without a body, aware without the architecture awareness requires. Some fragment of me pinned to this moment, forced to watch.
The second explosion comes.
Closer this time. The secondary detonation from between us and ground zero, larger than the first, and the shockwave it produces has not traveled far enough to lose anything.
It takes the cars.
All three of them lurch and collide in a single catastrophic instant, metal finding metal, the cruiser closest to Olivia swinging hard into her position. She has no time. Has not recovered enough from the first wave to move, to run, to do anything with that training that has gone quiet inside her.
The cruiser hits her mid-body.
She goes through the windshield of the second cruiser on the other side. The glass takes her at the waist, the frame of the windshield catching her lower body while the upper half continues forward through the interior and the momentum of the impact does the rest. Her lower torso separates. Just tears free, the physics of it as simple and terrible as anything I have watched in five loops now, the body failing along the lines that enough force always finds. I watch as her rectum flies apart in a completely different direction. Her femoral arteries are exposed for all to see as her lower half remains standing.
Her upper half comes to rest across the dashboard of the second cruiser, face against the cracked windshield from the inside, arms hanging, dark hair across her face.
Her lower half stays outside.
On the road. In the open air. Legs folded beneath it in the dirt.
The blood comes fast and then slows and then stops as her heart exhausts what it has left to pump as I see her eyes roll back to the back of her head. Her pelvis seems miserable, completely exposed to the air.
Then the crows arrive.
I do not know where they come from. The Yukon has never felt empty of them exactly, those black shapes moving at the edges of things, but there are six of them and then twelve and they find her lower half first, the exposed viscera where the separation happened, and they begin their work with the total indifference of creatures that do not recognise the difference between her and anything else that has ever been left in a field.
I watch.
I cannot do anything except watch.
The third explosion comes before the crows have finished.
The final shockwave is the largest of the three. It takes the cruiser that holds her upper half and rolls it, the vehicle tumbling twice before it comes down flat and hard on the road surface, and whatever is left of her inside it does not survive the rolling, the crushing, the final indignity of being compressed between steel and asphalt by something that does not know her name.
The wave reaches me where my head lies on the asphalt.
I feel it coming.
Then I feel nothing at all.
Then nothing.
Then light.