The Lockbox

1 - The Lockbox

“Well, why don’t the others have it then, smartass?”

Jordan could feel her eyes boring into him, could see her hand on her hip and her eyebrows raised to her hairline as clear in his mind’s eye as he would’ve in his literal ones if he were looking. He took a breath and dropped the box containing their Christmas stuff down onto the wooden pallets.

A nice touch, but if this basement floods like in Florida, those pallets will do about as much good as decade-old tylenol, he thought as he stood up. He took a deep breath, pushing down the anger fighting to rise within him and looked at his bride.

“I don’t know, Tay. But, Dave didn’t say anything about it, and thus, it is not any of our business.” He did his best to keep his tone steady, but heard tension creeping in, nonetheless.

“First of all, you don’t need to say both ‘and’ and ‘thus’ - it’s redundant - and second - ”

“Taylor.”

She snapped her mouth shut and he felt instantly guilty - both for using her full first name, an outburst he knew was nearly as hurtful to her as a slap across the face, and for his tone.

He stooped and turned again and pushed the box as far back against the wall as it would go, giving himself a moment to cool. He was about to rise when her hand fell on his shoulder. He sighed inwardly - three years of marriage wasn’t a lot by the standards of most, but it was enough to be able to control whether the sigh stayed in or got out - most of the time, anyway - and rose to face her.

“I’m sorry, babe,” she said, looking up at him, “I guess it’s not important. It’s just weird, ya know? I mean, really, why is ours - ” she stopped, shaking her head, and looked up at him again. “Anyway, I shouldn’t have snapped at you like that.”

“Or called me a smartass.” He said, smiling now.

“Eh, I wouldn’t go that far,” she said, smiling back and reaching around to grab his butt. “Although, I might add ‘hot’ to the descriptor as well, if that makes you feel better.”

“I guess it does, a little,” he said, bending to her. Her eyes closed in anticipation of the kiss, but he stopped just short of making contact. “Still friends?”

“Still friends,” she said, crossing the miniscule distance and planting a small kiss on his lips.

The fire that had warmed them both throughout their marriage wasn’t there in the banter or the kiss, but the genuine effort on each side was a start, and they released each other, she walking back out of their allotted storage room into the common basement area, he giving the Christmas box one final push to the corner where it would stay for another ten months or so.

Then he stood and his eyes fell on the lockbox.

“Anyway, I know we’re obviously both exhausted, and we still have to put together the bed and stuff, so I say we lock up what’s down here already, lock the rest in the car, and then put together our bed so we can relax. We have all this week to unpack and clean and whatever and…”

She went on, climbing the steps, her voice now hitting the rising piles of snow just outside and dying on impact almost immediately, but Jordan’s eyes remained locked on that strange, silver box.

It is kinda interesting, isn’t it? No external hinges, no actual lock. Plus - 

“Jordan?” She was standing at the top of the basement stairs, head craning to look in at him.

Now it was his turn to shake himself back to focus.

“Sorry, babe. Just… Just tired, I guess.” He laughed and walked out, turning to look one last time at the dull, winking shine of the lockbox as he went.

2 - Drifting Off

Jordan thought about asking Taylor to make love that night; but, he found that even the task of asking for it seemed about as taxing on his dwindling energy reserves as the act itself would be.

They hadn’t eaten since midday and maybe that was a part of it - lunch had been McDonalds and had, according to the restrictions of their new diet, earned them at least a day of hunger - and of course, the two-day car ride was draining in more ways than one, but there was something else too, something that seemed separated from the physical world: a dullness that he could sense in Taylor as strongly as he felt in himself. 

Of course, it could be and probably was exacerbated by the exhaustion and the hunger and the million other stresses of the past few weeks, not the least of which was the death of Taylor’s cousin the month before. She hadn’t been close to him, hadn’t spoken to him in years, and Jordan had never met him at all - hadn’t met nearly any of Taylor’s family, a fact that was in and of itself a whole other set of stresses for a whole other time - but the fact of his youth, the violence of the accident (the details of which Taylor had still not shared with him), and the familial proximity of him to her was distressing, to say the least. But this dullness, this distance from each other and from reality itself felt, in some strange way, like something all its own.

But such thoughts were too heavy for a mind as burdened with exhaustion as his own, and so he swept the mess of them out of the spotlight of his mind and found that damned lockbox behind where they had been, blinking dully from the dark corners of his consciousness.

It’s just a normal lockbox, every apartment has one, it’s where they keep the spare apartment keys so the maintenance guy can get in when no one’s home. 

Yeah, he could hear his inner-Taylor say, her voice dripping with sarcasm, and that other one, the rusty one in the common area - you know, the one that they can easily access because it won’t be behind our master padlock - that one’s just for… what? The landlord’s nudes?

Jordan scoffed at this, then turned to make sure his outburst hadn’t woken Taylor. He couldn’t see her face, but her back was still moving up and down in slow, rhythmic undulations.

Good.

His next impulse was to get up and check the… The what? The stove? The front door lock? The - 

(BABY)

The thought, completely unbidden, flashed across his mind in a harsh whisper, sending chills up his spine and leaving a pit the size of Texas in his stomach. For the third time that day, he made the conscious effort to clear his mind, and this time, found that, though the mental lockbox was still there, as securely fastened to the corner of his consciousness as the physical one was to the wall in their unit downstairs, he was able to shift the light of his focus onto more mundane things - his must-do-tomorrow, his probably-should-but-definitely-won’t, and his not-gonna-happen-for-awhile lists, the things they needed to buy for their new apartment, and, of course, food - until, sometime after midnight, all thoughts began to mush and swirl and fade to black.

3 - The Stench

Jordan wasn’t totally sure he had slept until he woke to find Taylor’s side of the bed already empty. There was a stench in the air, something rich and sickly stagnant, like soiled food or - 

(ROT)

 or something… Whatever it was, it was unpleasant. The smell brought him back to the apartment in Daytona, in which he had grown up. The Florida air had always been heavy with humidity so thick you could almost see it, but on the days when the breeze came in from the sea, it was not the summery smell of salt-water or the fried food cooking at the restaurant below or even the weed from the kids who frequented the skatepark next door, but the smell of the dumpster on the far side of the parking lot, which slunk into the open windows, becoming his waking companion most summer days.

But, there was no restaurant for miles and this was the middle of winter in - 

(WHERE? WHERE ARE YOU?)

“In Massachusetts! I’m in Massachusetts, dummy, remember?” Jordan said to himself, forcing a laugh.

He dragged his legs over the side of the bed and stretched, ignoring the smell to the best of his ability. As he did so, a sound came to him from the bathroom. He walked that way, thinking about his to-do list today, and then all thoughts froze as he saw his wife sprawled out on the bathroom floor in a quickly-growing puddle of blood. Her head was twisted almost all the way backwards, and there was an enormous shard of glass sticking out of her left eye which was flashing red and blue up at him.

Jordan screamed and stumbled back, stepping through the hall and into the living room, where he tripped and did a backwards somersault over one a box.

“Shit!” He screamed, scrambling up onto his elbows and then forward onto his knees. He had smacked his head a good one, surely, but he felt no pain in the moment - must be the shock - and then, mentally chastising himself for his girlish horror (your wife is lying in a pool of her own blood and you scream and fall all over yourself like a little - ), he stood and rushed back to the bathroom.

As he got to the doorway, he stopped, prepping himself to take in the sight again, to take in the blood and gore and - 

But it was all gone. It was only Taylor; on her knees now and looking up at him with a frightened expression on her face, but every bit as alive as he was.

“Are you - ”

“What’s wr - ”

They spoke at the same time and Jordan dropped to his knees in front of her, grabbing her gently by the shoulders. She met his gaze, her eyes narrowed in -

(MOTHERLY)

deep concern, and she asked, “What’s wrong? Are you okay?”

“I’m fine, I thought I saw - ” he cleared his throat. “I don’t know what I thought I saw. Are you okay?”

“This place stinks, Jordan. I’ve been up pretty much all night scrubbing and disinfecting and cleaning and I cannot get the stench out no matter what I do. Can you smell it?”

Her eyes pleaded with him, that he lie and say that of course their new apartment didn’t stink, of course it was only in her head; but they also pleaded, that he tell her the truth, that he say that yes this place stank and that no she wasn’t crazy, that neither of them were crazy, that the goddam place smelled like the asshole of a man-eating monster.

“Yeah, I smell it. But, if you couldn’t sleep last night - ”

“I couldn’t sleep because of the smell!” She interrupted.

“And,” he said, gently pulling her hands back down and holding them between his own, “we haven’t eaten since yesterday - ”

“And we still can't today because we had McDonald’s!” She said, hands trying to come back up again like a drowning person trying to stay above the surface. 

He pushed them back down and continued; “and the weight of all that is bubbling up in this one issue, and that is understandable, but I promise you: it is not a big deal, and we will get it taken care of, even if we have to buy an industrial carpet cleaner - ”

“Which we cannot afford,” she said, but it was clear she was losing her steam.

“Well, they rent out those kinds of things all the time. And I know we’re not supposed to eat - ”

Her eyes darted back up to his and she opened her mouth to speak, but he went on before she could interrupt.

“But, I’m gonna make a judgment call here and say that we need the energy more than we need summer bods.”

She sighed, but he could see a measure of relief in her eyes.

“Yeah, I guess so. We’ll have to go to the store, though. I think the chicken we brought up went bad sometime over the trip and we’ve only got snacks and pasta beside that, and I have no idea where either of those ended up, let alone the pots to cook any of it, let alone - ”

This time he put his hands on either side of her face.

“Everything is gonna be ok. We’ll find everything, and everything is gonna be okay.” He pulled her face closer to his. “Hear me, Tay?”

“Mhmm,” she said, nodding, loosing a few standing tears from her eyes.

“Good,” he said, wiping them with his thumbs. “Now, I’m gonna go find a pizza place - ” he saw the alarm cross her face, “for Caesar salads, my dear. And in the meantime, I want you to lay down and try to get some rest. I know there’s a lot to do and that the smell is bothering you, but everything will seem a little better if you can get some rest.”

He rose, marveling at the lack of popping complaint from his knees or back (must be that fresh Massachusetts air), and went back into the bedroom to grab yesterday’s clothes, the only ones still unpacked. With a quick sniff deciding him on their relative freshness, he poked his head back into the bathroom, where Taylor was finally rising from her knees.

“Get some rest, babydoll,” he repeated as she stepped out of the bathroom. As she passed him heading towards the bedroom, the memory flashed back of that one, blinking shard of glass sticking out of her eye and a shiver shot down from his skull to the base of his spine. 

Maybe I’ll take a little nap myself, later on. I feel like I could sleep for years, he thought as he put on his coat, grabbed his keys, and headed out the door.

4 - The Tow Guy

Though the sky continued to spit white flakes into heaping piles onto the ground, the air did not have the biting sting that Jordan had come to expect after the horror stories he had heard of Massahusetts winters.

He trudged through the snow on the path to the already-plowed parking lot, adding “shovel pathway” to his to-do list, which was beginning to reach a length of Biblical proportions.

The car wasn’t quite a shapeless hump yet, but it was well on its way. He dragged his arm across the windshield and was making his way to the left side when the horrid sound of screeching tires accompanied by the acrid odor or burnt rubber and hot metal tore across the parking lot in a pack-a-punch burst, freezing him in his tracks. He whipped his head around towards the street, expecting some kind of snow-plow/car accident to be unfolding there, but the street was adorned only with a light blanket of snow. Heart racing, he made his way over to the street and looked down it both ways as far as the hilled sections and the trees lining both sides would allow. Nothing.

Hearing things, too, now. Maybe I didn’t get quite as much sleep as I thought.

He took one final glance both ways and then walked back to his car. 

Perhaps it was the stagnant cold air from the freezing temperatures trapped inside without any sunlight getting through the cracks to warm it, perhaps it was something else, but it was freezing in the car, colder than it was outside.

Jordan reached for the ignition, thinking, I’ll be lucky if the bugger starts on the first - but as he stuck the key into the ignition and turned it, he was met not with the guttural vroooom of the engine firing up or even the tired, repetitive cough of it trying and failing to start in the cold, but a sound like an explosion coming from the engine bay.

“Shit!” he screamed, jumping in his seat so high he bumped his head on the ceiling. “What the hell is this?” He rubbed his head more out of instinct than any real pain, of which there was none (huh - I must’ve knocked it harder than I thought when I fell upstairs. Aaaand finding a primary care doctor just got bumped up the list. Wonderful).

He looked down at the dash and saw that the lights were blinking erratically.

“Shit,” he said again, his voice sounding more resigned than angry to him. “Great. Just wonderful.” Then he gasped as he remembered - “AAA!” and pulled his phone hastily out of his pocket.

One of the few things they had really prepared for ahead of time was making an account with AAA, a New England towing dispatch service.

“Last thing you want is to be stuck in the middle of a podunk town like Rochester one night having to wait for some hick farmer to make his way over to you in his 50 year-old Ford pickup for a jump on a 0 degree night,” his MA-native, snowbird uncle Phil had told him when he had shared the news of their move with him. “AAA’s got connections all over New England and’ll getcha hooked up with a tow or a jump or whatever faster’n you can say ‘clam chowdah.’”

He pulled up the contact, and clicked on the phone icon.

Nothing.

He tried again.

Still nothing.

“Dammit dammit dammit!” He said, punctuating each curse with a fist to the steering wheel. He looked up at the corner of the screen and saw exactly what he expected - just the SOS symbol.

After a moment’s consideration of destroying everything in sight, Jordan took a deep breath and bent down to pull the hood latch release. As he was coming back up, something caught his eye in the rear-view mirror - flashing lights. At first, he only sat there, wondering if what he saw was real. Then he leaped out of the car and towards the street, where he had just enough time to see the tail end of a large, reddish flatbed truck passing just in front of the apartment. It already had a load in back - there was a motorcycle strapped on that looked like it had ridden its last adventure recently and ridden it hard - but surely the guy had at least a jump pack, or maybe a mini-repair kit or something.

“Wait!” He screamed running towards the street, “Hey! Hold on a minute, please!”

He knew that such screaming was futility, that just the roar of the engine alone, not to mention the scraping of the metal plow against the concrete of the road and whatever music the guy was probably blaring would make his attempts about as effective as telling an alcoholic to simply stop it, because it was bad for them. And yet…

Jordan saw through the gloom of the midday storm that the man’s brake lights had just flashed on. He recommenced his hysterics.

“Hey! Please, help! Hey!”

After a moment, the red beacons of the brake lights were joined by the dull yellow-white of the reverse lights, and a moment after that, the pickup truck was pulling into the parking lot, accompanied by the cab-muffled sounds of 70’s-style guitar riffing.

As Jordan walked around to the driver’s side, he realized that his initial assessment of the truck as “reddish” wasn’t quite accurate - it merely looked reddish because of the rust eating away at every single part of the vehicle, including the hubcaps. Before he had time to think about this, the driver’s door opened, giving freedom to the tunes blaring from the crappy speakers.

“Hey man, everything okay?”

He was young and there was something strikingly familiar about him, something in his features that called back some recent memory which Jordan simply could not place, but he pushed these thoughts aside, grateful that he had stopped.

“Better now that you’re here! Thank you so much for stopping. I’m thinking maybe my battery is dead. I went to go try to start my car and there was this noise like - ”

(A TREE, WE -)

Jordan blinked, his eyes darting all around, just barely holding back a gasp at the phantom voice which seemed -

(FAMILIAR)

to be a constant companion since yesterday.

I’m going crazy, bonkers, losing my marbles, a dice short of a yahtzee, a -

He cleared his throat and looked back at the plow driver. The young man was completely unphased by Jordan’s sudden self-interruption; he was standing looking at him through half-lidded eyes with a lazy smile curling one side of his mouth and hands sticking halfway out of his pockets, as though waiting for the punchline of what was shaping up to be a real killer of a joke.

“Sorry. We just moved in yesterday, after two days of straight driving all the way from Florida and now my car won’t start,” he gestured at it, “and I’m a bit frazzled to say the least. I have AAA, but no service whatsoever, and I was hoping maybe you could give it a jump and see if that would help?”

The kid nodded slowly while he was speaking, the smile growing into a toothy grin that made Jordan’s unease double.

“Yeah, man, nobody gets service here. Nobody really seems to need it though. Most stop in, get what they need fairly quickly, and then move on. But I’m happy to give your car a jump, anyway.”

“That’s great, thank you,” Jordan said and turned back to the car, trying to ignore the lingering echo of the man’s strange comments in his head. He walked around to the front and reached for the hood release. 

“Hey, didn’t catch your name by the wa - ” Jordan started; then he put his hand on the hood release, screamed a curse, and jumped back.

He looked down at his hand. In the dim light, he didn’t see any damage just yet, but he was sure that by the afternoon, it would be a sweltering mess of red flesh. When he looked back up, he saw the tow guy standing by the car, one hand still in his pocket, the other holding a blue jump pack. That smile was still on half of his face while the other half was frozen, giving the man the appearance of a stroke victim.

“You alright, man?”

Jordan stepped towards the hood again.

“Yeah, sorry. Friggin hood release felt about a million degrees, for some reason. Car’s been off all night, no idea what the hell is going on here.”

“Well, why don’t we take a look?” The tow guy said.

“Hey, wow!” Jordan said, stepping forward again as the guy reached for the latch release, “you’re gonna burn your - ” but then the hood was open and the guy was bent over the engine bay, head bobbing slightly as he observed the non-working workings of the car.

“Mmmh. Mhmm, yeah.”

Jordan took another step closer.

“Wha - what’s going on? What do you see?”

“Everything looks right as rain. You said you tried to start it already, right? Anything unusual happen when you turned the ignition?”

Jordan thought back to the awful crashing noise; “well, it kinda made a weird noise when I tried to start it, like - ”

(AN ACCIDENT, WE HIT - )

“Like a mini explosion or something like that.” Jordan said, uneasily ignoring his mental interloper.

“Hmm. Well, my guess is, you’ll probably need a shop to check it out. I’d offer to give you a lift, but,” he gestured with his head at the wreck of a motorcycle, “bed’s a little full already. You know how kids can be with bikes,” he said, shaking his head, “reckless.”

He turned, smile still plastered on his face, and walked back to his cab, opening the door and filling the cold, dead air of the parking lot once again with the fuzzy dueling leads of the electric guitars.

Is that -

“The Allman Brothers Band. Revival,” the young guy said as he climbed in, as though reading Jordan’s thoughts. “Pre-’71. Their stuff got real shitty after Duane kicked it, in my opinion.” He smiled broader and climbed into the truck.

“Hey, wait! Do you have a cell phone I could use?”

“Sorry, man,” the guy said, closing the door, “I’m not allowed to have a cell phone. Cell phones are what sent me here in the first place. Best of luck to you.”

And with that, the young man closed the door and backed out of the parking lot. Jordan watched him go, stunned to silence. He watched as the young man backed into snowy shadows of the street, watched as he pulled forward again, back onto his original path, watched as he drove through the dim rays of the streetlight in front of the apartment, watched as he turned and waved, and only when Jordan saw the left side of his face - the bloody, fleshy, ground-up mess of what remained of the left side of his face, anyway - did he realize how he recognized the tow guy and begin to scream.

5 - Sick

“You - you must be sick. Here, let me check.” She stepped forward, hand outstretched towards his forehead, but he stepped back.

“Where is it, babe?”

“Jordan, there’s no need to find it, it’s not possible, I’m telling you that you couldn’t have - ”

“Taylor! Where is the card?”

For a moment, she only looked at him, and once again her eyes pleaded opposites, her desires forking like the end of a snake’s tongue:

Ask me again for the photo, we need to see! 

Drop it already, won’t you just drop it?!

Jordan sighed. “I’m sorry, Tay. But… I just need to see it, okay? You’re probably right, I’m probably just - ”

(CRAZY)

“Wiped out and maybe a little sick or feverish - ”

(ARE YOU? ‘CAUSE LAST YOU CHECKED YOU COULDN’T FEEL A THING EXCEPT -)

“From lack of good, deep sleep and - ”

(AND FROM THE A -)

“SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP!” Jordan screamed, hands flying to the side of his head. “Just SHUT UP!!!”

He swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing, breath ripping in and out of his throat in hot bursts.

Then he looked at his wife, who was leaning against the counter, one hand grasping its edge with force so great it turned her knuckles white, the other covering her mouth. Her eyebrows were bunched up in the middle and a single tear was running down her cheek. Jordan took a step forward and his heart broke as he saw her flinch and step further away.

“I - I’m so sorry baby, I … you’re right, I must have a fever or something. Or just exhaustion, or… I don’t know. But I think maybe if I could just see the card your aunt sent, then maybe I could - ”

But then she was walking past him, straight for the door.

“Where are you going?”

She turned around slowly, and now her face was a stone - no fear, no anger, no love.

“I’m going down to storage to get more blankets. By the time I come back, you will have dropped this or we are going to have a problem. Do you hear me? Do you understa - ”

“It was a motorcycle accident, wasn’t it?” 

She went pale as snow.

“Did he hit something? Or did he just lose balance and slide?”

Then a dagger of pain shot through his head and he winced. As he closed his eyes against the pain, the man’s face came back to him: the raw, aggravated muscle and tendons exposed in a wicked grin, the piece of skin hanging in wretched flaps from his forehead and neck and cheek, the deep gouges running up and down the exposed cheek and jaw bone.

By the time he opened his eyes, Taylor was gone.

6 - The Lockbox

When ten minutes passed and Taylor still hadn’t returned (and the ghostly afterimage of the man’s ruined face in his memory still hadn’t faded), Jordan went after her.  

He took the steps from the back door down to the walkway slowly, methodically, as though a wrong step might trigger a -

(EXPLOSION, DEAR GOD, JORDAN, DO YOU REMEMBER, THE ENGINE -)

an IED or something like that, ignoring the - 

(REMINDERS)

voices as they came to him, which were stronger and more frequent all the -

(OUT, YOU’RE ALMOST OUT OF -)

time, their clamor, a growing -

(FIRE, IT’S SPREADING, OH GOD IT’S SPREADING, THE-)

cacophany in his head until he could barely -

(WALK OR SEE OR BREATHE OR)

think or speak, and now the basement door is before him, open wide, open wide like - 

(THE GATES OF HEAVEN OR HELL OR -)

the mouth of some giant, Lovecraftian monster, rising out of the ground to swallow him whole, and then he’s falling, falling -

(OUT BUT THEY’RE STILL INSIDE, THEY’RE STILL IN THERE, IN -)

to the basement floor, and he looks up and all goes silent as he sees Taylor in their storage unit, on her knees in front of the lockbox, which has been sprung open to reveal -

“A screen?”

Taylor does not turn around at the sound of his voice; does not seem to hear it at all. She kneels before the screen, her hands and head drooping and her shoulders slumped, looking like a wax figure of a praying woman who has been put too close to the heater.

Jordan rises, walks into their storage room, and looks at the screen inside the lockbox.

It was in first person perspective, a video of someone driving a car, someone’s hands on a steering wheel, someone’s eyes peering out onto a road far too snowy to be traveled safely, someone -

And then the voice returns, but this time it isn’t yelling; no, this time, it speaks with the calm, knowing cadence of someone who’s about to be proven right, and not for the first time.

(You know who it is, Jordan, not just someone, that’s -)

“Me. It’s me.”

At this, Taylor finally turns and looks up at him.

“No, it’s me. You were driving, remember?”

He ignores her, continues to watch as a gust of wind blows across the car’s windshield, causing the branches of the trees lining the road to dump snow by the bucket onto the road and the hood of the car and everything all around.

Then the eyes through which he is watching shift up to the rearview mirror, where they see, by the reflection of yet another mirror at the end of a backwards-facing car seat, a baby girl -

(That’s not just any baby girl, Jordan. You know her name. Say your daughter’s name. Say -)

“Krystal.”

At this, Taylor sobs and falls to her face.

Then the image blurs and at first Jordan feels hot tears streaking down his face, and he reaches up and wipes them quickly away, wipes them just in time to see a plow truck coming up over the hill on the wrong side of the road, on theirside of the road, and he sees himself jerking at the steering wheel, away from the beast coming to consume him and his family, and just before the car plunges off the side of the road, he sees the face of the plow driver and it’s the face of Taylor’s dead cousin, his face torn asunder by 70 feet of cold concrete, that damned smile nevertheless still in full force -

(No, that’s not right, it wasn’t him, it was -)

But it doesn’t matter, because now they’re off the road and they’re heading at full speed towards a tree, and Jordan tries at the last second to turn left or right or any way, but it’s too late, the ground is slick with snow on top of ice, and the tree grows larger and larger, like a long-form exposure shot of a freshly-planted sapling, and they’re getting closer, and then there’s a BANG and then only darkness.

Then, a smell: fire, burning rubber, smoke. Jordan could smell it then and he can smell it now, can smell what he can now see: the destruction of all that he loves. The screen shifts to the right and Jordan sees his wife in the passenger seat, sees that her shirt, before a crisp white, has now gone a deep maroon, and then the eyes shift up and her head is all twisted around wrong and there’s a shard of glass sticking out of her eye and the shard of glass begins to flash blue and red because someone must’ve called the cops, her cousin -

(the plow driver -)

Her cousin must’ve called the cops, but they’re not moving quickly enough, because his wife is -

(dead, Jordan, you must accept that she’s -)

dying, and if they don’t hurry, she’s going to die, and so he opens his door and falls out and begins to drag himself around to her side, and then he remembers the baby and he opens the rear door and sees that the rear windshield has shattered, that most of it is missing, but that not all of it is missing, that there are still a few pieces left, and those few pieces are covered in spots of blood. Then there is another BANG and a bright flash of light and -

And then he screams - both on the screen and on the basement floor, where he has fallen on his face, he screams and pounds the ground, and then a hand falls on his shoulder and he scrambles into the corner of the room, back against the wall, the damned lockbox above and behind him.

Taylor is standing before him. 

“We’re dead, Jordan.”

Jordan laughs.

“We’re not dead, Taylor. It was - no, this is a bad dream, a nightmare, something like that, we can’t be dead, because we’re here, talking, we’re -”

“We’re dead, Jordan, and you know it. You saw it happen. You, me, and - ”

Her voice breaks, and she clears her throat and tries again.

“You, me, and Krystal. We hit a tree - ”

“No.”

“And we were killed on impact - ”

“Taylor, you stop this right now!”

“And you tried to save us, but you died moments later, just before - ”

“STOP IT, GODDAMMIT, I SAID STOP IT, WE’RE NOT DEAD, WE’RE HERE, AND WE’RE TALKING AND - ”

“Jordan.”

She didn’t yell back. In fact, she got quieter. Her voice began to fade, and with it, she began to fade.

“We died, Jordan. You need to accept it. Until you accept it, you can’t - ”

But then Jordan is up and running, running past -

(through)

her and out the door of the storage unit, and up the basement stairs, but he trips at the bottom and falls face down onto the snowy pavement, not feeling a thing because -

(BECAUSE YOU’RE DEAD)

because he’s freezing cold and he tries to get up, but his knees are too weak and so he drags himself to his front steps, and inside the apartment, and then into the bedroom, and then everything goes black.

Epilogue

Jordan didn’t realize he had fallen asleep until he woke.

The bed was empty, which was -

(NOT RIGHT, WHERE IS SHE)

which was normal, of course, and the house was silent, no -

(NO CRYING BABY, NO -)

noise to disturb the peace of his new life in the great state of -

(DEA-)

Jordan sat up quickly, shook his head, stretched, and stood up, heading to the kitchen to go make some coffee. It was time to get unpacking.

“Gonna be here for awhile. Might as well settle in.”

Jordan smiled, not knowing that his smile was missing at least eight teeth, not realizing that his skin and clothes were charred and tar-black, not caring that he was dead.

“Might as well settle in.”

THE END