Then everything flickers.
For a terrifying half-second, the darkness thickens, heavy and absolute, consciousness slipping like it’s being pulled through a narrowing gap. I float somewhere weightless and detached, pain distant, thought dissolving, and then sensation slams back in all at once.
Another violent impact snaps my head forward, stars bursting across my vision when sound crashes back into existence in adistorted rush, metal shrieking, glass raining, something heavy tearing loose beneath the car. My stomach lurches hard, nausea rising as the world continues to spin, refusing to settle, refusing to let me orient or breathe properly.
The motion finally begins to slow.
The last rotation drags instead of snaps, the car grinding sideways before dropping hard, suspension collapsing with a brutal crunch that rattles through bone and teeth alike. The impact hammers the breath from me again, my vision blurring as the world lurches one final time before slamming to a stop.
Silence follows.
Not peace.
Just theringing.
The ringing in my ears swells until it’s all I can hear, layered over my own breathing while it tears in and out of my chest in ragged bursts. The smell hits next, burned rubber, coolant, hot metal, and blood, all thick enough to taste.
But I’m alive.
The realization takes time to sink in, shock dulling the edges of thought as I inventory myself piece by piece. Fingers twitch when I will them to. Toes respond, distant but present. Pain blooms everywhere at once now that adrenaline loosens its grip, but it’s pain I can feel, and that matters.
I turn my head.
The man in the passenger seat is motionless.
His head is tilted at an angle that defies anatomy, neck bent in a way that leaves no room for hope. His eyes remain open, wide and glassy, terror still frozen in them, but whatever had been looking out through them is gone. The dashboard’s emergency lights reflect faintly in their empty shine, illuminating a face already slack with death.
“Oh God.” The words scrape out of me, raw and barely audible. “Oh God, oh God, oh—”
My hands fumble at the seat belt, fingers clumsy and numb as panic begins to claw its way past the shock. When the latch finally releases, my weight lurches sideways, and I nearly spill across the center console, catching myself on the door as the world tilts sickeningly around me. Something warm trickles into my left eye, blurring my vision, and when I swipe at my face, my fingers come away slick and red.
Blood.
The door resists when I shove at it, the frame warped and jammed from the impact, but fear lends strength where pain tries to steal it. I slam my shoulder into the metal again and again until it shrieks and gives way, opening just enough for me to stumble out.
Cold air crashes over me. November bites hard, cutting straight through denim and fabric, stealing the heat trapped in the wreck as steam curls up around me. I stagger clear of the car, breath fogging white in the dark, legs shaking before the reality of what just happened finally, fully lands.
I stumble out onto uneven ground, boots slipping on loose stones and dead snow-covered leaves as I put distance between myself and the twisted metal coffin that used to be my car. Each breath burns, ribs protesting movement, but I force myself to keep going because staying means looking at the body, at what’s left of a man who grabbed my wheel and sent us careening to his death.
‘They’re coming,’he’d said. ‘Before they catch our scent.’
The words echo in my head as I look around, trying to orient myself in the darkness cut only by the car’s dying headlights. Trees loom on all sides, skeletal branches clawing at a sky that shows no stars, no moon, nothing but oppressive black that presses down like physical weight.
Then I see them.
Lights in the distance, warm and yellow against the darkness, maybe half a mile through the forest if I cut straight instead of trying to find the road.
Civilization.
Help.
Someone who can explain what happened, who can call for rescue, who can tell me the dying man’s ravings about monsters were just trauma and blood loss talking.
I start walking before conscious thought catches up with survival instinct, one foot in front of the other, following the lights like a moth drawn to flame. My phone is somewhere in the wreckage, probably shattered along with my cameras and any hope of salvaging this trip.
But phones can be replaced.
Equipment can be replaced.
