Chapter 21
An hour and thirty-two minutes before he needed to be there.
It was probably excessive, but Greg had never attended a highway collection before, and he wanted to be prepared.
He wanted to observe the traffic patterns, identify the stretch of road most likely to produce a multi-vehicle incident, and position himself for a clean, professional extraction.
He also wanted to get there before Dustin.
At that, he failed.
Dustin's truck was already parked on a frontage road that ran parallel to the interstate, pulled onto the gravel shoulder where a shallow embankment gave a clear view of the highway below.
He was sitting on the tailgate with his legs dangling, a pair of binoculars around his neck and a gas station coffee in his hand.
He spotted Greg immediately.
“You're early,” Dustin called.
“You're earlier.”
“I've been here since noon.” He took a sip of his coffee like this was a normal way to spend a Tuesday afternoon.
“Did you know this interchange is one of the worst bottlenecks in the state? Three interstates converge about a mile south of here. Traffic stacks up every day around four thirty when the merge lanes back up.”
Greg stared at him. “How do you know that?”
Dustin gave a little shrug. “You can find almost anything on the internet if you know where to look.” He raised the binoculars to his eyes and scanned the highway. “If it's going to be a pileup, this is where it'll happen.”
Again and again, this mortal fascinated Greg.
Dustin had done research. He'd driven here from Boulder and staked out a stretch of interstate like it was a jump site, calculating the variables, mapping out the danger zones.
This must be the same dedication he usually put into hurling himself off cliffs, except now it was turned toward keeping a stranger alive.
“You can't be here,” Greg said, only because he felt like he needed to say it, not because he thought Dustin would heed his words.
He was long past thinking that.
“I'm not going anywhere,” Dustin responded.
Of course.
Greg stood beside the truck, the afternoon sun warm on his face.
He should say something about last night. About the kiss, about the wall, about the way he'd spilled his heart out on the asphalt afterward. This can't happen. I wasn't made for this.
Greg said nothing.
Everything he'd told Dustin the day before was still true.
And yet here they were again. Side by side. As if gravity kept dragging them into the same orbit regardless of what Greg decided about it.
“Coffee?” Dustin offered.
“No.”
“Good call. It's terrible.”
“Then why are you drinking it?”
“Because it's coffee and I've been here for three hours.” He took another sip. “You going to stand there or you going to sit?”
Greg sat.
Close to Dustin.
He didn't know why. Or he did, and he wasn't ready to look at it directly.
They watched the interstate in silence. Greg held his clipboard in his lap. Dustin held his binoculars. Slowly, the traffic thickened.
At 4:00, the flow started to slow where the interchange lanes converged, just like Dustin had predicted.
“There,” Dustin said. He pointed south. “See how it's backing up?”
Greg saw. Cars were bunching together where the lanes merged, brake lights flickering in a chain reaction as drivers jockeyed for position.
“I need to get closer,” Dustin said, sliding off the tailgate.
“Dustin—”
Dustin ignored Greg's calling. He crossed the frontage road and moved down the embankment toward the highway shoulder.
Greg followed.
Traffic roared past five feet away, a wall of noise and hot exhaust that made Greg's whole body tense. The ground trembled beneath his feet with every passing truck and grit stung his face.
It was… unpleasant.
Unsettlingly so.
This was where humans existed. Not the quiet threshold Greg was trained for. Not the soft final breath, the gentle loosening of the soul. This was the loud, grinding, dangerous middle. The part where everything moved too fast and no one saw what was coming.
At 4:30, Greg felt a subtle pull in his chest. Jessica Torres was close. Somewhere in the river of metal and glass flowing along the interstate.
Greg scanned the traffic. The pull sharpened as a silver sedan moved through the interchange.
It was small and slightly dented on the rear bumper.
He couldn't see the driver through the glare on the windshield, but he didn't need to.
The tug in his chest was a compass needle swinging toward true north.
“That one,” he said without meaning to.
Dustin's binoculars swung to follow his gaze. “I see her.”
The sedan merged. Slowed. Moved with the flow.
4:38.
Nine minutes.
The traffic was thickening faster now. Brake lights cascaded in waves. The interchange was a clot of vehicles jockeying for position, some cutting in at the last second, others riding too close to the car in front.
“There's a truck,” Dustin said. His voice had gone flat and focused, stripped of everything casual. “There, two cars behind her. He's riding way too close.”
Greg watched the truck. It was massive, and it was tailgating, lurching forward in bursts as traffic stuttered.
4:41.
“If that truck brakes too late,” Dustin muttered, tracking through the binoculars, “and the cars in front of her stack up—”
He didn't finish the sentence. He was already moving down the shoulder.
“Dustin.” Greg went after him. “You can't get on the highway.”
“I'm not getting on the highway. I'm getting close to the highway.”
“Well, don't do that!”
Dustin ignored him. He was striding along the shoulder, eyes locked on the road. Greg stumbled after him, the roar of passing vehicles so loud he could feel it in his jaw.
4:44.
Three minutes.
“Come on,” Dustin muttered. He wasn't talking to Greg. He was talking to the sedan. “Change lanes. Take the exit. Do something.”
The sedan stayed in the right lane. The truck stayed behind her. Traffic compressed.
4:45.
Two minutes.
In two minutes, a soul would separate from its body and need guidance, and Greg would be there, steady and present and—
The truck driver's brake lights came on.
Too late.
The sound hit Greg like a blow to the head.
Metal shrieked against metal in a deep concussive crunch that vibrated through his bones and left him dazed for a second.
The truck slammed into the car behind Jessica's sedan and that car launched forward into hers, and then everything happened at once.
A van in the left lane swerved and clipped another vehicle and the whole thing cascaded outward like dominoes toppling in every direction, and the air filled with the stench of burning rubber and something chemical and sharp.
Dustin ran.
He vaulted off the shoulder and sprinted into the wreckage — into it — scrambling over the buckled hood of a van, heading for the silver sedan crumpled against the median as if he had no concern for his own safety at all.
“DUSTIN—”
A dark SUV skidded sideways out of the pileup.
Greg saw it before Dustin did. The vehicle spinning wide, its rear quarter panel swinging out in a lazy, inevitable arc. He opened his mouth but there was no time for the warning to travel the distance between them.
The SUV caught Dustin across the hip and flung him sideways. His body briefly left the ground and then hit the asphalt and rolled and stopped.
He didn't get up.
The world went very quiet inside Greg's head.
And then he was running.
One second he was standing on the highway shoulder and the next he was on his knees on the asphalt with his hands on Dustin's shoulders.
“Dustin! Dustin! Can you hear me?”
His hands were shaking. He was touching Dustin's face, his neck, feeling for — what? A pulse? He didn't even know how to find a pulse. He'd never needed to. He dealt in endings, not in checking whether someone was still—
Dustin groaned.
The sound made every fiber in Greg unclench. His relief was so violent it almost knocked him sideways.
“Don't move,” Greg said. “You might be… things might be broken, I don't know how human bodies… just don't move.”
“Ow,” Dustin said into the asphalt.
“Is that, are you…?”
“I'm fine.” Dustin's voice was strained and muffled and alive. “Fuck. That was a car.”
“Yes. It was a car. And it hit you.” Greg's voice was doing something strange; pitching up, going thin and frayed at the edges. “I told you. I told you this would happen.”
Dustin tried to push himself up and made a sound that Greg never wanted to hear again. A short, involuntary cry that he bit down on too late. His left arm gave out underneath him and he collapsed back to the asphalt, breathing hard.
“Don't move!” Greg admonished him.
“Is Jessica okay?” The words came out through gritted teeth, half-gasped.
Jessica.
Greg had forgotten about her.
How could he have forgotten about her?
He looked over his shoulder. The silver sedan was crumpled against the median barrier, caved in on the driver's side. Sirens sounded in the distance, barely penetrating the haze in Greg's head.
He searched for the pull in his chest, the compass needle, the tug of a soul needing guidance, and found nothing. Just silence where the signal had been.
The window must have opened and closed while he was on his knees with his hands on Dustin's face.
He hadn't noticed.
From the moment Dustin hit the ground, there had been nothing in Greg's awareness but Dustin.
Not his job, the very thing he'd been created for.
Only Dustin.
“Greg.” Dustin had gone very still. He was reading the answer on Greg's face. “No.”
Greg said nothing. He didn't have words for the horror inside of him.
“No.” Dustin tried to sit up again, and this time he made it halfway before the pain in his shoulder flattened him. “She's nineteen — you have to — Greg, go—”
“The window's closed.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I can't feel her anymore.” Greg's voice came out hollow. “I should have… it opened, and I didn't…”
“You didn't?” Dustin was staring at him from the asphalt, his face scraped raw on one side, road rash angry and red across his cheekbone, his left shoulder sitting visibly wrong. “She was nineteen, Greg.”
“I know.”
He knew he'd failed. He knew Jessica might be lost now. All because Greg had forgotten she'd existed when it mattered the most.
He looked down at his clipboard.
MISSED COLLECTION: Torres, Jessica. 19. Pileup, Interstate 25. Status: UNCOLLECTED. Report to HQ immediately.
He stared at the words. Then he set the clipboard down on the asphalt and turned back to Dustin.
“We need to get off the highway,” he said.
“Greg—”
“I can't undo it.” His voice cracked on the last word and he tried to fix that, pressing everything down. “Please. Let me get you off the highway.”
Dustin looked at him for a long moment. Then he nodded once.
Getting him upright was bad. His shoulder was visibly, grotesquely wrong. Shoved out of its socket and left hanging. The whole left side of his body was scraped raw, gravel embedded in his forearm, blood beading along the worst of the abrasions.
He swore extensively when Greg helped him stand, using expletives Greg had never heard before, words that he mentally cataloged for later examination, because apparently some part of his brain was still collecting human phrases even now.
They made it to the highway shoulder, then up the embankment, then to the frontage road, where Dustin sat heavily on the tailgate of his truck and breathed through his teeth.
Greg stood in front of him and didn't know what to do with his hands.
He needed to go back for his clipboard.
He didn't.
“We need to get you to a hospital,” he said to Dustin.
“I hate hospitals.”
“Your shoulder is dislocated.”
“You could put it back in.”
“I can't.”
“Then I'll find someone else to do it.” Dustin heaved another breath.
Greg looked at him, at the scrapes and blood on him. He was infuriating and stubborn and Greg felt something crack open in his chest that he knew he'd never be able to close again.
“Please,” he said. “Let me take you to a hospital.”
Dustin held his gaze for a long moment. The air between them felt charged. Not because Dustin had kissed Greg yesterday, but because Greg had forgotten his own name the moment Dustin stopped moving.
“Fine,” Dustin said and tossed him the keys with his good arm. “You do know how to drive, right?”
Greg caught the keys.
He did not know how to drive.