Chapter 6 #2
This road should have been bumper to bumper.
A Wednesday morning, seven forty-five—this stretch of highway should have been a parking lot.
Brake lights as far as you could see, everyone slumped behind their wheels with that dead-eyed stare people get when they’ve accepted that this is just what mornings are.
I’d done this drive five days a week for twenty years.
I knew exactly how long it took, exactly where it bottlenecked, exactly which light I’d sit through three cycles before moving ten feet.
But today I was doing forty-five in a zone where I usually idled.
Cars were out there, but scattered. Spread thin across the lanes, gaps where there shouldn’t be gaps. Whole stretches of open road that didn’t make sense for this hour.
Like half the city had decided to stay home, and nobody had told the rest of us why.
I frowned, easing through an intersection that usually ate five minutes of my life. Sailed right through. Didn’t even tap the brakes.
For a second, I genuinely wondered if I’d missed a holiday.
But there was nothing. No flags. No banners on the lampposts. No decorations in the windows. No kids out of school. No reason for any of this.
Just an empty road where there shouldn’t be an empty road.
I took another sip of coffee and watched the sidewalk.
That’s when I started noticing the people.
Not many of them. But something was wrong.
A woman stood on the corner outside a coffee shop, still in her pajama pants and slippers.
She held her phone in both hands, close to her face, gripping it so tightly that her knuckles were white.
Her face had no color in it. Her mouth hung slightly open.
She was staring at the screen with the kind of focus that had gone past concentration.
A line of dried saliva sat at the corner of her mouth.
As I drove past, her head turned to follow my truck—slowly, too slowly—but her eyes never moved from the screen.
Behind her, a man walked fast and clipped her shoulder hard enough to knock her sideways.
She staggered and caught herself on a parking meter.
He didn’t stop. Didn’t look at her. Didn’t seem to know she existed.
His skin had a waxy look to it, pale and damp, and his jaw was working, chewing on nothing, grinding at the air.
When he turned slightly, I caught his eye: bloodshot, pupils shrunk down to pinpoints even though the morning was overcast and gray.
His movements were wrong. Jerky. Like his body was being operated on by someone who didn’t quite know how it worked.
He just kept walking.
Another guy stood outside a storefront, pacing.
Back and forth, back and forth, same short path, same mechanical turns.
Each time he reached the end of his loop, his neck twisted a little too far—far enough that I could see the tendons standing out under the skin.
His fingers were in his hair, not running through it, but clawing at it, digging at his scalp as if he were trying to get at the bone underneath.
His shirt collar was dark and wet. I realized the stain was blood.
His nails had torn the skin open at the back of his neck, and he either didn’t notice or didn’t care.
I slowed at the next light and watched him.
He stopped. His head snapped toward me—fast, sudden, the way an animal reacts to sound. Our eyes met through the windshield.
His were wide open. All the way open. White showing around the entire iris, pupils contracted to almost nothing despite the dim light.
Something dark had collected in the corners of his eyes—thick, not quite blood, sitting there like tar.
The skin around his eye sockets was twitching, rapid, involuntary little spasms, like whatever was underneath was trying to push its way out.
He wasn’t scared. That was the thing. There was no fear on that face.
He turned away abruptly and walked off in the opposite direction, as if he’d forgotten I was there, as if he’d forgotten where he was going, as if he’d forgotten what going somewhere meant.
The light turned green.
I drove on.
I rolled my shoulders and flexed my hands on the wheel and told myself it was nothing.
Lack of sleep. My head was messed up from the divorce, from the empty house, from too many nights lying awake staring at the ceiling.
You start seeing things wrong when you’re running on four hours and bad coffee. That’s all this was.
The radio murmured underneath the sound of tires on wet asphalt—some morning show host laughing at his own joke; the sound cutting in and out of static. It grated on me. I almost turned it off, then didn’t, because the silence felt worse.
I came up to the next intersection, and two cars had stopped at odd angles.
A sedan sat halfway into the crosswalk, turned partway through a left that it had never finished, as if the driver had just quit in the middle of the maneuver.
Another car sat diagonally behind it, close enough that its bumper nearly touched the sedan’s rear quarter panel.
Neither one was damaged. There’d been no accident.
Nobody honked. Nobody yelled. Nobody got out.
The drivers were still inside, both of them, sitting behind their windshields. Their heads were turned in the same direction, the same angle. Both of them were looking off to the left; I couldn’t see from where I was. They weren’t moving.
My hands tightened on the steering wheel. Something cold settled low in my chest and stayed there.
I steered around them and kept going.
I tried to talk myself through it—an accident on the highway pulling traffic off the main roads, some stomach bug going around.
Maybe it was mentioned on the news I’d missed, something that had everybody spooked.
Half the city calls in sick, the other half acts strange—it happens. It’s flu season. It’s nothing.
Every explanation I came up with thin at best, the aquarium appeared through the windshield.
That curved glass front caught what little light the clouds were letting through, and my chest eased, slightly. Just enough. It was like this every morning.
Whatever I was carrying—Sadie’s voice in my head, the lawyer’s latest email, the silence of that house pressing in on me from every direction—it got quieter when this building came into view.
In here, I knew what I was doing. In here, things made sense.
Pumps ran. Filters cycled. Water stayed clean.
Animals survived because I showed up every day and made sure they did.
Simple. Predictable. Honest work that didn’t argue back or make me feel like I wasn’t enough.
I pulled into my usual spot and killed the engine.
I sat there.
The cab ticked as the engine cooled. It smelled like coffee and faintly stale smoke underneath—the ghost of the cigarettes I’d quit five years ago, still hanging around no matter how many times I cleaned the upholstery.
I wrapped both hands around the cup and stared through the windshield at the front doors of the building.
For a second, I didn’t want to move. I wanted to stay right here, in this small, quiet space between arriving and starting, where nothing was expected of me yet.
Where I could just sit and breathe and not think about Sadie or the house or the pacing man with blood on his collar or the two drivers staring at nothing in perfect unison.
But I couldn’t sit here forever.
I grabbed my bag off the passenger seat, opened the door, and stepped out into the damp morning air.
Whatever was going on out there, it would have to wait.
I had tanks to check.