Chapter 112.
Ant Tipton has spent most of his life selling one simple story: Fearless. Untouchable. Built different.
It’s always been a lie.
One he’s told to the rest of the world since childhood. Just not to himself. Never to himself. As much as he wants to believe it.
He knows why, of course, just because he could teach a bloody master class on the reasons for his darkest and worst fears:
When he was twelve, Tipton had walked away from a twin-engine plane crash near Cornwall.
His parents and his younger brother had died fiery deaths that day.
Somehow Ant Tipton had survived. It was like one of those stories you read about, wild stories about sole survivors involving luck or destiny, about insert-tragedy-here not being your time, at least not yet.
That had been him.
Not his parents, not his little brother. Just him.
He remembers the sound more than anything—metal tearing, the engine screaming, the pitch of human voices when panic turns them into something raw and animal.
Now he’s securely strapped into a chair in a room that looks too clean, too modern, too controlled. A huge wall-screen in front of him, one big as life.
Or death.
He’s back in that small plane, just looking out from the cockpit this time as the plane dips and rolls and barely pulls out of one dive after another.
Tipton’s riding a roller coaster through the sky, gripping the sides of his chair so hard he’s afraid they might break apart.
If he doesn’t break first.
And in the next second, the room disappears.
He’s back in the plane.
Not as a passenger this time—front row, looking out through the windshield as the horizon tilts, rolls, dives. The sound is so loud it vibrates his bones. His hands clamp the chair arms so hard his knuckles ache.
The plane drops.
It yanks up.
It drops again.
The screen in front of him abruptly changes again.
Now he sees other planes, all around him, falling out of the sky, before crashing and burning.
He tries to tell himself that it’s all just a movie, that he hasn’t left this room, or this chair—he’d been in simulators plenty of times.
Tipton tells himself that it’s all just a bad dream.
Only it doesn’t feel like a dream.
Or a simulator.
It won’t stop.
And he can’t turn away.
His nervous system doesn’t know pixels. His nervous system knows that day in Cornwall.
Tipton, strapped in, can only sit and watch the plane crashes happen, and keep happening.
In the next moment, he’s back in the cockpit, in even more of a death dive, the sound of the plane making his head feel it’s about to explode before the plane does the same, and this time he’ll be the one engulfed by flames.
Just the way it all happened when he was twelve.
The volume surges until it’s not just loud—it’s inside his skull. He hears screams, which sound exactly like the screams of his parents and his brother in the last few seconds before their plane crashed that day, before they perished, even if he miraculously did not.
Ant Tipton bites down so hard on his lower lip that he can taste blood, to keep from screaming himself.
He’s not going to give them the satisfaction of that.
Or hearing him beg them to make it stop.
He squeezes his eyes shut.
The sound doesn’t stop.
It gets worse.
Smoke. Heat.
The man who acts like he’s afraid of nothing is afraid to open his eyes back up.
The volume in the room is pumped up even more.
He tells himself to keep his eyes closed.
He does want to tell them to make it stop now.
But he won’t.
Or can’t.
Tipton tries to convince himself one more time that none of this is real.
Only nothing has ever felt more real to him.
Not since he was twelve and it was really happening to him.
Now Ant Tipton is screaming, because he opens his eyes, looks down, and sees he’s on fire.
Patrick Arrasmith