WAKING UP AND EVERYTHING is slick sleep-soaked grey.
Knock. It vibrated the glass against my cheek. Knock. I blinked stickily, groggily, rubbing at a kink in my neck, a cold clamminess burning from my temple to my earlobe. Knock. Rain was falling steadily, long vertical lines pelting down, down, down. It was quieter. I remember lifting my head—in disorienting distortion, unnaturally crooked—and finding it in a blur, a bleary-black blur, dimming...
"Who..."
I blinked again.
Nothing.
It was your first night in a front seat, jolted awake, doors locked, engine off. Paranoia would only become a ritual, untamed terror tucking you in nightly.
I'd dreamt it, I told myself. I sat up, squinting, but I could barely see anything; adjusting to a fuzziness between my brain and my body. My fingers felt fizzy. Trees bristling in a wet wind, distant fringes of I-95. The sky was black. Everything tinted an oily silver, iridescent lights fading overhead. Our windows were foggy.
I craned my neck to look behind us.
Somebody...
I couldn't tell how long I'd been asleep.
It was raining. It was dark.
It was...
Puddles of cloudy light, reflections, glints, and lines upon lines upon lines of empty parking spots, unraveling down to a fading, far-away outline, a diminished contour of a building.There wasn't a vehicle for as far as I could glimpse; no vague, idling silhouettes; not a single soul around to find us.
"Hey," I hissed, stiffening, unable to look away. Fog draped across gravelly darkness. It has a vague, grainy quality to it in my memory, an underexposed Polaroid. Everything in a slow-motion, unfurling and fraying and closing in on you. "Babe. Hey..." I huffed when I swiveled, reaching for her—a blob beneath a blanket—but I didn't touch anything. It fell away and I grasped... air.
Her empty seat. Keys in the ignition of an '02 Civic.
I threw my door open.
Whatever you're running from...
I heard him again in an abrupt, whistling breeze; as I stood, shivering against icy pins of rainfall, I couldn't hear anything else.
...it will catch up to you.
I left my door open.
It always does.
Not usually so early, I wanted to tell him.
Everything was colder, but crisper and clearer, as if I'd wiped a smudge from a lens. My head rushing. Lights greying, flickering; a short-circuiting shadow glitching across a ghostly haze.
My footsteps seemed to echo, splashing quietly.
I was the only person alive, I thought, at the beginning of an endless highway I'd tried to map from my bedroom. Nobody else.
But I stopped when I saw her.
Her, in a watery blur, at the opposite corner of the empty parking lot, watching you silently.
Alone.
No. No. No...
I remember a slow hitch in my breathing, a blind second of being strangled—before I fumbled, backpedaling, arms outstretched, brows furrowing between wet blinks; a foreign lag in my vision. What...
She didn't move. She didn't do anything.
My gaze skittered. Where...
I felt myself around a rust-specked hood, whipped around, threw myself into the dry, musty driver's seat—Dirt Nasty. It was stale and stiff, and I was soaked, chilled, but when I looked up again, I froze.
She was gone.
