“Yeah, Crow mentioned The Terminal.”
Emily nodded, and the world started shaking again. If we hadn’t been sitting on the floor, we would have been thrown to the ground.
“It’s getting worse,” I said.
“What else do you remember about that night in the truck?” Emily asked.
“Well, I remember you turning off the headlights at exactly six minutes past ten. We drove in the dark for a while with the radio tuned to that frequency. We were listening for something, and then suddenly there was a huge elk, and that’s when you swerved to the left.”
“That wasn’t what happened.”
“What do you mean?”
“You swerved to the left,” she said. “Not me.”
“What? No. I—” But she was right. Suddenly I remembered.
I was the one who had turned the wheel.
“And it was a tractor, not an elk,” Emily said.
“That’s right,” I said, and in that moment something shifted in my memory. Maybe it was my proximity to Emily Connors after so many years, but it was like a fog had lifted and the entire scene was suddenly clear. I remembered now; the tractor was rust colored. “It didn’t have its lights on,” I said.
“The police told us later that if you hadn’t swerved, none of us would have survived. You saved my life, but Annie died.”
Tears streamed down Emily’s cheeks.
I closed my eyes and brought myself back to that moment on the side of the road just after Emily and I were thrown from the truck. The truck had landed in the ditch, but somehow we’d ended up on the dirt shoulder next to the pavement.
When I woke up my head was killing me. I found out later that I’d suffered a massive concussion.
“I remember it had started to rain,” I said. “There was a lot of smoke or steam, and you were crawling over to Annie in the truck. And then, I think you came back and dragged me over there.”
“That’s right,” Emily said.
I could picture Emily’s face, streaked with motor oil, tears, and dirt. She was screaming something. I couldn’t quite make it out.
“You kept yelling at me.”
“Yes.”
“You kept yelling at me to help you save her. You said we have to save Annie, like before.”
“But we didn’t save her,” Emily said.
“Then the man in the tractor came over, and then the police, and that’s all I can remember.”
While we sat there in silence, I could smell the hot metal on the asphalt and taste the copper tang of blood in the air. And I could see Annie’s peaceful face as she leaned back in the truck, as if she’d just decided to rest her eyes for a minute.
“We couldn’t save her,” Emily said.
“Of course not,” I said. “We weren’t paramedics. We were kids.”
“I know how it sounds,” she said. “But what happened at the black well was real. We were able to save her then. We were able to somehow slip dimensional streams and save Annie. I know it seems crazy, but that’s what happened. We saved her once, but we weren’t able to do it again.”
Emily wiped away a tear, and as if on cue the world began to shake again.
I stood up and put my hands against the Night Driver machine.
If our world had less than an hour to live, how were we supposed to go outside and walk around knowing what was about to happen? It all seemed so completely unreal.
I was staring at the screen of Night Driver, watching the car move along the road at night in the dark, when I had an idea.
I smiled.
“What?”
I grabbed Emily’s hand and helped her up.
“What are you doing?”
“We need a car,” I said as I led her through the arcade to the front door.
* * *
—
As soon as we stepped outside, I started to feel a low buzzing in my head and a woolly itching at the base of my skull.
I could tell that Emily was experiencing something similar.
Everything appeared slightly unreal. It was definitely night, but there was a dusty dark gray blur sticking to everything. The world was fading into a photocopy of itself.
The people walking around the streets and driving in cars didn’t appear to notice that anything had changed, but the darkness was up there, hovering over everything.
I looked up at the host of faded swimming shapes that smudged and streaked the sky above us, and I started running, faster, pulling Emily along with me.
“Where are we going?”
“Lakewood,” I said.