Julian Andrade married and divorced a stripper faster than hell could rip a teenaged sinner out of the clutches of heaven with a bottle of MadDog 20/20 and porno magazine. For a while after she left, he missed the sex and the companionship. But even before she left, he had stopped missing the lonely nights she was out with some other guy.
After ten years they were finally decent friends again and quite sure neither of them would have it any other way. She ran off and married one of her office affairs who had more money than morals, and Julian eventually settled down with a male underwear model who also turned out to be a superhero on the transplant team down at the local hospital. Julian got the kid and she got some illusion of freedom, the kind that comes with a price tag on a diamond-studded collar.
But all that didn’t seem to matter in the end. They were both happier on this side of the divorce. She collected “vampire smut”—her description for the type of fiction she read, and the type of fiction he wrote, at least once upon a time. She got her hands dirty in a backyard garden on the weekends and he mingled with Boston black tie society. Julian was quite sure she was curled up in bed right at this moment, reading, while he was sitting in his car nearly wrapped around a tree, bleeding, and staring at the antlers of a buck that stepped out into the middle of the road.
He just wasn’t sure why she popped into his mind at this particular moment. Maybe because it was strange how fast life hits when you take every curve at eighty miles an hour.
The rain wasn’t helping his frame of mind as it hammered down in relentless sheets, transforming the night into a blurred curtain of water and darkness. He wiped his face. His hand came away with glass and blood. The shattered windshield had transformed into a macabre frame, the buck’s antlers a grotesque crown above his head, their jagged edges glistening in the dim light. Rain pounded on the car roof, a relentless drumbeat that echoed his throbbing pulse.
As he struggled to piece together what had just happened, the memory of her face flickered like a ghost at the edge of his mind, taunting him with its clarity amidst the chaos. Why in the midst of this chaos had she been the memory his mind chased? He could hear his own heartbeat, a frantic rhythm against the relentless roar of the rain. The buck’s dead eyes, unseeing yet accusatory, stared into his own. He could see his reflection in those glassy eyes.
The coastal drive from Boston to Bristol Cove should have been a scenic route that evening with a bright and clear full moon, but instead had been an excursion in avoiding debris and praising the name of the mechanic who had insisted on changing the wipers before he left town. It wasn’t quite hurricane level winds and rain, but Julian cursed the weatherman that had been wrong yet again in the estimation of what a “little tropical storm” hitting the east coast was going to bring in terms of rain. He was also off by six hours on landfall. Choosing to make the drive now was the mistake he’d made. Russell suggested he not leave until Friday. He didn’t listen. Russell was on-call for three days at the hospital starting that evening. He didn’t see any reason to sit at home alone, so leaving when he did make the most sense. Now it just seemed like asking for death to arrive and escort him home.
Julian tried to move and found the seatbelt was torn. His senses reeled as he pushed against the door, the metal groaning in protest before finally giving way. A wave of nausea rolled over him as he tried to move. He stumbled out into the mud, the rain soaking him to the skin, his mind still trapped in the disorienting aftermath of the crash. Lightning forked overhead, briefly illuminating the desolate road and the dense foliage that seemed to lean in and keep the car from going right over the cliff just beyond the edge of the road.
He staggered away from the wreckage onto the road, each step sending jolts of pain through his battered body. His thoughts were a chaotic swirl, fragments of memories and sensations blurring together in a dizzying haze. The rain pummeled him relentlessly, each drop a cold, hard needle against his skin. His limbs felt heavy and uncooperative, each movement a battle against the throbbing ache that seemed to emanate from every part of him. The crash’s impact was only now beginning to register fully. Adrenaline still charged through him, but his mind started to reason out the moment which left his body open to the raw edge of his injuries.
He looked around, trying to get his bearings but the landscape was an indistinct mass of shadows and storm. The fury of the storm intensified, the wind howling through the trees like a chorus of wailing spirits. Lightning flashed, revealing glimpses of the twisted metal of his car and the wall of forest beyond the opposite side of the road.
The world around him felt surreal, like a nightmare from which he couldn’t wake, each sensation amplified. He shivered as the cold seeped into his bones. Pain flared in his side with each breath, and he realized he was more injured than he initially thought. A sharp, stabbing sensation hinted at broken ribs or worse, and the taste of copper in his mouth suggested the possibility of ‘or worse.’ He tried to focus and push through the disorienting haze.
Through the cacophony of the storm, he heard a soft yet insistent voice cutting through the noise. “Sir?” The voice reverberated near him. A woman’s voice, he thought, but sounded like it was spoken through the sound of wind chimes on a summer afternoon despite the raging storm all around. “Sir? Can you hear me? Are you hurt?” The blood in his ears wasn’t helping him hear clearly either.
The figure of a woman stood half-engulfed in the shadows. Her presence was uncanny against the backdrop of the storm raging around them. She was holding an umbrella, but it seemed to do little good from the way the rain plastered her clothes against her body and matted her hair around her face. Julian squinted, trying to focus on her features. His vision blurred, whether from blood, tears, or pain, he couldn’t tell.
“Sir?” He thought he heard her voice again, like the melodies of soft wind chimes in the storm, before the world went black and the night reached out to swallow him.
“Can you hear me?”