Blast Protocol

Chapter 27

SILAS

I am an angry soul. Perhaps we all are. If you're not, then you're just kidding yourself. You've got blinders on. You haven't allowed yourself to look, really look, at the world around you. At the reality we exist in.

Let's face it. Reality is fucked.

I can recall, time and again, having looked at the various members of my family, and thinking...they're gonna die one day. They're gonna die, and there's not a damn thing I can do about it.

There was no way of knowing when, or how. Maybe it would be slow, and painful, like cancer, or some other terminal condition, slowly wasting away while I and other loved ones have to watch. Maybe it would be quick, painless, and merciful, at the end of a long, fulfilled life. If there even is such a way to die. People tell stories about eighty-year-old men and woman passing away in their sleep, peacefully drifting off from this life and into the next. But I've also heard that sometimes when people die in their sleep, they are discovered with both their eyes and mouth open in a silent scream.

I know I'm not supposed to think about that. I know it, though no one has told me so. It's one of those unspoken rules of society. Healthy, functional people don't obsess over death. They instead focus on the bright side. They do their best to enjoy life while they have it.

But the stoic mindset, practical as it might be, has never come easy to me. I know there's no point in obsessing over things I can't control. Rationally, I know that, and have always known. But that never stopped me from having those dire visions of death, like nightmares in the light of day. The dark, evil side of a daydream, one you can't stop or look away from.

Often, it happens in the form of a car accident. I, or a loved one—often a loved one—gets run off the road. Parts of the car have caved in, pinning us inside. At first we are confused, disoriented. Usually it's dark out, and the passenger door is twisted open at a weird angle, broken. The whole car is turned nearly on its side, and won't stop beeping. That stupid jingle reminding us one of the doors is left open, with the key in the ignition. There's a light blinking on the mangled door, casting a red, flashing bar onto the upward slope of the ditch.

We try to turn, to take the key out of the ignition, but something's wrong. Our body doesn't want to twist that way. It doesn't seem to want to move, or pivot, at all.

Vision is blurry. There's an incessant ringing in both ears. It takes time, and an eventual reclamation of the awareness of ourselves, and of our surroundings, before we realize the truth. It takes time to truly notice the warmth and wetness running out of our torso and onto the dashboard, the stick shift, the emergency brake, the passenger seat. Things, substances, on the outside, which should be on the inside. Abandoning the body like rats on a ship destined for the deep.

Horror. That's the next feeling. There will be pain, soon. Horrible, intense pain, wracking the mind and the body. But it is the horror that comes first. We have felt it our whole lives, in little pre-emptory tastes and sips. The knowledge of death. The knowledge that one day, not so far from now, we will come to no longer be. But now the goblet rests in our hands, and we cannot help but drink, and drink deep, in great gulps and glugs. Pure, unadulterated fear. Irresistible. Unassailable. With it, comes panic. Hyperventilation. Hysteria.

Somewhere, there's an intermittent buzzing. Something lights up in the corner, nestled just next to the passenger seat, caught in the lip of the door frame. It's our phone. Ringing.

We reach for it. With everything we have. Ignoring the pain. Ignoring the wrenching, tearing feeling in our insides. We are abandoned, isolated, trapped in wreckage on the side of the road. And if there is one thing we fear more than death itself, it is dying alone.