by Blake Crouch
I move toward the next door, hand Amanda the lantern, and grip the handle.
Turning the lever, I pull the door open one inch.
I see a concrete floor.
Two inches.
A familiar glass window straight ahead.
Three.
Amanda says, “It’s the hangar.”
“What do you want to do?”
She pushes past me and steps out of the box.
I follow, the lights shining down on us.
Mission control is empty.
The hangar quiet.
We stop at the corner of the box and peer around the edge toward the vault doors.
I say, “This isn’t safe.” My words carry through the expanse of the hangar like whispers in a cathedral.
“And the box is?”
With a thunderous clang, the vault doors disengage and begin to part.
Panicked voices bleeding through the opening.
I say, “Let’s go. Right now.”
A woman is fighting to squeeze through the space between the doors.
Amanda says, “Oh my God.”
The vault doors are only fifty feet away, and I know we should go back into the box, but I can’t stop watching.
The woman pushes through the doors into the hangar, and then reaches back and gives a hand to the man behind her.
The woman is Amanda.
The man’s face is so swollen and battered I wouldn’t have known right away that he was me except he’s wearing clothes identical to mine.
As they begin running toward us, I start to involuntarily retreat to the door of the box.
But they only make it ten feet before Leighton’s men rush through the doors behind them.
A gunshot stops Jason and Amanda in their tracks.
My Amanda starts toward them, but I pull her back.
“We have to help them,” she whispers.
“We can’t.”
Peeking around the corner of the box, we watch our doppelgängers turn slowly to face Leighton’s men.
We should leave.
I know this.
Part of me is screaming to go.
But I can’t tear myself away.
My first thought is that we’ve gone back in time, but of course that’s impossible. There’s no time travel in the box. This is simply a world where Amanda and I escaped several hours later.
Or failed to.
Leighton’s men have their guns drawn, and they’re moving deliberately into the hangar toward Jason and Amanda.
As Leighton steps in after them, I hear this other version of myself say, “It’s not her fault. I threatened her. I made her do this.”
Leighton looks at Amanda.
He asks, “Is this true? He made you? Because I’ve known you for more than a decade, and I’ve never seen anyone make you do anything.”
Amanda looks scared, but also defiant.
Her voice trembles as she says, “I won’t stand by and let you keep hurting people. I’m done.”
“Oh. Well, in that case…”
Leighton places his hand on the thick shoulder of the man to his right.
The gunshot is deafening.
The muzzle flash is blinding.
Amanda drops like someone flipped a power switch, and next to me, my Amanda lets slip a stifled shriek.
As this other Jason rushes Leighton, the second guard executes a lightning-fast Taser draw and brings him down screaming and twitching on the floor of the hangar.
My Amanda’s shriek has given us away.
Leighton is staring right at us with a look of pure confusion.
He shouts, “Hey!”
They start after us.
I grab Amanda by the arm and drag her back through the door of the box and slam it home.
The door locks, the corridor reconstitutes, but the drug will be wearing off any moment now.
Amanda is quaking, and I want to tell her everything is fine, but it isn’t. She just witnessed her own murder.
“That isn’t you out there,” I tell her. “You’re standing right here beside me. Alive and well. That is not you.”
Even in the bad light I can tell she’s crying.
Tears streak down through the grime on her face like running eyeliner.
“It’s some part of me,” she says. “Or was.”
Gently, I reach down and lift her arm, turning it so I can see the watch. We’re forty-five seconds shy of the ninety-minute mark.
I say, “We have to go.”
I start down the corridor.
“Amanda, come on!”
When she catches up, I open a door.
Total darkness.
No sound, no smell. Just a void.
I slam it shut.
Trying not to panic, but I need to be opening more doors, giving us a shot at finding someplace to rest and reset.
I open the next door.
Ten feet away, standing in weeds in front of a teetering chain-link fence, a wolf glares at me through large amber eyes. Lowering its head, it growls.
As it starts toward me, I shove the door closed.
Amanda grabs hold of my hand.
We keep walking.
I should be opening more doors, but the truth is I’m terrified. I’ve lost faith we’ll find a world that’s safe.
I blink and we’re confined to a single box again.
The drug has worn off for one of us.
This time, she opens the door.
Snow streams into the box.
A shot of bitter cold hits my face.
Through a curtain of falling snow, I glimpse the silhouettes of trees nearby and houses in the distance.
“What do you think?” I ask.
“I think I don’t want to be in this box for another fucking second.”
Amanda steps down into the snow and sinks to her knees in the soft powder.
She immediately begins to shiver.
I feel the drug wink out for me, and this time the sensation is like an ice pick through my left eye.
Intense but fleeting.
I follow Amanda out of the box, and we head in the general direction of the neighborhood.
Beyond the initial layer of powder, I can feel myself continuing to sink—the weight of each step slowly breaking through a deeper, older crust of compacted snow.
I catch up with Amanda.
We trudge through a clearing toward a neighborhood, which seems to be slowly vanishing before my eyes.
While I’m marginally protected from the cold in my pair of jeans and hoodie, Amanda is suffering in her red skirt, black sweater, and flats.
I’ve lived most of my life in the Midwest, and I’ve never known cold like this. My ears and cheekbones are rocketing toward frostbite, and I’m already beginning to lose the fine-motor control in my hands.
A driving wind blasts us straight-on, and as the snow intensifies, the world ahead takes on the appearance of a furiously shaken snow globe.
We push on through the snow, moving as quickly as we can, but it’s getting deeper and nearly impossible to navigate with anything approaching efficiency.
Amanda’s cheeks have gone blue.
She’s violently shivering.
Her hair is matted with snow.
“We should go back,” I say through chattering teeth.
The wind has grown deafening.
Amanda looks at me, confused, then nods.
I glance back, but the box is gone.
My fear spikes.
The snow is blowing sideways, and the houses in the distance have vanished.
In every direction, it all looks the same.
Amanda’s head is nodding up and down, and I keep squeezing my hands into fists, trying to force warm blood through to my fingertips, but it’s a losing battle. My ring of thread is encrusted with ice.
My thought processes are beginning to spin out.
I’m shaking with cold.
We fucked up.
It isn’
t just cold. It’s way-below-zero cold.
Lethally cold.
I have no idea how far we’ve come from the box.
Does it even matter anymore, when we’re functionally blind?
This cold will kill us in a matter of minutes.
Keep moving.
Amanda has a faraway look in her eyes, and I wonder if it’s the shock setting in.
Her bare legs are in direct contact with the snow.
“It hurts,” she says.
Bending down, I lift her in my arms and stagger into the storm, holding Amanda tightly against me as her entire body shakes.
We’re standing in a vortex of wind and snow and killing cold, and it all looks exactly the same. If I don’t stare down at my legs, the motion of it all induces vertigo.
It occurs to me: we’re going to die.
But I keep going.
One foot in front of the other, my face now on fire from the cold, my arms aching from holding Amanda, my feet in agony as the snow works down into my shoes.
Minutes pass and the snow falls harder and the cold keeps biting.
Amanda is mumbling, delirious.
I can’t keep doing this.
Can’t keep walking.
Can’t keep holding her.
Soon—so soon—I will have to stop. Will sit in the snow and hold this woman I barely know, and we will freeze to death together in this awful world that isn’t even ours.
I think about my family.
Think about not ever seeing them again, and I try to process what that means as my control over the fear finally slips—
There’s a house in front of us.
Or rather, the second story of a house, because its first floor has been completely buried in snow that’s drifted all the way up to a trio of dormer windows.
“Amanda.”
Her eyes are closed.
“Amanda!”
She opens them. Barely.
“Stay with me.”
I set her down in the snow against the roof, stumble toward the middle dormer, and put my foot through the window.
When I’ve kicked out all the sharpest jags of glass, I take hold of Amanda by her arms and pull her down into a child’s bedroom—a little girl’s, by the looks of it.
Stuffed animals.
A wooden dollhouse.
Princess paraphernalia.
A Barbie flashlight on the bedside table.
I drag Amanda far enough into the room that the snow pouring through the window can’t reach her. Then I grab the Barbie flashlight and move through the doorway into an upstairs hall.
I call out, “Hello?”
The house swallows my voice, gives nothing back.
All the bedrooms on the second floor stand empty. In most of them, the furniture has been removed.
Turning on the flashlight, I head down the staircase.
The batteries are low. The bulb emits a weak beam.
Moving off the stairs, I pass the front door into what used to be a dining room. Boards have been nailed across the window frames to support the glass against the pressure of the snow, which fills the frames entirely. An ax leans on the remnants of a dining-room table that’s been chopped down into burnable pieces of kindling.
I step through a doorway that opens into a smaller room.
The tepid light beam strikes a couch.
A pair of chairs almost completely stripped of their leather.
A television mounted above a fireplace overflowing with ashes.
A box of candles.
A stack of books.
Sleeping bags, blankets, and pillows have been spread across the floor in the vicinity of the fireplace, and there are people inside them.
A man.
A woman.
Two teenage boys.
A young girl.
Eyes closed.
Not moving.
Their faces blue and emaciated.
A framed photograph of the family at the Lincoln Park Conservatory, in a better time, rests on the woman’s chest, her blackened fingers still clutched around it.
Along the hearth, I see matchboxes, stacks of newspaper, a pile of wood shavings harvested from a cutlery block.
A second doorway out of the family room brings me into the kitchen. The refrigerator is open and barren, and the cabinets too. The countertops are covered with empty metal cans.
Creamed corn.
Kidney beans.
Black beans.
Whole, peeled tomatoes.
Soups.
Peaches.
The stuff that lives in the backs of cabinets and usually just expires from neglect.
Even the condiment jars have been scraped clean—mustards, mayonnaise, jellies.
Behind the overflowing trash can, I see a frozen puddle of blood and a skeleton—small, feline—stripped to the bone.
These people didn’t freeze to death.
They starved.
—
Firelight glows on the walls of the family room. I’m naked in a sleeping bag that’s inside of a sleeping bag that’s covered in blankets.
Amanda thaws out beside me in two sleeping bags of her own.
Our wet clothes are drying on the brick hearth, and we’re lying close enough to the fire that I can feel the warmth of it lapping at my face.
Outside, the storm rages on, the entire framework of the house creaking in the strongest gusts of wind.
Amanda’s eyes are open.
She’s been awake a little while, and we’ve already killed the two bottles of water, which are now packed with snow and standing on the hearth near the fire.
“What do you think happened to whoever lived here?” she asks.
Truth: I dragged their bodies into an office so she wouldn’t see them.
But I say, “I don’t know. Maybe they went somewhere warm?”
She smiles. “Liar. We’re not doing so hot with our spaceship.”
“I think this is what they call a steep learning curve.”
She draws in a long, deep breath, lets it out.
Says, “I’m forty-one. It wasn’t the most amazing life, but it was mine. I had a career. An apartment. A dog. Friends. TV shows I liked to watch. This guy, John, I’d seen three times. Wine.” She looks at me. “I’m never going to see any of that again, am I?”
I’m not certain how to respond.
She continues, “At least you have a destination. A world you want to get back to. I can’t return to mine, so where does that leave me?”
She stares at me.
Tense.
Unblinking.
I have no answer.
—
The next time I come to consciousness, the fire has reduced itself to a pile of glowing embers, and the snow near the tops of the windows is backlit and sparkling as threads of sunlight attempt to sneak through.
Even inside the house, it is inconceivably cold.
Reaching a hand out of the sleeping bag, I touch our clothes on the hearth, relieved to find them dry. I pull my hand back inside and turn toward Amanda. She has the sleeping bag pulled over her face, and I can see her breath pushing through the down in puffs of steam that have formed a structure of ice crystals on the surface of the bag.
I put on my clothes and build a new fire and hold my hands in the heat just in time to keep my fingers from going numb.
Leaving Amanda to sleep, I walk through the dining room, where the sun cutting through the snow at the top of the windows casts just enough illumination to light my way.
Up the dark staircase.
Down the hall.
Back into the girl’s room, where snow has blown in and covered most of the floor.
I climb through the window frame and squint against the painful light, the glare coming off the ice so intense that for five seconds I can’t see a thing.
The snow is waist-deep.
The sky a perfect blue.
No sound of birds.
No sound of life.
&nb
sp; There’s not even a whisper of wind and no trace of our tracks. Everything smoothed-over and drifted.
The temperature must be miles below zero, because even in the direct sun, I’m not anywhere close to warm.
Beyond this neighborhood, the skyline of Chicago looms, the towers snow-blown and ice-encrusted and glittering in the sun.
A white city.
A world of ice.
Across the street, I survey the open field where we nearly froze to death yesterday.
There’s no sign of the box.
—
Back inside, I find Amanda awake, sitting up at the edge of the hearth with the sleeping bags and blankets wrapped around her.
I head into the kitchen, locate some silverware.
Then I open the backpack and dig out a couple of MREs.
They’re cold but rich.
We eat ravenously.
Amanda asks, “Did you see the box?”
“No, I think it’s buried under the snow.”
“Fantastic.” She looks at me, then back into the flames, says, “I don’t know whether to be mad at you or grateful.”
“What are you talking about?”
“While you were upstairs, I had to use the bathroom. I stumbled into the office.”
“So you saw them.”
“They starved, didn’t they? Before they ran out of fuel for the fire.”
“Looks like it.”
As I stare into the flames, I feel something needling the back of my brain.
An inkling.
It started when I was outside a moment ago, looking at the field, thinking about us almost dying in that whiteout.
I say, “Remember what you said about the corridor? How it reminded you of being trapped in a whiteout?”
She stops eating, looks at me.
“The doors in the corridor are the connections to an infinite array of parallel worlds, right? But what if we’re defining these connections?”
“How?”
“What if it’s like dream-building, where we’re somehow choosing these specific worlds?”
“You’re saying that, out of an infinite number of realities, I intentionally picked this shithole?”
“Not intentionally. Maybe it’s a reflection of what you were feeling at the moment you opened the door.”
She takes the last bite of food and tosses her empty MRE packet into the fire.
I say, “Think about the first world we saw—that ruined Chicago, with the buildings crumbling all around us. What was our emotional state as we walked into that parking garage?”
“Fear. Terror. Despair. Oh my God. Jason.”