Transcendence

by Benjamin Wilkins

  “Please don’t make this worse than it is, Emmett.”

  The Kessler family car was an old 2018 Toyota Prius—not exactly the best car when it came to snow and ice, but Emmett had put studded tires on at the beginning of the season and the thing did okay most days. At least if the driver was sober, it did okay; drunk off your ass in a snowstorm is a recipe for disaster no matter what you’re driving. Not that it would have mattered much, since severe weather was notorious for making even self-driving smart cars do stupid things, but a newer Prius would have had at least some kind of sophisticated auto-pilot technology standard. Emmett had long been determined to put any new-car money the family might have saved up to a much more practical use: booze. Besides, he could drive just fine unassisted, thank you very much.

  Happy drunks tend to be particularly stupid ones. Somewhere in his booze-soaked cerebral circuitry, Emmett thought it might win him points to grab the keys out of Susan’s hands when she took them out of her pocket and jump into the driver’s seat himself. The cold night air had grounded him enough to stop the world from spinning out from under him, but at that point he didn’t actually have any intention of driving. At least that’s what he would tell himself when he lay awake at night playing what was about to unfold over and over in his mind. He was just trying to be funny.

  “Come on, Emmett.” Susan sighed heavily.

  If she’d only laughed at him instead it might have all gone down differently, or so Emmett would tell himself all through the trial and sentencing. It was a bunch of bullshit, of course—nothing that happened next was Susan’s fault—but Emmett wouldn’t be ready to look that truth in the eye for a long time coming.

  Emmett shut the door just as she got to it, grinning like a two-year-old testing a boundary for the thousandth time. His wife banged on the window, nothing about this fun or funny to her.

  “You’re plastered. You can’t drive.”

  She even sounded like she was talking to a two-year-old. So, Emmett escalated things. As she reached for the door handle, he locked the car, his now victorious grin widening and widening, until the rearview mirror caught his eye and he realized his two daughters were in the backseat.

  His oldest, Jennifer, who was just about to start first grade, had the reddest hair and the greenest eyes the world had ever seen—or if not the world, at least the reddest and greenest anybody in Emmett or Susan’s family had ever seen, which at the time for Jennifer was the world, so it counted just the same. Her already big eyes were wide as saucers as she tried very hard not to cry in front of her father.

  Emmett’s youngest, Bobby-Leigh (yes, with a hyphen), was almost two years old, and like her sister she clearly took her looks from her mother—pale skin, a galaxy of freckles across her cheeks and nose, jade eyes, and Susan’s signature red hair. She was one of those babies who hardly ever cried. The kind that seems to see things grown-up folks can’t. The kind of kid that makes folks wonder.

  Seeing his girls in the backseat could have ended it. But Emmett went the other way; if he couldn’t get Susan to laugh with his joke, surely he could get Jen and Bobby-Leigh to. So he escalated, again.

  “Please, Emmett. Just open the door,” Susan pleaded, her breath visible in the cold and looking like dragon’s fire.

  Emmett shook his head gleefully. “No.”

  They stared each other down, the whole time Emmett truly expecting her to break out in a grin of her own and start laughing at her hilarious husband. But of course, she didn’t.

  “Fine. Let the girls out of the car if you’re going to drive drunk,” she eventually said. And again, this too should have ended it, but Emmett went the other way and managed to get offended by the idea that he would put his children in jeopardy by driving when he couldn’t do so safely. Somehow he managed to skip over the fact that he was threatening to do exactly that, but logic was not part of his mental process at that moment.

  “Jesus, like I’d do anything that would hurt my own children after all the bullshit and money we went through to have them? I’m fine. Just get in.”

  Susan crossed her arms, her dragon breath fuming, feeling totally taken hostage by this man she loved. And she did love him still. Though right now she’d gladly have hit him in the face with a fence post if it meant ending this stupidity and getting everybody home in one piece. She knew Emmett didn’t really want to drive, but she didn’t know it was a laugh from her that would have de-escalated the situation—a situation that from Emmett’s side was quickly getting to the boiling point.

  Happy drunks are great. But the cold fact is happy drunks don’t always stay happy, and the reaction best trigged by alcohol, after stupidity, is anger.

  “I’m fine. Get. In. The. Car,” Emmett said, no longer trying to make anybody laugh.

  “No.”

  They stared each other down as the water, or whatever it was in Emmett’s pot at that point, boiled over. The girls—Jennifer frozen in fear and Bobby-Leigh seemingly tuned out altogether—watched as Emmett pressed the “Start” button on the car.

  “Fine. Stay here, then,” he said. “I’m sure Jack would just love to give you a ride. . . home.”

  From the backseat, Jennifer broke her silence and screamed.

  “Mom!”

  Tears poured from her eyes. Bobby-Leigh, back from la-la land it seemed, suddenly started screaming too. It was possible that until that moment, Emmett might have forgotten briefly that the girls were in the backseat. A fact that would have made happy-drunk Emmett laugh, and might even have ended this disaster before it got rolling. Unfortunately, happy-drunk Emmett had gone home for the evening and the only one left in the office was the irrational, something-to-prove drunk Emmett.

  “Sit. Now. Stop crying,” he commanded, immediately regretting the sharpness of his tone.

  “I just want to get out, Daddy. Please. Just let me—”

  “I’m fine,” he said, trying to be softer this time, trying to reassure her. “I am fine.”

  While Emmett was distracted by the girls, Susan moved around the car and banged on the passenger-side window. The sound startled him, and out of muscle memory, or instinct, or maybe even an unconscious need for self-preservation, he unlocked the door before he realized what he was doing. Instantly, Susan ripped the door open and planted herself in the passenger seat—still fully expecting Emmett to come to his senses, which he might have done had she not said the following.

  “Please, Emmett. Let me drive. You’re scaring me. You’re scaring the girls. Enough is enough.” Her voice was calm, neutral, nonconfrontational. He should have responded positively to her plea. Hundreds of books on crisis negotiation would have told her she was doing exactly the right thing. But sometimes the right thing just isn’t, and Emmett responded to her rational, even-keeled, placating tone by laughing like that was the funniest thing he’d ever heard. Ironically, if they’d switched their responses and he’d spoken in a calm, nonconfrontational manner and she’d laughed like a stoned hyena, what happened next would not have happened at all.

  But it went the other way. Emmett put his foot on the gas and shot out of the parking lot, rocking the passenger-side door shut and trapping everybody inside the old Japanese hybrid for better or for worse.

  When it comes to things turning out for better or for worse, folks almost always end up with the latter. The Kesslers were no exception.

  Susan was stunned by the atrocity that she’d unwittingly become a part of. It was even worse in her mind, because she had instigated it somehow. She didn’t speak for what felt like a long time. Instead, she noticed that snow had started falling again. She noticed how brave her girls were trying to be. She even noticed that the sane part of her husband was screaming on the inside for the insane part of him to pull the goddamn car over and let her drive—a fact she could see reflected back at her in his eyes.

  She breathed in.

  She breathed out.

  Emmett stayed on the road.

  She breathed in again, and then�
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  Beep! Beep! Beep!

  The car’s lane-departure alarm chirped as she felt the car cross over the middle divide, and her breath caught. Emmett corrected his course, but too much, and the car swerved dangerously close to a ditch at the side of the road. In the backseat, the levy of bravery holding back the cries of the girls broke, and the tears and sobs came hard against their thin frames, shaking them in little tremors that warned a massive earthquake was coming.

  Emmett was really trying to drive straight, but he wasn’t.

  Susan, who at this point was the only one not wearing a seat belt, turned and leaned over the passenger seat to the back and tried to comfort her children.

  “It’s going to be okay,” she lied. “It’s only a couple of miles to the house. There’s hardly anybody out. We’ll be okay.”

  Jennifer didn’t believe her, she could tell. And Bobby-Leigh probably didn’t understand her. If ever there was a moment in her life when she wondered how the hell she got to where she was, this was it.

  Another course correction from Emmett, but not as bad as the one before. Maybe they’d make it home without an accident. Maybe she’d call a divorce lawyer in the morning if they did.

  Oh, Jesus, is that really where this is all heading?

  “I’m totally fine. I actually drive better a little drunk.”

  Yep. That’s where this is heading, she thought sadly as the car swerved again.

  “You’re not a little drunk, Daddy. You’re a lot drunk,” Jennifer said from the backseat with every ounce of courage she had. Susan was proud of her. And that was the last thing she felt for her daughter, because Emmett turned around in his seat to dispute the little girl’s assessment. Or maybe to just remind her that she didn’t know anything about being drunk, so she should keep her mouth shut. Or maybe to apologize for everything. Whatever it was that he turned to say, it never made it out of his mouth, because as his body turned right, his drunk hands on the wheel turned left into oncoming traffic.

  The girls screamed. Emmett jerked the wheel back instinctively without actually understanding what was happening. Susan’s body, unrestrained by a seat belt, smashed into his.

  The car began to skid.

  Susan’s eyes suddenly dilated to the size of nickels as the headlights of an oncoming logging truck lit the inside of the old Prius like a flashbulb. Another jerk of the wheel by Emmett and the truck whipped past without contact, just an angry blare of its horn. Time ticked by slower and slower, as Susan felt her entire body start to burn from the inside out. She felt something cold and dark filling her mind like an oil spill in the ocean. Coating. Covering. Pulling her down into the heat that felt like it was boiling her blood in her veins.

  “Stop. The. Car,” she managed to breathe more than say, as she grabbed the wheel and pulled it hard, the intention of putting the car safely on the shoulder of the road already slipping away before her hands made contact with the hard plastic of the steering wheel. She was already gone inside when the car flipped and rolled, skidding across the road on its side, heading straight for the bank of snow as though off a launchpad. She didn’t hear her girls’ screaming. She didn’t hear the horrible crunching of metal and snow and pavement all being ground together.

  Her body was tossed like a rag doll into the air and bounced around the old hybrid like a fleshy pinball as the car spun. For an impossible moment in Emmett’s mind his wife just hung there in the air. Their eyes locked—but Susan’s eyes no longer belonged to her. Her body, also no longer hers, was frozen for a terrible second as her now supercharged muscles engorged and she actualized into a berserker for the first time. And then—

  CRASH!

  Ground.

  Gravity.

  The timelessness stopped.

  The girls’ screaming stopped.

  Life as they knew it stopped.

  The airbags exploded around them. But the monster that two seconds ago was Emmett’s wife and the mother of his children ripped through them like cheap toilet paper, snarling and grabbing but taking nothing with her as she continued through the windshield in an explosion of safety glass, out into the snow.

  Out into the cold.

  Out into the dark.

  Gone.

  * * *

  The click-click-click of the turn signal was the first sound Emmett heard when he opened his eyes. Or maybe it was the wind. Adrenaline had fried the alcohol in his system and may have popped a few of the regular circuit breakers in his brain as well. The circumstances that had put the car upside down against a tree off Highway 25 in the middle of a snowstorm flooded back into his memory as his system rebooted, but they came in jumbled. Or maybe the circumstances just didn’t make any sense now that he’d sobered up a little.

  Regardless, now wasn’t the time to try to be piecing the past back together. He was upside down. A nasty scratch along his cheek was bleeding all up his face and into his hair, but other than that he didn’t think he was actually hurt—banged and bruised for sure, but functional in the ways that mattered.

  One of the doors must be ajar, he thought absently.

  The dome light was on. The only other light was the yellow flash-pause-flash of the turn signals. The storm had picked up, and outside the car the darkness was cold and thick with falling snow. The blinkers pushed some of the blackness back, but between strokes, the night was an abyss—the kind that stares back at you gnashing its teeth if you look into it for too long. He quickly found himself looking away.

  He managed to twist around and see the girls hanging in their seats behind him, both unconscious but breathing and not bleeding that he could see. He looked at the torn passenger-side airbag and jagged-glass-edged hole where the windshield used to be. A flash of memory hit him: Susan being thrown through the glass into the gaping jaws of the night. It was just a flash, not enough to remember any details, but enough to fill his heart with dread and trip an intuitive tingle for urgency. He stared out into the blackness wrapped in swirling snow and tried to make out where his wife’s body had ended up, not wanting to see it but knowing it was out there somewhere. She must have been tossed pretty far because he didn’t see any signs of her at all.

  The animal-like whining of the wind outside the car picked up, drowning out everything but the click-click-click of the blinker flashing on and off.

  Jesus, this car has an extraordinarily loud turn signal, a nearly subconscious part of Emmett’s mind observed. It felt like it belonged on a clock more than a car, a clock attached to explosives, ticking the time down.

  Click! Ten. Off.

  Click! Nine. Off.

  Click!

  Suddenly the hairs on Emmett’s neck and arms stood up. Maybe it wasn’t the impending doom hidden in the sound of the flashers that was spooking him. Maybe it was what those cycling yellow lights did to the shadows as they went through the rotation of being on and then off that was giving him the willies. He could see outside the car, then could not. Click, able to see, then off, blackness. Able to see, then not.

  The shadows must be playing tricks on my eyes, he thought, as he squinted through the cold, snow-filled night, half-convinced he’d seen something moving out there but telling himself he knew better. The only thing out there was Susan’s body—which is exactly why he should have been scared, but between the booze and the accident, her berserking out just as the car struck the tree, and then crashing through the windshield was a detail momentarily lost to all but the deepest parts of his mind. Unable to identify where the sense of urgency was coming from but equally unable to fight it, he quickly popped open his seat belt and turned his attention to the girls.

  Just as his eyes shifted to his daughters, the yellow flash of the blinker caught the red hair of his wife billowing in the wind.

  Click.

  Darkness.

  Instinctively, Emmett looked over his shoulder and into the abyss, but—

  Click. Flash. She was gone.

  “Hey!” he called out to his daughters, as he tried
to shake Jennifer awake, turning once again to the staring abyss outside the car, squinting even harder now into the freezing blackness between each turn-signal flash.

  Click. Flash. Nothing was out there.

  Click. Flash. Still nothing.

  Click. Flash. Nothing.

  But something was. Every cell in his body was screaming it.

  “Susan?” he called out into the snowy night, feeling stupid the moment the sounds left his throat.

  Click. Flash. No response came.

  “Mommy?” Jennifer said, calling Emmett’s attention back to the inside of the car while behind him, as the yellow signal light flashed, the berserker Susan darted through the snow and was caught by the light for a fraction of a second again. The monster moved so fast, it was just an angry blur of denim, pale skin, and red hair lost in the swirling snow. Emmett turned and looked over his shoulder, but missed it again. His rational mind tried to get him to focus on getting the girls out, while his lizard brain continued to sound the alarm.

  “Are you okay, baby?” he asked Jennifer.

  “No.”

  “Yes, you are. Yes, you are. Can you get out of the seat belt?”

  “No.”

  “Yes, you can. Just try, baby. I’ll catch you.”

  The sudden sound of something (fingernails?) being dragged across the metal of the Prius’s body snagged both Emmett and Jennifer’s attention.

  “What was that?” Jennifer asked.

  Emmett didn’t know, not for sure—at least that was what he told himself with his rational mind. But his face betrayed the truth that his lizard brain had been screaming about since he woke up: They were in trouble. Big, fat, ugly, red-haired berserker trouble.

  “Dad?”

  Outside the car, the flash-flash-flash of the turn signal hardly pierced the veil of the shadowy night. Susan was nowhere to be seen, which was just fine because Emmett wasn’t wasting any more time looking.

  “Hold on to me,” he said, hoping only he could hear the terror in his voice. He maneuvered himself into the backseat enough to undo Jen’s seat belt. The harness snapped out of its lock and sent Jennifer tumbling clumsily into her father’s arms. Emmett pulled her to him, thanking a god he didn’t really believe in that she was okay.