FLATLINE

The first thing that came back to him was sound, and even that arrived wrong, muffled and slow, like his ears were packed with wet cotton. A rhythmic beeping, uneven, somewhere close to his head. Beneath it, static, the particular hiss of a radio caught between two stations, neither one committing to being heard.

Dexter opened his eyes to a ceiling he didn’t recognize. Rivets, evenly spaced, running the length of a low metal roof. A plastic IV bag swayed gently above him, tethered to a pole bolted into the floor, and for a long moment that swaying was the only thing in the world that made sense, because everything else refused to hold still. The ceiling tilted. Righted itself. Tilted again. He understood, distantly, that the room itself was moving, though it took longer than it should have to arrive at the far simpler explanation that he was the one inside a vehicle, and the vehicle was the thing in motion.

His mouth was dry in a way that felt less like thirst and more like his body forgetting how to want anything at all. He tried to speak and produced only a fragment of a word, something that might have been where, if he’d had the strength to finish it. The vehicle took a turn too sharply and his body slid an inch against straps he hadn’t noticed were there, and the small violence of it woke a deep, low pain somewhere behind his ribs, patient and enormous, the kind of pain that had clearly been waiting for him to notice it.

He turned his head, and the movement cost him more than he expected. Across from him, slumped against the wall of the vehicle, was a shape he understood, in some wordless animal way, before his mind was ready to name it. A woman. Not moving. Her stillness had a particular quality to it, an absence of the small unconscious motions that even a sleeping body makes, and something in Dexter recoiled from the shape of that absence and refused, for now, to look at it directly. His eyes slid past her the way you might avoid a bright light, some instinct deciding on his behalf that this was not information he could afford yet.

Closer to him, near enough that he could hear the labor in it, someone was breathing badly. Dexter’s eyes found him: a man near his own age, wrists cuffed to the metal rail of the stretcher beside him, his shirt dark and wet along one side in a way that had nothing to do with sweat. His breath came in short, uneven pulls, each one sounding like it had to be fought for and won, rather than simply taken.

Beyond a thin partition at the front of the vehicle, a driver sat with both hands steady on the wheel, his shoulders loose, his posture entirely unbothered by whatever chaos surrounded them. Something about the ease of him, in a night that so clearly did not deserve ease, was the first thing that struck Dexter as wrong, though he wouldn’t have been able to say why, not yet, not with his thoughts still arriving late and out of order like mail delivered to the wrong address.

The man’s eyes found Dexter’s in the rearview mirror.

“There he is,” the man said, and something in his voice was practiced, the particular calm of someone who had said reassuring things to frightened strangers many times before and had worn the words smooth with use. “Hey. Focus on my voice, okay? Just my voice.”

Dexter tried again to speak, and this time managed a single syllable, thick and unrecognizable even to himself. Who?

“Paramedic,” the man said. “You’re in an ambulance. You’re safe.”

Dexter’s gaze drifted, involuntary, toward the cuffed man beside him, and something old and wordless in his chest pulled tight at the sight of the restraints, the blood, the ragged breathing. He didn’t yet have a reason to be afraid of anything specific. He was afraid anyway, in the undirected way you are afraid of the dark itself before you’ve confirmed there’s anything in it.

“Don’t worry about him,” the driver said, watching this happen in the mirror with an attentiveness that would have seemed like care, if Dexter had been in any state to notice how closely it resembled surveillance. “He’s restrained. He’s not going anywhere.”

Dexter’s hand found the cold metal rail beside him and closed around it, gripping it the way you grip the only solid thing available to you in a world that has, in the span of a few minutes, become entirely unmoored. Outside the rear windows, past the shape of his own reflection ghosting faintly in the glass, there was nothing. No streetlights. No windows lit from within. A city that should have been full of small, ordinary illuminations, and was instead simply gone, swallowed into a dark so total it took Dexter a moment to understand he wasn’t looking at empty space but at buildings, at a skyline, at a whole world that had, somehow, had its lights switched off all at once.

Somewhere, faint and directionless, sirens wailed, the sound of them arriving from everywhere and nowhere, the acoustic signature of a city too large and too broken for its emergencies to have any clear geography left.

“What happened,” Dexter managed, the words coming easier now, though his voice still sounded like it belonged to someone standing several rooms away from himself.

“Blackout. City-wide. The whole grid’s down. You got caught up in it, just like everyone else.”

“My head…”

“You took a hit. You’ll be alright. Just stay still.”

Dexter’s eyes slid shut, not by choice but by the sheer gravitational pull of exhaustion, and for a moment he let himself sink into the dark behind his own eyelids, which felt, absurdly, safer than the dark outside the windows.

“Hey,” someone said, close to him, a voice frayed thin at the edges. “You okay?”

His eyes opened again. The cuffed man was watching him now, his gaze glassy but present, fighting visibly to hold onto consciousness the way a man holds onto a rope in water. Dexter didn’t answer. He didn’t know how to hold two truths in his hands at the same time: that this man, restrained and bleeding, was asking after his welfare with what sounded like genuine concern, and that every instinct in Dexter’s battered body was telling him this was somehow the wrong thing to be feeling reassured by.

“Don’t engage with him,” the driver said, sharp now, the practiced calm briefly cracking to let something quicker and more irritated through.

“I was just asking,” the cuffed man said, and there was a wound in his voice that had nothing to do with his physical injuries.

“Save your breath.”

Silence settled over the cabin, broken only by the low mechanical hum of the vehicle and the small percussive shocks of a road that had clearly seen better nights. Dexter let his head fall back against the thin pillow beneath him and understood, in the dim and unreliable way that concussed understanding operates, that he had, for now, no better option than to trust the calm voice belonging to the man driving him somewhere he could not see and had not chosen.

Time did the strange thing it does after trauma, compressing and stretching without any warning, so that when Dexter next opened his eyes he had no way of knowing whether minutes or an hour had passed. His thoughts, at least, felt marginally more his own. He turned his hands over in front of his face, studying the dried blood crusted along his knuckles, and found himself uncertain whether it belonged to him.

The cuffed man was watching him again, more alert now, or perhaps simply more determined to appear so.

“You don’t remember, do you,” he said, quiet enough that it felt more like an observation offered in confidence than a question.

“Remember what.”

“Anything.”

Dexter didn’t answer, because the honest answer was no, and admitting it out loud felt like it would cost him something he couldn’t afford to lose.

“There was a crash,” the man continued. “Before this. Before you got in here.”

“I know,” Dexter said, though the words felt hollow even as he spoke them, a reflex rather than a genuine claim to knowledge.

“Do you?”

From the front, the driver’s eyes flicked to the mirror. “He’s not exactly a reliable narrator right now,” he said, with the mild, unbothered tone of someone commenting on the weather. “Neither are you, actually.”

“Nobody asked you,” the cuffed man snapped back, with a sharpness that seemed to cost his damaged body more than he had to spare.

“No,” the driver agreed, entirely unmoved. “But I’m the one driving.”

Dexter watched this small, taut exchange pass between the two of them and understood, in some part of himself not yet fully awake, that there was a history here he wasn’t privy to, a current running beneath the surface of the conversation that he could feel but not yet read.

“Why are you cuffed,” he asked finally, turning to the man beside him.

The man’s jaw tightened. “Long story.”

“Not that long,” the driver put in, before Dexter could press further. “He’s in custody. The officer transporting him got caught in the blackout, the vehicle went down, we picked him up just like you.”

“Custody for what.”

“Doesn’t matter right now.”

“It matters plenty,” the cuffed man muttered, more to himself than to either of them.

“For what,” Dexter pressed, some thread of clarity beginning, finally, to work its way through the fog.

The man met his eyes directly for the first time. “Nothing you’d believe coming from me.”

The ambulance swerved hard, without warning, throwing everyone sideways against their restraints. The cuffed man cried out, a short, sharp sound, as the metal bit into torn skin at his wrists. In the ringing silence that followed, Dexter’s heart hammered against his ribs in a way that had nothing to do with his injuries and everything to do with a fear he was only beginning to understand he was allowed to feel.

“Sorry,” the driver said, entirely too calm for the violence of what had just happened. “Debris.”

“Can you slow down,” Dexter managed, his voice unsteady.

“Can’t. It’s not safe to stop moving right now.”

“Why not?”

A pause, brief but noticeable, as though the driver were selecting his words from a small and carefully guarded collection. “The city’s not stable. The best thing for all of us is forward motion.”

Dexter didn’t have the strength left to argue the point. His head dropped back against the pillow, and through the rear window he caught, for the first time, a distant flicker of red and blue light, far behind them, pacing the ambulance without ever closing the distance.

“Police,” he said, weakly, more relief in the word than he’d intended to show.

“They know where we’re headed,” the driver said, without turning. “Nothing to worry about.”

A crackle broke through the low static near the front of the vehicle, half-words fighting their way out of a radio mounted beside the driver’s seat. Unit four-teen. Status. Repeat, do you copy. The driver reached over without so much as glancing at it and thumbed the volume down until the voice dissolved back into a whisper too faint to parse.

Dexter watched him do this. Filed it away in some quiet corner of his mind without yet understanding why it mattered.

“Aren’t you supposed to answer that,” he asked.

“Dispatch is a mess tonight,” the driver said, easily. “Everyone’s talking over everyone. I’ll check in when we’re stable.”

He said it lightly, the way you say something you’ve said a hundred times before, and it was precisely that ease that snagged, faintly, at the edge of Dexter’s attention.

Beside him, the cuffed man’s eyes had gone sharp and focused, trying to communicate something his voice, worn thin, couldn’t quite manage.

“Ask him where the hospital is,” he whispered.

“What?”

“Ask him. Make him say it.”

“That’s enough,” the driver said, an edge of warning creeping into his voice.

“Just ask,” the cuffed man pressed, ignoring him entirely.

Dexter, unsteady, turned his gaze toward the front of the vehicle. “Which hospital?”

There was a pause. Not long. Just long enough to notice, the way you notice a single missed beat in a song you know by heart.

“St. Bernard’s,” the driver said.

“That’s not on this route,” the cuffed man said immediately.

“You don’t know this city,” the driver replied, flat.

“I know it better than you think.”

“Can everyone just stop,” Dexter said, the words dragged up from somewhere deep and exhausted, but nobody stopped, and nobody said anything more either, and the ambulance rattled on through streets that offered no light by which to judge how far, or how wrongly, they were traveling.

By the time Dexter had gathered enough strength to prop himself upright against the stretcher’s frame, he’d noticed that the cuffed man beside him had grown paler, sweat beading along his hairline despite the cold that had settled into the cabin.

“You’re bleeding through,” Dexter said.

The man glanced down at the spreading stain along his side. “Yeah,” he said, with a tired, almost embarrassed half-smile, as though this were merely one more inconvenience in a night already overflowing with them.

“Hey,” Dexter called toward the front. “He needs something. Gauze, pressure, anything.”

“Can’t stop the vehicle to treat him.”

“I’m not asking you to stop. There’s a kit right there.”

A pause, and in the mirror Dexter caught the driver’s eyes doing something he couldn’t quite name, a small private calculation playing out behind an otherwise untroubled expression.

“Fine,” the driver said finally. “Left compartment. Do it yourself, I’ve got my hands full up here.”

Dexter reached for the compartment, wincing against a pain in his own ribs that flared with every movement, and found a roll of gauze inside. He shifted closer to the cuffed man and pressed it, as gently as his shaking hands allowed, against the wound. The man hissed sharply, then forced his breath into something steadier.

“Thank you,” he said quietly, watching Dexter work with an expression that had shifted, somewhere in the last few minutes, from wary calculation into something closer to genuine gratitude.

“Don’t thank me yet,” Dexter said, focused entirely on the task in front of him. “I don’t know what I’m doing.”

“Neither do I,” the man said, with a weak laugh that seemed to cost him something. “Feels about right for tonight.”

For a moment, something eased between them, a small and human thing that had nothing to do with cuffs or blood or the strange calculus of who deserved trust and who didn’t.

“Listen to me,” the man said, quieter now, meant only for Dexter. “Really listen.”

“I’m listening.”

“Something’s wrong with him. The driver.”

“He’s trying to get us to a hospital in the middle of a blackout,” Dexter said, still focused on tying off the gauze. “Of course, something’s wrong. Everything’s wrong tonight.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

Dexter looked up then, meeting the man’s eyes properly for what felt like the first time all night.

“He hasn’t called it in,” the man said. “Not once. No hospital confirms a patient transport without radio contact. Not ever. Not even in a blackout.”

Dexter’s hands slowed on the gauze. “Maybe the radios are down everywhere.”

“Then how’d dispatch reach him a minute ago?”

Dexter had no answer to that. The question sat between them, ugly and unresolved, the kind of thing that, once noticed, could not be unnoticed again.

“Is everything alright back there?” the driver called, casual, from the front.

Both of them froze, uncertain how much of their exchange had carried forward through the thin partition.

“Fine,” Dexter said, working to steady his own voice. “Just finishing up.”

“Good man,” the driver said, and the warmth in his voice was, Dexter was beginning to understand, entirely indistinguishable from the coldness that might have been underneath it.

The ambulance slowed, and red light bled through the windshield in intermittent pulses, closer now than the distant flickers Dexter had noticed before. A voice, muffled by glass and distance, called out from somewhere outside. Roll it down. Need to see who’s aboard.

The driver rolled his window down partway. From the back, Dexter could catch only fragments, half-heard words swallowed by the thin partition and his own unsteady hearing, and the brief, sweeping edge of a flashlight beam that cut through the cabin like a blade of light through fog.

The transport report says two casualties, one custody transfer. That match?

“That’s right,” the driver said, his voice easy, practiced, and entirely convincing. “Blackout’s got everyone scattered, we picked up the custody transfer when his unit went down.”

Copy that. Are you clear for St. Bernard’s?

“Clear and moving.”

A pause. Dexter strained against his own exhaustion to see more, catching only the officer’s silhouette and the flashlight beam sweeping briefly across the cabin, across the cuffed man’s wrists, across Dexter’s own face.

The beam lingered on him. A half-second too long.

Are you good back there?

Dexter opened his mouth. Nothing came out at first, his throat dry, his mind screaming a hundred things his body refused, in that moment, to obey.

“He’s in and out,” the driver said quickly, smoothly, before the silence could stretch too long. “Head trauma. I don’t have much to say right now.”

Copy. Move along, we’ve got units backed up behind you.

The window rolled up. The light receded, taking with it the last real chance, Dexter understood too late that anyone outside this vehicle might have known something was wrong.

He sat there, stunned by his own silence, a slow fury building in him that he didn’t yet have words for.

“Why didn’t you say something?” the cuffed man asked quietly, watching him.

“I don’t know,” Dexter said, shaken.

“You had him right there.”

“Say what?” Dexter’s voice cracked, defensive and frightened all at once. “Do I have a bad feeling? They’d have looked at you in cuffs and me half-conscious and believed him in about two seconds.”

The man didn’t argue the point, because he knew, better than anyone in that vehicle, exactly how true it was.

The ambulance picked up speed again, swallowing back whole into the dark.

Dexter found himself staring at the back of the driver’s head for a long time after that, a slow, searching kind of scrutiny he hadn’t been capable of an hour earlier.

“How long have you been doing this,” he asked. “Driving.”

“Eleven years,” the driver said, easy as ever.

“Eleven years and you don’t know the fastest route to St. Bernard’s.”

A pause. Just slightly too long.

“Blackout’s got half the roads rerouted. GPS is useless tonight. I’m working off memory and instinct.”

“Instinct took us past St. Bernard’s twenty minutes ago,” Dexter said, quieter now, more careful. “I saw the sign.”

Silence settled over the cabin. The engine hummed beneath it. Dexter watched the driver’s hands on the wheel, watched for the smallest tremor, the tightening of knuckles, any of the small involuntary signs a nervous man’s body gives up without permission. There was nothing. The hands remained as steady as they’d been from the very first moment Dexter had opened his eyes.

“You’re confused,” the driver said finally, flat. “Head injury does that.”

“Maybe,” Dexter said, though he didn’t believe it, not anymore, and something in the quality of his own disbelief had become, in the last several minutes, entirely certain of itself.

Beside him, the cuffed man had gone very still, listening to every syllable pass between them with an intensity that seemed, now, less like fear and more like readiness.

“Dexter,” he whispered.

Dexter turned to him.

“When I tell you to move, you move. Don’t ask why. Just move.”

“Move where,” Dexter said, fear cracking through his voice. “We’re in a moving vehicle.”

“I don’t know yet. But when I say it, you’ll know.”

Before Dexter could respond, the ambulance took a violent, sudden turn, hard enough to throw them both against the wall of the cabin, and something in the quality of the silence that followed told Dexter, with a certainty that arrived all at once and completely, that whatever had been building all night had finally run out of road.

The vehicle was moving faster now, the engine straining beneath them, the dark outside rushing past at a speed that belonged to no driver concerned with anyone’s safety.

“Slow down!” Dexter shouted toward the front.

No response.

“Hey! I said, “Slow down!”

“Sit back,” the driver said, and something in his voice had changed entirely, the practiced warmth gone, replaced by something cold and final that made Dexter’s blood run thin with fear.

“Marcus?” Dexter said, quiet, terrified, using the name for the first time as though it might still mean something, might still call back the man who had spoken so gently to him only an hour before.

No answer came. Only the engine, louder now, and the dark rushing past the windows like something with intent.

“Dexter, listen to me,” the cuffed man said, his voice low, tight with controlled panic. “Whatever happens in the next few minutes, you do not let go of that rail. You understand me?”

“What is happening?”

“He killed her.”

Dexter froze.

“The caretaker,” the man continued, faster now, no time left for gentleness. “Before you woke up. I saw it. He didn’t panic, he didn’t hesitate, he just did it and kept driving like nothing happened.”

“Why would he…”

“I don’t know why. I don’t care why. I care that he’s not slowing down and there’s nothing between us and wherever he’s taking us.”

Dexter’s eyes went to the front of the vehicle, to the driver’s unmoving shoulders, to hands still perfectly steady on a wheel steering them somewhere neither of them had chosen or consented to.

“Marcus,” Dexter said, desperate now. “Please. Just tell me what’s happening.”

“You’re not who I need alive tonight,” the driver said, without turning, and something in the gentleness of his tone made the words land far worse than any shout could have. “But you’re not who I need dead either. So sit still, and maybe you walk away from this.”

The words settled over Dexter like ice water.

“He’s talking about me,” the cuffed man said, urgent, quiet.

“What does that mean…”

“It means we’re almost out of time.”

Ahead, through the windshield, a shape rose out of the darkness, enormous and geometric against the black sky, sparking faintly along its edges in a way that made Dexter’s stomach drop before his mind had fully caught up to what he was looking at.

“What is that…”

“Grid substation,” the man said. “The last one is still holding power for half the east side. He crashes us into that, it’s not just us that goes.”

“Casualties happen in blackouts all the time,” the driver said, his calm returned now, chillingly complete. “Nobody looks twice.”

Something in Dexter, some final reserve of adrenaline burning clean through the fog that had clouded him since he first opened his eyes, pushed him upright. He unbuckled the strap holding him to the stretcher with hands that shook and did not stop moving anyway.

“Tell me what to do,” he said to the man beside him.

“There’s a manual release by the rear door,” the man said, fast, urgent. “If I can get free, I can reach the partition latch, buy you a few seconds. You have to get to him.”

“I can’t fight him, look at me…”

“You don’t have to win. You just have to make him lose control of the wheel for three seconds.”

The substation loomed larger now, closer, sparking against the black sky like something alive and patient.

“Okay,” Dexter said, steeling himself against a fear that had nowhere left to hide.

“Okay,” the man echoed.

Dexter lunged toward the partition, ignoring every scream of protest from his battered body. Marcus, sensing the movement without needing to see it, threw an elbow back with brutal precision, catching Dexter hard across the jaw. Dexter fell back, dazed, blood filling his mouth.

“Stay down,” Marcus said, cold, final.

Behind him, the cuffed man had worked one wrist half-free of its restraint, skin tearing in the process, blood slicking the metal enough to let him slip free. He dragged himself forward, every inch a battle his ruined body had no business winning.

“Dexter. Now.”

Dexter pushed himself upright again, blood on his lips, and threw himself at the partition, grabbing for anything, for Marcus’s arm, for the wheel itself, for whatever purchase the moment allowed. The ambulance swerved violently, metal screeching against something unseen, the whole world tilting sideways for one long, suspended second.

The cuffed man reached the partition latch and threw it open, dragging himself through the gap with his one free arm and his one still-cuffed hand, wrapping both around Marcus’s throat from behind with everything he had left to give.

“Get off!” Marcus choked out, fury breaking through the calm at last.

The wheel spun free beneath nobody’s full control. Dexter grabbed it, wrenched it hard to the left with strength he didn’t know he still had.

The substation filled the windshield entirely now, impossibly close, sparks raining down like something out of a nightmare given weight and mass.

“TURN!!” Dexter screamed, to no one, to everyone, to whatever was left of the night that might still be listening.

The ambulance clipped the outer edge of the substation’s fence, tore through it in a shower of white sparks, and slammed sideways into a concrete divider beyond it with a violence that swallowed every other sound in the world.

Metal screamed. Glass shattered outward in a thousand small, glittering pieces.

Then, all at once, there was nothing at all.

Silence came first, heavy and absolute, broken only by a low electrical hum somewhere outside and the slow, dying tick of an engine giving up its last warmth.

Dexter stirred before he understood he was stirring. Blood on his face. Glass caught in his hair. Alive, in a way that felt less like relief and more like disbelief, a fact his body hadn’t yet found room to accept.

He looked toward the front. Marcus was slumped over what remained of the wheel, entirely still, in the particular way that told Dexter, without needing to check, that he would not be moving again.

He turned, slowly, toward the man who had spent the whole of this endless night trying to save him.

The man lay on the floor of the cabin, exactly where he’d fallen, his one free hand still curled as though it were holding onto something that had, in the last few seconds, slipped irretrievably away.

“Hey,” Dexter said, his voice hoarse, disbelieving. “Hey!”

He crawled to him, pressing, shaking hands against a wound that had never once stopped bleeding, though some distant, rational part of him already understood that pressure would not be enough, not now, not after everything the night had already taken.

“Stay with me. Come on. Stay with me…”

The man’s eyes fluttered, found Dexter’s face, and held there with something that looked, in the end, almost peaceful.

“Told you,” he whispered. “You’d know.”

“No,” Dexter said, breaking now, fully and finally. “No, don’t…”

But the man’s breathing had already begun to slow, and a moment later, it stopped altogether, and Dexter remained there in the wreckage with his hands still pressed against a wound that no longer needed pressing, for a long, long time.

Outside, through the shattered windshield, the city remained dark. Remained silent. A world that had not yet decided whether it planned to come back.

Dexter looked up, finally, taking in the full wreckage around him: the substation sparking uselessly a few feet away, damaged but standing, the fence torn open like something had clawed its way through it. He understood, distantly, that he was alone now in a way that had very little to do with the empty, lightless street outside the ambulance’s broken windows.

He didn’t move for a long time. There didn’t seem to be anywhere, yet, that made sense to go.