In Limbo

In the Limbo

The road was the kind of road that swallowed sound. No streetlights, no houses, nothing but scrub brush stretching flat and silver-grey under a moon that kept slipping behind clouds. Then metal screamed against metal, and the night broke open.

Johnny opened his eyes to a ringing silence.

For a few seconds he didn't know which way was up. The world tilted, blurred, steadied. Grass hissed against a wind he could barely feel. Somewhere close by, an engine ticked as it died, each click slower than the last, like something's heartbeat slowing to nothing.

Then it came back to him in pieces. The headlights swinging wild across the brush. Sonia's scream, cut short. The impact — not a sound so much as a feeling, a wrongness in his own chest.

— Sonia!

He was on his feet before he'd decided to stand, legs unsteady, palms scraped raw against gravel he didn't remember falling on. A few meters away the car sat crumpled against a shattered tree trunk, one headlight still burning weakly into the brush, throwing long broken shadows.

She was still inside.

— Sonia! Can you hear me?

Nothing. Not even a groan.

He threw himself against the door and pulled. It didn't give — not an inch, like the metal had fused shut around her. He ran to the other side, hands shaking so badly he could barely grip the handle. Still nothing. Through the spiderwebbed glass he could see only the dark shape of her, slumped, unmoving, her hair fallen across her face.

Panic rose in his throat like something physical, something he could taste.

He needed his phone. He needed to call someone — anyone.

He clawed through his pockets. Empty. He checked again, as if the phone might have appeared the second time, patting himself down with hands that no longer felt like they belonged to him. Nothing. It had to be in the car, lost somewhere in the wreckage, useless to him now behind a door that wouldn't open.

He looked up. Looked around.

The road stretched empty in both directions. No headlights. No houses. Not even the distant hum of another engine. Just him, the dying car, and the girl he loved trapped inside it.

There was only one thing left to do.

— I'll be back, Sonia, he whispered, pressing his palm flat against the cracked window as if he could reach her through it. I promise.

Then he ran.

He lost track of how long he'd been walking. His legs burned. His throat had gone dry and raw. The road unspooled endlessly ahead of him, the same silver-grey brush on either side, until finally — finally — a light bloomed in the distance.

A gas station.

— Ah...

The word came out as barely more than a breath, but it was the only thing keeping him upright. If there was a station, there were people. If there were people, there was help.

He ran the last stretch on legs that no longer felt like his own, chest heaving, and burst into the light of the forecourt where a handful of figures moved between the pumps — filling tanks, leaning against car doors, laughing about something he couldn't hear.

Relief hit him so hard his knees nearly buckled.

— Hello! Please, I need help!

No one turned.

— Excuse me — I had an accident. My girlfriend's still trapped in the car, she needs help, please —

Not one head turned toward him. A man stood at the nearest pump, and Johnny went straight to him, closing the distance in three strides.

— Sir?

The man kept his eyes on the numbers ticking upward on the pump, as if Johnny weren't standing close enough to touch.

— Sir!

Nothing. Not a flicker. Not a glance.

Johnny stood in the middle of the station, and slowly, the noise around him began to feel wrong — too loud and too far away at once, like he was watching all of it through glass. People talked. People laughed. People walked past him closely enough that their shoulders should have brushed his, and none of them so much as blinked in his direction.

As if he simply wasn't there.

A cold feeling crept up the back of his neck, something he didn't have a name for yet.

— Why can't anyone hear me?

He shoved the question down. He didn't have time for it. A little further on, past the station, he could make out the dark shapes of houses — a town. Someone in a town would help him. Someone had to.

He crossed the empty street to the nearest house, where a man stood in the doorway, half in shadow. Johnny went straight to him, already talking before he'd even stopped moving.

— Sir —

The man turned.

And looked directly at him. Really looked, the way no one else had — like Johnny was the only solid thing on the whole street.

— Oh, the man said softly. You can see me.

It didn't register. Johnny was too far gone in his own fear to notice the strangeness of the words.

— Sir, I had a car accident, back on the road. My girlfriend's still trapped inside and she needs help. Please — I need someone to come with me.

The man went quiet. Something moved behind his eyes, something heavy.

— A car accident, he repeated.

— Yes! It happened near the brush, I have to get back to her before — please, I don't have time —

The man studied him for a long moment, and when he finally spoke, his voice had gone low and careful, the way people speak when they're about to say something that will break someone.

— I'm sorry. I can't help you.

Johnny felt something crack in his chest.

— What? Why not?

He heard his own voice rising, cracking with something close to begging.

— Please. If you don't help me, she's going to die.

The man lowered his head. For a moment neither of them said anything, the silence stretching long and terrible between them. When he looked up again, his eyes were wet.

— I'm sorry. I can't help you.

— But why?

The man's throat moved as he swallowed.

— Because... he started, then stopped. Because I'm already dead.

— Ah, Johnny breathed.

The word landed somewhere far away. The night around him seemed to hold its breath. He opened his mouth to argue, to demand it wasn't true, but no sound came.

The man kept going, his voice trembling now, thick with something he'd clearly carried a long time.

— I died three years ago. My heart gave out — years of drinking finally caught up with me.

He looked down at his own hands as though they belonged to someone else.

— But that's not what I regret most. What I regret is that I never got the chance to be there for my daughter. My drinking took that from both of us.

His voice broke entirely.

— I feel like I abandoned her. Like I left her with nothing.

A tear slid down his face, catching the porch light.

— I was the only person she had left in this world.

Another tear. Then his shoulders began to shake, quiet and helpless.

— I was the only one...

Johnny stood frozen, unable to find a single word. Moments ago the only thing in his mind had been Sonia — getting back to her, saving her, nothing else mattering. Now he stood in front of a grieving ghost who seemed chained to his own regret, and something in Johnny's chest twisted with a grief that wasn't even his.

But Sonia. He had to get back to Sonia.

He turned and started walking, faster with every step, back toward the road.

— Wait, the man called after him.

Johnny stopped. Turned.

The man hadn't moved from the doorway.

— The reason I'm still standing here, in front of this house — it's the regret. For abandoning her. That's what's keeping me.

He straightened, and his voice sharpened with something almost urgent.

— But there's something you need to understand about what's happening to you.

Johnny said nothing, his whole body gone still.

— If you can see me, the man said, then there's only one explanation.

He hesitated, and in that hesitation Johnny felt the ground tilt beneath him.

— You're not among the living anymore.

— No.

Johnny shook his head, already backing away.

— No, that's not — that's not true.

He didn't wait to hear anything else. He turned and ran, faster than he'd run in his life, back toward the road, back toward Sonia — because that was the only thing that still made sense, the only thing he would let make sense.

Along the way he passed more people. Every time, he begged.

— Please! Somebody, please help me!

No one turned. No one so much as slowed. Some walked straight through the space where he stood, close enough that he flinched, and felt nothing, and kept going as if he were made of air.

Piece by piece, everything came rushing back to him — the station, the silence, the man's tears, those five words that wouldn't stop echoing.

You're not among the living anymore.

— No, he said again, to no one, to himself. It can't be true.

He kept running anyway.

When he finally reached the crash site, his heart was slamming so hard it hurt. The car sat exactly where he'd left it, one headlight still flickering weakly against the dark brush.

He slowed. Approached carefully, dread crawling up his spine with every step.

— Sonia...

He looked through the window.

His face went still.

Two bodies lay inside the car.

The first was Sonia.

And beside her —

— was his own.

Johnny couldn't move. Couldn't breathe. He looked at his own face, slack and pale in the wreckage, then at Sonia beside him, unmoving. For a long moment there was nothing — no thought, no sound, just the terrible, undeniable weight of it settling over him.

Everything he had refused to believe. All of it, true.

The man had been telling him the truth.

Johnny was dead.

And in his desperate need to save Sonia, he hadn't let himself see it.

He stood there, unable to tear his eyes away from the two bodies in the car, until a new thought cut through the numbness like a blade.

— If I'm not among the living... then who's going to save her?

He looked around. The road was as empty as it had been from the start.

He looked once more at his own body. Then at Sonia.

— If I do nothing, she'll die. Just like I did.

The thought terrified him more than his own death had.

— No. I have to do something.

A strange pull began somewhere deep in his chest, tugging him forward, toward the wreck, toward himself. He didn't understand it. He didn't try to. He let it pull him in.

Johnny opened his eyes.

Pain arrived first — a full-body ache, sharp and immediate, dragging him back into a body that felt broken in a dozen places. Every breath cost him something. He didn't care.

Sonia.

Through sheer force of will he pulled the door open — how, he would never know — and worked his arms beneath her, lifting her out of the ruined car. His own legs barely held. Every step sent fire through him. He didn't stop.

Step by step, he carried her toward the distant glow of the gas station, the same one where no one had seen him only minutes — or was it hours? — before.

Just a little further.

Then, someone turned.

— Hey! Someone come, quick!

This time, they saw him. Bodies rushed toward them out of the light.

— There's been an accident, call an ambulance!

Johnny felt his strength finally giving way, draining out of him like water through open hands. He looked down at Sonia, safe now in arms that weren't his, and something in him eased.

He'd done it.

Whatever he was, whatever this had cost him, he'd done what he came back to do.

His legs gave out beneath him. He sank to the ground, the voices around him growing distant, folding into a soft roar of static. The last thing he heard, before the dark closed over him gently, almost kindly, was someone shouting for an ambulance.

Then, silence.

Sonia woke hours later in a hospital room, blinking against fluorescent light, alive.

Johnny never woke at all.

But somewhere in that space between — not quite gone, not quite anywhere — one image stayed with him. A man standing in a doorway, tears on his face, telling a stranger the truth he hadn't wanted to hear.

You're not among the living anymore.

Johnny finally understood. Limbo wasn't simply a place where the dead waited out eternity.

It was a place some souls stayed until they'd finished what they couldn't finish while they were alive.

And Johnny had finished it.

Now, at last, he could go.

THE END