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The Gray Suit and the Year of Reckoning
The man in the gray linen suit did not look like an angel, a demon, or a scientist. He looked like an insurance assessor who had spent thirty years eating egg-salad sandwiches in windowless basements. He sat across the laminate table, folded his hands over a blank manila folder, and pushed a cheap ceramic mug of lukewarm tap water toward me.
“If you could relive one single year of your life,” he said, his voice as flat as unironed cotton, “which one would it be?”
I did not ask who he worked for. When people wake up strapped to a vinyl chair in a concrete bunker beneath an abandoned rail depot, they usually waste twenty minutes shouting about the law or their rights. I had worked three years in industrial repossessions; I knew that when men in linen suits ask you a question in an airless room, the law has already packed its bags and caught the midnight bus out of town.
“Two thousand and fourteen,” I said immediately.
The man’s pen hovered over the card. His gray eyebrows twitched. “Most people choose eighteen. Or the year they got married. Or the year before the accident took their legs.”
“I don’t want my youth,” I told him. “And I never married. In 2014, I was thirty-one years old, driving an eight-ton flatbed truck across western New South Wales for an old lunatic named Silas Vance. On November twelfth, Silas took a four-digit brass padlock, snapped it onto a green steel army surplus chest, and stuffed it beneath the floorboards of an underground dugout in White Cliffs. Six hours later, he had a massive coronary over a plate of mutton chops at the local pub. He died before his chin hit the gravy.”
The man in the suit tilted his head. “And what was inside the green chest?”
“Rough-cut pine-tree opals,” I said. “Three sacks of them. Pulled out of an illegal shaft seventy feet below the red clay before the mining inspectors sealed the lease. Worth roughly two point four million on the private market in Antwerp. Vance was the only man who knew the combination to that lock. He told me he’d write it in his field diary the morning before he died, but he burned the notebook during a bout of alcoholic paranoia at three in the morning. I spent ten years digging post holes and hauling drywall for sixty dollars a day, wondering what four numbers were on that dial.”
“You want to go back for money,” the man said. It was not a question.
“I want to go back because I want thirty seconds alone with Silas’s notebook before he throws it into the kerosene stove,” I replied. “Give me 2014. From January first to December thirty-first. I’ll do the sweaty work. I’ll haul his survey gear through the dust, I’ll smile at his crazy stories, and when November comes, I’ll pocket the slip of paper, leave the dugout before the mutton chops arrive, and catch the train to Sydney.”
The assessor unscrewed the cap of a black fountain pen. He pressed the nib to the cardboard folder, drew a single vertical stroke, and blew on the ink.
“A year is a long time, Julian,” he whispered. “You don’t just visit. You occupy the meat. And memory is not a video recording. It’s an open wound that tries to heal while you’re picking at the scab.”
“Just push the button,” I said.
The assessor didn’t push a button. He reached across the table, grabbed my thumb, and bent it backward until the joint made the sound of a dry branch snapping under a boot.
The pain didn’t radiate up my arm. It exploded into a blinding flash of yellow light that smelled of burning rubber and cheap diesel fuel.
My lungs seized. I sucked in air, but it wasn’t the dead, conditioned chill of the bunker; it was hot, dry, and thick with the stench of red clay, river silt, and stale tobacco. My ears popped with a violent rush of wind.
I was sitting in the passenger seat of an ancient, rattling Toyota Land Cruiser. The dashboard was split down the center, its foam padding cooked into hard black toast by decades of ruthless sun. Through the bug-splattered windshield, the Cobb Highway stretched dead-straight into an undulating sea of saltbush and dry grass, trembling under a midday heat mirage that turned the horizon into liquid silver.
My hand was gripping the door handle. My thumb didn’t hurt. I looked down at my hands. The skin was tan, taut, scarred at the knuckles from steel fencing wire, free of the liver spots and stiffness that had settled into my fingers over the past decade.
I was back.
To my right, behind the wheel, sat Silas Vance.
He was wearing the same grease-stained khaki shirt I remembered, his gray beard trimmed with blunt scissors, his thick forearms covered in pale freckles and white hairs. A rolled cigarette hung unlit from the corner of his cracked lips. He looked eighty, but he was sixty-two—a man pickled in cask wine, diesel fumes, and outback sun.
“Stop daydreaming, boy,” Silas barked, his voice like gravel sliding down a galvanized chute. “Look at the map. Did we pass the Booroorban turnoff or are we still south of the Black Swamp?”
A cold prickle of adrenaline washed down my neck. It was March. We were hauling a load of cast-iron drill heads up from Echuca, heading toward the Darling River. I knew this day. I had lived this day. We were supposed to stop at the Royal Mail Hotel in Booroorban, drink two schooners of heavy draft beer, look at the giant iron sculpture of the Headless Horseman by the swamp, and sleep in the back of the ute.
“We haven’t hit Booroorban yet,” I said. My voice sounded higher, younger, less frayed by ten years of cheap cigarettes. “Another four miles. You’ll see the pub on the left.”
Silas didn’t answer. He reached down, grabbed a dirty rag, and wiped the inside of the windshield. His hand was shaking.
I frowned. Silas Vance never shook. In my memory, the man was an iron post sunk six feet into the earth. When a road train had clipped our side mirror outside Hay, he hadn’t even blinked—just spat out the window and cursed the driver’s mother. But now, his knuckles on the steering wheel were bone-white. His eyes kept flicking up to the rearview mirror every four seconds.
“Silas?” I said. “You alright?”
“Keep your eyes on the road,” he muttered. “Watch the tree line. Don’t look at me.”
“What tree line? There’s nothing out here but saltbush and sheep skulls.”
“Just watch the road, Julian.”
I turned toward the side window. The landscape rolled past in a monotonous blur of ochre dirt and pale green scrub. Everything was exactly as I had left it twelve years ago. The heat radiating off the door panel pressed against my left shoulder like a hot iron. I reached into my jeans pocket. My fingers touched a paper receipt, a brass pocket knife, and three silver coins. No smartphone. No plastic cards with microchips. Just the raw, heavy tang of 2014.
Then the Land Cruiser hit a cattle grid.
The steel bars clattered under the tires—clack-clack-clack-clack.
My gaze drifted down to the odometer on the instrument cluster. The little mechanical numbers were rolling over.
241,892.
As the back wheels cleared the iron grid, the third digit didn’t roll forward. It clicked backward with a sharp mechanical ping.
241,891.
I blinked, rubbing my eyes. The dust out here played tricks on your vision; everyone knew that. The glare from the hood could burn a hole through your retinas if you didn’t wear dark glasses. I looked again. The numbers were stationary.
“Silas,” I said slowly. “How many miles on this rig?”
“Too many,” he snapped. He reached out and snapped the radio on.
Static hissed through the dashboard speaker, followed by the dry, warbling drawl of an AM cricket broadcast from Melbourne. The commentator was talking about Michael Clarke and the English tour. The sound should have anchored me, should have confirmed that the machine in the concrete bunker had worked.
Instead, the commentator’s voice suddenly dipped down an octave, dragging out like an old cassette tape being pulled through a dirty playback head.
…and the ball goes through to the keeper… keeper… keep-her…
Then the radio clicked off. The knob hadn’t moved.
Silas hadn’t touched it. He was still staring straight ahead, his chest heaving under the sweat-stained khaki shirt.
“We aren’t stopping in Booroorban,” Silas whispered.
“What?” I turned to him. “We have to stop. The radiator’s weeping from the bottom hose. You said it yourself back in Deniliquin—if we don’t take on water at the pub, the head gasket will blow before we reach the Murrumbidgee.”
“We aren’t stopping,” he repeated, his knuckles whitening further. “They’re at the pub.”
“Who’s at the pub? The shearers?”
Silas turned his head toward me. For the first time all afternoon, his eyes met mine. They were bloodshot, the pupils dilated until the blue rings of his irises were almost invisible.
“You are,” he said.
A laugh caught in my throat, dry and hollow. “What the hell kind of bush joke is that? I’m sitting right here.”
“I know where you’re sitting,” Silas hissed. He didn’t slow down. Up ahead, on the flat horizon, the tin roof of the Royal Mail Hotel rose out of the saltbush like an abandoned barge stranded in an inland sea. Beside it, the silhouette of the Headless Horseman sculpture stood black and jagged against the brassy sky. “And that’s why we’re not touching the brake.”
“Silas, you’ve been drinking metho out of the camp stove again. Slow down. The temp gauge is in the red.”
“Shut your mouth!” he roared. He slammed his right foot down. The old diesel engine screamed, the transmission whining like a circular saw hitting a rusted bolt. The needle of the temperature gauge bounced against the brass stopper at the far right of the dial. Steam began to hiss from the edges of the hood, curling against the glass in greasy white ribbons.
We flew past the Black Swamp. In the stagnant, tea-colored water, half-submerged river red gums thrust their dead branches into the air like drowned skeletons.
Then we reached the pub.
The Royal Mail Hotel was a low, weather-beaten weatherboard box with a wide corrugated veranda supported by rough-hewn posts. Parked in the dirt yard in front of the saloon doors was a vehicle.
A flatbed Toyota Land Cruiser.
It was painted the same faded mustard-yellow as ours. The passenger door was dented where an emu had struck it two winters back. A blue canvas tarp was strapped across the cargo bed, covering three heavy cast-iron drill heads.
And standing on the veranda, leaning his forearms against the wooden railing with a cold glass of dark beer in his hand, was a young man in an olive singlet and grease-smeared work shorts.
He had my broad jaw. He had the crooked scar through his left eyebrow where a snapped winch cable had caught him at seventeen. He was laughing at something the publican was saying through the open service hatch.
I pressed my face against the passenger glass, my stomach dropping into a bottomless, icy pit. My breath fogged the window.
“Silas…” my voice was barely a croak. “Who is that?”
“I told you,” Silas spat, tears of pure terror leaking into the white bristles of his beard. He didn’t look at the veranda. He kept the pedal pinned to the floorboards. “Don’t look at him! If he looks over here and sees us, the whole bloody thing snaps!”
As we roared past the pub, the engine howling and throwing clouds of sulfurous white smoke, the young man on the veranda paused.
He lowered his beer glass.
Slowly, deliberately, he turned his head toward the highway.
His eyes swept across our windshield.
For a fraction of a second, across fifty feet of shimmering outback dust, my own eyes met mine.
The world went violently silent. The roar of the engine vanished. The rattle of the suspension cut out. The heat in the cabin turned so cold my teeth clattered together with the sound of dice in a plastic cup. The boy on the veranda didn’t look shocked or frightened. He looked through me, through the glass, through the metal, as if he were staring at a smudge of soot on an empty road.
Then we were past.
The sound slammed back in like an artillery shell. BOOM. The radiator hose gave way with a wet shriek, and a geyser of boiling green coolant erupted over the windshield, completely blinding us.
Silas fought the steering wheel as the truck fishtailed wildly in the soft sand shoulder. The tires screamed, throwing plumes of red grit thirty feet into the air. We spun through a full circle, the horizon whirling like a carousel in hell, before the front bumper plowed into a dry irrigation embankment and brought us to an agonizing, bone-jarring halt.
Silence fell over the cabin, broken only by the hiss of boiled water splashing against the exhaust manifold and the heavy, rhythmic gasping of our breath.
I sat there, my shoulder bruised where the seatbelt had dug in, my brain refusing to process the geometry of what I had seen.
“That was me,” I whispered. “That was… I was on that veranda in March of 2014. I remember that beer. It was an Old, too cold, tasted like iron pipes. I remember watching a yellow ute drive past through the steam…”
My voice trailed off. A cold sweat soaked through my shirt.
“I remember,” I said again, slower this time. “I was standing there. And an old Land Cruiser tore down the highway with its radiator blowing. I asked the publican who the crazy bastard in the truck was. And he told me it was just two drifters running from their own shadows.”
I turned my head. Silas was leaning his forehead against the steering wheel. His hands were dangling limp between his knees.
“How long have you been here, Silas?” I asked.
The old man didn’t move. He let out a wet, rattling sigh that shook his thin ribs.
“Three times,” he whispered into the vinyl of the horn pad.
“What?”
Silas lifted his head. His skin wasn’t just weathered; it looked degraded, like parchment that had been left out in the rain and dried over a kerosene heater. The skin under his eyes was black, and the fingernails on his left hand were split down the quick.
“I died in White Cliffs,” Silas said, staring through the fogged, coolant-streaked glass. “Heart blew out like a rotten tire. One minute I’m chewing on cold mutton, the next I’m in a room with a little bastard wearing a gray suit, asking me what year I’d like to do over.”
A cold wire tightened around my heart. “You?”
“I wanted to fix the lease,” he muttered, his lips trembling. “I cheated old man Miller out of the claim in ’13. I knew if I went back to ’14, I could file the paperwork in Broken Hill before his boys showed up with the rifles. But every time I pick this year, I wake up in this bloody ute outside Echuca with you sitting next to me, looking younger, looking stupid, talking about drill heads and beer.”
“Wait,” I said, my chest aching. “If you relived it… and I relived it…”
“The road doesn’t have room for two ghosts,” Silas said. He reached down beside his seat and pulled out a heavy, double-barreled shotgun with the stock wrapped in electrical tape. “Every time you cross your own tracks, the world gets stiffer. The paint peels off the signs. The towns empty out. Didn’t you notice the birds when we left Deniliquin?”
I froze. I thought back to the river red gums along the Edward River. In 2014, the wetlands were deafening with the sound of cockatoos, superb parrots, and corellas.
There hadn’t been a single feather. The branches had been completely bare, silent as telephone poles.
“The machine doesn’t send you back,” Silas said, checking the brass heads of the cartridges in the breech. Click-clack. “It dumps your mind into the garbage heap of a year that already happened. A copy of a copy. And when the copy gets too crowded, the ink runs.”
“What about the opals?” I demanded, my voice rising in panic. “The green chest in the dugout! Did you hide them or not?”
Silas turned his head and gave me a smile that was missing four bottom teeth. It was the most terrifying thing I had ever seen.
“There weren’t ever any opals, Julian.”
“You’re lying! You bragged about them for eight months! You drew the map on the back of the survey charts!”
“I bragged about them because if I didn’t have a treasure, you would have left me to die in a dry ditch outside Hay,” Silas said softly. “I was an old drunk with bad lungs and twenty thousand dollars of gambling debts to men who use bolt-cutters on fingers. I needed a mule to haul the fuel drums and pull the winch. You were greedy, Julian. You were young, stupid, and so hungry for easy money you could smell gold in a sheep trough.”
I sat back against the split vinyl seat. The world seemed to wobble on its axis. The entire foundation of my life—the ten years of bitter regret, the late nights staring at the ceiling wishing I had grabbed the combination from his coat pocket—it was a ghost story. A confidence trick invented by a dying drunk to buy himself a free laborer for nine months of outback heat.
“Then why did you come back to 2014?” I screamed at him. “If there was no money, why this year?”
Silas looked down at the shotgun resting across his lap.
“Because this was the year before you killed me,” he said.
The word hung in the boiling cabin of the truck like carbon monoxide.
“What?” I choked out. “I didn’t kill you. You died of a heart attack! Over dinner! In the pub!”
“That’s what you told the constable in Wilcannia,” Silas said, his voice dropping into a register that didn’t sound human. It sounded like the grinding of millstones. “You told him my ticker gave out. But I remember the taste of the mutton, Julian. It didn’t taste like sheep. It tasted like bitter almonds and the white powder you scraped out of the old rabbit-bait tins in the tool shed.”
“No,” I stammered, backing against the passenger door, my fingers scrambling behind my back for the handle. “No, that’s insane. I wouldn’t… I didn’t do that!”
“You didn’t do it yet,” Silas whispered. “In your memory, you’re the innocent boy who missed out on a fortune. In my memory, you’re the greedy rat who got tired of waiting for an old man to fall over. That’s the joke of this place, Julian. The man in the suit doesn’t give you the year you remember. He gives you the year you earned.”
Outside the truck, the outback was changing.
The bright, brassy sunlight of western New South Wales was curdling into a dull, leaden violet. The red sand didn’t look like earth anymore; it looked like powdered brick, flat and textureless. The scrub had frozen mid-sway, the wind dying instantly as if someone had thrown a master switch in the sky.
Down the highway, half a mile back, the yellow Land Cruiser that had been parked at the Royal Mail Hotel was moving.
It was driving toward us.
It wasn’t speeding. It was rolling along at an even thirty miles an hour, kicking up no dust behind its wheels. The engine made no sound. Through the heat mirage, its front bumper seemed to stretch and shudder like warm wax.
“They’re coming,” Silas said, cocking both hammers of the shotgun with two crisp, oily clicks.
“Who?”
“The first draft,” he said. “The ones who don’t know they’re dead. If they catch up to this wreck, they clean the slate. They grind us into the clay and finish the year the way it was written. You poison me in November. I die on the floor. You spend ten years hauling timber, crying about a locked box that had nothing in it but three rusty crescent wrenches and a dead scorpion.”
“Get us out of here,” I yelled, slamming my palm against the dashboard. “Silas! Turn the key!”
“The radiator’s blown, you idiot! The block’s cracked!”
“Then run!”
I kicked the passenger door open.
The heat that hit me wasn’t normal air. It had the weight of water, pressing against my temples until my eyes pulsed with blood. I scrambled out onto the red embankment, my boots sinking four inches into sand that felt as cold as crushed ice.
The physical laws were unraveling. The air smelled of salt and ozone, like the sea had suddenly broken through three hundred miles of desert and flooded the plains beneath our feet.
Silas climbed out the driver’s side, the shotgun clutched in his right fist, his eyes fixed on the approaching yellow truck.
The other Land Cruiser was two hundred yards away now.
I could see the figures in the cab.
The Silas behind that wheel was younger, his beard less gray, his head thrown back in laughter as he talked to the young man beside him. And the young Julian in the passenger seat was leaning his elbow out the window, tapping his thumb against the metal door in time to a song that didn’t exist in the air.
They weren’t looking at the road. They were driving blind through an empty universe, completely unaware that twenty yards in front of them, two shredded versions of their own future were standing in the ditch with their boots in the freezing dirt.
“Shoot the tires!” I screamed at Silas. “Shoot the engine block!”
Silas raised the shotgun to his shoulder. His hands weren’t shaking anymore. His face had set into a mask of pure, suicidal fury—the look of an old dog that had been backed into the corner of a shearing pen for the last time.
“You don’t understand, Julian,” Silas said, his finger tightening on the front trigger.
“Shoot it!”
“Every time I shoot,” Silas said, turning his cold, dead blue eyes toward me, “I miss the truck.”
He swung the barrels ninety degrees to the right.
The two gaping black holes of the twelve-gauge were pointed directly at the center of my chest.
“Silas, wait—”
“I tried three times to fix the mining claim,” he whispered. “I tried twice to dodge the truck. But the only thing that changes the script… is taking the poisoner off the board before we reach the Darling.”
The hammer dropped.
There was no sound. No thunderclap of gunpowder, no spray of lead, no kick against his shoulder.
Instead, the shotgun barrels simply dissolved into black smoke, pouring out of his hands like ink dropped into a bucket of clear water. The smoke didn’t rise into the sky; it drifted down to the red earth, pooling around his boots, bubbling and hissing as it ate through the leather of his soles.
Silas looked down at his empty, smoking hands. His mouth opened in an oval of horror.
“It’s not 2014,” he gasped, his voice thinning into a reed-like whistle. “Look at the sky, Julian. Look at the bloody sky!”
I looked up.
Above us, the violet vault of the outback heavens wasn’t blue, and it wasn’t gray. It was covered in rows of tiny, illuminated gray symbols, microscopic letters and numbers flowing in tight, vertical columns from the zenith down to the flat horizon, flickering like the green phosphor of a radar screen in an air traffic control tower.
The oncoming truck didn’t hit our Land Cruiser.
It reached the edge of the ditch and simply passed through it.
The two yellow vehicles overlapped for three seconds—a double exposure of rusted fenders, spinning fan belts, and cracked glass. The young Julian and the young Silas drove straight through my ribs.
I felt a sudden, sickening sensation of being turned inside out, like a cold hand reaching down my throat and pulling my organs out through my teeth. I smelled river mud, cold beer, and the lavender soap my mother had used thirty years ago. I heard myself laugh—the sound of my own twenty-something laughter ringing inside the hollow chamber of my skull, stupid, loud, and confident that the world was an open road waiting to be paved with gold.
Then they were gone, continuing north up the Cobb Highway toward Hay, their dust hanging stationary in the air like a wall of yellow plaster.
Silas was on his knees.
The black smoke had reached his waist. He wasn’t bleeding; his body was simply unspooling, his skin turning into thin, gray ribbons that fluttered in an unfelt breeze and dissolved into the frozen dirt.
“The room,” Silas choked out, clutching at his throat. “The man with the linen suit… he didn’t have an office… he didn’t have… a machine…”
“Silas!” I dropped to my knees beside him, reaching out to grab his shoulder.
My fingers passed straight through his collarbone. There was no resistance, only the sensation of dipping your hand into dry sand.
“What did you tell him?” Silas wheezed, his eyes rolling back in his head until only the yellowed whites remained. “Julian… what was the answer you gave him… when he asked the question?”
“I told him 2014!” I yelled, my voice cracking under the terror of the dissolving world. “I told him the year of the dugout! The year of the chest!”
Silas let out a sound that might have been a sob or a dying rattle.
“You idiot,” he whispered, his jaw crumbling into gray flakes of dust that blew across my knees. “He didn’t ask you what year you wanted to go to… he asked you what year you wanted to die in…”
The last of him collapsed into the red dirt, leaving nothing behind but an unlit cigarette and a single brass cartridge.
The silence that followed was absolute.
No wind. No engine hum. No crickets. Even the hiss of the cracked radiator had stopped.
I stood up alone on the edge of the Cobb Highway. The road stretched north and south, but it didn’t look like asphalt anymore; it looked like a flat ribbon of gray slate laid across an empty canvas. The trees in the Black Swamp had vanished. The Headless Horseman sculpture was gone. There was only the flat, brick-red line of the plain and the pale violet sky covered in its endless, running columns of code.
I looked down at my hands.
The skin on my left wrist was beginning to fray.
A tiny, paper-thin strip of epidermis was peeling upward, curling toward my elbow, revealing no muscle or blood underneath—only an empty, gray void that smelled faintly of dry paper and ozone.
I looked north.
Far in the distance, where the Cobb Highway intersected the horizon outside Hay, something was walking toward me.
It wasn’t a truck. It wasn’t an emu or a stray bullock.
It was a man walking at a slow, measured, professional pace. He was wearing an unbuttoned gray linen suit, carrying a thick manila folder beneath his left arm, and his right hand was swinging rhythmically at his side, holding a small brass stopwatch that flashed yellow in the frozen light.
I didn’t run. There was nowhere to run. The desert around me was flat for three hundred miles in every direction, and the edges of the world were already turning the color of skim milk.
I waited by the rusted skeleton of the Land Cruiser, my boots rooted in the freezing sand, watching the gray figure grow larger with every second.
When he reached the embankment, thirty feet away, he stopped. He looked at the smoking ditch where Silas Vance had dissolved, then shifted his pale, slate-colored eyes up to mine.
He didn’t look angry. He didn’t look triumphant. He pulled the manila folder from under his arm, opened it with a flick of his wrist, and retrieved a single sheet of heavy yellow paper.
“Julian,” he said, his voice carrying clearly through the dead air without the slightest hint of an echo. “You have three minutes remaining on the standard assessment.”
My hand was half-gone now. The gray unspooling had reached my bicep. I couldn’t feel cold or heat anymore; I could only feel the slow, methodical erasing of everything I had ever remembered.
“What is this?” I asked, my voice flat, stripped of fear by the sheer scale of the nightmare. “Where did you put me?”
“You selected 2014,” the man said, reading from the card. “The terminal file for subject 884-Julian. Cause of death: blunt force trauma following a multi-vehicle collision on the Cobb Highway, four miles south of Booroorban, March 14th, 2014.”
My heart gave a single, violent kick.
“No,” I whispered. “I lived until forty-one. I worked in Sydney. I hauled drywall. I went to the pub in White Cliffs—”
“A classic compensatory loop,” the man interrupted, not looking up from his paper. “The brain produces approximately seven minutes of subjective narrative while the neural pathways depressurize after the windshield shatters. In ninety-two percent of cases, the subject invents an unfulfilled goal—a fortune, a lost lover, a locked chest—to explain why they cannot accept the terminus.”
He closed the folder with a sharp, dry snap.
“You never made it to Hay, Julian. You never saw White Cliffs. You never bought the rabbit bait.”
“And Silas?” I asked, looking at the empty dirt.
“Silas Vance died on impact when the Land Cruiser hit the irrigation culvert,” the man said simply. “His projection terminated forty seconds ago.”
The assessor tucked the file back beneath his linen arm. He reached into his vest pocket, pulled out the brass stopwatch, and pressed the top button.
Click.
The gray columns of code across the sky suddenly halted their descent. They began to turn red—a deep, burning arterial crimson that dripped toward the horizon like fresh paint running down a hot wall.
“You have one selection remaining,” the assessor said, stepping down into the ditch toward me. His shoes made no sound in the sand. “Under Section 4 of the Reclamation Protocol, when an artificial loop collapses before brain death is fully registered, the subject may choose a secondary year to stabilize the terminal projection.”
He held the fountain pen out toward my remaining hand.
“Choose quickly, Julian. If the ink runs out before you name the date, you do not get to remember who you were when the glass hit your face.”
I stared at the pen. The skin of my fingers was drifting away like dandelion seeds in a gale. Down the highway, the roar of a speeding diesel truck suddenly echoed out of nowhere—the sound of an eight-ton flatbed blowing its horn, the scream of metal tearing through an iron culvert, the blinding glare of two halogen high beams bearing down on my eyes from two feet away.
I opened my mouth to speak.
The assessor watched me, his thumb resting lightly on the brass stem of the watch, waiting for the four numbers that would decide whether I woke up, burned out, or vanished into the red dust forever.
“The year,” he whispered, as the lights filled the universe. “Name it.”
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The Gray Suit and the Year of Reckoning
The man in the gray linen suit did not look like an angel, a demon, or a scientist. He looked like an insurance assessor who had spent thirty years eating egg-salad sandwiches in windowless basements. He sat across the laminate table, folded his hands over a blank manila folder, and pushed a cheap ceramic mug of lukewarm tap water toward me.
“If you could relive one single year of your life,” he said, his voice as flat as unironed cotton, “which one would it be?”
I did not ask who he worked for. When people wake up strapped to a vinyl chair in a concrete bunker beneath an abandoned rail depot, they usually waste twenty minutes shouting about the law or their rights. I had worked three years in industrial repossessions; I knew that when men in linen suits ask you a question in an airless room, the law has already packed its bags and caught the midnight bus out of town.
“Two thousand and fourteen,” I said immediately.
The man’s pen hovered over the card. His gray eyebrows twitched. “Most people choose eighteen. Or the year they got married. Or the year before the accident took their legs.”
“I don’t want my youth,” I told him. “And I never married. In 2014, I was thirty-one years old, driving an eight-ton flatbed truck across western New South Wales for an old lunatic named Silas Vance. On November twelfth, Silas took a four-digit brass padlock, snapped it onto a green steel army surplus chest, and stuffed it beneath the floorboards of an underground dugout in White Cliffs. Six hours later, he had a massive coronary over a plate of mutton chops at the local pub. He died before his chin hit the gravy.”
The man in the suit tilted his head. “And what was inside the green chest?”
“Rough-cut pine-tree opals,” I said. “Three sacks of them. Pulled out of an illegal shaft seventy feet below the red clay before the mining inspectors sealed the lease. Worth roughly two point four million on the private market in Antwerp. Vance was the only man who knew the combination to that lock. He told me he’d write it in his field diary the morning before he died, but he burned the notebook during a bout of alcoholic paranoia at three in the morning. I spent ten years digging post holes and hauling drywall for sixty dollars a day, wondering what four numbers were on that dial.”
“You want to go back for money,” the man said. It was not a question.
“I want to go back because I want thirty seconds alone with Silas’s notebook before he throws it into the kerosene stove,” I replied. “Give me 2014. From January first to December thirty-first. I’ll do the sweaty work. I’ll haul his survey gear through the dust, I’ll smile at his crazy stories, and when November comes, I’ll pocket the slip of paper, leave the dugout before the mutton chops arrive, and catch the train to Sydney.”
The assessor unscrewed the cap of a black fountain pen. He pressed the nib to the cardboard folder, drew a single vertical stroke, and blew on the ink.
“A year is a long time, Julian,” he whispered. “You don’t just visit. You occupy the meat. And memory is not a video recording. It’s an open wound that tries to heal while you’re picking at the scab.”
“Just push the button,” I said.
The assessor didn’t push a button. He reached across the table, grabbed my thumb, and bent it backward until the joint made the sound of a dry branch snapping under a boot.
The pain didn’t radiate up my arm. It exploded into a blinding flash of yellow light that smelled of burning rubber and cheap diesel fuel.
My lungs seized. I sucked in air, but it wasn’t the dead, conditioned chill of the bunker; it was hot, dry, and thick with the stench of red clay, river silt, and stale tobacco. My ears popped with a violent rush of wind.
I was sitting in the passenger seat of an ancient, rattling Toyota Land Cruiser. The dashboard was split down the center, its foam padding cooked into hard black toast by decades of ruthless sun. Through the bug-splattered windshield, the Cobb Highway stretched dead-straight into an undulating sea of saltbush and dry grass, trembling under a midday heat mirage that turned the horizon into liquid silver.
My hand was gripping the door handle. My thumb didn’t hurt. I looked down at my hands. The skin was tan, taut, scarred at the knuckles from steel fencing wire, free of the liver spots and stiffness that had settled into my fingers over the past decade.
I was back.
To my right, behind the wheel, sat Silas Vance.
He was wearing the same grease-stained khaki shirt I remembered, his gray beard trimmed with blunt scissors, his thick forearms covered in pale freckles and white hairs. A rolled cigarette hung unlit from the corner of his cracked lips. He looked eighty, but he was sixty-two—a man pickled in cask wine, diesel fumes, and outback sun.
“Stop daydreaming, boy,” Silas barked, his voice like gravel sliding down a galvanized chute. “Look at the map. Did we pass the Booroorban turnoff or are we still south of the Black Swamp?”
A cold prickle of adrenaline washed down my neck. It was March. We were hauling a load of cast-iron drill heads up from Echuca, heading toward the Darling River. I knew this day. I had lived this day. We were supposed to stop at the Royal Mail Hotel in Booroorban, drink two schooners of heavy draft beer, look at the giant iron sculpture of the Headless Horseman by the swamp, and sleep in the back of the ute.
“We haven’t hit Booroorban yet,” I said. My voice sounded higher, younger, less frayed by ten years of cheap cigarettes. “Another four miles. You’ll see the pub on the left.”
Silas didn’t answer. He reached down, grabbed a dirty rag, and wiped the inside of the windshield. His hand was shaking.
I frowned. Silas Vance never shook. In my memory, the man was an iron post sunk six feet into the earth. When a road train had clipped our side mirror outside Hay, he hadn’t even blinked—just spat out the window and cursed the driver’s mother. But now, his knuckles on the steering wheel were bone-white. His eyes kept flicking up to the rearview mirror every four seconds.
“Silas?” I said. “You alright?”
“Keep your eyes on the road,” he muttered. “Watch the tree line. Don’t look at me.”
“What tree line? There’s nothing out here but saltbush and sheep skulls.”
“Just watch the road, Julian.”
I turned toward the side window. The landscape rolled past in a monotonous blur of ochre dirt and pale green scrub. Everything was exactly as I had left it twelve years ago. The heat radiating off the door panel pressed against my left shoulder like a hot iron. I reached into my jeans pocket. My fingers touched a paper receipt, a brass pocket knife, and three silver coins. No smartphone. No plastic cards with microchips. Just the raw, heavy tang of 2014.
Then the Land Cruiser hit a cattle grid.
The steel bars clattered under the tires—clack-clack-clack-clack.
My gaze drifted down to the odometer on the instrument cluster. The little mechanical numbers were rolling over.
241,892.
As the back wheels cleared the iron grid, the third digit didn’t roll forward. It clicked backward with a sharp mechanical ping.
241,891.
I blinked, rubbing my eyes. The dust out here played tricks on your vision; everyone knew that. The glare from the hood could burn a hole through your retinas if you didn’t wear dark glasses. I looked again. The numbers were stationary.
“Silas,” I said slowly. “How many miles on this rig?”
“Too many,” he snapped. He reached out and snapped the radio on.
Static hissed through the dashboard speaker, followed by the dry, warbling drawl of an AM cricket broadcast from Melbourne. The commentator was talking about Michael Clarke and the English tour. The sound should have anchored me, should have confirmed that the machine in the concrete bunker had worked.
Instead, the commentator’s voice suddenly dipped down an octave, dragging out like an old cassette tape being pulled through a dirty playback head.
…and the ball goes through to the keeper… keeper… keep-her…
Then the radio clicked off. The knob hadn’t moved.
Silas hadn’t touched it. He was still staring straight ahead, his chest heaving under the sweat-stained khaki shirt.
“We aren’t stopping in Booroorban,” Silas whispered.
“What?” I turned to him. “We have to stop. The radiator’s weeping from the bottom hose. You said it yourself back in Deniliquin—if we don’t take on water at the pub, the head gasket will blow before we reach the Murrumbidgee.”
“We aren’t stopping,” he repeated, his knuckles whitening further. “They’re at the pub.”
“Who’s at the pub? The shearers?”
Silas turned his head toward me. For the first time all afternoon, his eyes met mine. They were bloodshot, the pupils dilated until the blue rings of his irises were almost invisible.
“You are,” he said.
A laugh caught in my throat, dry and hollow. “What the hell kind of bush joke is that? I’m sitting right here.”
“I know where you’re sitting,” Silas hissed. He didn’t slow down. Up ahead, on the flat horizon, the tin roof of the Royal Mail Hotel rose out of the saltbush like an abandoned barge stranded in an inland sea. Beside it, the silhouette of the Headless Horseman sculpture stood black and jagged against the brassy sky. “And that’s why we’re not touching the brake.”
“Silas, you’ve been drinking metho out of the camp stove again. Slow down. The temp gauge is in the red.”
“Shut your mouth!” he roared. He slammed his right foot down. The old diesel engine screamed, the transmission whining like a circular saw hitting a rusted bolt. The needle of the temperature gauge bounced against the brass stopper at the far right of the dial. Steam began to hiss from the edges of the hood, curling against the glass in greasy white ribbons.
We flew past the Black Swamp. In the stagnant, tea-colored water, half-submerged river red gums thrust their dead branches into the air like drowned skeletons.
Then we reached the pub.
The Royal Mail Hotel was a low, weather-beaten weatherboard box with a wide corrugated veranda supported by rough-hewn posts. Parked in the dirt yard in front of the saloon doors was a vehicle.
A flatbed Toyota Land Cruiser.
It was painted the same faded mustard-yellow as ours. The passenger door was dented where an emu had struck it two winters back. A blue canvas tarp was strapped across the cargo bed, covering three heavy cast-iron drill heads.
And standing on the veranda, leaning his forearms against the wooden railing with a cold glass of dark beer in his hand, was a young man in an olive singlet and grease-smeared work shorts.
He had my broad jaw. He had the crooked scar through his left eyebrow where a snapped winch cable had caught him at seventeen. He was laughing at something the publican was saying through the open service hatch.
I pressed my face against the passenger glass, my stomach dropping into a bottomless, icy pit. My breath fogged the window.
“Silas…” my voice was barely a croak. “Who is that?”
“I told you,” Silas spat, tears of pure terror leaking into the white bristles of his beard. He didn’t look at the veranda. He kept the pedal pinned to the floorboards. “Don’t look at him! If he looks over here and sees us, the whole bloody thing snaps!”
As we roared past the pub, the engine howling and throwing clouds of sulfurous white smoke, the young man on the veranda paused.
He lowered his beer glass.
Slowly, deliberately, he turned his head toward the highway.
His eyes swept across our windshield.
For a fraction of a second, across fifty feet of shimmering outback dust, my own eyes met mine.
The world went violently silent. The roar of the engine vanished. The rattle of the suspension cut out. The heat in the cabin turned so cold my teeth clattered together with the sound of dice in a plastic cup. The boy on the veranda didn’t look shocked or frightened. He looked through me, through the glass, through the metal, as if he were staring at a smudge of soot on an empty road.
Then we were past.
The sound slammed back in like an artillery shell. BOOM. The radiator hose gave way with a wet shriek, and a geyser of boiling green coolant erupted over the windshield, completely blinding us.
Silas fought the steering wheel as the truck fishtailed wildly in the soft sand shoulder. The tires screamed, throwing plumes of red grit thirty feet into the air. We spun through a full circle, the horizon whirling like a carousel in hell, before the front bumper plowed into a dry irrigation embankment and brought us to an agonizing, bone-jarring halt.
Silence fell over the cabin, broken only by the hiss of boiled water splashing against the exhaust manifold and the heavy, rhythmic gasping of our breath.
I sat there, my shoulder bruised where the seatbelt had dug in, my brain refusing to process the geometry of what I had seen.
“That was me,” I whispered. “That was… I was on that veranda in March of 2014. I remember that beer. It was an Old, too cold, tasted like iron pipes. I remember watching a yellow ute drive past through the steam…”
My voice trailed off. A cold sweat soaked through my shirt.
“I remember,” I said again, slower this time. “I was standing there. And an old Land Cruiser tore down the highway with its radiator blowing. I asked the publican who the crazy bastard in the truck was. And he told me it was just two drifters running from their own shadows.”
I turned my head. Silas was leaning his forehead against the steering wheel. His hands were dangling limp between his knees.
“How long have you been here, Silas?” I asked.
The old man didn’t move. He let out a wet, rattling sigh that shook his thin ribs.
“Three times,” he whispered into the vinyl of the horn pad.
“What?”
Silas lifted his head. His skin wasn’t just weathered; it looked degraded, like parchment that had been left out in the rain and dried over a kerosene heater. The skin under his eyes was black, and the fingernails on his left hand were split down the quick.
“I died in White Cliffs,” Silas said, staring through the fogged, coolant-streaked glass. “Heart blew out like a rotten tire. One minute I’m chewing on cold mutton, the next I’m in a room with a little bastard wearing a gray suit, asking me what year I’d like to do over.”
A cold wire tightened around my heart. “You?”
“I wanted to fix the lease,” he muttered, his lips trembling. “I cheated old man Miller out of the claim in ’13. I knew if I went back to ’14, I could file the paperwork in Broken Hill before his boys showed up with the rifles. But every time I pick this year, I wake up in this bloody ute outside Echuca with you sitting next to me, looking younger, looking stupid, talking about drill heads and beer.”
“Wait,” I said, my chest aching. “If you relived it… and I relived it…”
“The road doesn’t have room for two ghosts,” Silas said. He reached down beside his seat and pulled out a heavy, double-barreled shotgun with the stock wrapped in electrical tape. “Every time you cross your own tracks, the world gets stiffer. The paint peels off the signs. The towns empty out. Didn’t you notice the birds when we left Deniliquin?”
I froze. I thought back to the river red gums along the Edward River. In 2014, the wetlands were deafening with the sound of cockatoos, superb parrots, and corellas.
There hadn’t been a single feather. The branches had been completely bare, silent as telephone poles.
“The machine doesn’t send you back,” Silas said, checking the brass heads of the cartridges in the breech. Click-clack. “It dumps your mind into the garbage heap of a year that already happened. A copy of a copy. And when the copy gets too crowded, the ink runs.”
“What about the opals?” I demanded, my voice rising in panic. “The green chest in the dugout! Did you hide them or not?”
Silas turned his head and gave me a smile that was missing four bottom teeth. It was the most terrifying thing I had ever seen.
“There weren’t ever any opals, Julian.”
“You’re lying! You bragged about them for eight months! You drew the map on the back of the survey charts!”
“I bragged about them because if I didn’t have a treasure, you would have left me to die in a dry ditch outside Hay,” Silas said softly. “I was an old drunk with bad lungs and twenty thousand dollars of gambling debts to men who use bolt-cutters on fingers. I needed a mule to haul the fuel drums and pull the winch. You were greedy, Julian. You were young, stupid, and so hungry for easy money you could smell gold in a sheep trough.”
I sat back against the split vinyl seat. The world seemed to wobble on its axis. The entire foundation of my life—the ten years of bitter regret, the late nights staring at the ceiling wishing I had grabbed the combination from his coat pocket—it was a ghost story. A confidence trick invented by a dying drunk to buy himself a free laborer for nine months of outback heat.
“Then why did you come back to 2014?” I screamed at him. “If there was no money, why this year?”
Silas looked down at the shotgun resting across his lap.
“Because this was the year before you killed me,” he said.
The word hung in the boiling cabin of the truck like carbon monoxide.
“What?” I choked out. “I didn’t kill you. You died of a heart attack! Over dinner! In the pub!”
“That’s what you told the constable in Wilcannia,” Silas said, his voice dropping into a register that didn’t sound human. It sounded like the grinding of millstones. “You told him my ticker gave out. But I remember the taste of the mutton, Julian. It didn’t taste like sheep. It tasted like bitter almonds and the white powder you scraped out of the old rabbit-bait tins in the tool shed.”
“No,” I stammered, backing against the passenger door, my fingers scrambling behind my back for the handle. “No, that’s insane. I wouldn’t… I didn’t do that!”
“You didn’t do it yet,” Silas whispered. “In your memory, you’re the innocent boy who missed out on a fortune. In my memory, you’re the greedy rat who got tired of waiting for an old man to fall over. That’s the joke of this place, Julian. The man in the suit doesn’t give you the year you remember. He gives you the year you earned.”
Outside the truck, the outback was changing.
The bright, brassy sunlight of western New South Wales was curdling into a dull, leaden violet. The red sand didn’t look like earth anymore; it looked like powdered brick, flat and textureless. The scrub had frozen mid-sway, the wind dying instantly as if someone had thrown a master switch in the sky.
Down the highway, half a mile back, the yellow Land Cruiser that had been parked at the Royal Mail Hotel was moving.
It was driving toward us.
It wasn’t speeding. It was rolling along at an even thirty miles an hour, kicking up no dust behind its wheels. The engine made no sound. Through the heat mirage, its front bumper seemed to stretch and shudder like warm wax.
“They’re coming,” Silas said, cocking both hammers of the shotgun with two crisp, oily clicks.
“Who?”
“The first draft,” he said. “The ones who don’t know they’re dead. If they catch up to this wreck, they clean the slate. They grind us into the clay and finish the year the way it was written. You poison me in November. I die on the floor. You spend ten years hauling timber, crying about a locked box that had nothing in it but three rusty crescent wrenches and a dead scorpion.”
“Get us out of here,” I yelled, slamming my palm against the dashboard. “Silas! Turn the key!”
“The radiator’s blown, you idiot! The block’s cracked!”
“Then run!”
I kicked the passenger door open.
The heat that hit me wasn’t normal air. It had the weight of water, pressing against my temples until my eyes pulsed with blood. I scrambled out onto the red embankment, my boots sinking four inches into sand that felt as cold as crushed ice.
The physical laws were unraveling. The air smelled of salt and ozone, like the sea had suddenly broken through three hundred miles of desert and flooded the plains beneath our feet.
Silas climbed out the driver’s side, the shotgun clutched in his right fist, his eyes fixed on the approaching yellow truck.
The other Land Cruiser was two hundred yards away now.
I could see the figures in the cab.
The Silas behind that wheel was younger, his beard less gray, his head thrown back in laughter as he talked to the young man beside him. And the young Julian in the passenger seat was leaning his elbow out the window, tapping his thumb against the metal door in time to a song that didn’t exist in the air.
They weren’t looking at the road. They were driving blind through an empty universe, completely unaware that twenty yards in front of them, two shredded versions of their own future were standing in the ditch with their boots in the freezing dirt.
“Shoot the tires!” I screamed at Silas. “Shoot the engine block!”
Silas raised the shotgun to his shoulder. His hands weren’t shaking anymore. His face had set into a mask of pure, suicidal fury—the look of an old dog that had been backed into the corner of a shearing pen for the last time.
“You don’t understand, Julian,” Silas said, his finger tightening on the front trigger.
“Shoot it!”
“Every time I shoot,” Silas said, turning his cold, dead blue eyes toward me, “I miss the truck.”
He swung the barrels ninety degrees to the right.
The two gaping black holes of the twelve-gauge were pointed directly at the center of my chest.
“Silas, wait—”
“I tried three times to fix the mining claim,” he whispered. “I tried twice to dodge the truck. But the only thing that changes the script… is taking the poisoner off the board before we reach the Darling.”
The hammer dropped.
There was no sound. No thunderclap of gunpowder, no spray of lead, no kick against his shoulder.
Instead, the shotgun barrels simply dissolved into black smoke, pouring out of his hands like ink dropped into a bucket of clear water. The smoke didn’t rise into the sky; it drifted down to the red earth, pooling around his boots, bubbling and hissing as it ate through the leather of his soles.
Silas looked down at his empty, smoking hands. His mouth opened in an oval of horror.
“It’s not 2014,” he gasped, his voice thinning into a reed-like whistle. “Look at the sky, Julian. Look at the bloody sky!”
I looked up.
Above us, the violet vault of the outback heavens wasn’t blue, and it wasn’t gray. It was covered in rows of tiny, illuminated gray symbols, microscopic letters and numbers flowing in tight, vertical columns from the zenith down to the flat horizon, flickering like the green phosphor of a radar screen in an air traffic control tower.
The oncoming truck didn’t hit our Land Cruiser.
It reached the edge of the ditch and simply passed through it.
The two yellow vehicles overlapped for three seconds—a double exposure of rusted fenders, spinning fan belts, and cracked glass. The young Julian and the young Silas drove straight through my ribs.
I felt a sudden, sickening sensation of being turned inside out, like a cold hand reaching down my throat and pulling my organs out through my teeth. I smelled river mud, cold beer, and the lavender soap my mother had used thirty years ago. I heard myself laugh—the sound of my own twenty-something laughter ringing inside the hollow chamber of my skull, stupid, loud, and confident that the world was an open road waiting to be paved with gold.
Then they were gone, continuing north up the Cobb Highway toward Hay, their dust hanging stationary in the air like a wall of yellow plaster.
Silas was on his knees.
The black smoke had reached his waist. He wasn’t bleeding; his body was simply unspooling, his skin turning into thin, gray ribbons that fluttered in an unfelt breeze and dissolved into the frozen dirt.
“The room,” Silas choked out, clutching at his throat. “The man with the linen suit… he didn’t have an office… he didn’t have… a machine…”
“Silas!” I dropped to my knees beside him, reaching out to grab his shoulder.
My fingers passed straight through his collarbone. There was no resistance, only the sensation of dipping your hand into dry sand.
“What did you tell him?” Silas wheezed, his eyes rolling back in his head until only the yellowed whites remained. “Julian… what was the answer you gave him… when he asked the question?”
“I told him 2014!” I yelled, my voice cracking under the terror of the dissolving world. “I told him the year of the dugout! The year of the chest!”
Silas let out a sound that might have been a sob or a dying rattle.
“You idiot,” he whispered, his jaw crumbling into gray flakes of dust that blew across my knees. “He didn’t ask you what year you wanted to go to… he asked you what year you wanted to die in…”
The last of him collapsed into the red dirt, leaving nothing behind but an unlit cigarette and a single brass cartridge.
The silence that followed was absolute.
No wind. No engine hum. No crickets. Even the hiss of the cracked radiator had stopped.
I stood up alone on the edge of the Cobb Highway. The road stretched north and south, but it didn’t look like asphalt anymore; it looked like a flat ribbon of gray slate laid across an empty canvas. The trees in the Black Swamp had vanished. The Headless Horseman sculpture was gone. There was only the flat, brick-red line of the plain and the pale violet sky covered in its endless, running columns of code.
I looked down at my hands.
The skin on my left wrist was beginning to fray.
A tiny, paper-thin strip of epidermis was peeling upward, curling toward my elbow, revealing no muscle or blood underneath—only an empty, gray void that smelled faintly of dry paper and ozone.
I looked north.
Far in the distance, where the Cobb Highway intersected the horizon outside Hay, something was walking toward me.
It wasn’t a truck. It wasn’t an emu or a stray bullock.
It was a man walking at a slow, measured, professional pace. He was wearing an unbuttoned gray linen suit, carrying a thick manila folder beneath his left arm, and his right hand was swinging rhythmically at his side, holding a small brass stopwatch that flashed yellow in the frozen light.
I didn’t run. There was nowhere to run. The desert around me was flat for three hundred miles in every direction, and the edges of the world were already turning the color of skim milk.
I waited by the rusted skeleton of the Land Cruiser, my boots rooted in the freezing sand, watching the gray figure grow larger with every second.
When he reached the embankment, thirty feet away, he stopped. He looked at the smoking ditch where Silas Vance had dissolved, then shifted his pale, slate-colored eyes up to mine.
He didn’t look angry. He didn’t look triumphant. He pulled the manila folder from under his arm, opened it with a flick of his wrist, and retrieved a single sheet of heavy yellow paper.
“Julian,” he said, his voice carrying clearly through the dead air without the slightest hint of an echo. “You have three minutes remaining on the standard assessment.”
My hand was half-gone now. The gray unspooling had reached my bicep. I couldn’t feel cold or heat anymore; I could only feel the slow, methodical erasing of everything I had ever remembered.
“What is this?” I asked, my voice flat, stripped of fear by the sheer scale of the nightmare. “Where did you put me?”
“You selected 2014,” the man said, reading from the card. “The terminal file for subject 884-Julian. Cause of death: blunt force trauma following a multi-vehicle collision on the Cobb Highway, four miles south of Booroorban, March 14th, 2014.”
My heart gave a single, violent kick.
“No,” I whispered. “I lived until forty-one. I worked in Sydney. I hauled drywall. I went to the pub in White Cliffs—”
“A classic compensatory loop,” the man interrupted, not looking up from his paper. “The brain produces approximately seven minutes of subjective narrative while the neural pathways depressurize after the windshield shatters. In ninety-two percent of cases, the subject invents an unfulfilled goal—a fortune, a lost lover, a locked chest—to explain why they cannot accept the terminus.”
He closed the folder with a sharp, dry snap.
“You never made it to Hay, Julian. You never saw White Cliffs. You never bought the rabbit bait.”
“And Silas?” I asked, looking at the empty dirt.
“Silas Vance died on impact when the Land Cruiser hit the irrigation culvert,” the man said simply. “His projection terminated forty seconds ago.”
The assessor tucked the file back beneath his linen arm. He reached into his vest pocket, pulled out the brass stopwatch, and pressed the top button.
Click.
The gray columns of code across the sky suddenly halted their descent. They began to turn red—a deep, burning arterial crimson that dripped toward the horizon like fresh paint running down a hot wall.
“You have one selection remaining,” the assessor said, stepping down into the ditch toward me. His shoes made no sound in the sand. “Under Section 4 of the Reclamation Protocol, when an artificial loop collapses before brain death is fully registered, the subject may choose a secondary year to stabilize the terminal projection.”
He held the fountain pen out toward my remaining hand.
“Choose quickly, Julian. If the ink runs out before you name the date, you do not get to remember who you were when the glass hit your face.”
I stared at the pen. The skin of my fingers was drifting away like dandelion seeds in a gale. Down the highway, the roar of a speeding diesel truck suddenly echoed out of nowhere—the sound of an eight-ton flatbed blowing its horn, the scream of metal tearing through an iron culvert, the blinding glare of two halogen high beams bearing down on my eyes from two feet away.
I opened my mouth to speak.
The assessor watched me, his thumb resting lightly on the brass stem of the watch, waiting for the four numbers that would decide whether I woke up, burned out, or vanished into the red dust forever.
“The year,” he whispered, as the lights filled the universe. “Name it.”
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The Gray Suit and the Year of Reckoning
The man in the gray linen suit did not look like an angel, a demon, or a scientist. He looked like an insurance assessor who had spent thirty years eating egg-salad sandwiches in windowless basements. He sat across the laminate table, folded his hands over a blank manila folder, and pushed a cheap ceramic mug of lukewarm tap water toward me.
“If you could relive one single year of your life,” he said, his voice as flat as unironed cotton, “which one would it be?”
I did not ask who he worked for. When people wake up strapped to a vinyl chair in a concrete bunker beneath an abandoned rail depot, they usually waste twenty minutes shouting about the law or their rights. I had worked three years in industrial repossessions; I knew that when men in linen suits ask you a question in an airless room, the law has already packed its bags and caught the midnight bus out of town.
“Two thousand and fourteen,” I said immediately.
The man’s pen hovered over the card. His gray eyebrows twitched. “Most people choose eighteen. Or the year they got married. Or the year before the accident took their legs.”
“I don’t want my youth,” I told him. “And I never married. In 2014, I was thirty-one years old, driving an eight-ton flatbed truck across western New South Wales for an old lunatic named Silas Vance. On November twelfth, Silas took a four-digit brass padlock, snapped it onto a green steel army surplus chest, and stuffed it beneath the floorboards of an underground dugout in White Cliffs. Six hours later, he had a massive coronary over a plate of mutton chops at the local pub. He died before his chin hit the gravy.”
The man in the suit tilted his head. “And what was inside the green chest?”
“Rough-cut pine-tree opals,” I said. “Three sacks of them. Pulled out of an illegal shaft seventy feet below the red clay before the mining inspectors sealed the lease. Worth roughly two point four million on the private market in Antwerp. Vance was the only man who knew the combination to that lock. He told me he’d write it in his field diary the morning before he died, but he burned the notebook during a bout of alcoholic paranoia at three in the morning. I spent ten years digging post holes and hauling drywall for sixty dollars a day, wondering what four numbers were on that dial.”
“You want to go back for money,” the man said. It was not a question.
“I want to go back because I want thirty seconds alone with Silas’s notebook before he throws it into the kerosene stove,” I replied. “Give me 2014. From January first to December thirty-first. I’ll do the sweaty work. I’ll haul his survey gear through the dust, I’ll smile at his crazy stories, and when November comes, I’ll pocket the slip of paper, leave the dugout before the mutton chops arrive, and catch the train to Sydney.”
The assessor unscrewed the cap of a black fountain pen. He pressed the nib to the cardboard folder, drew a single vertical stroke, and blew on the ink.
“A year is a long time, Julian,” he whispered. “You don’t just visit. You occupy the meat. And memory is not a video recording. It’s an open wound that tries to heal while you’re picking at the scab.”
“Just push the button,” I said.
The assessor didn’t push a button. He reached across the table, grabbed my thumb, and bent it backward until the joint made the sound of a dry branch snapping under a boot.
The pain didn’t radiate up my arm. It exploded into a blinding flash of yellow light that smelled of burning rubber and cheap diesel fuel.
My lungs seized. I sucked in air, but it wasn’t the dead, conditioned chill of the bunker; it was hot, dry, and thick with the stench of red clay, river silt, and stale tobacco. My ears popped with a violent rush of wind.
I was sitting in the passenger seat of an ancient, rattling Toyota Land Cruiser. The dashboard was split down the center, its foam padding cooked into hard black toast by decades of ruthless sun. Through the bug-splattered windshield, the Cobb Highway stretched dead-straight into an undulating sea of saltbush and dry grass, trembling under a midday heat mirage that turned the horizon into liquid silver.
My hand was gripping the door handle. My thumb didn’t hurt. I looked down at my hands. The skin was tan, taut, scarred at the knuckles from steel fencing wire, free of the liver spots and stiffness that had settled into my fingers over the past decade.
I was back.
To my right, behind the wheel, sat Silas Vance.
He was wearing the same grease-stained khaki shirt I remembered, his gray beard trimmed with blunt scissors, his thick forearms covered in pale freckles and white hairs. A rolled cigarette hung unlit from the corner of his cracked lips. He looked eighty, but he was sixty-two—a man pickled in cask wine, diesel fumes, and outback sun.
“Stop daydreaming, boy,” Silas barked, his voice like gravel sliding down a galvanized chute. “Look at the map. Did we pass the Booroorban turnoff or are we still south of the Black Swamp?”
A cold prickle of adrenaline washed down my neck. It was March. We were hauling a load of cast-iron drill heads up from Echuca, heading toward the Darling River. I knew this day. I had lived this day. We were supposed to stop at the Royal Mail Hotel in Booroorban, drink two schooners of heavy draft beer, look at the giant iron sculpture of the Headless Horseman by the swamp, and sleep in the back of the ute.
“We haven’t hit Booroorban yet,” I said. My voice sounded higher, younger, less frayed by ten years of cheap cigarettes. “Another four miles. You’ll see the pub on the left.”
Silas didn’t answer. He reached down, grabbed a dirty rag, and wiped the inside of the windshield. His hand was shaking.
I frowned. Silas Vance never shook. In my memory, the man was an iron post sunk six feet into the earth. When a road train had clipped our side mirror outside Hay, he hadn’t even blinked—just spat out the window and cursed the driver’s mother. But now, his knuckles on the steering wheel were bone-white. His eyes kept flicking up to the rearview mirror every four seconds.
“Silas?” I said. “You alright?”
“Keep your eyes on the road,” he muttered. “Watch the tree line. Don’t look at me.”
“What tree line? There’s nothing out here but saltbush and sheep skulls.”
“Just watch the road, Julian.”
I turned toward the side window. The landscape rolled past in a monotonous blur of ochre dirt and pale green scrub. Everything was exactly as I had left it twelve years ago. The heat radiating off the door panel pressed against my left shoulder like a hot iron. I reached into my jeans pocket. My fingers touched a paper receipt, a brass pocket knife, and three silver coins. No smartphone. No plastic cards with microchips. Just the raw, heavy tang of 2014.
Then the Land Cruiser hit a cattle grid.
The steel bars clattered under the tires—clack-clack-clack-clack.
My gaze drifted down to the odometer on the instrument cluster. The little mechanical numbers were rolling over.
241,892.
As the back wheels cleared the iron grid, the third digit didn’t roll forward. It clicked backward with a sharp mechanical ping.
241,891.
I blinked, rubbing my eyes. The dust out here played tricks on your vision; everyone knew that. The glare from the hood could burn a hole through your retinas if you didn’t wear dark glasses. I looked again. The numbers were stationary.
“Silas,” I said slowly. “How many miles on this rig?”
“Too many,” he snapped. He reached out and snapped the radio on.
Static hissed through the dashboard speaker, followed by the dry, warbling drawl of an AM cricket broadcast from Melbourne. The commentator was talking about Michael Clarke and the English tour. The sound should have anchored me, should have confirmed that the machine in the concrete bunker had worked.
Instead, the commentator’s voice suddenly dipped down an octave, dragging out like an old cassette tape being pulled through a dirty playback head.
…and the ball goes through to the keeper… keeper… keep-her…
Then the radio clicked off. The knob hadn’t moved.
Silas hadn’t touched it. He was still staring straight ahead, his chest heaving under the sweat-stained khaki shirt.
“We aren’t stopping in Booroorban,” Silas whispered.
“What?” I turned to him. “We have to stop. The radiator’s weeping from the bottom hose. You said it yourself back in Deniliquin—if we don’t take on water at the pub, the head gasket will blow before we reach the Murrumbidgee.”
“We aren’t stopping,” he repeated, his knuckles whitening further. “They’re at the pub.”
“Who’s at the pub? The shearers?”
Silas turned his head toward me. For the first time all afternoon, his eyes met mine. They were bloodshot, the pupils dilated until the blue rings of his irises were almost invisible.
“You are,” he said.
A laugh caught in my throat, dry and hollow. “What the hell kind of bush joke is that? I’m sitting right here.”
“I know where you’re sitting,” Silas hissed. He didn’t slow down. Up ahead, on the flat horizon, the tin roof of the Royal Mail Hotel rose out of the saltbush like an abandoned barge stranded in an inland sea. Beside it, the silhouette of the Headless Horseman sculpture stood black and jagged against the brassy sky. “And that’s why we’re not touching the brake.”
“Silas, you’ve been drinking metho out of the camp stove again. Slow down. The temp gauge is in the red.”
“Shut your mouth!” he roared. He slammed his right foot down. The old diesel engine screamed, the transmission whining like a circular saw hitting a rusted bolt. The needle of the temperature gauge bounced against the brass stopper at the far right of the dial. Steam began to hiss from the edges of the hood, curling against the glass in greasy white ribbons.
We flew past the Black Swamp. In the stagnant, tea-colored water, half-submerged river red gums thrust their dead branches into the air like drowned skeletons.
Then we reached the pub.
The Royal Mail Hotel was a low, weather-beaten weatherboard box with a wide corrugated veranda supported by rough-hewn posts. Parked in the dirt yard in front of the saloon doors was a vehicle.
A flatbed Toyota Land Cruiser.
It was painted the same faded mustard-yellow as ours. The passenger door was dented where an emu had struck it two winters back. A blue canvas tarp was strapped across the cargo bed, covering three heavy cast-iron drill heads.
And standing on the veranda, leaning his forearms against the wooden railing with a cold glass of dark beer in his hand, was a young man in an olive singlet and grease-smeared work shorts.
He had my broad jaw. He had the crooked scar through his left eyebrow where a snapped winch cable had caught him at seventeen. He was laughing at something the publican was saying through the open service hatch.
I pressed my face against the passenger glass, my stomach dropping into a bottomless, icy pit. My breath fogged the window.
“Silas…” my voice was barely a croak. “Who is that?”
“I told you,” Silas spat, tears of pure terror leaking into the white bristles of his beard. He didn’t look at the veranda. He kept the pedal pinned to the floorboards. “Don’t look at him! If he looks over here and sees us, the whole bloody thing snaps!”
As we roared past the pub, the engine howling and throwing clouds of sulfurous white smoke, the young man on the veranda paused.
He lowered his beer glass.
Slowly, deliberately, he turned his head toward the highway.
His eyes swept across our windshield.
For a fraction of a second, across fifty feet of shimmering outback dust, my own eyes met mine.
The world went violently silent. The roar of the engine vanished. The rattle of the suspension cut out. The heat in the cabin turned so cold my teeth clattered together with the sound of dice in a plastic cup. The boy on the veranda didn’t look shocked or frightened. He looked through me, through the glass, through the metal, as if he were staring at a smudge of soot on an empty road.
Then we were past.
The sound slammed back in like an artillery shell. BOOM. The radiator hose gave way with a wet shriek, and a geyser of boiling green coolant erupted over the windshield, completely blinding us.
Silas fought the steering wheel as the truck fishtailed wildly in the soft sand shoulder. The tires screamed, throwing plumes of red grit thirty feet into the air. We spun through a full circle, the horizon whirling like a carousel in hell, before the front bumper plowed into a dry irrigation embankment and brought us to an agonizing, bone-jarring halt.
Silence fell over the cabin, broken only by the hiss of boiled water splashing against the exhaust manifold and the heavy, rhythmic gasping of our breath.
I sat there, my shoulder bruised where the seatbelt had dug in, my brain refusing to process the geometry of what I had seen.
“That was me,” I whispered. “That was… I was on that veranda in March of 2014. I remember that beer. It was an Old, too cold, tasted like iron pipes. I remember watching a yellow ute drive past through the steam…”
My voice trailed off. A cold sweat soaked through my shirt.
“I remember,” I said again, slower this time. “I was standing there. And an old Land Cruiser tore down the highway with its radiator blowing. I asked the publican who the crazy bastard in the truck was. And he told me it was just two drifters running from their own shadows.”
I turned my head. Silas was leaning his forehead against the steering wheel. His hands were dangling limp between his knees.
“How long have you been here, Silas?” I asked.
The old man didn’t move. He let out a wet, rattling sigh that shook his thin ribs.
“Three times,” he whispered into the vinyl of the horn pad.
“What?”
Silas lifted his head. His skin wasn’t just weathered; it looked degraded, like parchment that had been left out in the rain and dried over a kerosene heater. The skin under his eyes was black, and the fingernails on his left hand were split down the quick.
“I died in White Cliffs,” Silas said, staring through the fogged, coolant-streaked glass. “Heart blew out like a rotten tire. One minute I’m chewing on cold mutton, the next I’m in a room with a little bastard wearing a gray suit, asking me what year I’d like to do over.”
A cold wire tightened around my heart. “You?”
“I wanted to fix the lease,” he muttered, his lips trembling. “I cheated old man Miller out of the claim in ’13. I knew if I went back to ’14, I could file the paperwork in Broken Hill before his boys showed up with the rifles. But every time I pick this year, I wake up in this bloody ute outside Echuca with you sitting next to me, looking younger, looking stupid, talking about drill heads and beer.”
“Wait,” I said, my chest aching. “If you relived it… and I relived it…”
“The road doesn’t have room for two ghosts,” Silas said. He reached down beside his seat and pulled out a heavy, double-barreled shotgun with the stock wrapped in electrical tape. “Every time you cross your own tracks, the world gets stiffer. The paint peels off the signs. The towns empty out. Didn’t you notice the birds when we left Deniliquin?”
I froze. I thought back to the river red gums along the Edward River. In 2014, the wetlands were deafening with the sound of cockatoos, superb parrots, and corellas.
There hadn’t been a single feather. The branches had been completely bare, silent as telephone poles.
“The machine doesn’t send you back,” Silas said, checking the brass heads of the cartridges in the breech. Click-clack. “It dumps your mind into the garbage heap of a year that already happened. A copy of a copy. And when the copy gets too crowded, the ink runs.”
“What about the opals?” I demanded, my voice rising in panic. “The green chest in the dugout! Did you hide them or not?”
Silas turned his head and gave me a smile that was missing four bottom teeth. It was the most terrifying thing I had ever seen.
“There weren’t ever any opals, Julian.”
“You’re lying! You bragged about them for eight months! You drew the map on the back of the survey charts!”
“I bragged about them because if I didn’t have a treasure, you would have left me to die in a dry ditch outside Hay,” Silas said softly. “I was an old drunk with bad lungs and twenty thousand dollars of gambling debts to men who use bolt-cutters on fingers. I needed a mule to haul the fuel drums and pull the winch. You were greedy, Julian. You were young, stupid, and so hungry for easy money you could smell gold in a sheep trough.”
I sat back against the split vinyl seat. The world seemed to wobble on its axis. The entire foundation of my life—the ten years of bitter regret, the late nights staring at the ceiling wishing I had grabbed the combination from his coat pocket—it was a ghost story. A confidence trick invented by a dying drunk to buy himself a free laborer for nine months of outback heat.
“Then why did you come back to 2014?” I screamed at him. “If there was no money, why this year?”
Silas looked down at the shotgun resting across his lap.
“Because this was the year before you killed me,” he said.
The word hung in the boiling cabin of the truck like carbon monoxide.
“What?” I choked out. “I didn’t kill you. You died of a heart attack! Over dinner! In the pub!”
“That’s what you told the constable in Wilcannia,” Silas said, his voice dropping into a register that didn’t sound human. It sounded like the grinding of millstones. “You told him my ticker gave out. But I remember the taste of the mutton, Julian. It didn’t taste like sheep. It tasted like bitter almonds and the white powder you scraped out of the old rabbit-bait tins in the tool shed.”
“No,” I stammered, backing against the passenger door, my fingers scrambling behind my back for the handle. “No, that’s insane. I wouldn’t… I didn’t do that!”
“You didn’t do it yet,” Silas whispered. “In your memory, you’re the innocent boy who missed out on a fortune. In my memory, you’re the greedy rat who got tired of waiting for an old man to fall over. That’s the joke of this place, Julian. The man in the suit doesn’t give you the year you remember. He gives you the year you earned.”
Outside the truck, the outback was changing.
The bright, brassy sunlight of western New South Wales was curdling into a dull, leaden violet. The red sand didn’t look like earth anymore; it looked like powdered brick, flat and textureless. The scrub had frozen mid-sway, the wind dying instantly as if someone had thrown a master switch in the sky.
Down the highway, half a mile back, the yellow Land Cruiser that had been parked at the Royal Mail Hotel was moving.
It was driving toward us.
It wasn’t speeding. It was rolling along at an even thirty miles an hour, kicking up no dust behind its wheels. The engine made no sound. Through the heat mirage, its front bumper seemed to stretch and shudder like warm wax.
“They’re coming,” Silas said, cocking both hammers of the shotgun with two crisp, oily clicks.
“Who?”
“The first draft,” he said. “The ones who don’t know they’re dead. If they catch up to this wreck, they clean the slate. They grind us into the clay and finish the year the way it was written. You poison me in November. I die on the floor. You spend ten years hauling timber, crying about a locked box that had nothing in it but three rusty crescent wrenches and a dead scorpion.”
“Get us out of here,” I yelled, slamming my palm against the dashboard. “Silas! Turn the key!”
“The radiator’s blown, you idiot! The block’s cracked!”
“Then run!”
I kicked the passenger door open.
The heat that hit me wasn’t normal air. It had the weight of water, pressing against my temples until my eyes pulsed with blood. I scrambled out onto the red embankment, my boots sinking four inches into sand that felt as cold as crushed ice.
The physical laws were unraveling. The air smelled of salt and ozone, like the sea had suddenly broken through three hundred miles of desert and flooded the plains beneath our feet.
Silas climbed out the driver’s side, the shotgun clutched in his right fist, his eyes fixed on the approaching yellow truck.
The other Land Cruiser was two hundred yards away now.
I could see the figures in the cab.
The Silas behind that wheel was younger, his beard less gray, his head thrown back in laughter as he talked to the young man beside him. And the young Julian in the passenger seat was leaning his elbow out the window, tapping his thumb against the metal door in time to a song that didn’t exist in the air.
They weren’t looking at the road. They were driving blind through an empty universe, completely unaware that twenty yards in front of them, two shredded versions of their own future were standing in the ditch with their boots in the freezing dirt.
“Shoot the tires!” I screamed at Silas. “Shoot the engine block!”
Silas raised the shotgun to his shoulder. His hands weren’t shaking anymore. His face had set into a mask of pure, suicidal fury—the look of an old dog that had been backed into the corner of a shearing pen for the last time.
“You don’t understand, Julian,” Silas said, his finger tightening on the front trigger.
“Shoot it!”
“Every time I shoot,” Silas said, turning his cold, dead blue eyes toward me, “I miss the truck.”
He swung the barrels ninety degrees to the right.
The two gaping black holes of the twelve-gauge were pointed directly at the center of my chest.
“Silas, wait—”
“I tried three times to fix the mining claim,” he whispered. “I tried twice to dodge the truck. But the only thing that changes the script… is taking the poisoner off the board before we reach the Darling.”
The hammer dropped.
There was no sound. No thunderclap of gunpowder, no spray of lead, no kick against his shoulder.
Instead, the shotgun barrels simply dissolved into black smoke, pouring out of his hands like ink dropped into a bucket of clear water. The smoke didn’t rise into the sky; it drifted down to the red earth, pooling around his boots, bubbling and hissing as it ate through the leather of his soles.
Silas looked down at his empty, smoking hands. His mouth opened in an oval of horror.
“It’s not 2014,” he gasped, his voice thinning into a reed-like whistle. “Look at the sky, Julian. Look at the bloody sky!”
I looked up.
Above us, the violet vault of the outback heavens wasn’t blue, and it wasn’t gray. It was covered in rows of tiny, illuminated gray symbols, microscopic letters and numbers flowing in tight, vertical columns from the zenith down to the flat horizon, flickering like the green phosphor of a radar screen in an air traffic control tower.
The oncoming truck didn’t hit our Land Cruiser.
It reached the edge of the ditch and simply passed through it.
The two yellow vehicles overlapped for three seconds—a double exposure of rusted fenders, spinning fan belts, and cracked glass. The young Julian and the young Silas drove straight through my ribs.
I felt a sudden, sickening sensation of being turned inside out, like a cold hand reaching down my throat and pulling my organs out through my teeth. I smelled river mud, cold beer, and the lavender soap my mother had used thirty years ago. I heard myself laugh—the sound of my own twenty-something laughter ringing inside the hollow chamber of my skull, stupid, loud, and confident that the world was an open road waiting to be paved with gold.
Then they were gone, continuing north up the Cobb Highway toward Hay, their dust hanging stationary in the air like a wall of yellow plaster.
Silas was on his knees.
The black smoke had reached his waist. He wasn’t bleeding; his body was simply unspooling, his skin turning into thin, gray ribbons that fluttered in an unfelt breeze and dissolved into the frozen dirt.
“The room,” Silas choked out, clutching at his throat. “The man with the linen suit… he didn’t have an office… he didn’t have… a machine…”
“Silas!” I dropped to my knees beside him, reaching out to grab his shoulder.
My fingers passed straight through his collarbone. There was no resistance, only the sensation of dipping your hand into dry sand.
“What did you tell him?” Silas wheezed, his eyes rolling back in his head until only the yellowed whites remained. “Julian… what was the answer you gave him… when he asked the question?”
“I told him 2014!” I yelled, my voice cracking under the terror of the dissolving world. “I told him the year of the dugout! The year of the chest!”
Silas let out a sound that might have been a sob or a dying rattle.
“You idiot,” he whispered, his jaw crumbling into gray flakes of dust that blew across my knees. “He didn’t ask you what year you wanted to go to… he asked you what year you wanted to die in…”
The last of him collapsed into the red dirt, leaving nothing behind but an unlit cigarette and a single brass cartridge.
The silence that followed was absolute.
No wind. No engine hum. No crickets. Even the hiss of the cracked radiator had stopped.
I stood up alone on the edge of the Cobb Highway. The road stretched north and south, but it didn’t look like asphalt anymore; it looked like a flat ribbon of gray slate laid across an empty canvas. The trees in the Black Swamp had vanished. The Headless Horseman sculpture was gone. There was only the flat, brick-red line of the plain and the pale violet sky covered in its endless, running columns of code.
I looked down at my hands.
The skin on my left wrist was beginning to fray.
A tiny, paper-thin strip of epidermis was peeling upward, curling toward my elbow, revealing no muscle or blood underneath—only an empty, gray void that smelled faintly of dry paper and ozone.
I looked north.
Far in the distance, where the Cobb Highway intersected the horizon outside Hay, something was walking toward me.
It wasn’t a truck. It wasn’t an emu or a stray bullock.
It was a man walking at a slow, measured, professional pace. He was wearing an unbuttoned gray linen suit, carrying a thick manila folder beneath his left arm, and his right hand was swinging rhythmically at his side, holding a small brass stopwatch that flashed yellow in the frozen light.
I didn’t run. There was nowhere to run. The desert around me was flat for three hundred miles in every direction, and the edges of the world were already turning the color of skim milk.
I waited by the rusted skeleton of the Land Cruiser, my boots rooted in the freezing sand, watching the gray figure grow larger with every second.
When he reached the embankment, thirty feet away, he stopped. He looked at the smoking ditch where Silas Vance had dissolved, then shifted his pale, slate-colored eyes up to mine.
He didn’t look angry. He didn’t look triumphant. He pulled the manila folder from under his arm, opened it with a flick of his wrist, and retrieved a single sheet of heavy yellow paper.
“Julian,” he said, his voice carrying clearly through the dead air without the slightest hint of an echo. “You have three minutes remaining on the standard assessment.”
My hand was half-gone now. The gray unspooling had reached my bicep. I couldn’t feel cold or heat anymore; I could only feel the slow, methodical erasing of everything I had ever remembered.
“What is this?” I asked, my voice flat, stripped of fear by the sheer scale of the nightmare. “Where did you put me?”
“You selected 2014,” the man said, reading from the card. “The terminal file for subject 884-Julian. Cause of death: blunt force trauma following a multi-vehicle collision on the Cobb Highway, four miles south of Booroorban, March 14th, 2014.”
My heart gave a single, violent kick.
“No,” I whispered. “I lived until forty-one. I worked in Sydney. I hauled drywall. I went to the pub in White Cliffs—”
“A classic compensatory loop,” the man interrupted, not looking up from his paper. “The brain produces approximately seven minutes of subjective narrative while the neural pathways depressurize after the windshield shatters. In ninety-two percent of cases, the subject invents an unfulfilled goal—a fortune, a lost lover, a locked chest—to explain why they cannot accept the terminus.”
He closed the folder with a sharp, dry snap.
“You never made it to Hay, Julian. You never saw White Cliffs. You never bought the rabbit bait.”
“And Silas?” I asked, looking at the empty dirt.
“Silas Vance died on impact when the Land Cruiser hit the irrigation culvert,” the man said simply. “His projection terminated forty seconds ago.”
The assessor tucked the file back beneath his linen arm. He reached into his vest pocket, pulled out the brass stopwatch, and pressed the top button.
Click.
The gray columns of code across the sky suddenly halted their descent. They began to turn red—a deep, burning arterial crimson that dripped toward the horizon like fresh paint running down a hot wall.
“You have one selection remaining,” the assessor said, stepping down into the ditch toward me. His shoes made no sound in the sand. “Under Section 4 of the Reclamation Protocol, when an artificial loop collapses before brain death is fully registered, the subject may choose a secondary year to stabilize the terminal projection.”
He held the fountain pen out toward my remaining hand.
“Choose quickly, Julian. If the ink runs out before you name the date, you do not get to remember who you were when the glass hit your face.”
I stared at the pen. The skin of my fingers was drifting away like dandelion seeds in a gale. Down the highway, the roar of a speeding diesel truck suddenly echoed out of nowhere—the sound of an eight-ton flatbed blowing its horn, the scream of metal tearing through an iron culvert, the blinding glare of two halogen high beams bearing down on my eyes from two feet away.
I opened my mouth to speak.
The assessor watched me, his thumb resting lightly on the brass stem of the watch, waiting for the four numbers that would decide whether I woke up, burned out, or vanished into the red dust forever.
“The year,” he whispered, as the lights filled the universe. “Name it.”
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The Gray Suit and the Year of Reckoning
The man in the gray linen suit did not look like an angel, a demon, or a scientist. He looked like an insurance assessor who had spent thirty years eating egg-salad sandwiches in windowless basements. He sat across the laminate table, folded his hands over a blank manila folder, and pushed a cheap ceramic mug of lukewarm tap water toward me.
“If you could relive one single year of your life,” he said, his voice as flat as unironed cotton, “which one would it be?”
I did not ask who he worked for. When people wake up strapped to a vinyl chair in a concrete bunker beneath an abandoned rail depot, they usually waste twenty minutes shouting about the law or their rights. I had worked three years in industrial repossessions; I knew that when men in linen suits ask you a question in an airless room, the law has already packed its bags and caught the midnight bus out of town.
“Two thousand and fourteen,” I said immediately.
The man’s pen hovered over the card. His gray eyebrows twitched. “Most people choose eighteen. Or the year they got married. Or the year before the accident took their legs.”
“I don’t want my youth,” I told him. “And I never married. In 2014, I was thirty-one years old, driving an eight-ton flatbed truck across western New South Wales for an old lunatic named Silas Vance. On November twelfth, Silas took a four-digit brass padlock, snapped it onto a green steel army surplus chest, and stuffed it beneath the floorboards of an underground dugout in White Cliffs. Six hours later, he had a massive coronary over a plate of mutton chops at the local pub. He died before his chin hit the gravy.”
The man in the suit tilted his head. “And what was inside the green chest?”
“Rough-cut pine-tree opals,” I said. “Three sacks of them. Pulled out of an illegal shaft seventy feet below the red clay before the mining inspectors sealed the lease. Worth roughly two point four million on the private market in Antwerp. Vance was the only man who knew the combination to that lock. He told me he’d write it in his field diary the morning before he died, but he burned the notebook during a bout of alcoholic paranoia at three in the morning. I spent ten years digging post holes and hauling drywall for sixty dollars a day, wondering what four numbers were on that dial.”
“You want to go back for money,” the man said. It was not a question.
“I want to go back because I want thirty seconds alone with Silas’s notebook before he throws it into the kerosene stove,” I replied. “Give me 2014. From January first to December thirty-first. I’ll do the sweaty work. I’ll haul his survey gear through the dust, I’ll smile at his crazy stories, and when November comes, I’ll pocket the slip of paper, leave the dugout before the mutton chops arrive, and catch the train to Sydney.”
The assessor unscrewed the cap of a black fountain pen. He pressed the nib to the cardboard folder, drew a single vertical stroke, and blew on the ink.
“A year is a long time, Julian,” he whispered. “You don’t just visit. You occupy the meat. And memory is not a video recording. It’s an open wound that tries to heal while you’re picking at the scab.”
“Just push the button,” I said.
The assessor didn’t push a button. He reached across the table, grabbed my thumb, and bent it backward until the joint made the sound of a dry branch snapping under a boot.
The pain didn’t radiate up my arm. It exploded into a blinding flash of yellow light that smelled of burning rubber and cheap diesel fuel.
My lungs seized. I sucked in air, but it wasn’t the dead, conditioned chill of the bunker; it was hot, dry, and thick with the stench of red clay, river silt, and stale tobacco. My ears popped with a violent rush of wind.
I was sitting in the passenger seat of an ancient, rattling Toyota Land Cruiser. The dashboard was split down the center, its foam padding cooked into hard black toast by decades of ruthless sun. Through the bug-splattered windshield, the Cobb Highway stretched dead-straight into an undulating sea of saltbush and dry grass, trembling under a midday heat mirage that turned the horizon into liquid silver.
My hand was gripping the door handle. My thumb didn’t hurt. I looked down at my hands. The skin was tan, taut, scarred at the knuckles from steel fencing wire, free of the liver spots and stiffness that had settled into my fingers over the past decade.
I was back.
To my right, behind the wheel, sat Silas Vance.
He was wearing the same grease-stained khaki shirt I remembered, his gray beard trimmed with blunt scissors, his thick forearms covered in pale freckles and white hairs. A rolled cigarette hung unlit from the corner of his cracked lips. He looked eighty, but he was sixty-two—a man pickled in cask wine, diesel fumes, and outback sun.
“Stop daydreaming, boy,” Silas barked, his voice like gravel sliding down a galvanized chute. “Look at the map. Did we pass the Booroorban turnoff or are we still south of the Black Swamp?”
A cold prickle of adrenaline washed down my neck. It was March. We were hauling a load of cast-iron drill heads up from Echuca, heading toward the Darling River. I knew this day. I had lived this day. We were supposed to stop at the Royal Mail Hotel in Booroorban, drink two schooners of heavy draft beer, look at the giant iron sculpture of the Headless Horseman by the swamp, and sleep in the back of the ute.
“We haven’t hit Booroorban yet,” I said. My voice sounded higher, younger, less frayed by ten years of cheap cigarettes. “Another four miles. You’ll see the pub on the left.”
Silas didn’t answer. He reached down, grabbed a dirty rag, and wiped the inside of the windshield. His hand was shaking.
I frowned. Silas Vance never shook. In my memory, the man was an iron post sunk six feet into the earth. When a road train had clipped our side mirror outside Hay, he hadn’t even blinked—just spat out the window and cursed the driver’s mother. But now, his knuckles on the steering wheel were bone-white. His eyes kept flicking up to the rearview mirror every four seconds.
“Silas?” I said. “You alright?”
“Keep your eyes on the road,” he muttered. “Watch the tree line. Don’t look at me.”
“What tree line? There’s nothing out here but saltbush and sheep skulls.”
“Just watch the road, Julian.”
I turned toward the side window. The landscape rolled past in a monotonous blur of ochre dirt and pale green scrub. Everything was exactly as I had left it twelve years ago. The heat radiating off the door panel pressed against my left shoulder like a hot iron. I reached into my jeans pocket. My fingers touched a paper receipt, a brass pocket knife, and three silver coins. No smartphone. No plastic cards with microchips. Just the raw, heavy tang of 2014.
Then the Land Cruiser hit a cattle grid.
The steel bars clattered under the tires—clack-clack-clack-clack.
My gaze drifted down to the odometer on the instrument cluster. The little mechanical numbers were rolling over.
241,892.
As the back wheels cleared the iron grid, the third digit didn’t roll forward. It clicked backward with a sharp mechanical ping.
241,891.
I blinked, rubbing my eyes. The dust out here played tricks on your vision; everyone knew that. The glare from the hood could burn a hole through your retinas if you didn’t wear dark glasses. I looked again. The numbers were stationary.
“Silas,” I said slowly. “How many miles on this rig?”
“Too many,” he snapped. He reached out and snapped the radio on.
Static hissed through the dashboard speaker, followed by the dry, warbling drawl of an AM cricket broadcast from Melbourne. The commentator was talking about Michael Clarke and the English tour. The sound should have anchored me, should have confirmed that the machine in the concrete bunker had worked.
Instead, the commentator’s voice suddenly dipped down an octave, dragging out like an old cassette tape being pulled through a dirty playback head.
…and the ball goes through to the keeper… keeper… keep-her…
Then the radio clicked off. The knob hadn’t moved.
Silas hadn’t touched it. He was still staring straight ahead, his chest heaving under the sweat-stained khaki shirt.
“We aren’t stopping in Booroorban,” Silas whispered.
“What?” I turned to him. “We have to stop. The radiator’s weeping from the bottom hose. You said it yourself back in Deniliquin—if we don’t take on water at the pub, the head gasket will blow before we reach the Murrumbidgee.”
“We aren’t stopping,” he repeated, his knuckles whitening further. “They’re at the pub.”
“Who’s at the pub? The shearers?”
Silas turned his head toward me. For the first time all afternoon, his eyes met mine. They were bloodshot, the pupils dilated until the blue rings of his irises were almost invisible.
“You are,” he said.
A laugh caught in my throat, dry and hollow. “What the hell kind of bush joke is that? I’m sitting right here.”
“I know where you’re sitting,” Silas hissed. He didn’t slow down. Up ahead, on the flat horizon, the tin roof of the Royal Mail Hotel rose out of the saltbush like an abandoned barge stranded in an inland sea. Beside it, the silhouette of the Headless Horseman sculpture stood black and jagged against the brassy sky. “And that’s why we’re not touching the brake.”
“Silas, you’ve been drinking metho out of the camp stove again. Slow down. The temp gauge is in the red.”
“Shut your mouth!” he roared. He slammed his right foot down. The old diesel engine screamed, the transmission whining like a circular saw hitting a rusted bolt. The needle of the temperature gauge bounced against the brass stopper at the far right of the dial. Steam began to hiss from the edges of the hood, curling against the glass in greasy white ribbons.
We flew past the Black Swamp. In the stagnant, tea-colored water, half-submerged river red gums thrust their dead branches into the air like drowned skeletons.
Then we reached the pub.
The Royal Mail Hotel was a low, weather-beaten weatherboard box with a wide corrugated veranda supported by rough-hewn posts. Parked in the dirt yard in front of the saloon doors was a vehicle.
A flatbed Toyota Land Cruiser.
It was painted the same faded mustard-yellow as ours. The passenger door was dented where an emu had struck it two winters back. A blue canvas tarp was strapped across the cargo bed, covering three heavy cast-iron drill heads.
And standing on the veranda, leaning his forearms against the wooden railing with a cold glass of dark beer in his hand, was a young man in an olive singlet and grease-smeared work shorts.
He had my broad jaw. He had the crooked scar through his left eyebrow where a snapped winch cable had caught him at seventeen. He was laughing at something the publican was saying through the open service hatch.
I pressed my face against the passenger glass, my stomach dropping into a bottomless, icy pit. My breath fogged the window.
“Silas…” my voice was barely a croak. “Who is that?”
“I told you,” Silas spat, tears of pure terror leaking into the white bristles of his beard. He didn’t look at the veranda. He kept the pedal pinned to the floorboards. “Don’t look at him! If he looks over here and sees us, the whole bloody thing snaps!”
As we roared past the pub, the engine howling and throwing clouds of sulfurous white smoke, the young man on the veranda paused.
He lowered his beer glass.
Slowly, deliberately, he turned his head toward the highway.
His eyes swept across our windshield.
For a fraction of a second, across fifty feet of shimmering outback dust, my own eyes met mine.
The world went violently silent. The roar of the engine vanished. The rattle of the suspension cut out. The heat in the cabin turned so cold my teeth clattered together with the sound of dice in a plastic cup. The boy on the veranda didn’t look shocked or frightened. He looked through me, through the glass, through the metal, as if he were staring at a smudge of soot on an empty road.
Then we were past.
The sound slammed back in like an artillery shell. BOOM. The radiator hose gave way with a wet shriek, and a geyser of boiling green coolant erupted over the windshield, completely blinding us.
Silas fought the steering wheel as the truck fishtailed wildly in the soft sand shoulder. The tires screamed, throwing plumes of red grit thirty feet into the air. We spun through a full circle, the horizon whirling like a carousel in hell, before the front bumper plowed into a dry irrigation embankment and brought us to an agonizing, bone-jarring halt.
Silence fell over the cabin, broken only by the hiss of boiled water splashing against the exhaust manifold and the heavy, rhythmic gasping of our breath.
I sat there, my shoulder bruised where the seatbelt had dug in, my brain refusing to process the geometry of what I had seen.
“That was me,” I whispered. “That was… I was on that veranda in March of 2014. I remember that beer. It was an Old, too cold, tasted like iron pipes. I remember watching a yellow ute drive past through the steam…”
My voice trailed off. A cold sweat soaked through my shirt.
“I remember,” I said again, slower this time. “I was standing there. And an old Land Cruiser tore down the highway with its radiator blowing. I asked the publican who the crazy bastard in the truck was. And he told me it was just two drifters running from their own shadows.”
I turned my head. Silas was leaning his forehead against the steering wheel. His hands were dangling limp between his knees.
“How long have you been here, Silas?” I asked.
The old man didn’t move. He let out a wet, rattling sigh that shook his thin ribs.
“Three times,” he whispered into the vinyl of the horn pad.
“What?”
Silas lifted his head. His skin wasn’t just weathered; it looked degraded, like parchment that had been left out in the rain and dried over a kerosene heater. The skin under his eyes was black, and the fingernails on his left hand were split down the quick.
“I died in White Cliffs,” Silas said, staring through the fogged, coolant-streaked glass. “Heart blew out like a rotten tire. One minute I’m chewing on cold mutton, the next I’m in a room with a little bastard wearing a gray suit, asking me what year I’d like to do over.”
A cold wire tightened around my heart. “You?”
“I wanted to fix the lease,” he muttered, his lips trembling. “I cheated old man Miller out of the claim in ’13. I knew if I went back to ’14, I could file the paperwork in Broken Hill before his boys showed up with the rifles. But every time I pick this year, I wake up in this bloody ute outside Echuca with you sitting next to me, looking younger, looking stupid, talking about drill heads and beer.”
“Wait,” I said, my chest aching. “If you relived it… and I relived it…”
“The road doesn’t have room for two ghosts,” Silas said. He reached down beside his seat and pulled out a heavy, double-barreled shotgun with the stock wrapped in electrical tape. “Every time you cross your own tracks, the world gets stiffer. The paint peels off the signs. The towns empty out. Didn’t you notice the birds when we left Deniliquin?”
I froze. I thought back to the river red gums along the Edward River. In 2014, the wetlands were deafening with the sound of cockatoos, superb parrots, and corellas.
There hadn’t been a single feather. The branches had been completely bare, silent as telephone poles.
“The machine doesn’t send you back,” Silas said, checking the brass heads of the cartridges in the breech. Click-clack. “It dumps your mind into the garbage heap of a year that already happened. A copy of a copy. And when the copy gets too crowded, the ink runs.”
“What about the opals?” I demanded, my voice rising in panic. “The green chest in the dugout! Did you hide them or not?”
Silas turned his head and gave me a smile that was missing four bottom teeth. It was the most terrifying thing I had ever seen.
“There weren’t ever any opals, Julian.”
“You’re lying! You bragged about them for eight months! You drew the map on the back of the survey charts!”
“I bragged about them because if I didn’t have a treasure, you would have left me to die in a dry ditch outside Hay,” Silas said softly. “I was an old drunk with bad lungs and twenty thousand dollars of gambling debts to men who use bolt-cutters on fingers. I needed a mule to haul the fuel drums and pull the winch. You were greedy, Julian. You were young, stupid, and so hungry for easy money you could smell gold in a sheep trough.”
I sat back against the split vinyl seat. The world seemed to wobble on its axis. The entire foundation of my life—the ten years of bitter regret, the late nights staring at the ceiling wishing I had grabbed the combination from his coat pocket—it was a ghost story. A confidence trick invented by a dying drunk to buy himself a free laborer for nine months of outback heat.
“Then why did you come back to 2014?” I screamed at him. “If there was no money, why this year?”
Silas looked down at the shotgun resting across his lap.
“Because this was the year before you killed me,” he said.
The word hung in the boiling cabin of the truck like carbon monoxide.
“What?” I choked out. “I didn’t kill you. You died of a heart attack! Over dinner! In the pub!”
“That’s what you told the constable in Wilcannia,” Silas said, his voice dropping into a register that didn’t sound human. It sounded like the grinding of millstones. “You told him my ticker gave out. But I remember the taste of the mutton, Julian. It didn’t taste like sheep. It tasted like bitter almonds and the white powder you scraped out of the old rabbit-bait tins in the tool shed.”
“No,” I stammered, backing against the passenger door, my fingers scrambling behind my back for the handle. “No, that’s insane. I wouldn’t… I didn’t do that!”
“You didn’t do it yet,” Silas whispered. “In your memory, you’re the innocent boy who missed out on a fortune. In my memory, you’re the greedy rat who got tired of waiting for an old man to fall over. That’s the joke of this place, Julian. The man in the suit doesn’t give you the year you remember. He gives you the year you earned.”
Outside the truck, the outback was changing.
The bright, brassy sunlight of western New South Wales was curdling into a dull, leaden violet. The red sand didn’t look like earth anymore; it looked like powdered brick, flat and textureless. The scrub had frozen mid-sway, the wind dying instantly as if someone had thrown a master switch in the sky.
Down the highway, half a mile back, the yellow Land Cruiser that had been parked at the Royal Mail Hotel was moving.
It was driving toward us.
It wasn’t speeding. It was rolling along at an even thirty miles an hour, kicking up no dust behind its wheels. The engine made no sound. Through the heat mirage, its front bumper seemed to stretch and shudder like warm wax.
“They’re coming,” Silas said, cocking both hammers of the shotgun with two crisp, oily clicks.
“Who?”
“The first draft,” he said. “The ones who don’t know they’re dead. If they catch up to this wreck, they clean the slate. They grind us into the clay and finish the year the way it was written. You poison me in November. I die on the floor. You spend ten years hauling timber, crying about a locked box that had nothing in it but three rusty crescent wrenches and a dead scorpion.”
“Get us out of here,” I yelled, slamming my palm against the dashboard. “Silas! Turn the key!”
“The radiator’s blown, you idiot! The block’s cracked!”
“Then run!”
I kicked the passenger door open.
The heat that hit me wasn’t normal air. It had the weight of water, pressing against my temples until my eyes pulsed with blood. I scrambled out onto the red embankment, my boots sinking four inches into sand that felt as cold as crushed ice.
The physical laws were unraveling. The air smelled of salt and ozone, like the sea had suddenly broken through three hundred miles of desert and flooded the plains beneath our feet.
Silas climbed out the driver’s side, the shotgun clutched in his right fist, his eyes fixed on the approaching yellow truck.
The other Land Cruiser was two hundred yards away now.
I could see the figures in the cab.
The Silas behind that wheel was younger, his beard less gray, his head thrown back in laughter as he talked to the young man beside him. And the young Julian in the passenger seat was leaning his elbow out the window, tapping his thumb against the metal door in time to a song that didn’t exist in the air.
They weren’t looking at the road. They were driving blind through an empty universe, completely unaware that twenty yards in front of them, two shredded versions of their own future were standing in the ditch with their boots in the freezing dirt.
“Shoot the tires!” I screamed at Silas. “Shoot the engine block!”
Silas raised the shotgun to his shoulder. His hands weren’t shaking anymore. His face had set into a mask of pure, suicidal fury—the look of an old dog that had been backed into the corner of a shearing pen for the last time.
“You don’t understand, Julian,” Silas said, his finger tightening on the front trigger.
“Shoot it!”
“Every time I shoot,” Silas said, turning his cold, dead blue eyes toward me, “I miss the truck.”
He swung the barrels ninety degrees to the right.
The two gaping black holes of the twelve-gauge were pointed directly at the center of my chest.
“Silas, wait—”
“I tried three times to fix the mining claim,” he whispered. “I tried twice to dodge the truck. But the only thing that changes the script… is taking the poisoner off the board before we reach the Darling.”
The hammer dropped.
There was no sound. No thunderclap of gunpowder, no spray of lead, no kick against his shoulder.
Instead, the shotgun barrels simply dissolved into black smoke, pouring out of his hands like ink dropped into a bucket of clear water. The smoke didn’t rise into the sky; it drifted down to the red earth, pooling around his boots, bubbling and hissing as it ate through the leather of his soles.
Silas looked down at his empty, smoking hands. His mouth opened in an oval of horror.
“It’s not 2014,” he gasped, his voice thinning into a reed-like whistle. “Look at the sky, Julian. Look at the bloody sky!”
I looked up.
Above us, the violet vault of the outback heavens wasn’t blue, and it wasn’t gray. It was covered in rows of tiny, illuminated gray symbols, microscopic letters and numbers flowing in tight, vertical columns from the zenith down to the flat horizon, flickering like the green phosphor of a radar screen in an air traffic control tower.
The oncoming truck didn’t hit our Land Cruiser.
It reached the edge of the ditch and simply passed through it.
The two yellow vehicles overlapped for three seconds—a double exposure of rusted fenders, spinning fan belts, and cracked glass. The young Julian and the young Silas drove straight through my ribs.
I felt a sudden, sickening sensation of being turned inside out, like a cold hand reaching down my throat and pulling my organs out through my teeth. I smelled river mud, cold beer, and the lavender soap my mother had used thirty years ago. I heard myself laugh—the sound of my own twenty-something laughter ringing inside the hollow chamber of my skull, stupid, loud, and confident that the world was an open road waiting to be paved with gold.
Then they were gone, continuing north up the Cobb Highway toward Hay, their dust hanging stationary in the air like a wall of yellow plaster.
Silas was on his knees.
The black smoke had reached his waist. He wasn’t bleeding; his body was simply unspooling, his skin turning into thin, gray ribbons that fluttered in an unfelt breeze and dissolved into the frozen dirt.
“The room,” Silas choked out, clutching at his throat. “The man with the linen suit… he didn’t have an office… he didn’t have… a machine…”
“Silas!” I dropped to my knees beside him, reaching out to grab his shoulder.
My fingers passed straight through his collarbone. There was no resistance, only the sensation of dipping your hand into dry sand.
“What did you tell him?” Silas wheezed, his eyes rolling back in his head until only the yellowed whites remained. “Julian… what was the answer you gave him… when he asked the question?”
“I told him 2014!” I yelled, my voice cracking under the terror of the dissolving world. “I told him the year of the dugout! The year of the chest!”
Silas let out a sound that might have been a sob or a dying rattle.
“You idiot,” he whispered, his jaw crumbling into gray flakes of dust that blew across my knees. “He didn’t ask you what year you wanted to go to… he asked you what year you wanted to die in…”
The last of him collapsed into the red dirt, leaving nothing behind but an unlit cigarette and a single brass cartridge.
The silence that followed was absolute.
No wind. No engine hum. No crickets. Even the hiss of the cracked radiator had stopped.
I stood up alone on the edge of the Cobb Highway. The road stretched north and south, but it didn’t look like asphalt anymore; it looked like a flat ribbon of gray slate laid across an empty canvas. The trees in the Black Swamp had vanished. The Headless Horseman sculpture was gone. There was only the flat, brick-red line of the plain and the pale violet sky covered in its endless, running columns of code.
I looked down at my hands.
The skin on my left wrist was beginning to fray.
A tiny, paper-thin strip of epidermis was peeling upward, curling toward my elbow, revealing no muscle or blood underneath—only an empty, gray void that smelled faintly of dry paper and ozone.
I looked north.
Far in the distance, where the Cobb Highway intersected the horizon outside Hay, something was walking toward me.
It wasn’t a truck. It wasn’t an emu or a stray bullock.
It was a man walking at a slow, measured, professional pace. He was wearing an unbuttoned gray linen suit, carrying a thick manila folder beneath his left arm, and his right hand was swinging rhythmically at his side, holding a small brass stopwatch that flashed yellow in the frozen light.
I didn’t run. There was nowhere to run. The desert around me was flat for three hundred miles in every direction, and the edges of the world were already turning the color of skim milk.
I waited by the rusted skeleton of the Land Cruiser, my boots rooted in the freezing sand, watching the gray figure grow larger with every second.
When he reached the embankment, thirty feet away, he stopped. He looked at the smoking ditch where Silas Vance had dissolved, then shifted his pale, slate-colored eyes up to mine.
He didn’t look angry. He didn’t look triumphant. He pulled the manila folder from under his arm, opened it with a flick of his wrist, and retrieved a single sheet of heavy yellow paper.
“Julian,” he said, his voice carrying clearly through the dead air without the slightest hint of an echo. “You have three minutes remaining on the standard assessment.”
My hand was half-gone now. The gray unspooling had reached my bicep. I couldn’t feel cold or heat anymore; I could only feel the slow, methodical erasing of everything I had ever remembered.
“What is this?” I asked, my voice flat, stripped of fear by the sheer scale of the nightmare. “Where did you put me?”
“You selected 2014,” the man said, reading from the card. “The terminal file for subject 884-Julian. Cause of death: blunt force trauma following a multi-vehicle collision on the Cobb Highway, four miles south of Booroorban, March 14th, 2014.”
My heart gave a single, violent kick.
“No,” I whispered. “I lived until forty-one. I worked in Sydney. I hauled drywall. I went to the pub in White Cliffs—”
“A classic compensatory loop,” the man interrupted, not looking up from his paper. “The brain produces approximately seven minutes of subjective narrative while the neural pathways depressurize after the windshield shatters. In ninety-two percent of cases, the subject invents an unfulfilled goal—a fortune, a lost lover, a locked chest—to explain why they cannot accept the terminus.”
He closed the folder with a sharp, dry snap.
“You never made it to Hay, Julian. You never saw White Cliffs. You never bought the rabbit bait.”
“And Silas?” I asked, looking at the empty dirt.
“Silas Vance died on impact when the Land Cruiser hit the irrigation culvert,” the man said simply. “His projection terminated forty seconds ago.”
The assessor tucked the file back beneath his linen arm. He reached into his vest pocket, pulled out the brass stopwatch, and pressed the top button.
Click.
The gray columns of code across the sky suddenly halted their descent. They began to turn red—a deep, burning arterial crimson that dripped toward the horizon like fresh paint running down a hot wall.
“You have one selection remaining,” the assessor said, stepping down into the ditch toward me. His shoes made no sound in the sand. “Under Section 4 of the Reclamation Protocol, when an artificial loop collapses before brain death is fully registered, the subject may choose a secondary year to stabilize the terminal projection.”
He held the fountain pen out toward my remaining hand.
“Choose quickly, Julian. If the ink runs out before you name the date, you do not get to remember who you were when the glass hit your face.”
I stared at the pen. The skin of my fingers was drifting away like dandelion seeds in a gale. Down the highway, the roar of a speeding diesel truck suddenly echoed out of nowhere—the sound of an eight-ton flatbed blowing its horn, the scream of metal tearing through an iron culvert, the blinding glare of two halogen high beams bearing down on my eyes from two feet away.
I opened my mouth to speak.
The assessor watched me, his thumb resting lightly on the brass stem of the watch, waiting for the four numbers that would decide whether I woke up, burned out, or vanished into the red dust forever.
“The year,” he whispered, as the lights filled the universe. “Name it.”
#bloganuary #bookReview #books #curiosity #dailyprompt #dailyprompt2875 #Evernote #everyday #facts #fiction #IFTTT #Pinterest #ShortStory #writing -
EU halts Brazilian meat imports over antibiotic concerns
Credit: clickpetroleoegas.com.br The European Union has suspended imports of Brazilian meat and other animal products while awaiting assurances…
#Europe #EU #EuropeanCommission #Antibiotic #Brazil #Imports #Meat
https://www.europesays.com/europe/129379/ -
Meat industry faces worker shortage after visa policy changes
West Australian abattoirs and pork producers say recent visa changes and the near impossibility of attracting local employees…
#Australia #abattoir #AU #australiaimmigration #australiavisa #Austrlia #immigrationpolicy #migrantworkers #piggery #skilledmigration #skilledvisas #visa #visachanges #WesternAustralia #workers
https://www.europesays.com/australia/86701/ -
Is this a filet mignon? https://www.diningandcooking.com/2796417/is-this-a-filet-mignon/ #Meat
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pork but not sure what cut https://www.diningandcooking.com/2795826/pork-but-not-sure-what-cut/ #Meat
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Meat Candy AKA Smoked Pork Belly Burnt Ends https://www.diningandcooking.com/2795644/meat-candy-aka-smoked-pork-belly-burnt-ends/ #food #FoodPorn
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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/sep/01/us-trump-rubio-meddling-brazil-election. With further reference to your point about #Brazilian #meat, @capnthommo!
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Ground beef patties with onion, pepper, and mushrooms https://www.diningandcooking.com/2795290/ground-beef-patties-with-onion-pepper-and-mushrooms/ #Meat
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I think these short ribs are flirting with me. https://www.diningandcooking.com/2795002/i-think-these-short-ribs-are-flirting-with-me/ #Meat
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🥩 Crafting the perfect bite of meat: Engineers develop metamaterials that mimic muscle and fat architecture
https://phys.org/news/2025-01-crafting-meat-metamaterials-mimic-muscle.html
#meat #food #materials #manufacturing #metamaterials #protein
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Beyond Meat seems to be the new meme stock
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Eat less meat, France urges, for sake of health, climate
France wants people to think twice before eating meat. The French government issued a long-awaited report Wednesday urging people to limit meat consumption for their health and also to fight climate change—and not everyone in the country of “steak-frites” is thrille…
#dining #cooking #diet #food #Frenchdiet #francais #france #French #frenchdiet
https://www.diningandcooking.com/2798811/eat-less-meat-france-urges-for-sake-of-health-climate/ -
Eat less meat, France urges, for sake of health, climate https://www.diningandcooking.com/2798811/eat-less-meat-france-urges-for-sake-of-health-climate/ #francais #france #French #FrenchDiet
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Don't be a meat proxy.
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Did Big Meat Hijack America’s Dietary Guidelines? Why These Doctors Are Suing the Government. https://www.diningandcooking.com/restaurants/20282/ #VeganRestaurant #VeganRestaurants
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Did Big Meat Hijack America’s Diet Guidelines? Why These Doctors Are Suing the Government. https://vegnews.com/big-meat-hijack-americas-diet-guidelines?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon #vegan #vegetarian
