The bass from the party was still a dull thud in Kevin’s chest, a phantom rhythm he tried to outrun. “Told you I was fine to drive,” he slurred, a cocky grin plastered on his face as the old Honda Civic hugged the dark, winding road. In the passenger seat, Jess fumbled with the radio, her nervous laughter a thin sound against the heavy night. Behind her, Mark was already passed out, his head lolling against the window, the defiant click of his unfastened seat belt a forgotten act of teenage immortality.
Only Leo, wedged in the rear left seat, felt a different kind of thrum. It wasn’t the beer or the music. It was dread. He had buckled his seat belt out of habit, a small, insignificant act that now felt like the only sane thing he’d done all night. The headlights carved a nervous path through the dense trees, and Kevin, egged on by silent bravado and cheap alcohol, pushed the accelerator.
The curve wasn’t a curve. It was a question mark the road posed to the reckless. And Kevin’s answer was a laugh.
The world didn’t just spin; it shattered. There was a sound that wasn’t a sound—a cataclysmic tear in the fabric of existence, like a giant ripping steel in half. A blinding, incandescent flash, and then Leo was thrown forward, the seat belt biting deep into his chest and hips as the car folded around the unyielding body of an ancient oak. The world became a symphony of cacophony: screaming metal, shattering glass, and the final, wet thud of impacts that stole the air from his lungs. Then, silence. A deep, profound, and absolute silence.
Consciousness returned not like a dawn, but like a flickering faulty light. Pain was the first thing, a network of fire mapping every inch of his body. He tasted copper and gasoline. The Civic was no longer a car; it was a mangled carcass of steel, torn so violently that the front half, where Kevin and Jess had been, lay a dozen feet away, a grotesque sculpture of twisted wreckage. Through the splintered remains of the back window, he could see Mark’s motionless form, half-ejected, his body at an angle that defied life.
A sob caught in Leo’s throat, a jagged piece of glass. He was alive. They were not. The thought was so monstrous, so final, that his mind recoiled.
And then he saw them.
They coalesced from the shadows pooling at the edge of the headlights’ broken glare, not walking but flowing, slithering. They were shadows given form, impossibly thin and tall, with too many joints and limbs that moved with a sickening, insectile grace. Their bodies were the color of a starless midnight, and where faces should have been, there burned points of dying, malevolent ember. They were demons, not from any book, but from the raw, screaming nightmare at the heart of the universe.
One of them reached a claw of solidified night toward the driver’s seat. As its fingers touched the wreckage, a shimmering, terrified copy of Kevin was pulled free. It was Kevin’s soul, flickering and transparent, his face a mask of pure, unadulterated regret. The soul opened its mouth in a silent scream, thrashing against the hold, but the demon was infinitely stronger. It unraveled him from the metal as if he were a loose thread.
Another creature was already at Jess’s side, her soul a frantic, weeping light, reaching for something unseen. A third descended on Mark, whose defiant spirit still fought, a silent snarl on its phantom lips. The demons were tireless, ancient, and utterly without mercy. They herded the three struggling, screaming soul-lights toward the center of the road. There, the air itself had begun to thin and tear, creating a wound of absolute nothingness in the asphalt. A hole, blacker than any shadow, from which emanated a cold that had nothing to do with temperature and a low, guttural drone that vibrated in Leo’s bones.
One by one, the demons forced their captives to the edge. The souls fought, their flickers growing dimmer as they neared the abyss. Kevin’s was the first to go, dragged down with a final, silent shriek of terror. Jess followed, a fading tear of light. Mark was last, his defiant struggle extinguished as he was plunged into the rent in the world. The hole sealed with a sound like a sigh, and the demons dissolved back into the night, their terrible work complete.
Leo lay broken amidst the ruin, his breath coming in ragged, shallow gasps. The horror had eclipsed the pain. He had watched his friends be damned. He was next. He squeezed his eyes shut, waiting for the cold claws.
But they didn’t come.
A different feeling began to permeate the air—a warmth, a pressure, a sense of presence so immense it made the demons feel like fleeting shadows. Leo forced his eyes open, craning his neck back.
Standing there, just beyond the wreckage, was a being so radiant and terrible it burned his vision. It was ten feet tall, at least, but its height was its most mundane feature. It seemed to be wrought from starlight and silence, its form humanoid but so perfect it was painful to behold. Its arms were crossed over a chest that glowed with a soft, internal luminescence, and from its back unfolded wings that weren’t feathers, but vast, shimmering panels of captured dawn. Its face was obscured by a light so pure it was almost blinding, but Leo could feel its gaze upon him. The being’s eyes, he somehow knew, were like nebulae, holding the weight of eternity.
It didn’t move. It didn’t speak. It simply watched. Its gaze was not one of pity, or of anger, but of profound, terrible understanding. It was a witness. A guardian. A judge. It stood as a barrier between him and the encroaching darkness, a fixed point of order in a universe of chaos.
The sight was too much. The physical agony, the soul-shattering horror, and now this impossible, divine presence—it overwhelmed his teenage mind, shattering what little resolve he had left. His vision tunneled, the angelic light shrinking to a single point in the encroaching blackness. His breathing slowed to a crawl as he began to gasp for air. He was dying and could not stop it. He looked at the tunnel and cried out for his mom and dad. His eyes closed and he was gone, his physical body just lay still with no more life.
The last thing he saw before the world went away was the light from the Angel, a single, unwavering star in an all-consuming night. Then, there was only the blessed, final release of passing out. He woke up in spirit at the gates of a heavenly place standing beside the Angel that had come for him. Ahead was his grandfather and grandmother that had passed away a few years ago. They always took him to church and told him God and Heaven were real.
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