He came to on the floor, face pressed to linoleum that smelled like rust and mold. For a long time, he didn't move. Just listened. The silence was total. Not the kind you notice, but the kind that notices you back.
His eyes opened to a dim ceiling, water-stained tiles, a cracked fluorescent bulb long since dead. His body felt foreign. Limbs that bent the right way but didn’t feel like his. Muscles that twitched on their own. His tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth like old paper.
He tried to remember. Name. Age. What he’d eaten last. A color he liked. Anything.
Nothing came.
The panic hit slow, like a wave that forgets to crash. Just a sick pull in his gut. A sense that something was missing. Not taken. Not erased. Just never there.
He sat up too fast. The world tilted. Shelves loomed like teeth in the half-light. A shopping basket lay sideways nearby, its plastic handle cracked. He grabbed it, not knowing why.
The floor around him was littered with dust and wrappers, paper that crumbled when touched. He touched it anyway. Some of it flaked into his palm. One piece stayed intact: a comic book. Jonah Hex. The name made him pause.
The man on the cover looked like him. Or he looked like the man. Close enough to matter.
He kept the comic. Rolled it gently. Slipped it into the battered satchel beside him.
Inside: a hunk of dried meat, a crumpled water bottle, a small leather book with tissue-thin pages. A wooden cross. It rattled when he picked it up. No memory stirred. No warmth, no pain. Just an object.
He slung the bag over his shoulder. Stood slowly. The weight of the coat tugged on his frame. He looked down and saw the guns. One on each hip. Old style. Metal worn smooth at the grip. Holsters scuffed but oiled.
He didn’t remember them either. But his fingers curled around the grips like old friends.
He made his way down an aisle of rotted toothpaste tubes and collapsed cardboard displays. The air was dry but smelled like something once wet. Behind the counter, a register gaped open, empty. A doll’s head rested on the shelf where cigarettes should have been. Its eyes were painted shut.
He reached the front of the store and peered through grime-smeared windows. Light filtered through like soup. Everything outside was bleached and crooked.
He stepped out.
The world was... broken. Not bombed. Not burned. Just done. Buildings leaned like they were tired. Street signs dangled. A bus sat frozen mid-turn, front end buried in a hydrant, windows burst inward. No bodies. No birds. No wind. Just a thick, old heat.
He walked. No idea where or why. His boots struck pavement that split beneath him. Weeds poked through the cracks. A parking meter buzzed quietly, the sound too steady for a dead place.
He didn’t know how long he walked. Hours maybe. Time didn’t behave.
He passed houses that looked eaten. Rusted playgrounds. A billboard half collapsed that read: “TRUTH WILL RETURN” in peeling red letters. Someone had spray-painted “LIAR” underneath in black.
He kept moving.
His head throbbed. Not pain. More like a pressure. Like something behind his eyes wanted out. Not words. Not memories. Just presence.
He stopped in front of a crumbling gas station. The sign above the door read “WE PROUDLY SERVE”, but the name below was scratched out.
He turned the knob and stepped inside.
The door creaked open and let out a sigh, like the building itself had been holding its breath. The smell inside was stronger than the drugstore: old oil, mildew, and something sweet that had gone sour. He stepped in and let the door close behind him. The light shifted—cooler now, greenish through cracked panes, like being underwater.
Dust coated the counters, and ancient snack bags had imploded into themselves. A line of lottery tickets still hung on their pegs, faded numbers barely legible. Behind the counter, a photograph curled in its frame. He picked it up. A man, woman, and child stood in front of this very station, all smiling, all vanished.
He put it back and wiped his hand on his coat.
The silence wasn’t silence anymore. It had a texture now. A pulse. Not sound, exactly. Something his body noticed before his brain did. He pressed his palm to the counter. It was warm.
He blinked. The counter was cold again.
His head ached. Not from dehydration, though that was creeping in too. This was deeper. Like some echo of himself was buried under his thoughts, trying to surface. Every time he tried to focus, it slipped. Not like memory loss. Like reality didn’t want him remembering.
He walked behind the counter, pushed open the little door meant to stop thieves, and descended into a back room. The floor sagged. A single lightbulb hung above, unlit but swaying as if something had recently passed.
In the corner, a freezer hummed.
It shouldn’t have.
He opened it.
No food. No power cord. Just cold, dry air. The kind that made his bones tense. The back wall of the freezer was metal, but scratched into it were words.
“God sees.”
He shut the lid and turned away.
He went back up and stood in the middle of the store. Let the quiet roll over him.
Then came the mirror.
It was nailed to a beam next to the door, cracked diagonally like it had been punched or shot. He caught his reflection and froze.
Not because of the face, which looked weathered, familiar in a way that made his stomach twist.
But because for a second—just a flicker—he wasn’t alone in it.
Behind him, something stood. Tall. Thin. Head tilted slightly. No eyes, no mouth, no anything. Just the shape of something that shouldn’t be.
He turned around. Nothing.
Turned back. Just his reflection again.
He breathed in. Held it. Let it out.
The world wanted him afraid. He could feel that now. Not random fear. Not survival instinct. Intentional. Like someone had stitched the emotion into the walls, the sky, the broken things.
He stepped back out into the light and sat on the curb in front of the station. The horizon rippled from heat or something worse. He rubbed his face with a dry hand, felt the grit in his beard, the pull of cracked skin around his eyes. There was a rhythm to his body. Not just breath or heartbeat. A third thing. Low and slow.
Like waiting.
He heard the wind shift.
Except it wasn’t the wind.
Something moved. Out by the far pumps. He rose. Quietly. His hand dropped to the grip of one of the revolvers. It felt easier this time. Natural.
A figure stepped into view.
But not a threat. Not immediately.
He was wrapped in cloth like a walking scarecrow, arms thin as broomsticks, eyes hidden under dark goggles. He moved with the hesitation of someone who’d spent too long underground.
And with that, Dibbs had arrived.
He didn’t reach for the gun.
Not yet.
The figure limped forward, dust swirling around its feet like it knew how to follow. The cloth around the man was stitched together from curtain fabric, tarp, and what looked like weather-beaten flags. Not a scrap of skin showed except for the cracked lips poking out from beneath the goggles and a shredded hat. Jonah tensed anyway. He didn’t know why. Just that his gut said this man had seen too much and survived too well.
“You came out wrong,” the man rasped.
Jonah said nothing. The voice was like stone being dragged across a pan.
The figure stopped a few feet away and leaned heavily on a twisted cane made from a rifle barrel. He tilted his head, the goggles shifting just enough to suggest eyes beneath them. He sniffed the air like an animal.
“Yeah,” he muttered. “Smells like fire and ruin. You got the mark.”
Jonah blinked. “What?”
“The dream-mark. Happens to some of you. Woke up where you shouldn’t have. Way the air wraps around you, way the sky doesn’t quite touch your shoulders. Ain’t natural. You got birthed by the wrong dream.”
Jonah instinctively took a step back. The man just laughed, a dry, rasping thing that barely qualified as human.
“Name’s Dibbs,” he said. “I was here before the sky went black. Still here now. Can’t tell if that’s punishment or persistence.”
Jonah watched him, fingers twitching near the holsters.
Dibbs saw. He raised one hand, gloved in something that looked like it had once been a teddy bear.
“If I was gonna shoot you, I’d do it from underneath. Not out here in the sun. But if you wanna play cowboy, go ahead and draw. I got nothing but time.”
Jonah didn’t move.
Dibbs grunted. “Thought so. Come on. You’ll cook out here. Got shade. Got noise walls. Got water that don’t talk back.”
Jonah followed. He didn’t know why. Maybe the quiet needed a witness.
They moved around the gas station, past a shattered vending machine and an ancient payphone that hummed softly in a language no one remembered. The hatch was half-buried in sand, but Dibbs pulled it open with the ease of practice.
“Mind your head,” he muttered.
The ladder creaked under Jonah’s weight. The air down there was dense and metallic, like breathing through a wire screen. At the bottom, the room opened into what looked like a den, a bunker, and a shrine stitched into one. Lights flickered low, running on some hacked-together solar rig. The walls were layered in tin foil, torn comic book pages, and scorched newspaper clippings. The floor was soft with rugs, skins, and what might have been puppet hair.
Jonah felt it before he saw it: something watching him. Not Dibbs. Not a camera. Just a sense that the walls themselves had memory.
“Sit,” Dibbs said. “Or stand. You look like a stander.”
Jonah stayed standing.
Dibbs tossed a flask toward him. Jonah caught it. Sniffed it. Water. He drank.
“So,” Dibbs said, settling into a pile of cushions. “You got questions. Probably a lotta them. You won’t like the answers. Most of ‘em contradict each other. That’s how you know they’re true.”
Jonah leaned against the wall. The surface felt warm again, then ice cold, then warm.
“What is this place?” Jonah asked.
Dibbs looked around, almost offended. “This?’ This is sanctuary, son. This is what the world forgot about. Used to be gas stations were places of worship. Folks traveled miles just to top off and piss out their confessions.”
Jonah frowned. “No, I mean the world. What happened?”
Dibbs grunted. “The Old War. Last thing anybody remembers clearly. The whole sky lit up like Christmas, then went out like a match. Some say it was bombs. Some say bio-spirits. Some say judgment. I say it was all of that and more. Truth is, the war never ended. It just changed outfits.”
He tossed something to Jonah … a cracked compass. The needle spun wildly.
“The world doesn’t know where it’s going anymore,” Dibbs said. “Just loops back on itself. Time’s drunk. Memory too. You woke up in the middle of it. You ain’t the first.”
Jonah stared. “What do you mean, I’m not the first?”
Dibbs leaned forward. His goggles caught the flickering light and turned it to fire.
“They made others. Back before the collapse. The Last Men, they were called. Meant to fix the world, or tear it clean. Cloned, bred, built—no one agrees. Most went mad. One went missing. The Ninth.”
Jonah didn’t speak.
Dibbs pointed at him.
“You ain’t just some poor soul with memory loss. You’re Subject Nine. I don’t care how or why. I just know what the air does around you. It bends. It stutters. Reality gets... itchy.”
Jonah looked at his hands. Scarred. Weathered. A long diagonal line ran across his forearm. He hadn’t noticed it before. Now it itched.
It was shaped like a serpent.
No. A fish.
No. Something else.
He touched it. The skin twitched.
Dibbs watched him closely.
“You’re gonna bring a reckoning,” he said. “Whether you mean to or not. They’ll come for you. Some to kill. Some to worship. Some to put you back in the cage you crawled out of. One of them already knows where you are.”
Jonah felt the weight of the crucifix in his bag. The leather book throbbed faintly, like a second heartbeat.
“Who?” he asked.
Dibbs stood, joints cracking.
“Her name’s Silah,” he said. “And she ain’t like the others. Born from irradiated soil, raised in a lab-chapel, taught to hunt by men who forgot their names. She knows the songs the satellites still sing. And she’s beautiful in the way a knife is beautiful. And just as forgiving.”
Jonah stared.
Dibbs walked to the hatch.
“She rides with patched armor and half a smile. You’ll know her by the way your blood starts whispering. By the time you see her eyes, it’ll be too late.”
Above them, the wind shifted.
And the sky remembered how to scream.