CHAPTER 1: LAST SHIFT

  Forty-seven lights.

  I'd counted them so many times I could map them with my eyes closed. Fluorescent tubes hung from the warehouse ceiling in neat rows. Industrial, indifferent and eight were burnt out. Nobody had replaced them in three months, maybe longer. The dead zones they left pooled in corners and built shadows that never quite reached the floor.

  Nobody cared about the lights. Nobody cared about anything in this building except the belt.

  My hands moved without me. Grab box. Scan barcode. Green light, always green, check the label and sort onto the correct secondary belt. The box slid away on rubber rollers, already gone. Another took its place. The conveyor never stopped. The hum filled the space, steady enough that your brain filed it under background noise and forgot it existed.

  That was the point.

  This one was heavier than the last. I didn't need the label, the weight told the truth. Automotive parts, probably. Dense metal packed tight. My shoulders knew the difference between automotive and electronics, between hardware and textiles. Eleven years of this and my body had learned the job better than my mind ever had.

  Grab. Scan. Sort.

  The warehouse stretched around me, vast and cold. Too cold near the loading docks where night air crept in, too warm near the machines that ran hot and constant. The smell never changed. Cardboard, machine oil, and the trapped staleness of a building that hadn't drawn a real breath of air since they'd poured the foundation. The floor vibrated under my steel-toed boots. Everything vibrated, the machinery made sure of that.

  Other workers moved at their stations, distant figures in faded blue shirts. I didn't know most of their names.

  A box came through crooked on the belt and my hands corrected it without thinking, straightening it in the same motion I used to sort it. I didn't even look. The correction lived in my muscles now, automatic as breathing. Somewhere in eleven years I'd stopped being a person who worked here and become a component in the machine.

  "Hey, you been here long?"

  I glanced up. Tommy stood at the adjacent belt, young face eager under the fluorescent glare. Early twenties, still had that look of this is temporary, I'm passing through.

  I'd had that look once.

  "Yeah," I said. Kept working.

  "You like it?"

  "No."

  The word came out flat. Tommy's expression shifted. He turned back to his belt. The warehouse closed around us again.

  I didn't blame him for trying. What was I supposed to tell him? That I'd started here as a temp eleven years ago, just until I found something better? That temporary turned permanent while I wasn't paying attention? That looking for better required energy I hadn't had since…

  I didn't know since when. That was the honest answer. The energy had bled out so gradually I'd never noticed it leaving.

  My lower back ached. It always ached, and I carried it the way I carried the vibration in the floor and the smell of oil. Just another piece of background noise that had fused with my body.

  Sarah's birthday had been last month. Fourteen. I'd called, talked maybe ten minutes before she had to leave for soccer practice. She sounded good, happy. Rachel had moved them to Colorado three years ago when she remarried. David seemed decent. He had a good job and a big house with a yard. The kind of stability I'd never managed to build.

  I got two weeks in summer and alternating holidays, that was the agreement. I'd thought about fighting for more, then looked at what I'd be fighting with: a studio apartment, a graveyard shift, a father who showed up in theory but wasn't really there in practice.

  Better to let them have the life I couldn't give them. That's what I told myself, generous framing for a man who was mostly just too tired to try.

  Michael had sent me a drawing last week. Eleven and still drawing pictures for his dad. A house and a big sun, stick figures holding hands. I'd stuck it on the fridge with a magnet, the only thing on there.

  I should visit more, should make the drive on my days off instead of sleeping through them. I should be more than a voice on the phone and a signature on a birthday card.

  The divorce hadn't been anyone's fault. Rachel and I had just… thinned out. Two people who stopped reaching for each other until the space between us hardened into something permanent. She'd cried when I signed the papers. I hadn't. Whatever I felt couldn't find its way to the surface anymore.

  The clock on the far wall read 2:47 AM. Four hours and thirteen minutes left. Then back to the apartment to sleep, and come back to do it again.

  Grab. Scan. Sort.

  I wasn't unhappy. That would have required feeling something.

  I was just empty.

  The break room smelled like burnt coffee and reheated meals. The microwave had a brown stain inside that predated my employment. Nobody cleaned it and nobody would. Two fluorescent lights buzzed overhead with a thin electrical whine that could crawl into your skull if you paid attention.

  I didn't.

  I pulled my lunch bag from the fridge. Brown paper with my name written in black Sharpie. The bag had gone soft from reuse, corners creased, fold line worn smooth. Inside was a turkey sandwich on white bread. The cheap turkey, pressed and formed, more water than meat. The bread was slightly stale. I couldn't remember making it. Couldn't remember if I'd considered adding anything else.

  My table was in the corner. I sat with my back to the wall, unwrapped the sandwich and took a bite. Chewed, swallowed. Fuel.

  Two guys at another table talked about something, their voices rose and fell, punctuated by laughter. The sound reached me the way light reaches the bottom of a lake. Filtered and distant.

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  "You got kids?"

  Tommy again. Standing there with his own lunch bag, hovering the way people hover when they haven't been invited but plan to sit down anyway.

  He sat down.

  "Two," I said. "Fourteen and eleven. Sarah and Michael."

  "That's cool." He pulled out a sandwich that looked like someone had actually made it. Real meat, lettuce, tomato, and care pressed between the bread. "You see them much?"

  "They're in Colorado with their mom." I lifted one shoulder. "Long drive."

  "Man, that's tough." He nodded like he understood, and maybe he did. "My parents split when I was eight. Dad moved to Texas. Saw him twice a year."

  I looked at him then. Really looked. A kid trying to make a connection across a break room table with a man who'd forgotten how connections worked.

  "You ever think about moving closer?" he asked.

  I had. Looked up jobs in Denver. Started a few applications. Then the follow-up emails sat in my inbox and the phone calls went unreturned and the whole prospect of starting over in a new city and a new job, collapsed under its own weight. It all required energy and energy was the one resource I'd completely run out of.

  "Sometimes," I said. "I Haven't figured it out yet."

  Tommy nodded. "My dad used to say that too." He took a bite. Chewed. "He never did. Still in Texas."

  I didn't have words for that. So I ate my sandwich. The clock on the wall ticked. Each second landing with a click.

  "You ever think about doing something else?" Tommy asked. "Like, anything besides this?"

  I saw myself eleven years ago. Same hope. Same quiet certainty that the right door was just one more try away.

  "No," I said. "Eventually you stop thinking about it."

  His face tightened. He nodded, took another bite, and we sat in silence for half a minute. Then he muttered something about the bathroom and moved to another table where voices were louder.

  I finished the sandwich in steady bites. Drank lukewarm water from a plastic bottle that tasted like plastic. Stood. Tossed the bag in the trash. Walked back toward the warehouse floor.

  The mechanical hum was waiting for me. Constant and familiar as a heartbeat.

  Four more hours.

  The grinding started around six.

  I noticed it the way you notice a tooth beginning to ache. Easy to ignore until it isn't. A conveyor belt two stations over had gone rough. Metal on metal. A scraping whine that cut through the drone and climbed.

  Heads turned. Someone shouted. The belt stuttered, stopped. Boxes piled up behind the jam, cardboard stacking into a swaying tower.

  "Shit. Belt's jammed again."

  "Call maintenance."

  I glanced at the clock. 6:32 AM. Twenty-eight minutes left. Maintenance wouldn't show for hours. They never did.

  But the boxes were piling. Production was stopped.

  I walked over.

  The jam was obvious: a box caught in the mechanism at an angle the belt couldn't muscle through. Cardboard crushed and torn where gears had tried to eat it. Simple problem. Reach in, pull it free, belt moves again. It would take ten seconds, tops.

  The safety guard was propped open.

  It was supposed to be a metal cage. Something that kept hands out of moving parts. Somebody had wedged a piece of wood under it months ago. Maybe longer. Everyone knew. Management knew. Nobody cared. Proper shutdown took time. Time cost money. The piece of wood was faster.

  I'd fixed jams this way a hundred times.

  I reached in. Metal warm from friction, slick with oil. Fingers found the crushed edge of cardboard. I pulled.

  Didn't move. Wedged tight.

  I shifted my grip and pulled harder. The box gave a fraction. Almost free.

  Behind me: "Be careful, man."

  I pulled again. Another inch.

  The piece of wood slipped.

  The guard dropped. The belt's automatic restart kicked in, someone hit reset, or it was on a timer. Didn't matter.

  The mechanism engaged.

  The gears moved.

  My arm was still inside.

  The pain was instant and total. I heard the crunch before my brain could name it. Bone, then the wet tearing that followed. My vision whited out, came back red, started going dark at the edges.

  I tried to scream. No air. No sound. Just the machinery doing what it was built to do.

  Voices. Multiple. Shouting. Muffled.

  The belt stopped.

  Too late.

  I fell backward, or was pulled, everything tilting, rolling. Fluorescent lights blazed overhead. Forty-seven of them. Eight burnt out. I could see them from here, flat on my back on the concrete.

  I couldn't feel my arm.

  Then I could. All of it. Too much of it at once. Pain that was alive and chewing outward.

  Blood spread across the concrete. Dark. Catching the light.

  Faces above me. Tommy. Others. Mouths moving. I couldn't hear them. Just a high ringing and my own heartbeat running too fast.

  Something pressed against my ruined arm. The pain spiked and I tried to scream again and still couldn't.

  My vision narrowed. Tunnel. Just the lights. Just the blood.

  This is stupid, I thought. This is such a stupid way to die.

  Sarah. Michael. I should call them. Say something. I should've driven out more. Tried harder. Been more…

  The lights flickered.

  Went dark.

  Cold.

  That was first. Cold that went past skin, past muscle, into the marrow of my bones. Rain hammering down on bare skin. I gasped, dragged air into lungs that shouldn't work, and choked on water.

  My eyes opened.

  Gray sky. Rain in sheets. Clouds that churned.

  I tried to sit up. Slipped. Went down face-first into wet earth that smelled of smoke and something worse underneath. Something rotting.

  I pushed up again, slower. Hands sinking into mud. Red-brown. Slick.

  Blood. I was kneeling in blood.

  My arm. The machine had crushed my arm. I looked down, bracing for mangled flesh, for the pain to come roaring back.

  My arm was whole.

  Intact. I flexed my fingers. They obeyed. No injury. No scar. No pain.

  What the fuck.

  I was naked. Bare skin coated in mud and blood that wasn't mine. Rain washed some of it away without making a dent in the rest.

  I forced myself to look around.

  Bodies.

  Dozens. Men in armor, metal plates over leather, designs I'd never seen. They'd been killed hard. Hacked apart with blades and axes that had torn through steel and flesh with terrifying efficiency.

  One man near me was missing half his face. Another had been opened from shoulder to hip, everything inside him spilled into the mud. A third lay on his back with his eyes open, rain filling the sockets.

  I gagged. Tried to vomit. Nothing came up. My stomach was empty. Just bile that burned my throat.

  The smell was worse when I stopped moving. Blood. Smoke. The sharp stink of bodies voiding at the end. I'd known that happened in theory. Theory and three feet away are different things.

  I stood. Slipped. Caught myself. The ground was churned sludge. Mud and corpses and black columns of smoke in the distance.

  No buildings. No roads. No power lines. No cell towers. Nothing from my world. Just rolling hills and bodies and rain.

  I died on the warehouse floor. I remembered the pain stopping. The lights going dark.

  So where the hell was I?

  A shout cut through the rain. Words I didn't understand. Harsh, guttural, not any language I'd ever heard.

  A rider emerged from the gray. Armored. Helmet with a soaked horsehair crest hanging limp. The horse was massive, dark, steaming in the cold. The rider's spear was long and wicked, the point crusted with old blood.

  He saw me and shouted again.

  I ran.

  Barefoot, naked, slipping through blood-slick mud. My foot hit something soft, a body, and I nearly went down. Kept moving.

  Hooves behind me. Unhurried. The rider had nowhere to be. I had nowhere to go.

  I tripped. Foot caught on something, armor, a weapon, a limb, and I hit the ground hard. Before I could get up, a hand fisted in my hair and yanked. Pain flared across my scalp. I swung. My fist hit armor plate and the impact shot up through my wrist like I'd punched a wall.

  The rider backhanded me. Armored glove. Casual. My vision flashed white and I tasted blood.

  I fell. The mud caught me.

  More hands. Rough. I was dragged through the muck, head ringing, everything tilting and smeared. Voices in that same language, shouting commands I couldn't grab a single meaning from.

  I was thrown into a heap with other bodies. Living ones. Men. Dazed, injured, terrified. Prisoners huddled in mud and rain.

  Rope snapped around my wrists, cinched tight enough to bite. I tried to speak. "Where am I? Does anyone speak English?". And a soldier with a scarred face shoved me forward. The rope cut deeper.

  We started marching.

  Around me, prisoners shuffled in a daze. Some bled from wounds. Some limped. Some cradled broken arms. Others had eyes too wide and breathing too fast. The same blind confusion I felt.

  I tried to catch someone's gaze. Tried to find recognition. Most looked straight through me. All of us were strangers in a place none of us understood.

  The rain kept falling, the soldiers kept shouting and we kept walking. My feet went numb. My hands went numb. The cold and the fear were the only things still sharp.

  I died in a factory in Ohio.

  And I woke up in hell.