Race You Back to the Car!

It started during rounds.

Sarah had just finished checking the vitals on a post-op detox patient — jaundiced, shivering, refusing to speak — when she noticed the silence. Not the good kind, not the hush of a sleeping ward or the stillness of a storm passed, but the kind that swells, stretching outward like a balloon right before it bursts.

Then the sky cracked.

It was a clean split, like lightning had kissed the clouds and left a seam. And from that seam, hatchets fell.

At first, one or two. Then ten. Then hundreds — raining down with a sharp, terrifying grace. Some embedded themselves in the concrete courtyard outside the clinic. One split the No Smoking sign in half. Another landed clean through the picnic table, lodging itself deep into the faded wood with a twang that echoed like a plucked nerve.

Sarah didn’t move. Her hands, still gloved, hovered over a clipboard. Everyone else? Screaming. Ducking. Praying. One patient collapsed into a fetal position and sobbed.

Then it got weirder.

TWO HOURS LATER

The emergency generator buzzed, casting the main hall in flickering amber. Someone had brought candles. Someone else had started mumbling the Lord’s Prayer but kept getting stuck at “deliver us from evil.”

Sarah sat at the nurses’ station, peeling her gloves off one finger at a time. Her knuckles hurt. Her back hurt. Everything hurt.

Across from her, a woman who had been catatonic for three days was now sitting upright, tracing invisible patterns into the air. She whispered something every time she reached the top of her pattern. A word.

“Margaret.”

Sarah froze. She hadn’t told anyone her middle name. Not in years. The woman looked up, eyes gleaming silver in the dim light.

“You left him,” she said. “Sarah Margaret, you let him drown.”

Sarah stood too fast, bumping the rolling chair into the wall. Her stomach lurched. That voice — how did she sound just like —

“Who told you that?”

The woman only smiled. Her fingers kept dancing.

EARLIER THAT MONTH (or maybe last year? maybe longer?)

Time didn’t work right anymore in the Zone. Not since the storms began. Not since the government declared this a “psychological quarantine area” and then… vanished.

Sarah had stopped trying to measure the days. The people who could still count them were the same ones who wore tinfoil necklaces or spoke only in numbers. It was easier to keep moving, to keep nursing. She wrapped wounds. Managed psychotic breaks. Administered expired meds with a prayer.

And the hatchets? They just kept falling. Not every day. Not in patterns. But always sudden. Always final. Each impact came with a humming note, like a tuning fork buried in the earth. The sound rippled through walls and into bones. And then came the hallucinations.

One man believed his wife returned and brought their unborn daughter in her arms. He sang lullabies into empty air.

A teenager dropped to the floor and clawed at her face, screaming about the rats crawling out of her mouth.

Some people laughed like children. Some curled into themselves and whispered entire symphonies.

Sarah never saw a thing. Not once. The hatchets avoided her. Landed inches away, never close enough to brush her skin. And she never hallucinated — not like the others.

They started calling her The Unstruck.

BACK TO PRESENT

A girl with blood in her teeth had given her that name, giggling as she bled from a head wound. Said the hatchets didn’t touch angels. Or demons. Or ghosts.

Sarah had smiled politely, taped gauze to her scalp, and walked away. But it haunted her. The fact that it was true. Not even a scratch.

She remembered one storm when three hatchets landed around her in a perfect triangle. A fourth hummed inches above her shoulder but didn’t fall. It just hovered in the air, spinning slowly. Then dropped straight down and stuck in the floor. Not touching her.

They were getting closer.

MEMORIES LEAKING

She began hearing her brother’s voice in the quiet. Not in hallucinations. In the pauses between things. Between one patient’s seizure and the next’s confession. In the hum of the generator.

“You always fix things,” he whispered. “Even when you’re broken too.”

She hadn’t thought about him in years. He’d drowned the summer she turned sixteen. The summer she swore she’d become a nurse, because her hands hadn’t been strong enough then.

She remembered doing compressions on wet sand. Screaming for help. Her knees bruised from the rocks. His lips blue. She remembered the silence afterward.

Her parents didn’t blame her.

She blamed herself enough for all of them.

THE SHRINE

A cluster of survivors had built a shrine out of broken IV poles, rosaries, and shattered mirrors. Every time a hatchet fell and someone hallucinated, they added something new.

A button from a jacket. A fingerbone wrapped in thread. A feather dipped in salt. One day, a woman added a photograph of a boy. He looked just like her brother. Sarah stared at it for hours. She didn’t ask questions.

THE EDGE OF THE ZONE

One day, Sarah walked. She left the clinic behind. Left the supply room. The meds. The people clinging to visions of lovers or gods or old sitcom reruns.

She walked past the hatchet field — where blades stood upright like gravestones.

Past the school turned shelter. Past the shrine. Until she reached the edge.

The air shimmered there. The sky was clear. No cracks. No storms. Just a soft orange sun that shouldn’t have been possible. Too warm. Too real.

And standing in the field?

Herself.

Or a version of her. Barefoot. Blood-streaked. Dressed in the same scrubs but glowing at the edges. The other Sarah held a single hatchet. Not falling from the sky. Just waiting.

THE FINAL TRUTH

“I died, didn’t I?” Sarah said softly.

The other Sarah nodded. “Code blue. Cardiac arrest. You went down in the OR.”

“I was trying to save her.”

“You always were.”

She dropped to her knees. The dirt was warm beneath her. The wind tasted like salt.

“My brother— he died when I was — ”

“I know,” the other Sarah said. “And you never forgave yourself.”

“I thought I could save everyone.”

The other Sarah knelt too, placing the hatchet between them.

“You’ve already saved enough.”

Sarah reached out, fingers trembling.

The handle was smooth. Familiar. Worn.

The moment she touched it, the sky began to unpeel. The quarantine zone lifted, pixel by pixel. The hospital dissolved into light. The hallucinations blew away like dust in a strong wind.

And the real Sarah?

She stood.

Whole.

Seen.

Ready.

EPILOGUE

A California beach.
Three teenagers and a dog running toward the surf.
One yelling, “Race you back to the car!”
The tide rolls in.
This time, she doesn’t turn away.
This time, she walks into it.
And the sky doesn’t crack; It sings…

For Sarah —

the first friend I made in Maine,
the wildest kind of special I’ve ever known.
You’ve held my hand through chaos, quarantines, and the actual apocalypse. We survived working through COVID together — real patients, real heartbreak, and yes… real people who wore tinfoil necklaces and spoke exclusively in numbers. (Not a metaphor. Not a drill. Just Monday.)
You’re a nurse in every sacred, stubborn, shining sense of the word. You show up. You love fiercely. You lead with your whole damn heart. This story is for you. For the way you carry others. For the way you forget to carry yourself.
May you always remember to give the same softness, the same loyalty, the same mercy — to you. May you always walk away from what no longer serves you. And may you never forget that the world is better because you are here.

xo, Missy