The light turned green and I followed the cars through. Two lanes ran in opposite directions, a string of strip malls on either side. Franchise shops found in every town, spreading like a virus. Billions served into ubiquity. But this familiar scene was now cast in a sinister light. A series of cheesy façades camouflaging the interconnected hell dens where innocent people were taken and subjected to unexplainable terrors. My world had irrevocably changed and I didn’t know how I could possibly acclimate to this new reality. There is no end to our veils of innocence, and life gets worse as each one falls away.

Two miles farther down the road and I saw a sign for I-85, a highway that I knew would lead me home. Took the on ramp and found my bearings after a few exits. I was near Macon, about sixty miles outside Atlanta. There’s nothing in these parts, which made them perfect for this psycho’s sadistic tricks. Assuming I had been out here the whole time. Could be they drove me out here while I was passed out to cover their tracks. Either way, it didn’t matter. I’d be home in an hour and could start the process of finding out who had done this and how. Which would be tricky, as I had no evidence aside from the condition of my face. My first call would be to Solomon. Why he would recommend this book in the first place made no sense to me. Why he’d subject me to this.

Mile markers flashed by as I considered my next steps. Step one would be to appease Cassie, which would be no easy task. She had almost certainly wandered past worried into the realm of pissed off. My eighty-proof breath fumes wouldn’t help my case much. It would almost be easier to tell a lie than it would the truth. Just say I relapsed and went on a bender. Once in seven years wasn’t too bad, and it wouldn’t happen again. Write this whole sordid episode off the ledger of my life and move on. Lock the trauma away and lose the key, which was how I’d traditionally dealt with such things. Not that there’s a model for how to handle what I’d just been through. No word for the type of PTSD certain to plague my future. And to think of the other unfortunate souls going through their own version of this right now. We live in a psychotic world and the only way out is death. Jesus, the car reeked of blood.