I woke up that morning with a lightness in my chest I'd never felt before. The Alaskan air filtered through our hotel window, crisp and clean, carrying with it the promise of adventure. Olivia—my wife, I kept reminding myself with a grin—lay sleeping beside me, her dark hair splayed across the pillow.
"Hey," I whispered, gently shaking her shoulder. "Wake up. I don't want us to be late for our own honeymoon."
She groaned and pulled the blanket over her head, but I was already up, energized by the excitement of the journey ahead. We were going to drive across the continent—through the vast, untamed wilderness of Canada, all the way to New York City. It was ambitious, maybe even crazy, but that's what made it perfect.
I showered, dressed, and made a quick breakfast—scrambled eggs, toast, nothing fancy. By the time I'd finished, she emerged from the bedroom in a rush, dragging her suitcase behind her, her hair still damp from her own hurried shower.
"Come on, Clyde," she said with that teasing smile of hers. "I thought you didn't want to be late."
We loaded up the car and pulled onto the empty highway as the sun climbed higher, turning the barren Alaskan landscape into shades of gold and amber. The road stretched endlessly before us, flanked by nothing but tundra and sky.
About an hour into the drive, Olivia turned to me with a curious smile. "So where are we supposed to be going right now?"
I'm not sure I've ever hit the brakes that hard while going sixty miles an hour. The car lurched, and I whipped around to stare at her.
"What did you even pack if you don't even know where we're going?" I asked, incredulous.
She burst out laughing, that full-bodied laugh that had made me fall in love with her in the first place. Then she just shrugged and settled back into silence, content to let the landscape roll by.
As we neared the Canadian border, I finally explained the plan—the route we'd take, the stops we'd make, the sheer distance we had to cover. "We're crossing almost the entirety of Canada," I told her. "It's going to take days, but it'll be worth it."
She nodded, her eyes bright with excitement, and I felt that rush of joy again. This was it. This was our beginning.
We were somewhere in the Yukon when we approached a crossroads. The main highway continued east, well-paved and clearly marked. But there was another option—a smaller, rougher road that cut northeast through the wilderness.
"Take that one," Olivia said suddenly, pointing to the offroad path.
I glanced at her skeptically. "You sure? That doesn't look like much of a road."
"It's shorter," she insisted. "My boss uses this route all the time when he drives from Alaska to the mainland instead of flying. Trust me."
I did trust her. But there was something about the way she said it—casual, confident, with that military precision she'd never quite shaken—that gave me pause. She'd served for six years before we met, and while I admired her for it, I also knew she had a tendency to underestimate danger.
Still, I wanted to make her happy. I wanted this trip to be perfect.
I turned onto the narrow path.
"Alright," I said. "But if we end up stuck in the middle of nowhere, you're explaining it to the tow truck driver."
She grinned and pulled out her phone, scrolling through playlists until she found one. Eminem's sharp, staccato verses filled the car, and we settled into an easy rhythm.
"Seriously?" I said after a few songs. "Eminem?"
"What's wrong with Eminem?"
"Nothing, if you're stuck in 2002."
She rolled her eyes and switched to Billie Eilish. The mood shifted—darker, more atmospheric. We argued good-naturedly about which artist was better, our voices rising and falling with the music as the car bounced along the uneven road.
The wilderness around us grew denser, the trees closing in on either side. It was beautiful in a wild, untamed way.
That's when Olivia gasped and grabbed my arm. "Clyde, stop the car!"
I hit the brakes, confused. "What? What's wrong?"
"Look!" She pointed out the window, her face lit up with childlike wonder.
Beyond a wrought-iron fence that ran alongside the road, a field of daffodils stretched as far as the eye could see. Thousands of them, maybe millions, their yellow heads bobbing in the breeze like a golden ocean. The sight was surreal—impossible, even—this far north, but there they were, defying logic and geography.
"Oh my God," Olivia breathed. "Clyde, we have to go see them. Please?"
I looked at the fence—old, ornate, with sharp decorative spikes along the top—and then at her face, so full of excitement and joy that I couldn't say no.
"Alright," I said, pulling the car over. "But if we get arrested for trespassing, you're explaining that to the cops too."
She was already out of the car, running toward the fence. I followed, laughing at her enthusiasm. The fence was about chest-high, and the spikes at the top were purely decorative—wrought iron shaped into fleur-de-lis patterns. Old-fashioned, but not particularly dangerous if you were careful.
Olivia hopped over first, nimble as ever, her military training showing. She landed on the other side and immediately spun around, her arms spread wide. "Come on, slow poke!"
I climbed over more carefully, mindful of the spikes, and dropped down beside her. The moment my feet hit the ground, she grabbed my hands and pulled me into the field.
The daffodils surrounded us, an impossible sea of yellow and white. The air smelled sweet, almost overwhelming, and the only sound was the wind rustling through the flowers and Olivia's laughter as she spun in circles.
"This is perfect," she said, her eyes shining. "This is absolutely perfect, Clyde."
I pulled her close, wrapping my arms around her waist. "Yeah," I said softly. "It really is."
She looked up at me, and for a moment, the world narrowed to just the two of us. Her smile, her eyes, the warmth of her body against mine. I leaned down to kiss her—
And then I heard it.
A sound like distant thunder, but wrong. Too sharp. Too sudden.
I turned my head toward the source, my military wife already tensing beside me, her body going rigid with recognition. "Clyde—"
The shockwave hit before she could finish.
It came from somewhere far down the road, but it was massive—the kind of explosion that could level buildings. The pressure wave rolled across the field like an invisible tsunami, flattening the daffodils in its path.
And then I heard the screech of metal.
The fence.
Time seemed to slow as I watched the ornate wrought-iron barrier tear free from its posts. The decorative spikes—those beautiful, harmless fleur-de-lis patterns—transformed into something deadly as the entire fence lifted into the air, spinning like a massive blade.
"OLIVIA, GET DOWN!"
But there was nowhere to go. No time to run. The fence was already there, moving impossibly fast, those ornamental spikes catching the sunlight as they spun toward us.
I tried to pull her down, tried to shield her, but the fence hit us like a scythe through wheat.
I felt the impact—a searing, tearing sensation across my shoulder and arm. Pain exploded through my body, white-hot and all-consuming. But that pain was nothing compared to what I saw next.
Olivia.
The fence had caught her full-on. The spikes had torn through her body at three points—her neck, her waist, her legs—and as the metal passed through and beyond us, as momentum and physics did their terrible work, she—
She came apart.
Three pieces.
My mind refused to accept it. Refused to process what my eyes were seeing. This couldn't be real. This couldn't be happening. Not to her. Not to my Olivia.
I tried to scream, but no sound came out. I was on my knees in the daffodils, which were no longer golden but red, so red, painted with arterial spray that fountained from where her neck had been severed.
The fence had done its terrible work with surgical precision. Her body—bodies—lay scattered across the flowers like some grotesque parody of a sacrifice. The top section, from her shoulders to her neck, had fallen forward, her face pressed into the daffodils as if she'd simply decided to smell them. Blood pooled around her head, soaking into the earth, turning the yellow petals crimson.
Her midsection—her torso—had collapsed backward, and I watched in numb horror as her organs spilled out like toys from a broken box. Intestines uncoiled across the ground in gray-pink ropes. Her liver, dark and glistening, slid free and landed with a wet thump. Her stomach, punctured by the impact, released its contents in a sickening rush.
The lower half of her body, her legs still bent as if she were kneeling, had toppled to the side, twitching with residual nerve impulses that made it look like she was still trying to run, still trying to escape what had already happened.
"Olivia... Olivia..." Her name was all I could say, over and over, a broken record of denial and despair.
Blood was everywhere. It sprayed from the severed arteries in pulsing jets that gradually weakened and stopped. It pooled in the depressions between the daffodils. It soaked into my jeans where I knelt.Her heart fell out like a stray ball. It painted the world in shades of red that would never wash away from my memory.
The smell hit me then—copper and iron and something worse, something primal and wrong. The smell of death. The smell of the inside of a human body exposed to open air.
I reached out with my good arm, my other hanging useless and bleeding at my side, and touched her face—the only part of her that still looked like Olivia. Her skin was already cooling. Her eyes were open, staring at nothing, seeing nothing. The light that had been there just seconds ago, the joy and wonder and love, was gone.
Snuffed out.
Erased.
As if she'd never existed at all.
"I'm sorry," I whispered, my voice cracking. "I'm so sorry. I should have—I should have—"
But what? What should I have done? Not stopped? Not let her see the flowers? Not taken this road? Not married her in the first place so she wouldn't be here, dying in a field in the middle of nowhere because I'd wanted to make her happy?
The pain in my shoulder was starting to register now, sharp and insistent, competing with the agony in my chest. I looked down and saw bone. White and gleaming, protruding from the torn meat of my arm. Blood ran down my side in steady streams. Too much blood. Too fast.
I was dying too.
The thought should have terrified me, but instead I felt only relief. I didn't want to live with this. Didn't want to carry this memory. Didn't want to exist in a world where Olivia had been torn into three pieces in a field of daffodils.
The world was starting to fade now, graying at the edges like an old photograph. I slumped forward, my face landing in the flowers next to hers, our blood mingling in the soil.
At least I'll die with her, I thought. At least I won't be alone.
Then I heard it.
Another rumble. Distant but growing closer. A second shockwave, maybe from a secondary explosion, maybe from whatever hell had been unleashed down that road.
I tried to lift my head, tried to move, but my body wouldn't respond anymore. I could only lie there, watching the daffodils tremble as the sound grew louder, closer, more insistent.
The shockwave hit like the hammer of an angry god.
I felt my ribs crack, felt them punch inward into my lungs. Felt something rupture deep inside my chest. Blood filled my mouth, hot and thick and choking.
My last breath came out as a wet gurgle.
My last thought was of her laugh. The way it had sounded in the car, light and free and full of life.
Then nothing.
Just darkness.
Just the end.
The daffodils continued to sway in the wind, now painted red, indifferent to the tragedy that had unfolded in their midst. Two bodies lay broken among them, a man and his wife, their honeymoon cut brutally short.
And somewhere, beyond the veil of death, beyond the reach of understanding, a clock reset.
Preparing to tick again.