He was driving the hour he died.
Born to Be Wild was two minutes in, all engine noise and open road, and Danny tapped the wheel with two fingers, glad the shift was finally behind him.
Traffic thickened near Larby, and the queue closed him in behind a red Ford Fiesta, its rear end furred with dried mud. He glanced at his phone on the passenger seat and caught a violet flare across the screen — light from somewhere above, bent through the windscreen. He leaned across to look up.
A liquid-black, triangular shape hung above the traffic three cars ahead, rippling like melting metal through the air. His stomach dropped before his mind caught up with why.
He stamped for the brake, missed, hit the accelerator instead, and slammed forwards into the red Ford ahead of him. The airbag exploded in his face and something in his neck lit up white. He tried to turn it and couldn’t.
‘Fuck.’ The word came out thick, blood already filling his mouth where he’d bitten his tongue.
Engines revved hard in every direction at once. Cars further up were turning on the carriageway, mounting the verge, reversing into each other in the scramble.
Every driver on the carriageway was doing precisely what he’d done a moment earlier, running from the thing above them into the cars around them. The shape hadn’t touched a single vehicle. The traffic was doing all the damage on its own.
Pinpricks swept over his skin as he floated up through the broken glass of the windscreen, as though gravity wasn’t there any more. He went up in a straight line, legs swinging loose beneath him, the crashed traffic shrinking to something a child could have arranged on a carpet.
He rose higher, slowly, and beneath him a column of people lifted off the tarmac — not everyone, Danny registered, only some. A man cradling an arm bent wrong at the elbow. A woman with blood sheeting down one side of her face. Himself, neck locked solid, the world tilting sideways every time he tried to move it. The dark metal shape was working through the wreckage like something reading X-rays.
Something cracked in his neck, the good kind of crack, vertebrae finding their places again, and the pain that had seared his skull for two minutes simply stopped. I can turn my head. He turned it, once, testing.
His neck was whole.
A woman drifted past him, close enough to touch, face wet, moaning a word he couldn’t catch. He saw the blood on her cheek stop moving, saw her eyes flicker in recognition. Beneath her, the road kept falling away, full of people who weren’t floating, the ones who’d only been frightened, left standing where they were, watching.
Fear and wonder sat in Danny’s chest at the same time. Whatever waited inside the opening of the metal triangle’s base, his body was healed before he reached it.
Then the jets came through the clouds.
The shriek arrived before the aircraft did, two of them, low and fast, and the metal triangle above rippled with a new intensity — one hard convulsion through its whole body, the way a hand comes off a hot pan. It didn’t fire. It didn’t turn to fight. It ran, and the beam beneath it cut out mid-breath.
Danny fell from higher than he’d been taken. So did everyone else.
Somewhere below, a radio was still going, the same song near its end now, the singer daring the world to catch him, guns blazing, embracing whatever was coming next. Four notes of it reached Danny before the ground did.