Simon did not understand at first that the shaking was the earthquake.
At the beginning, it felt like the van hitting something it shouldn't have. A hard swerve. The shriek of metal pulled too far in the wrong direction. His shoulder slammed into the side, breath knocked out of him in a short, startled sound.
Then the world refused to settle.
The road pitched beneath them. The van tilted, lurched, and tipped again, as if gravity itself couldn't decide where it belonged. Somewhere up front, someone shouted—a sharp, broken sound that cut off too quickly. The noise around him blurred together: tearing metal, glass bursting outward, a deep sound underneath it all that he felt more than heard.
Then came the impact.
Simon's head struck something hard. Pain flared bright and immediate, then dulled into something distant. The van rolled, once—maybe more. He lost track of direction. Lost track of time. For a moment, there was nothing but pressure and noise and the sense that the world had slipped out from under itself.
And then it stopped.
Silence rushed in where the sound had been, thick and ringing. Dust hung in the air, turning the sunlight a dull, floating gray. Simon lay still, stunned, waiting for something else to happen.
Nothing did.
He became aware of pain in pieces. His wrists burned where the cuffs had cut into him. One leg throbbed badly, deep and persistent. His mouth tasted like metal. When he tried to breathe deeply, his chest protested with a sharp ache.
"Hello?" he said, or thought he did. His voice came out hoarse and small.
No answer.
He shifted, slowly, carefully. The van lay on its side. The front was crushed inward, metal folded like it had been softened by heat. The windshield was gone. So was most of the roof.
The officers didn't move.
Simon stared at them for a long time before understanding what he was seeing. He told himself they were unconscious. He waited for someone to groan, to cough, to swear.
No one did.
The realization settled without drama. Without ceremony. It didn't crash into him—it seeped in, heavy and cold.
He was alive.
Everyone else wasn't.
The thought felt wrong. Not lucky. Not grateful. Just wrong, like a mistake that hadn't been corrected yet.
He managed to pull himself free of the wreckage. His hands shook as he worked the cuffs against twisted metal until one snapped loose. The other followed after several tries. When he stood, his vision swam, and he had to brace himself against the side of the van until the world steadied.
The street around him was unrecognizable.
Cracks split the asphalt in long, jagged lines. A building across the road had partially collapsed, its upper floors sagging inward. Alarms wailed somewhere in the distance—car alarms, security systems, something higher and more urgent layered over them. People shouted. Sirens followed, their sound warped and uneven.
Simon took a step, then another. His leg protested sharply, but it held.
That was when the thought arrived.
Uninvited.
A bright afternoon.
Birds in the air.
Then, the trembling begins.
His stomach twisted.
"No," he muttered, though there was no one close enough to hear him. "No."
It didn't make sense. He had read a story the night before. That was all. A strange one, sure—but stories didn't do this. They didn't break roads open or kill people or leave him standing alone in the wreckage of something he didn't understand.
And yet—
The timing.
The details.
The way the world had moved, not violently, but decisively—exactly as the words had described.
His mind refused to settle on a single emotion. Fear came and went without finishing the job. Grief hovered somewhere distant, unfocused, unable to land. Guilt crept in despite having no clear reason to exist, pressing down on him simply because he was still breathing.
He thought of his relative. The closed door that morning. The way he hadn't knocked. The way he never did.
The connection felt thin. Coincidental. And yet it lingered.
People began to gather at a distance. Someone shouted for help. Another voice yelled that emergency services were on the way. Phones were already out—screens glowing, cameras pointed, messages being sent. Somewhere nearby, a radio crackled with frantic voices.
Simon stood there, dust on his clothes, blood drying along his temple, trying to understand when exactly the day had stopped being normal.
He felt watched.
Not by people. Not even by cameras.
By sequence.
By the quiet alignment of things happening in the wrong order, too neatly, as if the world were following instructions he hadn't seen.
And beneath all of it—beneath the pain, the noise, the confusion—one thought refused to leave him alone:
If this really was a story, then it wouldn't care that he hadn't done anything wrong.
Stories never did.
They only moved forward.