Cracked Car Windshield

The sun was too bright for June. It felt like a personal insult, hitting the white expanse of the Perimeter Highway and bouncing back with enough force to burn Lucy’s retinas. She squinted through cheap sunglasses, her breath coming in short, jagged puffs that hung in the air.

Underneath her boots, the Wilson tennis rackets creaked. They were a joke—duct tape and nylon strings—but they kept her from sinking waist-deep into the Great Stall. It had been snowing since April. The world had just stopped. No spring, no mud, just a permanent, freezing glitch in the calendar.

Everything in her apartment reminded her of what was gone. Shawn’s half-empty bottle of oat milk had turned into a science project before the power finally cut. His charger cord was still plugged into the wall, a white tail leading to nothing. She missed the way he’d leave the bathroom mirror steamed up. Now, the air was just dry and cold. It felt like the world was being deleted, one person at a time. Shawn had gone out for milk ten weeks ago. He hadn’t come back.

She saw the roof of the Subaru first. It looked like a gray rock poking out of a sea of white. As she got closer, the rackets made a rhythmic, annoying sound. Clack-thump. Clack-thump. Her hip flexors were screaming. She reached the car and started digging with her gloved hands. The snow was light, powdery, and unnaturally dry. It didn’t pack. It just drifted like ash.

She cleared the driver’s side window. The glass wasn't frosted from the inside. That was the first bad sign. If he’d been huddling for warmth, there would be ice. She used the spare key she kept in her bra, her fingers fumbling with the cold metal. The lock turned with a heavy thunk. The door groaned, pushing back a wall of snow as she forced it open.

Shawn wasn’t there.

On the driver’s seat, right where his lower back would have been, was a pile of something that shouldn't exist. It looked like lichen, or maybe moss, but it was glowing. It pulsed with a faint, bioluminescent lime green light. It didn't look organic. It looked like a physical manifestation of a computer error. She reached out, then pulled back. Her stomach did a slow roll. The car smelled like ozone and old coffee.

"Shawn?" she whispered. The word was flat. The snow swallowed the sound instantly.

She looked down at the center console. His phone was there, the screen cracked in a spiderweb pattern. She picked it up. It was freezing, the metal biting into her palm. She pressed the side button, not expecting much. It vibrated. The battery was at four percent. She bypassed the passcode—he always used her birthday—and went straight to the gallery. There was only one new file. A video from April 14th. The day he left.

She hit play. The footage was shaky. It was Shawn’s voice, but he sounded distant, like he was talking underwater. "Lucy, look at the sky. It’s not a storm. It’s... it’s happening." The camera tilted up. The sky in the video wasn't gray or blue. It was a violent, neon green. The clouds looked like they were being rendered by a GPU that was melting. Then, the video cut to static. Not normal static—lines of code that flickered in and out of existence.

"Hey!"

A voice cracked through the silence. Lucy jumped, nearly dropping the phone. Three figures were sliding toward her from the overpass. They weren't on snowshoes; they had long, carbon-fiber skis and wore white camo that made them look like ghosts. They carried jagged poles tipped with sensors. Ice-Stalkers. She’d heard about them on the shortwave radio before the batteries died. Scavengers. Believers.

The lead stalker slid to a stop, his skis throwing up a spray of fine powder. He pulled down a face mask. He was young, maybe twenty, with eyes that looked like they hadn't seen a bed in a week. "Leave it," he said. His voice was minimalist, stripped of any warmth.

"It’s my boyfriend's car," Lucy said, her grip tightening on the phone. "Who are you?"

"Silas," the guy said. He didn't offer a hand. He pointed at the glowing lichen on the seat. "You shouldn't touch the data-rot. It’s sticky."

"The what?" Lucy asked. "This is just... I don't know what this is."

"It’s him," a girl behind Silas said. She had blue hair peeking out from under a fleece cap. "Or what’s left after the upload. The Great Stall isn't weather, girl. It's a server migration. We’re the files that didn't move."

Lucy felt a cold spike of irony hit her. "You’re saying my boyfriend was uploaded into the frost? That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. It’s June. It’s just cold."

Silas shrugged. "Believe what you want. But the radio doesn't lie."

He reached into the car and turned the volume knob on the dash. The Subaru was dead, but as soon as his fingers touched the plastic, the display flickered to life. There was no station number. Just a series of shifting symbols. A sound started bleeding out of the speakers—a low, rhythmic churning. Then, a voice. It was Shawn. Lucy’s heart hit her ribs. But it was wrong. He was speaking in reverse, the syllables clipped and metallic.

"...em... oh... llee... hhh..."

"Shawn?" Lucy leaned in, her forehead touching the steering wheel.

"He’s trying to sync," the girl with blue hair said. "But the signal is weak this far from the hub. They’re all up there, or in there. Somewhere else."

Lucy ignored them. She felt a frantic need to find something real. Not ghosts in the radio. Not data-rot. Something physical. She started clawing at the glove box, then the side pockets. Her hand hit a seam in the padded dashboard, right above the air vent. It felt loose. She jammed her fingernails into the gap and pulled. A small plastic panel popped off.

Inside was a folded piece of paper. It wasn't a digital printout. It was hand-drawn on a napkin from the diner where they used to get breakfast. It was a map. There were landmarks she recognized—the old grain elevator, the bend in the Red River—but the destination was marked with a sun symbol. Written underneath in Shawn’s messy handwriting were three words: Where it’s summer.

"What’s that?" Silas asked, stepping closer. His shadow fell over her, long and thin in the fading afternoon light.

Lucy shoved the napkin into her pocket. "Nothing."

"The signal is getting louder," the girl said, looking at her sensor pole. The lights on it were flashing red. "We need to move. The frost is hunting for more bandwidth."

Lucy looked at the glowing lichen on the seat. It seemed to pulse in time with the reverse whispering coming from the speakers. She felt a weird, disconnected sense of grief. The Shawn who liked overpriced sneakers and hated the ending of every movie they watched was gone. But the Shawn who drew maps on napkins was still out there. Or he was the map.

"I'm going to find him," Lucy said. She didn't say it to them. She said it to the car.

"You’ll freeze before the first mile," Silas said. He sounded bored, like he’d said this to a dozen other people. "The summer is a myth. It’s just a high-res rendering of the past."

"Then I'll live in the rendering," Lucy snapped. She stepped back from the car, the tennis rackets sinking slightly. The radio voice grew more frantic, a glitchy loop of Shawn’s voice that sounded like a sob played backward.

She turned away from the Ice-Stalkers. The sun was dipping below the horizon, casting long, violet shadows across the highway. The silence of the world was heavy, broken only by the wind whistling through the abandoned cars. She had the phone, she had the map, and she had the rackets. It was a shitty inventory for an apocalypse, but it was all she had.

She started walking. Every step was a struggle, her muscles burning, her skin feeling tight and dry. She thought about the oats milk in the fridge. She thought about the way the light used to look in their bedroom at 4:00 PM. Those things were missing now. The world was full of holes. She just had to find the one that led back to the sun.

Behind her, the Subaru’s headlights suddenly flashed once, twice, then went dark. The glowing lichen in the driver's seat flared with a brilliant, blinding light before fading into the gray upholstery. The Ice-Stalkers were already gone, vanished into the white like they’d never been there at all. Lucy didn't look back. She kept her eyes on the grain elevator in the distance, a dark finger pointing at a sky that was slowly, terrifyingly, beginning to turn green.

Her breath caught in her throat. She felt a vibration in her pocket. It was Shawn’s phone. It shouldn't have had any battery left. It shouldn't have been able to receive a text. But the screen lit up against her thigh, burning through the denim of her jeans. She pulled it out.

A single message was on the screen, the sender's name missing.

Keep walking, Luce. The frame rate is better in the valley.

She stopped. Her heart was a drum in her ears. She looked at the map, then at the greening sky. The air felt different now—less like cold wind and more like a static charge. She touched her face. Her skin felt slightly pixelated, a buzzing sensation under her fingertips. She wasn't sure if she was still breathing air or just inhaling code.

She looked down at the snow. Where her tennis rackets had pressed into the drifts, the impressions weren't white. They were glowing with that same lime-green light. She was leaving a trail of data. She wasn't just a girl on a highway anymore. She was a sequence.

The reflection of the green sky caught in a piece of broken glass on the road. For a second, she saw herself. Her eyes looked like emeralds. Her hair looked like spun wire. She looked like something that belonged in a world that hadn't ended, but had simply changed its format.

She took another step. Then another. The highway stretched out forever, a long, white bridge to a place that might not exist. But as long as the map was in her pocket and the voice was in her head, she wasn't alone. She was just lagging. And eventually, every glitch finds its resolution.