Jonas threw his and Clara’s luggage into the back of their Toyota 4Runner, his phone pressed to his ear.

“…Well, if there’s anybody who needs a quick getaway, it’s you, my friend,” said Mike, his voice cheerful on the other end.

Jonas exhaled. “I do, and I’m looking forward to it. But honestly? I’d be content staying here—doing nothing. Just sleeping. I’m that exhausted. But it’s really all for her. We barely see each other anymore. We’re drifting apart.”

His hand brushed against the small pocket in his suitcase. The engagement ring lay nestled inside. He thumbed it, feeling the weight of everything: debt, work, fleeting time. If he lost Clara, he lost everything. “Yes… I have to do this,” he muttered, voice barely above a whisper.

Mike chuckled. “Good. I can’t wait to hear how it goes. You’ve got this.”

Jonas slid into the driver’s seat, Clara beside him. Before they moved, he asked, “You sure you’ve got everything?”

She glanced around the car: phone, laptop, lipstick, hair clip tucked into the cup holder. “Got everything, babe.”

He set up navigation on his phone, then eased the car into gridlocked traffic. Clara peered at his screen. “Try a different route. Maybe these side streets will be faster.”

“I’ve got a quicker exit,” Jonas said, confident. “Trust me, we’ll get past this.”

The detour took them onto streets Jonas didn’t recognize. Every turn, the navigation recalculated, glitching. They passed unfamiliar desert flats, rusted fences, and a horizon that didn’t change.

“Babe, your phone can’t keep up. Just stay on one street!” Clara urged.

“I’ve got it. South should get us where we need to be,” Jonas insisted, though unease prickled at him.

Eventually, the road led them to the outskirts of town. His phone froze completely. Jonas pulled off to the shoulder and restarted it, while Clara fiddled with hers.

Her finger hovered over the screen. A message from her mom popped up: “Where are you? Everything okay?” She tapped a reply, but when she tried to send, her contacts flickered—her mom’s name vanished.

Jonas glanced back at the trunk. “Funny… I could’ve sworn you packed your laptop.”

Clara turned. Her laptop, which had been in plain sight, was gone. Even the lipstick she’d left on the console had vanished for moment.

“What…?” she whispered, checking her phone again. The text to her mom had disappeared. Gone.

Jonas’s stomach sank. “We didn’t turn… we drove straight.”

Her eyes flicked to the side of the road, and there it was: a rusty, broken sign listing nearby towns, faint red blemishes smeared across it like dried blood. They’d passed it before. And yet… there it was again, almost exactly the same.

Clara’s voice trembled. “We’ve come full circle. How is that even possible?”

Jonas’s throat tightened. “I don’t know.” He glanced back at the backseat again—her laptop gone, her lipstick gone. Everything they thought they had with them was slipping away.

Clara stared at her phone, searching for her mom’s number. “It’s… it’s gone,” she said, dread curling in her chest. “I… I can’t even call her.”

A low, eerie silence settled over the car, broken only by the faint hum of the engine. The horizon stretched endlessly, the same desolate desert, the same impossible loop of signs and sand. Jonas felt the first real twinge of panic. Something was very, very wrong.

And The Red Mile was just beginning to show its teeth.

Jonas drummed his fingers against the steering wheel, the steady rhythm nearly lost beneath the hum of the engine. Beside him, Clara leaned back in her seat with her boots crossed, and a perplexed look on her face.

“Feels like we’ve been on this stretch forever,” she said, watching the barren dry wasteland radiating over the distant heat waves. “Not a single sign. Just red dust and sky.”

Jonas chuckled. “I’m sure we’re this is the way. We’ll get there. Trust me.”

Her laugh was brief and sarcastic—the kind of laugh that combined her bratty attitude and her utter lack of his confidence. She kept quiet but there was something telling her that they were more than lost. Her instinct was screaming at her that there was something very wrong. But then, with a sound like paper tearing in her mind, something shifted, and told her to look down at the floorboard. Clara’s purse—resting by her feet—simply wasn’t there anymore. One blink, and it had vanished.

“Uh…” She sat forward, patting the floor. “Jonas, did you—?”

He frowned. “I didn’t touch anything.”

“Then where the hell is my purse?”

Silence stretched across the dashboard. The road ahead wound on in its perfect, endless line of cracked red asphalt. Jonas gripped the wheel tighter as he told her he had no idea what happened to her purse and to check the backseat. As she glanced back, she noticed she couldn’t see the tips of her bright pink luggage poking out from above the back seat.

“Babe, WTF! Not only is my purse and laptop gone, but so is my luggage!” She desperately yelled as Jonas remained silent. It wasn’t as if he didn’t believe her, he merely feared what it meant if she were correct. He was scared of the unknown that it might mean.

“Jonas, stop the car and look!” Clara cried.

It took him a moment to register her panic, but he finally slowed and eased the 4Runner onto the shoulder. When he glanced into the rearview mirror, his breath caught. There was nothing behind them. Not road, not desert, not even dust. Just a blank, infinite void.

He scrambled out of the car, blinking hard as if his eyes might clear the illusion—but the same sight confronted him in every direction: a red road unraveling forward into forever, and behind them, only emptiness.

Heart hammering, Jonas rushed to the trunk. A small, stupid hope flared—maybe the luggage was still there. Maybe this was all some trick of the mind. But when he lifted it open, the sight hollowed him out: nothing. The bags, the clothes, Clara’s laptop—all gone.

“Is it there?” Clara called, voice desperate.

Jonas couldn’t speak.

She bolted from the passenger seat, tears streaking her cheeks, and saw the void herself. “No,” she whispered, shaking her head, “No, no, no…” Her luggage was gone too.

They stood together in the furnace heat, staring both ways down the endless scarlet road. No birds. No cars. No wind. Just silence, heavy and suffocating.

Jonas eventually stumbled back to the driver’s seat and sat, palms pressed against the wheel. His thoughts tangled and broke apart with every attempt at logic. Clara slid in beside him, sobbing quietly. He forced the car into drive. Tires crunched, the odometer ticked forward. Another mile. Then another. And then—impossibly—they passed the same broken sign again: THE RED MILE.

Jonas jerked the wheel, skidding them into a U-turn. “We go back,” he muttered. “We go back the other way.”

Clara squeezed her eyes shut and whispered like a prayer: “Keep driving. Just keep driving.”

But the road kept taking.

First their luggage. Then their phones. Then Clara’s lipstick, her hair clip, the purse she had sworn was at her feet. Jonas reached toward his chest for reassurance—where his pacemaker should’ve been. Nothing.

His blood turned to ice. He knew instantly what it meant.

When Jonas was twenty-five, a viral infection had scarred his heart tissue, leaving him prone to arrhythmias. Without the pacemaker, his heartbeat had never been steady enough to sustain him. The tiny device had been his lifeline for decades. Without it, each thud of his heart was ungoverned chaos.

And now it was gone.

He felt it in the tremor of his hands, in the shortness of his breath. The irregular stutter of his pulse made the world tilt. His body was unraveling just like their belongings. Each mile demanded something new—at first trivial, now vital.

Another mile. Jonas’s vision blurred. His heart stuttered, skipped, dragged itself forward in a painful rhythm. He gripped the wheel until his knuckles bleached. Then they saw it again. That cursed sign. THE RED MILE. His foot slipped from the gas. The car drifted toward the shoulder.

“Jonas?” Clara sat upright, panic flooding her voice. “Jonas, what’s wrong?”

He tried to answer, but only a ragged murmur came. His head sagged forward onto his chest. And then—nothing. The 4Runner coasted to a stop in the gravel, slowed by thorn bushes and cactus. Clara screamed, shaking him, begging, “No, no, no, please!” But Jonas didn’t stir. His chest was still.

She stumbled out of the car, screaming into the barren sky, the sound swallowed by the heat and dust. When she looked back, Jonas’s body was gone. The driver’s seat was empty. She climbed inside and reaches for her phone that wasn’t there to call 911. But even if she had her phone, she doesn’t know what she would even say. There was no explanation for what was going on.

The feeling of impending doom was all around her as if doom itself was replacing Jonas and all of their things. All she could think to do is drive and she did, until the car ran out of gas. It didn’t matter anyway, all she did is drive in circles too, like before. Her sobs broke into ragged gasps as her trembling hands gripped the leather steering wheel.

She got out of the car and looked back. All that remained was her. The road. The sign. And the knowledge that each mile would take more, until there was nothing left to give.

When she finally tears the sign down in her hysteria, and when her last scream split the horizon and she clawed the sign from the ground, she realized the awful truth: there was no beginning. There was no end.

The Red Mile always ends the same way.

With nothing and when this strange blood loop revelation lands — the beginning and the end will always be one.

And now too, she is gone.