Chapter 5: The Sunflower Container

Chapter 5: The Sunflower Container

The world outside the car window was a meaningless smear of sodium orange and midnight blue. Streetlights bled into one another, their halos blurring in the rain-slicked glass. Alex sat in the back seat, a passenger in a nightmare, his body cold and distant. The worn fabric of the seat, the low rumble of the engine, the rhythmic thump-thump of the windshield wipers—it all felt like a recording of a life being played back to him from a great distance.

Up front, Wallace drove with a calm, focused intensity, his hands steady on the wheel. He navigated the deserted late-night streets of the city with an unnerving purpose, as if following a map only he could see. Dan sat in the passenger seat, his usual boisterous energy gone, replaced by a tense, somber silence. He stared out his own window, the city lights reflecting in his eyes, making them look like dark, empty pools.

No one spoke. The silence was a living thing, thick with the impossible revelations that had shattered the air in Wallace’s grimy living room. We are not human. You are one of us. You’ve just forgotten. The words echoed in the hollow space where Alex’s identity used to be. He wasn’t fighting anymore. He wasn't screaming or crying. He was simply… adrift. A profound, hollow exhaustion had settled deep in his bones. Part of him, the rational part that was now a tiny, screaming voice in a vast wilderness, prayed this was an elaborate kidnapping, a prelude to a ransom demand, anything that belonged to the world of men and money. But the larger part of him knew, with a certainty that defied logic, that he was being taken to his own funeral.

The car turned off the main road, the smooth asphalt giving way to cracked, weed-choked pavement. They were in the industrial outskirts of the city, a place of skeletal factories and sleeping giants of rusted metal. The landscape was a graveyard of ambition, ruled by high chain-link fences topped with coils of barbed wire that glinted like thorns in the moonlight.

Wallace pulled up to a gate, the beams of the headlights cutting a sharp path through the darkness. He killed the engine, and the sudden silence was deafening. He got out, produced a heavy key, and unlocked a massive padlock. The gate swung open with a groan of protest, a sound that echoed in the vast, empty space beyond.

He drove the car into a sprawling complex of warehouses and shipping containers stacked like colossal, multicolored blocks. The place felt dead, abandoned, a forgotten corner of the world. Wallace parked the car in the shadow of a towering crane and killed the lights.

“This way,” he said, his voice quiet but firm.

Alex moved on autopilot, his legs feeling like they belonged to someone else. The night air was cold and damp, carrying the metallic tang of rust and the faint, oily scent of diesel. His breath plumed in front of him. Dan fell into step beside him, a silent, stocky shadow.

Wallace led them through the labyrinth of steel boxes. Each container was a sealed mystery, a metal tomb. Alex’s heart, a sluggish and unreliable muscle, began to beat a frantic, painful rhythm against his ribs. The sheer scale of the place was oppressive, making him feel tiny and insignificant.

Finally, Wallace stopped. He stood before a specific container, no different from the dozens they had passed, except for one detail. On the corrugated steel door, almost completely faded by sun and rain, was the ghost of a painted logo: a cheerful, stylized sunflower, its petals peeling away like dried skin. The simple, almost childish image was so grotesquely out of place in this industrial necropolis that it made Alex’s stomach clench.

“This is it,” Dan muttered, his voice gravelly.

Wallace produced another key, this one smaller. He inserted it into a heavy-duty lock bolted to the container’s locking mechanism. The tumblers clicked with an obscene loudness that echoed off the surrounding steel walls. He then put his shoulder to the heavy lever and pulled.

With a deep, groaning shriek of tortured metal, the massive door began to swing open.

A smell wafted out from the darkness within. It wasn't the dry, acrid scent of the mummified corpse in the bathroom. This was different. It was the stale, sterile smell of sealed plastic mixed with a faint, cloying sweetness of decay. It was the smell of a secret kept too long in the dark.

Wallace swung the door wide open, revealing the cavernous, black interior. He pulled a powerful flashlight from his jacket pocket and clicked it on. The beam cut through the darkness, illuminating a space that was almost completely empty, save for a few wooden pallets stacked against one wall.

And the object lying in the center of the floor.

It was long and man-shaped, just like the thing under the sink, but this one was larger, wrapped meticulously in thick, translucent plastic sheeting, sealed at every seam with wide, silver duct tape. It was a crude, makeshift sarcophagus.

“Go on,” Wallace urged, his voice soft, almost gentle. He gestured with the flashlight beam. “Look.”

Alex couldn't move. His feet were bolted to the ground. This was the precipice. The moment the world ended for good. If he looked, if he saw, there would be no going back. The tiny, screaming voice of reason would be silenced forever.

“We’ll help you,” Dan said, and for the first time, Alex heard something like pity in his voice. He took a step forward, his hand resting for a moment on Alex’s shoulder before he moved toward the plastic-wrapped form. He knelt, his fingers finding a purchase on a taped seam.

“You need to see this, Alex,” Wallace said from the doorway. “You need to remember what you are.”

With a final, desperate intake of breath, Alex forced his legs to move. He walked forward into the cold, stale air of the container, his steps unnaturally loud on the metal floor. He stood over the body, looking down. Dan ripped the tape with a loud crackle and pulled back the top layer of plastic, exposing the head and shoulders.

Alex looked.

And the universe ended.

The face staring up at him with dull, lifeless eyes was his own.

It was undeniably, irrevocably him. The same slightly crooked nose he’d hated in pictures. The small, crescent-shaped scar on his chin from falling off his bike when he was twelve. The tiny mole just to the left of his eye that his mother had always called his “beauty mark.” Every line, every pore, every imperfect detail of the face he had shaved and washed and stared at in the mirror every single day of his life was there, slack and pale and utterly devoid of life.

It was Alexander Vance. The original. The empty vessel.

The air rushed from Alex’s lungs in a silent scream. His knees buckled, and he collapsed to the floor, catching himself with his hands. He stared, his mind wiped clean of thought, of reason, of everything except the impossible sight of his own corpse.

The proof. The undeniable proof.

And as he stared into his own dead eyes, something flickered deep within him. It wasn't a memory of a childhood birthday or a first kiss. It was not a human memory at all.

It was a sensation. A phantom feeling from a time before time.

A vast, silent, sensory-deprived darkness.

A primal, formless existence, filled with an overwhelming, gnawing ache.

A hunger not for food, but for experience.

It was a crack in the dam of his forgotten self. The first tremor of a flood that was about to wash away the last remnants of the man named Alexander Vance forever.