Chapter 2 The Time Tunnel
When Chloe came to, pain slammed through her whole body.
Her ears rang. Her head felt as though it were splitting open. For a few seconds, she couldn’t see anything except white light.
Then sound rushed back all at once—shouting, car horns, the hiss of smoke, someone screaming for help.
The van had stopped.
No—crashed.
Chloe blinked hard, trying to force her vision into focus.
The old Ford E-350 had slammed into the roadside guardrail at the tunnel exit. The front end was crumpled inward, and white smoke poured from beneath the hood into the freezing air.
For a moment, she couldn’t understand what had happened.
She only remembered the tunnel.
The flickering lights.
That awful scraping shriek.
Then the world had gone mad.
The van had been thrown around like a toy. Light had burst in from every direction, so blinding it felt like her eyes were burning out of her skull. The whole vehicle had shaken violently, surging forward, then jerking backward, as if some invisible force were dragging it through the dark.
She had thought they were all going to die.
Outside, voices were gathering.
“Car accident!”
“Call 911!”
“There are people inside!”
“Hello? Yes, near the Mountain Tunnel exit in State Forest Park—a Ford E-350. It looks bad. There are several passengers—”
“There’s a child in there too!”
Within minutes, sirens howled through the cold.
Police cars arrived first, sealing off the area with yellow tape. Then came the ambulances, one after another, their red and blue lights strobing across the snow.
The passengers were pulled out and loaded into separate vehicles.
Chloe barely remembered any of it.
A paramedic strapped her to a stretcher. Someone pressed gauze to her forehead. Someone else asked her name, her age, whether she knew what day it was.
She answered automatically.
At least, she thought she did.
By the time the ambulances left the scene, people nearby had already started posting photos online.
The wrecked Ford E-350.
The smashed front end.
The tunnel.
The passengers in outdated clothes stumbling out in shock.
Once the photos spread, people began digging.
It didn’t take long for the internet to spit up something ugly.
The vehicle’s model and registration had been reported missing more than twenty years earlier.
The driver and all nineteen passengers aboard had vanished without a trace that same year.
The case had once made national news. In Minnesota, it had even been listed among the state’s strangest unsolved disappearance cases.
Back then, police had searched the route, the forest, nearby lakes, ravines—everywhere they could think of. Some believed the driver had abducted everyone. Others thought the van had crashed in some remote place and simply never been found.
Either way, the same impossible question was now exploding across the internet:
If the van disappeared over twenty years ago… how had it just reappeared today?
No one outside had an answer.
And inside the hospital, the people from the van had even less.
The entire medical wing at Northwestern Memorial Hospital had been sealed off.
Doctors, nurses, police officers, and social workers moved briskly through the halls, tending to cuts, bruises, and panic. The passengers from the van had all been separated, examined, questioned, and monitored like survivors of some disaster no one quite knew how to classify.
After her forehead contusion was cleaned and bandaged, and after she underwent a full physical exam, Chloe was escorted by a nurse to a conference room inside the ward.
She walked in on unsteady legs.
A long table filled most of the room.
Several passengers were already there, along with two social workers and a police officer seated at the end of the table. Everyone looked pale and rattled. One elderly woman was crying quietly in her husband’s arms. Another woman sat clutching her child so tightly the little girl could hardly move. A few other passengers watched the social workers with frightened, hollow eyes as phone calls were made one after another.
“This number is disconnected.”
“The number you provided is no longer in service.”
“Do you have any other contact information?”
With every failed call, the room seemed to grow colder.
Chloe stood in line behind the driver.
He was in his thirties, broad-shouldered, with thick bandages wrapped around his head. Dried blood marked one side of his face. In his hands, he still clutched the crystal photo frame from the van.
The little boy’s picture inside had cracked so badly the face was almost unrecognisable.
He gave one number after another.
None of them worked.
At last, his mouth trembled. His eyes went red.
“Step aside for now,” the police officer said, his tone gentler than Chloe expected. “A social worker will help you locate your family.”
The driver nodded stiffly.
A man that tall should not have looked so lost.
But his shoulders had caved in completely by the time he moved away from the table.
Chloe sat down in the chair he had just vacated.
Her palms were damp.
Across from her, the officer glanced at the paper in front of him, then at her.
“Name?”
“Chloe Frost.”
He nodded and made a note.
The nameplate on the table read: Officer Samuel Whitaker.
Chloe stared at him.
She still couldn’t quite understand the words everyone had been throwing around since she woke up. Now. Today. Twenty years. Two thousand twenty-five.
It all sounded like nonsense.
Like some terrible joke no one had bothered to explain properly.
She swallowed, trying to steady her voice.
“Um…” She licked her dry lips. “Is it really 2025?”
The room seemed to go quieter after she asked it.
Officer Whitaker looked at her for a moment, then answered calmly, “Yes, ma’am. Today is August 20, 2025.”
For one second, Chloe forgot how to breathe.
August 20, 2025.
Not 2002.
Not this morning.
Not the day she had left her parents’ house with a suitcase full of things her mother had packed for Nathan.
The strength drained out of her body so fast it felt as though someone had pulled her bones out from under her.
Her shoulders slumped.
Her fingers turned cold.
Her eyes burned, but no tears came yet—only a wild, hollow panic.
Twenty-three years.
Twenty-three years had passed.
And Nathan—
Nathan is waiting for me.
The thought flashed through her mind so fast, so desperately, that it nearly broke her.
If it was really 2025…
Then where was he now?
