TENSION (SURVIVOR - WEEK 4)

Fall 2013.

Bzzt.

Bzzt.

Bzzt.

Coltrane wiped sleep from his eyes as his phone buzzed on the nightstand. It'd only been an hour since sleep found him, after wrestling for a few hundred people in some small town in western Pennsylvania. Just enough money to cover gas and a slice of rent, nothing more.

Bzzt.

Bzzt.

Bzzt.

His hand found the phone before his eyes did. Light hit him square in the face the way it does at three in the morning, and it took a second before the words on the screen came into focus.

911 — It's time.

It's time.

He shot up in bed.

He moved like a man who hadn't finished most of a bottle of bourbon the night before, which was to say he moved anyway. Legs off the bed, feet on the thin motel carpet. He grabbed his pants and got them on despite the blur behind his eyes and the dry taste coating his mouth, yanked a shirt off the floor and over his head, ran a hand across his skull once, and kept moving.

He stuffed the bag, zipped it enough to trust it, laced his sneakers, and did one fast pass around the room. Everything he owned fit in that one bag, and he wasn't leaving a piece of it behind.

He was behind the wheel before he had any business being behind a wheel. He punched Baltimore into the GPS. Three hours out. He put his foot down and let the old car do what it could, watching the speedometer the whole way, because he knew the speed limit changed depending on who was driving through these towns and what they looked like doing it.

Three hours later, he pulled into the lot. The bourbon had left his system somewhere around hour two, replaced entirely by adrenaline. He was out of the car and through the front doors before he'd fully registered parking it.

"Sir, phone and keys in the tray."

He dropped them in and went through the metal detector without slowing down.

"First one?" the guard asked.

The question caught him off guard for a moment. "Yeah," he said. "Yeah."

The guard smiled. "Enjoy every second of it."

Coltrane nodded, grabbed his things, and ran for the elevator, jabbing the up button like it would speed anything up. Inside, he hit the button for the third floor and watched the doors close, the adrenaline finally draining out and leaving something closer to fear behind it.

DING

He was out and moving before the doors finished opening, past a desk, up at a monitor for half a second, then gone around the corner, reading room numbers as he passed them until he found the one he wanted.

He pushed the door open slowly. Dark room. And there she was. Alex, in the bed, eyes closed. He shut the door behind him and crossed the space to her.

"Hey," he whispered, kneeling.

Alex's eyes opened halfway. She smiled. "You made it."

"I did. Got here as fast as I could."

"You're here now. That's what matters. You missed the messy part, though."

"Oh."

"It's fine, babe. She's here. She's perfect."

Alex lifted her other arm, and there was a baby in the crook of it, asleep.

Coltrane let that sit for a second. First time he'd ever seen his daughter.

"You want to hold her?"

Something close to fear moved through him. "It's okay," Alex said. "They're resilient. That's what the nurse told me after I dropped her the first time."

"Wait, what?"

The smile spread wider. "Kidding, love. Come on. You've got this."

He reached out, hands shaking, and got her settled into the crook of his arm, pressed against his chest. Little Jamie. He looked down at her and felt the whole shape of the world shift under him.

Nine months of nerves gone, replaced by something with no name he could put on it yet.

"Hey, Jamie," he said, quiet, mostly for her.

Baltimore, Maryland. August 17, 2026.

Coltrane watched as the sun dipped behind the horizon. Next to him, Jamie sat folded into herself, arms and legs crossed so completely she looked like a piece of living origami.

"What do you want to do next?" Coltrane asked.

She unfolded and stretched out flat on the grass. "Let's get some weed."

He was mid-sip of water. It came back out immediately. "What did you say?"

"Kidding, Father." She sat up and kissed his cheek. "You've got to learn to take a joke."

"How was that a joke? Is this some new-age nonsense you kids do? Like making me believe no cap and bet are your real slang?"

"You will never know our true slang. Never!"

He gave her a look. "You might be on drugs."

"I might be. Buy me ice cream and remind me I'm your favorite child."

He stood and pulled her up by the hand. "You're my only child."

"Then I win by default. Victory is mine."

"Though I do wonder if you actually came from me."

"A hundred percent. DNA confirmed. I get all my weirdness from you."

"No. That's your mother."

She paused. "You're right. Ice cream."

She took off down the hill. Coltrane followed at a much slower pace, aware that one wrong step at his age could pull something that would take a week to stop complaining about.

On the sidewalk, Jamie shoved her hands in her shorts pockets. "So. Round four. You've made it this far."

The last three rounds had all left something sour in his mouth. He wasn't eager to relive any of them.

"Yep."

"You think you'll make it all the way?"

"I think this is the end of the line for me."

"What? You've done so well."

He shrugged. "There's a point where you realize you're playing with house money. I'm the newest guy in PRIME. Outlasted Kuroyama. Outlasted Jiles. Outlasted Stanislav. Hunter's gone. Gamble's gone. That weird guy, Lemieux, is gone, too."

"And you're still standing."

"For now. But nothing's promised. And this next round's got me worried. It's not wrestling. I can't just get in there and beat somebody. It's a barbecue cookoff in Kansas City. That's a recipe for disaster."

Jamie groaned. "You're such a downer. No wonder you couldn't keep somebody like Mom."

"I paused things with your mother. That's different."

"You keep calling it paused. It's been a decade."

"That's the word I'm using."

"What's the real story?"

"Story for another day."

"Do you still love her?"

No hesitation. "Every single day."

"Then you should get back with her. I think she'd give you a shot."

"I don't know, kiddo. I put your mother through some things back then. I don't want her ever feeling like she has to take care of me again."

Jamie didn't have an answer for that. Thirteen was old enough to think you understood everything and young enough to have no idea which direction to point two people who'd loved each other that long.

Then she spotted the sign.

"Ice cream!"

Five minutes later, they walked out with a waffle cone holding a single scoop of frozen yogurt for him and a bowl the size of a mixing bowl for her. Three scoops of cookie dough, sprinkles, candy, marshmallows, whipped cream, the whole production.

"I don't understand how I get this, and you get all of that."

"Because I'm me and you're you."

He took a lick of his yogurt and didn't have a comeback for it.

"Dad. You ever think about the different directions your life could've gone?"

He thought about it for a second.

"Every single day."

Baltimore, Maryland. August 21, 2026.

Alex reviewed the chart on bed fourteen again. Vitals stable. Pain managed. The gunshot wound in bed six had made it through the night without complications, which in this ER counted as a small miracle and didn't get treated like one, because there wasn't time.

"You clocking out, or you just going to stand there staring at that chart until it changes on you?" Priya leaned against the nurses' station, already in her own scrubs, coffee in hand, ready to take the floor.

"Give me a sec." Alex finished the note and closed it out. "Fourteen's stable, doctor already rounded. Six is postop; watch his sats. They dipped a little earlier but leveled out. Twenty-two's family is a lot, heads up, they'll ask you the same question four different ways, hoping for a different answer."

"Love that for me."

"Nine's discharge paperwork is done, just waiting on transport."

Priya took the tablet from her, scrolled through it once. "You good? You look wiped."

"Long one."

"They're all long ones."

"Some are longer." Alex pulled her badge off and wound the lanyard around her hand. "I'm out. Call me if fourteen does anything interesting."

"Fourteen better not do anything interesting. I want a boring night."

"Don't we all."

Alex walked to the break room, clocked out, grabbed her bag from the locker, and pushed through the doors into a parking garage that smelled of exhaust and other people's cigarettes. Her feet hurt in a specific, familiar way that twelve hours in the same shoes produced and nothing else did. She thought about Jamie, probably doing her homework, and Coltrane, preparing for his next round of Survivor. Her people, even if she and Coltrane were no longer together, were what consumed her mind.

She found her car on level three, dropped into the driver's seat, and took a moment before starting the engine.

The drive home was uneventful. Down the ramp, out onto the street, past the same gas station, the same church with the marquee that never updated its sign fast enough to catch up with the actual week.

She didn't notice the black sedan pull out of the garage behind her.

She didn't notice it hanging back, matching each turn she made, always three cars between them, patient in a way regular traffic wasn't.

She turned onto her block, pulled into her spot outside the new building, and gathered her bag from the passenger seat.

The sedan parked twenty feet down from her, on the opposite side of the street. The person watched her exit the car and walk into her building.

Then the driver's and passenger-side doors of the sedan opened. Two men stepped out and watched as she opened the door to the new building. They crossed the street, slipping in through the front door before she realized what was happening.

Kansas City, Missouri. August 21, 2026.

Coltrane had been on his feet in the smoker shed since two hours before sunrise. Film crews moved around him all day, capturing whatever they needed for the next cut of ReVival, set to air in two hours. Brisket, pulled pork, beans, the list continued on and on, and the work never let up, and neither did the cameras.

Wrestling, he could figure out. Working a smoker, he'd learned from people on the street who did this kind of thing with their eyes closed. Doing both at once, on television, for points, that part he still hadn't cracked. He'd made it to round four anyway. Jamie wanted him to keep trying. That was enough of a reason.

He looked at the five men still standing between him and elimination and wasn't sure any of them had a clue what they were doing. Rob Williams was more interested in his beer and kicking the equipment than cooking on it. Henry Keyes had rigged his rig to look steampunk, for reasons nobody had bothered to ask him about. Kenny Freeman kept taking his smoker apart and putting it back together, as if he didn't trust it to stay assembled on its own. The Anglo Luchador actually seemed to know something, though everything he touched came out with a Mexican twist to it. Nathan Lake treated the seasoning like a chemistry set.

Coltrane pushed through the exhaustion anyway. Minutes from the final round, his phone buzzed in his pocket. He held up a finger to the production assistant hovering nearby and stepped away.

Alex. He answered, slipped out of the tent into the cool Kansas City evening.

"Hey. Don't have long. Everything good?"

Silence. Something moving in the background he couldn't make out.

"Alex?"

Then a different voice. Not hers.

"Yo."

Thick accent. Unfamiliar.

"Who the fuck is this?"

"Careful how you talk to me. We got your wife and your kid. Just want to talk. Any disrespect gets returned. Understand?"

Coltrane's jaw worked. Every old instinct in his body came up at once.

"Who sent you?"

A laugh. "You know who."

He did.

"Put Alex on."

A pause. Then her voice.

"Cole. What's going on?"

"Don't have a clue. You okay? Jamie okay?"

"Yeah. Didn't even see them coming. Walked into the building, opened the door, and they were behind me. I'm sorry."

"Don't. Don't apologize. I'm coming. You hear me?"

"Yeah."

"Don't do anything. I'll handle it when I'm there."

"Okay, Cole."

"I love you. I love Jamie."

"Same."

"Put them back on."

Movement on the line.

"Listen." Coltrane's voice dropped flat and even. "I'm coming back to the city. You touch them, you hurt them, you say one thing I don't like, there's going to be hell to pay. You let them sleep, you keep them comfortable, and we'll have whatever conversation you want. Hear me?"

"Cool. Don't take too long. We might get bored."

"Don't."

Click.

He put the phone back in his pocket. His whole body had gone taut, every muscle pulled tight at once. Nothing in the usual list, angry, scared, furious, quite covered it. Every ounce of him wanted to get in his car and leave. He could tell the production crew he was out, quit Survivor, and make his way back to Baltimore. Would someone from PRIME stop him? Would Lindsay Troy tell him his contract was ironclad and he had to finish this out?

Darius, though, wouldn't do anything foolish. He wouldn't send men to hurt Jamie and Alex. As much baggage as there was between them, and there was a lot, Darius did care about their well-being. He wouldn't do something foolish that he couldn't walk back from.

He had one hour left to finish here. Then he was getting back to Baltimore as fast as a car, a plane, or his own two hands could get him there.