The night was thick, suffocating in its stillness, broken only by the distant murmur of the city’s insomniac heart. I walked, weary and disoriented, through the fog-laden streets, the unyielding weight of the day still pressing down on me like a shroud. The hour had long since passed when the sounds of life should have faded, yet the neon lights from a nearby bar flickered incessantly, casting long, broken shadows that seemed to mock the quiet.
I had been working in the junk removal field for years now—a profession not particularly glamorous, but one that offered a steady paycheck and, more often than not, the ability to erase the traces of other people’s lives. “Same day junk removal” had become my motto, a quick and efficient method of clearing the detritus that cluttered existence. I had mastered the art of unloading other people’s burdens and moving on without a second thought. The task, as mundane as it seemed, had never felt more mechanical. Just a job, and like all jobs, it demanded that I neither look nor feel too deeply.
But tonight… tonight something was different.
As I rounded the corner, the distant hum of an engine cut through the night’s quiet, and the sudden screech of brakes brought my thoughts crashing back into the present. A black van skidded to a stop directly before me, its headlights blinding for a moment, as though to thrust me into a dream from which there would be no waking. I froze, my senses suddenly alert, my heartbeat rising in sync with the engine’s idle growl.
The van’s door flung open with a heavy metallic groan, and my breath caught in my throat. Inside, there were five figures—five men, dressed in identical dark coats, their faces cast in shadow. And then—then—I saw it.
They looked exactly like me. Not similar—identical.
Each one of them, a reflection of me. Their eyes, their posture, the way they stood—every detail was unnervingly the same. A shiver crawled up my spine as the realization struck. There was no mistake. These were my doubles.
The first of them—the one nearest the door—stepped forward, his cold eyes locking with mine. He reached into the van, and in one swift motion, tossed something toward me. It was a gun, the metal cold and heavy in my palm.
“No time to explain,” he snarled, his voice a jagged echo of my own. “Get in the van.”
I could feel the weight of the gun in my hand, its purpose clear in the strange urgency of his voice, but my mind refused to accept the reality unfolding before me. A thousand questions filled my head, questions I couldn’t even begin to grasp, but there was one thing I knew beyond doubt: the choice I had was not mine.
I stood frozen for a moment, staring at the gun. I had held weapons before—tools of my trade, used to haul away the junk that cluttered my days. But this was different. The weight of it felt wrong, foreign, and yet, my fingers wrapped around the handle as if they knew exactly what to do.
The other figures in the van remained silent, their faces unreadable, but their eyes—they watched me with a cold, distant expectation. There was no judgment in them, no anger—only a flat, implacable certainty that I had a role to play in whatever scheme they had set in motion.
And so, against every instinct that screamed for me to flee, I climbed into the van. The door slammed shut behind me, sealing the darkness inside.
We drove through the empty streets in silence, the van’s wheels scraping against the asphalt as we navigated through alleyways, away from the familiar parts of the city, into the forgotten corners where the light never quite reached. The city felt distant now, as if we were moving through some strange underworld, untethered to the world I had known.
I glanced around at the others, the faceless reflections of myself, and found nothing in their eyes to offer comfort. We were strangers—no, something more unsettling. We were versions of the same man, and yet, I could not trust them.
One of the figures spoke, his voice a low, unfeeling murmur. “It’s a next day junk removal.”
The words made no sense to me, not at first. What did it mean, this “next day” business? Were we going to clean up some mess? Clear out a space? That’s what I did—moved other people’s trash. But something about his words carried a darker weight, as though he was speaking of something else entirely.
Another of my doubles, seated at the far end of the van, leaned forward, his face twisted in a thin smile that looked more like a grimace.
“We clear the junk,” he said, eyes glittering in the dim light. “Everything. And everyone.”
The words landed with a heavy finality. My stomach turned. I thought of all the things I had moved in my years—stale furniture, broken electronics, boxes of things that were once treasured and now discarded. But what he said… that was no longer about objects. That was about something far darker.
The van slowed and came to a stop in front of an old warehouse, its walls crumbling with time. The rusted metal door loomed in front of us like the entrance to some forgotten crypt. A low buzz hummed from within, the kind of noise that came from machinery, grinding and working in the dark.
We all disembarked in unison, as if pulled by some unseen thread. My reflection—the one closest to me—gestured toward the warehouse. “Time for removal,” he said, his tone flat, like a man stating an undeniable fact.
Inside, the space was cavernous and cold, the air thick with the smell of decay. Large crates filled with discarded objects piled high like monuments to lives long since abandoned. And in the center of the room—the junk—was something else. Human forms—familiar, yet not. People, faces twisted with sorrow and despair, their eyes glazed with resignation. They were… me? No. They couldn’t be. But they were. They were reflections—distorted versions of who I was, of who I had been.
The others moved swiftly, as if they knew exactly what they were doing. They began sorting through the piles of discarded people, pulling the forms from the heaps, handling them with cold indifference.
“Professional junk removal,” one of them murmured, the words falling from his lips as if they were nothing more than a formality.
And then it hit me. This wasn’t just about the junk. This was removal of another kind.
They had come for the discarded versions of themselves—the failed lives, the forgotten pieces of who they were. They had come to cleanse. To erase.
I stood there, gun heavy in my hand, unable to move, unable to speak. I was no different from them. I was no different from the junk we were removing.
And then, just as suddenly as it had begun, it stopped. The figures turned to me, their eyes locked onto mine with an unsettling familiarity. My heart pounded in my chest. I could feel it—the weight of their gaze, of their expectation.
What now?
And as I stood frozen in the center of it all, the room seemed to close in around me. The van waited, a silent observer, its doors beckoning like a dark mouth ready to swallow me whole.
The decision was mine to make. But was it? Was it ever mine to begin with?
The gun felt lighter in my hand, as though the answer had already been chosen.
And as the shadows closed in, I realized that I didn’t know who—or what—I had been before I got into that van.
Was I still me? Or had I already been discarded long ago?
The van’s engine hummed louder, and I took a step forward, into the dark, uncertain of what awaited.
