I contented myself with just looking in from the window. If I were alone, I would’ve ventured in. But I knew what my companion would make of it. I didn’t want him spreading any more rumors about me. He already found me absurd to begin with and made no pretense to hide it, eyeing me like I dropped a handful of dirt in my mouth if I studied a peculiarly shaped leaf, turning it over; I liked to draw them.

I looked over my shoulder at him. He sat motionless, staring out through the gap in the fence, his fingers absently tying and undoing knots in the lasso on his lap. The seat he was in was probably attached to a vehicle at some point. I don’t know where he got it from, but I found him lounged in it after I completed the sweep to confirm the house was empty. He tipped it back, rocking himself by pushing his heel against the carcass at his feet.

I gazed back into the room. With my eyes and just enough moonlight, I could make out the different objects within. I guessed the use of some, but wondered what such-and-such thing might be used for and made up stories surrounding them. Of course, I had no one to share them with. Not anymore.

The scene was more or less similar everywhere. The larger of the objects were things you could sit on. Everything that once might have been shiny was marred. Rotting scraps of food and debris covered the floor, the kind accumulated over time. Shards of glass glinted in the half-light; eyes of small live things also glinted, the only live things there, which moved about in the shadows. Despite the size of the rooms they all carried the same stench, of disuse and desperation, and reminded me of an abandoned zoo.

I didn’t bring you here to sightsee.

I turned about to find his head cocked at me.

What sight you do find worth seeing, though, is a mystery.

“First off, you didn’t bring me here,” I said, walking over to Flanim. “We were dispatched by the FARM.”

And a fine service you’re providing.

I didn’t bother with a rejoinder (it would only have drawn yet another reply, and I preferred the silence between us) and stood leaning against the craft. Through the missing boards in the fence, I had a clear view of the forked road and the glimmering river beyond. There were a lot of strays in the area, and the FARM never had enough ukhivs so they’d sent us. We’d spotted half a dozen of them entering sector 79. They were out of range of my tranq gun and eluded us by the time we landed. That was a moon ago.

After much dispute, we decided to camp. Which I still didn’t see the point of. We could’ve gone on a different course and picked up other ukhivs. A lot of them scuttled around, especially at night. We certainly weren’t under orders to bring in specific ukhivs or anything. Maybe that’s not entirely true. We were instructed to make the sturdy sort our priority, the kind suitable for labor or experiments, and also the smaller ones, lately very much in demand as pets, and they could be easily conditioned. But Flanim seemed set on pursing the ones we’d glimpsed. They’ll take shelter for a while before setting off again, he’d said. And that much was true, as we had noted from previous patterns. So here we were.

And I hoped not for long. The stink from the dead ukhiv at his feet only got stronger with every passing moment. It wasn’t one we’d struck down. Or, at least, one I hadn’t. We were carrying it around since we left base. I was puzzled when he dragged it aboard the craft. He didn’t answer when I asked him what he was up to. If he had anything resembling lips, I’m sure they would’ve curled in a grin.

Recalling his smug attitude, I got annoyed anew at the smell and said, “Can you get rid of that already?”

You don’t see me asking you to toss your gun.

“What does that have to do with it?”

He didn’t reply. I got up again and paced at some distance. Ukhivs could be subdued in a number of ways; they were soft. But I preferred tranq guns, as did Rokfilof, my old partner. They got the job done quickly and didn’t cause a mess. Flanim, on the other hand, favored the opposite. He flung a lasso from the craft at the running ukhivs and whooped (much to my annoyance) when it would restrain one. As much as I disliked him, I was in awe of his skill and had tried something similar on stationary objects in my quarters with laughable result. Any admiration I allowed myself stopped at that. What followed after never failed to repulse me. He savagely beat the ukhiv senseless using his bare hands. Whenever we came across a herd, I always took out the smaller ukhivs first. He lost interest if they were already unconscious.

It was contrary to our job, what he did. We were gatherers. Not hunters.

He was roaring mad when I tranqed a young ukhiv he had caught once. I thought his rant would make my head burst.

Stay out of my way. You still want to be soft after what happened to old Rokfilof?

He stepped back, seeing my fist tighten over the dagger at my belt.

All I’m saying is you get yours, let me get mine. What do you say?

I didn’t take his outstretched hand, and he ranted some more. For someone with no hole in his face except to breathe, he sure gave a lot of lip. I found exchanging a dialogue with him loathsome. Hated having him in my head, and being paranoid that maybe he could hear my thoughts, although I knew that wasn’t the case. His telepathic ability was limited to a one-way transmission, which was the norm for his species. He hummed a tune in my head once. I told him as calmly as I could, that if he ever did it again, I’d carve him an actual mouth. He never did it again. Later, I absently hummed the tune and wondered if it was really me, then held my clenched fists behind my back.

I was at the window again when he said he saw something. I made for the fence, tripped over the ukhiv in my haste and banged my head against the boards.

Need a fourth eye, do you?

I ignored him and peeked beyond the fence. It was a small pack. There were four of them, maybe five. They stood frozen, a dark cluster. The thud sounding from my fall had probably given them pause. I made out two full grown ukhivs among them when they stepped out of the shadows. It was hard to tell, but they appeared different from the pack we were pursuing and headed in the opposite direction along the riverbank.

We’d been out long enough, and it was better than nothing.

“Let’s get this over with,” I said.

You read my mind, Flanim said and shook with soundless laughter. The sight never failed to unnerve me.

He sprung to his feet, the moon glinting off his chitinous exterior.

I stepped aboard the craft, and it thrummed to life.

A little help here?

He stood with his hands hooked under the dead ukhiv’s arms. Even for Flanim, who although a head shorter than me was as sturdy as they come, the ukhiv was exceptionally large. He had struggled to drag it off deck earlier, not asking for help but grunting exaggeratedly. Needless to say, I hadn’t paid him any mind.

“Just leave it.”

But I need it.

Arguing would only have cost us more time so I helped him.

“Why did you take it down in the first place?”

I needed something to prop my feet on. Its gut’s just the right height.

All I could do was scoff. More than a few times I had wondered to myself why he was lugging it along. Certainly not for the FARM. They didn’t have any use for dead ukhivs, none this decayed, anyway. Whatever the reason was, I was sure it was twisted. The next few moments proved me right.

“Keep running!”

“Jack!”

A small silver dome-like thing, no larger than a button, stung the boy’s neck and he collapsed mid-stride.

“Go! I’ve got him.”

They had only become aware of the craft overhead when it was too late. It was the first time Katie saw one up close. Terror grasped her but so did fascination; she vaguely thought it resembled a large silver sandal.

Arthur lunged for his son, who was sprawled unconscious a few feet ahead, when a lasso cinched around him, tugging him back.

Ruth wheeled around hearing Katie scream. She whimpered seeing a man’s body with a rope tied around his capacious mid-section roll off the craft’s platform. The body landed with a heavy splat, sending up a dark spray. While the other end of the rope held back Arthur, there might as well have been multiple loops ensnaring them all.

“Katie, run to Mommy!” said Arthur, but she remained still.

Ruth’s paralysis broke when she saw a short bug-like creature jump to the ground. Trembling, she ran back, passing Katie, and gathered the boy in her arms.

“Take them,” Arthur said.

She said something incomprehensible through sobs, then turned and ran, screaming for Katie to follow her.

But Katie only shuffled in one place from foot to foot

A tall, spindly creature lithely landed behind the shorter one, gun in hand.

Arthur ceased his frantic struggle to free himself and turned to Katie. Both her parents screamed for her to move. But she blinked, looking at her father with a dazed anxiety.

Without being aware of it, Ruth began to step backwards, hugging the unconscious boy draped over her shoulder tighter.

“NO! Ruth, don’t you leave her. Don’t you da—”

The creature landed a blow in his gut. Its companion had a gun trained on Katie who was crying now, noiselessly. Behind her Ruth had disappeared into the distance.

Arthur groaned in agony feeling his lower ribs crack. Straddling him, the thing grabbed his head. He screamed, but not because of the pain in his skull as it was knocked back against the ground. He screamed at the touch of its digits which felt like bendable tin coated with pus.

Somewhere in the distance a dog howled and another took it up. The only other sounds were grunts, groans, screams and thwaps, and crisp crunching and silent sniffling.

The taller creature with obsidian eyes, like three black snooker balls embedded in his face, tilted his head at Katie, and the tip of his trembling gun angled down.

The motion drew his partner’s attention, who quickly glanced at him then pinned his gaze on Katie. The next instant, she bawled and clapped hands over her ears.

He raised his gun again but swung it sharply.

The shorter creature collapsed on Arthur with a spatter of tiny silver domes on the fleshy part of its arm and up its creased neck. Drawing staccato breaths, Arthur frantically pushed it off him and with flailing arms scrambled away to a side.

Reaching for his belt, the other creature drew forth a dagger and sliced the rope.

For a second, Arthur locked his two eyes with its three then staggered to his feet and limping back, brusquely grabbed Katie and hobble-ran.

When they put some distance behind them, he looked back and sighed in relief. A part of him had thought it had only let them go to hunt them down, the way some of them liked to make a game of it.

The only thing at their heel was the wind, clutching and cold. Katie breathed heavily, though not from the running. The dark of the river had become a slate grey under the lightening dawn sky.

Against it, Arthur saw the taller creature get down on a knee, the gleam of a blade near its companion’s face.

“You know what day it is!” said the man holding the knives. Tall and lanky, he had striking blue eyes, sparkling with joy as he held the blades. He stood in front of seven men and women, eight total in this tiny nightmare. They congregated in a super deluxe mobile home, the site of all these demented games, a twisted answer to survival of the fittest.

There were eight knives in the Gorgeous Man’s hands.

“It’s the day where only one can leave!” he said, squeezing the knife handles with excitement, bending over with fits of laughter. “If anyone leaves!” Pumping the knives up and down, he looked around the group, his smile stretched from temple to temple, teeth so large they looked like they belonged in the mouth of a bull shark.

Today is the day it’s the day that I die it’s the day that I die it’s the day that I die-

Charlotte knew this day would come, when her letter would arrive saying she was next in the mobile home. Every year, a new group was chosen. Either one person left the site, or they would all die ripped apart. The mobile home was a hybrid; two mega homes stitched together like a bloated, murderous chimera. A leader like the Gorgeous Man was always on retainer, culled from his family at a young age and brainwashed to anticipate this day with glee. The interior setup changed annually, in case the winner were to give any tips to community members about hiding places or helpful sharp edges. The winner would then join the army of true believers, the extremists who had taken over the country, the True Cross militia.

Charlotte knew the militia was inspired by the First Crusade, and the literature that was passed around the community described them as “agents of God’s wrath upon a sick and sinful world.” After the most vocal opponents to the militia were murdered years ago, including her mother, who had beat one of the militia members to death with an iron after he broke into their home, the mobile home games began. Called the Holy Arcturus (a gathering together that was anything but magnificent), they believed “God would spare the worthiest of the group” during these exercises, ensuring the entire community would soon be free of weak links. Those who were not would be excommunicated via death, by “the hand of God upon that of your neighbor.”

A rapid evolution of the purest.

Charlotte shifted in her spot in the circle, looking toward the floor as a small ache slid through her lower back. She had suffered from mild scoliosis as a girl, leaving her slightly bent. Her legs and arms were strong, though, she had been a competitive swimmer on a local level before the world went mad. Within the last year she had become prone to violent flashbacks, an unconscious wound from PTSD after the First Battles. During these episodes, her mind would push her through a doorway, into a place where the dead were still breathing and colors other than wine magnified their pigment like breath, blooming brightly like supernovas from the ground and the trees. The experiences used to frighten her, but now she longed to stay in the vibrant comfort of that place, watching the flowers absorb the sun, wishing she could smell their petals.

Back in this beige nightmare, she lifted her gaze as the Gorgeous Man stepped in front of her, gleeful as a kid on Christmas morning. “Here is your baby, your beautiful baby, your protective man. All the better to gut you with,” he cawed, handing her a 6-inch knife. The handle was tepid from his palm, and slightly slick. The steel was spotless, and she could see half her face in the reflection. The serrated blade broke the edge of her cheek, sliding it down in the reflection like she was having a stroke. Still cackling, he stepped in front of each member, presenting their respective knife.

Looking away from her broken reflection, she scanned the group. The man on her right was an insurance salesman named Tom Ofstad who used to love driving around town in his “vintage car,” a rust-orange Ford Pinto. The woman on her left was Elaine Fischer, a substitute teacher who routinely had a group of foster kittens in her home. She was a dedicated member of the Beth El Synagogue before it was torched, its holy bones turned into barrack reinforcements, the concrete foundation a place of extremist battle. In front of her stood Rick Stephens, a sandy-haired mechanic who always had a bright handkerchief sticking out of his coveralls. Charlotte used to see him at his auto body shop during her morning walks, bent over the open hood of a car, his handkerchief blowing in the breeze behind him like a jellyfish floating undersea. Today he was wearing his new uniform, a black jumpsuit with gold lettering on the chest. A member of the True Cross Mechanical Team, his required outfit bore the words:

Deus Lo Volt

God Wills It.

He had also lost a parent, his father, in the First Battle, when the Agents had come and bled the community of threats. Tom had once fought against them, and now was one of them, indentured to fix the killing machinery that filled the streets. The faint tributary of a scar ran down his cheek, a reminder of the world before, when it was worth fighting for.

Near him was Kaitlin Spencer, a rail-thin, tall brunette who wore the same cardigan every day, and was trained as a dental hygienist. She used to love watching the kids in the dental office choose a little toy from the bucket after their visits. Now, she attended to men returning from battle, their mouths black and broken. The librarian, Addy Penford, was shaking near the Gorgeous Man, wracked with tears and fear. Despite her position in the circle, Charlotte couldn’t help but feel most awful for the kids in town who were going to lose their librarian, even if the reading material was regulated. Standing near the door was Jason Foster, a shithead known for his nightly performances starring whiskey and a bad temper. Tall, with dark curly hair and green eyes women write poetry about, he was a reckless beauty. Once at their local dive, Charlotte had watched him knock back eleven drinks in a row, then go outside and howl at the moon, hands curled into C’s, his breath heavy in the cold air. The militia didn’t outlaw alcohol (with the sickle, winemaker, and the wrath and all), but they were known to inflict serious punishment for public intoxication.

“Now, you all know the rules,” said the Gorgeous Man, once the knives were handed out. Tucking his (handle first) under his arm, he scanned each group member, forcing eye contact with each as he spoke. “No leaving the mobile home. No helping one another, and no hiding the whole time. This is an exercise in action. And no slasher show off scenes, okay? This isn’t some bullshit, low budget, torture porn movie.”

Charlotte wet her lips. Her throat suddenly felt like a tunnel, the vehicle of her breath rushing toward a shrinking pinprick of light. Tom turned his knife in his hand, his eyes glassy like a doll’s. Elaine’s hands shook, the blade catching the light from the barred windows and filling the room like a disco ball. The Gorgeous Man cocked his right hip out and raised his arm, sticking his thumb out like a hitchhiker. “We get in, we gut out.” He roared with laughter, bending forward so the blade of his knife caught the light, a beacon in the yellow room. The group shifted uncomfortably, looking at one another. Elaine had tears streaming down her face. Charlotte guessed she would die first.

Straightening up, he tapped his watch. “We’ve got one hour. Scatter off, beauties!” he shouted, running toward the hallway.

For a moment, Charlotte considered breaking out the kitchen window behind the yellowed shade. But then she remembered the guards, and the lines of them on each end of the property. They had stretched down the road for miles, twitching on Adderall and clicking the safety on and off their guns, with all the time in the world.

Snap. Click. Snap. Click.

There had once been rows of lilac trees on that road, lavender and kind. They reminded Charlotte of her childhood farm, where the lilacs filled the air with their sweet scent next to mulberry trees that dotted the lane. Back before those colors were outlawed, and the flowers were torn out of the ground, left to die in pale clumps. Before the world went mad.

She squeezed the handle of her knife, and ran toward the east end of the mobile home.

Barely ten minutes into the hour, Charlotte watched with horror as her prediction came true: Elaine was hacked to death. She had run around the corner of the kitchen counter, hysterical, her knife pointed toward the floor. An easy target. From her hiding place behind the refrigerator—fuck the rules—Charlotte could see the sweat standing out on Elaine’s face, beading and cascading like a river churning over her skin. Charlotte bit her lower lip to control her breathing, crouching behind the counter, her spine creaking like a tree in the wind. Out of nowhere, Tom ran around the corner of the kitchen and face first into Elaine, bawling as he plunged his knife over and over into her torso, the way you might puncture a sweet potato before microwaving it.

Charlotte could barely control the screaming in her own skull. No, no, no, no, no.

Elaine’s shrieks drowned into gurgles. Her eyes bugged outward, looking as though they would rip from her skull and fling themselves into orbit. Even as she slumped forward over the knife, Tom kept howling, kept stabbing. The knife slid easily in and out of Elaine’s body, like a spoon through a stick of butter. Once the dam of her body was broken, her blood ran like streams down Tom’s arms, rushing toward his elbows and coagulating into wide smears as her torso was shredded.

Charlotte squeezed her eyes shut. One down.

Pieces of Elaine dotted the kitchen floor as Charlotte ran for the bathroom. She slammed the door, turned the lock, and backed away quickly. You did not want to spend too much time against walls or doors here. Brittle cedar would change to the consistency of cotton candy when a knife was slammed through.

Charlotte could almost visualize the knife handle through the door as Tom tapped on it a few seconds later.

Tap, tap, tap.

“Please,” he whispered, his voice sliding down the door like a deflating balloon. “You’ve got to let me in.”

Charlotte didn’t move. Her arms felt separate from the rest of her body, one hand gripped against the sink, the other wrapped around her knife.

The taps stopped. Silence.

The crash that followed bent the door just slightly. In the tiny bathroom, it sounded the way a doomed jet would upon impact with the ground, changing from solid to liquid and screaming with the impact of bodies, smoke, and fuel.

Tom threw his weight into the frame, bellowing as he landed blow after blow. “Let me in! I know you’re in there, Fucking let me in!”

Charlotte leaned against the sink, feeling the cold press of ceramic in the small of her back. The door cracked and splintered, the hinges moaning. “You fucking bitch, I know you’re—”

His voice stopped, with a hollow sound a stone makes after being dropped down a well. Shivering with adrenaline, she crawled under the sink, pressing her hands against her face. Over the pumping of blood in her ears, there was a sound like a shovel piercing dry earth. It reminded Charlotte of her mother in their garden, during summer days where the loudest sounds were the thwack of her hand shovel near the tomato plants, and the wind dancing in the trees. Closing her eyes under the cave of the sink, she half expected to hear the evening cicadas as they vibrated like tuning forks against the trees, camouflaged so well that it seemed the branches had voices.

In the darkness behind her hands, she saw the roses.

The smell of summer, the canopy of trees, the way the shovel cut the earth, tossing dirt along the edge of the garden, the sounds of slicing, cutting my fingers on the wild rosebushes near the barn, the life and brightness of petals, of blood, the taste and smell, watching as it dripped down my fingers, feathered around my shirt sleeve, watching as it grew and bloomed on my body, my body the garden, remembering the rose garden never ended it never—

A wet moan, then silence. There was a crack, and the sound of a blade being pulled from something heavy. The door buckled under the next thump, a body slapping against the wood grains.

Charlotte’s eyes snapped open and she pressed her hands in a prayer.

Two footsteps fell outside the door.

Tap. Tap.

Charlotte was relieved to hear screaming outside the door. The taps stopped, footsteps crashing into a run that faded down the hallway. A distraction for the time being. Her throat burning, she crawled out from the sink and stood carefully. She turned the tap on and bent under the faucet, still hearing the muffled chaos outside the door. The water tasted warm and grainy, like licking a piece of limestone. After she turned the tap off, she could hear movement inside the bathroom. She whipped around, holding her knife at chest level.

“Who the fuck is there?”

There was a sob from the shower. Charlotte pulled the curtain aside. In the tub cowered a dark-haired woman.

Kaitlin.

“Please don’t kill me please don’t kill me, oh God please don’t kill me…”

Charlotte lowered her knife.

“What are you doing in here? The rules say no hiding.”

Kaitlin was curled in a ball, her knees drawn up below her chin. Her dark hair looked wet. She sobbed violently. Charlotte noticed her fingernails were torn to shreds, traced with dark blood.

“I can’t go out there. I can’t kill anybody. Why do we have to do this!?”

Charlotte put her knife on the sink counter and sat on the edge of the tub. Shreds of wood from Tom’s collision with the door spotted the linoleum like scattered straw. She turned to Kailin.

“Because if you don’t, they will kill you in here, like a trapped animal. They will kill you, because this is the way the world is now.”

Charlotte’s voice dropped.

“And we allowed it to get this way.”

Kaitlin pulled in one long sob, exhaling with a bark. Charlotte locked eyes with her. The helplessness in the room was another presence, insidious and needy.

“It’s everyone for themselves here. If you want to survive, you have to fight.”

Kaitlin nodded, sniffling wetly and began to move out of the tub. Charlotte stood and picked her knife back up, the handle cool from its recess. She grabbed the doorknob and paused.

No sound from the other side.

She pulled the door open, hearing nothing but her own breath and the gentle aftershocks of Kaitlin’s whimpers.

Tom’s body was face down outside the door, his back torn open. Among the branches of muscle, his vertebrae glittered in the pale hallway lighting, like new railroad tracks. Kaitlin let out a low cry, the sound clattering over her teeth in a hurried exit. Charlotte looked at his body, disconnected from her own in a haze. All aboard for the Number 3 Train to the brain stem! Charlotte bit her lip to keep from laughing out of pure horror. She thought of her own spine, and the way it twisted in the valleys of her back.

What will it look like when it’s torn out of me?

They stepped over the body, into the humid hallway. Kaitlin reached out and touched Charlotte’s hand. Charlotte turned to her, the smell of sweat and death rich in the air. Kaitlin’s eyes were hollow, peering from the black ringed sinkholes in her skull. Charlotte felt a rush of coldness at Kaitlin’s sick, wide smile, as comforting as a clown’s in a horror movie. She had changed from bathroom to the hallway, like she had put on a mask.

“Everyone for themselves,” Kaitlin said softly, gesturing toward Tom, sweat beads shining like jewels on her arm. Her eyes were wild.

Sick with fear, Charlotte managed a weak nod. They split off toward the hallway.

From her hiding place behind the bedroom door, she watched the Gorgeous Man sing as he pulled his knife from Jason’s temple. The blade was slick with brain matter, matted and muddy like the bottom of a pond. The struggle hadn’t been much. Jason wasn’t as graceful with a knife as he was with a shot glass. The Gorgeous Man had cornered him in the bedroom and handled him like a matador, elegantly swinging his hips back and floating his arms as Jason clumsily jabbed his blade toward him. A few minutes into the performance, without dropping his arms, the Gorgeous Man delicately turned his wrist and struck, burying the blade in Jason’s skull.

“Bullseye!” he screamed, twisting the handle, the blade making a sound like a man sucking a juicy peach. Jason’s right eye closed, his lips drawn up like he had put on a pair of headphones with the volume all the way up. The Gorgeous Man swayed as he cranked, dancing as the knife twisted more easily, lubricated by blood and brain.

“Another one bites the dust. Ohhh another one and another one—”

Involuntarily, Charlotte let out a cry. His head snapped toward the door as Charlotte slapped her hands over her mouth. In one motion, he pulled the knife from Jason, the body flopping to the floor. She could see the Gorgeous Man through the crack, his eyes blazing through the hinge like blue searchlights.

He wiped the blade on the leg of his pants. Raising it in front of his chest, he slowly walked toward her.

“It’s still warm, it’s still warm, darling,” he whispered, his lips curling in an awful, snarling smile. “It will feel so nice, so nice when it slices you open…”

His eyes rolled like sharks in the surf. He was now pressed against the slit of the door, his lips moving quickly, spitting as he spoke faster and faster. Charlotte hitched her breath, trapped.

She barely had time to move as he shoved the blade through the opening, blood and brain drying in light strokes along the edge, just missing her face.

“In a second it will be so warm in you, it will be so warm and feel so good, come out and get a taasttee…”

Years ago, when the door had been made, a factory worker noticed a tear in the grain. Deciding against scrapping the door, he had marked it as complete, turning it face down on the delivery truck. This tear was deep, creating a valley in the door with one slope taller than the other, and razor sharp. After it was purchased by a real estate company, a sign was placed over the disfigurement, and it was forgotten. The sign had been taken down recently by the Agents as they removed any reminders from the time before. And that factory worker? He died nine years ago of a heart attack while sitting in lunchtime traffic, his Italian club rancid in the sunlight, filling the truck cabin with a salty, oily smell.

Because of his laziness, that fat bastard saved Charlotte’s life from the Gorgeous Man.

She slammed the door forward, knocking the knife out of his hands. He bellowed as the wood connected with his head. The tear in the door bit hungrily at his forehead, devouring the fleshy wrinkles from his surprised expression like a thick piece of cake. His blood and hair smeared across the grain. The Gorgeous Man screamed and fell to the ground.

Her adrenaline boiling hot, she lunged forward, kicking his knife away and using her own as she sliced a horizontal slit across his shoulder. The gash spread across his skin quickly, like a flame devouring paper. He howled in pain, his forehead bleeding, thrashing on the floor. The injuries were enough of a shock to keep him on his back. One hand covered his forehead, the other his shoulder. She stepped over him and raised the knife, fist over fist, moving too quickly to feel her own body.

With one shuddering scream, she slammed the knife into his clavicle, feeling the twigs of his ribs give way, the canvas of his skin tearing. His arms jerked down and she saw the madness of his eyes, one partially hidden by the long strip of skin that hung over it, and the other a dazzling sapphire, the reptilian pupil dilated into a pinprick. Hysteria swirled from his face like the Great Red Spot of Jupiter and she felt excruciatingly dizzy. He reached up to grab her but it was too late, his grip was nonexistent as she screamed with him, screamed and stirred his lungs like a soup, until his faded into silence.

When the Gorgeous Man was dead, Charlotte was sure it was almost over.

It’s almost eleven, we’ve got an hour, we’ve got an hour…

But after an hour, what then? What happened when the ringleader was dead?

She remembered the very last line of her letter:

Ephesians 5:15-16: Look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise but as wise, making the best use of the time, because the days are evil.

She was struck by cold nausea.

They only give us an hour, because we are agents of the wrath of God, to lollygag is to sin. We are pigs, raised in a slaughterhouse on a schedule. To fight is to waste time.

The pain in her back slithered down her legs, wrapping around her hamstrings and twisting into her butt. She rubbed her lower back and winced, standing like a person might after weeding a garden all day. But she had been killing this day, the Gorgeous Man’s lungs sliced into smooth, pink pieces in his chest, like a nest of newborn mice. Her head began to throb and her throat screamed for water. I can’t do this much longer.

She headed for the laundry room.

As Charlotte’s knife sliced through the woman’s collarbone, she thought again of the yellowed shade in the main room, the only color in the entire place, besides the blue pools of the Gorgeous Man’s eyes. Kaitlin had found her here, as she struggled to move the washer from the wall to hide behind for a quick break. Kaitlin rushed her, powerful like a horrible wave, screaming with joy and panic. And victory.

“The rules say no hiding,” she shrieked.

Charlotte’s knife had a life of its own in her hand, her fingers wrapped around it like a bouquet of flowers. As Kaitlin stopped in front of her, she presented it upward, plunging it deep into the meat of Kaitlin’s chest, her breasts hungrily devouring the blade. Her white cardigan sprung crimson fault lines along the front, feathering the wool with bright blood, almost pleasant in its vivacity. Upon that impact, time hit its brakes and dragged its fingers slowly across the room. Kaitlin’s smile faded, lips falling over her teeth like curtains.

Or shades.

Charlotte watched calmly as Kaitlin’s brown eyes widened, the raft of her pupil floating slowly to the middle of a hazel sea. The shock sent her mind elsewhere.

I can remember boating in Chadron with my dad, the life jacket was too big and the sun was so hot, but we were laughing, paddling around the lake that summer, that trip when we woke up and Mom was gone, Dad was worried but said she’ll come back, and she did an hour later still in her pajamas and no shoes, her feet were bloody, her pajamas torn, she said she was abducted by aliens, that they dropped her off in the woods, and she was laughing and crying then screaming, and I wasn’t laughing anymore, because there is evil here, there are monsters in this world…

Back in the room, she could see the shift of Kaitlin’s arm. Still shaking off her flashback, Charlotte couldn’t move quickly enough. In a sideways motion, Kaitlin tore open Charlotte’s stomach. Charlotte could feel a quick, white heat, the pain melting into a buttery numbness. Her intestines spilled out in wet ribbons, twisting around her thighs like a vine. She could smell bile, rot, and blood, her vision fading under the weight of shock. Involuntarily, she let go of the knife still feeding in Kaitlin’s chest, her own hands grabbing for the organs as if to put them back in her belly, slippery in her hands. As she pushed them back into the gash, the pain became violent, wrapping its hands around her and throttling. The world was red.

Suddenly, under Kaitlin’s screams, she could hear something else. The wind blowing through mulberry trees, the sound of the corn stalks brushing against one another like running water. She closed her eyes and could suddenly see the red barn, her father’s yellow truck, the wheel wells lined with rust. The colors were so bright, so alive, breathing against a background of emerald crops. She could see the wild rosebushes, pressing their petals against an opal sky, their pink petals with their delicate scent, calling to her. Home.

The taste of iron seared across her tongue as her lips spread into a dying smile.

She could finally smell the lilacs.

I didn’t flinch at the sound of Howlers screaming into the blizzard outside the log cabin or at the sound of bombs exploding on the other side of the mountain, but I did at the sound of the door leading to the garage slamming shut.

“Good thing I headed out when I did,” Flynn shouted from the mud room. “The weather’s getting nasty.”

I snatched a rag from where it hung over the faucet and forced myself to clean the kitchen island. I’d already cleaned the granite countertop until I could see the natural wood beams on the ceiling reflected in it. But going through the motions kept ants from racing beneath my skin and standing my hair on end.

Flynn swaggered into the kitchen in stocking feet. He deposited his snow-soaked hat on the kitchen island, freeing his shaggy, black-nearly purple hair to cling to his head. He still wore his winter jacket, and the white, water-proof fabric was covered in a paste of snow, mud, and blood.

“I didn’t know you were hunting,” I said.

“I wasn’t. Just headed into town to fill the gas cans before the storm hit.” He laid a Winchester shotgun on the counter and then scratched the dark stubble along his square jaw. “A couple kids thought they were going to take the last of the gas, but I handled them.”

“How?”

His lips stretched into a full boyish, toothy smile that didn’t come close to reaching his amber-colored eyes.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “What’s for lunch?”

I swallowed and turned my attention to the stove, where crumbled, brown meat sizzled amidst rice and beans. I grabbed the spatula and began stirring the food. In doing so, the smell of cooking meat—a smell halfway between the greasy aroma of beef and the lighter scent of turkey—burst into the air.

“Squirrel,” I said. “It’s almost ready.”

“It already smells good.” The sound of clothes sliding off skin and crumpling into a pile on the floor came from behind me. “I’m gonna hop in the shower real quick, then I’ll be back. Do you mind washing my clothes right away? They’re pretty ripe.”

“Leave them on the floor, and I’ll take care of them.”

The putrid smell of body odor reached my nose an instant before his lips pressed against my neck. His ropy, muscular arm wrapped around my midsection and gave it a quick squeeze before he jogged upstairs.

The sound of the bathroom door snapping shut opened the floodgates for the tension to scream out of my body, and I nearly fell forward into the sizzling pan.

“Just get through the day,” I muttered. “Get through the day.”

I stirred the rice and beans and squirrel one more time to prevent it from burning to the metal and then gathered the clothes off the floor. I tried to pick them up by the clean sections, but my fingers quickly started sticking to his clothes.

Off the kitchen sat what had been the laundry room. I used it for the same purpose, though now the washer and dryer both lay in the middle of the front yard. Our supply of gasoline for the generator limited the amount of electronics that we could use, and an electric washer and dryer ranked low on Flynn’s list.

I nudged the washbasin beneath the waterspout with my toe and turned on the water. After adding a scoop of detergent, the water’s gentle ripple was overcome by bubbles. The light hit the bubbles just right to turn the soapy film a translucent purple with hints of green and blue at the edges.

I carefully laid the clothes into the basin one at a time, watching the bubbles pop with each piece of fabric breaking the water’s surface. The wind howling outside turned into white noise, and I found myself drawn to the soothing rhythm of the clothes slipping into the bottom of the tub. I almost didn’t notice the gritty pebbles sticking to my fingers or the small pebbles floating amidst the bubbles.

It took my brain a second or two to recognize what I was seeing. The gritty pebbles on my fingers and floating in the water were flesh. Maybe with chunks of bone mixed-in.

Flynn’s jacket slipped from between my fingers.

My vision blurred at the edges until all I could see was the washbasin. Then I doubled over and emptied my stomach before sinking to the floor. I was barely aware of what I was kneeling in or the smell of charred food coming from the kitchen or the footsteps thudding down the stairs.

“How stupid can you be? Do you have any idea how long it took me to catch and skin that squirrel?”

I didn’t move. I couldn’t move.

Flynn stormed through the doorway, and his stocking foot smashed against my lower back and sent my kidneys banging into my other organs. It knocked the breath from my lungs. I couldn’t get it back before his fingers wrapped around a section of my hair and used it to lift me nearly to my feet. His fist kissed my cheekbone, sending me back to the ground. In the tumble, I smashed into the washbasin and water sloshed over the edge.

I managed to roll over onto my hands and knees and began to crawl. My hands slid in the soapy water, but I redoubled my efforts until I started making forward progress toward the corner where a built-in cabinet stood.

“Get back over here,” Flynn growled.

His hand wrapped around my ankle, and he yanked me backward. I dug my fingernails into the tile floor. The strain as my nails began to separate from the cuticles was the most bearable pain that I would feel for a long time.

 “I’m so sorry, Isabel,” Flynn said for the ninth time in the past half-hour. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

I slouched against the dining room table, battling to stay upright even as the room spun around me. Endorphins had taken the edge off the pain inhabiting almost every square inch of my body, but where my forearm had broken still felt like it was on fire. The sensation only worsened as Flynn wrapped it in a makeshift splint.

My blood was splattered across the front and arms of his gray, long-sleeved shirt along with the front of his pants. It would have been turning stiff as the blood across my shirt and jeans was well on its way to hardening into the fabric. He’d yet to wash the blood from his hands.

His fingers gingerly caressed my skin, and he worried his bottom lip between his teeth.

“You know I didn’t mean it, hon,” he said. “Right?”

I channeled my energy into ignoring the spinning room and focused on Flynn.

It was the last thing that I wanted to do. I wanted to lay my head on the cool wood of the table and let it soothe the throbbing beneath my cheekbone. I wanted to close my eyes until sleep or unconsciousness let me escape from the pain for a little while.

The lie that’d danced across my tongue and slipped from my lips a thousand times balked at being said.

This was not the life that I expected when Flynn discovered me huddled inside a jackknifed tractor trailer on I-495 outside of Boston. I’d survived for more than a year on whatever expired canned food that I scavenged from empty buildings and had avoided being mauled by Howlers. It was a life lived day-to-day with no guarantee of seeing what passed for sunrise.

Flynn promised an end to that. Surviving alongside another person meant sleeping an hour without bolting awake at the creaks or hard gusts of wind; it meant cooperating to accumulate more resources than I’d gather on my own; and it meant human contact. That was what convinced me to crack open the back of the trailer that day nearly ten months ago: leaning into another living person.

Solitude cannot be a way of life for anyone intending to remain human; it wears too much on the soul. It wore on mine.

Flynn was on his way north to Bear Mountain in New Hampshire and to the over-stocked, seasonal cabins buried deep in ski country. He had an SUV and a Browning rifle, and he was a handsome man. So I said yes and climbed into the passenger seat the next morning.

“Isabel?”

I wrapped my fingers around his muscular hand and squeezed.

“I know you didn’t mean it,” I said. “I know.”

He held my hand gingerly in his own before bringing it to his lips.

“Thank you,” he whispered.

Flynn brushed at his eyes with his sleeve, sniffling as he did so. Then he pushed his chair away from the table, eased my chair backward until there was enough room for him to pick me up, and then carried me upstairs to the master bedroom. After helping me undress as carefully as he could, Flynn laid me beneath the covers and kissed my forehead.

“I’ll bring up some ibuprofen,” he said.

I didn’t hear him walk across the wooden floor or come back inside the room to pour water and pain killers down my throat. When I opened my eyes, he was gone. There was a glass of water on the nightstand, and the door was closed. The grayed, hazy light that normally seeped through the lone window behind the headboard was gone, leaving the room dark.

I eased myself onto my elbows and waited for the bed to stop rolling like it was on a ship at sea rather than on the second floor of a mountain cottage. The motion eventually turned into a quiet rocking, and I was reasonably sure that I could be upright without tipping over. I slowly sat up until I leaned back against the headboard.

The broken bone of my forearm suddenly felt like it caught fire. Despite the tight splint, the bone had moved. Maybe a fraction of a centimeter. Or a millimeter. But it had shifted, and the pain dug its claws into me, resisting the numbing of endorphins and the painkillers still in my bloodstream. I clutched the splint to my chest and breathed through clenched teeth.

Slowly, the pain receded ever so slightly the longer that I remained still. It was too dug-in to go away completely.

I embraced it. It was the only thing keeping me from tumbling back to sleep, and I wanted to stay awake. There were too many nightmares licking at the edge of my dreams.

So I sat still, listening to bombs being dropped on Howlers on the other side of Bear Mountain.

A foot and a half of snow had fallen by the time I’d recovered enough to emerge from bed. I clung to the walls and the counters and the chairs whenever the blood rushed from my head. And while the pain of a broken arm had mostly faded to static, I still kept it protectively against my chest when I walked.

“Let me help you with that.”

Flynn eased the plate from my grip and took the other one off the counter. He laid them on the kitchen island before guiding me to the barstool with a hand on my lower back.

“Are you sure that you don’t want to eat at the table?” he asked, eyeing the barstool.

“I’m sure,” I said. “I haven’t felt dizzy all afternoon.”

He helped me onto the seat and watched me from the corner of his eye as I blew steam from the rice.

Then a bomb exploded.

The cabin shuddered, and I toppled from the barstool and only managed not to slam into the ground because Flynn caught me by the upper arm. He hauled me to my feet, keeping me upright against the counter even though his attention had travelled outside.

“Get upstairs,” he said.

I watched him collect his respirator and a Browning rifle from the hall tree before bolting through the front door. The door swung back into a closed position, but the latch didn’t quite click into place.

I wobbled when I stepped away from the counter, grabbing hold of the nearest barstool to keep my balance. It was slow work moving from the kitchen to the laundry room. The dizziness slowed my pace for sure, but so did the explosions that rippled through the floor.

Flynn kept his guns on display. A Browning semi-automatic rifle and a Winchester rifle leaned against the hall tree while a matching set of Ruger semi-automatic pistols rested on stands atop the fireplace mantle. He even had a sawed-off Winchester shotgun that lived on his nightstand. There wasn’t an open corner of this cabin that a piece of heavy artillery didn’t call home.

But they were big guns with a recoil that nearly knocked me over whenever Flynn coaxed me onto his makeshift firing range in the woods. I couldn’t hope to fire one of them one-handed since using both hands was out of the question. So I had to get ahold of my gun.

My Glock G22 semi-auto pistol belonged to a Suffolk County Sheriff before I pried it from her corpse. It served me well enough: accuracy at a distance and plenty of power to stop a running Howler or human.

I gripped the doorframe until the aftershocks of the explosion stopped vibrating through the floor and then went directly for the cabinet in the far corner. There was a false shelf on the bottom of the left-hand side which hid a sixteen-inch by sixteen-inch cubby that I’d discovered a day after Flynn and I moved into the cabin. He didn’t know about it, and he didn’t know about my Glock, the holster, or the ammunition that I’d found when he still allowed me on supply runs.

I checked the chamber for a bullet before sliding a new magazine inside. When I started back for the doorway, the front door banged open. The bang was quickly drowned out by shrieks. Each hit an octave that threatened to burst my eardrums, the sound travelling through my skin and leaving bits of shrapnel behind until it lodged firmly in my chest. It was pain embodied, and it was nothing like the pain humming below the surface in my arm. This pain was one of living flesh being devoured one molecule at a time.

Howlers stampeded through the living room, and their footsteps branched off in different directions. Some faded while others stomped toward the doorway of the laundry room.

The front of the cabinet pressed against my shoulder blades until I realized that I’d backed myself into the corner. I trained the Glock on the open doorway and rested my finger on the trigger guard. A drop of sweat trickled down from behind the hair at my temple. The rest of my body was still, and even my heartrate had slowed to a crawl.

I breathed in. I breathed out.

The Howler stumbled into the doorway.

Howlers used to be human and were still considered human by Howlers-Rights groups before the second asteroid hit Greenland. The scientists that survived the first strike in Australia theorized that a microscopic organism carried by the asteroid caused excruciating pain when introduced to the human body. It did other things, too: multiplying and devouring every healthy cell it could find; causing the skin and underlying fat and muscle tissue to seemingly melt off the body; and instilling an insatiable, cannibalistic hunger.

I knew more about the Howler in the doorway than any of the scientists before or after the second asteroid. Mostly because there wasn’t enough time between the two strikes for anything but panic to spread, and because those still alive after the second were more concerned with survival than pursuit of scientific inquiry.

The Howler in front of me curled back what remained of its lips in a snarl, displaying its worn, graying teeth. Its sunken eyes peered out from a face that seemed ready to sluff off at the slightest breeze. There was no skin left and only a few muscles curling over the white of its skull.

The Howler let out an ear-piercing shriek, and then it charged.

I deliberately moved my index finger from the trigger guard to the trigger, sighted-in on the barreling figure’s forehead, and delicately squeezed the trigger. The bang that followed made my ears ring even more so than the shriek.

The Howler slammed to a stop like it had run head-first into a glass wall before crumpling to the floor. I felt rather than heard the pounding feet of the other Howlers racing toward the gunshot. The narrow doorway forced them into a nearly single-file line, and those behind bunched up in the hallway, creating a logjam.

I picked them off one by one with a bullet to the forehead. My head pounded from all the gunshots, and the smell of burning gunpowder briefly overpowered the smell of necrotic flesh.

It jarred me out of my rhythm when they stopped clambering overtop of their counterparts. I forced my index finger back to the trigger guard and pressed through the emptiness in my ears to listen for the shrieks. There were none.

I turned back to the cabinet to reload my gun before inching my way toward the accumulation of bodies on my laundry room floor. I gave them as wide of a berth as possible in such a narrow space and used my gun hand to balance against the doorframe when I had to step atop them to get through the doorway.

Any other Howlers that’d entered the house would’ve come running to the sound of the firefight, but I still cleared every room on the first floor after knocking the front door shut with my foot. Their bloody tracks only made it halfway up the stairs, so I didn’t bother mounting them to check for a hidden Howler in the master bedroom or bathroom.

For the first time in a long time, the cabin felt secure. The Glock waited for me on the counter next to the plates of now-cold rice while I retrieved one of the last water bottles in the refrigerator. I sat down and finished my rice.

Flynn shuffled through the front door nearly two hours later. His respirator hung around his neck, the plastic face-shield crackled like a car windshield after being struck by a rock. His shotgun was nowhere in sight. There wasn’t a piece of clothing on him that hadn’t been shredded, and the skin showing through the gaps in fabric was raw.

“Isabel.” My name was hoarse in his throat.

I shot to my feet and then grabbed onto the counter to keep the sudden dizziness from knocking me to the floor. In doing so, I bumped my arm ever so slightly, and the broken bones screamed.

“Easy, hon.”

His hands were on my upper arms, guiding me back to the barstool so that I could lean back against the counter’s edge. He kept his hands in place while I breathed through the pain. Inhaled through my nose. Exhaled between my teeth.

The blinding pain eased little by little until it hit a bearable level. It was then that I got a good look at Flynn, and what I saw made my heart drop.

“Flynn,” I said quietly. “Did you get scratched?”

Flynn stepped back until he was an arm’s length away. When he looked me in the eye, I knew the answer.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”

I reached up to wipe away the tear that rolled down his cheek. It was all that I could do to ignore the way tears fogged up my own vision.

He took hold of my hand and gently kissed the inside of my wrist. His breath warmed my skin, leaving behind the barest hint of moisture.

“I don’t want to leave you here,” he said. “I can’t let you be alone. It’s my job to protect you, to keep you safe.”

His fingers caressed my skin and fluttered across the edge of the splint.

“It’s going to be okay,” I lied. “You’re going to be okay.”

He shook his head. “One of them scratched me. I’m-I’m not going to turn into one of them; I can’t let that happen. But I can’t leave you.”

His eyes suddenly focused on the counter behind me, and he snatched an object from atop it. It wasn’t until his fingers wrapped around my Glock that the realization of what was about to happen dawned on me.

“This is how it has to be,” he said.

I lunged for the gun. My fingers wrapped around the muzzle and forced it away from my chest. I’d caught Flynn by surprise, so he let me push the gun away without offering much resistance at first. But then the full force of a six-foot, two-hundred-pound man turned on me and proceeded to wrench the gun out of my grasp. The muzzle moved back toward my chest in slow motion as his finger darted behind the trigger guard and onto the trigger.

I screamed.

Flynn hesitated for a fraction of a second, which was long enough for me to dart forward again. I wrestled and scratched and banged my knee into his groin and rammed my forehead into his chin. His grip never loosened, but he wasn’t able to force the muzzle against my chest again.

The gun went off.

All the fight drained out of Flynn in an instant, and I found myself sitting atop his prone form while blood cascaded from matching holes beneath his jaw and at the crown of his head. Bits of brain and skull lay scattered across the hardwood floor.

I scrambled backward until there was nowhere else to go, and even as I sat frozen and pressed against the wall, my eyes never left Flynn. As if he would sit up at any minute and come after me. As if I would wake up in the king-sized bed with Flynn snoring beside me.

But as hard as I willed those realities to be true, nothing changed. Flynn still lay dead on the kitchen floor with blood now trickling from the wounds where the bullet entered and where it exited.

The wind howled on the other side of the cabin walls in competition with the fresh wave of explosions close enough to shake the cabin. My water bottle toppled off the counter and bounced off Flynn’s foot before coming to rest against the leg of the bar stool. I stared at it for a long time.

Then I got to my feet.

I pulled a weathered hiking backpack from the closet in the hallway and darted around the house as I packed it. Clothes, matches and lighters, an assortment of screwdrivers, boxes of ammunition, granola and energy bars; all of it went into the bag. I shoved the entirety of our medical kit into the front and side pockets.

The last item I picked up was my Glock. It lay beneath the coffee table in the living room. I checked the magazine; three bullets left. I tucked it into the holster that I’d threaded onto my belt before slinging the bag and both rifles on the hall tree over my shoulder.

When I left, I closed the front door softly even as the wind tried to rip the handle from my hands.

“This can’t go on,” Weasel said.

He stood on tiptoe, his belly to the wall, looking through the musty glass at the street outside. The Arabian Nights hookah lounge lay in the basement of an old apartment building, its windows offering an unprecedented view of any passerby’s ankles. Or they would have, had there been any pedestrians left. Nowadays it was just an empty sidewalk lined with abandoned cars, the asphalt shimmering in the oppressive heat.

“This can’t go on,” he said again, and began pacing around the room, staring at the same couches and ornate cushions and dead TV screen he had been staring at for the past two weeks. Painted on the walls, a desert strewn with pyramids and mosques and distant oases. Empty hookahs rose from the tables like glass-and-steel minarets.

“I raise one,” Gabe said, and added a cigarette to the half-dozen already on the table. He sprawled on a couch, naked but for his boxer shorts. He had removed those, too, at one point, and had only put them back on after numerous complaints from Weasel and Pauline. When this all began, his head had been freshly shaven and his goatee thick and trimmed. Now his hair had grown to a dark crew cut and his beard approached that shipwreck-survivor look.

“Sure,” Pauline said, and rolled another cigarette to the pile. She sat across the table from him, also clad only in her panties. She had worn a shirt for nearly a week after they had holed up in here, but the rising temperatures forced her to abandon her modesty. Weasel and Gabe hardly noticed her breasts anymore. The heat left everyone semi-comatose.

“Let’s see them,” Gabe said, and dropped his cards on the table. Pauline obliged. They stared at the two hands in solemn contemplation. “Damn,” he said as she scooped up the cigarettes. Three days in, he had called her into the back room and tried to hook up with her. He had come out shaking his head, saying, “She’s into chicks. Hell, man, when it rains it pours.”

“What I wouldn’t give for some rain,” Weasel muttered.

Gabe looked at him. “Huh?”

“Freshmint. I miss freshmint. With saloom.”

Gabe sighed. “I feel you, bro.”

They had run out of hookah tobacco four days ago. A huge problem, as aside from playing cards and getting inebriated, smoking was their premier pastime. More importantly, it calmed the nerves. Kept hands occupied and masked the stench of stale perspiration. Restless, they turned to the cigarette rack above the bar. Pauline was a weekend smoker so she had already consumed some of those. Gabe hadn’t bought a pack in years, but he started again out of boredom. Even Weasel, whose only encounter with tobacco was the weekly hookah with Gabe, had a few. And he hated them. Couldn’t understand how anyone could enjoy such flavorless smoke.

Not that he understood much of anything anymore. The world had officially gone to hell fourteen days ago, though the signs of the coming calamity had been there for a bit longer. A month or so. First, the nights had changed. Became warmer. Brighter. After a week, you could no longer tell night from day. Then the new light appeared in the sky. Everybody assumed it was a comet, what with it having a tail and all, but then all the big shot astrophysicists came on TV to explain that it was in fact a star. A red giant that somehow shot through space like the galaxy’s largest, meanest rocket.

The astrophysicists claimed that Mira II—that was the star’s official moniker, though people soon dubbed it Wormwood—would come no closer to Earth than two hundred million miles. A hair’s breadth in space terms, but still too far to affect us much. Two days later, earthquakes. Chasms opening everywhere. Streets caving in and buildings toppling. Villages buried under avalanches. Volcanoes erupting to spew searing death over the countryside. Tsunamis galore.

Gabe and Weasel were at the Arabian Nights when it began. The owner, Adnan, cranked up the TV volume and then everyone in the lounge stared at the destruction on display, hookah pipes hovering before slack mouths. Then the tremors began. Deep in the earth, like an electrical current prickling the soles of their feet. Hookahs fell from tables, spilling coals over the linoleum. The building groaned. The screen went black. The lights flickered and died. Patrons screamed in the gloom. Adnan grabbed his head and fell on his knees and wailed like a man doomed.

Gabe and Weasel were the first out the door. Though it was ten in the evening, outside it may as well have been high noon. People ran from buildings in abject panic. Cars crashed against each other. Flowerpots fell from balconies to explode on the sidewalk. A cloud of dust rose over distant rooftops. On the pallid blue sky, Mira II swam mindless like a fiery tadpole.

The tremors passed, but the panic stayed. The streets were soon blocked with wrecked or abandoned cars and people were stampeding. Weasel would’ve stampeded with them, but Gabe grabbed his arm and told him they should stay put. “Where are you gonna go?” he had said. “You’ve seen the news, the fucking earthquakes are everywhere. We should stay here and wait to be rescued.”

“But Gabe… what if the building falls?”

“Look at it, it’s already stopped shaking. If we stay in the street, we’re gonna get trampled or bricks are gonna fall on our heads or we’re gonna get shot by looters. Unless you got a helicopter, it’s best we hide and wait for this whole thing to blow over.”

“And if it doesn’t?”

“What is this, the end of the world? Of course it will.”

They returned to the deserted Arabian Nights. Adnan had fled along with the rest. He had left the keys on the bar, so Gabe went and locked the door. Two hours and a hookah later, their bellies began to groan. The fridge behind the bar was stacked with juices and booze and bottled water, but no food aside from a homemade chicken sandwich. Adnan’s dinner, most likely. After they had eaten it, Gabe said, “We hafta get some cans.”

“Cans?”

“Canned food, bro. Tuna. Sardines. Beans. Stuff can last us years.”

“Where will we find that?”

“In the supermarket across the street, of course.”

“I… I doubt it’s open now.”

“So? We’ll loot it.”

“What? No.”

“There’s no power, remember? Security cams are all dead. Besides, after we’re rescued and everything returns to normal, we’ll go back and pay for the stuff we took. This is about survival, bro. I wouldn’t be surprised if the place has already been looted.”

They arrived at the supermarket to find its front window shattered and its cash registers emptied. They filled two trash bags with cans, crackers, candies, rice cakes, toilet paper, bottled water, soft drinks, red wine—Gabe insisted even the cheapest, warmest red wine tasted okay if you mixed it with Coke—and cartridges for the portable gas stove Adnan kept in the back. “Don’t worry,” he said as they headed back. “We’ll have ourselves a cozy catastrophe.”

They first saw Pauline as they walked back to Arabian Nights. A twenty-something redhead with a messenger bag under her arm, she stumbled down the sidewalk, leaning a hand on a nearby wall like a sailor traversing a storm-wracked deck. Gabe asked if she was okay, and she said, “No, fuck no, I’m not okay,” and showed them the matted, bloody hair at the side of her head.

They took her to Arabian Nights and disinfected the gash with tequila and dabbed it with napkins until it stopped bleeding. Pauline had been outside when the tremors hit. A chunk of masonry broke off from a first-floor balcony and clipped her on the head. She had tried to get home, only to discover a gaping fissure had zig-zagged through the city, swallowing entire buildings. She had been wandering the area, searching for a way to cross the chasm, when she ran into Gabe and Weasel. Weasel asked her why she didn’t just follow the fissure itself, and she licked her lips and said, “I did, at first. But then I heard…”

“Umm, heard what?”

“Noises. From the fissure. They weren’t tremors. They were more like… squawks.”

“Squawks?”

“Yeah, like there were giant birds down there.”

“In the fissure?”

“Yeah. I got scared so I ran away.”

“It’s just nerves,” Gabe said.

“Screw you, I know what I heard.”

Gabe shook his head. “You probably heard the earth shifting and the echo made it sound weird.”

“No, it wasn’t like that. It sounded like a bird.”

“An underground bird is an oxymoron.”

Sadly, Pauline was right. Their one remaining link to the outside world, the radio, was crammed with people describing the monstrosities that had emerged from the cracks in the earth. Biologists speculated there was an entire ecosystem deep beneath the planet’s crust, hitherto unknown to us, and that the seismic disturbances caused by Mira II’s gravity had sent its denizens skittering for the surface. The last broadcasts they heard before their batteries ran out urged listeners to avoid these creatures, since most appeared omnivorous.

Not that they needed the warning. Every now and then, they, too, heard things. Hisses. Squawks. Growls. A week in, a woman dashed through the street outside. Before they could call to her, something else darted past the window. A serpentine body lined with myriad segmented legs. Gone too fast for a good look. They heard a heavy thump as the woman slipped or was dragged down. The ripping, snapping noises that came after she had stopped screaming have fueled their nightmares ever since. The incident erased whatever ideas of leaving Arabian Nights they might’ve entertained. Until now.

“Freshmint,” Weasel said. “God, do I miss freshmint.”

Gabe wiped his brow. His hand came away glistening. “I hear you, bro. I’d kill for any flavor right now. Even orange. These cigarettes taste like trash.”

“I’ll be happy to take them from you,” Pauline said.

Gabe groaned.

Weasel licked his lips. “I was thinking. Maybe we could…”

“What, bro?”

Weasel shook his head.

“Can’t leave me hanging after you got me wet, bro. C’mon, say it.”

Weasel looked through the window at the parched street. “There’s that place.”

“Which one?”

“The one next to Nefertiti.”

Gabe’s eyes widened. “You mean…”

“Yeah.”

“What the hell is Nefertiti?” Pauline asked.

“A hookah lounge Weasel and me used to frequent until the new owner made it a booze-free establishment.”

Pauline arched a brow. “And?”

“There’s a hookah store next to it. It stocks everything hookah-related. Probably has boxes full of flavored tobacco.”

“Freshmint,” Weasel said. “And saloom.”

Gabe grinned. “And lemon. And apple. And coffee. And chocolate. And watermelon. Holy shit, I’d drink my own piss for a watermelon hookah.”

“With saloom,” Weasel said.

Pauline frowned. “You can’t be serious.”

Gabe shrugged. “It’s just half a block from here.”

“I don’t care if it’s next door. Those things are out there.”

“We haven’t seen them in days.”

“That doesn’t mean they’re gone. I’m not letting you two go out. You saw what happened to that woman.”

“Well, umm, she didn’t have a gun,” Weasel said.

All three of them looked at the shotgun on the couch, its wooden haft scratched and glazed with age. They had found it in a drawer behind the bar, laid alongside a nightstick and a can of pepper spray. Adnan’s security.

Pauline shook her head. “Nobody here can shoot a gun.”

“I can,” Gabe said.

“Yeah, right.”

“I’ve been to the range.”

“How many times?”

“One.”

“Did you use a shotgun that one time?”

“No, a pistol.”

“Forget it. Not happening. There’s no fucking freshmint in your fucking future.”

Weasel and Gabe spent most of the following twenty-four hours standing by the windows, watching the street for signs of inhuman presence. They occasionally saw it, too. A pigeon landed on the sidewalk and pecked around. A rat scuttled under a car, its hairless tail bouncing. A skin-and-bone cat came by and looked at them, its yellow eyes narrow and judgmental. It looked diseased. When it became apparent no monsters infested the streets, they brought up Nefertiti again.

“Use your brains,” Pauline said, looking up from her game of solitaire. “Those things lived all their lives underground. Daylight must be blinding to them. They’re probably hiding inside buildings.”

Gabe threw his hands up. “What would they be doing in there? Either they went back underground, or they migrated in search of food.”

“There’s plenty of food in people’s homes.”

“Uh, I don’t think animals can open fridges,” Weasel said.

“Or cans,” Gabe said.

She rolled her eyes. “Whatever. I’m not going outside to find out.”

“It’s… it’s a supply run. You know, like they do in zombie movies. Gabe thinks—”

“I don’t give a damn what Gabe thinks. I’m not risking my life for a box of fucking hookah tobacco. Seriously, what’s with you and hookahs? You’re like a couple junkies.”

“I… We love smoking hookahs,” Weasel said.

“We’re passionate about it, okay?” Gabe said.

Pauline groaned. “Madness. Fucking madness.”

Gabe laid the shotgun, the nightstick, and the pepper spray on a table. “You take this,” he said, handing Weasel the pepper spray. Before Weasel could protest, Gabe stroked his beard and said, “You’re gonna need a melee weapon.” He went behind the bar and returned with an ornate scimitar. The same scimitar belly-dancers performing at Arabian Nights used as part of their shows, swinging it in rhythm with the music or balancing it on their heads or even holding it in their teeth.

“Umm, Gabe… I think that’s just a prop.”

“It’s not a prop, bro. Look how heavy it is. It’s like a baseball bat.”

They skinned some pillows and fashioned primitive hoods. Then they donned their clothes for the first time in too long and fiddled with the shotgun until they figured out how to switch off the safety. Pauline watched them, her mouth a straight line. “Are you really going to risk your lives for some tobacco?”

Gabe shrugged. “It’s only gonna take like twenty minutes.”

She followed them up the stairs and to the door, her arms crossed around her sweaty torso. “Guys, seriously, this is stupid.”

Weasel stood in the doorway and offered her the key. When she didn’t take it, he swallowed dry phlegm and dropped the key in the nook of her arm, careful not to accidentally touch her breast. He stepped out after Gabe.

Outside, a hundred degrees in the shade. In April. The air was warm and dry, the wind blowing in Weasel’s face hot like the fumes blasting from a car’s exhaust. Heated asphalt cooking his feet through his shoes. A dead, cloudless sky. Mira II looming over everything, twice the size of the Sun. Necrotic spots like clouds of soot marred its orange tail. A cold yellow light glowed in its iris like a luminescent tumor.

Gabe took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. He walked with his back stooped, the shotgun pointed forward, glancing over his shoulder as if to make sure Weasel was following. The nightstick stuck out of his back pocket like a metal tail. At the intersection, they heard footsteps and turned to see Pauline hurrying after them, trying to move fast and stay quiet at the same time and failing at both. “I’ll go mad if I stay there alone,” she whispered as she caught up, panting like she had just ran a marathon. In her hand, a lipstick.

“What are you gonna do with that? Paint dicks on their faces?” Gabe asked.

“It’s pepper spray, dumbass. I always have it in my bag.”

The Arabian Nights area had been lucky. Not so the rest of the block. Cracks cut through streets and sidewalks and even buildings. Some were broad enough to rip tires or trap wheels or swallow people whole. Crashed or immobilized vehicles blocked most streets. They passed through a small park with a playground nestled between the trees. Dead grass, dying branches. Desiccated leaves rustling like ghostly whispers. A swing swaying in the wind, its chains too hot to grasp. Silence sepulchral.

Also, bodies. Birds. Cats. Dogs. People. Some broken under falling masonry, others run over by panicked drivers, others still ravaged in manners most bestial. All reduced to bone and bits of skin and fur. The stench wasn’t quite as bad as roadkill, but it was everywhere. It wasn’t long before they sprayed the sidewalk with the semi-digested tuna they’d had for breakfast.

Sprawled in the gutter, they found the bastard child of a crab and a turtle. Big as a raccoon, its shell had been cracked open as if with a rock and the insides devoured. Another of its kind rested against a bus, its pincers torn off in what must’ve been a desperate last stand. More uncanny carcasses dotted the path to Nefertiti. Unlike the crab-turtle things, most of these possessed no exoskeleton, making it difficult to glean their original shapes from what little remained.

Then Nefertiti was up ahead, and in the midst of that fetid graveyard bathed in the glow of a baleful star, Weasel felt the corners of his lips twitch. Its windows were gone, the doors hanging from their hinges, the great sun shade that shielded its terrace torn to strips. Half the building had collapsed. Sticks of rebar poked from smashed walls like malformed ribs.

The little hookah store didn’t fare much better. Its front window was shards and the hookahs had tumbled from their shelves, covering the floor with shattered glass. Gabe crept up to the store like a kid playing soldier. He peeked inside, and gave a thumbs-up. The door was jammed, so he cleared the remains of the window with the nightstick and clambered into the gloom. Minutes oozed like blood. Then Gabe said, “Bingo,” and Weasel let out a breath he didn’t remember holding.

Gabe emerged with a plastic bag full of little carton boxes with drawings of lemons, apples, bananas, strawberries, and cherries plastered above photos of blackened lungs and Smoking Kills signs. He gave the bag to Weasel and said, “Didn’t find any freshmint. But I bet there’s some in Nefertiti.”

“Are you for real?” Pauline said.

“Real as they come, baby.”

“Fuck you.”

“Anytime, anywhere.”

“No, fuck you because my ex-boyfriend used to drop that same stupid line and now you reminded me of that asshole.”

Gabe frowned. “You said you were into chicks.”

“I sure did.”

He snorted, shaking his head. Then he headed for Nefertiti.

They stepped on its terrace and stood in its ruined doorway. A two-level establishment, its second floor was wreathed in shadow and its first littered with torn cushions and broken bottles and fallen hookahs. The stench of rot wafted from within. Under the bar, rooted at the edge of sunlight, lay a couple dozen brown objects. Each was about the size of a fist. And they pulsed.

Weasel heard himself say, “Eggs,” in a child’s voice, and then something on the second floor shifted. A segmented, serpentine body covered in a gnarled carapace. As long as an alligator and almost as thick, it uncoiled itself from the darkness above and fell to the floor with a meaty thud. It stood on its many legs and wiggled its antennae and clicked its mandibles, and he had just enough time to think, A centipede, a giant fucking centipede, oh my God, it’s a giant fucking centipe—

It charged. Pauline screamed, and so did Weasel and Gabe. The shotgun roared and a hole burst in the bar and then the thing lunged. It embraced Gabe’s leg and drove the many moving parts of its mouth into his thigh. He shrieked and went down on his ass. It started shaking him up and down, its head spattered crimson. He pumped the shotgun and shoved the barrel in the thing’s face and its head exploded like a dropped melon.

Another centipede rushed from Nefertiti. Still screaming, Pauline raised her fake lipstick and drenched it in orange poison. But the thing never slowed. It had no eyes. It had evolved in a lightless place that rendered vision minimal and oculars wasteful. It clamped its many legs around Pauline’s torso and dug its mandibles into her throat and slammed her on the concrete like a lioness tackling a gazelle.

Weasel grasped the scimitar in both hands and brought it down on the centipede’s head. The blade cut into the carapace in a spurt of blue ichor. The thing screeched and tore its face out of Pauline, yanking the scimitar from his hands. It hissed at him, the sword still planted in its skull, the many appendages around its maw spreading like a flytrap from hell.

“Move, bro!” Gabe shouted.

Weasel’s feet tangled and he stumbled and fell against the terrace banister. He felt thunder in his chest and saw a hole yawn in the thing’s side like a mutilated orifice. It screeched again, then spun around and fled, trailing ichor and bits of carapace. It skittered up a ruined wall and disappeared into the building. A hush ensued.

Weasel looked at what remained of Pauline’s throat. After that, he looked at her no more. He pushed the decapitated centipede off Gabe and helped him to his feet. In death, the thing’s legs squirmed, slathering its own fluids over the tiles like a Rorschach pattern. Gabe’s jeans were shredded and drenched red, the flesh of his thigh crisscrossed with gashes.

Cradling the shotgun and the tobaccos to their chests, they trundled back. Past the hookah store and the carcasses of what they now recognized as the centipedes’s previous meals. Past the park with its dying trees and empty playground. Through a broad street clogged with cars that shimmered in the sun like a desert highway. Into a trashed drugstore to stock up on bandages, antibiotics, disinfectants, and painkillers. By the time Weasel had finished dressing the wound, Gabe’s face was so pale it resembled porcelain.

A couple hundred feet from Arabian Nights, Gabe stumbled and fell on one knee. He had to lean on Weasel the rest of the way. As they unlocked the door, he looked up to the sickly blue heavens and the alien star reigning above, and said, “Fuck you, you fucking bitch. Damn, I feel like crap.”

“Jesus, Gabe, you’re burning up.”

“Just gimme more painkillers.”

Weasel helped him down the stairs and laid him on a couch and brought him water. Gabe emptied the bottle and said, “Freshmint with lemon. Fix me a freshmint with lemon.”

“Sure, man,” Weasel said, and went behind the bar. He filled the hookah’s vase with lukewarm water, added the silicone grommet, and mixed the two tobaccos with his fingers. He placed the mixture in the bowl, then tore a portion of aluminum foil and wrapped it over the top of the bowl so that it resembled a tiny drum. With a toothpick, he poked holes in the foil. It was only after he had affixed the bowl to the hookah that he realized he had forgotten to heat up the charcoals. He opened another drawer and looked at the orange carton box within. Coconut coals. The best. He flipped up the lid and reached inside. His face contorted.

“Oh man, Gabe, you… you won’t believe this.”

No answer.

“Gabe?”

Still no answer.

Weasel leaned over the bar. Gabe lay on his back with his eyes shut and his mouth open. Slowly, walking on tiptoe, Weasel approached the couch. No snoring. He hovered a palm over Gabe’s mouth. No breath. He checked his pulse. Nothing.

“Oh, Gabe,” he muttered, inspecting the bandage. Some red had seeped into the cloth. Hands shaking, he undid it and looked at the wound. Swollen black veins spread from the gashes like skeletal fingers. He should’ve known. After all, centipedes were venomous creatures.

Weasel drew his fingers through his hair. He had nothing to cover Gabe with, so he piled cushions on his head and chest until only his legs were visible. That made it worse, somehow. He went back behind the bar and just stood there, staring at the charcoals box. A single black cube sat within. He needed at least two for a hookah. They had been so obsessed with getting more tobacco, they forgot to check how many coals they had left.

Weasel staggered to the center of the room like a drunkard and placed his hands on his face. Sweat and tears against his palms. Something snapped in the back of his mind, and before he knew it he was prone on a couch, laughing. And crying. And laughing and crying at the same time. Then he began to scream.

Far up in the barren sky, Mira II shone brighter.

Before the media fell, the talking heads called it The Rip. It happened across multiple nations on Rip Day, a day now as infamous in US history as Columbine or 9/11. The Rip created chasms throughout the states, ragged doorways to another place, and the sound of them opening was like a wet envelope being torn asunder by failing geriatric teeth.

Men of science argued about The Rip on CNN and Fox News, trying in vain to explain the unexplainable. Various theories surfaced, but the most popular was that what we perceive as reality wore thin in certain areas. No one could agree if it was an inevitable accident or if it was intentional from the other side. But a large portion of the experts agreed that these chasms opened into an alternate dimension, an uncharted void both alien and incomprehensible to human beings.

The doorways appeared the same everywhere. They looked like some great hand took a crude knife and carved a slit into thin air at ground level. A translucent membrane covered each entrance, and there was nothing to be seen past the membrane but immense blackness and rain that seemed to pound everlasting. Each site quickly swarmed with military personnel, the government stretching themselves to the last man and woman in order to post quarantine compounds at all the known Rip slits.

It was human curiosity that damned them all. A single field biologist with a utility knife at a doorway in Pineworth, West Virginia. This man approached the membrane with the misguided idea of obtaining a biopsy, thinking the veil might be something akin to living tissue.

It sliced as smooth as paper, and as the membrane retracted, they came pouring through from the wet void. It started a domino effect across all corners of the continent. Membranes began to split on their own, and the swarm washed over those military camps with merciless antipathy.

Gun fighting, explosions, and all manner of human ingenuity sought to repel them. The resistance lasted a grand total of one week before civilization staggered to its knees due to what poured from The Rip slits.

The lights were blotted out, and electricity died with a gasping fizzle. Airplanes fell from the sky and subway trains smashed into each other in the depths of the earth. The population was culled in such a systematic ravaging that billions soon became mere hundreds. The world was prepared for global warming, nuclear war, and even widespread famine.

But the world was not ready for The Rip. Even in the wildest of imaginations, no one could fathom those wet and waiting things—things not built for our fleshy state of being. The corruption seeped from the slits like weeping wounds across Mother Nature’s mutilated face, and all was lost in the blink of disbelieving human eyes.

They tried one last time to close the doors. One massive last stand for the human race, a march to triumph or doom.

The hopes of an entire sentient species rested on the shoulders of those brave few that fought to the bitterest end. Hope died with them. All they found was doom. And in their final moments came the realization that doors that open into dripping black spaces can never be closed again.

Raymond holds the 12-gauge pump action shotgun in the crook of his elbow as he stomps through the dim confines of his derelict kingdom. The slot machines are just dead monoliths now, and all the former gambling worshipers have gone to little piles of mucus-covered dust. The casino is an eerie place without the lights and sounds to give it life, but it’s served him well as a fortress of solitude after the events of The Rip.

It’s been several months since Rip Day. He was lucky when the Rip slits opened. He’d been holed up in his hunting cabin on North Mountain sipping down shine and bagging a few wild turkeys out of season, but he was forced to flee when they came. They were after the wildlife, and it brought them sliding through the cities, the suburbs, and even the remote mountains. They have trouble breathing on our side, so they harvest the lungs of the living to compensate. Some sort of biological symbiosis that allows parts of them to blend with parts of us. They take faces, too, doesn’t matter what kind. Raymond has seen them utilize both the faces of humans and animals alike. They strip the flesh clean, make a mask of it, and then attach the lungs on either side of that dripping mask. The lungs expand, and the tattered mouth of the mask lets them expel a kind of black ichor after the oxygen is spent. They’re fiends for blood, too. They don’t drink it or digest it; they just smear it all over their bodies to keep themselves from drying out in our atmosphere. They like it wet and hot, sauna conditions, and they seem to luxuriate in a thick layer of warming plasma.

Raymond knows they’ve gotten inside. He just woke up from a pitiful slice of broken sleep. He was dreaming of the day that he came home to the doublewide trailer to find his wife’s face peeled clean and all of his children lying on the porch with their chests just open craters, the ribs bent back and snapped with their organs rotting in the sun. All that were taken were the lungs. That’s always the way of it.

He heard the slosh of them somewhere near what used to be a casino bar. It overlooks the entire establishment, a skybox view of all the dust-coated table games. He’s familiar with their watery movements. They sound like a mixture of a dripping faucet and something slithering through a mud hole. He smelled them, too, and the aroma helped to draw him back to the waking world. It’s a stench to make the nostrils twitch. It reminds him of the stink of snot splattering out of the nose of someone fighting through a bout with influenza.

There are only a few entrances to the casino, but he thought for sure he boarded them all up and smeared his special repellent along the thresholds. There’s only that emergency exit with the faulty lock, but he chained that up good, didn’t he?

Raymond hopes so in the deepest part of himself.

They’re so damn fast. That’s the weirdest part. They shouldn’t be fast. You see the physiology of them and you think of the only living organism on earth that they’re comparable to, and you imagine they’d be slow. They’re not. They must have evolved differently in the place they come from. That dark boiling landscape where the rain never stops.

Raymond hasn’t seen or heard another person since Rip Day. For all he knows, he could be the last. Nothing but a bearded old man holed up in cavernous casino and waiting to die. He’s considered going out by his own hand. That’s the merciful way. It’s much better than having them suck off the face and pull out the lungs, but he has a certain amount of pride left in him, and taking his own life is not something he’s willing to do just yet.

He’s been holding to a desperate wish that the world as a whole can still come back from this. Maybe there’s a way to seal up the slits. Perhaps they’ll just close on their own just as naturally as they opened, and the moist hell that waits on the other side will become nothing but a traumatic memory.

He wishes for this, but he also knows in his heart that the horde that came through won’t just vanish into thin air. They’re too numerous, too curious, and too intent on exploring what America has to offer. He thinks maybe they orchestrated The Rip in order to have more space to inhabit. Humans numbered in the billions before all this, but the things that came through seem to exist in the trillions. There are big ones, small ones, and breeders that never leave their chosen hives. Raymond thinks overpopulation drove them to seek out new realms of existence.

If that was their plan, they succeeded. They found a way through. They never tried to communicate with the human race. It seems they speak only the language of subjugation and destruction. Their own biological survival is the imperative, and colonization is the endgame.

Raymond rounds a bend and looks downward, but he sees no sign of their presence. He hears them, though. They’re watching him. Curdled slurping sounds, breathy expulsions of moisture, and that lightning quick noise of multiple bulbous bodies sliding across the floor.

Their defining trails are crisscrossed all around the tiles. Raymond leans down and runs an index finger through the stringy clear ooze with a look of distaste dominating his features. They got in somehow. They see him, they know of him, and the ambush is probably seconds away from happening.

Raymond knows he’s dead already. He sighs, resigning himself to slaughter as many of them as possible before he goes down. He checks the shotgun, and he finds that he has quite a few shells left. All the lead has been dumped out, and that’s par for the course. Lead smashes through them, but it does no lasting damage.

Only the rock salt seems to put them down. He’s seen it happen a few times when he was racing through the streets to get here. A few courageous souls saw what the things resembled, and they fought with nothing but cans of sodium and fists full of white particles. It’s nasty business. They writhe, twist, and contort inward when the salt hits them just right. It’s acid for things like them. It corrodes and eats them up, and Raymond isn’t opposed to offering up a little misery to the bastards that razed the only world he’s ever known.

They’re coming now. They make no attempt to hide because they know he’s cornered and there’s no place left to run. They slide with incredible agility across the floor, these great gastropods, blazers of slime trails and masters of the mucus that coats them. Their man-masks hang from featureless faces, just droopy and decaying visages with stalk eyes protruding up past the ragged crater holes of their masks. Sensory tentacles curve outward in anticipation, and the human lungs that they’ve bound to themselves expand faster and faster as they converge on the lone survivor.

The shotgun fires again and again. Rock salt splatters the horde, and many of them fall, seizing and tormented, to the floor. The salt dissolves them, their mucus membranes bursting with agonizing blisters, but still they come, sliding and slithering over their dead with single-minded purpose.

Multiple soft and sticky bodies smash into Raymond at the same time from all angles, and he loses his grip on the shotgun. Probing sensory tentacles manipulate his flesh, and he finds his chest caving inward as they strike for the lungs, the most pivotal part of a man. It’s what they need. It is the singular resource to allow this colonization to be a complete success.

Raymond’s last thought is a fragmented memory from his boyhood. He recalls a vision of himself giggling in the dirt and tipping a canister of Morton salt on a few slugs that were out and about in his mother’s garden.

They boiled and they writhed, and their suffering brought him a form of tingling pleasure. He didn’t think of it as anything more than a fun way to spend a rainy afternoon.

They’re slurping out his eyes now. They’re drowning him in a cocoon of mucus. Their sharp stalks find him, and they stab and they stab, ragged punctures taking shape all over his torso. His anguish seems to last forever.

Deep in the abyss of what remains of his mind, he thinks that this must be how it feels when a slug is salted. Desolate pain. Endless excruciation. Hurt, helpless, and at the mercy of the merciless…

His lungs explode outward in a spray of viscera.

No more breath. No more life. No more humans.

He regrets what he did to those slugs.

The straps of the backpack had rubbed Haley’s flesh raw and were now gnawing at it, biting ever deeper, to the bone. The backpack weighed a ton, or maybe it was just a couple of pounds but she’d been carrying it for what felt like months. Or was it months? Right now, Haley couldn’t care less which it was. She tried to adjust the right strap a bit, wincing with pain and then relief washed over her, for about a second, until the strap slipped back into its old place, gnawing at her flesh with every step she took.

“Look, smoke!” Juli yelled and Haley almost jumped out of her skin. She swayed but kept her balance. Her daughter grabbed her hand and pointed forward. “Look!”

“Juli…” She didn’t have the energy to tell the girl it’s not a good idea to yell. She didn’t have the energy to tell her to be quiet, as she had done so many times in the early days after the world got what it deserved in her decidedly non-humble opinion. She only had enough energy to look up from the road, where she had been gazing for the last few hours, or days, or months. There was a town about half a mile from them, the town they had set out to reach, and there was indeed a plume of smoke rising from the chimney of a house at the near end of the place.

“Come on, Mom!” The girl pulled on her hand and Haley lurched forward, almost falling over again. Her hair, wispy brown streaked with white now that she couldn’t maintain the lovely auburn shade that came in bottles, fell into her eyes. She tossed it back.

“Juli, give me a second and stop pulling,” she finally managed to say. She swallowed spit—spit that had suddenly filled her mouth at the sight of the smoke rising from that chimney of the nice-looking house half a mile away. Smoke meant people, sane people, and people meant food. But not necessarily, Haley thought. Not always. Her daughter let go of her hand and looked away, biting her lower lip.

“I’m sorry, hon, you know it may not be good,” Haley said. “It’s July, you know. People don’t light fires in July.”

She was barely keeping her eyes open. She was barely standing on her feet. If she were on her own, she would have put an end to it a long time ago. She had a knife. But she wasn’t alone. She had a 12-year-old to take care of and she had promised Jim.

“Can you give me just a minute?” she asked and without waiting for an answer, she slipped the straps of the backpack off her shoulders and sagged to the ground.

“Sure,” Juli said quietly. “I’m sorry.” She sat down next to her mother, crossing her legs. “Are you in pain?”

Haley shook her head and tried to smile. She almost did and saw Juli’s face mirroring her expression. The deep brown eyes, the raven black hair—Jim’s eyes and hair—sent a bolt of pain through her chest but she swallowed it and tried to smile.

“I’ll be fine, just need a bit of a rest before we reach that house.”

“Sure,” Juli said, frowning. “We can wait ’til tomorrow, if you want.”

“No, we can’t,” Haley said, looking around and then meeting her daughter’s eyes. She saw the disgust that suddenly claimed the girl’s face. “It’s okay. I forget about them too sometimes.”

They were surrounded by corpses. The road leading to the village was lined with piles of still decomposing bodies, bony fingers sticking out from rotting sleeves, eyeless skulls with pieces of skin still stubbornly hanging onto them staring at the woman and the girl, the bodies at the bottom crushed by so many other bodies on top, human parts scattered around the piles.

“It must have been bad,” Haley said, gazing at the stinking piles.

At the beginning, she used to throw up from the smell whenever the Barnes family encountered a single corpse, of which there were many. Then the killings began on a mass scale. Now, a year later, Haley didn’t notice the smell most of the time. Neither did Juli. The girl looked embarrassed by it now. Haley got hold of her hand and squeezed. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Yeah, I know,” Juli said, squeezing her mother’s hand back. She cleared her throat and tore her eyes from the piles of former humans. “I just forgot and that’s kind of scary.”

“I know, honey,” Haley said. “I forget about it, too. It’s normal.”

“But it stinks so badly!” Juli said. “It’s… It’s disgusting!”

“I know. I know.” A shot of pain made her wince again and double over.

“Mom?” Panic rang out loud from that single word.

“I’ll be all right,” Haley said. “I will, I promise. Just a cramp.”

She’d been pregnant when Jim died. She was no longer pregnant, exhaustion and malnourishment had taken quick care of that last mistake she and her husband had made, but she was still bleeding. Haley hoped she hadn’t developed an infection, she really hoped. Doctors and medicines were hard to come by these days, as was food.

“Are you sure?” Juli asked, her eyes wide with fear. Haley thought, not for the first time, what she would do to make this fear go away. Anything, that’s what she would do. Or maybe not, she thought hazily. Sometimes there was a worse look in her girl’s eyes—an absent, indifferent look. Haley was seeing it more and more often.

“I am,” she said, hoping she’d managed the reassuring expression she tried for.

“Okay,” the girl said and looked away, to the house with the smoke coming from the chimney. Haley sighed.

They sat like this for another minute or so. Haley offered Juli water from the half-empty and much used plastic bottle she carried in the backpack. Juli refused. Haley took a very small sip and put the bottle back. They had to find water soon. This was their last bottle and the sun was scorching. Haley stood up, slowly and carefully.

“Come on, Juli, let’s go,” she said, picking up the backpack and putting it on. “Got your knife?”

Juli rolled her eyes and that made Haley finally smile. The kid was still okay. As okay as a kid of 12 could be a year after a breakout that had wiped out 80 percent of the population. At least, that’s how it looked to Haley. Their whole neighborhood was gone, dead or sick, very sick. And infectious. So infectious that you couldn’t touch them unless you wanted to become like them—completely retarded, incapable of doing anything more than shuffle aimlessly, mouth hanging open, and moan. Zombies, only not those from the movies, thankfully. The sick ones didn’t chase people and they didn’t try to eat them, but they could still be dangerous because sometimes they lurked in their houses and could grab the unwary by an arm or a leg, which was a death sentence. They died of starvation and dehydration. Or they got shot and thrown by the road. Nobody could be bothered with graves, not any more.

The disease was terminal, whether you died quickly, from complications, or wilted away slowly like these new helpless monsters whose touch was death. Everyone died, some by their own hand right after they were infected or even without being infected. They just couldn’t take it, and Haley could completely relate. She couldn’t take it either but she was taking it. Just like most of the people still left out there, she guessed.

“All right now,” Haley said as they started walking again. “What’s the drill?”

The first time she’d referred to it as a drill, Juli had laughed, a little hysterically but still amused. This was exactly why Haley had used the word. Yet funny or not, they both knew they had to be prepared for their encounters with strangers. So far they’d been lucky. Kind of.

“We move slowly, we look around, and we listen,” Juli recited.

“And?”

“And we’re ready to run if we hear a moan,” her daughter said.

They didn’t carry knives. It was a joke that Jim had come up with a few months ago, after they’d waited out the exodus and the quick deaths, and they were forced to move on because they’d eaten all the food. The shops were looted, the streets were clogged by empty cars, so walking was their only option. Jim had taken a knife, the biggest knife from the kitchen. But they all knew, even Juli, that a knife would be useless if one of the sick ones touched them. The knife was for the healthy ones. They all knew that, too.

The piles of human bodies thinned as they approached the town. By the time the two got to the sign that said “Biderford,” all traces of corpses had disappeared. The stench remained, though. It was everywhere. Juli turned around and looked at the road they’d just come from.

“Do you think they killed them all?”

“Yes,” Haley said curtly. Even though they’d spent a year surviving, running, and hiding, she still had that instinct to protect her daughter from life’s cruelties, which had significantly multiplied over the past twelve months. Yet now she saw no point in trying to make the truth look prettier. Not that it was possible, really, not after they’d both seen the piles of decomposing flesh and cloth.

“Makes sense,” Juli murmured. They’d stopped to look around. There weren’t any obvious signs of life in the town, or at least this part of it—only an empty road lined by seemingly empty houses. There were no cars, which probably meant there were enough survivors in Biderford to have cleared them from the streets. Why anyone would bother doing that was beyond Haley but if the townspeople had really driven the sick ones out and massacred them, then they were probably capable of caring about the state of their streets and clearing them from abandoned cars. Or they just all left in those cars if we’re being realistic, Haley told herself.

The house with the smoke coming out from its chimney was two houses down on the right. An unassuming two-storey affair in faded white. That’s how it looked from a distance, anyway. The smoke continued to trickle up into the still July air, dissipating into the intense blue of the sky. For a second everything looked so peaceful that Haley dared imagine that this whole last year was a nightmare, an extremely vivid one but still just a nightmare. And then the stench returned, filling her nostrils, bringing her back to reality.

“Come on,” she told Juli, who was looking around, daring a few steps forward. Haley detached herself from the pole of the town sign and took a step forward. The backpack, containing two sweaters, a half-empty 50-pair box of surgical gloves, three cans of baked beans and the half-empty bottle of water along with what remained from a shirt that had belonged to Jim, which she’d used for the bleeding, weighed her down again. Juli had carried it for a while in the morning but Haley had insisted they switch after a couple of hours. For some reason she felt safer with the backpack on, despite the pain. If anything happened that needed them to run, Juli would be quicker without a backpack.

Haley staggered a bit and then straightened up. She was feeling a little better. The pain in her belly had dulled, there didn’t seem to be any sick ones around, and her girl was okay. There was bound to be water somewhere in this town. And food. The baked beans were a strategic reserve, which Haley had picked up from the last place they’d stayed—the Geigers. Both were dead now. Like Jim.

A bird chirped from the maple tree by the town sign. Juli jumped. Haley didn’t have the energy but her heart did a somersault. Her daughter huffed, embarrassed. They walked into town, along what was most probably the main street. There was a Citgo station on the left and a dilapidated house on the right. Its door was hanging open but Haley didn’t even consider going in. Houses with their doors hanging open were always looted and sometimes contained their original occupants, sprawled on the floor, or the bed, or the couch, where the disease had overcome them, starting to moan the moment they saw someone come in, groping the air, exuding disease from their every pore.

Or, worse, they lurked behind doors and sometimes fell on the person who opened that door. That’s what had happened to Jim—a second of distraction had cost him his life. Haley wasn’t sure he was dead. Maybe he was. Maybe he had taken care of himself like he’d said he would. Or maybe he’d gotten scared and had died painfully or was still dying. She refused to think about these alternatives. She assumed he had ended it himself. It was easier this way.

“Do you think there may be something left at the store?” Juli asked, working hard to conceal the hope under a thin veneer of curiosity.

“Let’s check,” Haley said and the two turned left, where five pumps stood dusty and blind in the heat. Most of the hoses lay on the ground, spread in a chaotic pattern, thrown down no doubt angrily or desperately by the unlucky ones who’d reached the station too late, too long after the tanks had run dry.

The convenience store’s door was ajar, they saw when they approached, moving slowly, cautiously, between pump 2 and pump 3. The glass front revealed a mess inside but a mess was better than emptiness and they had seen empty stores on the road. Completely empty, cleared out, with just the shelves left standing. That was the curious thing—those who had cleared out the store had done it in an orderly fashion. Haley was terrified when she saw such a store for the first time and she couldn’t explain why.

This one, however, looked normal, like stores should look after the apocalypse—broken shelves, overturned racks, the floor littered with empty packets of chips, broken bottles and soda cans, and, hopefully, some food lost in all this trash. Juli peered through the door without touching it. Haley mouthed Be careful but her daughter didn’t see it. Besides, she knew to be careful. She was especially careful after Mrs. Geiger fell on her father from behind the door of the Geigers’ bedroom. She turned around.

“It looks empty,” the girl said and turned her head back to the store. Haley nodded. Stores often looked empty and were empty. The big looting wave was long over, along with the initial panic that caused it when people started dying in the thousands, in hospitals, in their beds, on the streets. Now, it was only scavengers like her and Juli that dropped in. Sometimes sick ones wandered into a store, too, but they were easy to spot there—they were very noisy as they tried to move through the usual mess. Often, they fell and stayed on the floor. Often, they died there and stopped being a danger. But you never knew.

“Okay, let’s see what’s in there,” Haley said and took the backpack off. She kneeled in the dust, took out the glove box and pulled out two pairs of latex gloves. She passed one to Juli and donned the other. The disease lingered on things like handles, water faucets and pretty much everything that people touched. It was like Ebola this way. Only it was much worse than Ebola. It was an Ebola-like virus that was supposed to eradicate malaria by killing off the plasmodium that caused it from the inside. Only it didn’t. Something went wrong with the infection. The mosquitoes died, which was one of the purposes, but before they did, they spread the all-new disease so efficiently that instead of getting good old malaria, humankind was now close to extinction. Gloves were precious.

Haley watched Juli put on the gloves. Then she put the box back in the backpack and got up. She dreaded the thought of putting the backpack on again but she couldn’t risk leaving it here, not with the gloves in it. And the water, she reminded herself. As she straightened up, she felt that her crotch was sticky but not exactly wet. Haley took it as a good sign and even cheered up a little. She was getting better. She wouldn’t have to leave Juli alone. The thought made her sick.

“Ready?” she asked and the girl nodded her head. Haley walked up to the door, took the handle between her thumb and index finger, and pulled very slowly. The door opened wider, silently. Juli waited by her side. Haley paused for a second and then pulled the door wide open. The two exchanged a look and stepped in, Haley first, Juli right behind her. A new smell suddenly overruled the all-pervading stink of old decay outside. The counter, to the left of the door, was covered with cash and blood. It stank, not as bad as the piles outside the town line, but still bad. The body was behind the counter—a girl, it looked like, judging by the form. The face was a total loss—bits of bones protruded from the bloody mask that covered what remained of the skull, no features discernible. A swarm of flies made the bloody mask look alive—they were feeding, laying eggs, taking a break hovering over the corpse and then returning for their next meal.

Someone had shot at least two bullets into that head, which may have been pretty before. Two large-caliber bullets. And it hadn’t happened long ago—no maggots had hatched yet. Haley suddenly lost all hope of finding anything worth taking in this place. She turned to tell her daughter they’d better go just in time to see Juli bend over and throw up a handful of water and stomach juices. Haley had forgotten to tell the girl to stay away and not look. She had forgotten to protect her from the sight behind the counter.

“Deep breaths, honey,” she said, rushing to her daughter, squatting next to her. “Deep breaths.”

Juli tried to nod but a dry retch shook her. After it passed, she inhaled deeply and wiped her mouth on the sleeve of her T-shirt.

“I’m sorry,” the girl whispered.

“It’s okay, baby, you haven’t done anything wrong,” Haley whispered back, hugging her tightly and rubbing her back. The girl hid her head in her mother’s neck. “It’s okay. I’m sorry I let you see this. I’m really sorry.”

Juli sobbed a couple of times, then raised her head and stepped away from Haley.

“It’s okay,” she said. She took another deep breath and closed her eyes for a second. “I’m okay.” She opened her eyes. “It didn’t happen long ago, did it?”

Haley shook her head and got up.

“Do you think they’ll come back?” the girl asked, sniffing.

Haley took off the backpack and took out the bottle of water. Juli took a sip and gave the bottle back to her mother.

“I don’t think they’ll come back,” Haley said.

“How do you know?’ Juli asked and kicked at an empty pack of chips. “Why would they make such a mess? Can’t they clean up after themselves?”

Haley smiled at her daughter’s outrage, so out of place and yet so reasonable, so sane. Julianne was still sane.

“Let’s see if we can find some food, all right?” she said and reached out to Juli. The girl took her hand and for a second they stood there, hand in hand, in the debris, the stench of fresh death hanging over them, almost palpable. Juli thrust her right leg forward, stirring the pile of packages, bottles, and cans. Haley hesitated for a moment, then did the same. They started moving forward, stirring the debris with their feet, scanning the store for any candy bar, packet of chips, box of cookies, anything that the last visitors of the place might have missed.

The last time they’d eaten was the previous afternoon—they’d split the ten remaining saltines from a box they’d found in an abandoned house a week earlier and had finished the pack of peanut butter chocolates that Haley had taken from the bag of a dead woman they’d stumbled upon when they were leaving the last town. She didn’t remember its name. She remembered they left it three days ago, after it turned out there was a whole swarm of sick ones in the town’s Methodist church. Apparently, there were a few infected people among them still at the early stages of the disease, who broke down the doors and let them all free. Haley and Juli were squatting in a house nearby and they heard the shouts of “Get them!” and the moans. Then they saw the still-sane ones run up the street, to the house they were hiding in, and made a quick exit through the back door and into the woods. They had to run. Haley almost gave up halfway through but she made it to the road, bleeding, breathless, but alive. And so did Juli, which was the important thing.

“See anything good?” Haley asked in her new cheery voice. She was feeling better by the minute, in spite of the dull pain in the pit of her belly, in spite of the girl’s corpse behind the counter, in spite of the stench. She’d felt worse pain, when Juli was born, prematurely. She’d seen worse things, when Mrs. Geiger fell on Jim, hands groping, mouth opening and closing, eyes unfocused, sealing his death sentence the moment her palm came into contact with his neck. And she’d smelled worse smells, when the blood started flowing out of her when she miscarried two weeks ago.

Juli tapped her foot on something in the pile of garbage and her face lit up. She grinned at her mother, let go of her hand and reached down. Her hand came up with a box of lemon cookies. The box was trampled but unopened. Haley’s mouth filled with saliva again, just as it did every time she thought about the baked beans in the backpack. She swallowed.

“Great find, kid,” she said. “It’s all yours.”

Juli hesitated with the misshapen cookie box in her hand. Then she offered it to her mother. Haley blinked back the tears that had suddenly filled her eyes and shook her head.

“All yours,” she managed. “You need your strength.’

Juli’s chin started trembling.

“No, Juli, I’m not going anywhere!” Haley said. She waded through the debris to her daughter and grabbed her by the shoulders. “I’m fine, seriously. And I have baked beans.”

Juli didn’t smile. She continued staring at her mother, studying her face, which Haley knew was drawn, dry, and paler than usual, blinking away tears, swallowing back her worry.

“Juli?” Haley said, relaxing her grip on the girl’s shoulders. She forced her fingers to loosen their grip on the thin bones and turn the squeezing into light massaging. “Juli, please have the cookies. You know you love them and you’re hungry. Then we’ll have some beans, okay?”

“Are you really fine?” her daughter asked, with her bottomless eyes that cut short any attempt at a lie fixed on hers. “Are you?”

“Of course I am,” Haley said. She knelt in the pile of garbage in front of her daughter and looked her straight in the eyes. Jim’s eyes. “I’m well and good, and I’ll be much better after you eat these cookies.”

“Mom, that’s emotional blackmail,” Juli said. She looked somber. So somber that Haley burst out laughing. Juli jumped. Haley grabbed her and pulled her to her chest, squeezing the girl, not caring if she hurt the tiny body. Juli hugged her back, fiercely. The box of cookies fell on the floor behind Haley’s back. She groped for it with one hand and pulled it out from the mess. Then she wedged it between her and Juli.

“Take it,” Haley said, letting go of Juli and pressing the shapeless cookie box to the girl’s now scrawny chest. “Please. Emotional blackmail and all.”

Juli took the box with one hand, keeping the other one around her mother’s neck.

“Okay,” she said, stifling a sob. “If you insist.”

Haley hugged her again, kissed her cheek and let go.

“Let’s see if we can find anything else,” she said, getting up. The empty packs, wrappers, and cans rustled under her feet, so she didn’t hear the soft moan that came from the door. Neither did Juli. She’d opened the box of cookies and had stuffed a palmful of crumbs into her mouth. She was watching her mother, who was blocking the door from view. Then Haley made a step forward, to the single aisle of the small store, and Juli choked on her cookies. She shot up from the floor, coughing up crumbs, and grabbed her mother’s arm. Haley started and her head snapped back to the door.

The sick man at the door had not been sick for a long time. He still looked normal but for the mouth that opened and closed erratically and the unfocused eyes. His clothes were filthy and he swayed a little like a drunk, but otherwise he could pass for a healthy man. A year ago, of course. Not now. He let out a low moan and stepped forward unsteadily. The reek of urine, feces and unwashed body hit Haley and Juli in the nose, for a second overtaking the other prevailing smell, of violent and messy death. The man lifted his right hand and groped the air. He was moving toward them.

Haley and Jim had discussed whether the sick ones could smell the healthy humans and neither of them was sure, but it did look that way. The eyes of the sick ones didn’t seem to see very well, the feet were unsteady and still they always tried to approach the healthy ones they encountered and touch them. Perhaps that was their way of asking for help. Perhaps they wanted to spread the disease now that they’d lost their own lives to it. Haley didn’t know. Juli had insisted they were asking for help but since her father’s death—or accident, as she called it—she refused to talk about it.

“Slowly,” Haley whispered, trying to push Juli behind her back. Juli resisted, planting her legs right where she was, next to her mother, facing the door and the stinking man who was standing there, groping the air, his head swiveling from side to side like a hinge that’d gotten unhinged. Which was pretty much what had happened, what happened to all of them. And then they died of starvation and lack of water.

“I know, Mom,” the girl said, her eyes fixed on the sad creature at the door who’d just taken another tentative step toward them. They both stepped back into the aisle—the very short aisle, it now seemed to Haley. They had no weapons. They were both in T-shirts, which was bad. But they wore long pants, which was good. And they couldn’t just outwait the sick one or run. Haley was sure they would find more food in here, food they needed because they might have to run from that house with the smoke coming out of its chimney. There could be bad people there. Or dead people. Besides, Haley had seen—or imagined she’d seen—a few cans left standing in the soft drinks fridge and she wanted them. They needed them.

The sick one advanced, now moaning more loudly, his feet trampling what could be food, and Haley felt a sudden hot wave rise to her face. Anything he touched they couldn’t use. And he couldn’t eat it, not even with help. She knew that because she’d seen people try to feed their sick ones. They couldn’t chew or swallow, even if they were fed forcefully. The food and the water just didn’t go beyond their mouths. This she’d heard from a doctor previously employed by one of the biggest hospitals in the Midwest, now on the run like the rest of them. “They can’t live,” she’d said. “But they don’t die quickly enough.”

That doctor, Miriam, as she’d introduced herself to Haley and Jim, had, as far as Haley was concerned, saved their girl’s life six months ago by sewing up a wound Juli had gotten on her knee trying to run away from a sick one. That was back at home, in Iowa, when they were hanging on to their last hope that the disease could be contained. Three stitches were what Miriam administered, plus a helping of antibiotic powder. That was all she could spare and Haley was endlessly grateful for it. Miriam was now dead, touched by a seemingly recovering patient who said she had the flu before she collapsed on the floor of the shelter—a former high school—and made it clear to everyone that their hopes were doomed. They were all certain the shelter was safe until Constance collapsed on the floor of what had been the chemistry lab in happier times.

“We’ll go round the aisle,” Haley said. “See if there’s anything that looks edible or drinkable. We’re not coming back.”

“But we can try and trip it or something,” Juli said.

“No,” Haley said. She had no intention of letting Juli near the creature or approaching it herself. That was too much risk. One swipe with a hand, that’s all it took for one of them—or both—to become like him or, if they were lucky, die within a week.

“I can trip him, Mom,” Juli insisted. “I can tackle him to the ground.”

“No!” Haley said, no longer caring who heard them. There was nobody here, after all, besides the sick one and the corpse. One done corpse, one on the way. And two potential corpses. “You’re not going anywhere near it. And don’t you dare say ‘But.’”

She didn’t turn to look at her daughter as she said this but she felt the girl’s hand tense in hers for a second before relaxing. Juli knew the risks. She was just being defiant. Or hopeful, maybe. Haley, however, was taking no chances. They’d scope the place, take what they found, and they would then beat it as quickly as possible. It stank here, anyway. She continued walking backward, her eyes fixed on the thing that was now much closer to them, while Juli turned around and started rummaging through the shelves.

“Give me a bag,” she said. “There’s some candy bars here.”

Haley risked a glance away from the staggering creature and saw her daughter pick up a Starburst stick. The colors on the wrapper were so bright they blinded her for a second. How the candy had survived she couldn’t imagine, but it had.

“Yes!” Juli said and waved her hand, full of candy. Two Mars bars. One Twix. Too much chocolate, Haley would have said just a year ago. Now they were food, as good as any other. She took out a plastic sandwich bag from the back pocket of her pants without taking her eyes off the creature advancing on them and passed it to Juli. The sick one was standing five feet away now, in the pile of garbage, his head swiveling left and right, his right foot raised for the next step, arms groping the air in front of him. Then his head swung to the left and he froze.

“Mom, I think there are some more cookies here!” Juli whispered. She was excited. She was hungry. And she hadn’t finished her box of squashed cookies.

“Good,” Haley said, not really hearing her. She’d never seen any of the sick ones freeze like this. They always seemed to be moving, groping, shuffling, seeking the life they no longer had, it seemed to Haley. And she was not giving it to them. Or to him, this stinky former bull of a man who was now hunched down, skin hanging off the bones, greasy blond hair hanging down his filthy face, and huge hands flailing around, groping for them, for her and Juli.

Now the filthy face was turned halfway to the counter where the flies buzzed all businesslike, or rather business-as-usual-like. They didn’t care about the sick ones, Haley thought wistfully for a second before focusing again on the weird thing that was happening to the sick one. His arms had seized flailing and had fallen slowly to the sides of his wasted body. His back had straightened. He looked like a man ready to fight. A man who’d sensed danger. Which was impossible, Haley told herself, because they could not sense anything, except for the living humans. They could only waste away. She turned to Juli to tell her there was something wrong with the sick one, when her uterus dumped what felt like a pound of blood and endometrial matter into her panties. With the load came pain, dull but strong, rendering her temporarily incapable of anything more than doubling down and pressing her hand to her belly.

“Mom?” Juli piped, her voice leaving no doubt that Haley looked really bad. And she felt bad, as if all her energy had drained out to pool in the center of the shirt sleeve she was using as a sanitary napkin. It weighed her down. It weighed her down so much Haley felt her knees buckle and sagged down to the floor. Black fog started seeping into her peripheral vision, advancing to the center. Sounds started fading, replaced by a shrill ringing in her ears. Haley gathered the last remnants of energy she had and bit on her tongue, as hard as she could. The fog cleared almost instantly and sounds returned. She heard Juli calling her, pulling on her arm, and then she heard something else. The sick one. The sick one whined like a dog that’d been kicked viciously. Her head snapped up and she saw the man make an about turn and walk out of the store.

“Mom! Mom!”

“I’m fine, Juli,” Haley said. Her voice was steadier than she expected but that was probably the stress—too much of it and you start sounding calm and apathetic.

“What happened?” the girl asked, staring intently into her mother’s eyes, now a very pale blue, disturbingly pale.

“Just a cramp,” Haley said, glancing at the open door of the store. “What happened to him?”

Juli shrugged.

“He stood like a statue for a while and then just left. Lucky us. Can you walk?”

“In a while,” Haley said, closing her eyes for a moment. Her tongue hurt but thankfully she hadn’t bitten into it too hard to worry about an infection. “And we better hurry. Something scared the sick one and I don’t know what it was.”

“Maybe more sick ones are coming and he got scared?”

“That’s what I’m thinking,” Haley said. She no longer saw any point in trying to hide her fears and anxieties from Juli. If things got bad, she’d better be prepared than shielded by her mother’s care. That would only make her more vulnerable.

“Okay, let’s go through the shelves quickly and then we’re out,” Juli said.

“You go, hon,” Haley said. “I need to rest a little.”

“All right.” Juli didn’t look like she thought this was the best idea but she didn’t try to argue. She started rummaging through the shelves, trying to find the food in the trash, moving along the aisle away from her mother. Haley closed her eyes again and tried to relax.

A noise made her realize she was about to doze off. A weird rustling sound, followed by a dull thump and then another one. There was another sick one in here with them.

“Juli!” Haley called just when her daughter, who had by now gone around the aisle, started screaming. Haley found energy she didn’t know she had and sprang to her feet. She turned to where the screams were coming from and froze just like the sick one.

Juli was standing a few steps away from the counter, screaming her head off. Behind the counter, a faceless figure caked with blood and stinking of death swayed slightly when it got to its feet and lurched toward Juli. The countertop stopped it.

“Juli!” Haley yelled and got moving. She rushed to her daughter, who was standing there as if she had been planted, screaming and screaming, and screaming. She grabbed the girl’s hand and pulled her to the door, glancing in passing to the dead, faceless girl who had just found where the countertop ended.

Mother and daughter ran out of the store and Haley slammed the door shut, unsure how much good this would do but incapable of coming up with a better idea. The first few steps she had to drag Juli along but now the girl was running on her own. They crossed the road and went around the dilapidated house that marked the beginning of the town. Its backyard was shaded by a huge oak tree. Haley pulled her daughter behind its trunk and sagged down to the ground. She couldn’t run any farther. She couldn’t even walk right now.

“What was that, Mom?” Juli said, her voice quavering, her face as white as the snow that used to cover their own backyard every October. “Was it dead?”

“Yes,” Haley said. There was no way anyone could survive two or more shots to the head.

“Was it a zombie?”

“Zombies are in the movies, Juli,” Haley said. She hated zombie movies. She hated all the supernatural movies, actually, zombies, vampires, the lot. And now one such movie was unfolding right here, in real life.

“So what was it, then?” the girl insisted, a little belligerent, a little agitated, still shaking in her mother’s arms.

“I don’t know,” Haley sighed. She didn’t add that there may be more like it. There were bound to be more like it. But Juli could figure this out for herself.

“What are we going to do now?”

“We’re going to stay put,” her mother said. She wasn’t afraid anymore. She was too exhausted to be afraid. “We can spend the night here. Then we’ll figure it out tomorrow.”

“You think it’s safe?” Juli asked, incredulous.

“No, Juli,” she said. “Nowhere is safe, but it’s a bit better here than trying the house. We can run if something—that thing—comes this way. I can’t fight right now and I need some rest before we move on.”

“I know,” the girl said softly. “I’m sorry.”

Haley thought she actually heard her heart snap. She had a pretty good idea what she would do, right after Juli went to sleep. Walking corpses were just too much. She wasn’t going to live in a horror movie and she wasn’t going to let her daughter live in one, either. Haley had a knife that Juli didn’t know about, a pocket one, and she was going to put it to good use later this night.

“It’s okay, honey,” she said, pulling her daughter into her lap. “It’s okay.”

After all the death and destruction, all the blood and horror, it comes down to this: five men with kitbags and weapons, shivering in the cold, making their way up a snowy trail, through the dark winter woods, on their way to face a god. It’s a futile gesture in the face of humanity’s last gleaming. We’re going to die and it’s probably going to be very painful.

He knows we’re coming, of course. It would be naive to think otherwise. He can hear every step, every frosted breath. Sergeant O’Reilly claims to have seen a dark shape hovering over us as we passed Mount Healy, but we’re tired and hungry and have suffered so many losses that it’s hard to trust our senses anymore. We’re like a boxer staggering off the ropes, raising our gloves for a final desperate assault, even though the canvas is lurching toward us with every weary step.

Then we all stop walking, one by one, staring off through the branches and leaves. We can see it in the distance now, glowing in the night. A giant structure of ice, towering up into the sky, nestled between valleys. His home. It’s beautiful and it’s terrifying. We’re so small, so helpless. For a moment I feel myself drowning, overwhelmed by the task ahead, but then Captain Mason taps my arm softly, reminding me that this is my cue, that I have the first line.

“There it is. That’s his fortress.” It’s clunky set-up dialogue but I do my best with it. I haven’t spoken since yesterday and my voice feels strange and distant.

O’Reilly is up next. “Keep low. Eyes front. Stay frosty.” He grimaces at the lines but at least he delivers them like he means it. Before all this he was with British Special Forces—leading coalition teams on night raids in Afghanistan, taking down strongholds of Boko Haram and Al-Shabaab in Kenya and Nigeria. He says he’s surprised by his nostalgia for those days. The world was simpler then, even if we didn’t know that at the time.

There’s a pause during which Mason shoots Sergeant Hernandez a sharp look. Hernandez is still staring toward the crystal tower and it takes him a moment to remember his line.

“I wonder if he knows we’re here.”

The snow covered trees look on in envy at his wooden performance and I feel a twinge of anxiety. Can the target sense insincerity? Is he monitoring us, shaking his head at the stumpy cadence of Hernandez’s recital? He could crush us in a heartbeat. He would barely have to move. I can’t really blame Hernandez, though; he’s a career soldier who never imagined he’d end up in a situation like this. None of us did.

“If he knew we were here, we’d already be dead.” Mason sells his line perfectly, making up for Hernandez’s lackluster performance. For a moment I forget myself and even believe we’re having a real conversation.

“How so, Captain?” That’s the final member of our team. Lance Corporal Eriksson—twenty-eight years old, a solid slab of muscle and patriotism, topped off with a severe crewcut. Eriksson told me he’d joined the Marines to test himself, but when he says “test himself” you really hear “hurt other people. ” He’s a man who has never been troubled by the moral complexities of pulling a trigger. The other night I held him as he broke down and wept, his great big shoulders rising and falling as he muttered in horror of how there was no bird-song in the woods anymore.

“Because he’s a coward,” replies Mason. “Look at India. Europe. At what happened to the Chinese. It’s always from a distance. A real man would look his opponent in the eye. A coward hides.”

There’d been some debate over the phrase “a real man.” Mason delivers the whole thing as a challenge, though, a gauntlet thrown down. We’ve been reciting these exchanges for the past few days, always variations on the same theme. He’s big and powerful, we’re nothing, so he needs to come out and face us. It’s crude and basic psychological warfare, meant to allow us to get closer to him, because this plan, this suicide mission, it only works if we’re in the same room.

We’re working from a script that Diane wrote up for us, back at the Anchorage base. There were disputes and hushed arguments over how we should approach this, but in the end high command deferred to her—after all, she’d known him better than anyone. She was his wife. They were the perfect couple. Before everything changed.

There’s a crater in a field in Iowa that the government declared a national monument. Shards of the meteorite that carried him on display in the Smithsonian. Even though he was from some distant dying planet, he was one of our own. He saved folks from burning buildings and falling airplanes, he made rain fall on the arid settlements of Ethiopia and Sudan, every natural disaster would see him hurtle into danger, to do what he could, like he had no choice. He was the best of all of us.

I keep wondering if there were warning signs we missed.

There was always this aura of blandness about him. He was charming, handsome, almost too perfect I guess. The fact that he dressed up in tights and wore a cape does, in retrospect, seem like a huge red flag, but like many of us, he’d grown up on a midwestern diet of comic books and cartoons—his costume was a tribute to the very culture and people he had sworn to protect.

He wore that same costume the night those confused news reports first started rolling in. Natural disaster. Terrorist attack. There was panic and chaos and then that infamous footage of him floating above the Eiffel Tower, the city on fire beneath him, that smile on his face.

I’d met him twice before.

Once was at the base in Cornado, just across the bay from San Diego. I was out the back of the barracks, having a quiet smoke, when I felt a sudden shift in the wind. There was a strange charge of electricity in the air and there he was, standing in front of me.

I’d seen photos and videos of him, of course, but in the flesh he was even more impressive, the colors seemed brighter and sharper, exactly how a legend should be. Larger than life. I had an odd feeling, like déjà vu and vertigo at the same time. I think I actually steadied myself against the wall. He nodded a greeting at me, asked me my name. It took me a moment to compose myself and reply.

“Tom. Tom Hooper.”

He leant forward and took the cigarette from my hand, studying it. “How long have you been a smoker, Tom?”

“Uh… a few years now.”

“There’s a shadow.” He snuffed out the cigarette with his fingers and then took his hand away. The crushed cigarette remained floating in the air. “On your left lung. It’s very faint but it’s there.”

He waved his hand over the cigarette and it separated into fragments, a constellation of burnt and broken tobacco. His gaze fixed upon the pieces and they started glowing, burning up, disintegrating. The small galaxy on fire. Then he fixed those blues eyes upon me.

“This will only hurt for a moment,” he said. He pulled me in close and slammed the palm of his hand against the center of my chest. The air went out of me. I felt a rush of fire rolling through my lungs, with a sharp arctic wind chasing behind it and then he removed his hand and smiled, releasing me.

“Stay off the cigarettes, Tom. Life is for living.” And with that he was gone, a shimmering blur disappearing off into the cloudless sky, leaving behind a Private First Class who returned to his bunk with shaking hands and a broad smile as he tossed his cigarettes into the trash.

That was the kind of man he was. He saw little difference between extinguishing a forest fire or returning an errant balloon to a crying toddler. He was here to help. To make the world a better place.

Then you think of what happened later. Bodies twisted and mangled. Cities scorched and burned. Continents shaken and torn apart. I was in the ops room when we got news that Europe was gone. My brother was over there, serving on the battleship Anna Maria. I remember my CO staring at the comms officer, saying over and over again, “What do you mean gone?” his voice rising to a panic.

In Rio de Janeiro they dropped a B83 nuclear bomb on him. 1.2 megatons—seventy-five times stronger than the Little Boy that was dropped on Hiroshima all those years ago. He walked out of the mushroom cloud like it was just smoke on the breeze.

I can’t view that day at the barracks in isolation anymore. Some nights I’ve lain there, placed my hand over my chest, just like he did, as if by copying his movements I could find some insight into why he changed. But no insights ever come. All I know is that there was a shadow on my left lung, and then there wasn’t, and that was his choice, his will.

The second time I met him was two years later, in Syria, the aftermath of the Mhardeh refugee camp massacre. The killings were some sort of insurgent statement; this is what would happen to those who accepted aid from the West. Families. Women. Children. Two hundred fifty people were slaughtered that day. I thought I’d never see anything that bad again. It only took a few hours for me to be proved hopelessly wrong.

Our squad was first on the ground. We had forced them back to their strongholds on the edge of town, blocking off the roads to Hamas, settling in for a lengthy war of attrition—or a shorter one if the requests for air support went through. Then the order came over the comms of support of a different nature—he’d joined the fight. The CO told us to drop back and secure the perimeter. To this day I’m not sure what made me disobey that order. Maybe I just wanted to see what retribution looked like. Maybe I was hoping for some myself. I walked through that camp. I’d seen what those insurgent forces had done.

It was an old paint factory, three stories tall. Broken windows like jagged tombstones. The metal doors of the main entrance had been blown in, a dark, gaping mouth. I later discovered that my helmet cam started malfunctioning at that point, some kind of static interference. Maybe that was his doing. Maybe he didn’t want anyone to see what he’d done.

It was near pitch black inside the factory. I clicked on my flashlight to see where I was going. It swept over the husks of rusting machinery, and then onto shapes that I couldn’t understand at first, in the center of the room. It was like some giant sculpture, except it was still alive, mostly alive, impossibly so.

There were bodies but they weren’t bodies anymore. It’s like he had rearranged their atoms, blended and melted them together. It was around seven or eight feet tall. Flesh, melted and fused, arms and legs and screaming mouths and wide open eyes, all as one. Skin stretched and distorted, veins and intestines interwoven across the surface like twine over a ball. It was the enemy. It was a horror of meat and tissue.

And then one of the eyes blinked and all I remember was rushing for the exit, falling to my knees outside, retching into the dirt, gasping for air.

“They were bad people, Tom.”

He was standing there, looking off, and even though his body language suggested a level of agitation, his hair was perfect and his eyes were dolphin blue, and for the first time I wondered if it was all some mask, and if so, what the true face below looked like.

“You saw what they had done at the camp. To those children.” His voice had that strange timbre of justification to it. He shook his head, and there was a hint of anger and frustration in there. “Sometimes I don’t understand you people.” He looked at me, as if I could explain it. I didn’t know what to say. I’d seen the refugee camp. I didn’t understand either.

He stared at me for a long beat and then nodded, his voice soft. “Best you report back to base, Tom. Tell them the targets have been dealt with. Tell them I’ll handle the clean-up.”

He offered his hand and I took it, and as he helped me up I found myself nodding back, trying to ignore that rising panic, that urge to get as far away from him as possible. I moved out, glancing back once. He was still standing there, his back to me, the cape fluttering in the gentle breeze, staring into the darkness of that paint factory.

I didn’t tell a single person about what I’d seen. He was right. They were bad people. They deserved to die. But most of all I remember thinking that I was glad he was on our side, one of us.

And then three months later Paris happened.

Strike Team Alpha has entered the ice fortress. In doing so I feel like we’ve stepped from our reality into his. He took on the costume of a comic book character, and it’s like we’re walking through the pulpy pages of a two-fisted adventure. I want to start laughing at the absurdity of it all, but I’m scared I wouldn’t be able to stop.

Eighty percent of the world’s population is gone. It’s a number that Diane wrote down for me, but I could barely comprehend. I imagine the survivors, huddled into camps, desperately struggling to stay alive, never knowing when he might appear over them. It’s down to us. It’s down to us and we’re just as scared and weak as the people out there.

Mason moves in first, taking point. Sergeant O’Reilly is tight on his back, with Hernandez to the right. I’m on the rear, Eriksson ahead of me, gazing up at the frozen archways over his head.

He’ll let you come to him. Diane wrote it down on the white-board, during our final debriefing, as they handed out our modified painted weapons, our single piece of ammo. They’d arrested Diane straight away, once it had become clear what he was doing.

Maybe they thought by holding her hostage they’d convince him to stop, although it turned out she’d more or less been living apart from him for a few months by this point. She was open about it, said she had noted a change in him, he seemed distant, restless. He had been spending more and more time out in the wild, building some kind of fortress.

He said he needed a place to think, to be alone. To try and shut out the world. The last time she saw him she said that it felt like things had gone back to normal. Whatever had been troubling him had passed, although in light of recent events she said maybe it was more like a decision had been made, that he was free from the worries that had been plaguing him.

They had dinner, they made love and when she woke he was gone. She didn’t hear from him for twenty-three days. The next time she saw him was with the rest of the world, breaking news, on every channel, in every country.

She was his wife, though, and she knew his secrets. His weaknesses. He had tested himself against every chemical, alloy and substance, and found only two had any affect. There was lead, which caused a unique layer of protection against his electromagnetic vision. And there was tellurium, a rare silver metalloid, which did something much much worse.

It would be our magic bullet. Our one chance to harm him.

We all remembered the footage from the late night talk-show where the host had fired a loaded gun at him and he’d not only caught the bullet in his teeth, but ejected it back toward a target, hitting the bullseye as the audience roared and cheered. With his eyes closed and blindfolded of course.

He’d hear the shift of the trigger before we’d even pulled it. We were marching to our deaths because we had lost so much and there was nothing else to do. The last thing I ever told my ex-wife was to go screw herself. We were fighting over the house we’d shared, trying to sell it, trying to work out who was owed what. Like that mattered. We’re so fragile and small, yet we spend so much of our lives being hurt and trying to hurt each other, unaware of how quickly things can break.

Diane wrote down one more thing. A single phrase. A few words that she believed would be even more powerful than the bullets we carried. All we had to do was be in the same room as him.

With every step up the ice covered stairs, we are getting closer and closer. Moving along crystal walkways, pepper potting our way to the top. We’re covering corners and inching forward as if this was a normal reconnaissance op, going through the motions. He’s letting us come to him. We might as well just stroll in, blowing whistles and trumpets. It’s like we’re in some warped charade, everyone playing their part. The fantastical tower. The magic bullets. The monster at the center of the maze.

His is floating a few feet off the ground, his back to us, staring out at the blanket of stars over the darkened valleys and forests. Even now, even at the end of it all, there is a sense of theater. The cape. The costume. The insignia still on his chest as he turns round, looking down at us with that perfectly sculpted face.

“So obviously I’ve been listening,” he says, as if it’s part of a continued discussion we’ve been having with him. “This conversation of yours, the back and forth, about how I’m some sort of coward…” He pauses for a moment as if to consider the significance of the word for the first time. “This was all Diane’s idea, right?”

Captain Mason doesn’t break eye contact with him. “It was. Yes.”

“It felt like something she would come up with. How is she?”

“She’s wonderful. She’s seen most of the world burnt and destroyed by the man she loved.” In moments like these I would follow Mason off the edge of the earth. He knows he could be destroyed in a heartbeat, yet he won’t give the bastard a single inch.

But the world’s most powerful man just smiles at us, like a tolerant parent looking down at her naughty children. “You’ve coated your guns in lead. Which makes me think you’re hiding something.”

We hadn’t planned for this contingency. We knew the lead would protect the barrel from his vision, but we never discussed the possibility that the act of concealment would give us away. Mason was meant to keep him talking, draw him in, deliver that one final piece of dialogue from Diane. Then Eriksson would open up with the first shot. A chain reaction–O’Reilly, Hernandez, and finally me further back—the last bullet, the last hope. Confuse and overwhelm him.

Within seconds it all goes wrong.

Eriksson jumps the gun. He’s been increasingly erratic on the journey up. Maybe he believed in the hero more than the rest of us. The flag. The symbol of truth and justice. Whatever it is, something has snapped and he raises his weapon to fire, even though he’s meant to wait for Mason’s signal.

There’s a crackle in the air, a blur of movement, and Eriksson stumbles forward, guts spilling out from a cavity in his stomach. O’Reilly and Hernandez have taken their cue from Eriksson and both try to get their shots off. They disintegrate before my eyes.

I can’t even move. I am like a statue, frozen in this kingdom of ice.

“Elevated heart beats,” he says, his costume flecked with blood. “I could hear them all the way up the mountain. And then a sudden escalation before action, well… it’s something of a giveaway. Was this the plan?”

“Some of the plan,” says Mason and he’s angled his weapon so it’s facing the enemy, but his M16 has started to glow red and it’s burning into his hands and even then he still tries to pull the trigger, but then he’s gone as well. The air is heavy with the iron scent of metal and blood. I still haven’t moved. There’s a thousand thoughts screaming in my head, but I can’t seem to grasp any of them.

I’m the last hope of humanity and I can’t even raise my weapon.

Maybe he senses this turmoil, looking toward me, brow furrowed, as if he’s genuinely concerned for my well-being. “How have you been, Tom?”

Everyone I know is dead. There is no fresh start, no rewind, no coming back from this. He destroyed our world because he could. How have I been? I don’t even know what that means anymore.

“…I’ve started smoking again.”

“I know. I can smell it off you.”

I pull out a crumpled pack, placing a cigarette into my mouth with shaking hands.

“Do you want me to light that for you, Tom?”

“I’m fine. Thank you.”

I’m surprised at how cool I sound, even though my voice breaks a little a bit when I speak. My lighter catches on the third attempt, and there is the welcome inhalation of warm smoke and cold air.

“I’m guessing you still have your bullet,” he says, nodding to my M16. “‘One in the pipe’ as you boys say.”

I nod. It seems pointless to try and lie to him at this stage. Like Mason said, if he wanted us dead, we’d be dead already.

“So I guess I have to ask… what happens now, Tom?”

“Why did you do it?”

He gives me an uncertain smile, shrugs. “Remember that shadow on your lung, Tom?”

Of course I remember. His hands on my chest. The heat and the cold.

“You’re smoking again, though. Even though I did my best to stop you. To help you.”

We’re quiet for a while. I inhale, exhale. There doesn’t seem like much else to say, but I say it anyway. I tell him that I’m going to finish my cigarette and then I’m going to shoot him. I tell him how the tellurium bullet will rip into his flesh, causing the cells around it to blacken and decay as it continues on its path to his heart.

I explain how within moments his vital organs will vesicate. His legs will give way. He will collapse to his knees, those perfect blue eyes wide open in horror as he clutches at his chest, his hand over that famous insignia, his muscles convulsing as his body shuts down. It will be quick. It will be painful. It will be a better end than he deserves.

“It’s possible, Tom. I am rather fast, though.”

I drop my cigarette to the frosted ground, grinding it out under my boot. And then I tell him one more thing.

There is a moment of silence and then he asks me to repeat what I just told him. This is a man who can hear your heartbeat from a thousand miles away, yet he needs to hear me say those words one more time, to fully understand them.

“She’s pregnant.”

This was the last thing Diane wrote down for us, the last piece of dialogue, the true secret weapon. After everything, all the death and devastation, she still believed there was some good in him. Some sense of hope, no matter how buried it had become. Some piece of learned humanity. She believed that moment of hesitation would be enough.

He will know you’re telling the truth, she wrote. He will hear it in your voice. She stood there, in the base at Anchorage, her hands over the gentle curve of her stomach, their unborn child within. She was broken and tired, and yet she still had faith. She was the best of us.

I am raising my M16. This moment is frozen in the time it takes for a bullet to leave the barrel and reach its target. Or for a man who fell from the sky to reach out and end my life and humanity’s last chance alongside it. He goes to say something, to speak. I think it might even be the word stop.

But I am already pulling the trigger and hoping for the best.

My silver-haired neighbor stands alone on his son’s front porch, his suitcase sitting beside him like a faithful dog. He turns toward the whisper of dry leaves rustling across asphalt. I can barely hear the sound as I watch and listen from the open window of my daughter’s house. He picks up his suitcase and begins his short journey to the curb.

A shuttle van pulls to a stop in front of him. Its strange headlights glow like jackal eyes in the night.

When the shuttle’s door opens, I can hear the driver growl, “Speed it up, Dino, I don’t have all night.”

My neighbor disappears inside and the van drives off into the darkness.

I’m a Dino, too—short for dinosaur. Lately the media refers to us as “Deadwood.” Neither name is meant to be kind.

Returning to my makeshift bed on the living room couch, I’m thankful to have shelter, food, and my family. After watching my neighbor leave for his Relocation tonight, fear rages inside me like a cornered panther.

Early the next morning, as I’m fixing breakfast for everyone, my grandchildren rush in to give me morning hugs. Amy is five. She has her father’s Greek coloring and her mother’s sweet nature. Joel is nine and loves sports. Mark is seven and thrilled that his two front teeth have gone missing. Both boys resemble my side of the family with their light brown hair and blue eyes. My grandchildren are the joy of my life.

Their father follows them into the kitchen. Thomas works for a collection agency, which is perfect for him. He looks like a thick-necked professional bouncer.

“So, Jill, how long have you been here?” Thomas asks as he pours himself a cup of coffee.

“Eighteen months,” I say, keeping my eyes on the frying eggs.

“And how old are you now?”

I break two yokes slapping the eggs over. “Fifty-nine in two weeks. How old are you, Thomas?”

My daughter walks into the room. “Let’s go! We’re all going to be late if we don’t start moving.”

Within seconds, Gloria and I are the only people in the kitchen.

“I’m sorry, Mom, he’s cranky this morning. Thomas loves his job, but hates his boss. He has an interview this afternoon. If he gets this promotion, he can work from home.”

My hands ball into fists, “You’re going to miss your bus again, Gloria.”

After everyone is gone, I find a flyer from their local chapter of the national organization NIOT—Now It’s Our Turn—of young people who blame anyone over fifty-five for everything.

Thomas left it on the coffee table in front of the couch—by accident, I’m sure.

The flyer’s headline reads: How Long Are We Going to Support the Deadwood in Our Society?

I read the first two paragraphs before ripping the flyer into confetti.

Amy and I are coloring and watching cartoons later that afternoon. My book is filled with African animals while Amy colors princesses, fairies, and unicorns.

A government commercial starring much-loved actor Mark Reny appears on the screen. The man is everywhere: radio, television, and even children’s programs.

“Seniors still living with family, when you receive your Relocation letter, you will be taken to a safe haven where comfortable housing, nourishing food, and jobs are waiting for each and every one of you.”

“Grandma, why does Daddy keep saying that some people just don’t know when to get on the shuttle?”

“Your daddy is being silly,” I tell her. “Look, your cartoons are back on.”

Two cartoons later, Mark’s face appears on the screen.

“Our new government program, ‘Hope for the Lost’, provides a private shower area. The homeless are then given clean clothes, basic hygiene items, and a nourishing breakfast before boarding buses that will take them to a sanctuary.“

Before the next cartoon begins, Amy tells me, “Grandma, you’re hogging all the red and purple crayons.”

After dinner, Thomas turns on his favorite news program. The newscaster, Patti Snow, is young, beautiful, and articulate.

“Our three-digit heat wave will continue for the next seven days here in Los Angeles County. But flooding in some areas of the country, and drought conditions in others, continue to seriously impact farmlands and crops.

“Food rationing will continue through the remainder of this year.

“Now let’s check our global situation. Another 8.6 earthquake struck Japan early this morning. Tsunamis are expected to destroy more rice and soybean fields.”

Film clips of the disaster flash behind Patti.

Thomas snickers. “Like I say, Gloria, Japan always gets the really big breaks.”

Patti continues:

“Video filmed this morning in Pasadena shows our homeless seniors happily entering air-conditioned buses ready to take them to a secure refuge.”

The screen shows older men and women shuffling toward brown buses.

The scene quickly switches to single and two-parent families racing to green buses. A helicopter camera follows as their three buses park outside a former retirement community campus.

“It’s about time the government put those vacant buildings to good use,” Thomas says.

Gloria speaks up. “I’m glad those children will have a place to live, but I wonder where the brown buses went?”

Thomas never takes his eyes from the TV. “Who cares,” he snaps at his wife.

I bite my lip and stay silent, but I care very much where those homeless seniors went.

After a commercial touting a miracle cure for sleep disorders, Patti Snow returns.

“This news should be encouraging to our seniors. The Mohave Sanctuary was completed yesterday. Here is video of our nation’s 180th self-sufficient site.”

Mohave Sanctuary looks like a five-story stone swastika rising from the desert floor. We see an aerial view of smaller multi-shaped buildings surrounding the main building, scattered Joshua trees, and a vast windmill farm.

“Now that is one hell of a building!” Thomas says.

Patti continues:

“Remember to guard your monthly gas and food rationing cards. If lost, they will no longer be replaced.

“We care about our faithful viewers and remind you that the government-mandated eight p.m. curfew is for your safety. Stay well, and I’ll see you tomorrow night.”

On Wednesday evening, before we’re done eating, Thomas makes the announcement. “I got the promotion! Starting next Monday I’ll be working from home. Won’t that be great, kids?”

While the children cheer, my mouth goes so dry the pasta I’m chewing tastes like cardboard.

Gloria put the kids to bed early while I cleared the table and washed dishes. After losing their beautiful home in South Pasadena three years ago when the stock market plunged to mid-earth, they were lucky to rent this 800-square-foot house in Monrovia. No dishwasher, but I don’t mind hand-washing dishes and letting God tend to their drying.

Gloria and Thomas brush past me and walk out to their small back yard. The kitchen window is open so I can’t help but hear their conversation.

“Next Monday, Thomas? That’s fast. Maybe now I can use the car sometimes.”

“Gloria, I’ll still need the car to make personal collections.”

“What about my mom? Now that Amy’s in school and you’ll be working from home—”

“Exactly! She’s useless now, isn’t she?” Thomas lowers his voice. “Besides, Steven’s going to nominate me for President of our Chapter at the next NIOT meeting. How will it look for me if I have Deadwood living in my own home?”

“Tell me you did not report her to—”

“Last week. I called them last week. It’s done, Gloria.”

Thomas strides past me, Gloria in his wake. I hear their bedroom door slam and muffled tense voices as I rinse and rack the last pan.

Thursday afternoon Gloria comes home from work early so we can walk the children to the local thrift store for school clothes. Thomas is waiting for us when we return. I’m barely in the door when he hands me a government-issued neon yellow envelope.

“They needed a signature so I signed for you. You probably should open it right away,” Thomas tells me.

I read the two-page letter and stare at it for a few seconds.

“What does it say, Jill?” Thomas asks.

Ignoring her husband, I tell Gloria, “It’s my Relocation letter. I’m assigned to Mohave Sanctuary.”

“When?” they both ask.

“Eleven o’clock tomorrow night.”

“But that’s only one day, Mom,” my daughter says while glaring at Thomas.

“There’s also an instruction sheet.” I fold the pages and shove them back in the yellow envelope. “And it doesn’t take long to pack one suitcase.”

“Old suitcases are in the garage. I’ll go get one for you,” Thomas offers.

“Why are you leaving, Grandma?” Mark lisps through his missing baby teeth.

“Grandma won a long vacation. Isn’t that exciting?” Thomas tells my grandchildren before dashing out the front door toward the garage.

“Where are you going?” Joel shouts as all three children jump around with excitement.

“To a big hotel in the desert,” I lie.

Friday morning I scrub the dingy suitcase Thomas found in the garage and clean the house. By noon, my daughter’s home is spotless, so I treat myself to a long hot bath before packing.

First, I stuff in all the recommended clothes and hygiene items. Then I go through my photos and select the ones that truly touch my heart. I pack some books, my journal, two pens, and I’m done.

Gloria comes into Amy’s tiny room. I hand my daughter a shoe box containing the few things of value I still have.

“The jewelry is for you and Amy, and these old silver dollars are for the boys to share. The big box stored in your garage is filled with photo albums. I wish I had more to leave you, Gloria.”

Tears fill my daughter’s eyes so I hold her close and whisper, “If you hadn’t taken me in eighteen months ago, honey, I would have been out on the streets then. This time with you and the children has been a blessing. Please don’t cry.”

We have our favorite dinner that night—spaghetti tacos. We keep it festive for the children. I pretend to be looking forward to my vacation in the desert. No tears, only smiles and laughter. I give each grandchild special hugs and kisses at bedtime. I can’t let them see or know that my heart is breaking.

Thomas went to bed an hour ago. Gloria is in the kitchen fixing us another cup of tea.

I’ve never been a very brave or adventurous person, and now I’m so terrified I can hardly breathe. My eyes keep drifting to the suitcase by the door.

My daughter sits beside me and holds my hand. “Remember the time I lost my cuddle blanket and cried for days, Mom? That was nothing compared to this.”

“I love you so much, Gloria, but we need to say goodnight. If you go to bed now, this will be easier for me.”

Ten minutes before my assigned pick-up time, I slip into a jacket, wheel my suitcase out onto the porch, and lock the door behind me.

Darkness surrounds me as I stare up at the waning moon and listen for the whisper of dry leaves rustling across asphalt.

“Shame. We could’ve been good friends, you and I,” sighs Jack. “They say it’s better when you’re not alone. Oh well. Too late now.”

Her voice is muffled by the ill-fitting gasmask, but it won’t make any difference to her companion. A wild pony, covered with a shaggy winter coat, lies keeled at her feet. A good portion of its throat is missing. The blood hasn’t yet dried—had she been mere minutes earlier, Jack might have caught the pony alive.

She straightens and scans the moor. Dust makes it impossible to see more than a few miles, settling into the valleys like a heavy sea fog, and caressing the empty expanse of gorse, heather, and bracken that swallows the hills. Nothing breaks the ringing silence. Aside from the corpse, Jack decides she is alone.

Although leaving the pony to rot feels wasteful, she’s never been good at butchering, even with small hares and pheasants. And looking into its shining, black-marble eyes, Jack can’t shake the memory of feeding herds of Dartmoor ponies apples as a child—they’d come right up to her garden fence, inquisitive and unafraid, lingering for hours.

So, she leaves.

Besides, the responsible predator is probably diseased. The heath doesn’t hold much food anymore, and only madness would cause an animal to risk taking down the area’s largest inhabitant for nothing.

Of course, there aren’t any predators left. No foxes, no wild dogs. She tries not to think about it.

Walking back to her cottage, Jack fiddles with her gasmask. It belonged to her grandfather, a relic from last century’s war, and doesn’t stop the chemical smell of Dust from reaching her nose, but it’s better than nothing. It’s kept her alive this long, after all.

“You’re weak,” her grandfather used to say when showing off his war trinkets. “When I was your age, I’d seen things that would’ve made your eyes bleed right out of your head. You don’t even have the courage required to make friends.”

“Well, screw you,” she wishes she could say. “I survived when no one else could.”

Whether that’s due to skill or pure chance, it’s hard to say, but the circumstances don’t matter. What matters is she’s still alive.

Her cottage emerges from the Dust, whitewashed exterior long ago stained grey. In a previous life, it had been a hunter’s lodge, a retreat for townspeople searching for temporary solitude. The nearest house is over five miles away, and aside from a megalithic boulder on a nearby hill, it’s the only structure over a foot high in the area. For Jack, who never felt comfortable around others—a damnable trait for a twenty-something—it had, quite simply, been an escape.

Inside, the cottage doesn’t contain the expected kitchen and bedroom. Sure, a futon claims some space in a corner, and a camping stove sits discarded in another, but most of the single room is claimed by less conventional items. A corkboard of pinned butterflies, moths, and dragonflies hangs like a tapestry on one wall, and entire tanks of pond specimens and notebooks eat up almost half the cottage’s floor. Every now and then, a wing twitches, or an antenna waves. An assortment of radios and walkie-talkies cover anywhere left over.

Jack removes her gasmask and shakes her hair free of its scarf, cringing at the acidic scent still lingering in the curls. Not dropping the repulsed expression, she reaches for the nearest personal radio set and turns its dial.

“Hello? Can anyone hear me?” she asks in the robotic tone of someone expecting no answer. “This is Jack Sinclair, Hunter’s Cottage, Dartmoor National Park. Is anyone out there?”

Static.

“Please. It’s getting kinda lonely.”

Nothing. Only an empty crackle and the scratching sound of something—a bird, maybe?—crawling across the roof.

Trees are scarce on the moors, so Jack burns thorny brambles as firewood instead. The Dust makes the flames burn a darker, almost bloody red. The thorns cause weird shadows like reaching hands to twist over the cottage.

Jack lies on her back, staring up at the moonless sky stretching above. She’s more than accustomed to emptiness, but there’s something about the density of the darkness beyond the fire’s red glow that unnerves her—she prefers looking upward. Occasionally, she’ll see the smoky trail of a commercial starship heading into the oblivion.

“Stay!” she wants to scream. “Don’t leave me here!”

Not because she necessarily wants company. But the idea of being the last one left behind fills her with a paralyzing dread.

That’s the problem with people, though; they lack resolve. After all, it hadn’t been the plague that ended the world. It had been the aftermath. The panic. The wars. Maybe, if they’d pulled together and kept a cool head, Jack would still be getting her weekly eggs, milk, and newspaper. Instead, they’d run headfirst into self-destruct mode.

And Jack is marooned with nothing but her brain and a Springfield rifle for help.

Her eyes slip closed.

Moments later, something screams. Not a human scream. The scream a deer might make when shot, or that of a devil haunting crossroads. High, guttural, and unnatural.

Jack stumbles to her feet, grasping wildly for her rifle.

A shape darts into the darkness on two legs.

She stares after it, heart pounding. Perhaps she’s imagining things.

Lowering the rifle, she realizes her arms are covered in goose bumps. Shouldn’t the fire be warmer? Shouldn’t the glow reach further?

All of a sudden, the flickering red flames make her feel sick. She tosses a bucket of dirty water onto the thorns, covering her nose with her scarf as smoke billows across the heath, and runs as fast as she can toward the cottage.

“Can anyone hear me?” she says into the radio. To her dismay, she realizes she’s crying.

As if in answer, something shrieks again. It sounds far too close, like whatever it is is standing right outside her window.

“Is anyone…?” she begins, but trails off. She’s not sure she wants to know the answer anymore.

The outside world never quite managed to touch the people of the moors. Long after such things were frowned upon, locals celebrated their holidays with bonfires and dancing instead of gift exchanges and solemnity. They left salt on windowsills, carried bunches of dried lavender, and turned their clothes inside-out before walking alone.

Even as a child, Jack never believed such nonsense. She knew good sense kept accidents away, not silver bells. Tylenol cured headaches, not herb poultices. She remembered sleeping over at her best friend Lydia’s house in total silence—her family never spoke from sundown to sunrise to avoid accidental cursings—thinking she’d prefer living anywhere else but the moor.

Of course, even she couldn’t escape its strangeness entirely.

When she was four, a baby bird fell from a tree and broke its neck. Jack carried it inside to show her grandfather. No sooner had she crossed the threshold, the bird beat its wings again and wriggled from her hands.

When she was nine, she stepped on a snail, and after a few minutes, watched it continue moving as though its shell wasn’t shattered.

When she was thirteen, she ignored her grandfather’s warning and attempted to visit her parents’ graves in the village cemetery. He caught her before she could find them and dragged her home by the ear. He seemed more upset than angry.

“Don’t you understand?” he kept repeating. “Don’t you understand?”

That evening, when she was supposed to be asleep, she’d crept downstairs and watched her grandfather skin a hare. Without even stripping meat from bone, he’d taken the carcass outside and laid it at the edge of their property. Then he’d locked all the doors and turned out all the lights.

The next morning, the hare was gone.

When Jack graduated, she left Dartmoor to study biology at King’s College in London, and returned with her head full of science rather than superstition. She hadn’t planned on returning at all, but after four years of city living, coming back to the empty heath felt more like a necessity than a choice.

Within six months of moving into Hunter’s Cottage, the plague hit. Jack shut herself away, something she’d perfected, and let radios be her only human interaction. She listened to accounts of virally transmitted sicknesses that destroyed organs in a matter of days. She listened to accounts of riots and opportunistic terrorists, of order crumbling and anarchy in the streets. She listened as martial law was imposed, as stories of the wealthy abandoning Earth altogether for extra-terrestrial colonies surfaced. Of something labelled ‘Dust’, a by-product of the wars and chemical attacks, swallowing entire countries. Then, gradually, the radios fell quiet.

And Jack knew she was alone.

The morning after the bonfire, Jack finds a dead field mouse on her doorstep. Given the circumstances, there shouldn’t be anything odd about this—except, like the pony, the mouse is missing most of its throat.

Which means something must have dragged it to her doorstep. A cat, maybe? Surely, there are still cats left?

Without the strange colors and sounds of night time, Jack’s apprehension has evaporated. She nudges the mouse into the grass with her toe, pulls the straps tighter on her gas mask, and sets out to find food. There’s a town with a Co-Op Foods roughly an hour’s walk away, but she’s hesitant about re-entering civilization. She’s not strayed outside a two-mile radius of the cottage since the outbreak, and she’s terrified of what she’ll find. Besides, Jack Sinclair has never needed modern conveniences to survive.

It’s a dark day. Black clouds swallow the heath’s endless skies, and wind races unchallenged across the spread of heather. The Dust dances with the imminent weather, forming ephemeral shapes: a crucifix; a ball of unspooling yarn; a human, with the skewered proportion of a child’s drawing.

As Jack watches, the last form doesn’t evaporate with the wind. The hair on the back of her neck prickles. She has the feeling the not-human is watching her, too.

Thunder rumbles, and the form vanishes.

Jack blames the faulty gasmask. She’s inhaled too much Dust.

Down in the valleys, the air is cleaner. The ferns and sparse trees are less warped than the plants on the hills, and the tadpoles, water skippers, and newts continue to display almost natural behavior in the ponds. Occasionally, Jack comes down here to collect specimens like her research still matters. Today, there’s something menacing about the gathering clouds, and she doesn’t stop to observe anything unnecessary.

“Shit,” she says when a blackberry disintegrates in her hand.

Her fishnet boasts nothing more than a collection of black algae.

Her small animal traps are entirely empty. The snare of one is covered in dried blood, but the animal must’ve crawled away.

Giving up, she hikes back up the hill toward a well, making to fill up her canteen. There’s a crude lid to keep out the acid rain, and after removing it, Jack lowers the pail.

“Shit,” she says again, louder this time, when the bucket comes up empty.

Lightning accompanies the next roll of thunder, and the air begins to buzz with pressure. The lightning, like the fire, flashes red, accompanied by a smell like singed hair. Hoping to beat the rain, Jack abandons her venture. The glass eyepieces of her mask are fogging up. The heath blurs with the sky. She can’t justify or discredit the idea of the not-human continuing to watch her.

In the middle of the night, Jack wakes to a sound she never thought she’d hear again.

A voice. A real person’s voice.

“He—any—moor—over?” The words are buried in static. “Copy—no—any—noise—over.”

Jack nearly falls out of bed in her haste. Blindly, she tears through the pile of radios until she finds one with a blinking light.

“Surv—three—moor—any—cry—over.”

“Hello?” Jack cries, twisting the dials in a fruitless search for better reception. “Can you hear me? Hello?”

The words keep coming, but they’re broken. Drowned out by the thunder and the static and the pounding of Jack’s heart.

“Hello? Do you copy? Hello?”

“Many—no—rep—”

Then the world falls silent.

Jack crumples, leaning her head against the wall. Her fingers curl around the radio, knuckles white.

There are no more sounds but the thunder and her muffled sobs.

This is your fault.

The thing is outside again. Jack can’t tell if it’s morning or not—the sky is too dark. There is no sun, but no moon either. Her watch broke long ago. Her clock stopped. There is no time. Just Dust, just darkness, and a creature scratching at her door.

Your fault.

Jack hugs her knees to her chest, watching the butterflies squirm on the corkboard.

“You seem to have an aversion to killing things,” her anatomy professor used to say.

Not true. Killing doesn’t bother Jack.

But around her, things simply don’t stay dead.

The world died. But in Hunter’s Lodge, her specimens still struggle to free themselves of their pins. And something continues scratching at her door.

“Don’t you understand?”

She’d thrown herself into science, desperate for answers. None came. So, when the plague silenced her last connection to the village, she went searching for them herself. Before she reached the village borders, she’d passed a mass grave of plague victims.

The scratching grows more frantic. The thing cries, almost like a child. Like several children. Like the Devil himself.

Jack shoves her fist into her mouth to block a scream. Steadying herself, she rises to her feet, takes a nearby paring knife, and pulls back the curtains.

And right there, in the murky red light, crouches it. It’s rotten—of course it’s rotten, she knows how decomposition works—and notably, its fingers are missing. Worn down. Probably a result of clawing free of a mass grave.

It jerks its head to stare at her. She throws the curtain closed and falls to her knees.

“Interesting thesis, Sinclair. The regeneration of limbs in salamanders. I’ve heard you have something of a fascination with reanimation and regeneration. But what are you trying to prove?”

That the people of the moors were crazy, and she was not. That the dead could not rise. That the apocalypse was not forever, and monsters would not inherit the Earth.

As the door crashes down, Jack knows with absolute certainty she was wrong.

A starship soars overhead, slicing the clouds and delivering a sliver of sunlight to illuminate the morning-time moors. The Dust is tinged pink. Finally, the storm has broken, leaving an eerie calm in its wake.

The door to Hunter’s Cottage remains ajar, odd markings lining the wood. Not fingers. Something harder, sharper—teeth, perhaps. A mouse with no throat twitches on the doorstep, enticed by the smell of blood.

Because inside Hunter’s Cottage, there is blood. A lot of it.

Jack isn’t dead, though. To spite her yearning for reason and logic, death has continued to give her a wide berth. Instead, she lies in a confused pile on the floor, wondering why she can’t breathe. Wondering why that doesn’t seem to matter anymore.

Jack stands. Her vision isn’t… right. She can’t process anything, except a strange and unnatural hunger beginning to roil within. Her ears buzz with silence. There isn’t anything to hear, anyway. There’s nothing alive, in the traditional sense of the word, left on the heath.

Above, the starship’s tail fades and the clouds slip closed. This is the last ship to leave. Jack—perhaps mercifully—isn’t aware of her new degree of solitude. Just as the passengers on board aren’t aware that below, a series of new breeds are beginning to claim Dartmoor as their own.

And that maybe, just maybe, the plague that ended humanity was started by a girl who went to a city and raised the dead.

The hunter and his apprentice were walking along one of the few clear paths leading out of the Broken City when they heard the sound. Doc Holland, with his long duster coat, wide-brimmed hat, and rifle slung over his shoulder, had been humming a merry tune under his breath. Marcus, Doc Holland’s young apprentice, trailed just a few paces behind, gripping his canteen tightly as he slowed to take a long draw of black, sludgy water, which he almost choked on upon hearing the low, unearthly noise in one of the ruins to their left.

It was the sound of a low, feral growl.

Doc Holland came to a sudden halt, his cheerful tune cutting to a spontaneous silence. His right arm stretched out, hand completely flat to tell Marcus, Stop.

Marcus obeyed, and gradually lowered his canteen, trying desperately not to slosh the water around with his trembling hands. His heart was beating like a drum in his chest, so much so that he could practically feel it in his ears. Doc Holland was undoubtedly disturbed as well, though he was doing an exceptional job of hiding it. His hand remained completely still, refusing to shake even the slightest. Regardless, they were both thinking the same thing: Others, this close to the Broken City?

The city was a desolate place populated by ruins from a time long past; all of it caked in ash and dust from—what was called by the holy men—the Great Rapture; a time when the Lord himself reclaimed His world through holy flames that took both the people who once lived on the Earth, and nearly all that they had built, with them. It was a place only visited by the inhabitants of the land if they were traveling from one settlement to the next, though sightings of the Others were scarce, and practically unheard of here.

This was thought to be due to the ever-watchful eyes of the Shades—shadows left behind by the Rapture; shadows of the ancient people who once had lived in the great cities of old. Doc Holland had once assured Marcus that they were not to be feared, that they were simply the remnants of a time long past; nothing more than scorch marks amidst the ash, burned forever into the ground by the holy flames. Nevertheless, Marcus always felt an eerie, creeping fear every time they passed through the Broken City.

Thankfully, the Others were thought to fear the Shades as well, if not for their constant, ever watchful presence, then for some holy—or unholy—reason that was unknown to the people of the land. Either way, questions were scarcely raised on the matter. The Others were dangerous, so any place free of the inhuman things was considered safe passage.

Though the hunter and his apprentice were now wondering just how safe this place truly was.

The silence persisted on as the two of them waited for signs of movement. Two minutes passed, perhaps three.

Not a sound.

Marcus could feel an almost involuntary sigh of relief building within him, pushing its way out. He thought of how they would chuckle about this later; they would laugh at how easily they had both been spooked by the wind, as if it were some ghostly apparition. Doc would say, “Next, we’ll be jumping at our own shadows,” with his warm smile showing beneath his black, bushy beard, before releasing a long and hearty laugh.

But Marcus forced the sigh back to wherever it had manifested from, because Doc remained unmoving before him, and Marcus knew just by looking at his frozen mentor that there would be no celebratory laughter. They’d both heard the sound, and if anyone knew the difference between the wind and an Other’s growl, it was undoubtedly Doc Holland, who had many stories to tell about his previous encounters with the Others.

Marcus suddenly found himself wishing that he had some sort of weapon besides his bowie knife, though he’d lost his pistol in a fierce dust storm two days prior. He’d missed the weapon dearly, but he longed for it now more than ever.

More time passed, and the two remained unmoving.

Silence.

Doc Holland was sure now that the creature had heard their approach. Between his humming, and Marcus’s water sloshing in the canteen, there was no doubt that the Other had taken notice of them. In fact, it was just as likely that it’s growl was released on some pure, animalistic instinct upon hearing its prey advance toward it. Perhaps it had been hiding in the shadows of the Broken City for some time, waiting for an unsuspecting traveler to pass so it could feast. Whatever the case, it mattered little now.

The silence persisted, until finally a ghostly, whistling wind washed over them. The current kicked up ash and dust as it went, and Doc Holland’s leather coat began to flap audibly in the wind when it reached them. The sound of leather being manipulated by the wind was their only warning before the thing revealed itself.

The Other lumbered out from under one of the larger concrete edifices with a roar that could have just as easily been the thunder of a great storm. The beast was a mountain of crimson flesh and muscle, and while Marcus was only able to get brief glimpses of the monstrosity, it was no doubt one of the largest Others he’d ever seen. It walked—if you could call it walking—primarily on its massive arms, with fists that were nearly three times as large as Marcus’s head. Its chest was a crooked mess of an exposed ribcage, which opened and closed with each heavy breath the thing took, like some gaping maw of meat. There was something else, too, protruding from the sides of its shoulders, though Marcus couldn’t quite make out what that was.

Doc Holland’s rifle responded to the roaring leviathan with a loud report of its own, as if to rival the behemoth in strength. Marcus and Doc both watched as, for just the slightest moment, the Other paused to look where the rifle’s bullet had impacted with its immense bicep. Something cried out then, like a high-pitched shrieking that could only be in response to a great deal of pain, though there was no way the Other’s low voice could have made a sound quite like that. However, their time to take this into consideration was short. The Other looked back to them as the shrieking sound rang out, and its face—though inhumanly warped with muscular growths and twisted flesh—showed a deep, irritated scowl.

The Other stood on its considerably short legs for a moment, and hammered its bony chest with heavy, tumor-ridden fists. It was at this point that both Marcus and Doc began to run.

“What do we do now?” Marcus asked as the loud, meaty thuds of the Other’s fists hitting pavement sounded off behind them. Bullets seemed to cause some form of damage to the Other, but they were low on ammunition from the previous stretch of their journey.

“Our best bet is looping around, and running to the nearest way station,” Doc Holland said. “With luck, we can lose the bastard in the thick of the ruins. It’s too large to fit through many of the smaller crevices.” He turned then, and paused for a brief moment, allowing Marcus to run a few paces ahead as he fired off another shot. That same horrible sound rang out behind them like a banshee out for their blood. Doc Holland turned back, and once more broke into a complete sprint, proving to be rather agile for his age. “Until then, I’ll slow it down.”

Marcus supposed the plan was as good as any at this point, though he was worried about the structural integrity of the ruins if the Other tried to follow after them. The beast was likely strong enough to smash through ancient concrete, but hopefully it was smart enough to know that doing so had a high risk of burying the three of them alive. However, Marcus didn’t voice his opinions on the matter, because anything was better than simply trying to outrun the beast.

They ran without speaking for the next five minutes, the only sounds being the continuous, low thump, thump, thump-ing of the Other’s fists propelling the monster after them. Each time the sounds came dangerously close, Doc Holland would make an abrupt turn to fire a round or two into the Other, slowing it just enough to keep them safely ahead. Marcus’s fear was growing ever stronger as they went, and his reasons for being afraid were now twofold. As if the Other wasn’t terrifying enough, the hundreds of silent Shades that they passed by almost seemed to be watching with anticipation. While the Shades kept true to their silent, immobile ways, Marcus swore he could feel their scorched eyes on the two of them as they ran, and in his mind he could practically hear them calling, “Don’t fret, you’ll be one of us soon,” in a hundred ghostly voices that were filled with a cold, lustful avidity.

Marcus did his best to push these thoughts aside, knowing that they were simply a part of his childhood paranoia coming back to haunt him. Still, the thought of ending up like one of the Shades frightened him beyond measure. Being a dark, motionless shadow with nothing to do but watch as the wasted lands further tore themselves apart year after year wasn’t how Marcus wished to spend his afterlife, yet he could imagine the Shades coming for him when he died; his spirit lifting up toward the heavens, when suddenly he would find himself being pulled back toward the ash by icy, black hands. “Join us, Marcus,” the entirety of the Broken City would seem to be whispering at once, ghoulish voices echoing around him in every direction. “Don’t leave in such a hurry, come stay with us. The dust is particularly nice this time of year.”

Images of Marcus’s apparitional body being pulled deeper and deeper into the ash played in quick succession in his mind—like a horrible picture book that was being flipped through at nauseating speed—until nothing was left but a white hand attempting to make purchase in the thick layers of ash. Finally, one last ebony hand would rise up from beneath the surface, and pull what remained of him down into the depths of this terrible, purgatorial place. He would never see the gates of heaven that he had heard so much about, would never stand before the Lord, and this instilled young Marcus with a cold fear that was so wretched it seemed to contend with his fear of the Other, which was the more immediate—and reasonable—thing to worry about.

Marcus wasn’t entirely sure how far they had managed to run in the time it had taken him to think all of this. The jagged, taller ruins of the city rose up around them now, and in the distance Marcus could clearly see a section of the road that had been completely blocked off by fallen slabs of concrete and metal wiring, which had once run through these skyscrapers—that’s what Doc Holland called them—like arteries in the body of a human.

“There,” Doc Holland shouted, pointing toward a small opening in the warped barricade of metal and stone. “You go first, lad. I’ll keep the beast at bay!”

Despite the fact that his lungs were now painfully whistling with each breath he took, Marcus pushed himself forward and dove into the hole without the slightest bit of hesitation, only pausing a good twenty feet into the unnatural formation to wait for Doc Holland. Once inside, he heard several thundering blows from Doc’s rifle, followed by more of those ghastly screams. Then, Doc Holland appeared in the opening, scrambling frantically into the barbed, irregular tunnel as if he had absolutely no care for his own safety. As he crawled hastily into the concrete passage, a rusted metal wire tore through the left shoulder of his coat, thankfully not cutting deep enough to bite into his flesh.

Doc Holland pressed himself firmly against the inner wall of the tunnel, and for a moment the two said nothing as they waited for the Other to attack, knowing full well that their lives would be forfeit if it attempted to dig its way in.

Instead, a sound rolled in after them that was akin to the crunching of boots on loose gravel, and beneath that there was another sound, so deep that it’s very vibrations seemed similar to the rumblings of an earthquake. It was a throaty sound, not made by the vocal chords of a human being, but rather the throat of an active volcano just before it belched its molten innards about the land like some terrible, gutted beast.

It was the sound of the Other’s voice.

“A good show,” the Other said with some amusement. “However, you are only prolonging the inevitable, my juicy fleshlings! Why not come out of your burrow, and let nature run its course?”

Doc Holland began reloading his rifle at that, seemingly unperturbed by the monster’s words. “Perhaps I will, beast,” Doc called back, the flames of confidence burning deeply in his voice. “Perhaps I will, and maybe then I’ll show you more of what my rifle can do.”

The Other laughed a mighty, demonic laugh that rumbled into the concrete passage like the prelude to some great and powerful storm. Then it spoke once more, and its voice took on a far more serious tone.

“And perhaps I shall skewer you to one of these metal rods, and roast you over open flame until your yellow fat bubbles, and your eyeballs melt out of their sockets.” The Other paused and came closer to the entrance of the tunnel, blotting out the light. It lowered its voice ominously and said, “Do not waste our time on perhaps and perchance, my dear fleshling. We hunger, and you linger now without purpose. Run or fight, it matters little, though we would appreciate a bit of haste in your decision making.”

“We?” Doc Holland asked, but it was too late. The Other had already disappeared from sight, though it was undoubtedly hiding somewhere within pouncing range. Doc finished reloading his weapon and offered a long, haggard sigh. “Smart one, that creature,” he said simply. “Certainly well spoken for an Other.”

Unsurprisingly, the Other being more intelligent than most of its kind did little to boost Marcus’s confidence. “What do we do now?” he asked in a hushed voice, fearing that the creature was listening in on them.

“We head for the way station,” Doc replied, and then nodded as if to confirm the words to himself. “Aye, we head for the way station.”

And so, after a few minutes of rest, they did just that.

The tunnel provided them with only a quarter mile of cover, so they mostly made their way by going from structure to fallen structure, taking great care in remaining as silent as possible. While they rarely looked back, they could hear the Other following their scent—often much too close for comfort.

When they reached the halfway point, the two took a short moment to rest in one of the larger ruins. In their hurriedness to avoid the Other, both had gained a plethora of minor scrapes, cuts, and bruises. The Broken City was an unforgiving place, and one wrong move usually ended in some form of injury. With the sun quickly descending now, and the light of a lantern far too dangerous with the Other’s presence looming closely behind, they found themselves making a great deal of wrong moves.

“This is hell,” Marcus whispered as they hunkered closely together under a lopsided slab of stonework.

Doc Holland shook his head. “Nah, lad,” he breathed, almost inaudibly. “Hell is whatever hole that monstrosity crawled out of.”

As if in response, the Other snarled somewhere close by, and they heard the sound of moving rubble as the hulking monstrosity began to dig into one of the adjacent, dilapidated ruins. The two continued the rest of the way in a mutual silence, not daring even the slightest chance at revealing themselves to the horror that hunted them.

It wasn’t long before the sun had left them completely, and their only source of light became the distant glow of the half-moon above. For this reason, they almost missed the entrance to the way station.

Marcus had seen many way stations on their travels, though none of them were quite like this. The entrance was built into the ground itself, and instead of a keyhole, the door held a series of buttons that went from zero to nine. Fortunately, Doc Holland knew the code. This wasn’t much of a surprise, though, as Doc seemed to have keys for every way station and supply cache littered around the land. Being one of the few travelling doctors, and Other hunters, made Doc Holland a very treasured individual this side of the Dusted Lands.

“Coast seems clear,” Doc Holland muttered as he entered the code.

Now that Marcus thought about it, the Other had been silent for most of the latter half of their cautious trek through the Broken City. Was it possible that they’d actually been able to escape the beast?

Despite the silence, Marcus still found himself looking about cautiously in every direction, the ends of every nerve in his body pulsing with electricity. As Doc finished entering the code, he peeled back the metal door. It opened with a high wail, which echoed off into the distance. Marcus jumped at the sound, and Doc paused halfway to listen for signs of movement. Nothing seemed to respond to their inadvertent call, and so Doc finished the job.

The opening where the door had once been revealed only a deep, black hole. A rusted ladder dived down into the grim dark below, and Marcus felt inexplicably as though they were trading the giant, gaping maw of the Other for some new, more mysterious beast. However, he knew that they had no choice in their descent. With the sun gone, the Other would likely have the advantage, as its kind were often better suited to seeing in the dark.

“You go first,” Doc whispered. “Once you’ve reached the bottom, light up your lantern. I’ll climb down and close the door behind us.”

“Yeah, all right,” Marcus agreed. He mounted the ladder cautiously, not entirely trusting the ancient metal’s durability. Thankfully, despite a few minor groans in protest, the ladder held his weight without much difficulty. He counted fifteen steps to the bottom, which was something of a relief considering that, from the top of the ladder, the pit looked as though it could have gone on forever.

As Marcus stepped away from the ladder he fumbled around the pouches on his belt, until he found his book of matches. His hands were shaking with a slight, residual fear, but he was able to get his lantern lit easily enough.

Doc Holland began climbing down the ladder. Marcus watched as the moon disappeared behind the metal door, and suddenly felt strangely as though they were locking themselves in a cage. Still, he was comforted by the thought that they would no longer have to hide from the Other—at least for the remainder of the night.

“All right, then,” Doc Holland said in his normal speaking voice, which sounded almost alien after their hours of silence. He went to lighting his own lantern, and Marcus noted that his hands were surprisingly steady. They were the hands of a man who had seen his share of monsters; the hands of a man who survived each close encounter to tell the tale time and time again.

Once both their lanterns were glowing—almost protectively, Marcus felt—Doc began to walk deeper into the way station. While Marcus could see only long, black corridors with no end in sight, Doc seemed to know exactly where he was going, and before long they came to a series of hallways that split off from the main passageway. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to the placement of these passages, with no signs to mark where they led. In spite of this, Doc Holland pointed to one of these new passages, and said, “Head down the left hall, here, and see if you can find us any food.” He then took a few steps forward and glanced down the other hallways as if he was trying to remember where he needed to go. Then, to validate whatever thoughts were running through his mind, he nodded in silence.

“Where are you going?” Marcus asked in a voice that was almost pleading, as if to say, Don’t leave me already!

“To look for supplies,” Doc replied. “Might be ammo around here, if they’ve stocked the place recently.” He started down one of the corridors on the right, but paused briefly to look back at Marcus. “If you need anything, just give a holler. These tunnels are bound to carry your voice to me.”

And then Doc Holland was gone, the faint glow of his lantern disappearing along with him.

Marcus sighed softly, and began his hunt for food, the embers of anticipation slowly beginning to burn within him at the prospect of eating something other than dried meat, which had been their only source of sustenance on the road. It was the first happy thought he’d had in hours, but even that little bit of happiness was enough to make their encounter with the Other seem like a simple, harmless memory.

After a reasonable stroll down the hallway Doc Holland had pointed to, Marcus came across an open doorway. This door had a sign next to it, which simply read: Food and Water. Marcus allowed himself a triumphant smile at this. Things actually were starting to look up.

Marcus passed through the doorway with the thought of canned peaches and pears on his mind. This thought was quickly erased, however, when he found himself kicking something hard into the room with him. The hard object skittered across the floor with a clackity-clack. Curiously, Marcus approached where the thing had landed. What he saw gave him pause.

The item in question was a bone.

To make matters worse, Marcus also noticed that many of the shelves containing jars of food had been knocked over carelessly. Broken glass, fruits, vegetables, and pickled meat all polluted the floor. And there was something else, too, a strong, sour scent that rose even above the smell of vinegar from the pickled meat. It was a familiar scent that Marcus had experienced only once before in his travels with Doc Holland, and it was one that immediately extinguished the small flames of hope that had been building within him—it was the smell of old sewers.

“Oh God,” Marcus whispered as he walked further into the room. The light of his lantern illuminated the wall on the opposite side of the storeroom, and there, in the center of the wall, was a large, gaping hole. Marcus stopped momentarily, then took a few more hesitant steps forward.

More bones littered the floor near the wide aperture. Some of them were snapped in places, others seemed to have been chewed on by sharp, uneven teeth.

Why don’t we travel the sewers unless absolutely necessary? Doc Holland’s voice asked in Marcus’s head, coming through some old memory.

“Because the Others claimed them first,” Marcus whispered in response, speaking to nobody other than himself.

Everything began to click as he finished approaching that big, open cavity in the wall. He and Doc hadn’t been this way in weeks, but Marcus was willing to bet that if they’d made it to town, someone would have asked them to come out here to investigate some strange and sudden disappearances.

It never stopped chasing us, Marcus thought frantically to himself. It just noticed which direction we were heading, and decided to beat us here.

He held the lantern through the crevice with unsteady hands and peered only briefly into the vast darkness of the sewer before seeing his lantern’s glow reflect in two yellow, feral eyes.

The rumbling voice of the Other came to greet him from the darkness. “Hello, meat,” it said with an evil purr.

And then the monster came at him, heavy arms crashing against the concrete surface of the tunnel with a great and terrible ferocity. Though he felt paralyzed by fear, Marcus’s legs began to work automatically. He turned without thought, and sprinted out of the storeroom.

“Doc!” Marcus screamed into the dark tunnels ahead. “Doc, help!”

The Other pursued its prey easily enough in the corridors of the way station, though they were terribly narrow for a beast of its size. Marcus could hear the monstrosity thumping into the walls behind him as it gave chase, breathing subtle growls from a mouth that thirsted for the copper taste of blood. Marcus could feel its warm breath on his back as it drew closer, and could smell the wretched rot and decay of the bits of flesh that still lingered amidst its jagged jaw. Then the Other groped for him with a massive hand, and while he was just out of grabbing distance, its razor-sharp nails still sliced through the back of Marcus’s shirt. They trailed long, thin gashes through the flesh of his back as though it were nothing more than paper.

Marcus’s lantern just barely illuminated the walls of the main corridor when Doc Holland stepped into view. He was holding a red container, which sloshed with liquid. He dropped the container at his feet and shouldered his rifle. On instinct, Marcus dropped out of the rifle’s sight and slid across the smooth surface of the floor toward Doc, whose rifle rang out in a deafening defense. One, two, three rounds Doc Holland fired into the leviathan, and when Marcus turned to glance at the damage that was done, he saw that in these close quarters each of Doc’s bullets had found their marks. The Other stood ten feet away, now blinded with ebony sludge spilling from its eye sockets.

Doc kicked the red canister toward Marcus. “Drench this bastard,” he commanded.

Marcus, still on the ground, hastily uncapped the container. He turned back toward the Other and began to toss its contents onto the beast. The scent of gasoline filled the air as the Other thrashed violently about. It moved steadily toward them, enraged by its blindness. The walls spider-webbed outward in places as the Other threw its heavy arms wildly about, smashing the brick into dusty clouds.

Marcus took a few steps back and watched as Doc Holland took the lantern from his belt. “Get behind me, lad,” he said calmly. Marcus obeyed without question, and observed with a wicked fascination as his mentor smashed the lantern onto the monster.

Flames instantaneously covered the Other’s crimson flesh, making a brilliant show of light in the darkness of the tunnels. In its rage the Other lunged for the hunters, but the two were able to avoid its mass by dodging into another corridor.

The Other crashed harshly to the floor and began to thrash around. As it did so, Marcus noticed odd deformities on each of its arms, but as he watched the beast he noticed that these were unlike the rest of the muscular growths that had covered its surface. Indeed, these grotesque shapes were much more unnerving.

Just under each of its shoulders, the beast had the form of a baby just barely protruding from the surface of its skin. They were almost engraved there, as if their forms were carved, or perhaps even melded, into the flesh. As Marcus stared at one of them, horrified by the sight, he saw that the infant’s eyes looked back at him. They were beady and black, and appeared almost hateful beneath the glowing flames. The face was twisted in horrible pain, and Marcus realized suddenly that it was screaming a long, high-pitched shriek as the flames continued to work at the Other’s skin.

Marcus recalled seeing children who were joined together at the waist in one of the towns. Conjoined twins, they were called. Doc Holland had once said that it was one of the many birth defects left behind by the holy flames. Marcus also remembered that some of the older Others were born in the wombs of human mothers after the radiation of the holy flames twisted them into strange, inhuman beings. The holy men always said that this was the devil’s work, as with most of God’s children gone, Lucifer’s demonic legion could walk the land unopposed. Marcus was never sure why holy flames cleansing the land would have such horrible repercussions, but it was deemed unwise to question his elders, and so he simply accepted this as fact.

Watching the mounds of burning flesh, Marcus imagined two conjoined twins in their mother’s womb. He pictured a tumor rising up in the flesh that bound them together, and saw in his mind that tumor slowly grow in the radiated stomach; saw it overtake the two until it was the dominant form. The thought made him sick to his stomach, but just as he was about to turn away, the Other began to speak once more, rising to its feet.

“Fools,” it said. “I was born in the holy flames! Do you truly think a little fire will kill me?”

“Perhaps not, demon,” Doc Holland replied coldly. He placed the barrel of his rifle to the creature’s temple as it rose. “Regardless, I think it’s past time someone sent you back to the hell from which you came.”

Doc Holland unloaded the rest of his ammo into the Other, one bullet after the next, until bone and brain matter began to fly in every direction. As the Other crashed limply to the floor, black fluids began to flow out of its head in a steady, metal-smelling stream. The childlike cries of the Other’s meaty arms died off weakly as the monster took one ragged, final breath.

At last, the Other was dead.

Marcus and Doc Holland were both silent for a moment as they watched the flames continue to lick at the Other’s remains. A thick, putrid smell began to fill the air as the Other’s flesh began to bubble.

After allowing his poor, tired heart a few minutes of rest, Marcus thought it best to tell Doc Holland about the opening in the storeroom wall.

“Better go see about barricading it, then,” Doc Holland said at once. “No way we’re traversing the Broken City at this time of night, and I’m not about to let any more monsters find their way in here.”

The two took great care in maneuvering around the flaming corpse, and when they had bypassed the flames without lighting themselves on fire, they walked down the long passageway to the storeroom, both feeling tired, though happily victorious. Doc Holland began humming a merry little tune as they went. Marcus found the sound to be quite calming.

Marcus led the way into the storeroom, lantern held steadily before him to light their way. As he walked to the opposite end of the room, Doc Holland paused behind him to survey the damaged goods.

Marcus approached the gap, carefully stepping over the shards of broken glass that surrounded the floor. He then stopped abruptly, and listened.

There was a sound in the distance. It was a low, hissing sort of noise that Marcus couldn’t quite make out. “Do you hear that?” he whispered over his shoulder to Doc Holland.

Doc stepped up beside him and cocked his head toward the opening. “I do,” he said in a voice that was extremely grave.

The sound drew closer, and Marcus held the lantern deeper into the hole. To the left, he was beginning to make out a slender silhouette shambling toward them on all fours. As it drew closer, the glow of the lantern reflected off of its sunken, gray eyes. It had skin the color of ash, with long, almost crooked limbs that made it move awkwardly. Its face was elongated, giving it a sorrowful appearance, though it appeared to be grinning all the same. As it crawled closer, the two noticed long, curved claws on both its hands and feet, where its fingers and toes were fused together by protruding bones.

“Feast,” the Other was whispering. “Feast, feast, feast.”

Doc Holland aimed his rifle at the creature, and pulled the trigger.

The rifle responded with a simple, click.

A hard knock on the front door echoes back into the kitchen where I’m stuffing another French fry down my gullet. I jump and almost choke on the crunchy stalk of potato and breading.

I eye Franco sitting across from me at the slate black table, his plate is half empty already. His thick, ruddy brown hair is wavy and messy, framing generous eyes, soft cheeks, and a small pointed nose all coalescing down into a triangular chin. For a second, his hazel eyes meet mine, a hint of worry escaping their depths.

“Who’s that?” Franco asks, crinkling his brow and sweeping his eyes toward the noise.

“Hell if I know,” I say, swallowing down the remainder of my fry with a grimace. “I’ll get it.”

With an annoyed sigh, I get to my feet and make my way through the small kitchen. I don’t need much, but with the Under Shepherd and his fellowship of Deacon’s recent crackdowns on objectionable materials, my horde of belongings is even more meager now, or hidden. Before I can pass through the living room, another knock bangs on the door followed by a harsh command. I stop in my tracks.

“Open up,” a deep, commanding voice rings past the entry door just before beating on the wooden frame commences again. “This is the police.”

I gulp and take another step, then another which lands my feet on a small, bland rug just before the front door. I turn to my left and my eyes catch a picture from better days, before the church managed to sneak its way into everything, when we still had a president, a Congress and a real court system. Now it’s just the church and their holy book.

My parents are seated on a grassy knoll somewhere in the Blue Ridge Mountains. I’m sitting cross-legged between them, an only child. Everyone’s grinning, something I rarely do nowadays. Trees layered in browns, reds and oranges line the background just below a setting sun. I remember it being cool, bordering on frigid that day. I think I was fourteen. My smooth, pale, boyish face was happy then, brown eyes glinting in the light below the same headful of spiky chestnut hair I see in my reflection in the glass. There was a vibrancy in me that day that’s lacking now; hell, I’ve not felt that in years. I was a normal kid. I played basketball, chased after the girls, couldn’t wait to get my license, took my parents for granted. It’s hard to believe it’s been nine years since that day on the Parkway, seven years since my parents died at the hands of the church, the Fellowship as they call themselves. Their crime? They were God deniers, at least that’s what the Fellowship called them. It only took a matter of years after the church gained control, no, who am I fooling, took control, for such a crime to be decreed punishable by death.

My parents had instructed me to tell the government I believed in God to keep me safe. That wasn’t a problem though, because I did, I do. I don’t believe in their God, one that demands such intolerance and heavy-handedness, the denial of free will, but I do believe. Of course, they don’t need to know that little detail.

I grit my teeth as another knock comes at the door. I swear if they beat any harder, they’ll splinter the wood. My mind’s racing.

Why are they here? Do they know? No. How?

The Fellowship police don’t just show up at your doorstep for a quaint talk; no, they come because they plan to drag you out on the street kicking and screaming from your house.

No. Surely not.

I realize I’m breathing hard. I focus on calming down. I hear a soft padding on the floor behind me and turn to find Franco standing beside me, worry etched across his face. I try to grin, but it’s useless. My eyes lock with his.

“Open up!” the voice bellows again and I twitch. “Open up now, or we’ll break the door down!”

I’m sorry, I think. But I can’t seem to vocalize the sentiment. He nods like he understands. We can’t run. By now they’ve surrounded my tiny excuse of a home and are ready for any attempt we might make at an escape.

“Okay,” I whisper, taking another gulp and step toward the door, placing my palm against the cold knob. I take a deep breath and close my eyes for a brief second. Then I turn it and pull the door open.

The man behind the door, the one who was screaming for us to open up just seconds ago, pulls his hand back, apparently about to knock again. He’s a younger officer, late twenties, maybe earlier thirties, with a full head of hair and dressed in an all-black officer’s uniform, muscles bulging around his neck. The uniform is one of the few remnants of our society before the “ascension” of the church, before the church became everything. Behind him I count four others, all men, all standing at the ready, batons in hand.

“Kael Lawson?” the man asks, his tone calmer now.

“Yes, that’s me,” I tell him, trying to hide the worry in my voice. I see the man’s eyes shift from me to Franco.

“And are you Franco Wilder?” the officer asks, an air of importance and expectation in his voice, it almost sounds snide.

I nod slowly as Franco speaks up.

“Yes, I’m Franco,” he says.

The officer shifts on his feet, straightening, a grin forming across his thin lips.

“By order of the Fellowship, and the supreme Under Shepherd, you are both under arrest,” before he can finish speaking, the men behind him swarm in, swooping into my home and pinning my hands behind my back. I look over my shoulder to find Franco in the same predicament. A pained expression on his face sends a bolt of anger up my spine. I twist and turn, trying to pull my hands from their grasp. But I’m no match for the church’s police, trained from a young age, even before the church became all-powerful, to be master of both body and mind, to hunt and contain.

They pull my arms back together and slap a pair of handcuffs tightly around my wrists. I yelp as the cold metal rakes against my skin.

“You have no fucking rig—“ I try, but my words are cut off by the blunt impact of a large fist against my mouth. If it weren’t for the men holding me up from behind, I’d be on the ground right now.

I drop my face, squinting away the pain and letting my vision clear up. I lick my lips and taste the bitter flavor of blood trickling down my mouth and chin.

“I have every right. And watch your mouth,” the officer says before nodding to his men. “Bring them outside for public judgment.”

My eyes bloom open at his words and immediately I’m searching for Franco, craning my neck around to see behind me. I find him a few steps back to the right, as the officers march us out onto the concrete sidewalk that leads up against the edge of the road. There’s a sorrow in his eyes, much like my own probably, but it’s tempered by a strength he’s always managed in the harder times. That’s something I could never master, not with all the shit I’ve been through. Not after every sin in the Bible was codified into law and interpreted by some high-minded bunch of so-called deacons who thought they knew what was best for everyone and what wasn’t. Pharisees, I call them, the whole lot.

At first it hadn’t been bad, at least compared to now, that is. At first the big sins where punished with fines, or public humiliation. Then it became jail time and “restitution” to the church. The first crime to be newly minted worthy of the death penalty had been blasphemy and denying their God. Since then the list has grown and public judgment usually meant an immediate death penalty.

I twist my body to the side, trying to escape the grasp of the two men holding me. It’s useless, though, as they continue to press onward as if my struggle is nothing to them. I break my gaze from Franco and scan over the neighborhood, cast in the glow of the evening sun. I swear that everyone is standing outside, gawking at our misfortune. I wonder what they’re thinking.

What did they do? I guess they’re getting what they deserved. Damn ingrates. Sinners.

I wonder how many are cheering on the police. Our neighbors. People I’ve talked to almost every day, or at least passed on the way to work or town. They just stand there on their lawns, watching.

Do something! Help us! I scream inside, but I know it’s out of the question. Helping us would implicate them in whatever it is the church has deemed us criminals for. There will be no help coming.

To my left I catch David, my neighbor of three years, who I wish a “good morning” to every day before I drive off for work. He’s grinning, lips pursed and expectant, hands clasped.

Did he know about the plan? Had he somehow overheard Allison, Franco and I discussing the rebellion? Or what was left of it at least? That has to be it. No. They’ll come for her, too, then.

At the edge of the sidewalk, against the road, the officer barks an order I fail to make out. Without warning, the men behind me kick my knees in from behind and a hand shoves me forward. I collapse to the sidewalk, my knees scraping against concrete. I grit my teeth at the pain as another hand grasps my shoulder to keep me from planting my face onto the road. I glance to my right as Franco is dropped to his knees next to me. I try to smile. I don’t know, maybe I did.

This is it.

I refuse to break my eyes away from Franco as the officer who announced our arrest stomps around and stakes his place in front of us, demanding our attention.

“Kael Lawson,” he bellows, a proclamation to be heard by all around us, but especially for our busybody neighbor, David. “Franco Wilder. For the crime of…”

I drown out his words. I don’t want to hear them. I don’t need to hear them. I know what’s coming and I know why now. It’s hard to believe in this moment that there was a better time. A time when men and women chose their own destinies, when people were free to speak their mind, to disagree, to be a rebel. But now is not that time, and I know now that I’ll never see that time again.

“I’m sorry,” I tell Franco, tears pouring down my cheeks. I can only imagine how I look right now to the people standing around us, watching the night’s spectacle, but I don’t care.

“No. Don’t be,” he tells me between a stutter. A weak yet perfect smile interrupts the tears running down his face.

As the officer’s words touch my numbed ears, a few words hit me from his decree. They’re not here because of our involvement in the rebellion, they apparently don’t know.

“…by order of the Fellowship and the Under Shepherd, you are hereby sentenced to summary execution.” His voice is strong and commanding as he utters the end of our lives. I want to hate him so much, to hate everyone around me, the church, everyone. But I can’t. I hate what they’re doing, what they’ve brought us to, but I don’t hate them. I pity them.

In that moment, I glue my eyes to Franco as the sound of the officer racking the slide of his pistol back reaches my ears, a bullet in the chamber, ready. Time slows as I focus on those hazel eyes. I clench my bound fists behind my back and hold on to a scared smile.

Franco grins back at me through tear-stained lips, eyes sad but somehow happy in the same instant. As I hear the faint click of the trigger just before the finale, one last thought rolls through my mind.

What was my crime? I had done a forbidden thing. I loved him.

I put Biya in the lower kitchen cabinet. We go over the rules about quiet, calling out, and listening for our code word: ziggles. She is not afraid of staying in the cabinet anymore. I am not sure if that makes me feel better or just sick to my stomach. I kiss my daughter and the doll on the forehead. The hinge creaks as I gently close the door. I make a mental note to oil all the cupboards tomorrow. I lock up, and head down two flights of stairs to the street.

It’s raw out tonight. Windy. The howly type. Penetrating pores and chilling bone. Searching for vital organs to freeze. A wind with a purpose, my Beth used to say. So far, I haven’t run into anyone, marked or unmarked, for four of the eight icy city blocks I’ve walked to Tommy’s Deli. Lucky. Good. But even unmarked, what a sight I must be. A six-foot-five weirdo, sporting what is clearly a woman’s puff jacket (could not get the bloodstains out of my parka), in a lovely shade of violet blue, oh so carefully positioning my big man tootsies on scattered patches of dry pavement, whipping my head around with every step, expecting who the hell knows what. No doubt I look as if I’m fully prepared to pitch myself into a dumpster, should I hear even the tiniest rattle of a tuna can rolling down the street. My bristly red, mis-self-shaven head is fully exposed to the unforgiving gusts of late January. Ears starting to painfully tingle. But still, it would have been much too dangerous to wear the winter hat. No way.

Shame, though. It’s the hat Biya gave me for Christmas. A really uncool, monstrosity of a cap. Dark grey, with a strip of those white Aztec triangles which scream ski lodge, or marshmallow s’mores, or just, old guy. I don’t know if I fell in love with that hat because it was the first gift my 4-year-old ever gave me, or because it was so freakin’ warm. Berber lining. Fold-down, faux-fur brim. Generous ear flaps. Damn thing is even water repellent.

“You always get so cold, Daddy,” Biya said, eagerly fastening the velcro under my scraggly cinnamon beard. I had barely peeled all the green foil wrapping off the gift and she was on me, smelling of cinnamon apple oatmeal and yanking the side flaps down with purposeful kid grunts.

“It’s for out of doors men,” Biya continued, eyes skyward, carefully repeating what I am sure Beth told her to say. “Oh!” Biya added, remembering, “and trapped men.”

At this point my wife, Beth, could barely contain her giggles and jumped in, “That’s trappers, honey. You know, like hunters?” But Biya was already a hundred miles away. Having officially bequeathed her gift to me, she was now on to liberating her plastic tea set from the overkill bondage of the cardboard display box. The packaging for the set—pot, sugar bowl, creamer, and service for four—was adorned with a hideous mix of lavender, navy blue and popcorn yellow flower designs, making me think of the Scooby-Doo van for some odd reason. She was now tearing into it, kid grunts reemerging, as if she had some game show time limit for getting it free. Biya had no idea that the days of having tea parties with friends were pretty much over now. As were the days of hat wearing, despite the season.

But you don’t really know what I am talking about, do you? Well, if you had asked Beth, she probably would have regaled you with all the details, beginning to end. ‘Cause she followed it, you know? She didn’t work, choosing to stay home with Biya till she started first grade. So Beth followed it night and day while it was happening until— Well. She followed it. I wish I had followed it. I keep going over it in my head now, wondering if I had taken it more seriously at the beginning, if I had seen how quickly it was becoming scary, how I might have decided to get my family out of the city. I heard some people did that. I heard a lot of people say they were going as far as Canada.

Our landlord, Dell, across the hall in 201? He took his family to his sister’s place in some remote part of Maine. Like literally, the tip of Maine. “Whatever,” I said to Beth. “Let him do his paranoia shuffle, just like all the other idiots. So long as he doesn’t kick us out, or expect me to  a pigeon to drop him a rent check in Maine” I mighta, coulda, shoulda paid a little more attention to the deep lines of worry on my wife’s face as she relayed the story of how our landlord was abandoning his own building in quite a hurry, or the one about how she had to hit three markets that week to find one with some eggs. Instead, I did what Doyle always does best when anything happened; make his panicked wife feel as if she was totally, and womanishly, completely overreacting.

If you want an exact start date, it was November 14th. My wedding anniversary of all days. I missed the first broadcast that fateful night. But come the next morning at Wheelset Manufacturing, I found several of my work buddies in a cryptic huddle, intensely debating their theories about it, about her. I remember pushing past them to the timeclock. They were way too embroiled in their conversation to even scold me for jumping the line, and that was damn weird.

Anywho, at 8pm on November 14th, everyone’s cable had gotten interrupted, or hacked, or hijacked, or we all got hypnotized (everybody jumped in with their own personal theory and highly credible hearsay… my sister’s cousin’s friend who does the wife of a cable exec said…) No matter what show or what channel, anyone watching the tube got to see her for the first time; the her I will now refer to as the Gidgidoo. At 8pm, the Gidgidoo materialized on computers, televisions, phones, tablets, to make her first prediction, or whatever you want to call it, and started the damn apocalypse.

So how do I describe her? Well, I am pretty sure she was Indian. Indian, from like, India. Yep. Okay. You’re right. I’ll never be a poster boy for political correctness, and Beth would have scolded me for just making an assumption like that. But this is my yarn, dammit, and the big, bad “G” looked Indian to me. You work in a loud, sweaty machine shop all day with a bunch of old white guys, no radio, and two glorious 15-minute breaks, and let’s see how globally educated you can get. And I didn’t start calling her, a her. That part was not me. Everyone was calling it a her. Maybe it was just easier to think of it as a woman. She sure as hell inflicted pain like one. Yeah, that was probably a sexist remark, too. Congrats on catching it. If your ethical odometer is on overload, you can always stop listening.

So, whatever, there she was. This person on TV. Telling us that the very next day, all child abusers would wake up with a purple mark on their foreheads, so all the world can see the truth. That was her first broadcast, and those, her only words. All of Gidgi’s broadcasts always went down the same way. Any channel you were watching would fade out to a white-grey static, like in Poltergeist with that guy from Coach? Then this skeletal figure slowly comes into focus. Creamy, light brown skin, dressed in a white gown (looked a lot like those paper napkin gowns they give you at the doctor’s office), seated on a white floor, in a white, windowless room. A crumpled, somewhat dirty, urine-yellow blanket was laid over her skinny legs. Course I never saw the legs. I just assumed she had legs and wasn’t a mermaid or something. Her stick-like body would be turned away from the camera, and her twizzler-ish arms pushed straight down onto the floor, as if supporting what weight she had. But her head would be twisted backwards, looking back at the viewer over pointy and protruding shoulder blades. It looked really uncomfortable for her, but that was how she always appeared. Same way, every time. Like some sexy model position for a magazine that could have been titled Disturborexia or Brittle Broads or some such thing.

One of my friends, Lens Sozak, called her “The Mantis,” which was a darn good description if you ask me. Good old Lens was killed in a mob-action, as they’re being called these days. He developed a blue mark while vacationing at the Grand Canyon with his family. Nobody stopped to ask him if his mark was due to being a war vet, which he was. A crowd of people just picked him up in some sort of mosh pit ballet, and tossed him over the South Rim, right in front of his wife and three boys. Mob-actions were like that in the beginning. Now you really don’t see mobs, everyone pretty much stays on their own. But, it still doesn’t make strangers any less dangerous.

The Gidgidoo’s skin was pulled smooth, which might have made you think she was maybe twenty-five or so, but her eyes were kind of… sunken. Big, round, black-pupiled oglers, with wide, dark, old lady circles cradling beneath. To me, they made her look about two hundred years old and counting. And then, of course, there was her hair. She did have hair, a long, black shiny mane, probably her most woman-like feature, but only in some places. So if you’re having trouble with the visual, just picture an upside down spaghetti strainer, with black clumps of hair pulled through just some of the holes. And no, it wasn’t like she lost the hair. It looked like that was just how it grew.

Three blocks from Tommy’s Deli now and crossing the street. My heightened peripheral catches a flash of light. A flashlight, to be precise. Someone is hanging out in a side alley with a flashlight. They aren’t moving, and they aren’t chasing me, so I just keep on. The top tips of my ears feel like they’re literally burning off my head. Wicks on a roman candle. Idiot, I could have at least wrapped up my ears. I’m already in a purple quilt, what difference would a set of Biya’s socks around my ears make at this point?

It was Biya that named her the Gidgidoo. I never really asked why. The name seemed to fit. And I don’t talk about that with my daughter at all anymore. She’s got few other ideas to stew on as of late. Like why she can’t go out, or when’s Mommy coming home, or how come we only eat once a day.

I never saw the Gidgidoo interruption that first night. I was in the basement of our apartment building, battling with a broken storage cage. My jerky neighbor had yanked it off its post when he forgot the combination to his kid’s bike lock. Joys of renting, baby. Guess he thought destroying our shared storage space was a far better idea than just asking someone if they had bolt cutters. The only reason I found the damage in the first place was because the storage locker was my only safe, Beth-Free Zone (thank you, mini-centipedes) for hiding her anniversary present, a jet black angora sweater. It had a cowl-neck, was tight, and kinda beatnicky. We had seen it in one of the ladies boutique windows in town. Think the shop was called Mystafy Designs, but of course I was teasing Beth and calling it Misfire Designs. I made her go in and try it on. I knew she loved it when she emerged from the dressing room, all a-smile. God, she had a great smile. While waiting for her to sweater-up, I had uncomfortably perched my butt on a cubed platform, under an armless mannequin garbed in some red atrocity of an evening gown, punched with silver rivets. Rivets make the woman, you know. Two pinched-faced sales-women-witches, clearly unhappy with me parking there, and thus ruining the strategic and cohesive visual design of the entire store, shot me occasional glares as they busied themselves organizing silk scarves by color and shoving credit card applications into the unwilling hands of strangers. Beth had half-popped, half-snuck out of the little stall in the sweater, and I whistled loudly. More to annoy the sales staff than embarrass my wife. She then took one look at the ornate gold cardstock tag bearing the $189.00 bad news and guffawed like a donkey. Pinch-faces rolled their eyes at us, and I knew right there that little angora number was going to be the best surprise gift ever.

Anyway, that is where I was when the Gidgidoo appeared on the TV screen, in the basement of our apartment building, playing Mr. Fix-it, and doing a horrific wrap job on the sweater. Beth missed the G-woman, too. She was in the kitchen, gently trying to unravel herself from one of those killer marathon phone calls from Mom; blah, blah, blah, when are you two buying a house? Blah, blah, blah, when are you bringing Biya up for a visit? Blah and double blah.

But Biya did see it, and named her two names. The Gidgidoo, and, The Scary Lady. Of course, on any other night, Biya would have already been in bed (cause she’s friggin’ four), curled up with that ladybug doll she likes, dreaming under a ceiling of glow-in-the-dark, peach-colored stars. But no, my unsupervised daughter was happily flipping channels on our (never set parental control) remote. So first, a little of the The Shining, and then, the Gidgidoo. Yeah, yeah, I know. Nice parenting, Doyle and Beth.

The purple marking was the Gidgidoo’s first promise to all of us across the world in TV land, and damn if it did not happen the next morning, just as she said it would. And then every week after that at 8pm. A new announcement. A new color. And a new sinner would wake up marked, unveiled to the world, awaiting punishment, or running from it.

A blast of wind, frizzled with swirling ice-snow, slams into my face, immediately making my eyes water. I’m pushed back a step and almost lose my footing. I feel my left heel kissing a thick rounded ice patch and my heart jumps. Not sure, but I think some sort of cartoon “Whoa!” escapes my mouth. Yet, my arms seem to blessedly flail in all the right directions and I regain my balance. Slowly, as if not trusting the touchdown, I bend over, place my hands on my thighs and stare at the concrete. My body starts to involuntarily shiver now. Not from the cold, but from the near-miss realization. That could have been bad. Real bad. What if I cracked my head and knocked myself unconscious? Or broke my leg? If I couldn’t make it home tonight? Oh my god. I take a deep breath. Then, another. I’m okay. I’m a block from Tommy’s. Almost halfway home, little girl.

Purple was first. The Gidgidoo had said anyone who developed a purple mark on their head was a child abuser. She didn’t tell anyone to do anything about it. She just said it, like it was an indisputable fact. Like the way you say water boils, or that Superman can fly. Of course, Biya thought she said child shoes, of all things, so she thought marked people got shoes. I didn’t deserve that small miracle.

That year, there were an estimated 40 million children worldwide subjected to abuse, and I only know that ‘cause me and Beth, everybody at work, and about a bazillion other people hit the internet that week to learn just how many purples were hiding amongst us. I mean, if you believed the lady with the blanket. I didn’t, but I was curious about the numbers. Then it was all over the news. It was practically all the news there was. Purple-headed folks, spotted and rounded up in droves. For a little while, it was really probably a great time to be an attorney, a highway paved in gold by thousands of budding cases to defend: unreasonable search and seizure, illegal arrests, targeted arson, and accidental deaths. Lots of accidental deaths. I think for a moment, even amid all the violence, many people thought it was a good thing. I mean, if it was true, then it was kind of a miracle, right? We could identify and get rid of all these evil pieces of crap that hurt the world’s children every day.

But I guess that was not enough action for the Gidge. Nope. A week later, she reappeared from the snowy miasma, and I saw her this time. The seductive cadaver of hair plugs, selfishly crashing a rerun of Gilligan’s Island, to announce that a yellow marking meant cheaters. Cheaters on taxes? Cheaters on spouses? Kids who cheated at Monopoly? Who knew? Like I said, she wasn’t one for details. Let’s just say there were a lot of unhappy couples the next morning, and the IRS got an increase in its budget to take on some extra staff.

The deli I’m shopping is the only one still open that I know of in the once bustling retail strip off Vernon Ave. Most of the other local food places Beth and I used to haunt in Perth Amboy have had those chainmail doors in full lockdown for a while now. We never owned a car, and in some suburbs in Jersey, you don’t need to. I make the walk to Tommy’s twice a week. Don’t know what I’ll do if he ever closes. I go once it’s dark. Less people on the street after dark. The windows of the apartments above the shops I pass are lightless, or boarded up, perhaps to strategically indicate no one’s home. But I know better. There are living souls behind some of those dark windows, marked and unmarked. I am sure at least a few of those people saw my little Doyle On Ice show back there, or heard my extra manly “Whoa!” and were currently focusing some recently purchased binocs on my naked brow. Zoom in all you want, shadow people. My head’s clean. Though you might see some pretty interesting acne patterns from my processed food diet as of late.

Tommy’s red glass vintage lightbox sign is also off. The glass pane in the deli front door and the big picture windows to either side, replaced months ago with plywood, bear the age old proverb: This side up. As much as I want to grab the door handle and launch my body into that warm buttery yellow light, I don’t. I peer through a wood slat and count first. Two customers. One of them I know from my building. Wick Carmien, seventy-eight and teetering on his cane. Harmless. Jeez. Musta taken the dude an hour to get here. I’ll try to get my goods and roll fast. No freakin’ way I am walking him home. The other customer is a woman in her early thirties. Pretty. Hatless, too. Chestnut brown hair pulled back tightly into a ponytail so her whole forehead would be clearly exposed to the world. Welcome to the club, my sista. Tommy is at the front as usual, shotgun leaning on one shoulder, writing something on cans with a black sharpie. Out of labels I suppose.

Seems okay. Seems fine. I notice the glass doorknob is gone, though. Tommy’s got some sort of mechanical keyless entry contraption with a push down lever on it. Must have been some trouble. Looting, another sport in full revival these days. That magical moment when people decide that it’s okay to throw bricks through store windows, as long as they all do it together.

There’s a Twilight Zone episode (the title eludes me), where a whole bunch of people living in some suburban neighborhood, on a street called Maple, just start attacking each other. Throwing rocks. Breaking windows. Breaking skulls. And it’s all because houselights and car engines are going on and off for no reason and some kid says there must be aliens among them. I always thought it was a good episode, mostly because it had a cast of Zone regulars, so the acting is pretty good. It also stuck in my mind, even when I first saw it at 13, because the story was so far-fetched. Yeah, I know, the show was an endless parade of far-fetchedness; robots, gremlins, and little girls who fell out of bed and slipped into another dimension. I get it. But it seemed really impossible that within 20 minutes (plus commercials) a whole neighborhood of people could go from being mildly concerned that one car doesn’t start, to murdering each other out of fear.

The tipping point came for all of us Maple Street people of the world when the Gidgidoo appeared on the tube with her fourth unsolicited declaration. The third had been red. But the fourth, the fourth was a biggee. “Blue marks mean murderers.” Fini. So here is the thing about adding murderers to the party list, with no specific categories. We all just assumed she meant that a blue meant some Jack-the Ripper type, with pure evil in his heart. It never occurred to us in the first few days of blue it could include soldiers who fought in a war (hence my buddy, Lens), staff who worked in an abortion clinic, corporate execs whose authorized unsafe working conditions were followed by an accident, kids who forgot to feed their fish/rabbit/turtle, or even acts of justifiable self-defense. Well, and then let’s not forget all those self-righteous everyone’s who had just played a part in killing a purple or two over the previous few weeks. Don’t forget about them. Over a billion people woke up the next day and either found out they now knew a killer, or were one themselves.

That’s when Biya’s mark appeared. A pretty royal blue it was, kinda shaped like a moth. Beth called it a chicken nugget to lighten the mood, and then started drawing a blue mark on her own head each morning. Beth told Biya it was a contest—whoever could keep their mark on longest would win a shopping spree at the big toy store. Totally cool idea. What a mom, huh? Honestly, we had no idea why Biya got the mark in the first place. I guess she stepped on a bug at some point, who the hell knows? But by that time, I was keeping her inside anyway, and we had moved the TV to our bedroom, and it was mostly off, except at 8pm, once a week. Gidgidoo was damn punctual. Now, looking back, I think we should have let the TV stay on all the time just to block out all the screaming and gunfire we heard over the next week down on the street and once, even in our own building.

Now, drum roll please. You ready for this? You sure? Well, I was still working days at Wheelset during the blue phase. Yah. Factory was still open, and I was still working. Even when there was talk about mass exodus from cities at my job, I was still being an asshole. Every morning my terrified wife asked me not to go, and every morning I said something inane like: “Call me on my cell if you need to talk,” or “At some point it has to stop, honey, and we need the money.” And the award for worst husband on the planet goes to… I remember the last day I worked at the machine shop. Two guys on my wheel gang were out, and at the very least, it’s a three man job to assemble the axle with wheels, bearings and box. Union won’t even let you try to duo it. Too dangerous. Not that there were any union reps around to see. I was heading up to the second floor to track down Ted, my foreman, and ask what the hell I was supposed to work on for the day. Place was quiet. Like, wrong quiet. And instead of being scared, I clearly remember being completely pissed off about it. Passing through the truck shop to the stairs, I saw Eddie Eaton setting up a crane. Well, I heard him before I saw him.

“Motherfucker!” he politely addressed the bogie he was struggling to free from the lift. Again, another two-man job for which he easily would have been written up attempting alone. But Eddie E. was a Wheelset lifer, so if anyone gave him shit about it, he’d take pleasure in lobbing out that great old shop veteran standby, So, send me the F home then. Climbing the stairs, I’m looking around. Could it really be that it’s only me and Eddie?

Upstairs, I found Ted at his bench, pouring over census maps on Google, studying what must have been population density. Years ago for his birthday, the guys had a red and white metal street sign made for over his toolbox. It said: The foreman says: Don’t stick your finger where you wouldn’t stick your dick.

Sensing my presence, Ted wheeled around on his squeaky metal stool and announced to his audience of one, “I am taking my family to Murori.”

“Muwhatti?” I said.

“Murori, Nebraska,” Ted corrected, magnifier shop glasses pitched crookedly on his shiny bald head. He was beaming like a boy who had just found pirate treasure, and then added, “Population of 1.”

And he’s not kidding either. He shows me on a map. The least populated town in the USA. The most people that ever lived there was back in the 40s. Like 90 people or so. But these days, it was just one lady. Some widow named Tiler or Teler. She was also the mayor and ran the town restaurant. Ted had some notion that he was going to tap into his 401K, buy some of her undeveloped property and build a cabin there or something. He was rambling about solar panels, and I realized my mouth was literally hanging open as I took in his words.

“Um, Ted… dude… (clearly a talking down the jumper tone) be smart. What are the chances that you are the only guy who has this idea? I mean, if I was that lady, and it was really not gonna go back to normal, I’d be buying a shotgun and setting up some landmines right about now.”

I laugh. Ted doesn’t. Ted smiles at me with his lips pressed together. His face takes on this weird expression. He extends his hand and gently pats my shoulder, like I’m some small child that asked if Bigfoot was real. A scene from Father Knows Best flashes through my mind, and I almost think he’s gonna call me son, and then he says something in this dreamy-wise voice which freaks me the hell out. “You got a little girl, right, Doyle? Little Biya? Sweet little girl. You just think about that.” Teddy hops off his stool and wanders away. I watch him slowly head down a half-lit hallway, a few rolled up maps under his pudgy arm. I forget to ask him what job I should hit. That’s when my cell phone rings about Beth.

As I push open the deli door, I see Tommy’s got one of those dreamcatchers on the back of it, a bunch of mini, rusty, copper cow bells tied with lawn bag twist ties. Done in a hurry. It’s not pretty but it does the job; it announces another forehead. He’s even pulled the front register counter from its original spot on the right side of the store and angled it, in a very fire-hazardy kinda way, so that you actually have to walk around it to get inside the 1800-square-foot establishment. A kind of guards on the tower, alligators in the moat move if you ask me. Good for you, Tommy. Maybe that’s why your place is still open.

Tommy lifts his head with some urgency, recognizes me, relaxes, and resettles into his bean can sharpie project. I pick up one of the green plastic baskets on the floor next to the counter and head past him down aisle one. He’s only fifty-six, but he looks seventy if you ask me. I know his age only because of a birthday card from last year that he’s got thumbtacked to the corkboard behind the register. The card was from his wife, Lisa. I remember the day she showed it to me before she gave it to him. I was in the store with Biya that day. My daughter was completely engrossed with sucking on the caramel lollipop Lisa had just handed her. Lisa had pushed the card in my hands for a “guy’s take” on it. I told her it was pretty funny, which was clearly the right response, and it made her smile. Course, I didn’t have the backbone to tell her the truth. That guys don’t give a crap about greeting cards. The outside of the card is light blue, a cartoon of some old coot with a walker, and a grey puff of fart shooting out his ass. The inside says: At least I know you’re still breathin’! Love you, hubby! Happy 56th! It looks like it’s got some red gravy spots on it. They’re not, though. Gravy spots.

“Hey, Doyle,” Tommy says as I pass him.

“Tommy,” I respond. That is pretty much all the exchange we’ll have tonight. Except when I ring up. Then he’ll tell me what I owe him. He used to ask me about Beth and Biya. Or about the news of the day, the mobs, the marks, new colors, etc. People talked a lot about the Gidgidoo and the bad stuff a while back, like some degree of small talk made it all a little more bearable. Like the whole world wasn’t losing its mind. But he stopped seeing the gals come with me, so he stopped asking questions. I also never asked where Lisa was.

You know, I had told Beth to stay inside, and keep Biya inside, too. I told her if someone knocked to say I was just out buying more bullets. But we both knew she’d never say that.

A woman who lived across the street from our apartment called me from my wife’s cell. Told me to come home. There had been an accident. She was also the one who met me in the street as I was standing over my wife’s corpse just under the fire escape. I vaguely remember a small crowd around me as I stared down. Bet you some of the guilty ones were right there, just at arm’s length. So me, a small gathering of potential suspects feigning outrage, and neighborhood fishwife busy body bitch, Frannie Lebow, hysterically crying, holding my hand like she knew me and telling me what happened with an almost too eager delivery.

Beth had been in the middle of painting a giant mural on one of the walls in Biya’s bedroom. A bunch of soccer ball-sized bumblebees, flitting around a forest of brightly colored, three-foot-tall flowers. Now, Beth was no artist by any stretch of the imagination. She had majored in economics at Rider, but anything… anything to keep the kid and herself busy, happy, calm. Normal was good. Beth had been working on it for a couple days, and every afternoon when I would get home from work, my daughter would excitedly collect me at the front door and drag me into her bedroom to see Mommy’s daily progress. No, Dad, you can pee in a minute.

Beth was never neat about anything she did. She could for sure tell you where everything was in the apartment, and she was an exceptionally thorough cleaner, so you’d never know the mess had existed—but her process was, well, explosive. And her work on the super-sized flower mural was also executed in the same true-to-form, harry-caray, Beth fashion. Brushes everywhere, multi-colored fingerprints on coffee cups, and remnants of paint spills that had been only half wiped up. The pink thumbprint on the butter container was the best.

I had just left the apartment for work, about 7am, (same day I learned about magical Murori from Ted) and Beth, I guess, realized she needed something. Not following our never open the living room window commandment, which we had discussed about 7 million times, Beth had climbed out onto the fire escape to shout after me. She didn’t call me on the phone. She decided to yell into the street, where everyone heard her. Fran was watering a plant on her own balcony and heard it. I, however, did not. I had just turned the corner.

Fran says this is when all hell broke loose, because two women, whom she did not know, but was sure they did not live in the neighborhood, started to yell and point at my wife from the street below. Because there was purple splotch on her head. A little lingering paint from a three foot tall flower. Right smack dab in the middle of her forehead. Good going, Beth.

Now, could my wife have shouted down, I am painting a mural on my daughter’s wall? Sure. Could she have quickly grabbed the paintbrushes and paint can and dumped them over the fire escape as proof? Maybe. But she didn’t. She did the totally wrong thing. Beth panicked.

Fran said Beth shrieked, “Oh No!”(pretty much the worst thing you could shout, right?), cupped her hand to her mouth like she had been caught, scrambled back inside, and slammed down the window.

So once upon a time…

Yelling on the street about how there is a purple left.

Yelling on the street about how she has a little girl.

Mob forms (same way you’d imagine it would, just no torches or anything.)

Wife tucks daughter into cabinet to hide her.

“Be very quiet, honey, no matter what you hear!”

Mob breaks down apartment door.

Child is missing.

Mob demands to know where kid is.

Wife tells them it is none of their mobby business.

Wife is thrown out of window.

Mob’s Colombo-like detective skills match paint on wall to paint on wife head.

Mob disperses quietly.

Husband stands over crumpled body of wife.

Franny Fishwife tells story and holds husband’s hand against his will.

Husband thinks of sticking a paintbrush through Fishwife’s eyeball.

After that, you’d think I’d never leave my little girl alone again. You probably think it’s atrocious that I do. That I tuck her in three cleared out lower kitchen cabinets, equipped with blankets, pillows, an LED battery-operated chili-pepper light string, an exciting array of plush pastel animals, a few picture books, a Hello Kitty! thermos, and some of Beth’s lavender sachets from her lingerie drawer. What am I? A monster? Leaving my daughter in the dark, after what happened to her mom?

Okay, Smartie. Let’s take Daddy Doyle’s Multiple Choice Quiz, shall we? Don’t worry, you don’t have to study to pass the test. Ready?

When you are running out of food, and it is the end of the world as you know it, you should:

Go out onto the street holding a kid with a blue head in one hand and a tire wrench in the other.

Go out once a week, tuck your kid in a safe hiding space, and pray nothing goes wrong.

Starve

So, how’d you score, everyone?

Tommy’s Deli has three aisles of tall metal shelving that run back to a wall of four glass-door refrigerated cabinets. One door has a long crack in the glass, and it runs the length of the door, hastily taped over with black gaff tape. The tape barely holds it together, but somehow I don’t think the city code officer will be stopping by tonight. Over one of the glass doors is a sagging vinyl Pepsi sign pushed into the sheetrock with two rusty thumbtacks, the famous red and blue logo chased by some dingy orange flames. And while there are indeed soda cans in one of the glass cabinets, they are not cold and they are certainly not Pepsi. Just a mish mash of bargain brands, mostly lemon-lime, and a few cans of birch beer covered in what looks like dried mud. The other glass cabinets, also sans-frigidness, are filled with everything and anything. Blankets, flashlights, Christmas wrap, folded Great Adventure t-shirts (all small), a few random board games that my kid would have recognized, about 25 boxes of semi-crushed bran flakes cereal, a few soiled boxes of gingerbread pop tarts (Kelloggs execs musta tied one on before the new flavor conference meeting that day) and enough cans of chicken-n-star soup to build a small fort.

Except for some of the flea market items bulging from aisle shelves, the deli looks the same as it always had, even before the mantis propelled her bony shoulder blades into all our lives. The walls of the narrow store are dark pumpkin, roughly painted over bubbled sheetrock. A checkerboard of half-decayed fiber tiles remain in the drop ceiling. Ugly ass, uncovered fluorescent tube lighting. A green plastic house plant in a brass pot suspends from three chains in the center of the store. A large wall clock, reminiscent of grade school, minute arm missing, hangs on the left wall, its lower rim touching a pyramid of powder cleanser cardboard tubes. And the award for reverse feng shui goes to…

I grab six cans of soup from the glass cabinet, hang a quick left to swing back up aisle two, and crash into the ponytail lady, knocking her armful of naked baby food jars to the floor. And yep, they all broke.

“What the hell-” I hear Tommy bark from up front. Ponytail has already dropped to a squat, frantically searching through the mess, fingers be damned, for a jar that might have avoided the carnage. There aren’t any. Just broken glass and carrot mush, some of it on the tips of her pointy black boots.

She looks up at me, eyes all a tear, and the most pitiful voice I ever heard says, “Bobby likes the carrot flavor.” But here’s Tommy now with a dustpan and broom, scooting me out of the way, and asking us who’s paying for these, and I know it’ll be me. Does chivalry get a mark? And if so, what color would it be?

I’m standing there. Looking down. Just watching Teddy sweep the scratchy mess into an ancient army green metal dustpan, all the while emitting exasperated puffs and mumblings about his linoleum floor, a very “old man” thing to do. My dad used to do that, too, right after he beat me up. Murmurs and overdramatic exhales, like I had totally inconvenienced him by making him take off his belt and reset the toppled furniture he had thrown me into.

Ponytail, the young mother whose week I just wrecked, is still in a squatting position. I am assuming she is a young mother, and sincerely hoping the famous Bobby who likes carrot flavor was not her husband or some long-haired rabbit she owned. She is still staring down at the slimy glass fragments, seemingly waiting for some of it to magically reassemble into jar form.

As I am standing, and those two are still playing carrot catastrophe, my eyes scan the place and I catch Wick Carmien, the only other customer in the store, make a beeline to the register and steal two cans of beans. I say that like he was being smooth. Like he was some sort of crafty rascal. Like if you weren’t looking straight at him in that moment, you would have missed it. What I really saw, though, was an ancient shaky twig hook his walking cane over the top of the register, and for a moment look like he was gonna take one of those old man tumbles, catch himself, slowly select two cans, actually checking them for dents like he was buying a used car, attempt to stuff one into the left pocket of his red Gore-tex windbreaker, realize it was too small, and then actually try the same thing with the matching right pocket and be sincerely surprised by the no-go of it. Actually it was freaking hysterical. Guess Wick thought he had all the time in the world for the lentil heist of the century. He finally gives up, and then, get this, takes a fucking shopping bag, fumbles with the plastic opening for what seems like half my life, drops the cans inside it, procures his cane, and leaves the store, dreamcatcher bells happily announcing his daring escape.

I barely turn my head to check back on double-feature carrot tragedy still in progress on the floor, and hear the bells once more. Tommy and Ponytail hear the second set of bells as well and stand up. The three of us are now staring in awe at what seems to be five kids (or midgets, yes, yes, Beth, little people) standing in a perfect chorus line across the inside of the front entrance to the deli. They are all holding kitchen carving knives in their little digits. How cute. They are donned in white plastic ponchos, hoods up, and they each have the same mask on. Okay, I shouldn’t even call them masks, ‘cause this seemed way worse. They had copy paper print-outs of the Gidgidoo’s face over their own, attached with purple produce rubber bands over their ears. Eye holes roughly cut out of the face prints, undoubtedly with the very same carving knives they were holding. Two of them have got Wick, now cane-less, by the arms, and he’s probably moments away from a coronary, as communicated by his eyeball popping oh Christ, this is going down look on his face.

“Get the hell out of my store, you little crappers!” Tommy shouts, and I can’t but help short a giggle at the word “crappers.” Really, Tommy? I know you were caught off guard and all that, but you spun the intimidating store owner wheel and that was the best you could do? Little crappers? Anyway, the Gidgi posse does not seem to budge, and Tommy’s already stomping down the aisle to get at the gun before they spot it.

So Tommy gets to the front first and attempts some sort of wacko Schwarzenegger dive behind the register while grabbing for the gun. He does get the gun, but doesn’t make it over the counter, slamming his head and body into the brown metal box. One of the kids (and yeah, I know they’re kids now ‘cause they are shouting stuff and sound like they all own little red Flyer wagons) grabs the barrel of the gun. Tommy, still on top of the counter, punches him dead in the face. I hear something crunch and the kid goes down, hard, and is out for the count. By this time my fight or flight has kicked in and I am sprinting down aisle three, chrome metal shelving parallel to the counter, and right behind two of the Gidgi-toddlas. They turn, see me, and desperately try to jab their knives through the potato chip and dog food bags now between us. But it is far too late. I push the entire shelving unit down over them, and they get pinned beneath it. All the while, I can hear Ponytail in the back, screaming. Nice of you to help us by screaming like that, Ponytail. Are you sure that is what Bobby would have wanted?

Without hesitation or mercy, I stomp on their little hands and swiftly collect the cutlery. I wheel around (in what I say was some damn impressive choreography—see people, you only caught the “Whoa” show on the street… I do my best moves inside) and turn my new knife set on the two kids still holding onto Wick’s arms, like they have got some sort of weighty collateral. I slash one kid across the face, cutting both his mask and left cheek in half, while driving the other knife (my mind registers it’s a bread knife) into the other kid’s upper arm. At this point, the kids realize they have other more pressing goals outside of hostage-taking, and practically throw Wick into a pyramid of rigatoni boxes, and bolt out of the store. As an afterthought, I pick up the unconscious trick-or-treater from hell that Tommy clobbered, holding him up with my left arm and balancing his dead weight on my hip, open the front door again, walk down the front steps and pitch the brat into the street.

As I turn to re-enter the deli, the two I pinned, who must have wriggled out of their metal shelf crab trap, run past me into the darkness. Feeling kinda proud, I enter the store, spin around in a move only the original Temptations could’ve appreciated, secure the door and stand there, hands on hips, protectively facing the street. I wait for that warm, approving clap on my shoulder from Tommy. Nice job, son, how about some free lemon-lime soda? Or maybe a smattering of applause from Ponytail and Wick. But it doesn’t come. In fact, there is no sound at all from behind me, yet I know they are all staring. Then, of course, it happens. Cause Ponytail is yelling, “RED! He’s RED! RRRREEEEDDDDDDDD!”

And I must say, I think she was really being over the top about it. I mean it’s not like I am the only one out there. I just might be the first one she actually saw. I lift my hand to my face, but I already know what to expect. Must have happened in the scuffle. My fake skin flap is hanging, half-on half-off my forehead, revealing the blood red mark of a serial killer. But you know, it’s really not fair. I stopped doing all that when Beth and I had Biya. Way before the Gidgidoo showed up. Also, I haven’t been able to score any glycerin or gelatin powder in weeks, so I have had to reuse some of my old skin patches ‘til I could make some more.

But there’s no time to think now. Tommy’s already got the shotgun pointed straight at my back. I only know that because when he boarded up the store windows with the this side up panels, he did it from the outside. So I can see the whole show behind me, unfolding in the reflection. And there he is with the gun. And there she is, hunkered behind him, clutching his right arm for protection and continuing to point at me, like he could get me confused with somebody else in a store of four. And there’s Wick Carmien, staring at all of us, still recovering from his rigatoni tumble, and looking really confused. And there I am in the purple comforter coat, deciding the jinx is up as I smile and rip the skin flap off and toss it over my shoulder. Funny, I don’t feel as upset as I think I should be at this moment. I do not feel the shotgun blast either.

I unzip the door and step from the darkened void back into Grandfather’s room. It still smells of his aftershave and of Bengay, even though he’s been gone for more than a year. The attic room, usually hot and stuffy, is drafty this morning, as it has been all week. His room remains nearly untouched from the time when he hobbled around it, first heavy-footed and crouched over to avoid the sloped ceiling, later with his carved cane and a curved spine that made the crouching permanent.

A single semicircle window gives me a view of Brine Street covered in fallen leaves that haven’t yet dried up and lost their colors. Old books are stuffed onto rickety shelves my daddy built in one of the corners. In another corner is the coat rack still holding Grandfather’s flat cap and coat. His rocker is against the wall.

My room is one floor down, on the level with Mom and Dad’s bedroom and a bathroom and a linen closet. My room is mostly littered with clothes. I only wear dresses on my birthdays as a tribute to Grandfather, and I’ll never wear heels again. I gather up today’s clothes and head to the bathroom. It’s past due for a good cleaning. I used to be more vigilant at cleaning house, but it was easier with running water and consistent electricity. As time runs on in this new world, remnants of the past one dry up and crumble like the leaves each fall. I had clean water for months after the end, then it started smelling funny and looking dingy. I started boiling and bottling it. Later, I scavenged purified and distilled gallons from area grocery stores.

When the electricity finally stopped coming to our house, the thing I missed most wasn’t the TV or radio, but Wi-Fi. Until then, using the Web and social media still felt like I belonged to a world big and connected and alive, even though nothing was current or responsive. Facebook became a cyber ghost town of a billion profiles and histories. Final postings turned anecdotes and sped-up recipes into eulogies; emojis were epigraphs on the virtual gravestones of humanity.

The American Foursquare home I’ve lived in my whole life creaks as I move through it. My car keys hang on the hook at the end of the narrow hallway to the front door. Growing up, this hallway seemed bigger and longer than it is. I lock up the house, a habit I can’t shake even though I’ll never have a break-in.

Out front, parked on Brine Street, my street, is my dirty Pathfinder. Sitting inside with my iPhone, I text: A day is never as good the moment you realize there is still much of it left. I press SEND.

I drive the barren city blocks, window down, enjoying the breeze, passing Gramercy Park and the coffee shop I used to love. My destinations today are the shopping mall for clothes and batteries, my usual grocery stores for canned and dry goods and snacks, and the park on the way back. The great tree in Gramercy Park is losing the last of its leaves. There are other trees in the park, but none at its center, and none as large and beautiful as this Siberian Elm. I legit believe the tree is older than this park and this city. Maybe the world itself.

Sitting against the tree, my tree, I peel open a can of peaches and stare across the park. It’s overgrown now, the playground is frozen like it’s rusted, hiking paths are choked by unmanaged flora. But I’ll always love Gramercy Park. Mom and Dad brought me here so often. Grandfather never liked it, but he knew what it meant to me. After I finish the peaches, I crack open canned pudding.

This park is like the Internet: its vast emptiness reminds me of how big things made by people can outlast those people. I realize I’m underdressed. The falling temperatures remind me I need to stay alert. Nothing stays the same, not even in this new world. Change always comes. The seasons, the loss of comforts as more and more infrastructure crumbles, fear of how far into my mind loneness will take me. And worse. Eventually there will be a time to worry, to eventually lock the doors with intent. But Grandfather warned me of such a time. And prepared me for its arrival.

Grandfather holds me in his lap as we rock in his wicker chair. He is a room himself, my head presses against the wall of his barrel chest. Each arm are walls, too, and the room closes in on me with a gentle squeeze. I’m laughing. Mom and Dad are having a date night. I’m wearing Grandfather’s favorite dress. It’s not the one I like most, and it’s getting kind of tight around my belly. I don’t mind.

“Change is coming, Mia,” he says. I hear his voice in his chest, tickling my cheek. He’s been telling me this since I was six years old. It used to scare me to hear him talk about the Change, but now that I’m nine, I don’t worry about it as much. “I may not live to see the Change, but you will, my darling.”

I don’t like when he talks about not being here. Yes, he’s old, and his right hand sometimes seizes up on him, but he’s a strong, big room and his eyes never look old. My silver-haired grandfather is the greatest man I know. I can’t think of a life without him. I’ve told him this. He says he’ll always be with me, even after he’s gone. I think this is something people tell you so you won’t miss them as much.

“There is hope for you, my darling,” he says. “I will see to that. I will give you my greatest secret.”

What makes this new world strange and lonely isn’t so much the lack of people, but the absence of animals. I know what happened to all the people, but the animals just went away. This world was theirs, too. The sky seems vastly sad without the birds. You miss the big, bright things, but you also miss the small things teeming in the cracks and corners. I truly understood how alone I was when I discovered no worms in the soil, no ants in the pantry, no spiders in the dusty webs on the basement walls.

I am twenty-two. I am careful to mark the days since I’ve lost the automatic reminders from iPhones and radio and satellite TV. Before the end, time came to me as an involuntary function; now to track it is a commitment. In this place, my birthday can be any day, just mark it down and put twelve months between it.

Hey, I know how to pump gas from the tanks beneath the service stations, and stock up on the right medicines gloriously waiting at neighborhood pharmacies, and to keep my eyes and teeth strong and protected. Grandfather’s books help. On a schedule, I mow the lawns of every home on my block. That makes the neighborhood look less savage and less abandoned. Besides, busy work legit keeps my mind stable.

As for my appearance, I keep it practical—clean and shaved. Hair is short, clothes causal. I don’t do bras anymore, except when jogging, or doing hardcore scavenging. I’m stocked with enough Always pads to last me to menopause. I’m not a pretty girl. I know it. But I’ve known love. Love of my parents, and of my grandfather, certainly. I’ve tried to snag the love a boy here and a girl there. But I know I’m not someone’s idea of a catch. That’s all moot now, isn’t it? I am the most attractive woman walking the face of the earth.

The Pathfinder bounces and rocks as I guide it down Cabot Road, the worst road in town, even before the Change. I shouldn’t risk damaging the SUV on Cabot, but it’s the quickest way home. Inspired, I pull to the curb and snatch up my phone and text: Who will mind the things that need man’s constant care? Our nuclear reactors? Our unstable skyscrapers? Our dams and aqueducts? Our satellites still circling the globe? Our vast collection of deadly viruses? Who will fix the potholes? I press SEND.

I turn right onto Camden Ave. It’s smooth sailing from here to Brine. But I notice a doll in the middle of the street. I can’t recall seeing it earlier. You notice microscopic changes in a world without people to change things. I get out of the SUV, leaving it running. The doll’s China-white face is half smashed. Maybe I ran it over yesterday not knowing. It’s wearing a dingy denim dress over pantaloons. And an apron over the dress. I think of Raggedy Ann. The doll has a pull-string ring on its back.

It’s occurring to me that besides my dad’s final word and my own chatter, I haven’t heard a human voice since the world ended. I pull the ring and release it. At first there’s static, then a slow crescendo of sound as some out-of-use mechanism struggles to rewind the string. The doll speaks, slowly, garbled, but clear enough: “new… creatures… coming…” I drop the doll and almost wet myself.

I haul ass all the way back to Brine Street. When I slam the brakes in front of my house, the Pathfinder’s brakes grind miserably. I am reminded it’s time to learn to change out the brake pads, or to hotwire a new vehicle. Sweating by the time I reach the attic, I step to the corner behind the old wicker rocker. One hand is over my heart, which is going like a jackhammer, the other at my forehead. I think of Grandfather, then picture in my mind’s eye a beam of light coming out of my forehead. The imaginary beam marks a spot ahead of me. Reaching out, I pinch at the spot with my thumb and pointy finger. I breathe and concentrate until the spot’s tangible to my flesh. Pulling the spot downward, I unzip the doorway. I’m standing in front of a V-shaped opening between here and there. I step out of the room and into the void of comfort. Grandfather called it the Quiet Space.

In the void, the scent and light of my world slips away, the air of this world is crackling molecules. Momentarily, my eyes will adapt to the darkness. I zip up the door, closing out Grandfather’s room.

As I’m rubbing Grandfather’s shoulders and back with Bengay, he tells me it’s time to visit the Quiet Space. He tells me the story of a boy who discovers a special place beyond our world, where he is safe from everything. In the Quiet Space he is not restricted by the rules of our world. He doesn’t need food or drink, and he won’t be affected by time. It takes a while for me to understand that this is more than a story. The Quiet Space is real. It takes even longer for me to find the zipper that opens the door. It’s more about coming to sense its existence and wishing it into real life. When I finally open the door and giggle at what I have done, and can see the pride in Grandfather’s shiny eyes, I feel so loved.

“In here nothing can touch you,” he says. “Nothing can see you.”

Grandfather tells me of the coming days of darkness, the Change, the new world. And most importantly, the New Creatures.

“The New Creatures?”

“We’ll talk more about them when you get a little older,” he replies. “I don’t want to frighten you. But the time will come when you must hear about the New Creatures, even though it will scare you. Do you understand, darling?”

I tell him I do, but I don’t.

“What about Mom and Dad?”

“I’m sorry, my darling, but the Quiet Space is for you alone. That’s the way it must be.”

“How do you know, Grandfather? Have you tried to let other people in?”

He snaps at me. He’s done it before, but not often. “Child! Do not question the path that has been prepared for you. Don’t bring insolence to your naivety.”

“I’m sorry, Grandfather. I love Mom and Dad…”

He wipes tears from my face and kisses my cheeks.

The doll is a messenger from Grandfather, I know it. I need him more than ever. Some days I hate him for leaving me alone to deal with this new life. I remember as he lay dying in the hospital, Grandfather told me the Change would come any day. I’d been hearing about the damn Change for so long that at twenty-one years of age, I was surprised he said “days.” It had always been “in the future,” or “when you’re older.”

I’m home from college to see Grandfather because they tell me he won’t be leaving the hospital. Though we talk every week, I’ve seen him less and less since attending school, Bowling Green State University. I think of his hospital room as Antarctica: a bright, frozen white space where a person can’t live for long. His appearance shocks me. He’s no longer the big room who hugged me away in his huge arms and barrel chest. Grandfather is a feeble shell of a man. I’m thinking the real Grandfather is hidden beneath this boney man tangled in tubes and rumpled bedsheets.

When I’m alone with him, he tells me, “I’ll give you a signal when it’s time to escape into the Quiet Space.” He can’t breathe on his own and one eye is open wider than the other. His lips are so dry and cracked they look like dead fruit about to fall from a tree.

“Grandfather, don’t leave me,” I request selfishly.

“Hush, darling,” he manages. “Your whole life you’ve been preparing for this.”

“Grandfather!” My voice is unrestrained, juvenile. I’m shivering, breathing out frost. “Please don’t leave me!”

But he does.

He leaves me in this frozen wasteland, heart iced over with gooseflesh from head to toe. I remember my daddy tells me it’s okay to cry. I tell him, “I won’t because Grandfather will always be with me and he’s prepared me for this.”

I return to college after the funeral but promise Mom and Dad I’d be back next weekend to check on them. That weekend, having early dinner with my parents in our Foursquare on Brine Street, the world cracks. I look down into my tomato soup and see Grandfather’s false teeth float to the surface. Laughing’s the only thing I think to do. “It’s time,” they say. Light outside our windows draws down, an instant sunset.

“What the heck?” Dad says.

Donut, our eight-year-old Lhasa Apso, emerges from under the table in a barking frenzy. I react like a well-trained soldier. I don’t even think to say goodbye to my parents—Dad at the dinner table, Mom carrying a plate—as I bolt from the room.

“Mia!” is the last thing I hear my father say as I stumble up the stairs, to Grandfather’s room, to the void. I’ve opened it many times under his watch, but never by myself. Through the semicircle window, the black sky lights up like a nuclear bomb detonating in heaven. The light flashes through the window and illuminates the attic like a thousand-watt bulb. A moment later, as I’m concentrating to open the void, God-thunder descends, raining down on the world and shaking the house. Before I can witness anything else, I surrender to the safe place prepared for me.

I’m crying in the void. In eternal quiet, serene darkness, I bawl. For days, or weeks, or months, I float in the void. I am disembodied without an environment to define me. I am here, nowhere, until the whispering voice of Grandfather tells me it is time to come out.

Grandfather’s room has an odd stillness—the way it felt when I first returned to it after his funeral. I don’t want to go downstairs but do. Down to the second floor where I sleep, then down to the first. The house smells like sulfur. My parents never left the dining room.

Motionless at the table, Daddy’s head rests sideways on his plate. His eyes and mouth are pits of ash. Thin gray smoke trails up from the pits. Mommy dropped into a sitting position on the floor, a shattered plate between her legs. Her eye sockets are smoldering, bits of ash tumble from her slack mouth. My screams shatter my own ears. I hear only heartbeats throbbing in each canal.

Outside, on Brine Street, the first body I see is Mr. Swiftleg’s. On the other side of the street, directly across from us, he’s slumped over his lawnmower, the handle of the machine jammed up his armpits. His face is tipped down to the mower, but I can tell by the ash spilling on the machine that he’s dead. So is little Carol, his daughter. She’s on the concrete steps of their porch with Barbie dolls at her feet. Locks of her golden-blond hair have blown into her ashy mouth, her tiny head is twisted sideways.

I go next door to the Fowlers. Janice Fowler is stretched out on her sidewalk. I put my hand up to her face and can feel heat from the flames still burning from down within, cooking her insides. And in the road, Kevin has fallen beneath the open door of his polished souped-up Mustang. He loves that car. He’s on the asphalt, the skin exposed by his muscle shirt is bubbled by heat.

I run to the park, not looking directly at the wrecked cars or fallen bags of groceries or kids under their bikes. Gramercy Park is a public morgue. I stand at the crest of the park looking out at a sea of bodies. A kid face down in the sandbox, and another bent up in the monkey bars like a spider’s prey. An old man on a bench, still holding a bag of seeds, has puked up soot. A girl at the swing set is being slow-dragged beneath her swing, her leg tangled in the chain above. I won’t look into the circle of baby strollers whose mothers are in a pile around them.

People laid out on blankets are burned by the sun on their outsides, while bones and organs are baked to ashen powder on their insides.

Everyone, everywhere.

I run flat-out all the way home, back up to Grandfather’s room, open the void and hide away from this new world of charred corpses and cry until I lose consciousness.

“Help me, my darling. Turn the pages while I read.”

Grandfather’s bad hand is in a slack fist. “I will read, you turn the pages.”

He reads me strange stories of ancient days and struggles of good and evil. Some of the things he says and the words he uses don’t make sense. He tells me that in time I will understand the words of this book and of my great purpose in the new world. He has me fetch his cane. He pushes its carved knob handle into his feeble right palm and tries to squeeze.

“Soon, this hand will be lost to me for good,” he sighs.

I replace the cane knob handle in his hand with my own small hand.

“You’ll still have my hands, Grandfather,” I say. He smiles as he kisses me.

I buried Mom and Dad in the backyard garden. They hardly weighed anything. When I accidently dropped Mom, her middle section came apart in a blast of ash. I put them in the dirt and I put that part of my life in there with them. Saved from the flames and born into the new world. The devastation happened months ago, yet bodies smolder long after. Eventually, most bodies dry up, crumble and blow away.

I text: Human dust fills my lungs with the memories of my beloved, my neighbors, and strangers. I press SEND. I keep my smartphone charged by my car charger. I still use it to play games, to look at photos, and as an organizer. And mainly to fire off texts to the farthest reaches of my address book. My messages in a digital bottle sent bobbing in a cyber ocean.

With fall stepping up and the temperatures dropping every morning, I’m increasing my scavenging. When especially needed, I run the house on gas-powered generators; but I’m conservative with their use. I have winter to worry about.

I can’t find the doll in the road anymore. I need to hear from Grandfather. I drive to the mall. The Change left it a nightmare. The parking lot looks like an auto dealership: rows and rows of empty cars. Inside, the absence of people feels almost as creepy as the first time I navigated its walkways littered with burned bodies. It took months to clear out the bodies—from the food court, from the rest rooms, from the play center, from the shops. And weeks more to sweep out the ashes. The place still smells of sulfur.

My steps echo as I pass the dried-out fountain in the center of the mall that’s filled with corroded pennies. In the third toyshop I check, I find a pull-string doll in a corner darkened by a burned-out fluorescent tube. I tear the doll from its packaging. I pull at the string but it only releases partway, just one eye flits open. Its mouth looks scrunched up, like the doll’s about to throw a tantrum. A dying fluorescent tube at the front of the store flickers on the doll’s shiny face. I pull the string harder. The other eye pops open so hard the plastic eyelid flies off. There is no eyeball underneath. The socket is filled with blood. Its voice spills out as the string recoils into the doll: “The New Creatures come at night.” The blood in its socket alternates from red to black as the light goes on and off. I pull it again: “New Creatures come tonight.” A bloody tear runs down its plastic cheek.

I make it to the parking lot as the storm sets in. I speed home beneath a rumbling sky, my heart running as hard as the Pathfinder. Up in Grandfather’s room, familiar thunder rattles the arched wooden window frame. With tears in my eyes, I step out the room and into the void of protection. Inside, I am safe from whatever is cracking the sky. This is the safest place in the world, Grandfather used to say. “In here, nothing can touch you. Nothing can see you.”

As I wait I sleep, and I dream of my mother sitting lifeless on the floor, a shattered plate between her legs, still burning. In the dream she stares at me as she cooks, so hot I can see an orange-blue glow beneath the skin of her throat.

I’m greeted with the stubborn illusion of a peaceful sunrise streaming through the attic window. It might be any of the hundreds of sunrises I’ve witnessed from this room. Grandfather could be downstairs with Mom and Dad, waiting for me to join them for breakfast. Donut yapping for table scraps. But I know better. From the void I step back into Grandfather’s room knowing something has forever changed. Again. I’m terrified. I retrieve a gun from the locked box in the hallway closet. I’m careful to load it like my daddy taught me when I was sixteen. Outside I find no destruction, no dead bodies. I know where I must go and what I must do.

I drive to Gramercy Park.

The great elm in the middle of the park is gloriously in bloom. Its leaves have returned to its branches and multicolored flowers light it up like a child’s painting. And thousands of heavy, ripe pears bend its branches. I almost cry at the sight. It reminds me of life. It makes me think of the old world with a breathing Internet and crawling insects and animals and people.

I tuck the gun away and walk to the tree. Out in the open, I spot two people without clothes and they seize on my presence, moving toward me. My heart quickens as I take in the sight of people. They are the New Creatures. Not monstrous like I was led to believe. Beautiful. Naked. Flawless golden-brown skin, wooly hair. The woman steps to me, arms outstretched with a smile. Her breasts and nipples are as perfect as I have ever seen. I can’t help gawking at the man. Muscled and scarless. Mesmerizing in his upright posture and uncircumcised penis. I want to touch him.

“For God so loved the world that He swept it clean from iniquity and barbarianism, setting right what had been wrong for years upon years,” the female says.

I take a step back. She steps closer.

“The Lord kept His promise to destroy the world by fire. And all the world was set afire, but the fire did not burn the land and the trees and the oceans. The fire burned within every man, woman and child. In the center of the day, the Lord did command fire to burn man and his offspring. All sinners and their souls were burned away for eternity.”

The male creature steps up. “And after a hundred days, all life was gone from the earth. And on the 101st day, the Lord reached into the dust and reformed man in his image. And on the 102nd day, the Lord blew life into the mouth of man, and He named him Aman.”

She: “And on the 103rd day, the Lord reached into the dust and reformed woman, and the next day He blew life into the mouth of woman, and He named her Ava.”

“It is so beautiful here,” I say. “I can hardly stand the beauty.”

The female smiles at me. Perfect teeth, of course. “Soon, the Lord will return all the animals and fish and insects to this world. He took them away to keep them safe.” She seems to enjoy stretching out her arms. Gravity has no effect on her boobs. “And when they return, Aman will name each of them, one by one.”

I know what I have to do. “The fruit of this tree,” I say, “you must eat it.”

“Are you of old earth?” the female asks.

“Why were you not burned away?” her partner asks. “Why is your soul still here?”

“Because I am powerful like your Lord,” I tell them. Their eyes widen. Grandfather would be proud.

“No one can be as powerful as the Lord.”

“And yet I stand before you,” I huff. “Even after your God destroyed the world and all in it, I stand before you.”

“How…”

“I understand His ways,” I say. “He is a deceiver. I have tasted the fruit of this tree and it has given me powers like your God. If you taste of this fruit, you will have powers like your God. This is why He doesn’t want you to taste of this fruit. Trust me.”

“You ate the forbidden fruit?” the female asks.

The male grits his teeth. “We were warned never to eat of the fruit, Ava! Has the Lord not provided us with all the food we need in this garden?”

“It’s not a garden, it’s a park!” I say.

“I want to be powerful, like Him,” the female says. “I want to be powerful like God.”

“No!” Aman shouts. “Obey our God!”

I look the male in his eyes, then shift my stare to the female. “Him? A man? I am a woman, like you. A powerful woman. You can be a powerful woman, too. Taste.”

“Ava, no!”

“Taste!”

Ignoring her partner, the woman pulls a fat pear from the tree and digs her amazing teeth into it. Juice explodes in her mouth, down her chin. “It is glorious!” she manages.

“Woman, you have sinned against our Creator.”

“Your Creator has deceived you,” I reply.

The female smiles. “I feel great, Aman. Taste.”

Hesitating, then staring at me, the man bites the fruit.

The glow of his face fades away.

“Why are we naked?” he asks, cupping his privates. “We must hide.”

The female draws an arm across her breasts and covers her thick pubic hair with a hand. “Before He calls for us, we must hide.”

The sky darkens. All at once, the fruit falls from the tree. The colorful leaves blow off branches like a flame blown off a candle. I am terrified. I run to the SUV, never looking back, never looking to the sky. I plead to Grandfather all the way to the void to keep me safe.

Grandfather closes his Great Book of Darkness. It’s what I call it, anyway. I’m sixteen now. Taller, honor student in high school, still plain-looking. Our dog Donut wanders into the room through the door I thought I closed.

“I will not live to see the new world,” Grandfather tells me. “But you will. The Quiet Space will protect you. You will walk in the new world and you will carry our legacy into that new world.”

He kisses me. Touches me. Scrapes at my back with his brittle nails. “Darkness is assured, darling. It will have its day.” He’s weaker now, needing help positioning himself. I pull him to me. The room is always too stuffy. Heat from our bodies makes it worse. I close my eyes and think of the knob of his cane that’s carved into a jackal’s head.

“Remember, Mia, if you complete your task, you’ll get a gift from me.”

I wonder what this stuffy room with one window and a sloped ceiling would be like if Grandfather no longer stayed here. Then I think, this room and Grandfather are one and the same. He’ll never leave this room.

I saw a bird yesterday. Gliding on outstretched wings through the ashen fall sky. So beautiful I cried. I decide to make tomorrow my twenty-third birthday. A year older and more prepared to shape this new world.

People will put the world back together quicker this time. Stockpiles of history—music, books, movies, museums, photographs, computers—and derelict infrastructure all around the globe will guide the way.

I set out on my errands, more determined than ever. I have no desire to visit Gramercy Park anymore. There are other parks in the city, my city.

My grandfather’s love has never left me. A life devoted to me. Only me. His darling. In this new world, where man will again make a way, so will sin. I rub my swollen belly. My gift. I can feel a fire deep within me. I think of Grandfather, smiling, rocking in his creaky wicker chair in our tiny attic room. His eyes are shiny copper pennies floating in the void. We will be together again.

Detective Herring arrived at the Police Memorial Building around 9 PM on January 4th, 2069. He hurried through the halls, buttoning up his blazer as he walked. It was always strangely colder in the Homicide Unit. Officer Pratt was waiting for him when he walked in. The desk was covered in paperwork. This was going to be a high-profile case. It wasn’t every day one of the Highers was arrested for murder… Or anything for that matter.

“Is he ready for questioning?” Herring asked as he poured himself a cup of coffee.

“Yup. He’s sitting in interview room 1.”

“How did he take to being arrested? Should I brace myself?”

“He’s been fairly calm so far. Hasn’t even requested a lawyer yet.”

Herring was surprised. He’d expected a Higher to take being arrested as an insult. And in a way, it was. The Highers were above the law because they controlled the law. It wasn’t written down anywhere, but it might as well be engraved in stone.

“Did he seem to show any signs of guilt? Any nervousness?”

“Like I said, he’s been fairly calm. I even mentioned some of the evidence we have against him.”

“And?”

“He shrugged his shoulders and said it sounded like a solid case. If he’s nervous, he does a great job of hiding it.”

“Maybe he thought you were bluffing.”

“Maybe.”

Herring nodded. “This is going to be interesting.”

Pratt flipped on the recording equipment and watched from the adjoining room as Herring entered the interview room. The man sitting at the table with his hands cuffed together greeted the detective with a warm smile, but the sincerity was lost on both Herring and Pratt.

His name was Vincent Virgo. A few strands of his shiny, black hair hung in his face while the rest was slicked back behind his ears. His goatee was styled perfectly and his $5000 Armani suit emphasized his taste for the finer things in life. He was indeed beautiful, as all the higher people were. Such angelic looks were a further representation of his social status. Herring, like many others of the serving class, envied Vincent’s physical perfection. The rigid scar that ran across the Detective’s face literally burned with jealousy. He was only ten when the doctor ran a blade from his right brow down to the bottom of his left cheek. The regulated deformity of the Serving Class at a young age had been law for nearly fifty years. The type of handicap imposed was up to the doctor. Pratt, for example, was missing three fingers on his left hand.

They called it Marking Day. Each month, every child of the serving class who’d reached the age of ten would be taken to the clinic to be marked. Herring remembered his own Marking Day to be very traumatic. The experience was physically, mentally, and emotionally scarring. Marking was simply the Highers’ way of imposing their superiority. Every day, Herring would look in the mirror and be reminded that he was nothing more than a servant to the higher class. Still, it was better than being cast to The Bottom.

“Hello, Mr. Virgo,” Herring said as he sat down. “I’m Detective Herring.”

“Hello, Detective,” replied the Higher, still smiling a very superficial smile.

“You’re aware of why you’re here, right, Mr. Virgo?”

“Yes, I am.” He spoke softly, “Please, call me Vincent. Mr. Virgo is my father’s name.”

Vincent’s casual demeanor rubbed Herring the wrong way. It was a rare occasion when someone of the Serving Class could challenge the pretentious behavior of a Higher and Herring was more than eager to take advantage of the opportunity. He knew the chances of actually making a conviction were slim to none, but he was going try to his hardest and at the very least make the entire ordeal as unpleasant as possible.

“Mr. Virgo, you’re aware that you’re suspected of a very serious crime? One that could land you in prison or even permanent exile.”

Vincent frowned. “Is murder such a serious crime these days?”

“Yes, it is. And frankly, Mr. Virgo, the evidence we have against you is almost overwhelming and further investigation is under way. If you come clean now, perhaps we can prevent you from being exiled.”

“You have overwhelming evidence against me, Detective? How interesting! Do tell, do tell!”

“Gladly.” Herring opened the case file in front of him and began shuffling through the papers. Vincent raised an eyebrow in over-embellished curiosity.

Herring proceeded to place a picture of the victim in front of Vincent. “Do you know who this is, Mr. Virgo?”

Without looking down, he replied, “Yes. Yes, I do.”

“You didn’t examine the picture, Mr. Virgo.”

“Abigail Watson. The 19-year-old daughter of Oliver Watson.”

“That’s correct. She was last seen accompanying you upstairs to a higher floor of your lovely mansion on the night of your New Year’s Eve party.”

“It was more of a masquerade ball, but you wouldn’t know much about such festivities,” Vincent replied calmly.

“I know of the Higher’s New Year’s tradition and I also know you are rather adamant about holding this year’s ball at your home.”

“You seem to know a lot, Detective.”

Vincent’s indifference unnerved Herring. He wanted to see beads of sweat roll down the Higher’s face or a nervous tremble. Something. He was determined to get a reaction.

“Miss Watson followed you up those stairs and never came back down,” Herring said as he pulled out three more pictures. “She simply disappeared like these three men who were all last seen with you.”

Herring spread three more pictures on the table.

“And that, of course, means I’ve murdered them all. Is that what you’re getting at, Detective?”

“We arrived at that conclusion when a witness of ours spotted you driving Miss Watson’s car the same night she was murdered. Why were you driving Miss Watson’s car, Mr. Virgo?”

The smile reappeared on Vincent’s face. It was as if he were amused by the evidence presented to him.

Herring continued, “Miss Watson was reported missing on January 2 by her father. We have multiple statements from multiple witnesses. What happened when you went up those stairs?”

Vincent’s demeanor did not change. He merely nodded and replied, “Is that all you have against me, Detective? Some he said, she said?”

“There’s a lot of he’s and she’s. Enough to get you exiled.”

Vincent chuckled. Then, flipping his hair out of his face, he let his bound hands rest on the table. He leaned slightly forward and then whispered, “Are you sure you want to push this matter, Detective? You may not like what you find.”

“Is that a threat?”

“Not at all. It’s simply a statement of fact. I just don’t want you to dig too deep.”

Herring angrily rose from his chair, “Well, that’s my job and I won’t be happy until your exiled. We’re done here.”

Herring was halfway out the door when Vincent spoke up.

Very well, Detective. I killed them.”

The Detective froze. He couldn’t help but look to the double-sided mirror, his eyes desperately asking Pratt if he’d gotten it all on tape. Although he was sure he had, Pratt double-checked the recording equipment anyway. To arrest a Higher was one thing, but to get a confession from one…

Herring looked back at Vincent.

“So, you’re admitting, here and now, to the murders of Derek Bell, Jason Moore, Robert Burkhart, and Abigail Watson?”

“Yes. I killed them. I killed them all.”

Herring raised his eyebrows. He just got him to confess again… It was almost too good to be true. He tried to hide the satisfaction from his face, but he could feel the faint trace of a smirk on his lips as he said, “Okay. Well, tell me everything that happened, give me the locations of the bodies, and any other information you think would be of value and I’ll give you my word that you are not exiled. You’ll be able to live out the rest of your days in federal prison. Good food, TV in your cell, tennis courts. It’s the best deal you’re going to get.”

Vincent didn’t answer, his eyes locked with Herring’s. They were both grinning now, neither attempting to hide their emotions any longer. The Higher straightened up in his chair and cleared his throat.

“Detective, I’m not sure if you know just how powerful a man in position is. Even with my confession on tape, I could very easily buy my innocence. Please, don’t dispute me on this because we both know it to be true.”

Herring’s smile melted into a scowl. He was about to explode, but he didn’t. He couldn’t, because no matter how much he hated the fact, no matter how hard he was willing to fight to prove the contrary, Herring knew the odds were not in his favor. Especially when it came to Vincent Virgo, of all the Highers. To charge a member of the Council with a crime, of any kind, was unheard of. And to convict him could very well be impossible.

Vincent continued, “But, it is not my intention to allow my crimes to go unknown or even unpunished if that’s what’s necessary. I had planned a much more dramatic revelation but I suppose I must settle for this.”

“You wanted your involvement in these murders to be known?”

“Eventually, yes. Tell me, Detective, do you know what Derek Bell, Jason Moore, and Robert Burkhart all have in common?”

“Aside from the fact that you murdered them all?”

“Yes. Aside from that.”

“They were all former members of the Higher Council and political advisors for you.”

Vincent flashed the whites of his teeth. “I see you did your homework.”

“Yeah, you know, I don’t have people to do it for me.”

“Yes, well, if you were more thorough in your research, you’d have noticed they were all members of the Third Council. The Higher society sees these men as heroes. Specifically, for their strides to pass the Salvation Act of 2042. Are you familiar with that piece of legislation, Detective?”

Herring nodded. “I’m well aware of the Salvation Act.”

The Salvation Act of 2042 was considered the final nail in the coffin for social equality in America. From the new millennium on, the gap between the elite and the poor widened. Each year, the poor grew poorer and the rich grew richer, until the schism between the two reached epic proportions. By 2025, the upper class had unofficially taken control of the United States government through a series of empty promises, financial influence, and the exploitation of the desperate majority. America became a modern Plutocracy.

For almost two decades, the self-proclaimed “Highers” focused the country’s resources on technological advancement, specifically the development of Artificial Intelligence. The government employed millions of blue collared citizens to use the internet to feed information into their central AI system. Social media interactions, especially, were used to teach the AI about how the human mind works: our fears, our goals, our emotions, our flaws. All of what makes us, us. Eventually, it gathered enough information to be able to operate itself, making 2/3 of the work force at that time obsolete. Suddenly, millions of people were out of jobs, unable to find work that wasn’t being performed by the system they helped create. Poverty overtook the country like a sort of plague. Most reverted to savagery. Crime of all sorts sky rocketed. So, the Highers devised a plan to construct an entirely new society, separate from the one they destroyed. To do this, they took advantage of the only occupation left for average people to fill: construction.

The Salvation Act of 2042 employed a mass amount of poor, physically capable men to begin work on this new land. In return, they, their families, and future descendants were guaranteed entrance upon its completion. So thousands went to work, building a long stretch of pillars down the East Coast. Atop these pillars, they laid down concrete, built buildings… An entire new society. A Higher society, literally built on top of the ruins of the one they destroyed.

Once the project was complete and relocation began, total anarchy ensued. The Highers were forced to deploy all law enforcement and even military forces to “control” the general population until relocation was complete. It was pure anarchy, in the darkest and purest fashion. People lost their minds when they realized society was leaving them behind. Neighbors were killing each other for food, stealing from each other for luxury, raping each other for forgotten warmth. The cities of the ground soon swallowed themselves, the taste of chaos resonating for years. The wasteland that remained was renamed: The Bottom.

Agitated, Herring continued, “What is it you’re trying to say, Mr. Virgo?”

“I’m saying those men were amongst the most pretentious, amoral pieces of shit I’d ever met. Of all the Highers, the ones behind the Salvation Act were by far some of the most selfish people to ever walk this Earth. They were predators disguised as men in suits. Men who hunted and hunted and hunted until there was nothing left.”

Herring leaned forward. Virgo was losing his composure.

“Okay, so you didn’t like these men. They were pieces-of-shit, so you killed them. That’s what you’re telling me?”

“I’m telling you I killed them because they deserved to die!” Vincent barked.

His outburst resonated through the interview room, through the double-sided glass. Herring and Pratt watched silently as Virgo gathered his composure.

“I’m sorry,” He said, dropping his eyes. “Didn’t mean to lose my head. It’s just so hot in here. Could I please get some water?”

Herring ignored the request.

“You think those men deserved to die because of what they did as the Third Council?”

“You don’t, Detective?”

Again, silence. Pratt worried Herring was going to go berserk. He hated Highers to begin with and Pratt was worried to see him face to face with one, one who would have the audacity to ask such a question. Luckily, Herring didn’t react as expected.

“No. I don’t.”

“Oh.” Vincent cleared his throat. “I’m sorry, but would you mind fetching me that water I asked for? I can’t go any further without it.”

Again, Pratt waited for Herring to explode, but was pleasantly surprised when he simply stood up and stormed out of the room. Pratt turned in his chair, hearing the detective’s footsteps before he even entered.

“You got all that?”

“Yeah. Pretty crazy stuff.”

“It’ll make the news,” Herring grunted, filling a cup with water at the dispenser in the corner. “I’m going to go back in and get more details. You just keep that thing recording.”

“Yes, sir.”

Nodding, Herring spat into the cup of water he’d just filled and left the room.

Detective Herring re-entered the interview room. Vincent Virgo didn’t turn around. Herring placed the cup in front of him and sat back down at the opposite side of the table.

“There’s your water.”

Vincent smiled.

“Thank you. I was getting ready to black out in here.”

Pratt busted out into laughter watching the Higher drink his spit water. He didn’t understand how Herring was able to refrain from smiling, even the slightest.

“Why Abigail Watson?”

“Excuse me?”

“You told me why you killed Derek Bell, Jason Moore, and Robert Burkhart. But, why Abigail Watson? She wasn’t on the Third Council. She’s never been involved in politics. So, why did you kill her?”

Vincent averted his eyes downward, as if shameful of what he was going to say.

I’d actually never seen her until that night. I’d only heard of her, the infamous Oliver Watson’s daughter, heir to a technological fortune that Bill Gates would’ve envied. I was disappointed when I noticed her father wasn’t with her.”

“Why?”

“Because I was going to kill him. He was the whole reason I volunteered my home for this year’s masquerade ball. He was corrupted by his family’s success in the A.I. industry. Being born with a silver spoon in his mouth, made him a very cold man with colder intentions.”

“So, you’re saying you were trying to kill Oliver Watson for the same reason you killed the Highers from the Third Council? You felt he deserved to die, too? I have to say that motive seems like a bit of a stretch to me.”

“As if you actually know these people!” Vincent replied angrily, his sweaty face twisted into a condescending smile. “You might have heard of them, seen their name in print somewhere, but you don’t know them. I know them, Detective. I’ve eaten brunches with them. I’ve golfed with them, made deals with them. Men that will eat you alive if it means they can have a full belly! Sharks!”

“Was Abigail Watson a shark?”

Again, Vincent dropped his eyes. The mention of her name seemed to calm him, possibly even depress him instantly. Herring could see something change in the Higher’s eyes, as if something were taking place in his head. It was like a switch flipped, something not visible but very real.

Lightly tracing the rim of his now empty water cup, he began, “She was glowing that night. I think it was her first ball because she seemed almost breath taken by the extravagance of the festivities going on around her. She tried to keep her composure as a woman of class, but her eyes were large like a child’s.

“She awed at the extravagance of my home. There was a twinkle in her eye as she admired the weaving lines of gold that ran up the walls, the white marble floors, the swirling kingdom of angels painted on the ceiling, the twinkling of the diamond chandeliers. I watched her marvel at the long oak tables, all covered in silver platters of the finest cuisine and crystal bowls filled with spirits. She was admiring one of the ice-sculpted angels when I first approached her. She wasn’t the only one wearing a little black dress, but she definitely owned hers the best. Every curl of her sunny blonde hair seemed perfectly placed, no matter how much she moved or how strong a draft blew by. She was like Aphrodite, herself.

“We hit it off instantly. She seemed to be infatuated with me, my luxurious lifestyle the epitome of everything she loved, everything she was used to. It was more than the wealth that attracted her, though. It was the infamy. She’d seen my name on billboards her whole life. She’d heard her father and her friends talk about me. Sure, she had her own wealth, but under the shadow of her family name, she’d never have true fame. And she needed that. She needed the fame, the superiority. She needed to be the Highest of Highers. That was clear to me.

“It was almost Midnight when I asked her join me upstairs and bring in the New Year in a more intimate setting. Her face lit up at the idea. I could hear the curious whispers of my guests as I led Watson’s daughter up the curving staircase and through the double doors. When we were alone, I tried to tell her about the antique paintings I had hanging around my room. She pretended to be interested, but she didn’t seem genuinely impressed. So, I showed her my closet. Its massive expanse was enough to amaze her, but I took her hand and led her past my extensive wardrobe, back, back, until we reached my collection. Shelved on this back wall were lines of mannequin heads, their plastic faces masked by the skin of the fallen and forgotten. Over a hundred lifeless faces of all sorts stared at us. White, tan, black, young, old, hairy, beautiful, ugly. Each one was carefully skinned off the skull of a savage from the Bottom.”

Herring looked away, his fist clinching beneath the table. He wasn’t shocked to hear of Virgo’s collection. It had become a common practice amongst the Highers in recent years. Upper class people no longer displayed deer heads on their walls or laid down bear skin rugs. No, now their homes were decorated with an even more precious commodity. An entire business was emerging, where workers would risk venturing the Bottom to hunt survivors, or as the Highers called them: “savages.” They would hunt the savages, skin them, and sell their hides to the Highers. The faces were especially lucrative.

“She asked me if she could try one on,” Virgo continued, a faint smirk on his face. He enjoyed seeing Herring’s agitation. “I insisted. She kissed me on my cheek and reached for the face of a young Hispanic. A surprising choice. Hand in hand, we walked out across my room and out onto my balcony. I’m not sure if you know this, Detective, but I live on the edge of the city. So, that night, the view from my balcony was quite breathtaking, the full moon illuminating the sea of savages below. Abigail trembled seeing such a thing, the horrible illness that has overtaken the Bottom. It was a whirlpool of mindless cannibalism, a feeding frenzy of a fallen people. We could see them down there, tearing each other apart, desperately clawing at the pillars that support the ground beneath our feet now. Have you ever seen that, Detective? Do you know what it really looks like on the Bottom?”

Herring took a deep breath. “Get on with it. What happened?”

Pratt sat on the other side of the glass, chewing his thumb nail like he always did when he got nervous. He could almost feel Herring preparing to spring across the table. Vincent acquiesced and continued, slowly unbuttoning the top few buttons of his dress shirt.

“Voices from inside my home counted down the New Year. Five! Four! Three! She quickly put on her mask while I put on mine.” Again, Vincent dropped his eyes, some sort of pain in his face. “It was in that moment I knew she had to die, like the others. But, she wasn’t like the others and that’s what made me sad. She was merely cut from the same fabric, a fabric that had been sewn over the many generations before her. She showed me that there is no such thing as ‘innocence’ anymore. She showed me with those pretty brown eyes of hers… Through the holes of some strange man’s face.

“I leaned into her, our lips joining in a passionate kiss for the New Year. And even in the heat of our kiss, in my mourning of the death of virtue, I couldn’t help but laugh. She asked me what was so funny and wiping tears from the corner of my eyes, I told her, ‘Why, my dear, you’ve got something on your face!’”

Vincent Virgo’s voice trailed off into a somber laugh, as if his joke was as bitter as it was sweet.

Now smiling, the Higher continued, “I thrusted her over the balcony and watched her get swallowed by the sea of savages below. She was beautiful in her final moments, even as they ripped the flesh from her bones.”

erring shot out of his chair. His face red with fury, he flipped the steel table and lunged at the Higher. He lifted the Higher out of his seat by the collar of his shirt. On the other side of the glass, Pratt cursed under his breath. Detective Herring had lost it. It was time to intervene.

“Is this some sort of joke to you?” Herring spat. “Why did you really kill these people?”

“I told you why.”

“Oh, because you’re so self-righteous, right? You’re some sort of hero who cares for the little guys. Just why would you care about the little guys, huh, Mr. Virgo? Why would you care what people like you did to people like me?”

Struggling, Vincent separated himself from Herring’s clutches. His coolness had given way to a passion as unabridged and shameless as his adversary.

“Don’t be so blind, Detective! People like me, people like you, us, them. In the end it doesn’t matter, we’re all just people. People who hurt and hate each other not out of reason, but out of some sort of animalistic instinct. That’s what it is, Detective. Why I hated people like Oliver Watson, why I hate people like you. Because at our roots, we are no better than the diseased savages feeding on each other on the Bottom.”

“So, you have no remorse for killing, for what you did to Abigail? Because she was a savage.”

I am wiping the face of the earth of all its blemishes, so it can be beautiful again.”

Swiftly reclaiming Vincent’s collar, Herring cocked his fist back and unloaded. Repeatedly, he struck Vincent’s face, drawing blood by the second blow. He dropped to the floor by the time Pratt entered the room.

“What… what are you doing?”

Herring didn’t face his comrade. He kept his eyes on the beaten mess writhing on the ground.

“Some hands-on justice. This piece of shit is probably going to walk anyway and he knows it. So, why not? Why not just punish him now? While we have him.”

Vincent Virgo hollered from the floor, his laugh echoing through the room.

“Justice. Punishment. You sound like me, Detective, before I actually grew up and took action. Before I saw man for what he is. Come on. See me for what I am! Snuff me out from this world! Do it! Do it!”

Herring pulled his pistol and aimed it at Virgo’s face. Before Pratt could stop him, he pulled the trigger. Herring was indifferent to the splatter of scarlet on his face. It seemed almost therapeutic to him, to see that the Higher’s blood was as red as his. No more. No less.

Prat fled, as much out of fear as shock, and Herring was left alone with the body, left in silence to realize that Vincent Virgo was right all along.

In the end, through scars and masks, they were the same.

The mother—she could have been their biological mother, though in recent days, it was impossible to be sure who belonged to the real family units and which people had simply bonded together in the chaos following the invasion—clutched the youngest girl protectively against her. She and the two older girls held hands in a chain and walked in formation along the side of the highway. With so many people crowding together onto the fresh two-lane flattop, the last shiny trace of government stimulus funds, it grew increasingly more difficult to breathe. They’d walked for days, which added to the burden, and it had rained; a cloying, hot May rain that clung unpleasantly to the skin.

The family exited the shadow of an overpass that sat in pieces on the other side of the highway, the metal there showing burn marks around the places where it had liquefied to slag. The mother, holding the youngest girl’s weight on her hip and head on her shoulder, turned away from the flyblown remains visible at the edges of the rubble. The view on their side of the highway wasn’t much better. The rain had run into an area of deadfall precipitously close to the pavement. People bathed in that stagnant pool. Some, she noted, wrapping her free arm around the nearest of the two girls marching in step beside her and calling the other close, floated face down.

This was what life had become after the first vortexes formed over major cities, she thought, and the brief war was unofficially lost to a merciless enemy who’d claimed victory without so much as showing its face to the conquered.

The two girls. One was sixteen. The other wasn’t quite a teenager yet, trapped in that awkward physical state when the body has experienced a growth spurt but the face hasn’t quite caught up. The older gripped the younger by the sleeve of her brightly colored T-shirt. The youngest, cradled against the mother, slipped free and down to her feet, the mother no longer able to shoulder her weight. That girl’s face was scrunched into worry lines that might never straighten out, even if given an entire lifetime.

They marched together, one holding onto another in a line, like elephants in a circus parade.

“There’s the next exit,” somebody, a woman, said. A woman, because most of the refugees were women, the men and boys above a certain age drafted into service for a war that had, by all measures that mattered, already ended.

The highway sign pulled free of the horizon and hovered in a shade of green brighter than the lime-colored new leaves undulating at the sides of the pavement. The Bedford exit didn’t offer much in terms of hope; it wasn’t the germs that killed the sinister Martians inside their tripods or the computer virus that deactivated the shields so the jet fighters could take down the colossal alien motherships in those other, fictional invasions. Had it been days or weeks since they’d seen a jet in the sky? And that one was disintegrating high overhead, in pieces at the tip of a sonic boom.

But the Bedford exit offered a break from the walk. A place to relax and rest and, most importantly, learn the latest information from what remained of the world’s governments. At last report, the Canadians were coordinating the global response. How far down the line had things fallen so that the military in Montreal was making the key strategic decisions, the mother absently wondered.

Parched and sore in a way she’d never known, every joint feeling exposed and swollen, she cycled through the information for the umpteenth time, no longer sure what was real or the result of her frazzled imagination. Purple-black vortexes, over three hundred of them in the sky, and then… silence, darkness, on the heels of a terrible, destructive thunderclap.

Another sound, one equally terrible, jolted her out of the fog and back to the moment.

“Do not attempt to exit—keep moving! Bedford is sealed to all non-residents at this time per order of the mayor’s office and the board of selectmen. I repeat—”

The baritone bullhorn voice boomed the same announcement, this time louder. Not really louder, the mother realized. Closer. They passed underneath the green traffic sign. A cacophony of angry shouts and expletives laced the air.

“What do you mean, closed?” somebody shrieked, swears lobbed with the question at whoever held the bullhorn.

In another time, another life, the mother’s instinct would have been to shield ears with hands, to spare the young ones the vulgarities launched at the voice—and, among the colorful insults, the voice’s parents.

“They’ve paid off the military,” said the woman plodding at the family’s left.

The mother recognized the woman. She was younger, in her twenties if the mother had to hazard a guess, though recent time had aged her considerably.

Paid off the military? With what, she could only imagine. Not money. People were using hundred dollar bills to wipe themselves behind trees at the roadside. Money wasn’t an effective incentive any longer. Food, shelter… flesh, perhaps.

“What do you mean, go back?” another voice shouted. “Back to what? Concord isn’t there anymore, and they’ll be swarming all over the suburbs by now!”

The procession briefly logjammed and the mother felt a rush of lightheadedness after being on the move for so long. A swarm of imaginary black flies buzzed around her head. Sweat, bitter and powerful, filled her next desperate breath.

“Per order of Mayor Stanislaus Sherwood, you will not be allowed access to the town of Bedford, so move along!”

The mother caught sight of the exit through breaks in the crowd. Military vehicles lined the curve, blocking the ramp at a diagonal angle. Men dressed in sand camouflage lurked behind the vehicles, with guns aimed at the highway. The mother imagined snipers in the trees, their scopes trained on the mostly women and children, focused on their fellow humans during the worst time in the world’s history. Rage ignited in her blood.

But it quickly cooled in the madness of a deafening thunderclap and the panic the pop of the bullet unleashed. Another followed, and the head of the young woman made old beside her blew apart, there one instant, gone from her shoulders the next. The mother screamed, as did her small brood, though the cacophony of cries that rose up into the unsympathetic heavens swallowed their voices.

Bullets raced at them. The mother felt the displaced air molecules and a rush of heat as one ripped to within inches of her face. They couldn’t go forward, because the war mongers at the Bedford exit were now firing at anything that moved. They certainly couldn’t risk going back.

She grabbed the youngest girl in one hand, the oldest in her other, and hoped the oldest’s grip on the middle child was firm enough to keep them all together. And then she turned toward the other side of the highway and ran. Military troops and police vehicles guarded the on-ramp there, and they, too, had opened fire on the refugees.

The family unit, which would be down by one by the time the shooting stopped, had barely reacted to one horror when another unfolded. The first came at them from two sides of the road; the newest opened up directly overhead.

The shrieks of frightened women and children vanished into the personified roar above. Fresh terror rippled over the mother’s skin, laying icy scales on top of her sweat. She glanced up to see the same monstrous image all had come to know in recent weeks. Only this one was being born right before her eyes, eyes that refused to blink and started to sting even worse than her throat, now screamed raw.

The sky churned and a bruise formed in its fabric, purple-black at the edges with crimson woven throughout. The wound expanded; as it grew, the nearest clouds fell into its pull. A funnel tip clawed its way out of the vortex. Running blindly, aware that the men at the roadblocks were still firing—still, in the face of yet another unholy visitation by the enemy—she dared look up, into the whirls. And, for an instant, she swore she saw something beyond that bruised patch of sky; a hint of a reflection, a glimpse into the alien world where their mysterious opponents originated.

She only saw the vista briefly; saw that it was a surprisingly light and soft-looking view of snow-capped hills sitting beneath not one sun or even two, but three dim, distant lights. And then she saw a hateful face staring back, and all illusions of softness and light being representative of that alien realm glimpsed through a hole in the Earth’s sky evaporated.

A terrified voice reached above the chaos. “Over there!”

The mother hurried toward the voice, where her surviving section of the crowd had diverted. She ran blindly, going only on hope. The giant twister unfolded out of the sky. She felt its pull on her spine, its dragging influence and hunger in the rising wind. And there was a smell she hadn’t noticed before but was now acutely aware of, synthetic, not quite like cleaning fluid but in that vicinity. Caustic and industrial, whipped into a fury by the cyclone.

“Quickly, up here!”

The other lane appeared beneath their feet, and then they were crossing gravel, climbing over sedge and litter at the opposite side of the highway, and scrambling toward the tree line. Here was the cement shell of a dilapidated building scarred with graffiti. The structure wouldn’t offer much protection if the cyclone came down near it, the voice in her thoughts declared. But it was their only option, their only chance.

The oblong cement shelter, probably used for storing road salt or sand, sat open to the elements, its windows and doors long gone. They hurried in, pushing the people in front of them, pushed by the people behind them. Had any more refugees escaped the savage dragging force of the cyclone when it touched down on the highway, they likely would have been trampled or smothered. As it was, the crowd cut out less than a dozen behind them as the vortex swept past, close enough to grab the last two figures at the door and one trying to enter through a window into its deadly caress.

The mother pulled the older daughter close, unaware that the middle child was no longer with them, and together they shielded the youngest girl between their bodies. The vortex tugged at their backs, pulled at their hair. The mother smelled the synthetic compound on the youngest girl, strong enough to make the soft lining of her nostrils burn.

The cyclone passed by, turning the woods at the side of the highway into ragged nubs. When it was gone from sight, they saw that it had taken the rest of the crowd with it. So, too, the men with their guns, their vehicles and, presumably, the Town of Bedford, Population: 0.

They continued forward, the three that had once been four, surrounded by a sparse collection of stragglers that had once been a crowd. Smoke stained the horizon at their backs; ahead of them, at the roadside, they reached a campfire. A hunter who had killed, butchered, and roasted a deer offered to share as far as the meat would go. It was their first solid meal in days.

Following the cyclone, the youngest girl had difficulty walking, and the chemical smell she exuded intensified. For the next day, a day that ran together into all the other ones before it in the mother’s mind, the child complained of terrible stomach pains. At first, the mother blamed it on the venison and the polluted water they were forced to drink from puddles as the weather grew stifling with humidity.

Until the following day, when the little girl twice vomited viscous blue, and the mother caught her staring at them with malice in her eyes. The girl didn’t speak after that, and with the chemical stink came another, underlying smell, a putrid odor of rot.

Rabid, that’s how the little girl looked.

The mother, who really wasn’t the girl’s mother, and the other daughter, stopped in place, paralyzed by the image that greeted them: the youngest girl, staggering away from them, blue liquid running from her mouth, ears, and the splits in the flesh at her throat. The girl’s chest swelled and contracted, as though the child’s lungs had doubled in size. Tripled. Only…

Somewhere in the thinned-out crowd, a woman screamed, “Dear God, don’t you get it? That’s how they plan to send their soldiers through!”

“Mommy,” the oldest girl said, mentally devolving to an age younger than the youngest.

“Don’t you see?” the same woman shrieked, and the mother did, pulling her oldest daughter closer. “They softened us up from space… now, they’re readying for the ground invasion. They’ve seeded their soldiers inside our children!”

The child’s body contorted at an awkward stance, not quite standing, tilting under the effort of those greedy, swooping breaths. Each repetition stretched skin and clothing to their limits. A sound like celery stalks being snapped in half tore through the terrible, sudden silence.

And then, as they watched, unable to blink or scream, the transformation was completed, and the thing emerged, grub-like, from the husk that had once been human.

Alexander Tobey

Tobey Alexander has always suffered from an overactive imagination. Having decided to commit his imagination to paper in hope of inspiring his own children to embrace their creativity it has been an enlightening journey, to say the least. A full-time worker, husband and father to three finding time to write has always been the challenge. Tobey’s only hope is that his overactive imagination can be enjoyed by others and provide an escape from the mundane and every day.

Marvin Brown

Marvin Brown is the author of suspense novels Jigsaw Man and Covet, as well as the nonfiction work The House the Lord Built. He is a regular contributor to Insomnia & Obsession magazine. Brown lives in Akron, Ohio, with his wife and two daughters. Brown’s film reviews are available on the Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com).

Jessica Clem

Jessica Clem is a writer, marathon runner, and Stephen King fanatic currently based in Omaha, Nebraska. She holds a B.A. in English and a M.S. in Urban Studies, and works as a content strategist for a marketing agency. In her free time, she can be found hogging all the good books at the library, running on the local trails, and adding new spirits to her home bar collection. She has been published in Ms. Magazine, and various local publications in Omaha. She is happily single and spends her days with a beloved Yaris named Egg.

Jordon Greene

Jordon Greene is the Award-Winning & Amazon Bestselling Horror Author of To Watch You Bleed and They’ll Call It Treason. He is a full stack web developer for the nation’s largest privately owned shoe retailer and a graduate of UNC Charlotte. Jordon spends his time building web applications, attempting to sing along to his favorite rock songs, driving way too fast, and reading. He lives in Concord, NC just close enough and just far enough away from Charlotte.

Mary Victoria Johnson

Mary Victoria Johnson is the author several published novels, including The Other Horizons Trilogy, The Ashes and the Sparks, and The Inventress, as well as an upcoming novella series from EPIC/ABDO. She normally writes young adult stories, but branched out to the other side for her story Heathfolk. Mary is a student at the University of Victoria and lives in British Columbia, Canada.

Hekter Kaztro

Hekter Kaztro is a young storyteller striving to revive the world’s childhood nightmares. Inspired horror masterminds from throughout the ages, from H.P. Lovecraft to Wes Craven, he writes to exploit man’s most profound fears and remind you of the monsters lurking in the dark. Born in Anaheim, California, he now studies Film at Florida College of Jacksonville. This is his first published story.

Garrett Kirby

A lover of all things horror, Garrett Kirby writes his bone-chilling tales with a sense of glee. His goal: to scare his readers, and have one heck of a time doing it. A newcomer to the writing scene, Garrett introduces himself with his first piece of literary work, The Other.

Jack Lothian

Jack Lothian is a scriptwriter for film and television. Currently he is showrunner and lead writer on ‘Strike Back’ for HBO/Cinemax. His fiction has appeared in Helios Magazine Quarterly and Parsec Ink’s Triangulation: Appetites, as well as the graphic novels Tomorrow and Laptop Guy for BHP Comics.

Jeremy Megargee

Jeremy Megargee has always loved dark fiction. He cut his teeth on R.L Stine’s Goosebumps series as a child and a fascination with Stephen King’s work followed later in life. Jeremy weaves his tales of personal horror from Martinsburg, West Virginia with his cat Lazarus acting as his muse/familiar.

Gregory L. Norris

Gregory L. Norris is a full-time professional writer, with work appearing in numerous short story anthologies, magazines, novels, TV, and, so far, one produced feature film (Brutal Colors, Amazon PrimeA former feature writer and columnist at the Sci Fi Channel’s Sci Fi magazine, he once worked as a screenwriter on two episodes of Paramount’s modern classic, Star Trek: Voyager. Gregory judged the 2012 Lambda Awards in the Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Horror category and his stories have obtained Honorable Mentions in Ellen Datlow’s Best of Books and the Roswell Awards.

J.C. Raye

J.C. Raye is a Professor of Communication at a small NJ college, teaching the most feared course on the planet: Public Speaking. Witnessing grown people cry, beg, freak out and pass out is just another delightful day on the job for her, so she does know a little something about real terror. She has won numerous artistic & academic awards for her projects in the field of Communication & Media, and seats in her classes sell quicker than tickets to a Rolling Stones concert. Her short fiction can be found in anthologies with Scary Dairy Press, HellBound Books, and Books & Boos Press.

Rohit Sawant

Rohit Sawant’s fiction has been published in Kill Those Damn Cats - A Lovecraftian Anthology, After the Happily Ever After, and Flash Fiction Magazine. He lives in Mumbai, India. Enjoys sketching, films, and his favorite Batman is Kevin Conroy.

Irina Slav

Irina is an energy journalist by trade and a lifelong fantasy and horror fan with a degree in English. She’s been writing fiction since her teens and she still keeps her first unsuccessful novel attempt in a secret drawer as a reminder of the long way any author has to go before they produce something that’s worth reading.

Christine Stabile

Christine Stabile is retired. She is an active member of two critique groups and the Diamond Valley Writers’ Guild in southern California. She loves having more time to work on her short stories and novel. Dry Leaves is Christine’s first published short story.

S.E. Stone

S.E. Stone grew up in a suburb of a suburb of Boston, Massachusetts. She currently lives in Charlotte, North Carolina, where she finds any excuse to live-tweet ghost hunting TV shows and to wander through antique malls.

M.B. Vujacic

M.B. Vujačić is an economist by trade, storyteller at heart. He is a published author of three horror novels written in Serbian: Krvavi Akvarel, NekRomansa, and Vampir. His stories appeared in SQ, Devolution Z, Crimson Streets, Encounters, Acidic Fiction, Creepy Campfire Quarterly, Under the Bed, 9Tales, and Infernal Ink magazines, as well as in professional anthologies Toxic Tales, Silent Scream, The Nightmare Collective, and The Worlds of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Vol1. A fan of all things horror, he is also an avid gamer, hobby blogger, hookah enthusiast, and a staunch dog person. He lives in Belgrade, Serbia.

Copyright © 2017 by Jordon Greene.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any way by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording or otherwise without prior written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews or as provided by US copyright law. Franklin/Kerr Press supports copyright and thanks you for purchasing an authorized edition of this book.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locations, organizations, or persons living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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Edited by Jordon Greene

Cover Image by Getmilitaryphotos/Shutterstock.com

Cover & Interior design by Jordon Greene

Printed in the United States of America

FIRST EDITION

ISBN-10: 0-9983913-5-2 (Paperback)

ISBN-13: 978-0-9983913-5-9 (Paperback)

Fiction: Horror

Fiction: Post-Apocalyptic/Dystopian

Fiction: Anthology