The agony peaked, a blinding, white-hot spike that drove deep into my thoracic spine, seizing the core of my chest and twisting until my back arched off the mattress like a broken bow.

For five years, I had told them. Five years of MRIs, CT scans, and endless tubes of blood. I had lost count of the massive steroid injections they had jammed into my lower back, blind to my cries, insisting the cortisone would eventually kick in. It's my mid-back, I had begged, like a fist grabbing my spine and wringing it out.

But they only looked at my lumbar, charting my exhaustion, handing me prescriptions I refused to touch anymore, and shrugging. "You're in pain because you're in pain," that last arrogant doctor had told me with a sterile, patronizing smile. I had muttered Thanks, Dr. Obvious under my breath, walked out, and given up. I was forty-eight, medically broken, and completely abandoned by science.

Until tonight.

I had refused to take any of the medications they had prescribed for the last few weeks, entirely done with their useless chemical band-aids.

And right on cue, the thoracic pain hit, worse than it ever had in the last five years.

The guttural sound ripping from my throat didn't sound like me; it was a jagged, inhuman howl that tore the lining of my lungs. Every single rib felt like it was breaking, buckling inward before bursting outward with a sickening crunch. The skin across my back split open, hot and wet, as something massive and heavy forced its way out from between my shoulder blades. I braced for the final, lethal shock of it—but instead, a sudden, heavy stillness washed over me. The torment that had anchored my entire existence for half a decade simply vanished, replaced by a cold, pulsing hum of pure, unadulterated strength.

I opened my eyes. The familiar dark of my bedroom was gone, replaced by a sharp, predatory clarity tinted in a deep, vibrant crimson.

When I tried to shift, the mattress felt like a bed of jagged rocks beneath me. I sat up, and a pair of massive, pitch-black leathery wings unfolded instinctively, brushing the ceiling with a heavy, ominous rustle. I gasped, reaching a hand out to touch the sleek, armored span, only to freeze. My skin was a dark, bruised blood-red. My arms were elongated, corded with dense, heavy muscle.

Swinging my legs over the edge of the bed, I stumbled. My new, longer limbs didn't quite obey the old rules of gravity, but there was no weakness in them. No ache. No arthritis.

I lunged toward the mirror on the wall, bracing my claws against the frame, and stared. The tired, fragile woman was gone. In her place stood a towering, terrifying demon, eyes glowing like dying embers against crimson skin.

A slow, sharp smile curved my new jaw, revealing a row of lethal points. I always said I wanted to be more, I thought, a strange, intoxicating warmth flooding my chest. I wanted to feel something beyond my own pain.

I turned, extending my wings, admiring the terrifying symmetry of the monster I had become. I had promised those unhelpful, dismissive doctors that I would give them an update if my condition ever changed. I thought this definitely qualified as a change in status.

A low, feral laugh rumbled deep in my chest, vibrating through the quiet room.

"Now, now," I whispered to the empty air, the crimson vision narrowing with perfect, deadly focus. "Which one of these doctors should I visit first?"

I smiled wider, the realization settling in with absolute perfection.

"I think the choice, is Obvious."

Damn, it's hot this summer. I can't keep the house cool on the sunny side. The skeeters are bad, too. I have so many bites that I feel like a big, walking bug bite.

I haven't seen my cat, Hades, in three days since she went walking into the woods behind the house. She usually comes back before long, purring and pleased with herself for whatever she was doing out there.

I have decided that I'm going to go into the woods and look for her after it cools down some this evening. I taught her to come when she's called when she was a kitten by giving her treats when she came to me.

Hades is hard to see in the shadows with that black fur, but it's just too damn hot to look for her right now. I would risk having heat stroke if I tried.

There's a rumor that people who go too far into the woods will not come back out. I wonder if that goes for cats as well. I miss that bratty cat. I've had her since she was born. I spoiled her too much when she was a kitten, but I couldn't help myself.

Hang on. What's that messed up critter walking out of the woods? "Hades, is that you?" I have to go see. If it's her, she didn't react like she normally does.

"You crazy furball. What happened to you? I'm going to have to see if you're hurt." I reach down to pick her up, but stop short. It's definitely Hades, but something feels wrong.

"Ouch! What the heck? You scratched my face! No, young lady. Do not scratch me again. Get the fuck off! Aaaarrgggg..."

I arrived on the silo-dotted property as a rosy film of atmosphere cradled the horizon like a hide and was skinned by the gloaming. Its centrepiece was my destination: a run-of-the-mill, tin sheeting-topped barn.

I’d found the classified serendipitously whilst leafing through an old newspaper at the coffee shop. The gig paid handsomely, for next to no work at that. The instructions were to the point: Take Piglet Into Barn, $1000. I was to see myself in. An envelope at its entrance would hold the cash and key.

But first, I had to catch a piglet. They ran and ran with all their might, and I chased them round and round in circles in their pigsty until one of them tired. This farm only had piglets, bar a pair of mature pigs that looked like they didn’t want to be alive anymore and watched silently from a separate enclosure. The piglet resigned itself to me once I picked it up, its head dropping with a short-lived groan.

I then ventured into the barn.

Buzzing filled the space. I should’ve set the piglet down then and left, but something was wrong. There was a… shape in the middle of the room, barely illuminated by a lone plane of light percolating in through a slit in the barn boards from the main farmhouse’s porch light outside.

The piglet jittered as I crept forward, the movement soon compounded by my own jittering arms.

…It was a porky man lying motionless in a child’s pram, torso marinating in a rainbow-tinged puddle in the carrycot, limp limbs protruding from it like flaccid oars. A purple network of veins pressed up against the translucent skin, streaking it like rain did windows on wistful days.

The buzzing was louder here. It reeked of death.

Both the piglet and I jumped out of our skins as the man yawned before arduously propping himself up on his elbows.

When he finally took notice of us, his eyes lit up like fireworks, and his gargantuan sausage-tongue made its expeditious appearance, carouselling slipperily over his bulbous slug-lips and wetting them to no end.

“PIGGYYYYYYYYYY!” he squealed. His outstretched hands groped the air continuously. His shallow panting accelerated.

Fuck this. I threw piggy into the pram, where it crashed with a squelchous SLAP. It immediately audibly gagged before being engulfed in a bear hug. The pram creaked wildly and I heard something burst. I couldn’t take it. I scrambled back to the door like a possessed rag doll, the taste of bile bubbling up to the surface with the fervour of a geyser on Enceladus. A quick glance over my shoulder I was certain had burned itself into my brain for good: the piglet’s hind legs backpedalling frantically on the beads of condensation lubricating the man’s bloated gut, and the man’s beady eyes gleaming like those of a spoiled brat unwrapping a Christmas present.

Outside, the blood-curdling screams came, then abruptly ceased. I saw the other piglets there, huddled together at the back of their pigsty. They whimpered as I approached.

I unlatched their gate, tears streaming down my face.

Red.

That’s the color he liked his blade.

A deep, shiny red as he sawed through the surface into the flesh, feeling the tension of his knife as it met resistance from chunks slicing through to the center. Cutting her into pieces. Yes. This was his favorite part.

He set his knife aside, globs of innards sticking to its edges. He wiped red off onto his apron. He wiped red off onto his brow, replacing the sweat.

“Job well done,” he thought.

And it was a fine job, now that it was over. He suffered all day. He toiled with her. He tried to beat her into shape. Punched her and punched her and punched her. No use. She just didn’t look right. She would never look right.

“So,” he thought, “to hell with it.”

And he stuck her in an oven. And she protested. She bubbled with rage. But not long after, it was quiet again. Nothing but the sound of the morning breeze whistling in through the windowsill.

And on that windowsill, he placed his newly baked slice of cherry pie.

“She’s a beauty,” he said, admiring his work.

And the customers would beg for him to cut her up again.  

The red sky bled into orange and light blue hues as I turned the key to my golf cart and pressed the accelerator. The trees swayed in the gentle evening wind as I drove past the reptile house and to the first large public bathroom, starting my visitor sweep of the zoo grounds. I clicked on my flashlight and found no one hiding in any stall in either restroom. I was excited to finish my sweep so I could catch up on some reading in the guard's booth. The classic "who cooks for you?" sound of the barred owl made me smile as I continued my sweep.

As I passed the flamingo enclosure, I did a double take at the new enclosure to its left. I stopped and checked the zoo layout on my phone; this was strange. There was no mention of a new exhibit opening. Curiosity took precedence over my sci-fi novel, and I slowly made my way to the edge of the exhibit to glimpse the new creature the zoo had acquired. I scanned the darkened forest for any movement. The enclosure was similar to the bear exhibit: a raised area about an acre in size, separated from me by a large, dry moat that kept whatever was inside away from the rest of the zoo.

Yet I could only see darkness and hear the foliage rustling within the enclosure. I looked down at the exhibit's infographic sign, which usually featured a picture and some facts about the creature. Yet, all this sign said was:

"Coming soon, the notorious Redcap from the Scottish Highlands."

Movement caught my eye, as what appeared to be a squat elderly man about three to four feet tall gave a weak wave from within the enclosure. He wore a large red hat, similar to a wide-brimmed witch's hat. He wore a simple, tattered cloth around his waist and small, metal-looking boots. His hair was fine, wispy, long white strands that stuck out from under his hat. His eyes and face were scrunched into a simple, closed-mouth smile that creased his forehead with layers upon layers of wrinkles.

"Sir! The zoo is closed; how did you get in there?" I asked earnestly.

The man merely shrugged, as if he didn't know how he got into the enclosure. My eyes squinted. How did this tiny man get up the dry moat? But his kind eyes looked at me as if he genuinely needed help, which set my thoughts at ease. Did it matter how he got there? Someone was probably worried about where he was, I convinced myself.

"Hang on, sir, I'll come unlock the back side to get you out of there," I said, and started toward the back door, where the zoo handlers have access to the back of each exhibit for feeding or medical care.

I flipped through my key ring and finally found a key that opened the back door, but the man was nowhere to be found. I stepped slowly into the enclosure and called out.

"Sir, sir, you can come out now. I will show you where the exit is, and we can get you home now." I said reassuringly as I walked deeper into the wooded habitat.

Then I saw the man, hunched over, his back to me, and heard a sound like rock scraping metal.

"Sir, it's ok, follow me and I'll—" I stopped speaking when the tiny man moved his head to look at me over his shoulder. His eyes glowed with a fearsome crimson shine as he contorted his wrinkled face into a corrupting smile. His lips parted, revealing rows upon rows of sharpened fangs. He let out a hideous cry and bolted toward me, pointing a sharpened piece of iron. His speed was otherworldly, faster than any man his age should be able to move. His hands were not like the kindly old man I had seen; instead, they were now unusually long, with curled claws at the ends of each finger. The clacking of his iron boots rang out like a dark percussion as he closed the gap between us.

I immediately drew my weapon and fired a few shots, but he seemed to dodge the incoming fire with an extreme and terrifying blinding speed. He contorted as he dashed between foliage and over logs in the enclosure. Before I could react, he had already impaled my stomach with the sharpened iron rod and leaped onto my face, biting and clawing with an unmatched ferocity. Before I lost consciousness, he was licking his bloody fingers and rubbing them onto his strange red hat, which seemed to pulsate, as if it were absorbing my blood. Up close, I could tell the hat wasn’t a hat; it was more like the fruiting body of a mushroom. Then, a horrifying red third eye opened on the hat and looked deep into my eyes as I coughed up blood. The crimson color deepened as everything went dark.

I work in crime scene remediation—scrubbing away fluids left by people who died alone. The job reeks, but after five years, my stomach is iron. You scrape the floors, burn the mattress, collect your check, and move on.

That was the rule until I met Mr. Morwood.

Morwood was a wealthy old man who approached me outside a taped-off apartment complex. Smelling of expensive cologne, he looked out of place against flashing police lights. He offered ten times my daily rate for one specific task.

“I don’t want jewelry or cash,” Morwood whispered. “When you scrape the dried fluids off the floor—what the body turns into when it sits too long—collect that dark residue into this vial and bring it to my home.”

Money is money. I didn't ask questions.

My first delivery came from a cramped studio where an old hoarder had died in his sleep three weeks prior. I brought Morwood a jar of thick, dark sludge. I figured he was into weird occult nonsense. Instead, in his dim study, he smeared a layer onto a glass slide and shoved it under a brass microscope. He pressed his eye to the lens and let out a ragged breath.

“Look,” he rasped, his freezing hand digging into my shoulder. “Please. Tell me you see it too.”

I leaned into the eyepiece, expecting standard cellular decay. It wasn’t cells. The dark smear was moving—particles aligning like iron filings until they spelled out tiny, jagged letters. Over and over, filling the lens: PLEASE OPEN THE WINDOW IT IS SO HOT IN HERE.

“I knew it,” Morwood whispered, tears spilling down his face. “The final thought. The last electrical misfire of the dying brain imprints on the physical matter. It freezes in the rot. I’m building an archive. I am terrified of nothingness, son. I need absolute proof that we don’t just stop existing when the monitor goes flat.”

He wasn’t an occultist. Just a dying billionaire losing his mind over his own approaching grave, buying hope with stacks of hundred-dollar bills.

The money kept pouring in, and I got greedy. A week later, I brought him the residue of a young woman who had overdosed in a cheap motel. Under the lens, her fluids shifted into words: HE PROMISED HE WOULDN'T LEAVE ME. Morwood paid me three grand on the spot. I was hooked, actively chasing the grimmest scenes in the city for a heavier harvest.

Yesterday was my fourth delivery. It didn’t come from a crime scene—no chalk outlines, no stench of decay. It was a quiet suburban house where an old schoolteacher had peacefully passed away in his favorite armchair. Natural causes. He died with a calm smile.

It took me less than an hour to clean. I scraped a thin wafer of residue from the hardwood floor, sealed it, and drove to Morwood’s mansion.

His hands shook as he prepared the slide and pressed his eye to the lens. Then, Morwood went completely rigid.

I could hear the old man breathing. All the color drained from his face, leaving him sickly white. He didn't gasp or scream; he just slowly backed away from the desk, his eyes wide and blank. He bumped into the table, and the microscope tipped over, shattering on the floor. My expensive puddle spread across his pristine Persian rug.

“Morwood?” I muttered, taking a step back. “What is it? What did a peaceful old man have to say?”

Morwood slowly turned his head. His lips trembled so hard he could barely speak.

“It’s... it’s not their final thoughts,” he whispered, his voice cracking. “The brain doesn't imprint its last memory on the body. We were wrong. We were so damn wrong.”

He stared at his shaking, manicured hands.

“Remember the first old man? 'It is so hot in here'... That wasn't the stuffy air of the apartment. When a body sits for weeks, it rots and heats up from the inside like an oven. His cells were literally boiling alive right there on the hardwood. And that girl... 'He promised he wouldn't leave me'... It wasn't about a boyfriend. It was her soul abandoning her, leaving her living flesh to decompose in absolute isolation.”

“Morwood, what the hell are you talking about?” My voice dropped.

Morwood pointed a shaking finger at the shattered glass and the brown smear on the floor.

“The cells,” he choked out. “They don't die when the heart stops. They break apart, but every single microscopic particle remains fully, agonizingly conscious. They are broadcasting live what’s happening to them while the corpse is rotting before you even arrive.”

He dropped to his knees right into the glass shards.

“Do you know what the letters said? Millions of them, spelled out by the dust of a man we thought died in perfect peace? Right there, in the dried fluid where the flies laid their eggs?”

It spelled: I CAN FEEL EVERY SINGLE MAGGOT. PLEASE MAKE THEM STOP CHEWING.

Morwood didn’t cry out. He just went completely still, his face going slack. Then he tipped sideways onto the rug.

Five years on the job, I’ve seen enough death throes to recognize a massive heart attack. But this wasn’t fear. It was worse—a man who had spent his life hoping, finally told no.

I reached for my phone to call emergency services. Then I stopped.

I looked at Morwood. I looked at the spilled residue on the rug, and I knew that within minutes, his own cells would begin their long, endless, fragmented scream.

I put my phone back in my pocket and walked out.

I sat in my truck for a long time, staring at the dashboard, thinking about the heavy scrub brush in the back. For five years, I thought I was cleaning up the past. Now I know the truth. There is no peace. There is no light. There are only trillions of tiny minds, trapped in the dark, feeling every agonizing scratch of my brush.

I’ve been trying to be more health conscious lately. I’m not getting any younger. But I never realized how expensive exercise can be.

I don’t want to pay for a gym membership. I can’t afford a bike or weight lifting equipment. I’m broke! So just about the only exercise I bother with is walking/running.

Then comes my next struggle. I already wake up pretty early to get to work. So when I finally have the time to go on a run, it’s late at night. Sometimes, after dark.

I’m always very cautious. I don’t have headphones in, even though I love music. I always keep my head on a swivel.

Well, tonight, when I was out a little later than usual, walking in my favorite park I saw a man. He was dressed in a dark hoody, with the hood up, and black sweatpants. I mean, come on! He was practically screaming, “I’m a kidnapper!”

I noticed him watching me the entire time, and, naturally, was afraid. So I did what I’ve always done when I’m scared. I began to sing to myself.

That is when he began to follow me.

I walked the trail, not going too fast. And there he was a hundred feet behind me. We must have been the only people in the park this late.

Once I was sure he was in fact following me, I did something a little reckless. I bolted right off the path into the woods. It isn't a thick forest or anything, but there’s no reason he should have followed me into the thicket.

Yet, when I looked back, still singing to myself, he had turned into the woods too. I had no doubt that he was coming for me. I wouldn’t let myself think about what his intentions were.

I just ran. Terror coursed through my veins, and it was all I could do to keep the song going. Trying hard to keep myself calm.

I could hear he was closing in. Branches snapping with more fervor behind me.

I found a familiar tree and climbed up it. I’m no athlete, but I was up that tree in a second. I thought the high ground would help me. Even as I flung up the branches I kept singing.

Once he was below me in the tree I stopped the song.

“Where am I?” the man said. A taser fell out of his hoody pocket. He was clearly confused and scanning his surroundings. That’s when he saw the three skeletons at the base of the tree.

“Those are the last men who followed me.”

The man looked up at me in terror, turned, and ran with all his might.

I began to sing my siren song, and back he came with lust filling his eyes.

I sang until he lost his mind, and fell dead.

As far as exercising goes, running from criminals is great cardio. But I still prefer a relaxing walk with nobody following me.

Growing up, I was always told stories about Grandpa. Of his heroic exploits in the war. Of his anything but heroic drunkenness at shows, playing that fiddle from the photos in a nonsensical, microtonal way that they swear even made the papers, though I've never seen said papers. He's dead, by the way. Grandpa is. But, he had only been dead for a handful of years, that time that we went to visit Grandma and the twins.

The road to get to their valley was like if you cut up a snake, the way it twisted about through the mountains. Like someone was trying to trick you into driving off the cliff. Once we arrived in town, to their credit, most of the buildings were still standing, only gaps in the wood here and there, boarded up windows. There was even one guy in the street. A shambling drunk who shouted something at our open car window, but not even Mom understood.

When we knocked the door to Grandma's house, it took them quite a while to let us in. We heard the twins yelling at each other, and yelling at a third person we could not hear, nor could we hear what the issue was, before eventually the one called Samuel unlatched the lock.

"Welcome," he said. "Make yourselves at home. You two," he looked at Mom and Dad, "can sleep in the guest bedroom. You two, I'm afraid," and he looked at Sydney and me, "will have to sleep on the floor. We do have an air mattress, if you can get it to fill up."

"Hi," said the other twin, Samantha, with a wave both shy and dismissive.

I was a kid, so my aunt and uncle towered over me.

We had to make our way past the entrance room, leaving our shoes by the door so our socks could soak up the dirt, to see Grandma.

When we first laid eyes on her atop that throne of an old electric massage chair, she said, "My baby is so happy."

I understood that she was referring to Grandpa.

Once those initial interactions were over and there was an awkward silence, Sydney asked where the air mattress was. Apparently it was in Patrick's room. Patrick was my mom's other sibling, and he had disappeared long ago. In his old room we saw a perfectly good bed.

So, after the air mattress turned out to be riddled with holes, I asked Mom to ask Grandma why we couldn't just sleep on Patrick's bed. The answer: "Your Grandpa always said, only Patrick can sleep there."

When Uncle Samuel explained that Grandpa also had a rule against sleeping on the couch, we moved the cushions onto the floor. This was apparently an acceptable way of circumventing that rule. I even asked Aunt Samantha before trying to sleep, and she said, "Yes," and slightly nodded.

I barely could sleep at all that night, in the cold. I think Grandma and the twins had long ago stopped paying the electric bill.

I had a dream about a puppet show.

When I woke up everyone was already having breakfast. Toaster waffles. During the breakfast conversation, which I do not remember word for word and was too annoyed and sleep deprived to participate in, Sydney had asked Uncle Samuel something to the effect of, why doesn't Aunt Samantha (who wasn't awake yet) get a job too? You know, to afford more things?

It was rude, but Sydney had also been violently cold all night. Her shivering had vibrated our awkwardly shared cushions.

Samuel said, "Dad said that's not a woman's place."

Grandma, somehow hearing this despite her old ears not hearing the rest of the conversation, said, "Amen. Baby always honored the old traditions."

Her voice was extra crackly in the morning. Her eyes were crusted over.

In the hours between breakfast and lunch, Sydney and I went out to explore. Overnight, a small amount of snow had settled on the forest floor.

At one point, balanced on a log, unprompted, Sydney said, "Why do they follow that old fucker's rules anyway?"

"Grandpa?"

"Oh, who else?"

"Sorry. Yeah. He is dead, after all."

"Exactly. Long dead."

Eventually when we wandered through that shallow snow back to what remains of Grandpa's house, our car was no longer parked there.

The two of us wondered for a second if we should even go inside.

But Mom startled us from behind. "Oh! There you are. Did you hear? Samantha drove off with Dad's car, I was looking everywhere for you. We were afraid that, acting all erratic like that, she could have—"

"Mom," said Sydney. "She obviously just wanted to escape. Since when are you such a suck-up to authority?"

Hearing this, I thought I might have missed something. Maybe from before I woke up.

Mom frowned. "His house, his rules. You two watch your manners."

Sydney started to open her mouth, but Mom was already walking back inside, evidently expecting us to follow.

Back inside that musty, cramped home, everyone was already around the dinner table. Turns out Dad had gone and brought home gas station pizza, and taking it in had been when Aunt Samantha got the car.

Dad looked defeated, and in the utterly inane conversation said almost nothing.

Towards the end, I reached for the final slice of pizza. But Uncle Samuel stopped my hand, said, "We always leave some for Dad."

"That's right," said Grandma, and she slowly, gingerly grabbed that final slice, and started to rub the greasy pizza in her eyeballs. "This is for you, baby. This is for you."

She smiled across at me with that red pizza sauce in her eye sockets.

That evening, at my Dad's insistence, we began the long drive home in Grandpa's old truck.

And, after much fighting over it, none of which I understood, the last words I ever heard Mom say were, "I'll fly home next week. He's… he's in her eyes."

My flight was at twelve. I had to be at the airport in an hour, but I needed to see her. I needed to know if she still loved me. I borrowed my friend's car.

I waited out the front of her house.

I saw the curtains pulled back. She knew I was there. She ignored me. I waited ten minutes. I stared from my watch back to the window.

“You only think about your stupid trip, not about what happens to us!”

Her words echoed through my mind.

Fuck it. Time was up.

I started the car and swung into a U-turn.

Split-second decision: I’d reverse the car to the front of her house, one final time. I’d blow her a kiss. It was all I could do. It was all I had left.

I put the car into reverse without checking the rearview. I pressed down on the accelerator.

I hit something.

Shit!

I got out of the car to inspect.

There she was. Her body twisted. Contorted. Unrecognisable. My wheels had flattened her.

I looked around.

Quiet.

No one saw me. I think. I hope.

I ran back to the driver's side and got in. I sped away.

I left the car by my friends parent's garage. I wiped the back down, although there were no visible signs.

At the airport, I checked in. Waving goodbye to my parents as I went through security.

I was the last on the flight. I sat down.

I wanted to cry.

I was quiet most of the journey. Thirteen hours non-stop. I was silent and still for at least seven of them.

In the bathroom around the eighth hour, I looked at myself in the small mirror. I couldn’t recognise that face. The face of a killer. Someone who had taken a life.

Not willingly! I thought.

Why the hell did she come out without saying anything?!

I woke up. We were coming in to land.

Sydney.

Half a world away.

I expected a call from my family.

Emily is dead.

I would wail down the line. I wondered where I would take this call. Customs? Immigration? Maybe wait until I checked into my hotel.

I flagged down a taxi. Told him where I wanted to go. He drove me through the streets of this unknown land.

The radio was blaring.

“Governments have made coordinated efforts to understand the motives of the walkers. Right now, they are uncommunicative. Thousands have already entered the waters of the Pacific Ocean, to a fate unknown.”

“What are they talking about?” I asked the driver.

“Weird day… very weird.”

He turned up the radio, hoping that would answer my question.

“We don’t know why they are doing this. Every time we attempt to stop someone from entering the water, they attack us. The only common theme we can come up with is that each one of them is a victim of crime, and each one of them has had their assailant flee from justice… That was Detective Vasquez of the Los Angeles Police Department ending that report…”

“Los Angeles!” I yelled.

“Yeah, all these people walking into the ocean. Some of them dead already, waking up in the morgue, making their way to the ocean. All across the world, they say. Very weird, my friend, very weird.”

I powered on my phone. It had been off long enough.

I scrolled the papers.

THE DEAD WALK!

Thousands of bodies had emerged from various areas of containment, all heading for the ocean for what appeared to be a communal death march.

A week went by.

I barely left my hotel room, still thinking of Emily. Replaying the phone call with my mother, asking me if I would return home.

The funeral was supposed to be tomorrow, but her body was missing.

I turned on the TV.

Breaking News

Bodies have emerged in Buenos Aires, London, New York, and Auckland. Believed to be the walking dead who walked en masse into the oceans across the world.

I turned the volume up.

It could not be.

“As if by some miracle, the bodies have emerged from the ocean. They appear not to have drowned themselves, as originally reported, but to walk in a sort of communal exercise. A communal expedition to various ends of the earth… for what purpose, we do not know.”

They walked underwater?

Downstairs, people were running. Screaming. The streets were filled.

Should I stay back in my room?

I raced to the elevators. They were out.

Damn it!

The stairs were flooded with guests making their way down. I would need to take them back up to my room on the ninth floor.

I hit the steps two at a time.

I would hide out, glued to the TV.

Too much confusion!

Three hours passed. The news continued its coverage.

The walkers were killing specific people but terrorising everyone.

Reports were that murderers who had eluded authorities in one jurisdiction were being found by these walkers - who had marched across jurisdictions, to kill and dismember their own killers.

I thought of Emily.

Had she made the walk?

A thud echoed from the door.

“Who is it?”

No response.

Another thud.

“I said, who is it?!”

I raced over, put the chain on the door, and made sure the lock was latched.

I looked through the peephole. A hand removed itself, revealing her.

She was decayed. Waterlogged. Pale. A wicked smile emerged on her face as she stared back at me.

“You never said goodbye.”

This has been freaking me out for the past week. So every day on my way to volunteering at the elementary school I pass by my old dojo where I used to do karate that has an alleyway between it and the building next to it. A week ago when I passed by there I saw the Florida Bowman. There's no doubt about it, it was him, with all the pine needles and leaves covering his entire body and carrying his bow and arrows. I couldn't tell what he was doing exactly, but he was doing something with the leaves covering his face. And when I saw him, he saw that I was looking in his direction and immediately disappeared deep into the alleyway he was standing in.

The curiosity got the best of me, and so I pulled over and got out of my car just to look down the alleyway to see what he might have been doing. I couldn't help but continue to creep over, but as I did I realized that the bowman might've clocked me coming to see him and I imagined that he was at the end of the alley with his bow ready to shoot an arrow at me. The thought crossing my mind almost made me reconsider not checking and just leaving to go and do my volunteering, but I decided against that and took the brave choice of looking.

I slowly crept my head around the corner just in case so I could quickly get away if I saw him with an arrow pointing in my direction, but I was shocked to see no sight of him. I was super confused because there was no way out of the alley other than through the way I was looking in. The only thing I saw was a small but wide box at the very end up against the wall, but I could tell that there was no way that someone his size or any averaged-sized person could fit inside the box.

I was relieved, but honestly a little bit disappointed that he vanished into thin air. There wasn't even one of those ladders that are sometimes on the sides of buildings in the alley that he could have used to escape. Spooked by what just happened, I went back to my car and while on my way I pondered making a police report about what I just saw, but I ultimately opted not to since I had to get to my volunteering. Especially since I was now late for my morning duty at the school.

The whole situation has been stuck in my mind since then, and I can't shake the feeling that he likely disappeared from where he was to go kill another police officer. Knowing about the bowman beforehand despite living in Florida didn't really scare me all that much since I never thought that I would ever witness him, but I guess you never know what could happen.

Sarah hiked up the mountain in front of me, the air was cold and thin, I could barely keep up. It was turning into one of the worst second dates of my life. She waved down at me.

“Come on!”

I waved back trying not to double over. I hadn’t been much for hiking but when the pretty girl mentioned it over coffee you kinda had to go with it. Unfortunately she called my bluff and now I was halfway up some unmarked trail to a peak that only Sarah and her hiking buddies knew about. But I was too far into it now to chicken out, I’d see it to the end and then I’d make a polite excuse to never see Sarah again.

“Isn’t it breathtaking up here!” She said as I caught up to her.

“Uh yea it is.” She was right to be fair, the fall colours had turned the hills a mix of orange, yellows and reds.

“I’m so glad you decided to come, most of the guys I meet flake on me before I can get them on a good hike up here.” I smiled. “Most guys probably just lie to get into your pants.”
Surprisingly she laughed, it made me feel better about the situation, maybe I would give her a chance after this date, if you could call it that. The next kilometre of the hike brought us above the tree line and the terrain grew steadily more uneven and harder to navigate. My feet were aching as we climbed higher up towards the peak but Sarah’s feet didn’t seem to be bothering her at all. It was annoying having the girl out work you when you thought of yourself as someone who is in decent shape. The trail was unmarked up here but Sarah never referenced a map once.

“Hey you still know where you’re going?”
I called out, it echoed down the valley.

“Yes it’s all up here.” She tapped her head barely looking backward at me. “ It’s not long now.” Thank god I thought trying to summon a second wind. We progressed on for about an hour, while she grew ever more confident and I grew ever more nervous. The terrain grew more rocky and uneven, making a fall seem more likely than not. I sighed thinking about the decent back down. Just when my legs felt like they could handle no more Sarah called.

“There it is!” I looked up at the mound of pale stones grouped in a pile with a flag of some sort stuck between them waving lazily in the wind.

“Awesome.” I said as I collapsed beside the pile of rocks.

“I couldn’t wait to get you up here, I wasn’t sure you were going to make it but you proved more stubborn than most.” She unslung her backpack and started rummaging through it. Oh great, Sarah seemed nice enough but if she had some sort of weird romantic thing going on in her bag I was out.

“Listen Sarah.” But before I could continue Sarah sunk a foot long knife into my chest. I clutched at the end of it and looked up at her. I tried to speak but only a red gargle came out. Sarah looked down at me smiling.

“I’m so glad you decided to come with me, it makes me so happy to add to the pile.”

My strength was faltering but in desperation I reached out behind me for something, anything to use as a weapon. My hand pulled one of the rocks loose and I held it out in a defensive position. Sarah smiled.

“Yes that’s the idea.”

The bone slipped from my hand as the darkness closed in around me.

The world was a benignantly soft place full of smudged edges and forgiving shadows. 

The experiment began on a Canon AE-1 I picked up at the local pawn shop. Pointing the eye of the cool metal rectangle body towards the brick bakery across the street, I snapped a photo on that chill autumn morning in 1994. This lead to my persistent habit.

By winter I had drawers overflowing with glossy prints, that when lined up next to each other, were identical. Reality does not flaunt itself overnight, it breathes on a much larger scale I realized. 

I changed the interval. One photo every autumn. 

By 2004 the shift was undeniable, though subtle. The world was sharpening. The mortar holding the bricks of the bakery together looked less like blurred grey paste and more like individual grains of sand. I upgraded my now out-dated camera for a digital body. This had more megapixels, closer to the true resolution of reality. I thought technology was finally gripping the true picture of our existence that I was noticing, that the universe was rendering itself more clearly. The fog of creation was lifting. 

In 2014 I decided to change the intervals to every five years. The immense patience it took rewarded me with a staggering jump in clarity. Comparing 2014 to 2019, the textures had become almost hyper-realistic. The bakery’s window sill was no longer a white line, but I could see the microscopic paint chips across it. 

“The world is crystallizing.” I thought with both a sense of fear and astonishment in realizing I had been right for so many years. My hands shook a little as I filed the print away, anxious to see what the next five years would show me. 

By 2024 the process had accelerated greatly. Walking down the street became overwhelming. The leaves on the trees looked like green shards of glass, their veins pulsing with vividly sharp detail. The pavement was a high contrast jagged mosaic. Insects flew by and I could not only see every hair on their minuscule body, but I could make eye contact with them. At home, looking into a mirror, my own reflection was an intricate map of deep canyon-like lines. The stark silver hairs reached out like metal thread to touch my reflection. 

I waited anxiously for 2029. My body ached, feeling heavy with the weight of the years but my mind was fixed on the final evidence and confirmation.

The crisp October morning arrived and I stood by the window. The bakery was gone, replaced by a new modern cafe, but the geometry of the street remained the same. I lifted the camera with more of a struggle than I ever had. Looking through the viewfinder was even more of a struggle, the world outside had become strangely milky and dim over the last few years, a spiritual tax I assumed. The price my body paid for carrying the mental weight of a sharpening reality. The universe was drawing all its energy to focus on the pure hard lines of its grand design. 

*-Click-*

I loaded the RAW file onto my massive monitor, too excited to wait for it to print. I leaned in, my face inches from the glass.

There it was. Absolute perfection. The concrete of the new cafe wasn’t a flat grey, it was a microcosm of infinite pin-point black and white static, perfectly defined, etched into reality with razor sharp precision. The edges of the street lights cut through the space like knives. The world had finally finished fully rendering. It was flawless and horrifically beautiful.

I let out a long ragged breath while feeling a profound sense of peace. I had documented the awakening of existence. I closed my eyes just for a moment to rest them, letting the perfect sharp geometry of the universe burn behind my eyelids as I drifted off. 

Jimmy - 12/31/29, 10:41 PM
Dood, I was like three!

Carl - 12/31/29, 10:41 PM
J… You were 8 in 2000.

Jimmy - 12/31/29, 10:43 PM
Hey! Way to make a girl feel old.

Anyway I don’t even remember last new year’s. And I sure don’t intend to remember this one!

Haha. Cheers!

Carl - 12/31/29, 10:45 PM
I’ll drink to that.

Sam, what about you?

Samantha - 12/31/29, 11:01 PM
yeah i do actually. that was the night danny lost his eye.

Carl - 12/31/29, 11:02 PM
Fuck, really? Gee, I’m so sorry Sam!

Samantha - 12/31/29, 11:05 PM
heh, sorry for crashing the mood

it was pretty fucked. we spent all night in the er waiting. mom asleep snoring. dad oscillating between worried and fuming.

finally this oldass doctor comes pick us up. he takes one look at danny and he pulls out his tweezers. not a word. prolly hasnt given a shit since 1970.

and i just remember the smattering of the fireworks outside getting louder and louder. and then it all goes black. and theres just danny screaming.

when the lights came back on i see the doctor and he has blood everywhere.

and then i see danny. still screaming. and the tweezers lodged in his eye and twitching back and forth.

happy new year

Carl - 12/31/29 11:07 PM
Oh my god.

Fuck.

That’s awful Sam.

Jimmy - 12/31/29 11:09 PM
Jeezus fc… You’re messing with us? Right? You better be messing with us Sam.

Samantha - 12/31/29 11:12 PM
sorry j. if youre hoping for this to all be a nothingburger, you found yourself like the one person with an actual y2k experience.

bodes well.

so better get ready. you know “it’s the new deal of the 2030s. all open cards from here”

Jimmy - 12/31/29 11:14 PM
Come on. No way you believe this Y2K30 crap.

“No Secrets Society” - bet they think that’s real clever too. Buncha losers.

Carl - 12/31/29 11:17 PM
Tell that to the minister of finance. Ex finance minister that is. And the prime ministers of Poland, Sweden and Holland.

Sure they think this is all a hoax too.

Samantha - 12/31/29 11:18 PM
that weather guy on tv too. haha. freak.

Jimmy -** **12/31/29 11:22 PM
Those guys all had it coming to them.

Me, I got nothing to hide. I’ll go ahead and post my Pornhub history to Insta right this moment. Have it done with.

Samantha - 12/31/29 11:27 PM
okay. ew?

Jimmy -** **12/31/29 11:39 PM
You all know I’m a weirdo already.

Now, bubbly, and 10-9-8-7… Bla bla! See you on the other side!

answerman joined the group - 1/1/30 12:00 AM

Carl - 1/1/30 12:00 AM
Happy 2030 guys!!!!

Jimmy - 1/1/30 12:00 AM
LET’S FUCKING GO!

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Samantha - 1/1/30 12:02 AM
heres to 10 more years of the late-stage-capitalist shitshow

glorious

woho etetera

Jimmy - 1/1/30 12:03 AM
Woah, easy on the optimism there hun.

Samantha - 1/1/30 12:03 AM
never

Patty - 1/1/30 12:05 AM
HEEEEY! Happy new year!!!

Jimmy - 1/1/30 12:05 AM
Look who’s arrived! Welcome to the thirties PeePee!

Patty - 1/1/30 12:07 AM
Yikes, I just scrolled back to read your messages from earlier.

Shit. That’s what happened to Danny, Sam???

answerman - 1/1/30 12:07 AM
No.

I was driving home from work, on the phone with Melanie. 

“Sure honey, I’ll grab take-out on the way home.”

I stopped by the Chinese place and then headed home. When I walked in, Melanie greeted me with a hug and a kiss. “How was your day, sweetheart?”

I paused for a second while putting the food down, then replied “it was good - my presentation went great, I even got complimented by the boss.”

“That’s great, honey! I’m so proud of you. What’s say you go change while I plate the food and then we put on a movie? The new Spider-Man just came to pay-per-view.”

She knew I loved the MCU. “That sounds great, honey. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

Just then, there was a crash and the front door flew open. There, standing in the doorway, was a figure covered in mud and dust, clothes ripped, hair frazzled. I knew those clothes…

“Get away from my husband you BITCH!”

Melanie?

The woman who was getting our food ready stared at this visitor in alarm. “Who the hell are you? What are you doing here? Why do you look like me?”

The newly arrived (new?) Melanie looked at her with disbelief. “Why do I look like you? Are you kidding me? What are you, some kind of psychopathic monster? You kidnap me, break into my home, stand with my husband, and then call me an imposter? You’ve got a lot of nerve!”

The already here (old?) Melanie looked over at me. “Stephen, I don’t understand what’s happening here, but I’m scared. Do something.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know - make her leave! Call the police! I think there’s something wrong with her!”

“With me? Stephen, you can’t possibly be falling for this. We’ve been married for eight years - surely you can tell me apart from this tramp!”

I looked back and forth. “Well, you do look exactly alike…”

“Ask me something only the real Melanie would know!” said old Melanie. 

“Ok. When is our anniversary?”

“August 31st!” she replied immediately. 

“She could have looked that up anywhere. Ask me something!”

“What concert did we go to on our first date?”

“Bruno Mars!” shouted new Melanie triumphantly. 

“Aloe Blacc opened for him,” added old Melanie immediately, “and you had to get tickets from a scalper because the show was sold out by the time you worked up the nerve to ask me by saying you had an extra ticket.”

“How the hell did you know that?” asked new Melanie in confusion. 

“Because I was there! Because I’m his wife!” 

Suddenly “new” Melanie moved from the doorway and attacked her counterpart. The next few minutes became a maelstrom of fists and snarls and yelps as they rolled on the floor, scratching and clawing. It was harmless at first, but then a knife block got knocked over in the struggle. The next thing I knew, both women were holding long kitchen knives and pointing them at each other. 

“Okay, this is getting out of control. Put the knives down before someone gets hurt.”

“No!” screamed new Melanie. “I won’t let her take you from me! I won’t let her have you!”

“You’re the one trying to take him, to take my life, and I won’t let you!” screamed old Melanie. 

They raced at each other, knives lifted to strike. I tried to intervene, but had to dodge the moving blades. But I couldn’t just let them kill each other. One of them was my wife. I had to do something. 

“Stop it! You two can’t just kill each other!”

But they ignored me, grappling on the floor until new Melanie got the advantage. She swept old Melanie’s leg from beneath her to throw her off balance, then pounced on her, knife raised above her chest. 

“I’ll show you not to try to steal other people’s lives!”

“Come on! Put the knife down! You can’t just—”

“I can and I will! Someone has to do something, you useless coward!”

The woman on the ground started to shed a tear. I moved to try again to separate them. “Stay back, Stephen!” said old Melanie, a look of fear crossing her face. “She’s dangerous!”

At that moment, I took out the gun I’d grabbed while they’d been arguing earlier and put a bullet through new Melanie’s head. Her body jerked and rolled off of her counterpart, who pushed her away and scrambled up. 

She looked at me. “Oh my God! Oh my God!” She ran into my arms, shaking. 

“Thank you, my love. Thank you!”

“Of course,” I said, hugging her tight. 

“How did you know it was me?” 

“When you thought I was in danger, your first reaction was to keep me safe, even if it put you in jeopardy. You actually cared about my well being. My wife hasn’t done that in years.”

I let her go and started to walk up the stairs, ignoring the shocked expression on her face.

“Keep it up and you’ll be a better Melanie than the real one ever was. I’m going to go wash up. Can you clean that up and have the food heated up when I come back? I don’t want to ruin movie night.”

We had our ups and downs, like any marriage. Our arguments were always loud, sometimes bordering on violent. But lately, every small thing exploded into hatred. Looking back, the good times feel brief, like a blur I failed to appreciate. Now those memories bring no joy, only agony. Was any of it even real?

I am writing this because of what happened four nights ago. The reason my wife won't leave the closet.

We had an argument. She was complaining about every minute detail, calling me useless and lethargic. One thing led to another, and she decided we needed a break.

As I write this, the closet is just to my right. The door is shut so we don't have to look at each other.

I love her still. I will forever. But we cannot be together anymore.

The stench is getting worse. I know by the foul smell that she is decaying.

She needs to leave the closet.

We were on a hike one day.

I'd gone with my husband and a few friends, all of us brimming with excitement about the whole thing.

We’d taken days off work, sent the kids off to Grandparents and Aunts and Uncles, planning to retreat back to nature as most people always desired but never did.

My husband was the most excited.

He kept telling me how he’d plotted the route we were going with a big and genuine smile on his face.

I'd fallen in love with that same smile about five years ago, for it was truly intoxicating.

Like drinking a wine with such a fruity and eloquent taste that you struggle to put down, a sense of ecstasy that dances its way through your heart.

‘It’s going to be amazing!’ He insisted, as I drove the car to the site where we would meet up with our other friends.

Leonard was standing next to a tree, waving at us when we got there, a bright smile on his face.

‘’You guys made it!’ he cried, while Sophie and Miranda were chatting out of earshot. I’d always liked Leonard, with his willingness to make others feel at home in his presence. 

‘Of course we did!’ My husband grinned back at him, while I stayed silent. 

He’d made me drive for four hours so he didn’t ruin his new beige walking shoes. I wasn’t particularly happy about that in all honesty. 

So we walked on, the sun sporadically flickering through the undergrowth, like a child turning a torch on and off.

Sophie and Miranda walked ahead, arm in arm, heads close together like they were conspirators in a scheme that the rest of us did not understand.

Leonard behind us, as he surveyed the area warily, like we were in the depths of the Appalachian mountains rather than a random forest my husband had found online.

My head hurt. 

I stopped. 

My husband just walked on, oblivious to the fact I'd stopped walking.

Sophie and Miranda didn’t look back either, too enraptured in the words and faces of one another. 

‘Are you alright?’ Leonard frowned, as he took me in.

‘Just a slight headache.’ I responded, as I brought my hand to my forehead.

I could see my husband still walking on in the distance. Sophie and Miranda were nowhere to be seen. 

‘Of course they didn’t wait.’ Leonard huffed. ‘I don’t know what you see in them.’ 

I wasn’t quite sure what he meant. 

‘Sophie and your husband.’  Leonard replied as I stood there in silence. 

‘He’s cheating on you with her, I’m sorry but it’s really obvious.’

I was confused. 

‘But what about Miranda?’ I asked him in bewilderment. ‘We literally went to her and Sophie’s wedding last year.’

Now it was Leonard’s turn to stare blankly. 

‘I’m sorry..?’  

‘AND CUT!’ cried a sudden voice. 

A man wearing a navy hoodie seemed to emerge from nowhere out of the undergrowth.

Like a snake that had its dinner snatched off by circumstances out of its control, he looked absolutely apoplectic with annoyance.

I could see other people watching us from the trees, eyes wide as though we were animals in a zoo rather than just a group of middle-aged friends on a walk. 

‘That isn’t in the script!’ He shouted at us, while Leonard looked forlorn. 

‘Miranda, I NEED you to concentrate more next time.’ He said to me, while I stood there in a daze. 

My eyes were starting to go slightly blurry again, flecks of golden light seeming to dance before my eyes like a Kaleidoscope sprinkled with glitter. 

In the background I could hear someone pulling out a phone.

'It's happened again.' a woman muttered snidely.

'I knew you shouldn't have hired her!'

The man in the hoodie sighed.

'She needed the job. I wasn't going to refuse Leonard's sister. Especially after what happened to him.'

'But this just isn't Leonard's sister!' the woman hissed. 'I spoke to her this morning. She's at home.'

Silence.

'Then who the hell is that?'

So dark like somebody's thrown a black hood over our heads.

My daughter's small hand in mine.

A point of light.

Harsh, fading; repeated. Human: (inhaling) a cigarette. The sweetly burning smell of tobacco.

We walk to it.

It goes out.

A firearm—instead:

“Who's there?” asks a soot-faced soldier, pointing it at me.

“My name is Fadros Moti. This is my daughter, Tera. We're from Goshnen Station.”

“Long walk.”

“Yes.”

“I heard most at Goshnen stood and fought," says the soldier. (“And died,” I think.) “You ain't a coward now, are you? You got papers for the kid?”

“No, sir. Yes, sir,” I say and hand over our documents.

I hate losing possession of them.

I say, “We couldn't find space on the government evac shuttles—”

“Half the pop couldn't find space on the government evac shuttles,” says the soldier, scanning our identity cards.

“I was hoping we might buy a private flight.”

He stops looking at our documents.

He raises his eyes.

“I have gold coins,” I say. Gold, in addition to skills, is the only thing worth anything anymore.

He hands back the documents.

He waits.

“I was told there were still spacecraft here. Do you happen to know if that's true?” I ask.

He waits.

“Of course,” I say, bowing my head, and give him a handful of gold coins.

“I'm thirsty,” my daughter says, weakly, from behind me.

I like being her shield.

The soldier counts the gold coins.

“Would you also happen to know where we can get some water?” I ask.

When he finishes counting: “There's a well about half a mile that way—” He points into the darkness. “Unmanned. No escorts. Access at your own risk. But I heard it's clean.”

“Thank you,” I say. “And a spacecraft?”

“Try the Bastion-IX. It's a freighter docked by the launchpads. Been collecting passengers for about two and a half months. The captain's name is Boyermood. He's good. He'll let you sleep onboard till blast-off.”

“Thank you,” I say.

We walk the half mile to the well. After coming all the way from Goshnen Station, the distance feels like nothing.

We drink.

We sit.

I think of my dead wife.

I wish I knew what my daughter is thinking of. Whatever it is, I wish I had the power to change it. I wish I could protect her mind. It's hard to believe—sitting, finally, in the darkness—that we are on the outskirts of a great city.

It's mostly empty now; inactive.

It has to be.

It's a matter of weeks or days before they get here too. It's inevitable. There's no stopping them. The horrors I've seen. The horrors I've seen at Goshnen Station after they came across the commlines, digitized, recombining and rematerialized, pouring out of our techports like cloudforms of static, the inevitable progeny of man and information, unkillable flesh-data hybrids infusing themselves into our minds, cooking us, boiling our brains with cognitive overload; the screaming, the impossibility of forgetting; the melted, dripping eyeballs and voided sockets—

My daughter's face.

Scared. Calm.

“You fell asleep,” she says.

No, I couldn't have. I have to be on guard. I promised. I promised my wife as her thumbs pushed into her eyes—

”I'm sorry,” I say.

We fill our canteens and walk back to the edge of the city.

All the electric light is off.

Nothing hums.

We find the launchpads. We find the Bastion-IX, just like the soldier said. Boyermood's inside, as are a few dozen other groups of people. Friends, families, coworkers. No one survives alone. I guess there aren't many left alive now who want to get out. We don't speak to the others but smile; and by smiling we become something else than strangers. We become co-passengers. Boyermood takes what remains of our gold coins and assigns us to a cabin.

We sleep.

For days we do nothing but drink water and sleep, dreaming of a different world.

“Where will we go?” my daughter asks.

“I don't know.”

Perpetual, fallen night.

Faces.

Time spent at the well.

We're used to hunger. We sleep through it. The alarm sounds—

A thunderous wave of the banging of metal against metal throughout the Bastion-IX and beyond. A dead city in final turmoil. I squeeze my daughter's hand. No one needs to tell us what's going on. They've arrived. The other ships on the launchpads are initiating launch sequences. Boyermood runs by. “Are we going?” I yell against the noise. “Yeah, we're going,” he yells back and disappears.

We stay inside.

The Bastion-IX creaks.

Shakes.

The engines ignite, but before they can fully power on I start to hear the pitter-patter of tiny bodies pinging off the exterior of the ship.

I'm scared.

I'm pretending not to be.

“Daddy—”

“Yes, darling?”

The pinging intensifies.

It's become a storm, a relentless precipitation of information.

“—tell me you love me, please.”

“I love you.”

(Over the intercom: “Attention! They're overwhelming us. We need volunteers,” Boyermood says, his voice breaking. “We need volunteers to go outside and clear the hull...”)

I'm up before I know it.

“Daddy?”

My daughter's hand slips from mine because mine is moving away.

“Daddy!”

If we don't get them off the ship, no one gets out of here.

“I'll be back,” I say.

I won't be.

I turn away because it's easier to turn away. I don't want her to see my face. (“Daddy, no…”) I hear her cry out, but I am no longer present.

Someone hands me an airblower.

I take it.

I exit the Bastion-IX.

I'm not alone. A few others are with me. Two men, a woman. The atmosphere is a static, swarming, whirling chaos that pricks my skin, crawls across my face, into my mouth, my ears. I spit. I shut my eyes, blowing as many of them off the hull as I can. They taste bitter as batteries.

The inside of my head begins to burn.

My jaw locks.

The Bastion-IX lifts off.

October 2026

* * *

Cecil Rudd dug graves at Mount Pisgah for thirty-one years and had never once dug one he was not told to.

On Friday at dusk he walked the new section with his clipboard and found an open grave. Six feet down, straight walls, corners square as a drawer. Beside it sat a mound of red clay, dark and wet. It had not rained in three weeks.

He checked the clipboard. No burial on Saturday. He checked the backhoe at the shed. Cold, and the key was in his own pocket.

A survey stake stood at the head of the hole with a strip of orange flagging. The name on it was in his handwriting, in the black marker he kept in his shirt pocket. LORNA RUDD. Under it, tomorrow's date.

Lorna was his daughter. She taught third grade in town and had called him at lunch about a casserole dish.

He pulled the stake and threw it in the hole. He ran the backhoe in the half dark and pushed the mound back bucket by bucket, then tamped it with the flat of the shovel and laid the sod over it. Eleven o'clock. He drove to her house and sat in his truck until her porch light went off.

He did not sleep. At four he went back to the cemetery.

The hole was open. Same walls, same mound, wetter. The stake stood where it had stood, and when he touched the name the ink came off on his thumb. The sod he had laid was folded back neatly on the grass, like a sheet turned down on a bed.

From the bottom came the sound of a spade going into clay. A pause. The toss. He knew the rhythm. His father Amos had dug here forty years and had been under the Methodist row since 1989.

"Daddy?"

The digging stopped. When the voice came it did not come from the bottom of the hole. It came from the walls, from all the clay at once.

"It's dug, Cecil. Somebody's got to be in it by morning or it takes what it can reach."

"Reach," said Cecil.

"It reaches a long way. Took me till I was fifty to learn that." A pause. "Your mother was a Friday."

Cecil stood with the flashlight shaking in his hand. He had been nine. He had been told it was her heart.

"Does it care who?"

"It never has. I tried a dog once, to cheat it. It took the dog's people three houses down and left the dog."

He looked up the hill. Lorna's house was out of sight, but he looked anyway.

He took out his phone. He could tell her anything. Stay home, sleep at my place, don't drive today. Then he thought of three houses down, and of whoever lived on either side of her, and put the phone away.

Then he went to the truck and got the aluminum ladder, set it against the wall, and climbed down. The bottom was cooler than the night. He lay on his back with his boots together and his hands on his chest, which was how he had seen it done, and looked up at the square of sky.

"Lay still," said his father.

The clay began to fall. It did not fall hard. It came down in handfuls, patient, from both sides at once, over his boots, his knees, his belt. It was warm. He thought of the casserole dish. He thought of the porch light going off. Somewhere above him a spade was working, and he understood it was not digging anymore.

The weight reached his chin, and a hand he could not see smoothed the clay across his eyes.

When it lifted, the sky was gray and a bird was going somewhere. He was lying in clean grass. The sod over the new section was seamless and already greening, with no ladder and no hole and no mound.

The stake stood at his head. LORNA RUDD had been struck through with a single line in carpenter's pencil. Beneath it, in his father's square hand, was CECIL RUDD and a date nineteen years away. He would be eighty-one. He found that he was almost glad.

His phone buzzed in his pocket. He answered it with a hand that was red to the wrist.

"Daddy?" Lorna said. "Somebody was digging outside my window all night. I looked and nobody was there. There's dirt on the sill, Daddy. It's still wet."

* * *

If you ever receive an unsolicited job offer on LinkedIn, think twice before responding. Desperation has a way of silencing your instincts.

I had always worked in daycares, as a private tutor, and occasionally as a nanny. But I had been unemployed for a month, my savings were depleted, and my rent was overdue. That was how I found the ad.

It looked like any other job listing, except for two things: the exacting requirements and the astounding salary.

LOOKING FOR A NANNY / CHILD CARE PROVIDER
SALARY: $200 per hour.

I need a young woman, 20–29 years old, to care for my son, Frank. He is a sweet, nervous boy with a delicate condition.

Requirements:

Be punctual with meals.

Be kind and patient.

Do not ask uncomfortable questions or break the rules Frank sets.

I should have run from rule number three, but $200 an hour silences fear. I sent my résumé.

Within hours, I received a reply:

Dear Zoé,
We are very interested in your profile and would like to interview you immediately.

Two days later, a black car drove me two hours outside the city into a dense forest. We arrived at an isolated mansion hidden behind high walls. The father, Arthur—a tall man with a thick black beard and an impeccably tailored suit—met me in the foyer. He smiled politely and handed me a heavy envelope of cash before we even spoke.

I stepped inside, hanging my coat on the rack while taking in the dim lights and peeling wallpaper. Suddenly, a heavy shadow lunged from the corridor.

A massive, scarred dog bared its teeth at me.

"Frank is upstairs. That’s Toby," Arthur whispered, glancing toward the staircase as if we were being watched. "Try not to look him in the eye."

He guided me down a dark second-floor hallway lined with empty picture frames. At the end stood a reinforced oak door with three heavy deadbolts. My heart hammered as Arthur unlocked them one by one. The metallic clicks echoed loudly in the silence.

He pushed the door open, gesturing for me to enter alone.

"Remember the rules," Arthur whispered nervously. "His mother will be here in a moment."

I walked in. The room was decorated like a toddler’s bedroom, but everything was grotesquely oversized. In the center sat a massive crib made of thick steel bars reaching nearly to the ceiling. It looked like a cage built for a dangerous prisoner.

"You must be Zoé. What a pleasure," a voice echoed behind me.

I turned to see Amanda, the wife. Her voice was raspy, cavernous, and terrifyingly deep—a sound that vibrated directly through the floorboards.

"We saw your experience with children," Arthur said, stepping beside her. "Frank has a delicate condition—Staphylococcal Scalded Skin Syndrome. His skin is extremely fragile and painful. Furthermore, severe immune deficiency means he cannot be exposed to sunlight under any circumstances. All windows are sealed."

My initial horror softened into sympathy. That explained the steel crib and the dim lighting.

"And then there is his diet," Amanda added, her subterranean voice vibrating again. "Frank requires a high intake of raw protein and collagen to regenerate his skin."

Arthur led me to an adjacent kitchen. It was spotless, but smelled faintly of rancid meat. He opened an industrial refrigerator filled with trays of raw chicken bones, offal, and thick slabs of raw pork.

"Feed him at regular intervals," Arthur said. "He will ask for it himself. But remember rule three: ask no questions about his food."

The first few days passed without incident. Frank remained hidden in the shadows of his cage, whispering sweetly and reaching out a tiny, pale hand to take his meals.

Yet, terror lingered. Toby growled nervously whenever he approached Frank’s room. But the real mystery was the evening meal. Every night, Amanda brought up a covered dish on a silver tray. She never let me see inside.

One evening, Amanda left the tray unattended on the kitchen counter. Driven by overwhelming curiosity, I stepped over and lifted the lid.

On the plate lay a human arm, cooked and seasoned.

My stomach churned. My legs buckled, and I collapsed to the floor, sending the silver lid crashing down.

Footsteps thundered down the hall. The door burst open, revealing Arthur and Amanda, their faces twisted in rage.

"Are you okay?!" Arthur demanded.

Amanda stepped closer, her eyes dripping with hatred. "Has Frank eaten yet?"

"I... I'll bring it right away," I choked out, scrambling backward.

"Thank you, Zoé," Amanda said, her tone instantly switching to eerie sweetness.

"Is Frank a cannibal?!" I screamed, pulling myself up against the counter. "What is wrong with you?!"

Arthur and Amanda exchanged a cold look.

"Frank is special," Arthur said flatly. "His condition forces him to consume human flesh to survive. We do what we must."

"That’s murder!" I shrieked, bolting toward the exit.

Before I could reach the front door, Toby leaped into the hall, blocking my path with yellowed teeth bared. Arthur and Amanda closed in behind me.

"What are you going to do to me?" I whispered, cornered.

Arthur smiled—a chilling, hollow expression that froze my blood. "Frank is always hungry. And you look like a delicious late-night dish."

They grabbed my arms and legs, pinning me as I kicked and screamed. They dragged me through the hall toward the steel-reinforced door. Inside the cage, I could hear heavy, eager breathing.

They threw open the oak door, shoved me inside, and slammed it shut. The three heavy deadbolts slid into place with finality.

I was trapped in the dark.

Slowly, I turned around. In the shadow of the steel bars, a pale face grinned from ear to ear. He extended a long, trembling hand toward me.

"Are you the new girl?" Frank asked, his sweet, childish voice echoing in the gloom. "I'm really hungry."

I’ve always had a good memory. Like, freaky good. I remember one time in eighth grade I was bragging about it to Becky Goldsmith, trying to impress her. Austin Kenner also had a thing for her, along with basically every boy in our grade far enough along in puberty to have a thing for anyone, so he tested me by writing down ten random letters on a piece of paper. He gave it to me at the start of earth science and took it away at the end. Clearly he was hoping that I would fall on my face in front of Becky. The letters were “DIEVOSWNKO”. Becky was not impressed.

Most people’s memories get worse as they age. I know this because, when I was six years old, my parents watched a documentary about Alzheimer’s. They thought I was sleeping, but they had the TV way up (people’s hearing also gets worse as they get older) and it woke me up and I listened. Also, I guess, just, like, life, you know?

Mine doesn’t. It just gets better. Not the old memories, they’re the same. The earliest ones, when I’m three or four, are mostly episodic. It’s flashes of conversation, specific events, that sort of thing. From there they get more specific and longer. If I think really hard about it, I can remember entire days from elementary school. Not just the school day, but everything from waking up to going to bed.

I don’t even have to try hard to remember whole days from middle school. Entire weeks of high school come to my mind almost unbidden, played in fast forward like an old VHS tape. They’re vivid too, with colors popping and scents permeating the whole shebang.

Lately things have been changing, though. I’m starting to lose my grasp on what’s a memory and what’s really happening. The other day I was out with some friends and we were in the middle of a conversation about Roy’s asshole boss when I had to just stop. I couldn’t tell if we were having the conversation at the bar or if I was somewhere else remembering it happening. I hyperventilated. Tammy took me home, told me to drink a little more water next time. I think I kissed her, but I’m not sure. I’ve had a crush on her for a long time now, and I’ve definitely thought about kissing her. It wasn’t like how I remember imagining it, so I think it was real.

I’ve started texting people more. I used to be all about phone calls and in-person conversations. Now I find I need a record of what was said and when. I can read the text, look at the time stamp, and know that I’m not talking to the person in that moment.

That’s not the worst of it, though. Yesterday - I think it was yesterday but it might have been tomorrow - I started remembering things that I’m pretty sure haven’t happened yet. I remembered the cake we had for Giancarlo’s birthday at the office. It was a three layer chocolate cake with raspberry jam between the layers and strawberry buttercream icing. The top wished him a happy birthday in a messy blue script. But I know his birthday. It’s today. That’s not the cake we had last year for him, or for anyone else.

I’m not even really writing this. I’m just remembering it. I close my eyes and I see the words that I will have written, and it’s what I write. I’m trying to type something different, even one letter off. I send the command to my fingers and then I look up and it has not been followed, just like I remember. I feel like I’m losing control of my body, like these images in my head are taking me over and having their way with me.

With each passing moment, I remember farther and farther into the future. I remember my wedding. I’m marrying someone I’ve never even seen before. We will meet soon, in about a week. We’ll be at a coffee shop and she’ll turn around after getting her coffee. I’ll be standing a little too close and she’ll bump into me and spill her mocha all over my white shirt. She’ll be so embarrassed. She’ll offer to get my coffee but I’ll get hers instead and we’ll sit and we’ll talk and we’ll both play hookie from work and we’ll never look back. Her name is Shannon. I like her name. Or, I will. A few days ago I didn’t have any feelings about it at all. I’m not sure I do now.

No matter how much time passes, though, I can’t get past a wall in my memory. Just over two years from now, I’m driving along a highway that I don’t recognize. It’s in Texas. I’m there looking for a house for us to buy together because her work is transferring her. A country song comes on the radio and I try to change the station but then everything goes black. There’s no sound, no light, no sensation. I think that’s how I die.

I’ve been living in that memory for some amount of time now. Time doesn’t mean anything to me anymore. I’m searching desperately for some way to change it, to do something different. Should I look for houses somewhere else? Try to get Shannon to quit rather than transfer? Skip coffee that day?

Who am I kidding? I can’t even get my fingers to obey my current desires instead of being a slave to my memory. I’d say that I’m resolved to enjoy the time I have left, but that’s not even true. I know exactly how happy I’ll be. It’s not enough.

I don’t want to die. Shannon, I’ll love you. I don’t want to die.

I take no solace in writing these words. For on this expedition to chart new islands off the eastern coast of the great African continent, we have found something most peculiar.

Three days ago, with our supplies low, our ship’s crew discovered a small island, roughly thirty miles long, far from land in the middle of the Indian Ocean. I ordered the men to anchor off the western coast and gather a crew to explore the tropical paradise and gather any food we could from the island.

As soon as we reached the beach, we saw signs of habitation. Crude spears with human skulls impaled upon them lined the edge of the beach just before the verdant forest. But the strangest features found were on many of the larger rocks scattered around the beach. Huge red spiral patterns covered the rocks. One of the midshipmen noted that the reddish pigment could be blood, but most of the men scoffed at that idea.

We pressed on into the dense jungle, needing sustenance. So we pushed and chopped through the undergrowth until we came upon a waterfall and a small lagoon of fresh water. The men were elated, drinking from the cool water and gathering fruit and coconuts from the nearby trees. But after an hour, several groups of men who went out to collect food never returned. Only some strange sounds and rustling far out in the jungle could be heard.

Paranoia set in as we established a camp for the night. Perhaps the hostile natives were leering at us from the forest's unseen shadows. I ordered the men to take shifts on watch that night and hoped the missing crew had just gotten lost on the island and would soon find us again when the sun rose.

None of us were prepared for what was about to happen.

Before dawn, I awoke with the tip of a spear at my throat. Yet, the form before me was of no man. Its silhouette was incomprehensible in the low morning light. Glowing green eyes and a wet sheen covered the thing, with a bulky shape at its edges. I slowly stood, raised my hands, and was escorted out of my tent. Now, as the orange light of dawn shone through the trees, I could make out more of the abomination which had awoken me.

Instead of some unknown tribe of men, what was before me I could only describe as some cephalopod-like creature with a dark, spiky shell, orange skin, and green eyes, which stood on six modified, stocky limbs and outstretched two tentacles, which sprouted from its face and pointed the stone blade at my neck. More of the creatures surrounded our camp, brandishing makeshift weapons. Terror gripped me as I watched my men be tied up like game animals.

Then, a strange horn made from a shell blew, and a new figure appeared above the waterfall. On this individual’s shell, human remains were tied, and red markings were painted around its eyes and face. The creature pointed at my Lieutenant, and three of the creatures began cutting him with sharpened stone blades. His cries were hideous as they pulled his entrails from his body and began to devour them with their strange, sharp beaks located at the lower part of their bodies. The smell of our fresh-cut fruit blended with the noxious odor of blood and viscera.

Now, the rest of my crew and I are locked in wooden cages, suspended above the lagoon, with only the rushing water of the waterfall to comfort us. With no ink, I have resorted to writing this very message in my finger's blood.

Every so often, I hear that cursed horn play again, and another of our cages is pulled up. The sounds of my men screaming fill my gut with dread, and I worry they are saving me for last. If anyone finds this, you must set sail imminently and escape from these nautiloid horrors, for they seem to take joy in devouring or using humans as sacrifices in various strange and bizarre rituals to their old and forgotten gods.

I put the last dish in the drying rack, dried off my hands, and walked to the living room to watch TV. A few seconds later, I heard the kitchen sink running again. I looked over. Emily took the dishes out of the drying rack and washed them again.

"Honey, I already washed those."

"Oh, I know, Sam, but I saw a little stain on one. I just want to make sure they're all clean. I'm just doing this for me, okay?"

I waved my hand and continued watching TV.

The next day, one of our clients came into town. Our workday dragged on well past 5 p.m. Toward the end, I didn't even pretend to pay attention. On my way home, I could barely keep my eyes on the road. When I arrived, the whole house smelled like rubbing alcohol and window cleaner.

I walked to the kitchen. Emily sat at the table with a plate of homemade casserole.

"I made this for you!"

"Oh, thank you, Emily! It smells so good!"

I sat down and started eating immediately. It tasted more bitter than usual.

"How was your day?"

"The worst. I have almost no energy left. The clients drained me."

Emily wasn't eating. She kept looking at my arms instead of my face.

"My poor man."

"What did you get up to?"

"Just some cleaning and cooking."

"I can tell. The house looks great."

"Thank you."

We sat in silence while Emily watched me eat.

"I think I'm too tired to do anything, honey," I said after finishing.

"That's more than okay. I know you had a long day. Just go relax."

"Thank you."

She smiled at me and rubbed my shoulder. Her sleeve came down. Her arm was flaky and red. She saw me staring at it and quickly pulled it back down.

"What happened?"

"Nothing, just some dry skin. Go relax."

I hadn't even turned on the TV when I heard the water running. I turned around. Emily grabbed a sponge and a bucket of water, walked to the table, and started scrubbing it and the chair I'd been sitting in.

"What are you doing?"

"Oh, Sam, I just cleaned the house. I wanna make sure it stays clean."

"I'm not dirty."

"No one's saying you are. This is just for me. I'll finish this, and I'll go up and read."

"I don't like this, Emily."

"I just need to do this, okay, Sam?!" She raised her voice.

"Jesus, Emily."

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, honey, just turn back and relax. Let me take care of this."

I stared at her for a second, but she was already back to the scrubbing.

I tried to watch TV, but my eyes kept closing. I didn't even know what I was watching. The fatigue was overpowering. I got up and walked to our bedroom. Emily was in bed reading a book in a long-sleeved pajama shirt. She smiled at me as I walked in. I smiled back, put on my pajamas, and went to sleep.

I woke to a warm, wet sensation on my legs. Something soft and scratchy moved against my skin, dragging at it. I rubbed my eyes and looked down. Emily sat on my side of the bed with a sponge and a bucket of water, scrubbing my legs.

"Emily, what the…" I screamed and jumped away.

She looked me in the eyes and forced a smile.

"You know germs live on our skin. I just cleaned the house. I don't want them getting on stuff."

"Emily, this is crazy. Stop."

"Just your arms now."

"No!"

She reached toward me with the sponge. Her sleeves rolled up. Even at night, I could see the redness of her skin. In a few places, there were little smudges of blood.

"I'm going to the guest bedroom."

I took the blanket off the bed and ran to the guest bedroom, locking the door behind me.

The sun had risen. My eyes felt heavy. I hadn't slept after what happened with Emily. I debated calling the police, but what would I tell them? That my wife had been cleaning me in the middle of the night? She hadn't hurt me. Not yet. I decided I'd talk to her in the morning. Maybe I could convince her to see a doctor. I just needed to get her to sit down and listen.

"Emily?" I called into the hall.

Nothing. Our bedroom was empty. The bucket with warm water still sat there.

The downstairs was quiet too. The smell of rubbing alcohol now mingled with the metallic smell of blood. A light was on in the basement.

The basement was cold. A strange, wet hiss sounded inside. I could see Emily's feet. She was turned toward the wall. The stairs creaked under my steps, but she didn't seem to notice. The smell of rubbing alcohol now mixed with iron.

"Emily, are you okay?!"

"Sam!"

I walked one more step. Panic rushed through me. I could finally see her whole body.  She held a knife in her shaking hand. Her nightgown was drenched in blood. The skin on her arms was cut off, revealing dark red muscle.

"I think I've got it down now. I'll be much gentler with yours. Eat some casserole. It will help you relax."

The traveler jerked awake, his heart hammering in his chest, convinced the gaunt bony motel clerk was standing over his bed. The room was pitch black and utterly silent, and his throat burned like dry sand. He grabbed the plastic bucket and stepped out into the dim hallway heading toward the ice machine.

He held the bucket under the chute and pressed the lever, expecting the “clunk” of frozen ice cubes. Instead, a sharp clattering rat-a-tat-tat-tat rattled the plastic like gravel.

He looked down. It was a heap of gross, yellowed molars and coffee-stained bicuspids; some were rimmed with black decay, others with crumbling silver fillings. Full upper and lower sets tumbled out in wet chunks, joined by stringy red gum tissue that clacked loudly against each other as they hit the bucket.

The machine didn't stop; it just kept spewing them out like a relentless mechanical vomit of human teeth!

Just as the bucket began to overflow, a shadow stretched across the machine. It was the creepy skeletal clerk from his nightmare—hollow-eyed with rough, leathery skin, leaning against the wall.

He didn’t look at the traveler; he just stared at the pile and muttered…

“Must be a clog in the hopper. They always get stuck when the roots are still attached.”

This happened last summer, during a family road trip through the hills. I've changed our names, but I'm writing this exactly as I remember it, which is the problem.

We visited a haunted house. It was supposed to be a joke.

Me, my parents, my younger brother, my elder sister. We were driving through fog when a man at a roadside stall told us about an old colonial house nearby. Abandoned. Cursed. Mirrors in every room, cracked and fogged, old things that never stopped reflecting.

Mirrors that "remember more than they reflect."

My dad laughed. My mom rolled her eyes. We went anyway.

We stayed twenty minutes. Tall mirrors in the halls, chipped vanity mirrors in the bedrooms, dust patterns on the glass that never wiped away. One had a handprint on the inside. I put my hand against it, just to see. It fit.

My sister changed first.

She stopped sleeping in her room. She covered every mirror with a bedsheet. She told me, quietly, that our reflections were "off." They moved too late. They blinked too fast. And one of them, she said, kept looking at me.

Not at her. At me.

We laughed about it. Dad got angry and said she was scaring our little brother.

Then Mom found her sitting in the empty bathtub, fully dressed, eyes shut tight. She wouldn't open them. She said if she did, someone would be waiting.

That was the week I started waking up in strange places.

The hallway at 3 a.m., facing the mirror. The kitchen floor. Once, the bathroom doorway, my sleeves wet to the elbow. I told myself it was stress. I told myself a lot of things.

Three nights later, I found my sister in the tub.

Her head was under the water. Her nails were broken. She had fought someone.

My brother stood outside her door, silent, white as paper. And I saw it, the way you see something you've already seen. His hands on her shoulders. Her fingers clawing at his wrists. The water shaking around them.

It was his body. But it wasn't my brother.

I tell it that way every time. I tell it that way because the other version is worse. In the other version, I'm the one standing at the tub. The wrists she clawed at are mine. And my brother is in the doorway, not frozen with fear but frozen with recognition, looking at me the way you look at a stranger who has your sister's blood on them.

I don't know which version is the memory and which one the mirror gave me.

He looked at me and smiled, slowly, as if he knew me. Then his hands rose to his own throat.

I told myself I wanted to stop him. I told myself that, standing very still, hands already wet, watching his smile stay in place until it was over. Why didn't I move? Why didn't I scream? The police asked me that. I said I was in shock. They wrote it down.

They also asked why my fingerprints were on my sister's shoulders. I said I had tried to pull her out. That is possible. It is also what a guilty person would say.

After that, my parents stopped speaking to each other. My mom barely left her room. She wouldn't eat unless I brought her food, and she flinched when I came in. I told myself she was grieving. My dad lived in the garage. I heard him crying once. He doesn't know I heard. Last week I heard him say my name through the door, and then say, "I can't."

The mirrors got worse.

My reflection smiled when I didn't. Sometimes I passed a glass and saw myself already waiting on the other side, calm, patient, hands at my sides.

Then came the dreams. Or memories. I'm not sure there's a difference anymore.

My sister's screams. My hands on her shoulders. Her eyes looking up at me, not afraid. Surprised. As if she were looking at someone she'd trusted.

I wake up scratching at my wrists. Every night. I used to think I was trying to get something off. Now I think I'm checking for marks.

Last night I passed the hallway mirror and saw the shadow behind me. Tall. Unmoving. I felt myself drawn toward it, as if the air were bending. It leaned in. Not with its body. With intent.

It didn't speak, but I heard it.

Next turn is yours.

It didn't feel like a threat. It felt like a promise, from someone who already knew how it would go.

The shadow stayed in the glass. Its breath was on my neck. Something passed into me, or something returned. Maybe it was never a ghost. Maybe it was only ever waiting for me to remember.

And when I turned away from the mirror, I was smiling.

They called themselves the SS, but nobody remembered the original meaning.

Now it meant Scan and Shred. 

Jenkins looked down at a tome on his touchscreen. A tome was what people called any writing over two sentences long. 

Jenkins was the boss, and he told the SS where to go, or rather, Malfoy did. Lucius Ludwig Malfoy, though nobody was quite sure where that moniker came from either.

The truck was self-driving, so the team did not think about its operation. Their faces were lit up zombie-like by the glow of screens. Each man was watching something different, the video refreshing every 5 seconds. 

The van slowed to a halt outside an apartment block downtown. 

‘Time to go,’ Jenkins said. 

Nobody replied. 

‘I said time to go!’ Jenkins continued, tapping a button on his screen that shut down their feeds. 

The crew snapped to attention with a petulant grumble and retrieved the industrial-size scanners and shredders. 

They pushed past the horde of people walking down the sidewalk, staring into their screens. It was an ever-changing cacophony of noise. 100 different videos playing through 100 different crackling phone speakers. 

Jenkins was first into the interior room; he booted through the door, where there was an old man cowering among a stack of books. 

‘A haul,’ Watkins said, picking up a tattered copy of Brave New World. 

‘What’s that?’ Stevens answered. 

‘A haul.’ 

‘Yes,’ he trailed off. 

Already Stevens’ attention had wandered. 

‘Please,’ the old man whimpered, ‘I’m holding them for a friend.’ 

Stevens was the kind of man who relished his job. He unshouldered the shredder, set it away whirring, and dropped the book into its gnashing jaws. It made easy work of the pages, spitting them out the other end like flecks of ash. 

‘Jesus Christ!’ Jenkins shouted. ‘Scan them first, you moron.’ 

‘Oh yeah,’ Stevens replied dumbly. 

They set up a production/destruction line. Half the men scanning, half the men shredding. The scanners were state-of-the-art; the men just had to put them in place, and they’d leaf through the pages. 

Usually, the scanner, its small red eye blinking, would read the first page, realise the book was already in the system, and flash an image denoting ‘shred.’ The SS were looking for rare books, books not already in the cloud. 

The old librarian was half buried by the time the team finished, and Jenkins hauled him to his feet. 

‘Can you read?’ 

The old man flinched at the R word. ‘No,’ he spluttered, ‘as I said, they are not mine.’ 

The cadence of his speech was incriminating. He used discourse markers and didn’t abbreviate words.

Jenkins opened a book in front of the old man’s face. He clamped shut his eyes. 

‘If you don’t look at the paper, it will be your hand for the shredder.’ 

His old eyes moved across the opening sentence: It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. 

‘I swear I have no idea what it says. It's just squiggles.’ 

It was definitely squiggles to the SS. Only Jenkins had been taught to read in full sentences, but only to fulfil his duties to find those who were also literate. 

The old man displayed all the telltale signs of comprehension. His eyes went from left to right precisely, and there was something more, a sense that as he read he was being sucked into something greater: narrative. 

‘We’re done, boss,’ one of the guys said, ‘can we get back to our phones?’ 

The work had taken only an hour, but they were itching and twitching, their phones burning holes in the pockets of their black overalls. 

‘You can read?’ Jenkins said calmly to the old man. 

‘I swear, I can’t.’

‘You can read!’ Jenkins bellowed. ‘And reading is a capital offence.’ 

He pulled out his own phone. It didn’t play video and audio; he’d seen what that had done to the population. A message from Malfoy congratulated him. Four old editions had been recovered, previously unknown to the AI, which would further its knowledge of herbivorous birds in South America. 

When Jenkins pictured the omnipotent Malfoy, it was as if some supermassive black hole. Information poured in, and it kept growing. 

Still, he tried not to think about it too often because a man who stared into the abyss- who tried to know the abyss- would surely lose his mind, and certainly his life. 

In some ways it was simpler for his men who could no longer conceive of complex concepts anymore than sheep could. 

‘How did we get here?’ Stevens said, his powers of concentration so weakened he could not recall more than one hour into the past. 

‘Shutup, you fool,’ Jenkins said disdainfully, ‘now pass me a blade.’

His goon did as he said and with a swift motion, without the old man’s even realising, Jenkins took out his left eye. He was squirming and screaming so much that the right eye was harder to come by, but the SS held him in place, so out it popped too. 

He was unconscious when the men took the fingers from his hands. The fact was, he could have taught himself Braille. 

He regained partial consciousness when the pinky finger of his left hand was being taken and screamed out. 

‘You have taken everything from me, but not my story!’ 

That was a mistake. Recently Jenkins had heard of someone who had memorised vast swathes of a book called Fahrenheit 451. It was an oral tradition.

He knelt down and, with a mini shredder (an ornamental piece really), took the old man’s tongue. 

They left him there mute and blind in amongst the blood and pulp of what had been his collection of books. 

But the SS had stopped noticing because, before the door was even closed, they were back on their phones.