Carl A.S. Bystrom

4:17

^{A Novella}

Dedicated to Joon Chang

They will be appalled at the sight of each other and will waste away because of their sin.

—EZEKIEL 4:17

Content Warning/Trigger Warning:

This text contains multiple references to sex, violence, sexual assault, trauma, and death.

AUTHOR’S NOTE:

4:17 BEGAN AS A SHORT FILM conceived and created for the 2009 48-Hour Film Project International Shootout (December 2009) by 3T Productions, a small crowd of creative and enthusiastic souls led by director Joon Chang.

After a hectic evening of brainstorming and story development, I frantically typed through the night attempting to capture the best bits in a script. We began shooting at 5:00am the next morning. Thirty-six hours later 4:17 was ‘in the can.’

Film racing is a very collaborative process, so credit for concept, plot, character, and story rightly belongs to the entire cohort of participants.

4:17 harbored far more potential than we could capture with our limited resources over a single weekend. It has been my delight to finally revisit the world with this novella and to discover and follow each character on their individual journey through the collapse of civilization.

If you have ten minutes to spare, I encourage you to watch the original film here—

https://vimeo.com/9249489

PART 1

Premises

TREY

Still sore from the punch he’d thrown the night before, Trey stretched his fingers wide then clenched them into a tight fist. He didn’t know if the kid’s nose had broken but it felt good to imagine the possibility. He had no patience for belligerent little punks who assumed there were no consequences. There were always consequences.

Okay, maybe the guy didn’t deserve a smack in the face, but he shouldn’t have peed right there on the sidewalk. It’s not like he was homeless or strung out, just a drunk-assed college boy without the grace to hold it for a restroom or even a bush. Trey noticed his shoe dampening in the stream just as the kid turned from the wall, zipping his pants, a big grin plastered across his face.

Consequences.

Trey knew about consequences. His foreman hadn’t called in four days. There was plenty of work; they’d recruited him for the soil delivery at the mini-mall, a complete re-landscaping that could occupy a full team for at least two weeks. Trey figured they didn’t ping him on the second day because they’d have to pick him up. The cops impounded his truck the week before. He wasn’t drunk, just driving with a suspended license. They took the rig anyway, which meant bumming a ride for any piece work.

It also meant he’d have to ignore any calls for the Tree Jesus. Not that anyone ever called. Three months earlier, Trey spun up his own business. He placed a Craigslist ad—“Need to resurrect your garden? Call the Tree Jesus!”—and even set up Twitter and Facebook accounts. The old wheelbarrow and ladder he’d bought from his boss now lay useless in lock up with his other tools in the bed of the truck.

“What’s the problem officer?”

“Unsecured load. Can I see your license please?”

His foreman guffawed when Trey related the tale of the traffic stop. “You’re a piece of work, TJ.”

TJ —Trey Jenkins, Tree Jesus, Tittie Junky, Tail Jumper, Tough Joe.

Total Joke.

Trey wanted a shot. Needed a shot. The craving spiked like an awl just behind his eyes. He shook his head but that just sharpened the pain. If he held still, closed his eyes, and breathed, the jabbing might recede into a dull ache, but he’d lost that level of patience long ago.

He winced a little with each step as he tried to saunter along the all too familiar sidewalk past the afternoon’s iterations of the same old characters. He flashed a wan smile at a twenty-something party girl in fishnets, but she only glared back before stopping to watch a thrift-store-hipster with a soul patch kneel to re-chalk his espresso cart sandwich board. Her fate seemingly hinged on the day’s special. A sidewalk preacher with a head-mic blared about the End Times through a tinny speaker. Everyone avoided his eyes as they walked by. An old woman carrying four grocery bags barreled down the center of the sidewalk forcing the espresso cart dude to stand and move out of her way. He bumped into a toothless homeless guy and didn’t even apologize. Trey stepped behind a group of frat boys waiting at the take-out burger window to let the old lady storm by, then kept walking. All the same people doing all the same things. Middle-aged Total Joke slouching in his hoodie as he shuffled toward the only bar that might spot him a shot of Fireball.

“Hey!” A shout from behind him. “Ugly!”

Trey chuckled to himself. Boys will be boys.

“Yo loser!” The voice got closer. “I’m talking to you.”

Trey turned, curious about the scene, not imagining himself the target of the heckles until he noticed the square of tape stretched across the frat-boy’s nose. The kid from the night before, but this time with three clean-cut, broad-shouldered comrades. Lacrosse or crew, Trey figured.

He didn’t hesitate for a second, jabbed straight for the nose again, but the boy ducked back, real fear on his face, and the others rushed forward. They threw him hard against the brick of a retired bank building, sending a blast of white across his eyes, sharper and longer lasting than his withdrawal pains and exponentially more maddening.

“You’re a dead man!” Trey said, challenging a pair of bright blue eyes. The chiseled young man collapsed in front of him. The two behind him stepped forward, punching his guts. Trey saw only white.

“Charlie?” He heard the concern as he slipped down the wall, his accosters having backed away. Trey’s name wasn’t Charlie, but he’d take the sympathy. His eyes cleared and fell on the three guys hovering over the fourth, still prone on the pavement.

“What did you do to him!” Tape Nose glared at Trey.

What? Trey thought, staring back. ‘You’re a dead man?’

Tape Nose slumped to the ground.

The other two turned to the second of their fallen bros. “Kyle?” And then to Trey. “Jesus! What did you do?”

“What?” Trey said, then thought: You’re a dead man. You’re a dead man. Meeting their eyes in turn.

They collapsed next to their friends.

Trey laughed out loud.

Was this some kind of wicked blessing? He stood, shooting wary glances to either side. What had he done? Had he just wasted four frat-boys with his mind?

The fishnet girl took out her phone and started filming the kids lying on the ground. Trey pulled up his hood and walked away, fast.

By the time he reached the bar Trey had exercised his new power twice more. He missed a few times before he realized that he needed to meet their eyes. He downed a young woman—probably a whore given her short skirt, belly-button ring, and how she’d held his gaze—gender didn’t matter, calling her a ‘dead man’ worked fine. The other was just a sad old beggar no one would miss.

He left no trace; no scars, no weapons, no fingerprints, nothing. No one could bust him for what went on in his head, even if it did come true. Trey stood tall and his chest swelled with confidence. He was an angel of death—all powerful and totally immune.

You’re a dead man.

You’re a dead man.

He pushed through the heavy swinging door and picked off the lady bartender first, then a guy on a stool. Then another.

You’re a dead man.

He’d clear the place out and drink in peace.

He stepped forward toward a stout little copper-skinned guy crouching next to his fallen companion.

Yep, he’s really gone. Your turn now, just look up. There you go. You’re a….

Trey never finished the thought.

OUTSIDE

A thick haze blanketed the sky, casting an even, ambient grey across the cityscape. Nothing moved but the slow drift of mist. Skyscrapers stood dark in the distance. Only a handful of lights snaked into the scene tracing the few undisrupted lines of the collapsed power grid.

A figure clad in faded greens and blues—dirty cotton and worn denim—ran furiously across a deserted parking lot. The runner stopped and knelt to retrieve a labelless but intact tin can from the ground next to a pale corpse that lay staring blankly across the pavement. The running man, his breath heavy and fast, glanced warily behind him before sprinting toward a low brick building.

Several seconds later, a second figure slowly crossed the lot and carefully picked her way along a barely discernible path. Bundled against the damp morning air, she inched along the wall of the seemingly abandoned factory. Her dark hair hung loose under her fur lined hood and fell across her brow when she cocked her head to listen.

PHOEBE

Phoebe stared at her phone and tried not to listen to her parents arguing in the other room, but their voices swelled and then her dad swore.

Tonk!

The noise her mother’s head made when it hit the floor sounded like just like what it was—not a watermelon or a coconut or a bowling ball—but a head smacking against tile.

“Mom?” Phoebe stepped warily into the kitchen. Her father’s mouth hung slack and his eyes stared, wide and desperate, as he crouched next to her mother.

“Oh my god,” he said, pulling at her mom’s shirt and lifting her slack body onto his lap. “Oh my god!” He turned his face toward Phoebe, his eyes wide with panic. “Help!”

Too scared to feel anything but urgency, Phoebe desperately helped her dad administer CPR. Blood spurted from her mother’s mouth and eyes and her ribs cracked loudly as her dad’s pushed down on her dead mother’s chest with stiff arms. When Phoebe finally pulled him off, they both collapsed in sobs. When the 9-1-1 call took too long to connect, she retreated from her father’s bellows of frustration to hide in her closet. Hours later she came out to sit in silence next to the body as her father raged inconsolably. The medics never came.

Neither of them understood what had happened until days afterward, at which point the entire world had collapsed. The death of Shelly Anne Hathford shrank to nothing, not even a statistic. No-one kept track. Why would they? Overwhelmed by their own atrocities, no one had time to judge the world at large.

Her mother—not a tragedy, not an anomaly, just one memory among countless others—existed only for Phoebe and her dad. They alone kept her soul alive. But the anguish Phoebe shared with her father, their mutual despair, could not overcome the fact that he, in that moment, now months past, had looked into her mother’s eyes and whispered in his mind: “Die.”

She could never forgive him.

Phoebe’s dad sat on an overturned crate across from her, pitching a handful of thumbnail sized stones, one by one, into a bucket on the floor. He looked as tired as she felt, although they’d both slept better in the last few weeks than they had in months. She wondered if they’d ever feel rested again. The fatigue made her dad look old. Maybe she should feel sorry for him, but instead she wished for the millionth time that he’d died instead of her mother.

“You’ve got such beautiful hair,” Anya said. Softly, as if she were talking to herself. The woman’s fingers pulled gently as she twisted Phoebe’s locks into braids. “I wish Scott would let me do this to his.”

Phoebe guffawed. Scott’s hair clung to his head like a giant fur ball. All matted and tangled and messed up with his equally dread-locked beard. He looked like some crazed Muppet or something. Phoebe didn’t understand how Anya let him get near her, let alone kiss her and… whatever else. Not that Phoebe’s hair looked better, exactly—droopy and oily and unwashed—but the idea of braiding the mess on top of Scott’s head….

“You’re too nice,” Phoebe said, finally responding to Anya’s compliment.

That was true, Anya was nice. Thank God they’d found her. Or thank God Anya’s little tribe had found them. Phoebe had never felt as alone as she had over the months since it all started, wandering through all the chaos with a father she barely knew and could never truly trust. Having another female around made her feel safer. It didn’t matter that Anya was as dangerous as anyone else.

Anya wasn’t the type of girl Phoebe would have hung out with before. Snooty and self-important, Anya wore makeup and dresses and fancy furs that she’d doubtless scavenged from some abandoned department store. Even in this disaster of a world, the woman dressed like a high-end escort. Phoebe only wore jeans and whatever layers the weather required. Yet despite Anya’s ultra-fem appearance, she radiated strength, and stubbornness. She didn’t bow down to the men at all. Just having another female, a comrade in this cruel new world, gave Phoebe a tiny glimmer of something like hope. The fact that her new friend strutted around like she stepped right out of Mean Girls didn’t really hurt, either.

Anya pulled gently on her hair and Phoebe let her head tilt back. The tension melted from her shoulders. Phoebe had inherited curls from her dad which she wore long, despite his suggestion that she just hack it all off. Probably because it was something she could control, something that was hers, she kept it long despite the maintenance burden. Yet another reason to appreciate Anya.

“I wonder what’s taking them so long,” Anya said.

“It’s getting harder and harder to find food close by,” Phoebe’s dad said. “You can only scavenge the same places so many times.”

The three of them sat in a corner by the stairs waiting for Scott, Anya’s boyfriend, and Derek, another of their group, to return from their foraging expedition. Phoebe’s father (she refused to call him Chad despite his insistence that it would make her feel more equal) still demanded she remain in his sight at all times. So, while Anya braided Phoebe’s hair, he sat throwing rocks into a can. He looked drained and ragged, his chin rough with stiff whiskers and cheeks smudged with grease from his latest maintenance project.

To be fair, living in the basement of an old factory building didn’t fill any of them with glee, but it was such an improvement over wandering the streets that Phoebe sometimes felt kind of giddy. Her dad had changed too. Maybe he wasn’t happy, exactly, but he at least he had things to focus on other than all the dangers, real and imagined, threatening his daughter.

They’d walked for days in a long line of people moving from one nowhere to another—she called it ‘The Parade.’ One afternoon, maybe a week in, a gang rushed out at them from a side street cursing and grabbing people. In an instant the slow, trudging procession of refugees transformed into a cluster of panicked killers. In her head, Phoebe repeated the single word: “Die, die, die”—just has her father had coached her.

She didn’t know what she actually remembered and what she only imagined later. She couldn’t be sure whether she’d glanced up, chanting, at one of the panicked boys and whether it was the same boy she’d found the next day lying among the uncounted dead, but since that moment Phoebe refused to defend herself with the despicable word and instead strove simply to stare at the ground whenever threatened.

The next day, Phoebe proclaimed to her father that she hadn’t been cursed, that the power didn’t work for her. She only knew for certain that she hadn’t meant to and vowed that she never would again. She didn’t like feeling helpless, needing protection, but the thought of killing another sad, frightened person felt far more burdensome than relying on her father.

Phoebe had always considered herself an easy kid. Independent. Self-sufficient. She tried to act responsibly and respectfully and rarely felt any need to rebel. Looking back on her childhood—before the stark line demarcated by the Curse, before her mother had fallen dead on the kitchen floor, before the world had collapsed under the weight of random, trivial murder—she could see that her father had always played the role of the child in the family. Sometimes she resented him for stealing her chance at a rebellious youth.

Her clearest memories of her mother were of rolling eyes and lowered tones, commiserations about Phoebe’s dad’s latest oversight—forgetting to make her lunch or leaving her at school until the vice principal called to remind him. With a prod from her mom, Phoebe would nod and absolve him—she the parent, he the child—as he apologetically blamed his lapse on some new passion, some project of unexplained urgency that would inevitably lead to a half-finished garden shed or books strewn throughout the living room because, this week, organizing by genre made so much more sense than by author.

In contrast to her dad, and probably mainly to set herself apart from him, Phoebe took pride in keeping her shit together. She got decent grades, had a few BFFs in a crowd of acquaintances, and didn’t get bullied. She might complain about her Super-mom and flaky dad, but she had it better than a lot of kids. After barfing once at a party, she stubbornly avoided alcohol and drugs, but didn’t judge those who partook. Phoebe considered herself boring, and maybe a bit naive, but that felt right to her.

One summer, she and her two best friends made a game of shoplifting at the big indoor mall—competing for who could get out of the store with the largest or most expensive item. She didn’t ever win, mostly nabbing bracelets and earrings, before the game abruptly ended forever when one of the other girls didn’t come back to the food court. They found out later that she’d been grabbed by a department store security guard. This stopped her cold, not only because it transformed what she’d considered a kind of harmless sport into a bona-fide criminal activity, but also because Phoebe wasn’t sure if she would have been as cool under pressure as her friend had been. Having never actually experienced an authoritarian smack-down, she gave herself even odds of completely spilling the beans on their vacation shenanigans instead of claiming to have come to the mall alone to steal for the first time as her friend had done.

After her mom died, after the Curse descended on the world, things went loose faster than she could imagine. Just a night or too after it all started, the circle at the center of their cul-de-sac became a bonfire while unfamiliar voices shouted in belligerent celebration to a chorus of glass bottles shattering on concrete. The noise continued, punctuated by intermittent shrieks—of fear or delight, she didn’t know—until finally hushed by the glow of dawn. That morning, her dad packed up a duffel and they hiked away, joining a long line of others staring at the feet in front of them as they marched into the city.

The hours dragged like days and the weeks passed like hours. Walking took forever, particularly once they left the Parade, which they did after only a week or so, after her dad chased off the umpteenth sleazebag that scooted too close and whispered some sick-breathed proposition into Phoebe’s hair. On their own, they continually sidetracked, ducking away into the bushes or behind a fence every couple of blocks because her dad sensed people or heard the crows call a certain way. His intuition was usually correct, but that didn’t mean she didn’t resent having to run and hide every three minutes.

Protecting her from unwanted advances appeared to be her dad’s highest purpose at that point, which, annoying as it was, suited her just fine. So long as he didn’t talk to her about it.

Phoebe had talked with her mom about sex, but never her dad. She certainly wasn’t going to engage with him about it now. Before everything went south, Phoebe had acquired enough experience to know how boys were built and how eager and persistent they could be. She and her friends had watched some internet porn and pretended it was boring and Phoebe had briefly engaged in some not-quite-sexting—until she blocked the guy after he flooded her phone with pics of his junk and demanded reciprocation. In her only ‘relationship,’ between freshman and sophomore year, she’d worked up the courage for a couple of midnight movie groping sessions before the summer ended. Later that year, she even asked a guy from her host family on a choir trip to teach her how to give a blow job—a lesson that, to his obvious delight, she thoroughly enjoyed. But she was still a virgin when the Curse descended on the world.

She dealt with that particular innocence within a week. She felt like she had to, in an urgent and serious way that she didn’t really understand. There was a boy she’d had a crush on for months—they made a habit of catching each other’s gaze in math class to exchange eye-rolls at Mr. Babani’s endless droning. The guy even walked with her down the hall a couple of times.

Five days after the Curse appeared, just as most everyone was realizing how it worked, she snuck out and trekked two miles to his house. She threw rocks at his bedroom window until he peered out, then climbed up the trellis. The sex was fast and frantic and they cried as they fumbled and fucked and didn’t look at each other’s faces, but it was also important and necessary. She never saw him again. She still didn’t know if he survived.

Not long after that, her dad went into full commando mode and transformed into her one-man security and surveillance team with the singular mission of keeping her safe and alive. Just in time, as far as she was concerned.

After breaking off on their own, they occasionally met a family or a couple and traveled with them for a while, but inevitably someone would panic, and that usually meant someone died. Her dad made sure it wasn’t her, which meant that he killed a lot of folks, sometimes with his eyes and sometimes with an old baseball bat that he’d spiked with nails like some crazy medieval mace. The lucky ones he just chased off by swinging his stick and yelling like an angry dog.

The gangs were the worst. Always men, usually boys about her age, that would whoop and howl and circle them, bobbing in and out in a kind of violent hokey pokey, trying to isolate her from her dad. He taught her some self-defense—nothing formal, just sudden punches to the throat and a quick knee or shin to the balls—and she made good use of it a few times in advance of her dad’s berserker routine.

By all rights, Phoebe should have been horrified, even driven to tears by the mayhem they encountered on a daily basis, but mostly she just felt tired. Tired and thoroughly done with people. She would be happy to never see another human being. Even her dad. Sometimes especially her dad. Not that she didn’t appreciate him, but his presence oppressed her. He constantly checked on her, cautioning or advising or telling her to shush because of some strange sound or silence. She just wanted to be alone, stare at the sky, maybe read, but mostly sleep. She’d give anything to really sleep.

Phoebe and her dad debated for a full day before deciding to join Peter and the others. She didn’t like the idea of being walled in with people, not being able to run, but her dad finally won her over with the argument that sheltering in the basement would reduce their risk exponentially. Despite living at close quarters, they would be dealing with only five other people and wouldn’t need to worry about random encounters or wandering gangs.

So here they sat in that dim basement, her dad mindlessly filling a plastic bucket with pebbles, one toss at a time. Maybe they should have kept walking—but boy did she enjoy the feeling of Anya’s hands in her hair.

A clatter of footsteps echoed from the stairwell behind them and all three of them raised their heads at the sound. Phoebe exchanged a look with her dad. He lifted his hand in a ‘just wait’ gesture, then Derek burst around the corner at the base of the stairs, stumbled, and stopped next to them. He bent, hands on his knees, panting.

“God,” Derek said, between heaving breaths. “It’s crazy out there!”

Anya let go of Phoebe’s hair and reached out to Derek, touching his arm. “Where’s Scott?”

Derek shook his head. His face, obscured by the scarf and short-billed knit hat that he always wore, pointed toward the floor. “He didn’t make it.”

“What?” Anya flashed through a half-dozen expressions—confusion, disbelief, fear, sorrow, anger—before settling into a mask of impassiveness.

Tears swelled in Phoebe’s eyes. Even if his hair stank, Scott was the nicest of the men in the group, always kind and helpful but never asking for anything in return. Other than her dad, Scott was the only one that didn’t gaze at her in that way men always did—assessing, appraising, imagining whatever it was that they imagined. She didn’t pretend Scott had some special nobility of character or anything, just assumed that he got what he needed from Anya, but Phoebe appreciated it just the same.

Derek continued between gasps. “There was another group… they came in… we were scavenging… and….”

The way that he trailed off confirmed that Scott wouldn’t be coming back. Phoebe shot a tearful glance at her dad. He frowned.

“Did you see who did it?” Anya asked.

“You kidding?” Derek replied, still staring at the ground. “I wouldn’t look ’em in the face!”

A sudden clatter of metal echoed from the floor above them. The all looked at the ceiling and froze. Someone else was up there.

INSIDE

The six companions stood in a circle at the center of the brightest room in the basement enclave. The sun’s rays poured in from the windows, reflecting off the whitewashed walls and lighting the dust in hazy gray dots. They all shifted their weight from foot to foot, clenched their hands, and stared at the floor as they contemplated the question before them.

“I don’t think we should bring her in,” Anya pulled her furred coat tighter around her shoulders. “She might be the one who killed Scott.”

Peter straightened to his full height. “I’ve talked to her. I don’t think she knows anything about Scott. She saw Derek come into the building, but the rest is just an accident of timing.”

“I don’t believe in coincidence,” Anya’s disdain rang sharp. “She killed him or she was with the people that did.”

“Even if she was,” Derek said, “could you really blame her?”

“Scott’s dead.” Anya replied. “I’m not going to invite his murderer to dinner.”

“Say what you want, but Scott had to look someone in the eye to die,” Derek said. “I can’t blame anyone for simply surviving.”

“I can.” Anya said, almost hissing the words.

“We’ve got to give her the benefit of the doubt,” Chad said. “None of us would be here if we didn’t…”

“Hey, guys,” Peter interrupted. “Let’s tie up. We don’t need anyone else dying today.”

Everyone fell silent. Each retrieved a bandana from a pocket or lifted a scarf from around their neck and tied it tight over their eyes to ensure that no glance could pass between them. As they secured their defense, their shoulders relaxed and their breath deepened. The tension tangibly eased.

Ray brought a pair of novelty glasses out of his pocket and slipped them over his blindfold. “I think we should let her in,” he said. “Now that she knows we’re here—it’s that or kill her. Besides, we need some more female energy around here anyways.” While speaking, he moved his googly-eyed shades forward and backward like an ogling cartoon-character, in spite of the fact that no-one could see his gesture.

“Whatever.” Phoebe doubtless accompanied her exasperation with an eye-roll behind the fabric stretched tight across her nose.

“Look, the fact is we can’t trust anyone,” Peter said. “Not even ourselves. That’s why we’re all wearing blindfolds.”

“Hey,” Derek said, “speak for yourself.”

“Hey!” Peter’s tone sharpened. “If I get miffed, and look at any of you, and even think about you dropping down dead. You will.”

Silence.

“‘Miffed?’ Really?” Ray chuckled. “Who says ‘miffed?’”

Derek snorted.

“Yeah, miffed.” Peter said. “Just a tiny bit irritated. That’s all it takes for that stray thought to cross my mind. That doesn’t make me an evil person. It’s the exact same for her out there.”

“He’s right.” Chad said. “We don’t know what happened. An accident, self-defense. It doesn’t really matter. We’ve got to give her a chance. We don’t know if she has anything to do with Scott.”

“I still don’t trust her.” Anya’s voice tightened with resolve.

“Maybe that says more about you than it does about her,” Derek said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I’m just sayin’.”

“Please,” Phoebe’s arms spread out in emphasis. “Just stop!”

They stood for a full minute with only the sound of their breathing and the soft rustle of clothing as they swayed and shifted posture.

“Okay.” Chad said, breaking the silence. “Vote. All in favor of letting her in?”

The four men all chimed “Aye” in quick succession.

After a pause, Phoebe added her vote: “Aye.”

Anya huffed.

“Okay,” Ray said, ignoring Anya. “We’re all good then. Let’s eat!”

“I’ll bring her in.” Peter said. He pulled the bandana from his eyes as he turned from the group and headed toward the stairs.

* * *

Seven figures huddled in a small circle, sitting on overturned boxes and crates in a corner of the basement, hunched forward as if around an imaginary fire. Sara, the newcomer, bundled in her fur-lined winter coat, leaned slightly into Peter, who crouched on the floor, perhaps mindful that his lanky body would otherwise tower over the rest of them. On the other side of Sara, Chad sat with his daughter, Phoebe. Across from them, having reached a detente, Anya and Derek shared a crate. All of their faces had turned toward Ray, whose soft, generous presence seemed to radiate warmth, although their eyes meandered in an effort to avoid each other’s gaze.

“I offer this meal up,” Ray said, handing the open cans of tangerines and green beans to his comrades around the circle and raising his in a toast, “to our fallen brothers and sisters.” Six cans lifted in response. “Rest in peace, Scotty.”

The solemnity of the moment washed quickly away as the group welcomed Sara into the fold, telling stories about each other, attempting to encapsulate one another’s charm or wit or tenderness in a pithy recounting of one misadventure or another. All of them had learned early not to dwell on death, that burden simply could not be borne in this new world. They could only move forward. Sara asked questions, laughed at jokes, and soon everyone, even Anya, smiled and warmed to the novelty of a new presence.

* * *

“Noooo!”

Everybody rushed to the source of the bellowing that echoed through the basement and their hackles rose quickly as they took in the scene. Anger and suspicion filled the air. The men tousled, yelling at each other in rage and astonishment.

“Tie up!” Sara shouted. “Tie up! Tie up!” The newcomer secured the scarf around her own eyes and, as the last sound left her mouth, her words mixed with the rustle and thumps of bodies falling to the ground.

Sara and Derek stood with bandanas tied across their faces and their hands outstretched in the suddenly quiet space. Peter hadn’t blindfolded himself. His jaw slack, he slowly spun. Wide-eyed. Stunned.

Four bodies lay around him; Chad, Anya, and Ray had fallen dead, forming a near perfect circle on the floor around Phoebe.

PART 2

Fallen

CHAD

It always happened in the kitchen. Maybe the violence inherent in the act of slicing cucumbers and ripping lettuce tapped a vein of deep rage, or the chore of preparing sustenance for the family inspired a surge of righteous resentment. For whatever reason Shelly always picked that room to lay into him.

Admittedly, making dinner together provided the only space in the day to talk. Shelly’s administrative job followed a standard eight to six. That and the 45-minute commute didn’t leave room for much else. After the requisite parenting of their fifteen-year-old—a relentless exercise in coercion, compromise, and patience—they barely managed to squeeze in food and basic hygiene, let alone talking or laughing or fucking.

Chad adored his wife. She radiated competence. She embodied a rigor that he’d never witnessed in anyone else. He certainly couldn’t match it himself. He felt incredibly lucky that their strengths and deficits meshed so well. Their relationship wasn’t seamless. It definitely had seams. And rips. And creases. Particularly when he was out of work. Which happened more often these days than either of them would prefer. When the inevitable tensions rose between them, Shelly had a way of finding his sore spots and, with her characteristic rigor, poking at them. Sometimes that would get him moving, motivate him, which was good, but it always hurt. And pain sparked his temper, which in turn fed her own.

“Is it really worth five bucks just to flirt with the girl at the stand?” Shelly didn’t mention that it was her five dollars, but he heard it anyway. He wasted her money, money she earned with her time. Probably about six minutes of her workday, he figured. So sorry.

Shelly’s beauty sparkled when she got angry. She looked almost feline with her small body and cascade of wavy hair, and her blue eyes flashed like the hottest part of a candle’s flame. She looked beautiful, but the words stung.

“I didn’t do anything,” he said, his whine irritating even himself. He hadn’t. Not even something simple like asking the barista how she spent her time when she wasn’t slinging coffee. Maybe she was a runner and they could have commiserated about the drizzly autumn weather. Or maybe she was an artist and they could’ve arranged to paint each other. He hadn’t done anything, but he felt guilty anyway. Because he wished he’d been more courageous. Because he would have felt pride at doing exactly the thing Shelly would have a reason to object to, and now he felt chastised despite the fact that he’d wimped out.

The tension in Shelly shoulders and arms strained, like a spring tightening then releasing as her words shot forward like bolts from a crossbow. “Do anything? You never do anything!”

Now that wasn’t fair. It’s true he hadn’t seduced the barista—as if Shelly would have preferred that—but he did things, a lot of things. He played guitar and painted portraits (mostly self-portraits, but some of Shelly or Phoebe, if he could get them to pose for him)and he’d learned a fair number of skills from part-time jobs over the years. He had some basic landscaping so the garden always looked nice, he kept their cars tuned up, and he knew his way around the kitchen, particularly when grilling or frying. All things that Shelly seemed to take for granted because she did ‘real work’ in a real office.

He never should have mentioned that the coffee girl at the grocery store had finally remembered his name, then Shelly wouldn’t have snapped at him about spending his time ogling women instead of looking for a job. Now she was on a roll.

“You never take responsibility.” Shelly’s eyes turned from candle flame to glacial ice. Her attractiveness dissipated, lifted off her like steam, leaving only anger. “How ’bout you do… something?!”

Chad had leaned into a fire and realized too late that it burned. Shelly’s words slammed shut around him like the walls of a cage. He’d been caught, not just by the argument, but by his entire life—his wife, his daughter, the endless demand to ‘do something’ and ‘be somebody.’ If he really had the space to explore, maybe he’d find his true purpose. Maybe if she supported him instead of nagging him all the time. Why did she have to be so mean? It wasn’t as if he didn’t help out, didn’t try.

“God damn you Shelly.” Sometimes he wished she would just go away, leave him once and for all. Or just drop dead. Anything so that he could…

Shelly collapsed on the floor, the knife falling from her hand.

“Mom?” Phoebe’s voice called from the other room.

* * *

Chad snapped awake. Cold sweat covered his skin, the same as every morning since that evening in September. One hundred eighty-six days. One hundred eighty-six nightmares replaying that moment—the first time he’d killed someone. Not just someone. Not some nameless stranger, like so many after—but his wife, his lover, his life partner, the mother of his daughter. One hundred eighty-six days of regret, of paranoia, of fervently protecting his daughter from a world populated by homicidal maniacs who, quite literally, couldn’t control themselves.

Chad couldn’t count the number of people he’d killed over the last six months. He stopped counting soon after he stopped caring. After he realized that half the people he murdered had probably committed suicide and that if he’d only been brave enough, or selfish enough, he would have killed himself too.

The Curse seemed to arrive for everyone on the same day, maybe even the same moment. Within 48-hours the population was decimated. In less than a week, infrastructure around the world collapsed. After an initial blast of panicked social media the internet went quiet even though the cell and wireless services hummed along, empty, for another month or so. When everyone suddenly acquired the power to kill one another with a glance, anarchy descended upon the world. Any and all pretense of order and hierarchy fell away and the life he’d known receded into distant dream-like memory. The world before only felt real when he visited in his sleep.

The first few post-apocalyptic months had been a flurry of encounters and standoffs, brief coalitions and bursts of betrayal. Chad rabidly defended his daughter, wielding a ruthless, wanton distrust that undoubtedly sent many well-meaning and potentially valuable allies to their graves. His commitment only redoubled when, after a few weeks, Phoebe confessed that she didn’t believe she had the power at all and she felt defenseless, unwilling to even glance in the direction of anyone’s face for fear of death. It hadn’t occurred to him that some people might not have the curse.

At some level, everyone shared Phoebe’s reluctance to meet eyes—even if you had the power you might not use it first. Social interaction meant constant tension, with every encounter playing out like a scene from a spaghetti western: gunslingers facing off, evaluating their chances and assessing their own prowess against the quickness of the other.

Chad kept up a constant mental chant whenever he encountered other people: “Die, die, die, die, die.” He vigilantly maintained the refrain as he glanced quickly at faces trying to read expressions and evaluate intention. He couldn’t actually recall the last time he’d looked someone in the eyes without watching them drop dead. But he harbored no regrets about his actions. How could he? He had to assume that everyone did the same. Except Phoebe.

The longevity of this group, holed up in an industrial basement, surprised Chad. He even began to develop a kind of faith in the vision. Peter, the de-facto leader, wielded the power of conviction, a belief that humanity could rise to even this challenge. Given the right set of tools, people could learn to live cooperatively and happily again. Chad might never fully relax and find joy in the presence of others, but Peter’s confidence spread through the group like a contagion. The seven of them had sheltered in the basement of the old factory for almost three weeks and no one had died. When conversations started to turn in the direction of argument, someone would ask to ‘tie-up’—and everyone complied, no question.

Just the act of wrapping a bandana around his head, calmed Chad’s nerves. He sensed the same from all of them. Even when an argument ensued, they felt secure. They rediscovered that disagreements could be productive and that flaring tempers didn’t inevitably end in death. It almost felt normal again, despite the fact that they were all standing around blindfolded.

So the group held together. They cooperated. They improved the space and made it comfortable. Chad showed them all how to frame a wall and they built out rooms and improvised a heating and ventilation system. Chad felt productive, even respected. He applied what he’d learned over the years of manual labor, jumping from job to job, picking up one skill after another. He’d always been a jack-of-all-trades and now that diversity of skills paid real dividends. He added value. He was doing something.

Shelly would have been proud.

It felt almost like family. They ate meals together. They built things. They went out scouting and scavenging. They even played music on absurdly crude, homemade instruments. Only a couple of them could really sing but they all tried. And they laughed. It felt so good to laugh! The camaraderie just kept growing and, even if he couldn’t quite trust them, Chad started bonding with the others. He almost felt safe.

Then they lost Scott.

Chad couldn’t vouch for Sara’s innocence, Anya’s suspicions seemed perfectly reasonable—the woman had arrived directly on the heels of Scott’s death. But he’d argued for the newcomer’s inclusion anyway; he couldn’t condone the hypocrisy of barring entry into their tribe out of fear alone. Every one of them had been offered that chance, they couldn’t deny Sara the same opportunity. Welcoming anyone new meant risk, but he had to trust the system. The processes they cultivated, the culture they developed—they’d built it up not only in the face of danger but specifically to withstand it. Chad doubted their rites and rituals could completely protect them, but he knew with certainty that the only way to improve their little society was to test it.

So far, one night down, everything seemed okay.

* * *

When Chad and Phoebe first arrived, rats and mice pervaded the basement but over the previous weeks he’d closed up several small holes that provided access points for rodents. He created a morning ritual, checking all the windows, doors, closets, and dark corners for signs of intruders—both human and animal. It seemed to be working: he hadn’t seen any fresh droppings in at least three days.

About halfway through his morning rounds, Chad turned a corner and saw the body. Was someone sick? Hurt? It looked like they were wearing Phoebe’s coat. Who would have taken Phoebe’s coat? And her scarf.

His brain refused to process and he stood like a statue. After a few moments or minutes of hours, as if in a horrible sequel to his dream, he ran to where Phoebe lay sprawled on the floor. He pawed her skin and shook her body in panic and bewilderment until a terrible, cold loneliness spread through him. His daughter lay dead in his arms.

“Nooooo!” The long dog-like keening engulfed him, echoing through the emptiness that hollowed his chest. He didn’t realize that he was making the sound until he heard people running towards him.

His body flooded with rage.

“Who did this?!!” He screamed as one face after another appeared before him.

“Chad, we don’t even know what happened.” Peter’s voice sounded distant and dim. Of course he knew what happened—somebody had killed his daughter.

“I know she’s dead!” Chad choked on his own voice. The faces surrounded him now: Peter, Anya, Derek, Sara, Ray. “And I know one of you killed her!”

ANYA

This new woman, Sara, was a time bomb—a Trojan horse preparing to unleash destruction on their small fortress—but no one else could see it. Anya told them they couldn’t trust the newcomer. A stranger shows up just minutes after Scott’s death? Come on! But even Derek, who’d watched Scott die, only scoffed at her.

“Maybe that says more about you than it does about her.” And maybe it did, maybe it said that she wasn’t a goddamn fool.

Some wandering gang ambushed Scott and Derek while they were scavenging an old supermarket. Sara’s gang, Anya knew, although Derek couldn’t offer any details. He hadn’t even looked at the killer’s faces.

Scott’s absence hit Anya in waves. Death itself had become so mundane that shock and outrage were no longer automatic. Everybody died—any one of them might fall at any moment—this had become the visceral reality of their daily lives. Like the others, she took the news as a simple matter of fact, but as the day wore on a bitterness grew inside her. Scott had been her partner, her confidante, her only true friend in this new world. Now he was gone. And Derek hadn’t even given his killer a second glance.

Then, with the decision on whether or not to welcome the stranger in the balance, Phoebe, her only female compatriot, voted against caution. She knew that the group would probably have admitted the new woman regardless, but Anya was hurt and angry that Phoebe hadn’t supported her position. In the weeks since the girl’s arrival, Anya had welcomed her, comforted her, shown her solidarity—as a woman, a friend, and a survivor. They’d forged a tenuous connection—a nascent sisterhood in a world filled with mistrust and death—but Phoebe’s ‘aye’ crushed all that in an instant.

Anya felt certain that Sara was part of the gang that murdered Scott. She’d been sent along to see if there were any others. Now the newcomer had infiltrated their small oasis and stood poised to execute her plan, whatever it might be. And Anya stood alone against her.

Anya had never felt safer than she had with Scott, despite the fact that they’d met during what was surely the Apocalypse. But Scott was gone. She had no one to trust except herself. At least she could say that much now—she knew she could survive and protect herself even without her partner. This hadn’t always been true. Ironically, she’d only found the courage to stand on her own after the whole of civilization collapsed. Before the world fell apart, she’d never thought herself strong enough to feel secure.

Anya spent her childhood in a single wing of a mansion, or maybe it was a castle, outside of Moscow. Her family called it “The Cottage.” Her early life blurred into mush, not because of the years that had passed, but from the monotony of endless days alone in large sterile rooms. Her only company had been the stoic house staff that continually straightened the furniture she displaced while adventuring in fantasy worlds. Her mother, in random fits of guilt, provided sporadic reprieve with frantic shopping sprees at empty malls. Her fondest memory of that time was of being pinned against her seat, engulfed by the engine noise of the low, red, sports-car as her mother accelerated. She imagined herself a cosmonaut rocketing into space.

Her father announced the move on her eleventh birthday. He foresaw an imminent crash that would swamp Russia’s economy and decided to preemptively relocate the family to the States. She only had to listen to her mother complain about the man and his idiot ideas for a couple of years before her father’s prognostication finally bore out. He suddenly transformed, in her mother’s eyes, from a paranoid narcissist into a political genius.

To Anya, her father always seemed the same—remote, disengaged, and sporadically appearing with some proclamation of supposedly high import but little actual impact on her life. Occasionally he’d spare a few words about what a ‘beautiful young lady’ his daughter had become.

From the beginning, Anya ventured into her new life with bluster, costuming herself as an American teen. Anya’s beauty—real, imagined, acknowledged, or denied—became the central focus of her life.

Anya learned to leverage her own appeal. Because of her heavy accent, boys found her alluring and exotic, but they also assumed she was dumb. She took advantage as best she could. Bored with school and under-supervised at home, she eventually found herself caught up in the rave scene.

Anya spent the last few years before the Curse literally dancing every night away in one warehouse or another, drenched in drugs and used by men. Although her allowance could have easily covered all of her whims and expenses, she emphatically refused to pay for anything. Not with money anyway. All of her drugs, all of her cover charges, all of her access to the DJ lofts and backstage scenes were covered by guys. She didn’t have boyfriends. She didn’t date. She just leveraged her wiles and her underfed, teen-aged body to get whatever she wanted. And what she wanted was to escape into the soft, blurry warmth of designer drugs and let her body bounce, bend, and twirl in time to the pounding rhythms of electronic dance music.

After the Curse, during one of her late night conversations with Scott, Anya realized that the rush of the drugs hitting her brain while high-decibel beats pulsed through her body, reminded her of the cosmonaut daydreams from the childhood car rides with her mom.

Anya didn’t pay for anything, but that didn’t mean it came for free. She sold a bit of herself nearly every day in one way or another. She never considered herself a victim—she defiantly owned her decisions and took responsibility for her choices. She thought of it as a kind of double cross. As guys used her, she used them. She played with boys like toys—she’d ride his arm at a party for the price of admission, exchange a blow-job for blow—but then dump him on a dime, leave him standing on the floor in favor of some other piece of meat that caught her fancy.

The constant reinforcement that Anya had no value apart from her attractiveness to men, confirmed her sense of her place in the world—and it felt good to be right. As she was fondled and fucked by boys taking payment for the coke or the ride or the privilege that they provided, she took comfort in the honesty of the exchange, the recognition of her real worth.

She didn’t really enjoy the sex itself, but she thrived on the idea of sex. When some dude fucked her behind the DJ booth in the middle of the party, she got off, not on the sensation of him inside her or pressing her face against the wall, but on the hotness of the scenario—what it must look like from a distance.

On rare occasions, something would bring her back into her body—a cocky redneck slapping her face instead of her ass, or a drunk punk pressing a knife against her neck while he fingered her—something that made her afraid. She lived then, for a moment, in her body, feeling the sensation of shock or panic. A brief spark of life amidst the haze, until she fled from the pain to watch how hot it all was from afar. She developed a taste for those moments—like coffee or whiskey—finding a subtle flavor in the burn.

Anya once told a man that she had a rape fantasy—a man she hoped to trust, maybe even care about. She imagined that they could explore the scenario safely, on her terms. But of course it didn’t happen that way, instead he took her that same night. Punched her when she resisted, pinned her down when she told him no.

She used to think that the lines had been blurred, that it couldn’t be rape if you liked it rough or if you’d fucked the guy before, but now, as she stood clear and tall in a brand new world, she recognized that her entire experience as a woman had been a kind of rape. Everything had been forced, even as she reached for what she wanted. All her desires had been dictated by dicks. In retrospect, the illusion of her agency vanished, like the mystery of a magic trick revealed, leaving no space for wonder.

Anya had no delusions about the Curse. The Curse was a blessing, a great equalizer, an unmitigated and unimpeachable democratization of power. No class differences, no racial prejudices, no national boundaries, no governmental regulations could secure, partition, or amass the power that had been gifted on the population. It only took a few days before she realized the anarchy that had descended on the world was not temporary, but rather the new order. Anya recognized immediately that this meant freedom.

Her first kill, in the coat check at her final rave, struck as a stranger came inside her. After that she executed every man she saw. Their deaths, she realized later, were gifts they hadn’t deserved; she’d inadvertently spared them the horror of the days that followed.

After her brief but satisfying spree of revenge in the chaotic three hours it took for the warehouse to clear out, her deep psychological need to be thinner, tighter, more beautiful, and more attractive, lifted like steam from a bath. Her anorexia disappeared almost overnight. The immediacy of real power, of real equality, of superiority, cleansed her of her self-loathing. The curse washed away the stain that had soiled her soul ever since her first summer in the States, when her ‘uncle’ had groped her so boldly while playing Sardines.

In the first apocalyptic days, she ate. Deeply and thoroughly. Not gorging but fully enjoying the flavor and satisfaction of each nourishing meal. She indulged in the richest foods, tasted the unusual and exotic, sampled everything she could find—until the food ran out. At which point her experience with years of anorexia surfaced as an unexpected strength; as the weeks wore on and the violence settled and people began to group and divide, pair up and die off, she became a figure of fortitude. She didn’t complain about missing meals. She summoned energy that others couldn’t tap. She emerged as an asset amongst crowds of weepers and weaklings. Her value as a clear-minded and ruthless survivor attracted Scott, and their mutual respect, his respect for her, kept them together.

Her bond with Scott led to Peter and his utopian ideas of a new society. Peter had appeared one day walking boldly along the center of a downtown street, head held high—a tall, thin stick figure draped in oversized clothes clomping brashly over debris. She and Scott had been sleeping in a department store bedding section and stepped out just as Peter passed. Anya wanted to hide but Scott told her to wait and he called out.

“Hey!”

Peter dropped his eyes, raised his hands and turned. “Hello friend,” he said. “I’m just passing through but I’m looking for companions.”

“Haven’t seen anyone down here in a few days,” Scott said. “What did your friends look like?”

“Sorry,” Peter said, smiling. Even from across the street his grin was disarming. “I meant I’m looking for people to travel with. I know that some prefer to be alone and if that’s you, no worries, I won’t disclose your position. But if you need a friend, well… I certainly do.”

The three of them started traveling together and soon began to build up Peter’s vision, developing a set of rules and customs attuned to the realities of the new world. Peter was driven. He saw a clear path out of the chaos and anarchy that threatened to extinguish them all, but Anya knew the vision was flawed. Peter was gambling on defunct presumptions about power and community, but Scott felt inspired and she had grown to depend on him, so they agreed to travel together—a tiny band of idealists. She figured they’d ride that wave until it crested, then move on.

Scott was the only man, the only person, that Anya had ever really trusted. At first, she took his advances as sexual. His deferential respect seemed like just another strategy to get down her pants, but when she confronted him about it he seemed aghast.

“I don’t want to have sex with you!”

“Why not?” She said, taunting his lies. “I’m not sexy?”

“You’re plenty attractive.” He looked her up and down. “You just don’t seem to want sex. And that’s… you know… a turn off.”

“Why do you stay with me if I don’t turn you on?” She frowned and cocked her head. “You’re gay?”

“No.” He looked at her quizzically, as if to check if she was teasing. At that point, she wasn’t. “You are the strongest, most intelligent, most exasperatingly cynical person I’ve ever met. You also have an amazing nose for canned goods.” He smiled and shrugged. “Why would I leave?”

At first Anya had no interest in the man as a sex object, despite his sparkling green eyes. Scott had too much hair—long, dreaded locks that mingled with his beard in a wholly unpleasant tangle. He stubbornly refused to shave, offering a different reason every time she asked. After weeks of partnering, however, their bond pulled unrelentingly on her desire and they began to explore each others bodies with an intimacy she’d never experienced before.

“I want to make love to you,” she said one day.

“That… that fills me with joy.” He said, smiling broadly at her shoulder.

“But when we do it,” she said, reaching out for his hands. “You have to stare into my eyes the whole time.”

She didn’t think, didn’t believe for a second, that he would agree to those terms, but after only a moment’s thought he glanced up into her eyes and said: “Okay.”

Anya knew, in some deep way that she could never adequately explain, that Scott wouldn’t kill her, but she didn’t trust herself. She anticipated that at some point as he lay on top of her or while she straddled him, their lust pouring forth in jerks and spasms, that he would suddenly die—the victim of her sudden recognition that he was a man.

And they did it. They did it that very night and at least a dozen times after, staring into each other’s eyes, more vulnerable than they’d ever imagined, a thought away from death. Yet death never even crossed her mind.

Anya had never felt so alive.

But now she was alone again. She lay on the mattress exhausted and sad, one arm splayed out across the space that Scott had occupied only a day earlier. She remembered him laughing about how he was going to bring back a jar of raspberry jam—just for the two of them.

She hadn’t really slept. She woke repeatedly out of a recurring dream wherein she wandered the basement hideout executing all her companions. She must have looped through her fantasy four or five times during the night, each one a little different, each growing progressively more surreal. Her compatriots stood in odd places, shrunken to dwarves or ballooned into giants, sometimes in pairs, sometimes alone, jumping out at her from behind boxes or peering in through cloudy windows. She persevered on her bloody mission, over and over. She’d take Sara, always Sara first, Peter, Chad, Derek, sometimes even Scott, and Phoebe. Phoebe she killed with two spoken words: “Die, bitch.” She felt guilty for that. Phoebe seemed the only true innocent in the group, always accommodating, never greedy. She had voted to let Sara in, a stupid choice, but that was precisely because she was too nice. Trusting. Foolish. Anya felt sorry to abandon the girl, but she still couldn’t forgive her.

* * *

Six months since she gave up caring whether or not a man found her attractive, Anya still religiously applied her morning makeup. She had never worn it for anyone else anyway. She used the eyeliner, foundation, blush, and mascara to build her persona. Layers of confidence, emotional control, and focus accrued within her as she constructed her mask on the outside. It wasn’t a façade—she didn’t care what others saw or thought of her—the daily construction of her face was a ritual for her alone: an inventory, a tidying, an armoring.

Anya always took the extra time to grab handfuls of makeup whenever she went scavenging. After some initial comments and looks of derision, the others stopped judging. In fact, Phoebe had asked to borrow eyeliner just a week ago—an oddly poignant moment that cemented their bond.

Anya stopped before completing the eyeliner on her lower right waterline. She was tearing up and couldn’t focus. She breathed deep and blinked.

She needed to forge a new alliance. Her choices were limited. She couldn’t trust Sara, and Phoebe had burned her. Scott had gotten along with all the men, but that was because of the stereotypical male-bonding thing. Chad was handy but too soft and Ray never showed her any respect. She certainly wouldn’t sleep with Derek—and that’s all he wanted. Anya would never sleep with another man.

That left only Peter.

“Noooo!” Chad’s wail brought Anya up and out of her cubby without hesitation. Something was wrong. Very wrong.

She hurried toward the sound and arrived at the scene at the same time as Ray and Peter. Chad hunched near the ground cradling his daughter’s body.

“Who did this?!” He bellowed.

Other people shouted but Anya didn’t hear their words, she couldn’t take her eyes off Phoebe. Phoebe was dead. Just like in her dream.

Had it really only been a dream? Had she done this? Die, bitch. Had she killed the girl? But no, in her dream she killed all of them. Here, now, everyone was alive. Everyone except Phoebe. Had Anya dreamt her dead?

“Did you kill her by accident?” Chad shouted at Ray.

No, no, no. She couldn’t have. Could she? I don’t know! Anya thought as she looked up into Sara’s eyes.

RAY

Ray watched from behind his crazy-eyed glasses as Peter approached with the new arrival. She moved carefully, attentive. As they neared, Ray shot furtive glances at her face, although his eyewear was opaque from the outside he knew they offered no real protection; he’d seen hundreds of corpses wearing shades. The woman’s pale features looked like a fragile egg nestled inside her dark hair and the fur-lined hood of her winter coat. Her eyes darted around his kitchen and his face heated with embarrassment. He took pride in his domain but he suddenly saw it through her eyes, just a messier section of the basement.

He looked down and cranked the handle of the can opener.

“This is Ray,” Peter said, pointing with an open hand. “He’s our cook.”

“Fastest can opener this side of the Cascades!” Ray smiled as the top popped free. “Yeehaw!” He saw the young woman’s mouth spread in a laugh. If he couldn’t impress her with his housekeeping, at least he could make her laugh. He set down the opener, and held out the can. “Today’s favorite? Tangerines!”

“He’s not the best cook….” Peter said.

Ray’s grin didn’t waver. “But I’m fast.”

* * *

“She ran into the living room dressed in a unicorn onesie and holding a unicorn hobby-horse.” His friend’s entire face smiled when he talked about his daughter. “You know, a stick with a unicorn head on it?”

So this is what we’ve come to? No more 2:00am shenanigans, chasing skirts and shooting tequila, for these studs. Now we sit at the bar at 5:00 in the evening and swap stories about the kids over a Hefeweizen. He nodded at his friend and grinned.

“She was waving it around and yelling.” He raised his arm and shook his fist. “Ahhh!”

Ray remembered the girl. She was almost five, a few years older than his own son. He imagined her jumping around the living room in front of her dad. Ray looked forward to his boy growing big enough to wield a stick like that. They’d play pirates. Ray loved pirates.

“Suddenly I saw it—she was jumping around with a unicorn skin draped over her shoulders and a unicorn head on a stake—it was gruesome!” He shook his head, the grin still stretched across his face. “All I could think was: ‘All hail, Deirdre! Unicorn Slayer!’”

Ray laughed. “Did you actually say that?”

“Oh yeah.” His friend nodded. “And then she ran around for an hour repeating it: ‘All hail, Deirdre! Unicorn Slayer! All hail, Deirdre!’ Janet didn’t think it was nearly as funny as….”

His friend fell sideways and collapsed on the floor.

Ray immediately slipped off the barstool and crouched next to the limp body. As he moved, Ray’s mind automatically flipped back and analyzed the previous half minute with a new focus. The room had quieted in the seconds leading up to his friend’s collapse and the sound of his body hitting the floor was the last of a series of thuds, out of sight, behind Ray’s back. He hadn’t noticed any of that—he’d been caught up in his friend’s story, imagining the girl, the triumphant slaughterer of mythical beasts—until the moment his friend fell.

No breathing. The body lay completely lifeless in his arms. Ray looked up.

You’re dead! The voice boomed in Ray’s head. He didn’t plan it or logic through it. He didn’t even think it, but the murderer fell to the ground.

That’s how Ray knew it was God’s will. The man had come into the bar and killed three people in cold blood, simply because he had the power. Ray had no idea about the Curse at that point. He didn’t understand what had happened until a full day later as he wandered through the chaos that had been his city. But in that moment he did the right thing, without a thought. He realized, in retrospect, that the murderer must have been thinking him dead at the same time—anticipating his fourth kill in less than a minute—but Ray had been faster. Divinely inspired, he prevailed. How else could he have won? God must have willed it. Ray didn’t do anything—he had no idea what was happening—yet the killer fell dead.

Ray had always considered himself a God-fearing soul. He was active in his church. He volunteered every Tuesday serving meals to the homeless and he never missed a service. In the first years of their marriage, Nancy would sometimes try to keep him in bed on Sunday mornings, but Ray always insisted. It was his duty to keep her on the path. Saturday mornings on the other hand, those were their days—until Caleb was born. That’s when ‘family’ took on a whole new meaning for Ray—a sense of responsibility and duty that bordered on fear.

He still shook uncontrollably when he thought of the last time he’d seen his wife and son. He quaked, helpless against the tremors of grief and guilt. And Ray did feel guilty, even if his only sin had been to share a beer with a friend.

He’d kissed them both, said he loved them. He remembered that, cherished it—at least they knew he loved them. He squeezed his wife good-bye and asked her not to wait up. He was going out for a drink with his friend. Now, months later, he couldn’t even remember his friend’s name. He remembered the wife, Janet, their daughter, Deirdre ‘the Unicorn Slayer,’ but his friend’s name… he was… his friend. This lapse in memory chilled Ray to the bone—what if one day he woke up and couldn’t remember his son’s name.

Ray’s family disappeared. When he made his way home through the frenzied streets that night, the lights blazed through the windows. He burst through the door and called to his wife. The house was immaculate, as usual. Nothing seemed out of place. Until he got to the kitchen. There he found a dinner half-eaten—a plate set for Nancy at the table, Caleb’s high chair strewn with string cheese and cheerios. The doors were all locked shut and Nancy’s car sat in the carport. No bags packed, no clothes missing, nothing in the house disturbed. His family had simply vanished.

Ray didn’t put it all together until days later, after finding so many of his friends and neighbors dead and others simply gone without a trace. Riots, looting, and more killing flooded through the streets. The Apocalypse had arrived. That was certain. But so had the Rapture. Nancy and Caleb had ascended. They now lived in the Lord’s Kingdom. Ray and the others, everyone left alive, served their purgatory. The Chosen had been raised up, while the dead fell to Hell. God’s will manifested. And Nancy and Caleb remained safe, risen to Heaven unharmed.

Ray confirmed all of it when he opened his Bible and read the first words he saw: a grim line from Ezekiel describing people withering from sin after looking in each other’s eyes. Ray immediately closed the Book and returned it to his nightstand.

Since that moment, Ray felt God’s presence in a different way. The Lord had chosen him for a unique mission in this purgatory. Ray stood alone among the rest of the ‘survivors.’ They all suffered through trials of righteousness and condemnation. Would they kill? Would they seek revenge? Would they sacrifice? God’s final test fell upon them and not many passed. But Ray didn’t struggle like the rest. He didn’t worry, because he never felt the burden of the cursed choice.

Ray never decided to kill. As the sword of God, a divine tool, the Holy Spirit possessed him only when needed. Ray knew this, felt it in his soul—unlike those who killed for material gain or out of fear or panic—Ray never premeditated, never planned, and never slew a soul in defense or rage. He never actually willed anyone’s death. A hundred people, maybe more, had fallen under Ray’s gaze, but only at the Lord’s choosing. It always happened exactly like the first time—a voice, not his own, ringing in his head—You’re dead.

Ray’s faith, his knowledge of the true and righteous nature of the curse, freed him from the morose mindset that plagued so many others. He kept his humor and lived each day in the here and now, knowing that when God needed him, he would respond. Otherwise he focused on food, shelter, and good company.

He’d met Peter in the back of a ransacked neighborhood mini-mart. Ray bent to retrieve a couple of cans that had rolled under the soft serve machine. Others had trashed the place—toppled shelves, smashed windows—but most looters lacked thoroughness and Ray could almost always find some food-stuff or useful artifact buried in the mess.

“Need a hand?”

Ray spun, his arm cocking automatically, a can of Deviled Ham poised to hurtle toward the voice.

“Whoa!” The man stepped back lifting his hands and dropping his eyes. He stumbled over a fallen magazine rack. Tall and lanky—the opposite of Ray—Peter was disarmingly awkward. He straightened and gave Ray a quick nod. “Nice glasses!”

Ray smiled. He’d picked up the novelty crazy eyes earlier that day. “Thanks. I figure just because it’s the Apocalypse, doesn’t mean I shouldn’t look my best.”

That was the beginning of Ray’s first friendship since the world ended.

It turned out that Peter had a mission of his own, a vision of bringing order back into the world, restoring civilization, and civility. He’d gathered a few like-minded people and asked Ray if he’d join them. Ray felt a kinship with Peter. Their missions complemented each other. Peter could build a society and Ray could ensure, Lord willing, that the population stayed pure.

Peter introduced him to Derek, Scotty, and Anya. They stood around blindfolded and told their stories. Not stories from before—no one liked to talk about the old world—but about how they had survived thus far, what brought them there, how they met. At first, when it was just the five of them, they put on the blindfolds every time they gathered to talk, but after a while they realized it only mattered if they started to argue or get strident about something. As soon as someone raised their voice, you could feel the tension rise like hackles on a dog. That was when they needed to tie up.

Chad and Phoebe had joined them only a few weeks back, just after they’d found the old warehouse basement. That’s when the group really solidified. Seven souls together with a purpose—a band of pirates facing the stormy future. Chad stepped up quickly, quiet but industrious, and took on the role of maintenance man—which Ray appreciated. Ray liked to prepare the food and get the crew together for meetings or games, but he didn’t like the drudgery of cleanup and repairs. Phoebe seemed shy, but sweet—as innocent as anyone could be in the circumstances. Ray wondered why God hadn’t taken her up. She acted humble, wearing her beauty without pretension, but perhaps she’d been arrogant and prideful in school and only learned her humility after the Judgment Day.

Ray didn’t have a good read on Sara yet. He’d voted to include her but he would always accept newcomers—God would take care of things if anyone went astray. She seemed to fit well with the group, joining into the mealtime chatter and respecting the rites of their tribe. Even with Sara there, and the shadow of Scotty’s death hanging in the air, everybody had been able to relax and smile as they passed the cans of food around the circle. Ray wondered if they might be the new apostles, setting the stage for the return. Could Peter be the Second Coming?

Ray chuckled at his own hubris—then the wailing began.

* * *

“Nooooo!”

Everyone arrived at the same time. It only took a moment to understand why Chad spun around screaming at them and spitting with rage; his beautiful, innocent daughter lay dead at his feet.

Chad, in his grief, spewed accusations at them all.

“Maybe it was an accident,” Ray said. It had to have been an accident—no one would murder Phoebe—but Chad lunged at him.

“Did you kill her on accident?!”

“No!” Ray shook his head as Chad pushed him away. Phoebe was just a kid. The sweetest kid. God would never want that.

“Tie up! Tie up!” Sara’s voice rang out above the others.

Ray raised his eyes, truly afraid for the first time since that moment in the bar. He saw Peter and, as Peter looked back at him, Ray’s mind flooded with memory.

* * *

He burst through the front door, shouting his wife’s name.

“Nancy!”

Silence, more than silence—an eerie stillness. A cold, choking quiet. He strode through the living room to the kitchen. His son sat, asleep in the high chair. Ray rushed to him in relief.

But Caleb wasn’t asleep. He was dead. Still belted in, he slumped over the tray, a string of cheese clutched in his cold fist and cheerios strewn on the floor, soggy with blood.

Nancy lay sprawled there, her skin drained white, bright against the dark pool around her. A kitchen knife rested inches from her fingers. She’d cut her own throat. She’d killed their son and cut her own throat.

* * *

“Tie up!”

Ray stared into Peter’s eyes.

Kyle. His friend’s name was Kyle.

PART 3

Standing

DEREK

“Idon’t know what this means.” Sara sounded legitimately confused. “Did they kill each other?”

“I don’t think that’s even possible.” Peter said.

He was probably right. You could only look into one person’s eyes at a time, and someone always won the race to death.

Derek knew what he had done. Chad had been screaming bloody murder when they’d touched eyes and Derek didn’t waste a thought before dropping him. But that didn’t explain the other two. Chad may have gotten to one of them before looking at Derek, but things happened so damned fast that didn’t seem likely.

Peter or Sara, one of the two who sat blindfolded on the floor next to him, must be as guilty as he was. Except Derek didn’t actually feel guilty. He’d given that up after only a few weeks. Besides, if he were going to feel remorse, other things he’d done over the last 24 hours deserved more regret than surviving Chad’s wrath. Regardless of what had actually gone down, he certainly wouldn’t admit to his part in anything until someone else volunteered.

He played innocent. “It’s that or one of us killed them.”

“I don’t like this.” Sara’s voice betrayed her anxiety, which made Derek uneasy. He didn’t know her and couldn’t predict how she’d act under pressure. Based on the shudder in her speech, he assumed she’d killed one of the others.

“Look,” Peter said. “If one of us did something, we should just admit it. I don’t think…”

No. Derek had already decided against that route. He obviously couldn’t trust either of them. Things had moved from bad to worse. He would admit nothing. This could easily turn into a witch hunt or an ambush, if it hadn’t already. Nope. No way.

His hands began to shake. Sweat trickled down his sides. What if the others knew what he’d done? What if they were just waiting for him to break so they could have their revenge? The stakes were too high and he was bluffing. He needed to fold before he lost. The façade of this tribe, this mission, masqueraded as civility. But civilization was over. The world had ended months ago and these people simply refused to acknowledge it.

“I can’t take this!” Derek let his composure break. “I gotta go!”

* * *

The world, the real world, had died six months ago—but how he wished he could have it back! Derek had just begun to reap life’s rewards when everything fell apart. After wasting a few years in college (because that’s what people did after high school) he dropped out and took a real estate course. Just six night classes and a three-hour multiple-choice test then—bing, bang, boom—he held a license in one hand and an offer from one of the largest real estate firms in the city in the other. He couldn’t understand why anyone would waste their time in college when it took so little to break into one of history’s most lucrative professions.

It turned out to be a little harder than that. After three weeks he realized clients didn’t just call and ask for an agent and the firm’s promise of “floor time” really meant they required him to sit for hours in the office answering zero phone calls and watching no one walk in the door. When Derek asked more seasoned agents for advice they chuckled and suggested he do some cold-calling. The more helpful ones asked if he had any aging relatives in the area.

After four months of getting nowhere, his broker finally gave him a break and let him babysit a listing for a vacationing agent. The crappy little house stood in a working class neighborhood that hadn’t yet gone transitional but he dove in as deep as he could—cleaning carpets, rearranging furniture, and replacing the nicotine stained drapes. He set potted flowers on the porch and shooed the grey-faced owners out during Open House. The place sold on the second showing. The buyer, fresh out of school, had moved to town to join a local tech start-up. Derek ended up with both sides of the deal and a new computer geek friend.

Things began to move. As the city rose out of the recession on the back of the second tech boom, Derek rode his new nerd’s IT contacts. He was on his way to the good life.

Then God forsook them all.

* * *

“No, Derek, don’t.” Sara seemed to have gotten a grip on herself, probably one of those infuriating people that get calmer when you freak out at them. “We have to stay together. We can make this work.”

She may have found her calm, but that was crazy talk.

“Make what work?” Derek asked. She was spewing nonsense. Nothing here worked. “This is insane! This is death waiting to happen!” He couldn’t get any more honest than that.

Derek turned his face away from the others and pulled the bandana off his eyes. He blinked until the brightness subsided and stood to leave.

“You’re right.” Peter’s bewildered voice followed Derek out of the room.

No shit. Derek knew he was right, but life had always been death waiting to happen. The Curse just made it obvious.

* * *

Derek figured he was one of the last to know. He woke up on a regular Sunday morning, did his little workout routine—crunches, push-ups, and the six pull-ups he could manage on a good day—and skipped through the headlines on his phone while he sucked down two cups of coffee. If any news of unusual deaths crossed his feed, it didn’t register. Then he drove to the listing and set up signs on the corners in a six block radius. He sliced up a log of cookie dough and popped it in the oven—one of his colleagues had told him it made a house smell like home. He sat working crosswords for four hours. Not a soul showed.

Confused, but not terribly upset, Derek awaited the arrival of his latest tryst. They’d hooked up spontaneously when she toured him around her listing the week before. Like a moment straight out of his fantasies—they found themselves alone in an empty house and then—bazinga, bazanga, ba-boom—they lay naked on someone else’s bed. No porn star, to be sure, but a solid, suburban somebody-else’s-wife, she had ten years in the business and an appetite.

So Derek didn’t worry much about the slow Sunday. She would swing by after finishing her own open house a few streets away. Derek expected her around 4:15. He waited until after 6:00. Disappointed and angry, he strolled the neighborhood collecting signs and realized something was amiss.

Dead people on the street have a way of waking a person up.

Derek watched a kind of battle explode in front of him and realized they were downing each other with their eyes. Someone spun around and glared and another person would fall dead. Some of them were yelling things like: “You die!” and “I wish you dead.” So when a crazy-haired dude wheeled around on him, Derek yelled: “Die! Die! Kill kill kill!” The guy fell before the second ‘D.’

After that, murder came easy.

* * *

“I’m not going to let you go out there alone!” Sara called out after him as he headed up the stairs to the alley door.

“Too late now, lady.” Derek didn’t understand where Sara came from. She certainly didn’t run with the gang that killed Scott. Anya was no fool, but sometimes she just got things wrong.

The alley walls dripped with moisture and Derek hunched his shoulders against the cold. Dreary clouds left the air dim and the street awash in shadows. He lifted his face to the sky, felt the drizzle on his chin and cheeks, and relief washed over him. He’d finally left Peter’s collective behind. He spread his arms to breath in his freedom. He wiped at his nose and spit as the stench of rot and urine stung his nostrils.

Freedom always has a price.

That’s what Scott said, seconds before Derek killed him. Scott had been gushing about how Anya had finally let him down her pants. Derek didn’t want to hear it. Not because he wasn’t interested. He obsessed about sex, and about Anya, and even Phoebe. But he didn’t want to hear about Scott getting what Derek couldn’t have.

“I used to worry about getting tied down,” Scott said as they walked through the barren aisles of the supermarket. “That is definitely not a concern now.” Scott laughed, his matted hair and beard jiggling around his opened mouth. How could Anya kiss that?

“What’ll you do if we come across a pack of females?” Derek knew it was a stupid question, but he really wanted to wipe the grin off Scott’s face. Scrub it. With steel wool.

“Uh… nothing.” Scott smiled. “Look, I like women, but Anya is all I need. I wouldn’t give her up for anything.”

“Alright, bro,” Derek said. “If you want to sacrifice your freedom for a skinny chick with an accent.”

Scott looked Derek up and down, assessing him. “Freedom has a price.” He turned and walked down the aisle.

That’s when Derek picked up the magazine rack. The first swing knocked Scott onto the floor and Derek didn’t wait for a reaction before clubbing him repeatedly with the heavy base of the stand. When he stopped, Scott lay in a bloody pile and Derek panicked.

How would he explain this? Say they’d had a fight? What would they do? Kick him out of the tribe? Kill him in revenge? Then he realized he could say anything he wanted. Nobody else was there. Nobody would question his story.

As he ran back to the hideout, he rehearsed the tale about the gang jumping them in the supermarket. He sprinted, full-bore, as if he were actually bolting from an ambush. He got kind of into it, pretending the gang followed close behind. He started thinking that maybe someone was coming after him. Method acting, they called it.

Everything worked perfectly. He came in and told his story and no one even blinked. It would only be a matter of time before Anya let him down her pants.

Sara showing up was just icing on the cake. Any suspicion about Scott’s death magnetized right onto her. Anya convinced herself immediately that Sara had killed her boyfriend, which set Derek up perfectly for his role as the concerned friend, the last one to see Scott alive, the sympathetic shoulder to cry on, and then….

Everything went to hell.

He hadn’t killed Phoebe. He’d come across her early in the morning, wandering in the basement like they all did from time to time. He watched as she drifted by, her hand sweeping along the dusty surface of a dresser, touching the top of a chair. She paused in front of a strange ceramic figure, a life-sized mannequin of a baseball player from some local minor-league team long forgotten even before the Curse. Phoebe’s hand reached up to caress the face, its surface laced with cracks. The gesture stirred something in Derek and he moved forward quietly.

He slipped a hand around her waist as he spoke, gazing up at the weathered face of the statue. “He looks happy.”

Phoebe jumped and he reflexively grabbed her with the other hand.

“Let me go!”

He complied. “Okay. Didn’t mean anything.”

“Whatever.”

“You say that a lot. Do you really mean it?”

She glared down at his feet.

“Because ‘whatever’ leaves room for a lot.” Derek looked up and down her body, avoiding her face. She had amazing curves, a young woman for sure, but still a woman.

“A lot of room is exactly what I want. Plenty of space between you and me,” she said. Then her voice softened slightly. “Look, I think you’re a perfectly good guy. I like you just fine. I just don’t want any of that kind of attention. From you or anyone else.”

Whatever, he thought. Little bitch. And he walked away. That’s the way he remembered it anyway.

Hours later, he’d been chatting with Sara when the ruckus started. Everything went south after that. Things got kinda blurry and Chad turned on him, like an idiot.

Then he was standing there with Sara and Peter. Everyone else lay dead on the floor.

* * *

The alley door banged behind him. Derek picked up his pace in the opposite direction.

“Hey!”

Sara.

“I can’t let you leave!”

Derek pulled up. Let him leave? “Who died and made you queen?” Derek said. “Oh that’s right. Everybody!”

“That’s not fair.”

“Not fair?” He whirled around. “You’re right. I’m still alive.”

Sara caught up. He watched her boots come together and stop three feet in front of him.

Derek took a step back. “I suppose Peter is down there bleeding from his eyes?”

“No,” Sara replied, almost whispering. “Peter’s fine. He’s waiting for us to come back.”

“I’m not going back.”

“Trust me, Derek,” Sara said, sounding almost genuine. “I’m only looking out for our best interests here. You don’t have to hide your eyes from me.” She stepped forward, leaning down, trying to move her face into his line of vision.

“I’m certainly not going to look at you!” Derek twisted his head to the left. “I’m no fool.”

“Whatever you prefer,” she said. Derek heard the smile curling her lips.

He barely caught the flash of metal in the corner of his vision before he felt the sting in his ribs. The blade tore quickly back and forth slicing through his heart and he gagged on blood and bile as it rushed up his throat before he slumped to the concrete.

PETER

Peter sat where they’d left him, leaning against a wall with his blindfold on, the concrete chilling his back through his coat and shirt. He let the dark and the cold and the quiet wash over him.

He didn’t understand what had gone wrong. The previous night’s dinner went so well, the group warming to Sara even faster than he’d hoped. Everyone bonded. They managed through Scott’s death without drowning in paranoia or fracturing into opposing camps. They handled Anya’s emotional outbursts without shaming her, instead coming together to support her while still welcoming Sara to the fold. All of that represented a testament to the vision. Peter felt redeemed, even righteous.

But then Phoebe. What had happened?

It was too much. Scott going off and dying outside on an expedition—they could deal with that—but Phoebe. Dead, right there. On the inside. It was a wonder Chad didn’t just kill them all.

Maybe it was inevitable. Phoebe had always posed a problem. Young, beautiful, naive. It was like throwing a steak into a cage full of half-trained cats. Eventually one of them would break and pounce on it.

But kill her? Why would anybody do that?

And now only three of them left alive. Peter couldn’t pretend innocence any longer; he’d have to confess. The panic in Ray’s face had been too wild. Frantic even. Like he’d seen not just a body, but a ghost. Peter had to lay him down. He had no choice. Their eyes met. He imagined the same thing had happened to Sara and Derek. With all the chaos and emotion, it came down to who had the quickest reflexes.

Maybe Derek’s storming off would work out for the best. He had a rogue quality that never sat well with Peter. It reminded him of his old gang—Drew, Phil, and Randy—and the intoxicating freedom during those first few months when they took whatever, and whomever, they wanted.

Peter suspected that Derek yearned for that kind of rampant liberty again. Trying to maintain order against the chaos of the world seemed to make him anxious in a hungry, restless way. He always pushed against the rules, against the constraints of living with others. Sara should let just Derek go. Let him discover the loneliness down that road.

Peter knew loneliness all too well. He’d felt alone as long as he could remember. His father left him with his always ill, always nagging, mother when Peter was only thirteen. Left him to clean up the mess. Left him with not just the blood stained car that the police towed to the house after finding his dad’s brainless body in the driver’s seat, grey matter spattered across the rear windshield and driven into the backseat cushion by a spray of shotgun pellets, but with tens of thousands of dollars in credit card and gambling debts. Peter got a special permit to work underage and began fixing cars at the local garage to support his mother. It took years, but he slowly dug them out of the hole his dad had dug for them.

At nineteen Peter finally bailed, left the state, started working at a car dealership. After a few years—too much red tape and too many managers, sticklers for detail, breathing down his neck—he became an independent car broker. He found the best deals, new or used, for clients that didn’t want to hassle with the hard sell, or with haggling, or with searching the classifieds. He made out okay. He always sent something back to his mom, kept enough to pay rent and put food on the table he’d bought from the thrift store.

The same breezy charm that made him good at his job attracted a series of girlfriends; one of whom moved in with her dog and whispered dreams of marriage and family in his ear when they lay exhausted after sex. Dreams that began to solidify when Peter connected with the CFO of an investment firm who introduced him to a circle of wealthy colleagues. Peter made more money over those next six months than in his entire previous life combined. He found himself collecting on both sides of most deals, brokering the purchase of new high end sports cars to replace last year’s models which he would then sell off to dealers or other clients. He bought a house and moved in with his fiancé.

But he lost all that too. When the IRS knocked on the door and informed him that he’d been laundering money for the investment firm, cleaning and sheltering hundreds of thousands of dollars that his ‘friends’ had stolen from investors. Because his name was all over the deals, he owed the government over a hundred thousand in penalties. His girlfriend left him—she wouldn’t even let him keep the dog—and after only three months the bank foreclosed on the house.

The curse was actually a blessing for Peter. His debt, his record, his responsibility, all disappeared overnight. Peter and his three best drinking buddies went on a crazy spree of liberty. It had been amazing—the power, the freedom, the wanton excess. But his buddies all left too. One by his own hand, the others taken down by God only knew who. Everyone felt that rush of power, and no one could hang on to it.

So Peter set out to build a new tribe, this time on a firmer foundation. Or so he’d thought.

* * *

Maybe Peter could start fresh with Sara. He liked her, she had a strength and calm that he hadn’t felt from a woman since… well, since ever really. She could partner with him, help recruit, help lead. Maybe they could even have a kid together.

Would a new baby have the curse? Shit. What a scary thought. And what if the baby just wouldn’t stop crying. If it was hard not to think someone dead when they accidentally bumped into you, imagine how difficult it would be if they wouldn’t go to sleep for 36 hours and just screamed in your face.

Peter chuckled to himself. He hadn’t even kissed Sara yet and he was already thinking about murdering their kid!

Thoughts of death, thoughts of killing, had become so mundane. He remembered when he’d been afraid of death in the old-world—an abstract anxiety surrounding a great ponderous mystery. Death didn’t feel enigmatic anymore. That amorphous fear was replaced by a constant, vigilant paranoia. The surprise and wonder he’d formerly felt at a relative’s passing, or a friend of a friend—the sympathetic horror—had been thoroughly displaced by a kind of quotidian resignation.

Like everyone alive, Peter had killed. He’d killed a lot of people. He took no pride in it, but those first months after the curse had been a kind of cleansing—not a filtering of the strong from the weak, or the righteous from the damned, but a flushing out of panic and rage and repression and frustration. He believed that the rabid anarchy was part of the healing—not just from the curse itself, but from centuries of social tension leading up to that moment. The months of chaos were a prerequisite of the new world and the new society that, by necessity, would be even more civilized, more civil, than the old.

* * *

Peter jerked in surprise when Sara touched his hand, his head stopping hard against the concrete wall behind him.

“It’s okay,” she said, pulling on his arm and prompting him to his feet.

“Where’s Derek?”

“Gone.” Her voice echoed flat off the cold walls.

“He’ll be back.”

He felt Sara’s hands brush his cheeks. He lifted his own in defense, startled again by her touch, and grabbed her wrists. She was reaching for his bandana. He’d almost forgotten, in some impossible way, that he still wore a blindfold.

“Trust me.” Sara said.

Trust her? What an absurd request. Then again, she could be the future mother of his child. He took a long slow breath. His grip on her arms loosened. The new world had to start somewhere.

He didn’t turn away as she pulled down on the scarf. Peter blinked as his eyes adjusted. Sara wasn’t wearing eye protection either. Of course not. She’d walked out after Derek, come back, helped him up, reached up to his face, and now she looked up at him with those beautiful hazel eyes.

SARA

“Do you think you could kill someone by looking at them in a mirror?” Derek had slipped into the doorway behind her as she took advantage of one of the luxuries of her new accommodations—a hand mirror. She’d been examining her face and skin. She poked at her hair, as if prods from her fingers could bring life back into her limp, oily tresses.

She shot a glance at Derek’s image reflected in the glass before her. “Should I try?”

Derek’s eyes quickly dropped but he continued probing, undeterred by Sara’s jab. “Do you think you could kill yourself with a mirror?”

Sara didn’t answer.

* * *

They had been sitting in a circle after an evening meal. The group had formed quickly, gathering in the house with Sara and her husband. Her sister and nephew had been over for dinner when the Curse descended. The Redfelds, a young couple and toddler, that lived next door, knocked on the door about a week later. They brought their babysitter, a teenager who had run to them sometime in the first couple of days.

Sara cleared the dishes as her husband and Mr. Redfeld began their usual post meal debate—whether or not to move, and if so, whether into the city or away was the better choice. Should they stay together or split apart. Their volume increased and Sara heard her sister say:

“Hey guys, let’s cover our eyes!”

And then, after a short silence, all hell broke loose.

Not in a blur, exactly, but more of a collage, Sara’s memories of the moment crowded together all at once—the sound of the door crashing in, a barrage of gunshots and men shouting. Kicking automatically into self-preservation-mode, Sara scurried into the small half-bath off the kitchen. Women’s screams. Crashing noises. The laugh. A maniacal cackle.

“Why are they all blindfolded?!”

“Fuck if I know, but it sure makes things easier.”

Then another series of gunshots. Deliberate. Evenly paced. One, two. The women and children screaming. Three, four. Then only Mrs. Redfeld and the babysitter whimpering.

Sara stood in front of the mirror, staring into her own eyes, willing herself dead as she tried to block out the sounds of the two women being raped and beaten and raped again. She wanted more than anything to die right there, but the mirror held no magic. It wouldn’t reflect her will, only her own desperate tears. Eventually she slipped to the floor and prayed for the sounds to stop. She waited for the men to find her.

* * *

“Noooo!”

A mournful wail brought Sara back to the basement where she sat, still holding the dusty hand mirror. Derek turned to look behind him as the groan echoed off the walls.

Chad had found his daughter.

* * *

She’d come across the girl, weeping, alone in the middle of the basement’s cluttered main room. If not broken, the girl was fragile and cracked. Sara sat, put her arm around Phoebe, and listened to her ramble about an encounter with Derek, only minutes before. He hadn’t hurt the girl but he’d come on too strong. It knocked Phoebe for a loop. She hadn’t been sure until he walked away whether he’d go too far and now she didn’t know if she would ever feel safe in the basement again. Just one more leer, one groping hand might collapse Phoebe’s will and leave her bleeding, just a malleable piece of meat, defenseless but for some man’s mercy. A mercy Sara had little faith existed anywhere, especially not in this basement hideaway.

“I just want to go home.”

“I’m afraid this is home,” Sara said.

“No, it isn’t,” Phoebe clenched her fists. “This will never be home!”

Sara squeezed the girl’s shoulders, trying to calm her, provide some kind of comfort. “You’ll be okay.”

“You don’t know me!” Phoebe shook her off. “You’re not my friend.”

“I could….”

“You’re nobody!” Phoebe’s face dropped to her hands.

“It’s alright,” Sara said, reaching out again. “You can just cry a while. It’s okay.”

“Stop it!” Phoebe pushed away from her. “Just leave me alone! You’re not my mom! My mom’s fucking dead!”

You’re right, Sara thought bitterly, I’m not your fucking mom, and I’m goddamned glad for that. She took a breath, resolved. “You’re right,” she whispered aloud. “I’m sorry.”

Phoebe relaxed, wiping her nose with her sleeve.

“You know what I miss the most?” Sara watched closely, her arm back around Phoebe’s shoulders, then answered her own question. “I miss being able to look in people’s eyes.”

Phoebe’s gaze flashed up to Sara’s face—hopeful, understanding—certain of a shared sentiment that would bond her to a new sister. That single moment of hope gave Sara all she needed.

Phoebe folded and Sara eased the girl’s body to the floor.

* * *

The front door slammed, followed by a chorus of reckless whoops as the intruders leapt out into the street. Prudence would have Sara remain hidden for at least a few minutes after the men left her house, but she listened for only a second or two. Sara eased the door open and crept from the bathroom into carnage.

Everyone lay strewn around the floor like children’s toys. They were all still blindfolded. The men had been shot in their heads, and her nephew and the baby too. The invaders hadn’t needed to look in anyone’s eyes. The women lay half-naked and bleeding. Sara gagged. The babysitter moaned and rolled onto her side, closing her splayed legs and tightening into a fetal ball.

Sara crossed to the window bay and looked out over the front porch at the four men. They passed a bottle and slapped each other on their backs. One of them pointed to the neighbor’s house on the corner with its lights burning in the windows.

Sara turned back to the women on the floor. She went to both of them in turn. They looked to her with pain, humiliation, and horror stark and bare in their eyes. She released them from their torture. Her first deliberate kills. Acts of mercy. Just like her gift to Phoebe months later. Sara’s compassionate motives helped ease her guilt, weakening her compunction for when she needed to kill for other reasons.

The four men became three after only a week. Sara couldn’t follow too close. She dare not expose herself or give them any hint, not even the faintest scent of their stalker. But when the one drifted back and walked into the alley, she had no choice. When his piss pattered against the side of the very dumpster in which she cowered, she stood.

Drew, the shortest of the four, the drunkard, jumped back, pee spraying up into his startled face as he stared goggle-eyed at her sudden appearance. Then he collapsed dead. His urine continuing to fountain, raining down on him, as Sara slipped out into the street.

The second of man died at his own hand. In some ways, nothing had changed. Just as statistics indicated before the Curse had fallen upon the world, suicide remained the primary function of guns. Sara learned of his death while eavesdropping on the last two. They stood shaken and stunned. They resolved to leave the town and walk to the city some ninety miles south. To start fresh. Sara snuck off as their talk drifted to fantasies of what they might find. She wanted to see the dead man herself.

His name had been Randy and he looked almost as pathetic with the gun between his legs and his brains splattered on the bricks behind him as he had that first night, sitting in an armchair in the corner house. He’d nagged the others to go back so that he could take another turn on the Redfeld’s babysitter, whom he called ‘the young one.’ To Sara’s relief, the other three hadn’t acquiesced. Only their promise of ‘plenty of fresh, young pussy ahead’ actually got him out of his chair and marching out of the neighborhood.

She understood, too intimately, the kind of despair that might have led Randy to take his own life, but she had zero sympathy. Sara despised the man and her only regret at his death was that she hadn’t caused it.

Number three, Phil, was the first person Sara killed by hand rather than with a thought. He and Peter made the moronic choice to follow the train tracks down the coast to the city, easily doubling their walking distance, and hers, as they snaked along every zig and zag of the shoreline. The rails—perched on an endless, winding mound of crushed rock and gravel—provided little cover, so she kept to the beach, taking advantage of the twisting path and the noise of the surf to keep her hidden.

After two weeks of stumbling on the uneven ties, scraping hands and knees on rough stones, and nibbling through all of their poorly rationed beef jerky, the men came upon an impromptu community coalesced around an abandoned strip mall in the northern suburbs. Loose and unorganized, like a cross between a farmer’s market and a homeless encampment, the little community had no security or watchmen. Phil and Peter wandered in and joined a group sharing a pot of soup, no questions asked.

Sara waited a few minutes, half expecting her quarry to start murdering everyone, raping and pillaging as they had before, but they didn’t. They kept their eyes down and made friendly conversation. Sara scuffled in from the other side of the parking lot. She wandered between a couple of campfires before discovering that the group used the restrooms at the back of an old Vietnamese restaurant. She drifted in to wait in the hall outside the toilets.

Sara pushed up to Phil when he left the men’s room. Asking if he was new and if he wanted a proper welcome. He wouldn’t look at her, refused to meet her eyes, despite her aggressive come-on, but he didn’t hesitate to use his hands. Even after grabbing at her breasts and ass, Phil wouldn’t raise his face to hers, so she gutted him with a rusty oyster shucker she’d found next to a burnt out beach fire three days earlier.

Sara enjoyed the warmth of his blood flowing over her taught knuckles as he slid to the floor in the hallway. Her other hand clamped over his mouth while the distorted sounds of Def Leppard blasted too loud for the speakers in the dining room behind her.

Sara felt certain that Peter had caught on. He must have realized that he and his friends had been hunted. He seemed to deliberately avoid being alone after he discovered Phil in the back of the restaurant. But that only made Sara more careful, more determined, and patient. She watched from afar as he began to collect his new crew over the following weeks and struggled with her own ambivalence as he failed to rouse them into another vicious gang. Instead she listened to him preach his dream of a new society based on respect and restraint.

At night she would dream of that night, of staring at the mirror and discovering her husband and friends sprawled across her living room. She woke up each morning with a refreshed anger that only swelled at his hypocrisy.

One night, she lost track of them. Peter had gathered four cohorts by that time, three men and a woman, and Sara left them camped out in a downtown park. She slept on the second floor of an empty building, but they’d disappeared by the time she woke and checked on them. It was four weeks later and a few miles south when she caught sight of two of the men heading into an old Asian supermarket.

Sara had nothing to do with Scott’s death—two men had gone into the store, but only Derek came out. She followed as he scurried back to the basement hideout.

She was sneaking around on the ground floor, trying to figure out where Derek had gone when Peter found her.

“Hey!” His shout made her jump and, turning, she toppled a bundle of scrap metal, long slender pieces of a bed frame or shelving. The sound of them hitting the concrete floor reverberated around them as Sara stood frozen in front of her nemesis, certain that she would be recognized.

Of course, Peter had no idea who she was. He’d never laid eyes on Sara before. He hadn’t yet heard about Scott’s death and saw only a lost and lonely wanderer. He welcomed her, gave her a candy bar, and told her to wait while he talked with the others.

“It’s a democracy,” Peter said as he left.

Apparently they voted her in.

The others seemed well intentioned, warm and welcoming, but the cruel irony of the bandanas hanging around their necks only steeled her resolve. Peter had stolen the idea from her family even as he’d raped, murdered, and mutilated them. It didn’t matter if he’d found some kind of enlightenment, had repented his past, or strove for penance for his crimes. She would end Peter and destroy his dream.

* * *

Peter’s grip on Sara’s wrists relaxed and he dropped his arms. Sara reached up to his bandana.

“Trust me,” she said, knowing he would.

* * *

Sara left the building behind, walking across the litter strewn parking lot with a bounce in her step. She’d completed her mission. Her revenge exacted, she could forge ahead with a clean slate and live a new life.

Maybe she would gather a tribe. She could collect strays, like Peter had done, and build a community from the diverse skills and backgrounds of the people she selected. It was a good idea, she had to give him credit for that, and it might have worked but for his past coming to haunt him. Stalking him. Staring him down. But Sara didn’t have that problem, her past was dead. The memories faded like dreams.

EPILOGUE

Sara liked Brad. She decided after only a few days of traveling with him that he would be her first recruit. Despite deafness in one ear (although she couldn’t tell which), a stubborn baldness (he kept himself meticulously shaved—hairless everywhere that she could see), and a gruesome pattern of scars that marred what had probably been a reasonably handsome face, Sara found him attractive. Brad comported himself with wit, grace, and a fierce intelligence—and he hadn’t once made any kind of move on her.

“Brad.” She looked to where he knelt trying to spark some shavings under a meticulous kindling structure. “Brad!”

He looked up, annoyed at first, and then, as if suddenly recognizing his own name, smiled. “What’s up?”

“I think we should start a colony. Recruit some folks. See if we can build up a community.”

“Sounds kinda dangerous.” He refocused on his nascent fire. “People are a risk.”

“Am I a risk?”

“Well, frankly,” he said, not looking up. “Yes.”

“Then why are you here?”

He took a deep breath. “You’re a risk.” His tone was careful as he turned toward her, his eyes focusing at her hips. “But you are the strongest, most intelligent, most focused person I’ve ever met. You also have an amazing nose for canned goods.” He shrugged. “Why would I leave?”

SPECIAL THANKS

TREMENDOUS GRATITUDE to Joon Chang and the cast and crew of the original 4:17 film—especially to Troy Etley, Shelly Lloyd-Samson, Tava Bystrom, Tatiana Shamgunova, Roy Samson, David Reyes, Daniel Sipes, and Angela Muir for inhabiting slim sketches of character and bringing them to life. Thanks also to Jesiah Bell for critical edits and assistance with the original script. The full cast, crew, and list of collaborators can be found in the film’s credits.

Thanks to my beta readers Ian Bone, Martin Gudgin, and Lauren Riley for their time, patience, and insight. Although I stubbornly failed to address all of their concerns, the story would not be as readable, rich, or grammatically correct without their thoughtful feedback.

Profound thanks to my always-first reader and Main Squeeze, Autumn-Marie Sumiko Sakai Bystrom for her confidence, patience, and unwavering support.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

BORN AND RAISED IN SEATTLE, Carl Bystrom graduated from the University of Washington with a degree in the Comparative History of Ideas. He has tested computer games, painted houses, banged on drums and other instruments, fathered children, designed websites, taught juggling and sleight of hand, managed software development teams, and served as the Executive Director of a circus school. He lives, writes, and keeps house with his Main Squeeze in the suburbs of his hometown.

Copyright

4:17 Copyright © 2020 by Carl Bystrom. All Rights Reserved.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.

Blue Turtle Press

Cover by CAB

Cover Photo by Joon Chang

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, doesn’t adequately represent the complexity and depth of real humans and instead reflects limits of the author’s creativity. Any similarity to businesses, companies, events, or locales is either coincidental, public domain, or used as cultural reference, and the details are made-up or mis-remembered.

Carl A.S. Bystrom

Visit my website at www.carlbystrom.com