1
The sun is just beginning to scatter its light through the tops of the oaks when Riley throws her cell phone into the lake.
If asked, she wouldn’t say she’s given this decision a tremendous amount of thought. Standing there on the bank with her boots half-sunk in the mud, watching the spreading ripples where the phone went in, she realizes that it doesn’t feel like a decision at all. It feels like the natural culmination of a long series of events, each gathering with the other into something with unstoppable inertia. Rolling down the days and weeks and months.
Didn’t have a choice in it, she thinks, in the feeling of the solid little weight leaving her hand and the sound of it hitting the water with a soft splosh. It was just time.
Which of course gets her wondering about the last thing she really did have a choice in. She isn’t sure what that would have been.
Riley shoves her hands into her pockets, tips her head back, and stares blankly up at the blue sky cutting through the network of branches and nodding leaves above her. Once in some long-forgotten and therefore likely forgettable piece of writing, she read that the sky was the face of God. Bad poetry, that is. But if one granted that it was, in any respect, true, then where would God’s eyes be located? Could she be looking into them without knowing it?
Then we could go insane and try to kill each other, she thinks, and the corner of her mouth twitches in what isn’t remotely a smile. I have a feeling that would probably only go one way.
Or there is no God, which she’s always found most plausible—even Before, let alone now.
The cell phone is gone. The world is further away now. She realizes, as she turns and heads back up the small slope to rejoin the path toward home, that she feels nothing whatsoever about it.
She doesn’t feel as though she’s lost anything at all.
One thing she could say about the cell phone is that it was very old. It was starting to work more slowly, and its operating system was losing stability. She would have had to replace it soon anyway—or the logic of Before would have declared as much. In any case, that would have been done easily enough; place an order online and then sit back and wait. Wait for probably a while, because it takes a long time for things to arrive in the mail now, and it seems as if it’s taking longer every day. What once would have taken a week or so can now drag on for a month or more. Could be the mail itself, but it’s just as likely to be on the production end.
They don’t make anything like they used to. Many things being completely automated now has apparently made nothing better or more efficient. Once chip production faltered and then nearly collapsed, people began going back to the old items, the previously discarded items, and functional took almost universal precedence over new.
First, humans moved away from manufacturing and robots moved in. Then materials were harder and harder to come by, and so many robots sat idle, waiting for shipments that came late and irregularly or never came at all. And now so much less of everything is made.
These are the things Riley is meditating on as the house comes into view through the trees. It’s a house somewhere in between—too large to be a cabin, yet somehow not quite what most people would consider a House. The siding is faded from blue to a dirty grayish white, and the roof is mossy; the place as a whole is old and not well maintained.
Riley is no expert at home maintenance. She might have taught herself, but she might have done any number of things. And then again, as with so much else, it’s increasingly difficult to gauge the degree to which any given thing matters very much.
The gutters, leaf-choked. The flower beds around the sides of the house, badly in need of weeding. Starlings have nested in the chimney. As she makes her way down the gravel path toward the front porch, Riley notes these things as she always does: as the only markers of time’s passage that hold any real weight anymore. They establish her presence, that she’s been here. That she’s here now.
She’s found that if you don’t see other people for long enough, you begin to lose hold of that. You come unmoored and begin to drift, often in ways you couldn’t have predicted.
Her phone is sinking into lake mud. Possibly she’s well and truly drifting.
The screen door squeak-clacks behind her, and she stands in a shaft of sunshine that cuts through the tiny front hall’s gloom. She wipes her shoes on the ancient rug, and as she does, she notes—in the way she noted the gutters and the flower beds—the dark brown stains spattered in broad streaks and drops across the floorboards. Pooled against the scuffed white baseboard. Dripping down the faded green-and-gold floral wallpaper. There’s a great deal of it. When a woman shoots her husband of forty-four years in the head and chest several times and then slits her own throat with a knife, it tends to be messy.
By the time Riley got the call—as the only surviving relative of her grandparents, there was no one else for authorities to contact—it wasn’t even close to the first time she had to reckon with how much blood is in a human being, but it’s still a bit of a sight to behold.
She might have properly taken care of the stains when she moved in, but again, she might have done any number of things.
Maybe that’s part of the time thing, too.
She steps over the stains. Avoids them as best she can. Goes into the dim kitchen and makes herself a cup of tea. The kettle is electric, and therefore, with the frequent blackouts—more and more frequent, it seems—not always usable, but right now, the power is on. The tea is black and strong. She’s running low. She’ll have to order more very soon if she wants to wait only a month or so for it to arrive.
Although every time she places an order for anything, she half wonders if this will be the time it doesn’t come at all.
As she sits at the kitchen table and sips her tea, she thinks about the phone in the mud beneath around ten feet of water. The mud, stirred gently by the water, will have already begun to entomb it, like a skeleton setting to fossilize. In hundreds of thousands of years, will someone find it?
Will there be anyone left to do the finding? Will anything have changed? Will people still be going mad when they meet one another’s eyes, murdering, suiciding, or will it be over?
We’re all under the water, she thinks. I should jump in and join it. Lie down in the mud. Pull it over like a soft, cold blanket.
She digs her thumbnail into the pitted tabletop so hard it splinters. At the same instant, she realizes she’s been chewing her bottom lip so hard she tastes blood. She stops, feels a distant echo of unease. No, she moved out here so that she wouldn’t kill herself. Or that’s what she told herself at the time.
Time.
Which is the mud that covers.
Riley closes her eyes, swallows the tang of her own blood. In the trees outside, crows scream.
2
Crows scream.
Later, she would identify that as the tip-off. Maybe it was in direct response to what was happening out on the street and maybe it wasn’t, but there was a harshly hysterical quality to the screaming that stood out to her and drew her to the apartment window. Drew her gaze down.
Two people were fighting in the street below.
Riley watched them, her head cocked birdlike.
She had seen street fights before. Or at any rate, she had seen fights in the street. Growing up in a neighborhood that she would have characterized as roughish rather than rough, she saw more than her share of disputes settled with fists and clumsy grappling. It’s a thing she learned from personal experience: fights are clumsy things. There’s far more grabbing than punches or kicks. You spend more time on the ground than on your feet.
This was clumsy, too. But it wasn’t like any fight she’d ever seen, and the first thing that struck her was how much blood there was, because one of the two people appeared to be fighting with their teeth.
He lunged and snapped at the air. Two stories up, she could see the whites of his rolling eyes. Red streamed down his chin, gleamed in smoggy afternoon sunlight. He grabbed the woman he was fighting, yes, and he did so to hold her in place long enough to take a chunk out of her upper arm.
The woman scrambled to her feet. Tried to run. Tripped over nothing and went down, and he was on her again. By then, there was a small crowd. Stopped cars, honking. Raised cell phones. A general air of confusion. If it were a normal fight, Riley thought later, probably someone would have tried to break it up. Maybe. Most likely. But no one did. They stared and filmed, and the man tore the woman’s throat out. A hot dog vendor across the street stood there, jaw slack, as the dog in the bun he was holding slipped free and fell into the gutter. An elderly man gripped a parking meter and vomited all over his shoes. A girl who couldn’t have been more than sixteen burst into a peal of frightened giggles. The honking had stopped by then, or at least it seemed to have faded, and the street was eerily quiet.
Why did she notice those details? Why did her mind decide they were worthy of retention? The man was chewing a strip of flesh, diving back in for more. The woman was choking up her own blood, her feet twitching. Riley realized that she had one hand pressed against her mouth, the other jammed against the window sash. She wondered if she was screaming. She had never seen anyone die before.
She saw lots of people die after that.
Maybe that was Patient Zero. Maybe it wasn’t. It’s never been conclusively determined. All they know is that it didn’t happen all at once, until it was happening everywhere. As it turns out, for no apparent reason, something can break in your world, and suddenly, all around you, people are dying bloody and screaming every fucking day.
It’s horrifying. Then it’s weird. Then it’s inconvenient.
Then it’s just every fucking day.
3
She does have a desktop computer with an internet connection—of sorts. It’s satellite, not fiber-optic; she learned early on that with satellite, outages are less frequent. They do still happen, though, and every time she boots the thing up, it’s a wild guess as to whether her one connection to the world beyond this property will be there.
It’s there this time. She checks her email. She does this only to establish whether her latest order of food has shipped. It has; if all goes well, it’ll arrive before she starts to run low of too many items. Unless the production end has also finally broken down, if no one is left to maintain the automation and the drones.
Vast fields devoid of human hands. All metal and wires and quiet whirring. Sometimes she sees it in her dreams. It’s a safe thing to see.
There are a few other unread messages. She doesn’t read them. She barely registers what they are before she kicks the thing into sleep mode, and she promptly forgets them. This is such a deeply ingrained mechanism at this point that she’s barely aware that she does it.
A mechanism of what kind? Coping? Or something else?
If she were inclined to think about it at all, she would wonder why the fuck it matters anymore, whether it ever did.
What does coping even mean? She’s alive, she isn’t freezing or starving; as such, her life is reasonably comfortable. She’s managed to avoid looking directly at human eyes, physically present or in an image, for over two years. Isn’t this enough?
But she won’t ask that question, because there’s no reason to.
She wants to wash her face and lie down. In the bathroom, she stares at the blank wall where the mirror used to be. There are no mirrors anywhere in the house. Every surface capable of any significant reflection has been covered or removed or smashed. Last time she checked—which was, in fairness, a very long time ago—there was no clear evidence that meeting your own reflected gaze was sufficient to trigger a reaction, but why take chances?
Lying in bed staring at the shadows gathering on the ceiling, tracing her fingertips slowly over her own features like that old stupid cliché of a blind person learning someone’s face. Her touch is incurious, absent. It creates no image in her mind. She doesn’t need to see herself. It’s not as if anyone else is seeing her.
4
At first, no one knew what the rules were.
This is a thing she remembers with visceral clarity, a kind of distant but gut-twisting sense memory. Even when people began to figure out that it was a look that triggered it, and before the terror of how common and mundane and borderline unavoidable such a thing was truly settled in: there was the terror of not knowing what made it happen, what was safe and what was hazardous and what was for-sure deadly, what would kill you and whoever had the misfortune to encounter you before you killed yourself.
But the rules came later. It took a few days for people to fully grasp that anything big was even happening.
Geographically widespread, temporally diffuse disasters are emergent phenomena. They lack the clarity of the singular event that happens all at once and right out in the open, spectacular and undeniable. People wonder and doubt. People conspiratorialize. Hoax, a lot of people said. Or fake news or false flag, and many of them continued to use those words even as people they personally knew went insane and destroyed the people around them and destroyed themselves.
So here, here is Riley in those first few days: in bed and on her couch and on her floor and nowhere in particular, with a face she no longer clearly sees, scrolling and scrolling and scrolling as if she can reach an informational saturation point at which she’ll finally understand what’s happening. She had caved to that impulse before—of course, everyone had—but this felt wholly different, because it was.
Platforms did what they could to crack down on imagery, on video; moderators struggled to delete them as soon as they were posted. But it proved impossible to keep up. It was a torrent, and it grew heavier all the time—of screams, of blood, of crushed bone, of torn flesh, of cars ramming through crowds and into buildings, of gunfire, of flashing knives, of any weapon anyone could get their hands immediately around.
Anything might become a weapon. In the midst of their insanity, this new form of infected proved amazingly resourceful. Creative, even.
But the violence is so easily made abstract. It’s easier to look at, because it’s numbing and because it’s filtered through a screen, and Riley did not and does not have to think about the fear grinding into her stomach—how she could hide from it. How she could make herself safe.
Now there is no fear, but then, there was, ubiquitous as the screams.
She called out of work. Everyone was doing that by then. For days, she only ordered delivery, instructed them to leave it outside the apartment door. She saw no one, spoke only to her mother—a frantic voice high and tinny through the phone, Oh god, honey, today Mark Hanlon across the street, you remember him, he let you use his pool, he killed the postal carrier with a shovel, the police had to shoot him, please stay away from everyone, please just stay inside.
Copyright © 2024 by Sunny Moraine
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