MetaJoy Chapters 1+2 (Previous is now named Chapter 0) Exclusive Release (Patreon)

Author's note:

Weird issues with the drop. Won't be trying that again.

Howdy folks. Told you there'd be a surprise this week. I'm back, and at 'em, so we should have our standard QuestWright chapters.

This, of course, isn't QuestWright. Shawn (my co-author) and I thought it would be a good idea to show you guys these chapters WAY ahead of time. We're not going to release anything on RoyalRoad or anywhere else until the first 10, following chapter 0, are perfected. That means this is an exclusive posting available only here. It's likely these chapters won't appear on RR for another...let's say 2-3 months.

The way these work is, one of us writes the chapter, the other edits, then we edit the edits, then come to a consensus on if the chapter is complete. Between the two of us multi-editing (I coin the term), when the story's done, it'll be pretty much ready for publishing anywhere.

Now, here's the dealio. This whole story is HIGHLY experimental. We're going to be doing things I absolutely haven't seen anywhere else. So that comes with something special we need from the audience: participation.

Whenever you see these chapters, if at all possible, please comment on the following (if you're inclined): What works, what doesn't work, and what was your favorite part.

The reason is that you'll see a few things here that we're going to test out on you that may be confusing as hell, but make a lot of sense in our heads. That's difficult to find as the author, because we both know what we're looking at, whereas you guys are in the dark.

The first few chapters aren't so off the wall or out there, but the upcoming chapter is going to break that a bit, and each chapter after is going to further damage the preconceived notion of what you consider a novel.

Changes:

A few changes from the last chapter (You'll see this every so often):

: % of survivors shifted from 10% to 5%.

Near the end of the chapter, we added in that Craig notices an empty bus is traveling across the street, and a plane looks to have a strange, slow, angled descent.

Lastly:

So, here we go. This is 7k words, so you'll be getting a 12k-word posting this week if you add in QuestWright (second chapter is almost done. Should finish tomorrow, which I hope is true because I'm hosting a massive eSports tournament this weekend. Do you want me to post the youtube link here? Do you care? Meh.)

The genre is experimental LitRPG. The subgenres of LitRPG we're including are too many to list.

Enjoy, and Shawn is on here as well, so he'll see any comments you may have.

ACT 1

Chapter 1: A Hero Is Born (Again. For Real This Time.)

“We have two lives, and the second begins when we realize we only have one.” 

– Confucius

The world ended, and Joy Arbor was still kneeling on the sidewalk next to her brother’s severed arm.

She knew it was his because she remembered it holding her hand in darker times. Her shoulder, when she needed a guide. And because she’d watched him explode. 

Also, she recognized the watch.

She clutched Muffin’s leash to her chest; the dog himself pressed against her side in a tremble.

The bus. 

It was stopped at a light on Chapala when it happened, all those flashes of light zipped up into the sky, and then the light changed, and the bus just moved on its own, drifting into the intersection as vehicles do when nobody is touching the accelerator. 

The empty car that hit it was already in motion as the light turned from green to yellow. There had been someone in there, too, before all the lights came.

“Holy shit,” Joy said, looking from her brother’s severed arm to the fiery wreck in the intersection. “Holy shit, holy shit, holy—” A small explosion stopped her speaking as everything, everywhere, became chaos.

A tremor ran through her as something nearby moved. The orange glow that had once suffused Craig moved through the air toward her. It wasn’t drifting, but stalking forward with purpose, independent of any visible source, and by the time she felt the warmth settle over her skin, it was too late to step back.

“Oh. Whoa. WOW. What the hell is—OW!” 

The warmth grew to heat, then to unbearable heat, and then, like a sparkler sputtering out on the Fourth of July, it was simply gone.

Craig's arm lay on the blacktop before her as a plane, dragging a contrail blend in the distance, crashed. The shockwave took a few moments to hit, setting her back on her ankles as she looked up at the sky. It was already filled with smoke.

“Holy shit. This is just… holy shit. I mean…” She muttered like this for a few minutes with her eyes closed. In a brief pause, she opened them, saw only Craig’s severed arm, and vomited.

Joy felt as if she could have stayed there forever. A creature, muttering and cursing in that very spot, the smell of her own vomit filling her nose for the rest of her life. That is, had it not been for the booming, all-powerful voice that suddenly filled her mind, reading--out loud--text that appeared as if by magic before her eyes.

Hello Survivors!

If you’re reading this right now, that means you’re a part of the 3% remaining from the human population. Congratulations on your selection!

We won’t bore you with trivialities—

“Hey! STOP! I already read this.”

At the sound of her protests, the text stopped appearing, and the voice in Joy’s head was momentarily silenced.

“Who is talking? Where did everyone go? What the fuck happened to my brother?!” 

Joy held her breath, anticipating an answer or some kind of rebuttal, but none came. 

What the hell was going on? One minute, it was her birthday. Next, Allison turned into a beam of light and vanished. Then those flashes were everywhere, zipping into the sky from every building in view. It seemed to Joy that the roof rule was in full effect; anyone with a ceiling over their head was gone in a heartbeat. Mid-stride, mid-sentence; hell, they could’ve been mid-bite of some grease-bomb at Arby's. There, one moment, and a pinpoint of light the next.

She hadn’t screamed. Not when she saw the beams of light shoot into the sky, not when the blast of lightning exploded her brother into who knows how many pieces. 

At least one arm. 

She still hadn’t screamed. It all happened so fast. She was still thinking about where they might be going for her birthday dinner, and then zap. And then the bus, and the plane, and then she just fell to her knees.

It was all too much. And as the human mind was want to do, it rejected those things that overwhelmed the psyche. So, Joy laughed.

“Jeepers, I sure could use a joint right about now.”

Bark.

Muffin appeared to agree. He tugged Joy toward Craig’s car, parked less than six feet away.

“Okay. Okay. But we don’t have the keys, buddy.”

Muffin seemed to sigh. It was a very human gesture, so Joy wasn’t sure if it really happened or if she was reading too much into it. Then the dog padded over to Craig’s severed arm, gently nudged it with his nose, and the hand opened to reveal the car keys.

Bark. Bark. 

“Yeah. I see them. Wow, dude. The body’s not even cold yet, and you want me to scavenge this random arms keys and steal a car?”

Bark. 

Joy narrowed her eyes at the dog. Muffin tilted his head and let his tongue hang loose.

She reached for her phone. 

It was pure muscle memory, the same instinct she had every time something super crazy happened in her life that Craig needed to know about. Her thumb was already finding his name in her contacts before her brain caught up with what was happening.

She stared at the screen for a long moment. Eventually, she looked up at the arm.  

Joy stood, slipped the phone back in her pocket, and picked up the car keys.

“Hah, what a strange thing. That’s just a standard arm. Yep, yep, just an arm hanging out in the school parking lot. Oh, look, it’s waving…no, just the imagination. Well, Mr. Arm, we have to get going. Can’t hang around with disconnected arms, or I’ll get a bad reputation. It’s just a bit…much,” she took a breath. “I really need a joint.”

The car smelled like him. She pretended not to notice the odd combination of Axe body spray and a certain musk she’d inadvertently memorized over the course of a lifetime. Memories tried to intrude of a ten-year-old boy with a lopsided grin, but she pushed them back as she got in.

He’d been jumped after school that day. A group of kids had beaten the crap out of him. But he was smiling because he’d taken one of them down and shoved a fistful of dirt in the kid’s mouth and—

Joy shoved the memory into the darkest hole in her mind, then sat in the driver’s seat for a long moment, hands on the wheel, not going anywhere. Muffin pressed himself against her thigh and didn’t move. 

“Okay,” she said finally, to no one. “Okay.”

Then the text appeared again. But it was different this time. Text would appear, be deleted, and then be rewritten, as if there was some unseen battle for control unfolding in real time.

Congratulations, Craig [ERROR]

Reassigning. Please wait.

Congratulations, Joy Arbor!

The assigned concept Ultimate Primal Defier requires—

The assigned concept, Ultimate Primal Defier, has already been—

[ERROR]

Scanning participant.

You’ve shown all the traits of being a [ERROR]-

Assigning…

SCENESTEALER:

You weren't supposed to be here. And yet, here you are. Somehow, inexplicably, the scene belongs to you now. Don't question your ownership. We already are.

Please wait a moment as time reasserts itself, then enter the golden doorway beyond to access your full powers.

Joy read it twice.

"Scenestealer," she beat drums on the steering wheel in a pause. "I mean. Yeah, okay. That tracks."

Joy waited to see if anything else would happen. The text just sat there, glowing faintly in her vision, neither expanding nor explaining itself further.

“Is that it? Do I get powers or anything?”

Nothing answered. Joy took her hands off the wheel and waved them experimentally in front of her.

“Are you gonna freeze the world again, random world freezers?” She snorted, then looked at Muffin, “Let’s go.”

Just as she was pulling the car away, she looked in the rear-view mirror and saw it. The Golden Door. 

Floating a few inches off the ground and right in the middle of the road, it held itself with contempt, its edges softly glowing in the afternoon sun. It hadn’t been there a moment ago, she was certain of that.

Joy stared at the mirror for a long moment, then shook her head.

“No. Nope. Not happening.” She put the car in drive and raced out of the area for all of a few dozen feet before slamming on the brakes.

The Door was directly in her path. It placidly hovered with smugness, golden and glowy, utterly unbothered by the inconvenience it was causing.

Joy lay on the horn.

“Move outta the way, ya stupid flippin' door! Are you kidding me?”

It was not kidding her.

She edged the car right. The Door thankfully held still, but it was close enough to the curb that she couldn’t squeeze past on that side without losing a mirror. She tried the left. Better, barely. She’d have to go up on the median, which meant the driver's side wheels were going to bounce up over the curb, which would for sure scrape the undercarriage of someone’s car, that they absolutely would have strong feelings about. 

She did it anyway. “Sorry!” she squeaked. The car groaned as it rode up onto the median like it was climbing a mountain.

“We are not doing this,” Joy told the smiling Muffin beside her.  “I draw the line at floating, tracking doors.” Once she’d cleared it and bumped back down onto the asphalt, she breathed a very short sigh of relief. “Whatever that is, we are not doing it.”

She checked the rearview mirror. As if by magic, the Golden Door was gone.

With all the craziness happening, she put it out of her mind and focused on the road. Turning off Garden Street was where her brain kicked into gear, which was either a coping mechanism or a character flaw. Probably both.

She pushed the car through Micheltorena Street, past the two parks: Alice Kreck Park on her right and Alameda on her left, as she scanned around.

She was stunned as her eyes latched onto all the people wandering and running around. Until now, it had just been her, Muffin, and the Door. And that strange arm on the ground…

What the what? Where did all these people come from? Wait…Joggers…dog walkers…a horizontally-challenged fellow eating a sandwich on the bench. I think that’s a bunch of kids on a field trip! 

Her quick mind put two and two together.

These guys had all been outside when the thing happened. Allison…Allison had been the only one still inside the building before she turned into a dot of light. 

Was that all it took? Being inside? What a stupid way to pick survivors.

Okay. Anyone outside survived. The beams of light all came from inside. Cars, offices, homes. That’s the rule.

Which meant every hospital was running on whoever happened to be outside when it hit. But also, all the patients inside were also gone, so at least there was plenty of room.

There’s a silver lining! You just need to find the bright side of life. Or death, in this instance.

It also meant every school. Joy thought, briefly, sharply, of her own classroom, her kids, all of whom had been picked up for the day. 

How many of them had been in the car or already at home?

Joy dug a deep hole in the recesses of her mind and tossed that line of thinking inside because she couldn’t; she absolutely could not go there. But she also knew she couldn’t ignore the reality. Every school, office building, and home had been impacted.

How many people is that?

The system said three percent remaining. She did the math without wanting to. The global population is around eight billion, three percent surviving, that’s two hundred forty-three million people left on the entire planet. It sounds like a lot until you consider it’s basically the population of Pakistan.

A delivery truck had gone through the front window of a dry cleaner on her left, and its engine was still running. The plastic-wrapped clothes inside, free of ownership, swayed gently. 

She had to go wide around the truck.

Then she slammed on the brakes again. The Door was back. The stupid glowing door was in the middle of the road again, just on the other side of the truck.

Joy rolled down the window and flipped it off, “Fuck off, ya door!” Once again, Joy made her way over the median to get past it, then continued her drive through the apocalypse.

An ambulance had drifted into a parked car at the intersection of De La Vina and Micheltorena. It hadn’t been a soft tap. There was a woman trapped between the ambulance’s crumpled front end and the parked vehicle. She wasn’t moving, but Joy could see that her face was peppered with glass.

A construction crew had been working on a building half a block up. Four guys were on the ground surrounding a fifth one. That fifth guy was pinned under a pallet of cinderblocks that the crane had dropped when the operator disappeared, letting go of the controls. The other men were screaming, frantic, trying to use a crowbar on a literal ton of stone to free the man’s legs.

As if there’s anything left there to save. Whoa, where did that cynicism come from? He’ll make it! The miracle of modern medicine! Yeah! He’ll be just fine.

Above them, the crane’s arm was moving in a long unhirrioes arc. Just a yellow giant swigging a steel hook over the traffic below. Joy drove under the swinging shadow without stopping and did not look up.

Two blocks later, the Door was back again, planted squarely in the middle of the road just past an intersection. Joy didn’t even brake this time, simply veered onto the median, scraped the undercarriage again, bounced off the curb, and kept going.

After that, the Door seemed to get the message. Mostly. It never appeared in front of the car again, but when she glanced in the rearview mirror, it was there. Just sort of trailing behind her, moving whenever her eyes left its place.

Son of a bitch. Leave me alone, stupid door! Go haunt a gaudy, golden building somewhere. 

It stayed about two car lengths away, smug and patient, like a too-smart cat that had been abandoned but refused to stop trailing someone with food.

She resolved not to look in the mirror again.

Her path home always took her under the 101 freeway, but the sounds she heard coming from it today were not the norm. There was a sustained low grinding. An ongoing conversation of metal finding metal at alternating speeds, punctuated by something larger every thirty seconds or so when a faster car caught up to the slower carnage ahead of it. It just kept going, and would for a while yet. No one could stop them.

She made the mistake of looking over the top of the freeway’s barrier. Multiple vehicles were on fire. The smoke leaking off the overpass was already thick enough to diffuse the afternoon light into a burnt orange. A big rig had jackknifed across three lanes and was dangling over the street below.

Joy looked at the road ahead and gripped the wheel hard enough to make her knuckles go pale. She checked for oncoming, driverless vehicles and crossed under the overpass, keeping away from the semi looming over the road.

As she drove, she passed Super Cucas on the way to her neighborhood. The drive-thru menu board was on its side, knocked clean off its post by a car that had drifted through it and kept going into the restaurant itself. Its driver was simply no longer present. The automated speaker was asking in a tiny, cheerful voice if she’d like to try the new chorizo bowl today.

Joy had been to Super Cucas many times before; it was within walking distance of her apartment. But three months ago, on a random Saturday, Craig had texted her out of the blue, in the area, you eat yet? Which, in and of itself, wasn’t unusual; hearing from Craig was always a welcome surprise for Joy. 

They’d split an order of chips and guac and sat in a booth by the window, and he’d talked about a car he was working on, and she talked about a kid in her class who kept biting people. At some point, he looked at his phone and said he had to leave, and then left a ten on the table, hugging her on the way out.

She hadn’t thought about it since. There was nothing to think about. It was just a random Saturday.

She drove past it and didn’t look back. Which was actually pretty easy to do, because everywhere she looked, there was something strange to see. By the time she made it to San Andres, she had passed three pedestrians who looked like they’d been struck by vehicles that had no one behind the wheel.

San Andres was a residential street, and on Tuesday afternoons, residential streets were where the “roof rule” became a math problem with no survivors.

A sprinkler was still going in the front yard of an empty house, its rhythmic shuck-shuck-shuck the only sound on the block. They’re all empty now, Joy reminded herself.

She passed an open garage with a silver SUV still running inside, its exhaust pooling in the rafters like visible poison. It was a deathtrap in the making, even with the open door. But it was the roof of the SUV that stopped her heart.

A plastic car seat was perched right on the luggage rack, likely left by a parent who had reached for their keys and vanished before they could put the child in the car. It was empty.

Joy slowed to be sure there was no child there. Just as she did, a Border Collie bolted across the pavement, its leash snapping like a whip against the asphalt. She hissed a breath through her teeth and slammed the brakes.

“He’s gone. They’re all gone,” a voice croaked. 

Joy whipped her head around, clutching her chest. 

There was an old man on his porch across the street, a cardigan hanging loose on his thin frame. She rolled down the window to hear what he had to say. 

“I saw them,” the man said numbly. “That poor woman, Carly, was loading the car up, and put the baby’s seat up there to get the car started and cool it down inside. Then they were just gone.”

Joy looked at the empty garage and then back at the man.

“Are you okay?”

The old man held up dirty hands. “I was in the garden.”

He didn’t offer anything else. After an awkward moment of shared understanding, Joy drove away with her heart in her throat. 

Unbidden thoughts about Craig at ten years old with dirt on his hands, grinning, spliced themselves into her mind. She shook the thought away before another came. Chips, Guac, and a ten left on the table entered, forcing her back to Super Cucas. The warmth of a hug on his way out. 

That broke the dam.

She thought about three missed birthdays, and the delayed delivery, and how today of all days he’d just shown up, no warning, no explanation, just there with Muiffinn and that lopsided grin like it was nothing.

Why today, she thought. Why this day specifically?

She didn’t have an answer. And she was going to have to learn to live without one for a long while. 

Joy drove the last two blocks to her apartment and didn’t cry, which she was pretty sure was the shock still doing its job, and which she was very grateful for in the way you’re grateful for novocaine at the dentist.

“I think he was going to tell me he got superpowers,” she said, looking at Muffin.

Muffin had fallen asleep, but she’d like to believe he would have barked in agreement.

The dog farted.

“I’ll take it,” Joy stated dryly.

Chapter 2: Spark One For The Apocalypse

“I am responsible. Although I may not be able to prevent the worst from happening, I am responsible for my attitude toward the inevitable misfortunes that darken life.”

-Walter Anderson

Joy pulled up to her apartment building and sat with the engine running. The Door was behind her. She could feel it without looking.

In front of her, there were maybe a dozen people outside. She recognized her neighbor, Alex, from the unit below hers. He was in his mid-forties and always wore Dodgers gear. One time, he’d helped her carry a new TV she bought up the stairs without even being asked. Nice guy.

Alex was standing in the driveway in a bathrobe, arms crossed, with some mail dropped by his feet. The apartment building behind him looked completely normal. The same place she'd lived for four years. It was two stories of tan siding, with an exterior walkway running along the upper floor, and a long driveway cutting back toward the parking lot. 

The little crack in the front step that the landlord, Kevin, had been meaning to fix since approximately forever stood out to her. The sad little landscaping by the entrance that somehow always looked tended despite no visible evidence of anyone tending it. Normal. It was all completely normal. 

A few of the others outside she didn’t know. A young couple sat on the low wall by the entrance, not saying anything. An older woman in scrubs paced a tight rectangle on the sidewalk, while a teenage boy sat cross-legged on the hood of a car, eating Doritos and staring at her. All of them had been outside when it happened. 

Joy was still working out whether to get out of the car when it happened again. 

No warning or sound. Just a bright flash of light that hit each person differently. The lights themselves were different colors: some gold, some white, others in shades she didn’t know the names of. 

And then it was over. And the people outside her building were the same people they’d been before being hit with those weird colors of light. Except… they weren’t the same. At all. 

Alex looked at his hands. Then, with the focused concentration of a man attempting something he wasn’t sure was possible, he reached up and began to peel his own face off.

“Oh,” he said, in a tone of mild academic interest.” Interesting.” 

His skin came off his body in one piece, the way you’d unzip a suit and step out of it. It hung in the air for a moment, his flesh still standing on two floppy legs. Then it turned around to look at him, as he stared at his eyeless face. 

Alex himself was a raw map of exposed anatomy: bright red striations of muscle, pulsing yellow fat deposits, and the white, porcelain flash of his teeth now completely visible without the interference of lips. His eyes were two wet, unblinking marbles rolling in his meat-sockets.

“This is fuckin’ wild, man,” Alex said. Without lips to shape the words, the ’f’ sounded like a wet puff of air, his tongue slapping against exposed jawbone. Then, the skin suit turned around and began walking away on its own, with no eyes, no direction, and apparently no agenda whatsoever. 

Alex watched it go. “Hey,” he called after it. “Come back, dude!”

Joy remained in the car. The door handle was cold against her palm, but she didn’t open it. The only thing keeping her from red-lining into a full-blown panic attack was the sheer absurdity of what she was seeing and the odd comfort of the vehicle.

She watched the skinsuit Alex walk down the block. It’s an externalization, her mind whispered, a useless academic thought trying to make sense of the gore.

Her gaze drifted, pulled by a sudden ripple in the air near the garden wall. The young couple who had been clinging to each other weren’t a couple anymore in the conventional sense. The woman had simply disappeared. 

Joy’s perceptive eyes landed on the flattened blades of grass that shifted where the girl’s feet should be. Not gone, she realized, just… invisible. 

The man with her stared into the empty space with a specific kind of high-frequency panic.

“I’m still here,” said the empty air.

“Where?” The man reached out, his hand disappearing into nothingness as he found her body. His shoulders dropped a few inches with a relief so profound it looked like he might cry or collapse. 

“That’s my boob, Brian,” said the empty air beside him. 

At least they can still touch.

It was an odd thought that Joy supposed was her brain trying to calm her nerves, but it didn’t calm so much as unsettle her. 

A sharp POP drew her eyes to the woman in scrubs. She had stopped her pacing and was staring down at her own hand. A paper cup of coffee suddenly appeared there, steam rising in a thin, pathetic ribbon. She took a sip, her face twisting into a mask of pure annoyance. 

“It’s lukewarm,” she said to the empty street. 

She then made a second cup appear in her other hand. She sipped that one, too.

“Are you kidding me?” she snapped. “What kind of fucking power is this?!”

Before Joy could even process the woman whose power was to make lukewarm coffee appear, a flash of blue light reflected in her side mirror. The teenage boy who had been seated on the car hood had dropped his Doritos. He was looking at his outstretched arms, which were now wrapped in soft, flickering tongues of blue flame. He wasn’t screaming or in pain, though. He was staring at the fire with a stunned fascination, the way you look at something beautiful before you realize it might also be very dangerous.

Then, he sneezed.

A jet of fire scorched the hood of Craig’s car.

“Oh shit—” The teen stumbled backward, face contorted in surprise. The flames died instantly, both on his hands and the car, leaving a carbon-black scorch mark the size of a dinner plate on the paint. He locked eyes with Joy through the windsield, chest heaving, smoke rising gently from his arms. 

Joy looked at the mark on Craig’s car for a moment. 

He’s gonna kill me when he sees this. 

Before she could realize how silly that thought was, a horn sounded. It wasn’t a car horn; this sound was deeper and wider, and seemed to be coming from all around them. The sound made her teeth and the base of her sternum vibrate. Every head outside the building lifted up as an announcement appeared in the sky with weighted words. 

WARNING: 

TERATA WILL MAKE CONTACT IN APPROXIMATELY 10 MINUTES. 

PREPARE ACCORDINGLY. 

Joy read it twice. She didn’t know what Terata meant. She had a feeling she was about to find out and would prefer not to. 

Flinging the car door open and startling Muffin awake, she grabbed his leash and headed for the exterior stairs at a pace that was not quite running but not quite walking either. 

The woman in scrubs turned as she passed, still holding both cups of lukewarm coffee.

“This,” she said, raising one hand, “is an absolute joke.”

“I’m sorry,” Joy said, without stopping.

As she passed Alex, he pointed at the sky. “What’s a Terata?”

“No idea,” Joy said, taking the stairs two at a time.

“Hey —  does it look bad?” Alex called after her. 

“You look great, man,” she called back, already on the second-floor walkway.

Nine minutes. 

That’s how long she set the timer on her Powderpuff Girls watch for as she hit the landing at the top of the exterior stairs. Nine minutes to get in, get what she needed, and get back to Craig’s car before whatever a Terata was decided to introduce itself. 

She hit start just as she unlocked the door. 

Inside, her apartment looked exactly as she’d left it that morning, which meant it looked like someone had left in a hurry. She stood in the middle, trying to remember what you were supposed to do. There was a thing. A thing to do when the world ended. She’d read about it. She’d read about everything.

“Supplies!” She blurted out loud, then ran to the kitchen and threw open the refrigerator. Four water bottles, a carton of milk, baby carrots, and some hummus she'd made over the weekend. 

She gathered the water bottles into her arms and kicked the fridge shut with her foot, then looked around for somewhere to put them.

“Right,” she said, and set them down.

7:42 remaining.

The Ghostbusters backpack was in the front hall closet. It was shaped like a proton pack, immediately practical, and either deeply appropriate or deeply stupid given the circumstances. She didn’t think too hard about which. Joy grabbed it, ran back to the kitchen, and loaded the water bottles. Three full, one half-full. She noted that Craig would have said one was half-empty, and she would have corrected him, and then wished she hadn’t thought of that. 

Then she was moving through the apartment in a kind of controlled chaos. She raided the kitchen drawer for a big serrated knife, the one she used for bagels, which was not ideal but was the biggest she owned. Bathroom for the first aid kit and backup tampons, just in case. From her bedroom, she grabbed a few pairs of underwear, a couple of shirts, her Switch, and her Kindle, the logic being that if there were any downtime in the apocalypse, she would need something to do.

5:21 remaining.

The tin of joints on the nightstand was the last thing she grabbed. It contained five infused pre-rolls, the crystally kind that made her laugh too hard at old episodes of The Office. She slipped the tin and a lighter into the bag and found two more lighters scattered around the apartment and added those too. Because one was never enough, and only two felt like hubris.

3:08 remaining.

Back in the kitchen, Joy added a few cans of tuna to the backpack. They had pull-tab lids, she checked, because she was not going to survive the end of the world only to be defeated by a can opener.

She stopped in the middle of the living room, slightly out of breath, and looked around at what had been her life as of this morning.

“Pretty rough birthday so far, Muffin.”

Bark.

Joy grabbed her big floppy sunhat off the hook by the door, put it on, then checked the timer.

1:14 remaining.

Good. She was going to make it back to the car before the Terata thing happened. She’d have plenty of time to drive somewhere far from the city and figure out the rest from there. She had tuna, her Switch, and some joints. She had survived worse. 

Actually, she had not survived worse, but it felt important to believe that right now. 

“I’ve survived worse,” she said out loud, hoping it would strengthen her resolve. 

She grabbed the door handle, took a breath, and pulled it open.

“Okay, Muffin,” Joy said. “Let’s go explore the—”

The golden Door was on the exterior walkway.

Joy stared at it. The timer on her phone read 0:57. Then 0:56.

“Oh, come ON,” she said, slamming her apartment door.

She turned and ran back through the apartment to the bedroom window. It was only a one-story drop. Totally manageable.

She threw the window open and looked down. 

The Door was directly below the window, floating horizontally, parallel to the ground, closed side up. Like a trapdoor. Waiting.

Joy closed the window.

"Clever," she said, in a tone that indicated she did not find it clever at all.

She ran back through the apartment, flung the front door open again and—

The walkway was empty. The Door was gone.

Joy didn’t stop to feel relieved. She ran her ass off. 

The exterior walkway stretched the length of the building, and she covered it fast, Proton pack backpack bouncing, sunhat somehow staying on, Muffin keeping pace. The stairs were right there. She was going to make it to the car and—

BEEP BEPP BEEP BEEP BEEP. Her watch timer announced. 

“Oh, you’ve GOT to be—”

The third zap hit before she finished the sentence.

This one was different. Where the first had been white and the second had been an assortment of colors, this one was dark. Blackish-purple points of light fell from above like inverted rain, each one trailing a thin wake of shadow as it dropped. Joy stood helplessly on the walkway and watched them fall and felt, for the first time since Craig had been vaporized in front of her, genuinely, completely afraid. 

One of the dark beams of light touched down directly in front of the apartment complex, three feet from Craig’s car. 

The light pooled on the driveway for a moment, spreading and darkening, and then it pulled itself upright and shook itself off the way a wet dog shakes off water, and Joy realized with an unpleasant lurch of her stomach that that was exactly what it was. 

A dog. Roughly dog-shaped, dog-sized, dog-postured. Its tail wagged, and its ears perked up in the unmistakable body language of an animal that is absolutely thrilled to see you. And this dog had no problem in the sight department.

Every single inch of the creature, from the tip of its wagging tail to the end of its snout, was covered in eyes. Human eyes. Dozens of them, packed tight, blinking and moving independently, all of them glistening wet, oriented in slightly different directions.

“Oh no,” Joy said quietly.

Text appeared above the Teratas' head, floating in the air just long enough to read before dissipating.

SEEING EYE DOG

Terata Classification: Domestic Threat Level: **

Abilities: Omnidirectional Vision / Tracking / Enhanced Smell / Affection

Weakness: [Undiscovered]

Tip: It’s not cuddly.

The Seeing Eye Dog’s head swiveled toward the Alex skinsuit, which was still wandering aimlessly near the curb, and something in its approximately one hundred and fifty blinking eyes sharpened with interest. It lunged.

“HEY—” Alex shouted.

Fire Teen didn’t hesitate. “FIRE GO!” 

He thrust both hands forward and let loose a blast of flame.

They engulfed the Seeing Eye Dog as it screamed. A ring of eyes burst from the heat, making a wet, horrible sound Joy wished she hadn’t heard. It reminded her of squeezing a handful of grapes, and in that moment, she knew she’d never be able to eat the fruit again. 

The Dog staggered sideways, at least two dozen eyes weeping something thicker and more milky than human tears down its fur. But it was far from defeated. It turned its remaining eyes toward Fire Teen with an expression, insofar as a dog covered entirely in human eyeballs could be said to have an expression, suggesting it was reconsidering its priorities.

The Dog lunged at Fire Teen, who sidestepped, sending out another blast of blue flame.

The corner of Joy’s apartment building caught on fire.

“Oh shi—” Fire Kid spun, hands out, trying to pull the flame off the building, but it had already found the dry wood of the aged exterior stairs and decided to live there.

“The stairs!” someone shouted.

Joy looked at the stairs, which were now on fire, trapping her on the second-floor walkway.

She looked at the railing. One story down to the driveway. No worse than the jump from her bedroom window. 

Fuck it. 

Muffin whined, as if he knew what she was about to do, and she scooped him into her arms.

“Don’t worry. I got this,” Joy whispered to the shaking non-monster dog.

She swung her legs over the railing and dropped, hitting the asphalt hard enough that the shock radiated through her knees, but she came up moving. Her body felt strangely light, her recovery faster than the laws of physics usually allowed for a drop onto concrete.

She released Muffin, who growled at her before turning his attention toward the fight in the front yard.

Fire Teen circled the Seeing Eye Dog from the left, hands smoking, waiting for the right shot.  Alex looked like he was doing long division in his head, his brow furrowed in meat-deep concentration. Suddenly, the wandering skinsuit snapped to attention and moved with purpose toward the Dog from behind in jerky, stuttered steps.

The Dog’s attention was on Fire Teen. It didn’t seem to notice the silently approaching skinsuit.

Alex grunted, and the skinsuit responded, abruptly wrapping its leathery arms around the Dog’s neck. The Seeing Eye Dog thrashed, its multitude of eyes rolling in a dozen different directions. Scrubs Lady appeared on Joy’s left, holding a new cup of lukewarm coffee. Her expression was one of absolute resignation.

“Move,” she said, and walked past Joy.

Scrubs Lady grabbed the Dog’s snout with one hand and jammed a paper cup over it with the other. The Terata’s eyes went wide—all of them—and then it was thrashing and suffocating in a vacuum of coffee while being strangled by a hollow man. This lasted less than thirty seconds.

Then the Dog wasn’t thrashing anymore. Its eyes lost life and closed, one by one, like a city losing power grid by grid, until the last one closed and the Seeing Eye Dog was no more.

Scrubs Lady tossed the empty cups aside and summoned a fresh one. 

She took a sip. “Ugly bastard.”

The skinsuit released its hold on the dead monster, its arms falling limp. It stood up and began to wander again, its movements aimless and fluid, drifting toward the street. 

“Dammit!” Alex shouted, his voice a wet whistle. “I thought I had it! I had it under control!”

He hurried after his skin, his raw, muscular feet slapping damply against the pavement. He was so focused on his skinsuit that he didn’t even look as he stepped into the road.

Joy heard the Eardrum before she saw it.

It rolled down the street, making a sound that vibrated in her teeth and loosened the fillings in her jaw. It was the deepest, most resonant BOOM she had ever heard. It was a seismic concussion that cracked the street ahead of its arrival. This was followed immediately by a high, involuntary SHRIEK of pure agony.

BOOM-SHRIEK. BOOM-SHRIEK.

As it rolled closer, Joy finally saw it clearly. And a helpful text box appeared beside it.

EARDRUM

Terata Classification: Percussive Threat Level: ***

Abilities: Echolocation / Seismic Vibration / Involuntary Vocalization

Weakness: Those tiny feet.

Tip: It cannot help but scream. Please do not take it personally.

It was a nightmare of sheer mass. A giant drum turned on its side, slowly rolling down the block. It was thirty feet across and stood as tall as the two-story apartment building behind her. This Terata looked like an ancient, oppressive moon of flesh that filled the entire width of the street. Its surface was a continuous, densely packed wall of human ears, thousands of them, pressed flat against its fleshy body.

In the center of this field of human ears was a single, cavernous mouth, wide open, screaming in pain every time it rolled onto the small, entirely inadequate feet tucked far under its crushing rim. The feet perforated the road, leaving deep wells of pavement as the creature rotated forward.

“Alex! Look—” 

The Eardrum’s BOOM swallowed her voice whole.

It rolled over Alex and his skinsuit with a BOOM-SHRIEK that shook the ground and shattered the windows on Craig’s car. And then Alex was gone. 

The Eardrum kept rolling, screaming, and booming rhythmically, now streaked with the gore of what had been her neighbor. After a bit, it veered right, rolled over a house, and disappeared around the far corner of the block.

Scrubs Lady screamed like a B-Movie actress. Fire Teen stared at the red stain in the road that used to be Alex. Then he doubled over and puked.

Joy said nothing. She just watched the red stain spread slowly across the asphalt where Alex had been standing, and thought, with the detached clarity of someone whose grief quota had already been exceeded for the day: that's the second person I've watched die in the last hour. 

In the distance, more blackish-purple points of light were falling.

Then she thought: I should probably stop standing here.

The building, her apartment for the last four years, was fully on fire now, heat pressing against her back. Craig’s car was twenty feet away. She started forward.

The Door appeared in her path.

Joy stopped, inches from walking directly into it. She took a step back and looked at the Door. Then, at the points of lights falling in the distance.

“What do you want from me?” She asked the Door.

A whisper came the way whispers always come when magic is involved, from everywhere and nowhere at once, slipping into her ears after it breathed to life.

…Craig is not beyond saving…

She thought about the missed birthdays again, and why today, on this birthday, he’d shown up. She’d never know why. She couldn’t ask him.

Unless…

Joy flipped the backpack around and unzipped it. After a moment of feeling around, she withdrew her hand and the tin. Taking one of the pre-rolls out, she took a long whiff, then placed it between her lips.  

She turned to her burning apartment building, leaned in, and lit the joint of the flames of her former home. 

Joy stepped back as she took a long, slow drag and held it in. 

Coughing out an “Okay,” Joy exhaled, dropped Muffin’s leash, opened the door, and stepped through, the joint still held in her mouth.