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realities outside this
tiny room. After a while, the oily liquid has mostly absorbed, and
she inspects her hand. Still pale, but no longer dry, her palm
appears to have been clumsily splattered with bleach.
    When she stands again, her eyes lock on her
reflection in the full-length mirror on the wall. Her raw face
beneath unkempt dark hair looks decimated, the hazel eyes ravaged
from tears and smoke, her skin a lined mess.
    She casts a glance down the slowly
brightening hallway leading to Tony’s bedroom. She wants to say
goodbye to him. She makes her way toward his bedroom, and there’s
another distant explosion; it has the feel of something massive,
earth-rattling. The sound is a deep, rumbling hopelessness. She
tries her best to tune it out.
    Tony hasn’t moved an inch. She goes to him
and touches his hip, feels its familiar warmth. His body tugs at
her, nearly demands that she lay with him and close her eyes, lose
herself in a full-body embrace of denial, but she pushes gently
away from him.
    “I’ll be back,” she promises.

Chapter 3
     
    Rachel opens the door and finds that a layer of
smoke has settled over the neighborhood, heavy and oppressive. She
coughs into her sleeve and squints at the scene before her. She
scans the ground in all directions, holding her breath against the
possibility of a body that matches the description of her father: a
tall, wiry, athletic man, possibly in casual business attire or
gray workout clothes, depending on what he decided to do this
morning. The only bodies she can see from this vantage point are
the three lying motionless on the far driveway, and she prefers not
to dwell on those.
    Aside from unconscious bodies, there are also
no living and breathing people anywhere in sight, no people
screaming and sprinting in any direction. Her eyes lock on the
crashed car she saw from the window of Tony’s house. It’s a red
Volkswagen Jetta. Steeling herself, she makes her way toward it.
She’s glancing in all directions, wanting someone, anyone, to come
flying out of a nearby doorway to help her.
    She jogs to the Jetta, which is at an odd
angle, wedged between a tree and a brick mailbox. There’s a person
slumped behind the wheel, a woman, completely still. Rachel can see
only the back of her head, the hair curly and dark, thrown forward.
The engine is still ticking under its hood, barely. She wonders
when this accident happened. There’s an oily green liquid dripping
from the front of the car—she guesses from the radiator—onto the
sidewalk. She walks around to the driver’s side window, which is
angled upward a few feet above the ground. She has to step up onto
the severely turned front tire and prop herself against the tree to
peer inside.
    The red illumination coming from under the
flesh of the woman’s cheek lends a ghostly quality to the vehicle’s
dark interior. Rachel stumbles down from the car, nearly falling
into the street. She catches herself, staring, breathing.
    Despair clutches at her chest, threatening to
hollow her out. Lightheaded, she sits heavily on the curb and
surveys the scene. In the space of an hour, her entire world has
become a red-tinted nightmare. The blanket of smoke over the street
isn’t helping. She can see clouds of it wafting toward her from the
south. Magnolia Street is utterly desolate of life now, eerily
empty of traffic or people.
    Is anyone alive? Are people still
dying? Am I next?
    Rachel needs to find someone living
and breathing. She knows they must be out there, searching, like
she is. Who knows how many more are still in their homes, waking
up? She glances up and down the street. Way off to the east,
finally, she sees a figure running from one house to another,
possibly mirroring her own horrific discoveries. How many people
like her are just now realizing that their worlds have entered the
fucking Twilight Zone ?
    Her eyes dart to the Volkswagen again, wedged
up against the tree, and she remembers that she failed to check