The next day, as I head to work, everything around me is just noise. The roadblocks. The patrollers. The only thing that snaps me out of a daze is the sight of the Vanguard asylum. I stare through the barbwire to see Doomies gathered on a distant lawn for some kind of outdoor therapy session. A counselor with a green sweater vest and curly hair is telling them to adopt different poses. (Simon says . . . try not to lose your damn mind?)
Keep walking. Get to work.
The mart has the two people who might just have answers: Gutierrez, who might know more about Doomies, and Kyle, who could share more of what she’s seen.
Kyle. If I’m a Doomie, then so is she, right?
Man, of all the possible things we could’ve had in common . . .
When I enter the rear door and step into the back room, all the fluorescent lights are on. I’m blinded by the glare. I peer through my fingers to see Gully standing along the opposite wall, next to an unfamiliar Vanguard soldier who’s talking quietly into her walkie-talkie. The floor looks strange in the bright light. The concrete has a creamy hue, broken by patterns of pinky red, like a strawberry ripple cheesecake that someone dropped.
Blood.
A body is lying in the middle of the room, covered with a black plastic sheet. Feet are sticking out of one end.
Oh God . . .
“Jasper!” Gully roars. “Stay back, you moron! You could end up tracking blood everywhere. Go join the others in the break room.”
My body shakes as I pick a path through the puddles.
I enter the break room to see the early-shift clerks. Dean, Penelope, and Norm are preoccupied on their phones. Robbie and Jono are daring each other to drink kid’s shampoo for some stupid reason. How is no one freaking out?
Our assistant manager, Marco Van Nuys, is sitting alone at a table. Dude is giant, like, nearly seven feet tall, and he’s recently gotten into those adult “inner Zen” coloring books. He doodles in them whenever Gully isn’t looking.
“Marco . . .”
He gives me the briefest nod. “Sup, J?”
“Sup? Dude, there’s a—” I gesture at the distant blood. “What happened?”
Marco tells me a demon escaped the portal quarantine at 6:00 a.m. and got into the back room. Gutierrez was knocked unconscious, while Aaron Davis was badly wounded in a corner. Kyle rushed over and killed the creature, but she couldn’t save Aaron from bleeding out.
I didn’t actually know Aaron. We’d only exchanged brief hellos whenever we crossed paths in the back room. But still . . . fucking hell.
“Aaron is dead?”
Marco is focused back on the sunflower he’s been coloring in, and I realize his hands are shaking slightly.
“Wait. Is Kyle okay? Where is she?”
“She’s around here somewhere,” says Marco. “Probably just waiting like the rest of us for Vanguard to come and assess whether we can open up today.”
I need to see Kyle.
Gully has slipped away, so I creep out into the back room. I’m about to search for Kyle, but I freeze when a bulky guard heads my way: Aaron Davis.
Marco was mistaken.
I spin back to stare at the tarp-covered body as Aaron comes up behind me and puts a hand on my shoulder. “You knew him, right? Gutierrez.”
“Gutierrez?”
The ground wobbles under me.
“Sorry, buddy. He seemed like a good, solid dude,” Aaron mumbles, before wandering off.
A rustling draws my attention to the rear door, and I notice a kid in a green hoodie staring at Gutierrez’s sheet-covered body. He inches closer and closer, until something triggers his phone to create a coin-clinking sound.
The little shit! He’s the same kid who used Ollie’s injuries to get compensation points. I’m about to scream at him to get the fuck out, but before I can, he’s already fled the scene. And barely seconds later, two men enter through the same rear door, both dressed in white hazmat suits and black-visored helmets.
Vanguard scrubbers.
I’m frozen to my spot and can’t look away.
“So much blood,” one of the scrubbers mutters. “It’s like a freaking oil spill.”
He reaches behind him, then whips out a long hose connected to the portable vacuum cleaner that’s strapped to his back. The man starts sucking up the blood from the floor. White pouches on his suit bloat up with each mechanical slurp.
The other scrubber joins in. Every so often, they come across bits of flesh and bone, which they store in shoulder bags.
I feel sick. I need to get away. ASAP. I dart through a door to find myself in the one staff restroom. I try to breathe steadily and distract myself with, heck, anything else.
This space is almost floor-to-ceiling peachy pinks, from the five stalls to the sinks and walls. Near my feet is a black helmet speckled in blood. Kyle is sitting in a corner with her knees pulled up to her chest.
Her arms are covered in blood splatter, and the bottom edge of her yellow hair is stained with red. She is trying to use her fingers to comb out her messy hair, and each shaky movement is just spreading the red around.
“Kyle?”
It’s just us here.
Kyle freezes. Everything inside me settles down, as though there’s only enough space in this room for one of us to fall apart—and she got here first.
I kneel beside her.
Kyle must have been a warrior angel when she slew the monster that killed Gutierrez. But now she stares ahead blankly, shivering uncontrollably. A hand-dryer is mounted on the wall behind us, so I stretch up to push the ON button. Hot air blasts down, and Kyle crumples into my arms. The machine makes a jet-engine roar, on and on, and I hold Kyle tightly under a cone of warmth.
When the dryer times out and stops, I ask the one thing I wish someone would ask me: “You okay?”
Kyle nods, seems to regain some calm. She gazes at my arms wrapped around her and lowers her stare as she untangles from me. Soon we sit quietly against the edge of the sinks, and she whispers, “It all happened so fast.”
“What happened?”
“Aaron and Gutierrez were battling this blob with mouths—this impossible thing made of nothing but mouths—and Aaron got knocked unconscious. It was just Gutierrez, so . . . I . . . raced over to help him . . . but . . .” She wraps her arms around herself. “Cameron was dead before I could get to him.”
Cameron Gutierrez.
I didn’t even know his first name, and my grief starts to seem less like a real thing and more like a Here For You mart knockoff.
“You did your best,” I tell Kyle. “You couldn’t save him from—”
The restroom door swings open. A VC scrubber pokes his head in, scanning for additional blood or wreckage, as his colleague calls out from afar, “Anything in the restroom?”
“Just two F-16s,” this scrubber calls out, without even settling his gaze on us. “All good.”
All . . . good?
I want to stare at him, challenge him to look me in the fucking eye. But he’s already gone. And before the door slides closed again, I glimpse a completely clean back room floor. Gutierrez’s body is gone. Where he once lay, a plastic bag hovers and eddies, haunting the ground before floating away.
Vanguard might be the greatest cleaning company in history. Scrub, disinfect, polish, only to let shit hit the fan all over again. That’s their MO. Maybe that’s all they can do.
I exhale slowly before turning to face Kyle to say, “There’s something I want to talk to you about. . . . Uh—” My mind blanks as her eyes meet mine. “Something you and I . . . We’ve both . . .”
Kyle stiffens but says, “You wanna talk about that now?”
“How can I ignore that sketch of yours?”
Kyle raises a brow. “Sketch?”
“Yeah, the sketch in your notebook. I mean . . . you’re a Doomie, right?”
She flinches, rises to her feet. “Yeah, no. I’m not a Doomie.”
“I didn’t mean—”
And just like that, Kyle storms out of the restroom.
I try to follow her but get blocked when everyone streams into the back room. There’s a buzz of excitement as a hulking Vanguard soldier with a salt-and-pepper beard and gelled-back hair strides into the center of the room. He’s wearing a gray camo jacket and pants. His aviator-style sunglasses glint as he enters the fluorescent lights. His guns are holstered, one to each thigh.
Wait a sec. I’m staring at Lieutenant Davey Shiner. . . .
“Lieutenant Shiner!” Marco calls out.
Shiner takes off his sunglasses but gives a bored nod. Civilians are discouraged from taking photos of Vanguardians, but Penelope tries to sneak one. Shiner notices her, but Aaron sidles over to him and says, “Sorry, Lieutenant, I guess we’re all a little starstruck.” Aaron himself looks like he’d like to ask for a selfie.
Shiner pats Aaron on the shoulder and says something inaudible. Abruptly a switch goes off inside Aaron, and his cheeriness vanishes. The guard stalks over to Penelope, grabs her phone, and hurls it into a trash can. Penelope scurries away, tears in her eyes, and Aaron flinches as he takes in what he just did.
Gully steps over and says, “Lieutenant Shiner, I’m Gully Gorman, the manager here. I’d like to welcome you to—”
Shiner steps past Gully, for he spies someone at the back of the crowd. “You Kuan?” he asks, pointing.
Kyle steps forward, tries to straighten her shoulders, and nods.
Shiner studies her and lets out a humph. He gestures for her to head outside, and I notice another Vanguardian in the distance. “Head over there to be debriefed about this morning’s mess.”
“Yes, sir,” says Kyle as she heads off.
Shiner gazes at the rest of us and calls out in a booming voice, “Attention. I don’t know how many casualties you’ve had in this mart, but I’ll remind you all that you are legally forbidden from discussing anything you’ve seen.”
The staff shifts about.
Shiner’s lips curl up slightly. “I’ll assume you understand why, and I won’t bother to explain the repercussions for violating this order. Also, in light of the recent violence, Vanguard is temporarily assigning me here for a thorough risk assessment.”
Shiner finally acknowledges Gully and says he’ll be taking over the store’s manager office. Gully looks surprised but doesn’t argue. Shiner doesn’t really let him. He tells us to return to work. I’m about to try heading outside to talk to Kyle, but Shiner stalks over to me.
“You,” he addresses me. “Who are you?”
“Jasper. Uh, can I help you with something?”
“Humph . . .” Shiner sizes me up, eyes narrowed. “I’ve seen you loitering outside the asylum, haven’t I?”
Shit, shit, shit . . .
“Why do you—” he starts, but his walkie clicks with static. He wanders off to answer a call, and I dart back into the store. I notice Kyle heading back on her rounds, her helmet obscuring her face.
I walk over, and before Kyle can turn away, I whisper, “Look, I need to know more about your sketches, because I . . . I’ve seen the same things.”
She falters.
So I lower my voice even more and add, “I think I might be a Doomie.”
Kyle pushes up her helmet visor to look at me.
Briefly, her jaw slackens. I ask if we can talk somewhere in private, and she nods waveringly, so I lead her back into the back room, to an emptied storage closet. I close the door quietly behind us. Walls are covered in scratch marks and holes, illuminated by a single naked bulb. A demon attack occurred here ages ago, and the drywall is now all rotted due to water damage from leaky pipes.
Kyle leans back against one wall, her arms folded, while I stand against the opposite side. The vinyl floor between us might as well be an ocean of black and white squares.
“Why do you think you’re a Doomie?” she asks.
“It’s a few things. I have recurring nightmares about four ghostlike creatures who touch a portal and cause it to gush an apocalypse horde. . . . And then there’s my amnesia—”
“Wait. What?”
“My amnesia. I thought you knew?”
I assumed everyone here knew.
“You’ve got amnesia? For real?”
“Yeah . . . I can’t remember anything except for, like, the past few months.”
Kyle takes off her helmet and drops it to cause an enormous thunk, Kevlar on concrete. Next thing I know, she’s laughing like she’s just heard the greatest joke ever—like I’m the greatest joke ever.
“Kyle. I don’t see what’s funny. Either I’m going crazy, or the world is ending, or both those things are happening!”
Kyle sees my face redden and hushes. “No, I didn’t mean to laugh. It’s just . . .” She wavers, leans forward to cause her yellow hair to curtain her face. “I just, when we met again at the mart, I thought you were ignoring me . . . and I was fucking mad. I . . .”
Kyle wraps her arms around herself, and a sudden soberness makes it hard to read her expression as she says quietly, “Listen, I want to tell you . . .”
When I step closer, she stiffens and clears her throat.
“I just never would’ve guessed you were a Doomie. You . . . see the same glimpses of the future?”
I nod. “But how do you know it’s the future?”
Her brows crease as she studies me. “Well . . . I can sometimes sense when monsters are about to emerge. Every now and then, just before an attack, I get a gut feeling that something bad is right around the corner.” Her shoulders tense up. “Whenever I get nightmares of the apocalypse, I get that exact gut feeling—only amped up to a ten.”
My eyes widen. “Rewind a sec. You can sense the coming of monsters?”
“Sometimes,” she replies. “It’s something that’s helped me save a few people as a VC trainee. But . . .” Her eyes gaze at her helmet to take in a huge new scratch. “But despite sensing that something was coming today, I just couldn’t—”
“It’s not your fault,” I interrupt, wandering over to rest my shoulders beside hers. “You know that, right?”
Silence.
“Maybe if we work together, we can learn more about the apocalypse stuff, decipher these nightmares, and somehow find a way to . . .”
I can’t say it, but I’m thinking: save the world.
“Do something.”
“Do something? We can barely survive this place on a bad day, and you want to . . .” Kyle sinks slowly down the wall, gaze glassy, and an invisible string tugs me down with her. “Hell itself punched holes in our world. How do you fight a force that powerful?”
“I . . . don’t know.”
But crouching beside her, at least I know I’m no longer alone in all this.
Her gaze is focused on the opposite wall, where the soaked drywall has a hole at the bottom edge, revealing rotted plywood. The hole breaches two layers. I can see light from the alley outside.
I walk over there and kick the hole wider. Let in more light.
Kyle moves over, raises a brow at me.
I say, “Sure, we barely survive on bad days. Heck, we barely get by on the good days, when all we do is work jobs that don’t matter, buy shit we don’t need, and watch cat videos in bed until our bloodshot eyes roll back in our fuckin’ skulls. But still—” I punch a shoulder-level hole in the wall. “We’re not powerless to make holes of our own. Plans of our own. Something.” I lean against the wall. Pat it. “Come on.”
Kyle looks away, snorts softly. Then without warning, she punches the space right next to my head. I flinch. But when her eyes glimmer, I find myself grinning like an idiot.
We turn our attention to that lowermost hole and crouch to tear away more of the drywall. Soon we’ve got enough room to reach through the wall and rip away at the outermost layer of soggy board, until finally, we push our feet to this hole and kick the edges wider and wider.
Eventually, we’re half in the room, half out, our feet in the alley. I’m panting. She’s panting. Our legs are touching. Hips too. I feel self-conscious that my breathing is way too loud.
Kyle’s gaze settles on me, and we might as well be in that TV show in my head called PORTALS. Only this time there’s no laugh track, and damn, our Will they or won’t they? vibes are starting to feel pretty real. Or maybe that’s just my imagination.
But somehow, I have the fucking audacity to not look away. Instead, I whisper, “This apocalypse—if we don’t try to push it back, kick it in the nuts hard—it’ll keep pushing us around.”
A smile creeps over her face. “Do you seriously suggest we should just kick the apocalypse in the nuts?”
“Hell yeah!” I shout, and then like some kind of deranged war cry, I chant, “In the nuts! In the nuts!”
Kyle starts laughing. “Okay, okay!” She holds a hand over my mouth, and her touch makes me freeze. Almost as quickly, she pulls away and shifts her eyeline. “I have an idea.”
Out we go, through the hole and into the alley beyond. It’s a narrow corridor with an overflowing dumpster. Guards aren’t supposed to throw monster waste in the general garbage, but I can literally see a mutant lizard tail draped over the edge of the bin. Although Kyle is several steps away, our shadows appear side by side on the ground, silhouetted hands connected—
“You really don’t remember anything of your past?” Kyle asks, and I turn to face her. “What’s the first thing you remember?”
Her scrutiny makes me feel like a freak.
I shrug. “What’s your first memory?”
Kyle shrugs. “Believe it or not, I remember being in the hospital, like, as a newborn baby. White lights and shit.”
“Same! Except . . . I wasn’t being born. It was just me waking up in the hospital after my accident.”
Kyle gestures at the scummy alley and says with a snort, “Hah! In that case, welcome to your fantastic, wonderful world, baby!” Though we’re only joking, hearing her say baby—right to my face—makes my cheeks grow warm.
“So. This idea of yours?” I ask before the warm turns to a full blush.
“Right. You remember Pete Moretti?”
“Pete? Yeah, he was a clerk here, until two months ago when he quit.”
Pete was weird. Tall dude with a bowl haircut dyed green, who used to buy tons of the mart’s clothing after each shift. (Like, seriously, who needs polyester shirts that come in a reusable ziplock bag?) I didn’t know him well, but he was one of the few clerks who didn’t give me a dumb nickname.
“Pete didn’t quit,” says Kyle. “VC flagged him as a possible Doomie.”
“I had no idea. . . .”
“I was tasked to bring him to the VC asylum for an eval. But I just couldn’t dump him there. Pete’s a good guy. So, I brought him here.” Kyle gestures at a broken security camera in a corner and says, “This is a CCTV blind spot here. I told Pete to run, and I later told Vanguard that Pete shoved me down and took off.”
I don’t know what to say.
“I don’t know much about Doomies—no one outside the VC asylum and med staff really do—but Pete’s Doomsday Delirium seemed bad. I’ve got a definite feeling he’s seen way more future shit than we have.”
“Do you know where he is now?”
Kyle nods, then looks at her watch, and I realize it’s almost my break time, and maybe hers too. “I do. But trigger warning—” She leans in closer. “There might be blood.”