I don’t know where we’re headed, but the streets on the way are strangely empty of roadblocks. Kyle gazes back at me as we cross an empty intersection, and the invisible barriers around her also seem to have vanished. And damn, I don’t know what to do with all the space between us.
I stop in my tracks, and we halt on an empty street corner. We’re alone, and I mutter, “So . . . How did you, y’know, become a Doomie?”
Kyle rolls her shoulders. “I don’t know. I’d been having the same nightmare over and over . . . sharper and clearer . . . and one day I realized my life had changed.”
“Changed how?”
Kyle shrugs and gazes at the distance. “Doomsday Delirium disconnects you from everything. Makes you seem like a stranger to everyone, even yourself.” She side-eyes me. “So. Amnesia. What’s that like?”
No one’s ever asked me that. “It’s hard to explain. Like, have you ever bought a piece of clothing from the mart? You know how after it gets washed, it just stretches and shrinks and warps into something unwearable? Well, that’s my life. Nothing about it seems to really fit like it should anymore. Does that make any sense?”
Kyle shrugs and says, “As much as anything does anymore.”
“It’s like I’m always searching for myself. I used to wander around the city, hoping to stumble into someone I recognized—” I hush as Kyle gazes into my eyes, longer than I remember anyone ever looking at me.
Kyle seems ready to say something, but her invisible roadblocks slide back out as she frowns instead. “There it is,” she says, pointing at something behind me.
Kyle hurries ahead, guiding me to a rundown building with no signage. I follow her through an open entrance, then down to the basement, where we find ourselves in front of sliding doors that are painted solid black. Stenciled in bright red letters are the words: BLOODY BIG DISCOUNTS.
I cock a brow at Kyle. “Ominous much?”
We step toward the doors, but they won’t open. Instead, my phone’s VC app shows me a legal notice: Store management is not responsible for health issues that might arise from the use of affected products. . . .
Before I can read it all, Kyle reaches over and presses ACCEPT on my phone, and the doors slide open. What I see is a moldy ceiling with naked bulbs. Unpainted walls with signs like NO CHANGEROOMS and NO REFUNDS OR RETURNS. The store is half the size of the Here For You, and instead of aisles and shelves, this store organizes its inventory into huge mounds. It’s mostly clothes. Clothes splattered with bloodstains and vomit and other viscera, both human and demon. The whole place stinks of it.
It takes me a long moment to find my voice.
“So. Something tells me we’re not the target demographic of this place.” I turn to find Kyle covering her nose. “What is this joint?”
Kyle gestures around us. “VC figured it was wasteful for stores to incinerate bloodstained goods. So they created ‘monster-damaged apparel’ stores—MDAs. You can purchase stuff here by the pound.”
“Seriously? How come people don’t talk about this?” I ask.
“Well, there’s this.” Kyle tries to take a pic of the store, but her phone cam shows a gray blur. “And, of course, none of the ‘regulars’ are gonna blab about MDAs.” She gestures at two old ladies who are grabbing as many baby bibs as they can from a pile of blood-speckled fabric. They eye each other warily, and you’d think they were competing over gold.
All this chaos, and not even a portal in sight . . . !
“A week ago, I saw Pete enter here wearing a work vest,” says Kyle.
“Great sleuthing, Scoob,” I joke as we wander through the mounds. A second later we catch sight of the checkouts, where only three of the seven registers are manned. My gaze goes to a green-haired dude behind register one.
Bingo.
Pete is bobbing around as he places several bloodstained bikinis on a large scale. He addresses the shopper (an old guy wearing a business shirt and boxer shorts): “All righty! That weighs four pounds, mister! So, that’ll be four dollars, please.” Pete sets a little packet atop the mound and adds, “Please enjoy your complimentary Tide laundry pod.”
The man hands Pete four bucks, grabs the bikinis, then ambles away.
“Come again soon!” Pete calls out with a smile—an actual bright smile.
There’s no one else in the line, so we head over to Pete. I wave politely and call out, “Uh, hey, Pete. Remember us?”
“Jasper? What are you—”
Pete freaks out when he sees Kyle’s Kevlar vest—and its yellow text that reads VANGUARD. He yelps and seems ready to bolt.
But Kyle holds out her hands and says, “Pete. It’s me. Kyle.”
“Kyle?” He takes in her face, calms a little, but still looks uneasy. “Kyle. Hey, you . . . you shouldn’t be here.” He looks left and right, but we’re out of earshot of anyone else. “How did you even find me?”
Kyle moves closer to him. “We just need a minute, man. We wanna talk about those visions you had of the four ghostly monsters of the . . . well, apocalypse.”
Pete swallows hard. “Apoc . . . apoc . . . apo . . .” He squeezes his eyes shut. “Apo . . . apologies! I can’t help you with that, so, er, have a nice day and come again some other time.”
Pete tries to slip away, but Kyle blocks his path. “Pete, you can trust us. We’re not going to tell Vanguard anything. In fact, we just want to know about the apoca—”
“Nup, nup, nup!” he mutters, plugging his ears with his fingers. “None of that here, folks!”
Pete flees the checkout and zips between mounds of clothing. But just as we trail after him, he slips on a sock, trips, and slams face-first into a towering mound of clothes. Kyle and I look at each other, like What have we done? as we slowly approach his suddenly motionless body.
“Uh. Pete? You okay?” Kyle whispers once before taking another step closer and asking again.
Abruptly, Pete stirs and stretches out his arms—as though to hug the mound—and we hear him whisper, “It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay.” Is he talking to himself? Or the clothes? Pete rolls over and exhales. He catches sight of a metallic bomber jacket lying at his feet and lets out a long Ooh! “Where did you come from, buddy?”
Pete grabs the jacket, then wanders over to a nearby basket labeled STAFF USE.
Kyle and I approach. Pete stiffens when he notices us again, but I quickly tell him, “Pete, I’m sorry if we freaked you out. We just—”
“I—I don’t want to talk about that, that stuff,” he stammers.
I don’t know what to do, but I don’t want him to bolt, so I nod. “Sure, dude. We don’t have to talk about that stuff. Um . . .” I focus on Pete himself. “Let’s start over. How are you actually doing, man?”
Pete eyes us warily, but I smile, and that settles him a little. “Um. I’m good.” He shifts about uneasily, until his gaze settles on the jacket in his hands, and instantly his mood brightens. “Definitely good today, considering the awesome finds I’ve snagged. I mean, look at this beauty! Whaddaya think?”
I stare at the bloodstains on the cuffs of both sleeves. “Uh, it’s . . . a little worse for wear?”
“Eh. A little blood never hurt nobody. I can’t believe I didn’t see this during first dibs.”
“Pete,” Kyle begins.
I can sense Kyle getting impatient, so I flash her a look that I hope says, Hold on, before turning to Pete to try to keep him talking. “What’s ‘first dibs’?”
“Oh, just the coolest thing about this job. Each morning, before the crowds enter, us staff get first dibs to buy the best stuff that comes here. You’ll never believe the amazing things I’ve found in this joint!” He pats his chest, and I realize he’s wearing multiple T-shirts and two jackets under his work vest. How is he not sweltering? “This job is incredible!”
Okay, yeah . . . Pete’s definitely gotten a lot crazier since we last met.
Then again, I guess the same is probably true for me. So before Pete can be distracted by any more bargains, I move closer to say, “Look, Pete. I know what it’s like to be a little . . . not normal. That’s actually why we’re here.”
“Not normal?” Pete echoes. “Are you okay?”
“Not me—” I begin, but then I realize there is a question he could help with. “Actually, I never got the chance to ask you this, but what do you remember of me from, like, before my accident?”
Pete frowns slightly, shrugging. “Uh. You mostly just kept to yourself.”
I sigh. “Yeah, someone else told me the same thing recently.”
“Oh, I do remember one thing. You were always friendly—quiet but friendly—but a few weeks before your accident, you just . . . became like a zombie. You changed into a lifeless shell of a person.”
This! My Doomsday Delirium catalyst!
“Do you know what caused this change?” I ask, holding my breath.
Pete shrugs. “Sorry. I had a lot of my own shit to deal with. I wasn’t paying that close attention.”
Sighing, I focus back on why we came here today. “Pete,” I admit, “I think I’m a Doomie. I think Kyle’s one too.” His eyes widen as I explain how Kyle and I have both seen similar nightmares. Pete gets antsy again, but at least he doesn’t dart away. “Look, I know I said we didn’t need to talk about that stuff, but damn, we really do.”
“Why?” He retreats a step.
“So we can . . .” I struggle to finish that sentence, until Kyle steps over to my side, and I add, “Maybe try to save this dump of a world of ours.”
Pete stares at the ground for a long moment, then finally sighs and says, “I have seen a lot of things that maybe most Doomies haven’t. But if I make myself think of those things, I’ll probably have a total breakdown. I can’t, man. I just can’t.”
“But if we can stop what’s coming, maybe we can get you right again—”
“Look, dudes,” he tells us, holding up his hands. “I just want to live my life, do what I love, and be around my friends.” He pats his clothes at that last word, and I get this weird sense that maybe he’s talking about what he’s wearing. “Why should I try to change something that can’t be changed?”
“You don’t think we can stop the . . . end?” Kyle whispers.
Pete shakes his head. “I just . . . just . . .” He crouches down as he clutches his head tightly and shudders. “No, no, no, no . . . can’t go there, Pete. Can’t!”
I kneel beside him and put a hand on his shoulder. “I . . . I’m sorry. This was a mistake to come here. We’ll find another way—”
Pete sucks in a breath and grabs my arm shakily. I halt as he mutters, “I didn’t say I wouldn’t help.” He sits cross-legged and flicks a gaze between Kyle and me. “But I want something in return.”
Kyle scoots over to crouch beside us and asks warily, “What?”
“I need 160,000 VC points,” says Pete with a surprising directness. “Exactly 160,000 cold, hard points delivered straight to my VC app within the half hour.”
“Seriously?” I ask, before Kyle adds, “That’s a tall order, dude.”
Pete pulls out his phone and opens an unfamiliar app called Vanguard Sales Assistance. He clicks a confidentiality waiver, then gets to a long list of items for sale—antiques, cars, artwork, along with bulk lots of cheaper items. Unlike the MDA, most of this stuff seems to be in good condition.
“Is this like Vanguard’s secret version of eBay?” I ask.
Kyle does a double take. “Oh. I know what this is.” She averts her gaze from me as she says, “Uh, so . . . yeah, a lot of people on Hell Portal Day . . .”
“Died?” I whisper.
Kyle nods. “Yes. And because of that, there was a lot of stuff left behind. Vanguard tries to relocate stuff to a deceased’s next of kin, but when there’s no one to claim anything, Vanguard stores the stuff in secret warehouses. And I think they use this app to do, like, estate sales.”
My gaze returns to the app’s listings. “This is all from Hell Portal Day?”
“It might be years till they’ve processed everything,” she mumbles.
I think of my parents’ furniture and books. Is this where those items would have ended up if I weren’t still here? Would their stuff just be bundled into a bulk lot of other people’s junk? My fists clench as I ask, “Pete. Why are you showing us this?”
Pete is once again chipper, and I want to shake him, hard. Doesn’t he see the horror all around him? But he just opens one listing in particular: A bulk lot of unclaimed designer goods. Hundreds of pieces of (mostly) undamaged jackets, shoes, shirts that come in both men’s and women’s sizes. “So. I need 160,000 VC points to buy this lot. It expires in twenty-eight minutes.”
“That’s, like, eight thousand dollars,” Kyle hisses.
I exhale. Focus. “Right.” I open my VC app, click on the wallet section, then read aloud my balance: “I’ve got 10,001 VC points.”
Kyle opens her VC app to show me 11,800 VC. “That means we’re short almost 140,000 points.” She pauses. “I have about thirty-five hundred dollars that I could convert from cash to VC points. You?”
“I’ve got about twenty-five hundred dollars in my bank account.”
Kyle uses the calculator on her phone: “At a conversion rate of twenty VC points to a dollar . . .” She lets out a huff. “Shit. We’ll still be short 18,200 VC.”
“It’s all or nothing,” says Pete.
When we waver, he seems ready to head off.
“Okay, okay! Just give us a few minutes,” says Kyle. “Let us try to pull it together.”
Pete wanders off to give us space.
That’s when Kyle looks at the shoppers milling about and frowns. “Humph.” She gets to her feet, and so do I. “Hey, can you bring out the worst in these shoppers?”
“Worse than this?” I gesture at the bikini-buying guy, who has come back to grab some bloodied luggage—presumably for some terrifying holiday he’s going on.
“I need you to bring out the absolute worst,” she tells me.
“Well, okay, then. I’ll do my best.”
There are only four clerks working, and no manager is in sight. When no one is looking, I sneak behind the info counter and reach for the intercom. I’m about to make an announcement, but I freeze when I think of why I always dodge the public speaking stuff. Public speaking requires you to put yourself out there, but what if you don’t know who you really are? But then Kyle gives me a wink and a smile, and suddenly I become . . .
THE. MOTHER. FUCKING. GUY.
“Attention, shoppers! How y’all doing today in fair Sundownnn Cityyyy?”
Cringe overload. I sound like a deranged radio announcer.
Kyle raises a brow.
I redden but continue: “Well, well, well, folks! For the next five minutes, everything in the aisle—I mean the, uh, mound near the door—is free of charge. You heard me, people! Free, free, free! You’d have to be caaaa-razy to miss out! I repeat, everything there is free! Bibs! Cribs! Claim your dibs!”
I scuttle away just in time to see mounds of clothes wobble like Jell-O as shoppers rush to the “mound near the door.” People are cheering and, soon, yelling as they fight over crumpled clothes.
Finally, a manager in a polo shirt gets on the PA to say that the “sale” was a prank. But it’s too late.
The mounds of blood-dirtied clothes tumble to the floor. Fists start flying. Kyle darts over and hops up onto a large carton. She pulls out a whistle from her Kevlar vest, then blows out a painfully sharp note. People freeze, look up at the word Vanguard on her attire.
Kyle hops down and calls out, “Under directive eighty-nine of Vanguard’s city regulation rules, I hereby dock all your VC accounts of two thousand points each for disorderly conduct.”
The nearest guy lumbers over and casts a huge shadow around her as he says, “I ain’t takin’ orders from a pocket-sized trainee.”
Kyle doesn’t even blink. “My mistake. Twenty-five hundred VC points.”
He wavers, but she stares him down witheringly.
“Fine!” he hisses, stepping backward.
Kyle gestures for them to line up. “Phones. Present your VC apps. Now.”
Ten dudes open their VC apps and take turns handing their phones to her. Moments later, Kyle has pushed buttons in each account, and they’ve wandered off. I head to her side, and she discreetly shows me her VC app, which has twenty-five thousand extra points.
“Wow,” I mutter.
“Instead of deducting the points, I used their phones to initiate a transfer to my account,” says Kyle. “With any luck, they’ll never notice it went to me and not VC. But even if they do . . . well, we have more important things to worry about, right?”
We go over to Pete. Transfer 160,000 VC points to him. His face lights up as he presses a button within the sales app to buy those designer clothes. “Dudes! Thank you, thank you, thank you!” he exclaims as he reaches out to squish us both with a hug.
Pete leads us to the store’s back room. We enter a small closet, and he closes it behind us before flicking on a bulb. He takes in a breath before mumbling, “Fire away. What do you want to know?”
I can’t help it. I ask how he became a Doomie.
“Well, I’d known about the Doomies for a while. One of my neighbors was a Doomie. I thought he was crazy. But one day, there was a monster in the mart—a humanoid guy made of matchsticks—that broke through the portal quarantine and got into the aisles. I think this was before your accident, Jasper.”
“What happened?” Kyle asks.
“The monster walked up to me and actually spoke. It said to me, ‘Doomed . . . Everything is doomed,’ and then touched my arm. It singed my skin there.” Pete shows us a scar on his forearm that resembles a series of lines. “The whole experience freaked me out . . . and my mind just cracked open. Broke.”
Kyle looks closer at his scar. “That almost looks like a . . . barcode?”
Pete leads us out of the closet and over to a product-scanning station, which would’ve been used before this place became an MDA. He sticks his forearm under the laser, and the machine translates his barcode scar into a “product” description:
The end. 11/29/2024. A783.
I freeze. “The end? As in . . .”
“You-know-what,” says Pete, narrowing his eyes in concentration, as though struggling to stay focused on the present. “A783 is a mystery . . . but the date . . . I think that’s when it happens.”
I recognize the date from the memos posted by Gully.
“A Black Friday apocalypse?” Kyle and I breathe.
It’s like the worst promotional tie-in ever—retail hell meets actual hell!
“We need to report this to VC!” I interrupt. “Like, ASAP!”
Pete regains enough focus to say: “I already did that. I phoned one of their helplines and told them about the monster and the barcode. . . . I was scared, and I made the mistake of telling them about my hallucinations.”
“That’s how they flagged you as a Doomie,” says Kyle.
“Wait. So VC flagged you instead of calling you in to ask you about what you saw? How can they not see the danger?” I ask.
Kyle folds her arms and exhales. “They don’t want to panic the public. I think they see the danger, but they’ve gotten cocky.” She tells us that VC is adding more guards to portal zones in the lead-up to Black Friday. “They probably believe they’re powerful enough to stop a potential doomsday attack—and that doing so will be great PR.”
Pete slumps against a wall before adding, “Listen, ever since that day with the barcode monster, I’ve had dreams of a Black Friday event. . . . Four ghostlike figures gather at a portal and, somehow, just trigger it into gushing monsters. More monsters than you’ve ever, ever seen. I’ve had that vision a thousand times.”
“Yeah,” Kyle whispers, “we’ve seen it too.”
He takes in a breath. “Right. But a few nights ago, I had a different dream. I saw the moment when these four ghostlike figures first entered our world weeks ago. I saw them wandering around, unseen by everyone, as they checked us out. They spoke to one another . . . and although I didn’t understand their language . . . I got a sense of who they actually are.”
When he’s silent, I ask, “Who are they?”
Pete takes in a breath. “They’re the horsemen.”
“The horsemen, as in . . . the horsemen of the apocalypse?” I ask.
“Like from the Bible?” Kyle adds.
When Pete nods, Kyle and I swap a wide-eyed look.
Pete says, “I think they each represent a dark energy. Like, one of them embodies psychotic rage, and he can touch people to make them go apeshit. Another one is a bully who can imprison people with his touch.”
“They have powers?” Kyle asks.
“Right. Of course they’d have powers,” I mutter.
“That’s not all—” He seems to lose track of that sentence briefly. “I can’t explain it . . . but I have this feeling that the horsemen won’t be ghostly figures on Black Friday. Somehow I think they’re now trying to become . . . solid.” Pete shudders, holds out a hand to shield himself from something only he can see, and mutters, “No, no, no!”
“Pete. Stay with us.” I hold on to his shoulders and try to get him to breathe. “Pete? You’re hallucinating. Listen to my voice.”
Right then, a deep rumbling echoes in the distance. The ground shakes. Kyle and I carefully help Pete to a seat nearby before we rush to a back door to peer outside.
“What’s happening?” I ask as we step out onto the street.
“I don’t know,” Kyle whispers. “But that does not sound good.”
A few blocks ahead, the street leads into a park, where there’s an outdoor portal that’s shaking and rumbling within a quarantine cage. Nearby families stagger up from their picnic blankets and start darting away. Pigeons take to the sky.
But then, the rumbling gives way to a thunderous boom, and a chunk of rock shoots out from the portal and through the cage bars. The rock soars up a hundred feet before arcing back down to earth. It smashes onto the grass and bursts into a dense cloud of gray dust. In a split second, the park vanishes under this heavy fog, and seconds later, so too do nearby buildings, streets, and—
Shit! Run!