“Earthquake,” Tasha says.
“Tsunami,” Annie says. The seashore is so close; the water would rise up to cover them all. “We need to get away from here.”
Annie grabs Tasha’s hand and they run to the nearest exit, and from there to the ambulance on the ER ramp. Two fire trucks come screaming up the street as more people stagger out of the hospital, patients in rumpled gowns, nurses and doctors and orderlies in scrubs, their arms filled with blankets and bandages and boxes.
“We don’t have time!” Annie screams. “We need to go.”
Tasha turns back to the hospital. She does not want to die—not after what she’s survived. But they can’t leave yet. They need supplies. They need to figure out where to go.
She looks back toward Annie and sees people climbing into and onto the fire trucks, drivers in yellow jackets pushing people up.
Then a ball of fire arcs over their heads, so bright everything turns iridescent. It smashes into the hospital. Tasha falls to the ground, all
sound
gone.
The world explodes.
A hand on her arm. She lets Annie pull her up, stumbles with her to the ambulance, gets in the passenger side. The heat is almost unbearable. The two red fire trucks pull away in the smoke. Annie throws the ambulance into gear and they peel down the ramp and onto the road.
They’ve left people standing, but she can’t hear the screams.
As a child, she’d had night terrors—long twisted minutes with half of her in one world and the other half in the next. Endless dusty hallways with no corners and snarling demons who lunged at her through the wall. She’d bolt upright in her bed and scream, still asleep, strike the demons across the face only to have them multiply and pin her to the bed.
The demons came from the ground, like all wild things. They slithered up through the floorboards of the house and through the windows, pretending to be birds. They wrapped their talons in her hair and choked her with their feathered wings, then slid scaly down her arms and held her fast to the bed. Sometimes the terror in her chest would become its own thing, unfurling from her ribcage like a bat. It would smile with pointed teeth and press down into the bleeding skin of her stomach before launching itself into the air. The darkness from her ribcage would overwhelm the sky.
In the morning her mother might have a black eye, her father a puffed lip from where Tasha had hit them in the night. Her mother would hold Tasha close and murmur stories in her ear—dancing octopuses, starfish that gathered treasure and hid it beneath the sand, mountains, far away, that were so tall they reached the moon. Her father made them oatmeal and toast, weak tea with lots of warm milk and extra sugar for Tasha. Sometimes after a troubled night this would be enough to restore her and she was able to go to school. Other times she’d be too tired and they’d keep her home.
The doctors told her parents that the terrors would go away. They said this when she was seven, and again when she was nine, and after the night of her twelfth birthday, when she screamed about birds that burned holes in the ground, they shook their heads and said she was still a child and it would pass. Her mother turned the fire-birds into a story, but the terrors did not go away. In high school she found comfort in science and stayed up late into the night reading biology textbooks—blood and kidneys, heartbeats, brain. Night terrors, she read, were thought to be linked to epilepsy in some cases but not in others. There were questions around whether night terrors were congenital. Her grandmother had sleepwalked as a child. As the doctors said, most children outgrew night terrors before they hit their teens—and if they didn’t, nine times out of ten, the terrors became easier to manage. Medication to help you sleep without dreaming. Strict diets that helped to facilitate an easier transition into delta sleep.
Her terrors did become less, but also more—fewer instances, longer dreams. Once or twice she woke up and found herself on the lawn. The second time this happened it was snowing; with Tasha’s permission, her parents installed a lock outside of the door to her room and locked her in. The demons did not hold her down against the bed anymore—they just taunted her alone in a locked room.
Her years of studying late into the night prepared her well for medical school, then residency. She was alert when other students struggled to get by; as a resident she was eager to plunge into a trauma case at two-thirty in the morning when everyone around her was bleary-eyed and cautious. She did not need stories to help her through the night now, not when there were bodies to disappear into and heartbeats to measure. Mountains that reached the moon were not real, nor were starfish that hid treasure, nor were fire-birds that fell screaming from the sky and bone-bat things that crawled out from your ribcage.
On the first day of her residency she’d seen Annie in the hospital cafeteria, clad in her scrubs and sitting with three other nurses. Tall and blonde, like the princesses in some of the stories that her mother had told. (There were never any dark-haired, dark-skinned princesses, but she’d been too busy trying to sleep to wonder about that.) Annie looked up with something like recognition as Tasha approached, and Tasha felt her chest expand into a world bright and soft. The winged thing that unfurled from her ribcage this time was only made of light.
They were married in a year. Their parents surprised them with the down payment on a house. When she was finished her residency, offers came from other hospitals far away but Tasha turned them down so they could stay in the house by the ocean.They thought about having a child. She had terrors so rarely now they felt like the stuff of legend.
But demons are demons and don’t forget how to find you. When they came for her again, their hands were filled with fire. That time, they took her parents.
This time, they took everything else.
Billowing smoke, shaking ground, and groaning road. Great gaping holes around them as they drive past bodies tumbled over one another, past the wreckage of houses and tall apartment towers. The sky continues to fall around them in great flaming chunks. The ragged breathing of children and their parents fills the ambulance, too many people on board, but still they screech to a halt when they see someone standing in the mess. It doesn’t happen often enough.
“Where is everyone?” Annie asks at one point. Tasha has no answer. Sound has come back to her, slowly, along with a heightened sense of colour. Everything outside feels like it belongs to a different universe.
“What are we going to do?” Annie whispers.
“Keep driving,” Tasha says. The world still shakes off and on, but not as often. Water from the ocean has not followed them.
Not a tsunami after all. Something else entirely. Everything feels like a dream.
“Tasha,” Annie says, sharply. “Don’t fall asleep.”
“I’m not,” Tasha says instantly—but she is drowsy, drifting alongside Annie, closing her eyes against a world so sharp it almost hurts.
“You hit your head,” Annie reminds her. “It could be a concussion. Don’t fall asleep until I can check.”
“Annie, I’m okay.”
“You don’t know that.”
It’s all right, she wants to say. Annie, it will be all right.
But the words don’t come. They drive on, and the world continues to burn.
Meteors, catastrophe, impact event. The radio bursts in the ambulance are infrequent, and always catch them off guard. The entire world, it seems, has been caught by surprise. They stop for gas at one abandoned station and leave a pile of bills on the counter. The next time they fill up, Tasha slides money across the counter to a weeping sixteen-year-old boy.