It’s been 47½ days since the event.
It’s been 47½ days of wandering this godforsaken hellscape, eating when they find food and sleeping when they find shelter.
It’s been 47½ days and the only reason John knows is because his camera still logs the date and time of every photograph.
There was a time where the bylines and the photo credits meant something. And god knows (if she exists at all, and John’s not so sure) between him and Frenchie they’ve logged enough time in the literal trenches to get the job done right. They’ve got the awards to prove it.
Well, had. Had the awards to prove it. He’s pretty sure they got vaporized or incinerated or sunk to the bottom of a murky swamp or something just 47½ days ago.
Still, no reason not to do his job. Document. Report.
Survive.
Frenchie’s got his theories, because of course he does. “Not a nuke, is it, because we’re not, you know,” he says, pantomiming something akin to skin falling off his face around a horrific gaping maw. John can see every last one of his fillings, all present and accounted for.
“Don’t think that’s how it works,” John tells him.
“Could be aliens,” Frenchie continues. “Or, or, like—”
They stop in their tracks.
Strange sights aren’t—well, common seems like an oxymoron, even if John’s brain is still wrapping itself around the new normal. But this?
“It’s a house,” Frenchie says.
“Looks like it,” John agrees.
“But it’s—” Frenchie starts.
“Still standing,” John finishes.
They’ve taken shelter in any number of once-freestanding structures. Some things still work, just. Unreliably. But just when they think they’ve reached the end of their resources—water, food, power—something shows up, as if the universe is looking out for them.
Not like this, though.
“How’s your battery holding out, mate?” Frenchie says softly, not tearing his gaze from the house.
John hasn’t turned on the camera in a minute. Only so many “strange” sights a man can photograph before it starts to feel samey, but he knows. “Not that low,” he says.
“And we’ve, uh, we’ve got water.” Frenchie taps the tube coming out of his pack.
“Uh-huh. And food.” He feels the weight of it in his own bag.
“Right. So.”
Suddenly the house whirs to life—literally whirs, John can hear something spinning up as the lights click on in the windows. For a moment he’s certain someone’s about to emerge from the front door with a shotgun in hand, but nothing happens, just the settling hum of electricity in the midst of all this quiet chaos.
He’s not sure how long they stand there, just watching and waiting, before they both speak.
“So we should check it out,” Frenchie says at the same time that John wonders aloud: “What the hell’s going on in there?”
They look at each other and take a beat before stepping toward the door together. They’re doing this. They’re definitely doing this. John feels his heart pound in his chest as they reach the door. Frenchie’s jaw twitches. Neither of them reaches for the door, not right away. They just listen and look.
Nothing moves in the window. No sounds behind the door. Just the whirring of machinery, a little louder for proximity, and the gentle breeze scattering debris behind them.
Frenchie goes for the doorknob and stops short. “Hang on,” he says, “you should get this.”
John nods and reaches for his camera. He uncaps the lens and taps the power button, wincing as it chirps to life. Frenchie squares his jaw and finally makes contact with the knob. He waits a second before doing anything at all, and it feels like an eternity, like they’re waiting—hoping, even—for signs of electric shock, or footsteps rushing, or something, anything, that might explain this anomaly, this strange oasis in a sea of strangeness.
Nothing happens.
So Frenchie twists the knob. They both hear the latch click.
Nothing.
John holds up the camera and hits record. No point trying to take stills right now, just record and process later. If there is a later.
The door swings wide open when Frenchie pushes it, and then they wait.
It’s an ordinary house, or, well, used to be. Wood floors. White walls. Furniture and art. Lamps on. It looks lived in, except it isn’t. Other than the generator, there’s no signs that anyone’s been here in weeks—a soft layer of dust on every surface assures John of that. Still, they wait. Just in case.
When nothing happens, they step inside.
“Hello?” John calls out, leaving the door open to the elements. Frenchie takes another step forward, investigating something in a bowl on a table.
“Left their keys,” Frenchie observes. “Right here in the bowl. Just came home, dropped the keys, and”—he makes a little whipping whistle noise.
“You sure they’re gone?”
Frenchie shrugs. “Take a closer look around?”
They take a few minutes to go over the house, poking their heads behind closed doors, looking for any disturbance, but there’s nothing. Nothing much in the kitchen, either, not in terms of rations. But the power works, and that’s not nothing, so they take the afternoon to charge their electronics and lounge on the perfectly preserved reclining chairs.
When the sun begins to sink into the horizon, it comes as a surprise. It always does, these days, and John’s not sure if that’s just because it’s hard to keep track of the time or some side effect of the event. Even more surprising, however, is the loud thunk they hear as it does.
John has nodded off, since how many cozy afternoons do they get anymore? But the noise is loud enough to startle him awake, and if that’s not enough, the sudden shift in the foundation would be. “Wha–what is it?” he mumbles, rubbing sleep from his eyes.
Frenchie stands by the window, looking especially twitchy. “Well, I’m not an expert, but it looks like quicksand.”
“The house,” John says, concerned, “is in quicksand?”
“Seems so, yeah.”
John pulls things off their chargers and shoves them in his pack. “Wasn’t like that when we got here, was it?”
“It was not,” Frenchie confirms.
“Was there a back door?” John asks, pushing himself out of the recliner with a soft grunt. He’ll miss it.
“Oh. Yeah. Good call,” Frenchie said. He turned on his heels and the two of them fled out the back of the house just as the furniture began to slide and the whirring comes to a sudden halt.
It takes them a few days to notice it.
They’re settling in for the evening (is it evening, or just getting dark?), taking shelter in the half of an old school bus that hasn’t melted into the ground. John is busy snapping photos of the eerie green sunset while Frenchie scoops the contents of a can of something hopefully edible into their bowls. There’s still insects, whatever else survived, and John finds something comforting about the sounds they make at night especially.
He ducks into the bus and takes a seat across from Frenchie, trading his camera for a bowl. Frenchie always likes to scroll through the photos, ask questions, think about whether there’s a story to tell. John tucks into his food and enjoys the temporary peace.
“Hang on, what’s that?” Frenchie says, jamming a fingertip on the camera’s viewscreen. John hears the camera beep repeatedly as Frenchie scrolls through several photos in a row, more than he thinks he took tonight, even. “Yeah, that’s. That’s weird, mate,” he says, shaking his head.
“What’s weird?” John asks. Everything’s weird and nothing’s weird.
“There’s something in these pictures,” Frenchie says.
John raises his eyebrows, an unspoken gimme a break, man.
“Like, it’s shiny? And it’s in all of them?” He holds the camera out with one finger stretched over the screen, pointing to—
Huh. Yeah. That is odd.
“Don’t remember seeing that,” John says, suddenly uninterested in his canned mush. “How far back does it go?”
Frenchie takes the camera back. Beeps fly furiously in the echoey cramped space. “Uh, looks like… yeah, back to that house.”
“The house?” John asks, taking a moment to recall. “The quicksand?”
“Yep. Yeah. The quicksand house, that one.”
“And you’re sure it’s not, like, something on the lens?”
“Naw, mate, it’s in a different spot every time, right? Or like it moves around. See?” Frenchie shows him a few different photos. In one there’s a barely noticeable glint in the distance. In another, it’s practically in the foreground.
“The f*ck is it,” John breathes.
“Definitely f*ckin’ aliens, man.” Frenchie nods sagely. He sets the camera down on the bench next to him. “Like that thing with the chimps.”
“Thing with the—d’ya mean the obelisk? In 2001: A Space Odyssey?”
Frenchie stares at him like he’s speaking another language. “Pretty sure the thing with the chimps is way older than that.”
“What—” John scrubs a hand over his face. “That’s the title of the movie, you dork, not the year! It came out in like 1969 or something.”
“Oh, like a documentary?”
“Jesus Christ, mate,” John mutters. “It was science fiction!”
“Well, I don’t know!” Frenchie said, holding his hands up in surrender. “You know what they say, truth is stranger than fiction, and that was pretty f*cking strange, am I right?”
“That you believed dudes in gorilla costumes were real f*cking monkeys is pretty f*cking strange.”
“Oh, sh*t, they were f*cking?”
John takes a deep breath and resists the urge to throw his spoon.
“Ohhh. Right, no. Misheard that.” Frenchie taps a finger on his temple. “So what do you think it is?”
“What’re you asking me for?” John says. He takes another bite of food and ponders. “I mean, aliens is as good a guess as any.”
“Yeah. See?” Frenchie smiles impishly and pulls a small tablet out of his shirt pocket, flips it open, and uses the tiny stylus to jot down some notes. John’s never been able to decipher his handwriting, but that little device can.
It’s amazing, John thinks, that silly things like that used to feel like the future.
They continue to notice the object in pictures, but it takes a day or two before Frenchie suggests actually looking for it in the viewfinder.
They’re stopped at a stand of trees where there’s literally hundreds of opossums scurrying about. John realizes he’s not sure he’s seen an opossum up close before, because are their tails usually that long? He’s taking photo after photo while he contemplates the average tail length of the northernmost marsupial when Frenchie nudges him.
“Indulge me a mo,” he says, holding his hand out for the camera. John furrows his brow and lifts the strap from around his neck to hand over the device. Frenchie holds it up a few inches from his face and watches the viewscreen as he slowly scans the scene around them.
He stops and focuses on the split trunk of a tree dead ahead.
“Yeah, hey, look,” he says, slowly passing the camera back to John. “In the tree.”
John looks at the screen and sucks in a breath. There’s the–the thing, the object, the not-an-obelisk; he’s not sure what to call it. “f*ck,” he says.
“What do you think it is?” Frenchie asks. He’s looking at the spot in the tree as though he might stare it into existence, but when John looks with his naked eye, it’s just a tree. A tree covered in opossums with unusually large tails, maybe, but just a tree.
On the viewscreen, though, it’s an object, orb-like, metallic, throbbing faintly with a pale glow. “Hell if I know,” he says. “But I’m not sure I want to get close enough to find out.”
“Good call, mate, cheers,” Frenchie agrees, scratching his head nervously.
John decides he’s seen enough of these creatures and suggests they go around the trees. A fresh sense of dread settles in his belly as they walk.
Once they know how to see it, they can’t help but look.
Frenchie tries to ascertain if there’s some mathematical sequence to its position. He even suggests randomly experimenting with pulling out the camera, even when they might not feel like there’s anything to capture. (There’s always something, if John’s honest, just… a lot of weird sh*t has become practically mundane. Seen one slime green oil-slick swamp with three-eyed frogs, seen ‘em all, probably.)
He settles for taking notes and spending time reconciling them, searching for the pattern in the chaos, searching for something that will explain, if not everything, then at least this one thing.
There’s nothing.
It appears in different places, different distances, but they never see it move. Sometimes it’s directly in their intended path. Other times it’s in the middle of some kind of mess, but never the same thing twice. Once it’s in the middle of a shockingly geometric column of abandoned doll heads (which, points to the alien theory, John thinks).
They try to treat it like it’s just part of the landscape.
Frenchie thinks it’s some kind of observation drone. “Bet the country’s full of ‘em,” he says. “Watchin’ everyone left behind.”
John’s not sure who this “everyone” is. They haven’t seen another soul in two months—65¾ days, if he’s counting. This should bother him more than it does. He doesn’t say anything.
It’s been 82 days since the event and John thinks maybe he’s starting to see a pattern. When their path naturally takes them away from the object, they run into some kind of problem. Well, more problems than usual. Something annoying, like a strap breaks or the water tastes bad. And when they happen to travel toward it, their luck holds. They find food when they need it. They don’t trip and fall on uneven terrain. They have decently comfortable places to sleep. Little things. Plausibly deniable things.
Or maybe he’s finally starting to lose it.
Either/or.
So maybe they make their own luck, is the thing. John tries to experiment in his head. Doesn’t say anything to Frenchie, not yet. Maybe Frenchie counts as a control subject.
One time he suggests they veer left when the object is to their right and everything’s fine. So, maybe he’s wrong.
“Ugh, what’s that smell?” Frenchie screws up his face.
They’re hiking into a valley where the air is hazy. John sniffs, but doesn’t smell much. Maybe a whiff of ozone, but that’s not unusual. “I don’t…” he trails off.
“And d’ya feel that?” Frenchie continues, his arms suddenly closing around each other, fingertips scratching at exposed skin as he pushes his sleeves up. “Like itching in the back of your brain?”
John stops. “Sounds like an allergy.”
“Oh, no, I don’t have allergies,” Frenchie says. He drags a fingernail across his scalp and grimaces. “Well, I can’t eat peanut butter.”
f*ck. It’s not like they have a goddamn Epi-Pen in the apocalypse. Somehow that hasn’t been in any of the curiously well-placed supply stops they’ve visited over the past few months. John didn’t even think to look for it. He sighs. “That’s a bloody allergy!”
“OK, maybe,” Frenchie says, still scratching. “But I don’t see any peanut butter around here. Not even, like, almond butter or something, except I’m pretty sure I can have that, I just don’t like it.”
“It’s the smoke,” John says, realization dawning. “Has to be.”
“Uhhh, does peanut butter burn?”
John glares at him in lieu of an answer.
“Right, yeah, sure, I guess anything can burn, probably.”
“Probably,” John agrees. He thinks about turning around, because the haze isn’t dissipating, but behind them is some kind of fast-growing toxic sludge that disintegrated an energy bar wrapper he accidentally dropped on the ground in the morning and he’d rather not find out what it does to human flesh.
He turns on the camera, lifts the viewscreen to eye level, and looks.
“Hey, what’re you doing?” Frenchie asks, still scratching. “We should maybe turn around, or…”
“The object,” John says. “I’m looking for the object.” His eyes scan the tiny screen for the telltale pulse of light, which gets difficult as the smoke thickens.
“The hell’re you doing that for?”
Finally he spots it: a faint throb at this distance, a speck halfway toward the horizon.
“I think we can follow it,” he admits. He doesn’t say the thing he’s wondering: if this is just delayed bad luck from their last “wrong” turn. If the object is trying to teach them a lesson.
Frenchie furrows his brow as he continues to scratch his scalp. “Follow it?”
John doesn’t want to try to explain while Frenchie’s standing there going into anaphylaxis, so he just points in the direction of the object. “There,” he says. “Left.”
They manage to lope around the edges of the valley where the smoke isn’t as thick, making their way toward the invisible object. As soon as they get close, there’s a BOOM as the earth shakes. They stop, heads snapping to look back where they’ve been. The smoke is thicker in the distance, somewhere off to the right of where they started.
“Is that… green? Fire?” John asks.
“That’s weird, right?” Frenchie says.
They watch distant verdant flames lick at the edges of a new hole in the earth until the smoke blots out the light.
When John finally remembers to lift the camera and take a picture, the object is gone.
It’s been 126 days since the event.
They’ve followed the object for the last 37 days, and it hasn’t steered them wrong yet.
It also has yet to steer them in the direction of any other survivors.
“What if this is some kind of simulation?” Frenchie posits. “We think we’re here, but really our bodies are hooked up to machines in some artificial intelligence lab. Maybe on Mars.”
“On Mars?” John scoffs.
“Hey, I don’t know, anything is possible.”
John looks around. They’re surrounded by red rock, somehow, so maybe Frenchie’s onto something. He sighs.
“You’ve had worse theories,” he says.
The boardwalk is slowly crumbling into the swamp behind them, and the spanish moss that hangs in thick wisps from the half-submerged trees is a peculiar shade of electric yellow, but other than that, it’s a fairly tranquil setting for the apocalypse.
Frenchie’s taking the walk at a somewhat faster clip than he usually does, seemingly unable to trust that the swamp won’t catch up to them before they catch up with the object. John sticks to his regular pace, occasionally letting out a pointed sigh when he wants Frenchie to pause for as long as his anxiety will allow him so John can catch up.
“What do you think would happen if we ever, y’know, caught up with it?” Frenchie asks, waiting.
Brittle slats plunk into murky waters several feet behind John as he approaches. “I don’t know,” John says thoughtfully. “Always just kinda disappears as soon as we get close.”
“Right, but what if we, like, tried to catch it?”
The thing about surviving an apocalypse no one tells you—because no one else has experienced this particular apocalypse, certainly—is how boring it gets. Everything is strange, so nothing is. Just day after day of new weird sh*t to dodge, following the inscrutable edicts of a glowy orb they can only see through the screen of an electronic device with a shockingly long battery life, to say nothing of its storage capacity. Really, it’s a wonder it’s taken them this long to consider actively f*cking with their own survival.
“And what if we were?” John says dismissively. “What if we did catch up with the thing? What’re we gonna do then? Touch it? Carry it with us? Talk to it like it’s a f*cking answering machine?”
“Throwback,” Frenchie quips. “Beeeep! We’re sorry, the civilization you’ve been trying to reach is not available. After the tone, please record your last words before you die!”
John heaves a sigh as he reaches the place where Frenchie stands. More boardwalk falls into the water, then stops. There’s frogs or insects or something here, all humming or buzzing or croaking in harmony. He can practically hear the drumbeat that would’ve made it a hit among the lo-fi chill set.
f*ck it.
“Sure,” he says. “Let’s try to leave a voicemail to the aliens or AI superpower or whatever it is.”
“Cool.”
Another board snaps and falls as they continue walking.
There’s an odd cold snap the next night. Not so much that they’re worried about frostbite or anything, but chilly enough they can see their breath. They’ve taken refuge in a derelict building where they last spotted the object, which doesn’t seem to offer much in the way of protection from the elements, but at least it’s quiet.
“Did we follow right?” John complains. There’s some novelty in the way the words punctuate the air, the moisture in his breath freezing into smoke-like puffs and drifting down.
Frenchie is shivering a little, curling himself into John’s chest, too close to see it. “Must be worse somewhere else.”
“Maybe,” John says. He wraps his arms around Frenchie as they settle into their makeshift bed. “Don’t remember the last time I felt cold, though.”
“Right? I’ll say one thing about this apocalypse, mate, at least it’s been temperate.”
John laughs out a cloudy hah! “Always figured we’d get one extreme or another, eh? Climate sh*t.”
“Divine intervention, then,” Frenchie says. He sounds a little sleepy. Good.
“That’s your new theory?” John asks. Carefully, he buries his face in Frenchie’s curls, seeking a little more warmth than the air has to offer.
“I mean, how else do you explain this?” Frenchie asks, his tone softer still. “Stuck at the end of the world with my best mate, my…”
John’s heart flips in his chest. He squeezes Frenchie a little closer. “Yeah,” he says, feeling a sudden swell of emotion. “No one else I’d rather.”
Frenchie goes quiet as his breathing evens out, and John just listens. It’s still quiet; he can’t hear so much as a gust of wind. Perhaps the building is better insulated than it appears.
There might’ve been a time, some one hundred and who knows days ago, that John harbored a small crush on his colleague. They didn’t always work together on stories, but when they did, it went swimmingly. Even outside that, they were great friends, making time to see each other as often as their schedules permitted and texting when they didn’t. Sometimes they fell asleep in each other’s beds, but nothing happened. Neither of them dated much, though. John liked to think it was because they had each other. They just never quite got to the point of giving it a name.
Frenchie breaks the silence with a loud snore against John’s shoulder. John dares to let his fingertips gingerly stroke Frenchie’s back without loosening his hold, and he wonders if this is where the object meant to lead them.
The day John gets brave enough to hold Frenchie’s hand is the day they find the staircase.
He just slips in there, threads their fingers together, keeps walking. Gets an abashed smile from Frenchie, which is everything, turns out. They walk like that, joined hands swinging gently between them, as they walk down what used to be a paved road alongside a high retaining wall, now overgrown with red kudzu.
John didn’t even know kudzu came in red. And maybe it doesn’t. Stranger things really do happen every day.
They feel a gust of wind in their faces and both turn to see a flight of old stone steps cutting through the sea of vines. John can’t see beyond the top of the stairs, but he knows the object will be somewhere up there. One glance at his partner tells him Frenchie thinks the same. He uncaps the camera, turns it on, and holds it up where they can look together, even though he somehow knows without looking where they’ll find it.
“So it’s at the top of these stairs, then,” Frenchie says.
“Looks like it,” John agrees.
“And we’re not worried about, like, crumbling, or slipping on moss, or something?”
“Trust the ball,” John says wearily. “It’s all we have.”
“Accept no substitutes,” Frenchie says, cheekily recalling a world they’ll probably never get back.
They keep their hands together as they slowly ascend the steps. Some stones are loose, but none give way, though John swears the kudzu grows across the lower steps. They keep an eye on the viewscreen, making sure the object doesn’t move or disappear in front of them.
“Maybe this time,” Frenchie says. John knows exactly what he means.
As they near the top, there’s a peculiar sound on the breeze. Something they haven’t heard since—well.
“Is that…kids? Laughing?” John says, baffled.
“Maybe?” Frenchie says. “Not gonna lie, mate, it’s low-key f*cking ominous.”
“Yeah,” John agrees, but what choice do they have?
They keep going, because the kudzu has definitely grown in, the steps disappearing under a thick layer of vines. And both of them must have taken their eyes off the viewfinder at the same time, because the f*cking object is gone. John swears under his breath.
“John,” Frenchie says, pointing dead ahead. “Look.”
They’re five steps from the top, so the landing is in full view.
And so is a house.
The house.
“Can’t be,” John murmurs.
“But it looks—”
“Yeah, but that sunk. You saw. We both saw.”
“Swallowed whole while we ran off, yeah, babe, I was there.”
They force themselves to reach the top of the stairs, each searching as far to the left and right as they can for signs of…anything, really.
“You see anything?” John asks. There’s really nothing else for what looks like miles.
“Nah,” Frenchie confirms. “Bit of a letdown, eh? Just kind of rocky then flat, then rocky, then flat.”
“‘Cept for that,” John says, nodding toward that damned house.
He’s looking at Frenchie and thinking, not for the first time, how glad he is to be stuck in this surreal hellscape with this person. He’s thinking so hard he almost doesn’t see it—the light catches the edge of his vision, pulsing just so. He turns his head slowly and sees Frenchie do the same.
Frenchie swallows audibly. “You see that,” he says. It’s not a question.
“Yeah,” John says.
“It’s—”
“What else could it be?”
John turns his head again, looks at Frenchie and only Frenchie. Frenchie, whose face reads like a man weighing his options, like he’s choosing a sandwich to order for lunch and not whether to pursue a mysterious object that’s been their only companion for months. John’s stomach is in knots.
Another breeze flits past, carrying with it the sounds of children. He gets hit with a pang of dread.
“I don’t see what choice we have,” Frenchie says finally. “It’s—there.”
“Trust the ball,” John agrees, because it’s nice to have an obvious choice.
Frenchie squeezes John’s hand and leads him to the porch. “Do you wanna do the honors this time?”
John doesn’t, not really, but he thinks he needs to be brave. He nods and grabs the doorknob with his free hand, turns it, and slowly pushes in.
“Jesus, mate, the light—”
