From the other side of the bed, I heard Caleb take in a breath like he was going to say something, but then he kept quiet. A second breath and silence; a third. In the bedroom, dark but for the persistent glow of the streetlight outside the apartment window, I figured he was going to ask for sex despite me telling him already I didn’t feel like it, thought he was going to try to make a case as to why my long day could be eased by some fooling around. I was already forming my rebuttal in my head when he finally spoke.
“Marissa?” he whispered.
“Yeah?” I whispered back.
“Did you hear there’s a new mass?”
There was always a new mass somewhere, or rumors of new masses, or pictures of the masses moving across some decimated landscape that used to be a strip mall or something. I stopped my internal counterarguing. “What kind?”
“Some kind of flu. Equine flu.”
I paused. “Racetrack fever?”
“It didn’t really start at a racetrack, but that’s what some people are calling it, yeah.”
“What about it?”
Now he paused for so long I would have thought he was asleep if it weren’t for more of those intakes of air that didn’t lead to words. The little I’d heard about this particular mass put it near the state line, but there were a lot of empty miles between here and there, and masses tended to shamble away for more populated climes rather than lumbering through long expanses of wasteland.
“It’s probably heading back to Vegas,” I offered. Vegas was emptier than it had been, a lot emptier than when it was stuffed with millions trying their luck at the games—or at making a living from the gamblers—but I thought he needed comfort, and Vegas seemed like a good place to hope the mass went to instead of here.
“No, I want to—” He paused, almost a choke, and then he turned onto his side, facing me. I looked over to see his eyes wide and pleading in the glow of the streetlight. “Do you want to join it with me?” Before I could answer, he took another breath. “Don’t answer me now. Just think about it. But promise me you’ll think about it.”
“We’ll have to talk about this,” I managed to say.
He turned away, on the side facing the dresser we found on the curb two years ago. “Promise me, Riss.”
His hand reached behind and found mine. I almost yanked it away, an instinct tangled with my sudden need to turn my back to him, too. Or, hell, to get up and leave the bedroom, maybe the apartment, just to get some air. But even with him turned away from me in the mostly dark room, I knew what doing that would do to him. Don’t leave me, he had asked me time and time again, and time and time again I had promised I wouldn’t leave him behind like everyone else in his life had. Even if this wouldn’t be me leaving forever, I knew it would feel like it, and who knew if I could repair the resulting damage to the fragile trust we’d built together.
So I took his hand, and blinked back disbelief as I stared at the ceiling for the rest of that sleepless night.
Somewhere around 2 a.m., when all the posts about the latest episode of Love By Twilight started looking the same, I looked up the mass he was talking about. It had come across my feed at some point before but I only read into it enough to see that there was a new mass and that it was far enough away to not worry about it for now. Equine flu, also known as racetrack fever, since that’s where the first notable mass of it formed, in the stands of a racetrack up north. It was hard not to imagine a crowd of people sitting together—closer than they should have, obviously, but probably not shoulder to shoulder. Maybe someone had a sniffle. Maybe someone sneezed. Someone who had been down to see the horses before the race, or maybe it wasn’t caused by a horse at all; I could never understand how they decided what to name these things. Anyway, someone coughed or whatever and then what had been three people or five people or ten people was a single roiling, pulsing mass of flesh.
Science may have cured death, but hadn’t figured out how to do the same for disease. And people had to go somewhere, the news kept telling us, and no one was being buried, so masses were nature’s way of reclaiming balance. I hadn’t really seen one up close and I’d never seen one form, but there were enough videos for me to know I didn’t want to. Didn’t even want to think about it, honestly, but Caleb did. Caleb wanted to do more than think about it. Caleb wanted to do more than see it. And I couldn’t leave Caleb.
Almost three years together, but it felt like so much more. It seemed just as impossible to imagine a time before Caleb as it was to imagine how life could go on without him. I just wished it was any easier to conceive of what life would be like in a mass. Some people said that you continued as your own mind when you got absorbed into a mass, your brain floating around somewhere inside the whole. But then there were all those posts from the Collective Futurists saying that people in a mass became one communal consciousness, with individuality diffusing into the enrichment of the whole. Like a commune, but as an autonomous and mobile lump of disease. Which didn’t sound like anything particularly attractive to become, but the main point of the Collective Futurists was that becoming part of a mass somewhere, sometime, was not just inevitable but the peak of human evolution. Even if we wouldn’t really be human at all anymore.
It was hard to see being subsumed into disease as a kind of evolution anyone would want to participate in, though plenty of people did do that—watched for masses and flung themselves close enough to be sucked in. What Caleb wanted to do now, apparently. And it was hard to say which would be worse, losing your mind to the collective or keeping yourself intact as your body became part of a whole that you presumably couldn’t control. But the Collective Futurists were right that it was an inevitability, since no one could die anymore. I’d just been going along like most people, staying inside and washing my hands and doing all the things the scientists said would tilt the scale of “sooner or later” firmly in the territory of “later.”
But Caleb.
I turned, and then turned again, then turned the pillow over to the cool side. Caleb seemed to sleep through it all, apparently blissfully unaware of the bomb he’d dropped, and I was glad. We didn’t need to talk about this now. He needed his sleep. I needed mine, too, but waking him wouldn’t change anything.
When the sky started lighting up gray, I gave up and slipped out of bed. Caleb woke up, too, sometime between me getting dressed and heading for the door.
“Where are you going?” he asked, voice still thick and slurring.
“Work,” I said. It was mostly true. I added, “Ron texted and asked if I could come in early to help open.”
This was not true at all, but my manager had pulled that kind of thing before, so Caleb nodded, bleary eyed.
“I hope it goes okay,” he said, and after a brief, morning breath-tainted kiss goodbye, he shuffled back to the bedroom.
I got to the parking lot of Sergeant Chicken and put the Honda in park with no idea what to do next. Ron probably wouldn’t care if I actually did come in to help open, and a little extra on my paycheck would be nice. But he wouldn’t want to let me off early, and the seven-hour shift in front of me already stretched long. My eyes were finally starting to droop, too. A few spaces away, I saw Michael pull up in his sleek, new, how-does-he-afford-it Buick, and rub his eyes as he shuffled toward the back door of the restaurant. He and Ron could cover opening, and someone else would be coming in soon. I reclined the seat all the way back, pulled my hat low over my eyes, made sure my alarm was set for 7:50, and went to sleep.
By the time I got off of my shift, sweaty and stinking of fried chicken more than usual, I felt as ready to talk about what Caleb wanted as I figured I’d ever be. Business had been slow today; it always was when a new mass popped up nearby. People got spooked with the reminder of a new disease just looking for more victims. For a few days, they’d remember to stay home whenever possible and to stay far from each other when they had to go out, to wear masks, to wash their hands frequently and correctly—all the stuff we were all supposed to be doing all the time but didn’t. In the news, they were always warning us that masses could happen spontaneously, that someone could catch a disease from a large mass but not join it immediately, so you had to be on guard all the time. Which was exhausting, which is why no one did it, until the threat seemed immediate. And then we didn’t sell as many Chickie-Chicken Combos.
I had had plenty of time to think, and I used as much of it as I could bear to think about what Caleb had said. What he said and what he wanted, yes, but also trying to figure out why he wanted it. We were happy, I’d thought, most of the time. People didn’t usually voluntarily join masses unless they were tired of living, but we weren’t even thirty yet, and we’d only been together for three years, even if it felt like longer. Being sick of life sounded like something for old people, or people whose unhappiness made them feel old. How could he be sick of life when ours had really only just begun?
It didn’t take long, though, to remember how he was when we met. Shy and a little moody at a mutual friend’s New Year’s party, which I wouldn’t have even gone to except my friend Gemma, who was making a resolution to try new things, convinced me to go with her as moral support. She vanished almost immediately into a crowd of people; I saw them all making out together in a writhing bunch that half looked like a mass itself. I guess that thing just happens when you’re conventionally pretty. But I wasn’t, and neither was Caleb, leaning against the wall, staring into a drink that was mostly ice and melt, with a lone lime wedge sitting crookedly between the cubes. His eyes were a little too small to be handsome, his nose a little too large and low, but there was still something beautiful about him.
I don’t remember who approached who first. No, that’s not true; it was me, making awkward conversation at the table of depleted charcuterie boards and bowls of chips and seven-layer dip. Damn it, I hate when someone skims off all the guac, or something. So inconsiderate. The point of seven-layer dip is to get all seven layers at the same time. He said something like, “What can you expect from people who pick off the bad grapes but take the rest,” and it had had more bite than necessary for talking about a charcuterie board after 11 p.m. But when I gave him a side-eye, he’d also shrugged a little, almost like he was apologizing for who he was. That was enough for me to be curious enough to get to know the tender and wounded person beneath his prickly exterior. And knowing who he was inside was enough for me to fall head over heels, hopeless, doubtlessly in love.
For all his bluster about needing no one, he was desperately afraid that I’d be like everyone else in his life and abandon him. After dinner on one of our first dates, I’d realized too late there had been dairy somewhere in the burger and fries I’d ordered. I excused myself from the movie for the long and necessary trip to the restroom, trying to be as polite and vague as I could. When I finally got out, he was gone, the movie still playing for the mostly empty theater and my jacket still shrugged off where I’d been sitting. I texted him, Where are you? He left me on read until I showed up at his house and explained the whole thing. He acted like he was a little mad at me for not telling him I was lactose intolerant, but he also wrapped me up in a hug, tight and desperate, and it broke my heart to think he’d think I’d leave him so casually as that.
Right then, I knew I couldn’t leave him, and I was sure he wouldn’t leave me, either. But being two people together in love wasn’t enough for him anymore. He wanted us to be part of the same entity. I had to figure out how to be okay with that, or how to make him change his mind.
His car was gone when I pulled my Honda into our parking lot. The apartment was just as quiet, and I checked my phone to make sure I hadn’t missed any messages. Nothing from him then, or even after my shower when I tried in vain to get the smell of fried chicken out of my hair. But I noticed a corner of the table had been cleared except for a square of paper—the back of a bill I needed to pay—with his untidy scrawl: Picked up a shift. See you tonight.
I drummed my fingers on the paper, glad for the extra money but worried he was voluntarily picking up more work when I knew how much he hated it at the Fuel-N-Go. After a few false starts, I texted him: Got your note. I hope the shift goes okay. Love you <3. Then I watched my phone as if manifesting a reply. After a while, the watching became scrolling, and I almost forgot about how messy the table was or how I should do dishes or maybe head down to the coin-op before we were both out of cleanish clothes, because the algorithm helpfully let me know there was an update on the mass.
Instead of heading for Vegas like it seemed to be earlier, it had turned and was lumbering back our way again. A pit grew in my stomach. Masses had cut through the desert around us plenty of times before, and they hardly ever got close enough to even see them on the horizon. But it didn’t happen that often that one wanted to come this way, and it had never happened at a time when the love of my life had wanted to join one. When my stomach hurt too much to bear, I shoved my phone under a pile of junk mail and hugged my knees to my chest, like they could fill the hole that threatened to gape open there.
I wasn’t up front when it happened, but I heard the screaming coming from the dining room. When I thought back on it later, I had heard the sort of squelching sound like ground meat being squished together, but maybe I was imagining that afterward, knowing what had happened.
I was on the line, slathering a bun with just enough mayo to encourage a future heart attack but not cause one on the spot. Kenzie and Michael were both at the registers, both delivering the familiar spiel of “Welcome to Sergeant Chicken. Would you like to try the new Drumline Drumsticks combo?” followed by the murmur of their customers hemming and hawing their way through an order. The rise and fall of their voices was part of the symphony of the kitchen, a mellow baseline against the sizzle of the meat on the grill and the burble of the potato wedges and chicken in the fryer and the incessant beeping of this machine or that, and it would almost have been soothing if I weren’t at work hustling my ass off to make barely more than minimum wage.
Then, screaming. At first I thought it was coming from the kitchen, that someone had been splashed with oil again, though that usually came with more swearing. It kept going long enough for my ears to realize it wasn’t close, just loud, and then I saw people running to the front—and then running back even faster. Like the dumbass I am, I ran up, too, dodging Kenzie’s wild-eyed tear away from the counter.
Online, in the videos people post and on the news, masses always look kind of gray. Like, old-asphalt gray, wet-concrete gray. They look lumpy and squelchy and everything else, but overall a fairly innocuous, almost sterile gray color. The thing I saw on the other side of the counter was not gray. Maybe it was because of the too-bright lighting at Sergeant Chicken, but the overall color was far closer to the mottled brown of many shades of skin suddenly thrust together, which is probably because that was exactly what it was. Running through the desert-camo brown, though, were ribbons of red and purple, like when you get in a piece of chicken that was deboned and deskinned but still has a vein running through it that bleeds when you slice it apart.
It was certainly lumpy, though. And squelchy. And maybe this was just because it was so fresh and new, this mass, but I swore I could still see the faces of the people who had once been individuals. I swear I saw Michael’s face, mouth open and eyes pleading before that part of the mass shifted and his face disappeared inside of it.
I yanked my uniform’s polo shirt to cover my nose and mouth, as if that would save me if I were already infected, and ran away, my feet skidding and slipping on the grease-slicked floor.
We couldn’t leave, obviously. Spontaneous masses are rare but not so rare that we all haven’t had the things to do afterward branded into our minds. You’re supposed to stay put, but stay put as far away from every other person in the place as possible, and wait for authorities to arrive and take control of the situation. Whoever is in charge of the venue, in a public or private facility, is supposed to call the hotline, if there’s not already a button in place to contact the hotline for you. In someplace like a park, whoever sees it is supposed to call and keep their distance.
I don’t know who hit the button in the restaurant, but it probably wasn’t Ron, who came lumbering out of his office after what seemed like an hour. But I do know it was pressed, because when I got to the back, at least three people were throwing themselves in turns at the back exit, each time hitting the locked door with a dull thud that had to have left bruises. I was pretty sure I could hear the banging of the dining room doors being uselessly pulled, as if repeated yanks alone could break the lock and the hermetic seal.
“I think we’re supposed to stay away from each other and wait,” I said, but not very loud and still muffled through my shirt. Nobody seemed to hear, even as they gradually gave up on the door. But I hung back, at least, by the fryer that was burning what looked like a six-piece meal in one basket and a bunch of potato wedges in the other. I picked up the baskets and set them above the grease, wondering after if I had touched something contaminated, or if I had just contaminated them myself.
According to the incident report sheet the authorities pasted on the two dining room doors after they left, it took eighteen minutes and eleven seconds for them to arrive. I guess that was lucky, how quickly they came; I’ve heard of people waiting for hours before they could get decontaminated. Still too long to sit in the same building as a new mass, breathing ever-more infected air, hoping you don’t squelch out of your customary existence. I didn’t move from my spot by the fryer until they made me line up with the rest of the employees along the back, but I heard a lot of noise and a lot of squelching from the dining room, so they must have gone to contain the mass first.
I got home a little over two hours late. My skin still stung where I had been scrubbed and sprayed with disinfectant. Everything—everything—I’d been wearing when I went in that morning, right down to the mismatched Mickey Mouse socks on my feet and my almost-new bra, had to be burned, obviously, and I was covered only in a plasticky, papery jumpsuit and matching slippers the response team provided for everyone. It announced my arrival with each shuffling step up the stairs. When I opened the door, the apartment was dark.
“Caleb?” I asked. His Mazda was in the lot; I had checked. For a moment, I thought maybe he had gone for a walk or something. Maybe he’d run down to the 7-Eleven on the corner for a hot dog or one of those cookies with aggressively pink frosting. I hadn’t even thought about food since before the mass happened. Now I wasn’t sure if I’d ever be hungry again. A shadow in the corner shifted, and as my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I saw his face, horizontal on the couch and bathed in the thin glow from his phone screen. “Caleb. Why are you in the dark?”
“I guess I just lost track of time waiting for you,” he said. “I always figured it was a matter of time before you left me. I just didn’t think it was tonight.”
The phone cast more shadows than it illuminated, but I knew his expression well: all stone-faced and impenetrable, like he’d retreated too far into himself and gotten lost. And God help me, I was too tired to reassure him back into human emotion.
“Well, it wasn’t,” I said, flicking on the light.
He flinched, jerking back into the couch. When he opened his eyes again, I saw his expression shift rapidly from the hard mask I’d expected to confusion at what I was wearing to wide-eyed understanding. He bolted upright, eyes pleading.
“I’m fine,” I said, answering his unasked question. “Just tired.”
He rushed forward and almost tackled me with the force of his hug. After a moment of letting myself still be tired, frustrated, even mad, I hugged him back, and we swayed in a tangle of limbs. He said something, too muffled against my shoulder for me to understand.
I pulled away just enough to say, “What?”
“I can’t believe I really almost lost you.”
“Never,” I said. Even though that wasn’t true, was it? Maybe the customers in the restaurant who became the mass promised their significant others that they’d never leave them. Maybe Michael did. Maybe his twisted, yawning mouth was trying to say he was sorry for breaking that promise, right before his face churned into the rest of it.
Later, when I’d had a shower to scrub off all the disinfectant they’d scrubbed me down with and changed into real clothes, Caleb held me so tight in bed that I could hardly breathe. But I felt grounded, too, feeling his skin on my skin, his bones pressed up against my bones. No matter what happened today, no matter what I’d seen, this was real: him and me, held together as if one, together forever.
As if hearing my thoughts, Caleb said, “This is why I said the thing about equine flu. This shit is happening all around us all the time. We keep going to work and getting our groceries and whatever, but we never know when it’s going to be us. And I don’t want it to ever be us, but that’s not the world we live in anymore. This is, and when it happens, I want it to be with you. I want to choose when it happens, and who it happens with. I want to always be with you. I don’t ever want to have to say goodbye.”
“You didn’t even want to move in together,” I said, trying to laugh, trying to make those months of fighting a joke, trying to take the conversation away from this thing we’d been avoiding for two days now.
“I was scared. You were pushing me,” he said. “This is different.”
He held me tighter again, arms squeezing until I could hardly breathe. I felt the pain and I tried to feel the love that was behind it, but most of all I just felt cold, a kind much deeper than when I’d been shivering in that disposable towel a few hours ago. He was right, I knew he was right, but I didn’t want him to be right. Nobody had to say goodbye ever again. That was what they said at the press conference when they announced that death was over, that science had won. But every time I closed my eyes, I still saw that mottled brown mass and the viscera running through it. I still heard the screams and that squelching again and again, as if it was the beating of my own heart.
It was inevitable, eventually. They didn’t tell us what virus the mass from Sergeant Chicken was, if they even knew what it was themselves, but probably it wasn’t something as gentle as it sounded like equine flu was. To go to sleep, and wake up as part of something bigger. To always be with the one you cared about, in whatever form that took. That sounded like love, if anything did. I could convince myself of that, anyway, if I repeated it enough times. And there was still a chance that the mass would turn away, go somewhere else—maybe back toward Vegas after all—and this whole conversation could be put on hold. The inevitability nudged a little farther into the future.
“Okay,” I said.
The mass didn’t go to Vegas, didn’t even meander as it headed for town. Streets emptied pretty quickly and the Fuel-N-Go told Caleb not to bother coming in until things picked up. At least, that’s what he told me, but once when he was pulling up a meme to show me, I caught a glimpse of his text conversation with his boss saying he quit. I might have gotten mad if I weren’t so worried. This is love, this is love, this is love, I told myself until the words became meaningless sounds in my head.
At the same time, I’d never seen Caleb happier, and that made it easier for me to believe the mantra was working. His eyes shone brighter than they had the first night we’d said we loved each other. Then, we had lain naked and twisted in our sheets, and each other, on the mattress that passed for his bed in his apartment that was worse than this one. Now, he just looked up from his phone and peered out the windows. I could always tell when he saw a report of good news, meaning news that said the mass was growing closer, because he’d start grinning. He didn’t even roll his eyes when I watched Love By Twilight on my phone. Sometimes he’d hum and take me into some improvised dance I didn’t know the steps to. I’d smile back and try to dance because I loved him so, so, so much and whatever made him happy made me happy, even when it didn’t. Even when my stomach ached all the time. Sergeant Chicken was still in its mandatory 48-hour closure after an outbreak, so I couldn’t distract myself with work. There was only this. This was everything, should be my everything, and I was pretty sure at least half of my stomachache was out of guilt that it wasn’t.
“I think you can see it,” Caleb said to me late that afternoon, craning his neck and rising onto his tiptoes in front of the living room window. He waved me over. “Look there. A little to the right of the McDonald’s sign. Do you see it? Just above that brown building.”
I stood on my tiptoes and followed his finger, trying to see what he saw. When I couldn’t, I tried to imagine a mass like I’d seen online, but I could only see the same old skyline. The harder I tried to imagine what Caleb was seeing, the more my mind tried to drag up the jagged memories of what happened in the restaurant, as if that outbreak had overwritten all of the videos and images I’d seen over the past however many years.
“Isn’t it amazing?” he asked, his voice almost sounding giddy. “And it’s going to be ours.”
“It’s amazing,” I managed.
I squeezed his hand and pretended to be really busy with cleaning, even though there wasn’t any point, was there, if we were just going to be subsumed into a mass. Still, I slid in the quarters and watched our clothes tumbling around and around, trying to get excited about this being the last load I’d have to do. Because I’d be with Caleb forever and ever, with nothing to break us apart.
When I got back to the apartment, Caleb was gone, and so were a lot of our things: the little kitchen table and two chairs, the semi-broken bookshelf and the cracked-spine paperbacks I’d filled it with, the pictures we’d scrounged at thrift stores and hung on the walls over the cracks and holes the last tenants had left there. In the bedroom, our single nightstand was gone, though the dresser was still there, albeit tipped forward on the bed with all its emptied drawers hanging out. The bed had been stripped; our towels in the bathroom were gone; my bottle of lotion on the side of the sink was missing; our roll of toilet paper had even vanished from its perch on the back of the toilet. In the living room, the fraying couch and overstuffed armchair remained, their corner looking deceptively normal against the barrenness of the rest of the place. I walked slowly back and forth through the small apartment, still-warm laundry weighing down the basket in my hands. At one point, I stopped at the kitchen cupboards, wishing I was surprised to find them empty, too.
The door opened.
“Marissa?” Caleb called.
I turned the corner and saw him, hands stuffed in his pockets. A wide grin spread when he saw me.
“Ready?” he asked.
“Where’s our stuff?” I asked.
“We don’t need it anymore.”
“But where is it?”
The grin faded a little and he shrugged. “I gave it away. To people who do need it. We don’t, because it’s time. Right?”
This is love, I told myself, but my mouth betrayed me.
“But what if we don’t go right now? What if we ...” I swallowed. “What if we waited for the next one?”
“But Riss, we agreed. Equine flu. It’s gentle. You promised.” When I didn’t answer right away, his grin vanished behind that stone mask. “So you’re leaving me because I gave away some shit?”
“I’m not leaving you.”
“But you’re not coming with me?”
“I just want more time.”
“‘More time?’” he asked in that mocking way I hated so much, that I always tried so hard to not bring on myself. “You want more time to stay at this shitty-ass apartment that always smells kinda like shitty-ass chicken from your shitty-ass job? You want to abandon me for, for, for an ocean filled up with garbage and air that’s basically poison and reality TV?” He shook his head. He looked like he wanted to spit. “I should have known.”
Tears started trickling down my cheeks, and I hated myself for it. Judging by the way Caleb sneered at me, he did, too.
“And now you’re going to cry,” he said, “because that’s what you always do when you don’t get your way. I asked you for one thing, Marissa, one. One thing to prove you loved me.”
“You know I love you!”
His face softened, the change so drastic it made my knees wobble.
“So prove it, Riss.” He extended his hand. “Come on. It’s time.”
Caleb had given the Mazda away, too, to some guy panhandling on a street corner, so we drove my Honda downtown. In the corner of my vision, I caught glimpses of something large and gray moving between the buildings. If I looked over, I could see it clearly, if I wanted to.
Caleb was in the corner of my vision, too, leaning forward as far as the seatbelt would let him. He hadn’t wanted to wear it at all until I’d reminded him if we got in a wreck he’d miss the mass altogether, in addition to being busted up bad. He hadn’t complained then, even after we got closer to downtown and realized the roads were practically deserted, except for a few stragglers booking it away from downtown like bats out of hell. Except for us and a few others like us, embracing the inevitable.
I glanced over to look at Caleb, then jerked my attention back to the road. He was grinning again, lips wide and teeth white and just crooked enough to be charming, and practically bouncing in his seat. I wondered for a moment if we’d still have teeth, once we were in the mass. Michael’s face appeared in my mind again, the way his features twisted as he vanished inside the mass. I reached over to roll down the window a little, let in some air so I didn’t get sick, then stopped when I realized the air was probably full of the virus. Not that it mattered. We were going to be breathing that air soon enough. We were going to be part of that virus embodied soon enough.
Caleb gave me directions—“Turn there, no, not there, there”—which I tried my best to follow, even though I didn’t think he knew where he was going any better than I did. But as we went the wrong way down a one-way street, I caught another glimpse of the mass and figured out what he was trying to do: racing it from a parallel street to get in front of it so we could wait for its arrival and then ... well, whatever came next. It was moving faster than I would have expected, judging by its size, but not faster than the Honda could go on empty roads with no police patrolling them.
Or, rather, not quite empty roads. What was almost stranger than how few people were out was how many were. Some pedestrians keeping their distance, their phones raised up and turned sideways to film, while others ran toward the mass. Collective Futurists, probably, or just people like us. In the road, though, I found myself swerving around more than a few cars that were stopped haphazardly in the middle of the lane, doors still open. I could almost hear the bing bing bing of the “you left your key in the ignition, idiot” alert coming from inside. If you don’t plan on going back to your car, there’s no need to take your key with you.
The Honda hadn’t even fully stopped alongside the curb before Caleb whipped off his seat belt and tore out the door. On the sidewalk, he impatiently waved for me to follow. I locked the doors out of habit as I stuffed my keys in my pocket, then felt bad and unlocked them. I meant to toss the keys inside so someone else could use the Honda after I was gone, but Caleb called again, so I left them in my pocket and ran to catch up.
Though still blocks away when we reached the corner, the thing towered above us, reaching at least halfway up the office buildings flanking on either side of the street. We weren’t a big city, so the buildings weren’t exactly skyscrapers, but the sight was still enough for me to gape. It was grayer than the one at work, just like the pictures and vids had showed, but in real life I could also see faint ribbons of viscera cutting through it. Plenty of lumps, but none that looked like body parts. No faces. Just a mass moving forward, dauntless. At the intersection a block down, it passed through the stoplight, the glowing red of the light vanishing inside it only to reappear on the other side, apparently unharmed.
Caleb gripped my hand and squeezed until I thought it would break. But broken bones probably didn’t matter in a mass any more than faces did.
“Look,” Caleb said, pointing.
I looked, and saw an old couple, hair white and wispy, helping each other down the curb and onto the street. One man used a walker; the other, a cane. Their hands were clasped tight, and the man with the cane leaned over and put a fat kiss on the other’s cheek before both were swept into the mass, their yells short and startled, and then they were silent, and my ears filled with the squelching of the mass. I saw one of their faces and someone’s hand twisting and contorting before they disappeared inside of it, just like the people in the restaurant. Beside the mass, a cane clattered to the ground.
“That’s going to be us,” Caleb said, pulling me forward. Off of the sidewalk. Toward the mass. “You and me, Marissa, forever, just like them.”
“Just like them,” I repeated. This is love, this is love, this is love, this is—
But my feet were rebelling, becoming leaden and slow, and I stumbled on the curb. My hand joined the coup next, wrenching itself away from Caleb’s so fiercely his fingernails left long, stinging cuts behind.
“Marissa? Marissa!”
Now my feet decided they were light as wings and tore me back down the sidewalk toward the Honda, away from the mass, away from the only person I’d ever loved, away from the only person who really loved me. My vision blurred from tears. Stop, I wanted to tell myself, except for maybe I didn’t want to stop at all.
“Marissa!” he called again, pleading, furious, desperate. I turned around. He was still close enough that he could run for me, that I could run for him, but he didn’t move, just stood there even as I turned to run again. “Riss—”
I looked in time to see Caleb swept into the mass. His eyes met mine and for a moment my stomach was filled with butterflies like we were all the way back at that New Year’s party, him making biting comments about the charcuterie and me criticizing seven-layer-dip etiquette, just a pretense for getting close to that brooding boy in the corner.
We were together in a dim movie theater.
We were twisted in sheets, his steady, slumbering breaths on my bare chest.
We were a hundred places, a thousand moments all jumbled together, all long ago from the empty city streets and the mass of flesh and disease that advanced down them.
My hand raised in a silent goodbye among my sobs. Then his face twisted in the roiling flesh—just like going to sleep, I hoped, I didn’t believe—and the mass kept moving as if nothing had happened.
