Page 76 of The End of the World As We Know It

“You ever see the first one?” asked Derek.

“There’s a first one?” asked Bill.

“Oh, tonight’s gonna befun.”

PREY INSTINCT

Hailey Piper

The killing comes easier when you see what people really are. What threats they can become.

Since Helena. After her, the rest haven’t mattered, rare as they are. Humans and bullets have that in common. Rare and deadly.

But only humans can pretend they’re harmless, like the gaunt-faced woman dropping to the sand in her loose jeans and once-white tank top. It’s a steady, unpanicked shot through her heart. She should be dead instantly, at least from the outside. What abyss she’s experiencing within is anyone’s guess.

“Should’ve stayed away,” Silvia whispers, the wind brushing auburn locks into her scrutinizing eyes. “I warned you.”

Crimson stains the sand, but Silvia’s pale hands look clear of blood. The woman never touched her. Not the deadly captain, only another of his crew. If she’d left with everyone else, she could’ve found a softer way to die.

Silvia should’ve left, too, rather than hiding in that forgotten beach house these past two weeks. On the third night, she watched camo-clad soldiers dump bodies off the northern rocks, into the outgoingtide. One or two might have sounded like a flat palm smacking the waves. A spill of hundreds sounded like violent rain.

Gone now. The beach has been quiet, at least until this dead woman’s appearance, and her carelessness is just the beginning of Silvia’s troubles today. She watches another one mounting offshore, the kind she can’t gun down.

There’s no more weather service to predict storms, no definitive channel to explain if that sharp wind is a summer squall or a monstrous hurricane.

But Silvia knows a predator when she sees one. The dimming sky gives a tiger’s throaty roar, and from the sooty horizon climbs a black and bulging tower of cloud, with lightning forking ivy-like up its outer walls.

A new vessel for Captain Trips. Eager to learn how Silvia tastes.

None of it seemed real when Helena was alive. Silvia was already struggling to keep her goony act booked for children’s birthday parties—too many kids shrank in terror at clowns lately, her magic act was rusty, and she was aging out of playing a careful-of-copyright Barbie knockoff. When work dribbled away entirely, she’d taken it as a sign to seek a new career.

Not a sign of the world’s end. The reports and subsequent denial on TV at first seemed less intense than hers and Helena’s time with the hospice boys, keeping them entertained and accompanied, wondering if theIin AIDS should stand forInevitable. Even if sometimes inevitability wasn’t the case.

“Lost in another puzzle?” Helena asked, striding inside the house. She could tell the difference between Silvia watching TV and Silvia daydreaming at the screen.

Her stare turned to Helena, soaking in her tall figure and tan face and endless sprawl of golden curls as if she stood on an entirely different planet from the news.

“Thinking about names,” Silvia said. “For diseases. Like AIDS. And Captain Trips.”

“Oh?” Helena dropped her keys in the door-side bowl.

Silvia tucked her throat muscles down and deepened her voice into a Sam the Eagle impression. “A good name. AnAmericanname.”

Helena turned, and the TV’s reflection flickered in her pretty earthen eyes. “We’re going to want jugs for water. And canned food. Nonperishables.”

“It’s that serious?” Silvia asked.

“Bush-league president says what he says, I say what I say.” Helena spoke with such confidence, you could believe she knew the future. You could even believe she knew how to survive it. Silvia had understood since they met in the hospice halls, two hopeful angels lost in grim space, that Helena was the smarter one, the leader. Lucky Silvia to orbit that star—the doctor and the fool.

Helena made sense. Besides, it seemed almost silly to believe that tiny DNA fragments could crush the power of human civilization. Sensible under a microscope, even in a movie, but hard to believe when looking out the window and seeing no such doom in the air. As invisible as a deity, and almost as deniable.

At least until the coughing began. Until the virus cored Silvia’s world.

Partway up the narrow, tree-guarded road, Silvia accepts that she can’t outrun the storm. She clutches a lavender umbrella overhead, rain or shine, since no one’s manufacturing more sunblock anytime soon, and both sun and storm are predators. Or it’s all Captain Trips, sticking out vicious tongues from different mouths.

His storm-tongue licks at Silvia’s heels. She’s been walking for hours, and the patchy paved road has curled too far from the beach houses to turn back, zigzagging between coastal brush and a thicket of birch trees. This has always been a remote route, tucked away fromthe nearby town. Vacationers used to pretend the coast hid them from the world, and maybe it did once.

But that didn’t save them.