To read a text-only version of this chapter, click here.
Zinn checked her phone for the hundredth time that morning.
Still nothing.
She sighed. She’d been seeing Kiana for six weeks now, and she’d thought it was going well! They’d been spending time together almost every weekend—going out to movies and meals and one memorable Drag Queen Brunch, and a few times just staying in, cooking together at one of their places, Netflix-and-chilling in both the literal and sexy sense. She’d even gotten off work early yesterday to spend time with Kiana on her birthday—though her subway ride had ended in disaster and she never actually made it there, they’d agreed to a makeup date later. Kiana had seemed excited to see her.
Then, maybe it was the near-death experience talking, but Zinn fully lost her mind.
She texted:
Since then, she hadn’t gotten a reply. And not just that—she got left on read!
After no answer for twenty minutes, Zinn had texted a long apology for moving too fast, explaining that the accident had just reminded her that life was short, and that she really liked Kiana and hoped she liked her too, and that nothing had to change between them, she’d just wanted to express how she felt.
Still nothing. Left on read.
Right before she went to sleep, she texted a simple:
That one, Kiana hadn’t even looked at.
She’d had to stop herself from texting again before work. Instead, she’d had a ten-minute voice call with her sister Jasmine that was mostly Zinn ranting about how all her relationships were disasters and how, as the common factor of all of them, that was clearly her own fault—she was too old to be this bad at relationships, and it would never work out for her because the moment things were going well, she did something idiotic and sabotaged herself, and she always knew someone as gorgeous and smart as Kiana wouldn’t want to date someone as ugly and weird as her. Jaz made soothing noises at the right intervals, then cut her off to take the twins to school. She said they’d talk later, over drinks, once Zinn had chilled out a little.
She’d managed not to think about it while she was going through the hand-sorted mail for her route, quickly tossing the stuff the auto-sorting machines had rejected into the proper cubbyholes, one for each stop. She hadn’t thought about it while she was binding up the stacks for each loop with rubber bands, or while she was loading trays of mail and sharpie-numbered packages into her truck. She hadn’t even thought about it during the first loop of the day, hitting all the medical offices and small businesses in a three-story office building, saying hello to the usual receptionists and office workers, complimenting Brenda’s new manicure but keeping her feet moving and escaping before the woman could talk her ear off.
She did think about it during her second loop, the one through the little strip mall with apartments above it. That was because, just as she was handing off a pile of bills and junk mail to Carlos at the liquor store, her phone began to buzz in her pocket—over and over to signal a voice call, not a text.
This was only the first stop this loop—her phone was in her left pants pocket, but her left arm was occupied by a huge bundle of mail. She gave Carlos a nod, then rushed outside and spent a few seconds turning around in an awkward dance as she tried to fish her phone out of her left pocket with her right hand—she finally got it, but by then, the phone had stopped buzzing.
She looked at the missed call notification—it was an unknown number. It said they’d left a message, but when she checked it, the recording was just the sound of someone hanging up.
Just junk.
Dammit.
She continued her route, hit the two office buildings across the street and then the three buildings of the scruffy apartment complex behind it, two bins of mail for each and a random assortment of packages to leave in doorways and hope they didn’t get stolen.
As she was finishing up, her phone buzzed again—just once, for a text.
She dropped the stack of fliers she was holding back into the bin and grabbed her phone.
It wasn’t from Kiana; it was another unfamiliar number. Just in case, she mashed the notification on her screen to check the full message.
Huh. That had to be from one of the people she gave her phone number to yesterday, but the message was pretty vague. After the crash and…whatever the hell had happened after, she’d found some scrap paper in her bag and handed out her number to anyone who’d take it, just as a precaution. They’d all been herded out of the subway by metro workers and shepherded to the hospital, accounts taken by cops and injuries checked by doctors. But you couldn’t trust the powers-that-be to have their best interests at heart if the accident had been caused by, say, neglected maintenance in the subway tunnels, or a terrorist who slipped through police surveillance. She’d wanted to make sure they could talk to each other if they had to.
She typed back a quick message.
Maybe somebody involved in the accident had a warrant out, so now the cops were sniffing around, hoping for an easy arrest. Or maybe the accident was caused by negligence and whoever was responsible was trying to get the victims on their side. Or, hell, maybe some scummy personal injury lawyers had gotten involved. The texter could be talking about a lot of things.
There was one thing Zinn knew for sure, though: they certainly weren’t talking about any spooky pollution-cloud-looking supernatural creatures.
Under stress, the human brain was incredibly unreliable. She’d seen a deadly thing that looked like a sentient smog cloud, a UFC-worthy brawl, a disappearing man…a bunch of stuff that didn’t make sense. But she’d also hit her head and gotten pretty shaken up. No concussion, but the combo of adrenaline, shock, and the dim emergency lights could’ve still made her see things that weren’t there.
She probably shouldn’t be working today, honestly, but she’d bullied her supervisor into letting her by shoving the clean bill of health from the doctor into his hands and getting started before he could stop her. Usually she’d love a day off, but not now, when her family and friends were busy and she’d be stuck sitting alone in her apartment, nothing to do but think too much and wait for a text that refused to come.
She finished with the last apartment building and brought the empty bins out to the truck. She tossed them in the back and drove to the next part of her route—two quick stops at either end of a plaza that held a supermarket, two banks, a Dunkin Donuts, and a hardware store.
While she was walking up to the second bank, she realized she hadn’t thought about Kiana in a while—she internally congratulated herself on her restraint. But, of course, that sent her spiraling again. She pulled out her phone, which she’d intelligently put in her right-hand pocket this time.
Her last message still hadn’t even been read. At this point, it had to be intentional.
While she was still holding her phone, it rang again.
Same unknown number as before. She answered it.
“Hello?”
No reply.
“Anyone there? You okay?”
Still no answer, but on the other end of the line she thought she could just make out a young-sounding voice saying something like “Daddy, look, I’m flying!”
Then, they hung up.
Maybe her sister’s twins and their friends were prank calling her? They seemed a little old for that kind of thing, but 13-year-olds could always surprise you—mature as adults one minute, acting like toddlers the next.
Well, a few dumb prank calls on her route were no big deal, and she valued her status as Cool Aunt too much to tell their mom. She put the phone away, secretly hoping they’d be bored of their game now. Every time her phone went off, it sent her stomach into her throat.
Her phone buzzed again, and she just barely avoided dropping mail all over the sidewalk. She steeled herself with a deep breath and looked at the screen.
It wasn’t Kiana—it was a quick series of texts from the same number that had asked her if anything strange had happened. But the texter’s style was totally different this time:
O…kay, that was unnecessary. Zinn put her phone away and got back to work, wondering what the hell that was all about.
She was pretty much done with the commercial part of her route; the rest of her day was mostly spent weaving through residential streets, duplexes and triplexes squashed next to each other with the occasional squat concrete apartment building or convenience store breaking up the monotony.
This part of the city was poor and run-down, and a lot of the buildings were empty. Even many of the occupied places were the kind of rentals where the landlord does the bare minimum upkeep they can get away with, all peeling paint and sagging porches. She was pretty sure that a few of the door slots she shoved bills through had massive piles of old, dusty mail behind them, uncollected and abandoned. But there were still pockets of life, mostly older people who’d lived there for decades or college students who thought the commute was a good trade-off for cheap rent and an escape from dorm living. And there were still a couple busy blocks where people were raising families, bikes and toys scattered all over their small front yards, one slightly bigger corner lot that seemed to have a perpetual barbecue going all summer.
She smiled wryly to herself. Dilapidated or not, dying or not, this was Dogwood, her route, her beat, her home. Best neighborhood in the city, and she’d fight anyone who claimed otherwise, no matter what any stupid online “best and worst neighborhoods in Grisby” listicles claimed, no matter how many newspaper articles went on about the mass exodus to greener pastures, the lack of amenities, the rise in petty crime. They couldn’t see past the scruffy exterior, didn’t know the history, the magic these rows of houses hid.
She knew a lot of it was subjective. Not everyone could know that this was the street she and Lashonda always rode their bikes down to get slushies on summer afternoons. They didn’t recognize this empty lot as the place where local teenagers passed around warm, stolen beers and figured out what they wanted from life. They didn’t care that the bench near the playground was the exact spot where her nephew Jamal first reached up and called for “Thim! Thim!” to lift him up. If they didn’t know, maybe they’d just see another grimy, dying place.
But Zinn secretly believed that there was value in a part of the city having a little more room. She didn’t mean population density, but people having control over their space—the spaces they used and claimed as theirs, whether they technically owned them or not. In Dogwood, there was room to build something new or claim something abandoned, to make choices the neighbors wouldn’t approve of, to give special meaning to things that look like nothing to outsiders, to treat rules like suggestions. She’d been downtown a lot lately—that was where Kiana lived—and everything there felt so cramped and perfect and controlled. Maybe Kiana could walk to two different supermarkets and a subway stop in under ten minutes, but if she played music on her balcony for an hour, she’d probably get a call from the front desk telling her to keep it down. In Zinn’s neighborhood, playing loud music all night might lead to a screaming match in the street if people were feeling unreasonable, but nobody was going to call the cops over it or anything. People dealt with their own sh*t and did what they wanted without feeling like they were being watched and judged all the time.
As someone who walked down every street of Dogwood five times a week, she liked to keep track of things and look out for the people on her route, especially elderly people and kids on their own. That included her own family—her parents were getting older, and her twin niblings Jamal and Poppy were often home alone while Jaz was working.
She was climbing a set of creaking steps when her phone started to buzz again—another voice call. She dug for it in her pocket with a sigh, fully prepared for another prank, not really looking as she brought it to her ear.
“Hello,” she said flatly.
“Um…hi,” a faintly familiar voice replied. “Sorry to bother you, but you gave me your phone number yesterday?”
“Oh—hi!” Now that she had the context, she thought she recognized the voice of the woman with the kids and the suitcase. “Are you okay? You never came to the hospital after the accident.”
“Yeah…I had somewhere to be.”
“I’m Zinnia, by the way—well, everybody calls me Zinn.” She shoved mail into the box and made her way down the steps, phone held awkwardly between her ear and shoulder.
“Cherie,” the woman said simply. “Thanks for giving me your number yesterday. That was…a lot.”
“Yeah, I wanted us all to be able to compare notes without anybody interfering. Anyway, did something happen? I got a few texts, but not much real information. Is somebody hassling you?” Zinn started walking to the next house, legs following the familiar route on their own.
“No…nothing like that,” Cherie replied. She sounded deeply uncomfortable for some reason, and she trailed off, leaving behind an awkward silence that Zinn didn’t rush to fill. Cherie found her voice again after a few beats.
“Um…has anything strange happened to you last night or this morning?”
“Huh. That’s exactly what the person who texted me asked. But no, nothing weird besides the accident itself—everything’s been normal on my end.”
“Oh, I wonder… I was thinking that there might’ve been chemicals in the air underground that messed with everyone’s heads. My son, he’s been acting, well…confused since it happened. And…I think I am too?”
“What, like hallucinations?” Zinn asked. She couldn’t help but think back to the stuff she knew wasn’t real—the weird cloud of smoke especially. She hadn’t mentioned it to anyone, since it just seemed too ridiculous to be anything but a vision brought on by a blow to the head. But if other people were seeing things, a chemical or drug could explain it.
“No… Well, maybe,” Cherie said, still hesitating. After another moment of silence, she gave up on subtlety and blurted, “My son says he can talk to the cat, and I think I believe him.”
Silence. Zinn’s unstoppable mail carrier walk ground to a halt.
“Okay…”
“My son doesn’t lie about things like this,” Cherie said, the words rushing out, “so at the very least, I think he believes it’s true. And…okay, I know this is insane, but he got the cat to do tricks? And he didn’t seem to give any commands, just told me what she was going to do, and then she did it? She’s a totally normal house cat, and there’s no way he could’ve been training her somehow without me knowing about it. And he kept…laughing, like someone was telling him jokes I couldn’t hear. I haven’t heard him laugh like that since…”
She trailed off, something even more uncomfortable in that silence. Zinn took pity and didn’t make her finish the thought.
“Huh, that does sound like something messed with your heads. If he’s high, that could make him laugh too much. But you’re nearly twenty-four hours out from the accident, so whatever it is should be leaving your systems soon. Or, y’know, stress can cause a ton of strange reactions, and maybe this is a coping mechanism—for both of you. I think your next step is to go to the doctor. Ideally a doctor you trust, not someone at the hospital from yesterday.”
“Okay…yeah,” she replied, seeming to wilt a little. “You’re probably right. There have been, well, some other stresses in our lives lately, and maybe this accident just pushed us over the edge. It’s probably a medical issue. Right. Thank you.”
“No problem,” Zinn replied, voice going gentle. “Listen, keep in touch, yeah? Give me an update on how you’re doing.”
“All right,” Cherie replied, seeming a little surprised. “I should go. Thanks for hearing me out.”
“Take care,” Zinn replied and ended the call.
She started walking again, her feet traveling the familiar route on their own. Cherie’s story about a talking cat didn’t really match up with anything Zinn had experienced, which made the idea that they were drugged more likely—a bunch of drugged people would all have their own personalized delusions. A shiver ran up her spine as she thought about some unknown chemical entering her bloodstream against her will, making her see things that weren’t there and doing who-knows-what damage to her body and mind.
We need to figure out what it is, Zinn resolved. We can’t handle the fallout if we don’t even know what we’re dealing with.
She was about to shove her phone back in her pocket when she noticed something—she’d received some texts while she was talking to Cherie.
Holy sh*t…he said “smoke monster.”
He saw the smoke monster too!
Zinn’s mind raced. Cherie’s drugging theory didn’t hold up if Zinn and someone else had seen the same thing. If she and the other passengers were having shared delusions, that meant something worse—and she still didn’t know exactly what. What could cause a shared delusion? She shoved the bundle of mail she was holding into her mailbag and started typing on her phone with both hands:
But nothing she found made sense. Everything she skimmed through about shared delusions was about tight-knit, repressive communities coming to believe the same thing as a powerful leader figure. She’d only just learned this Alvin guy’s name. And drugs all worked the way she thought, with each person’s trip specific to them; she couldn’t imagine how a shared trip would even work.
If this was a prank, it was incredibly elaborate, and she really didn’t see the point. They should’ve all jumped out to laugh at her by now, right? The prank video should’ve showed up online? She typed “Grisby subway prank” into Google just in case, but the only relevant result was some harmless dance thing from five months ago.
If nothing else made sense, the unthinkable started to seem like the only option: that there were real, actual monsters living in the Grisby subway system.
Zinn shook her head. These disjointed calls and texts were getting stupid; what she needed was actual, solid information. If they all got together, they could test things—see if Alvin’s grandmother’s health was really better, if Cherie’s kid had taught his cat tricks, or if they all had bloodshot eyes and spaced-out expressions.
Or maybe they didn’t exist at all, and everything was in her head. She didn’t feel that far gone, but she wouldn’t know, would she? She had to believe she wasn’t in a coma or something, living out a life that only existed in her own mind.
But assuming the people she’d been talking to weren’t all part of her own personal hallucination, she wanted to look each of them in the eye to see if they seemed legit. She considered herself a pretty good judge of character, but it was hard to tell what they were really thinking and feeling in a few awkward sentences over the phone, or in a handful of what really seemed like prank texts. If this Alvin guy was messing with her for some reason, she was going to be pissed.
She opened her phone and quickly saved all the numbers from people who’d contacted her: Cherie, Alvin, “2 texters 1 asshole.” She paused for a moment, then added the spam call from earlier. Maybe the silent caller was someone else from the train going through their own weird sh*t. She created a group text and added them all.
Zinn got back to her mail truck and melted into the seat. She’d made it to lunchtime, thank God. Now she could drive back to the plaza near the Dunkin, use their bathroom, get a massive coffee, and maybe buy a bacon-egg-and-cheese or something to fuel her for the rest of this absolutely cursed day.
The phone, still in her hand, buzzed.
Zinn dropped her phone. It bounced on the pavement with a screen-shattering crunch.
