This Is How You Die: Stories of the Inscrutable, Infallible, Inescapable Machine of Death

by Неизвестный

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” Marka said, reflecting that even if it was a load of BS, at least he was selling it well, and she wasn’t crying anymore. “If that’s true, then no matter how many parties you did, you’d never be able to keep up with the demand.”

  “Nah, you’re right. I bet in some third world sweatshop, there’s rooms and rooms full of girls typing in things like CANCER and HEART ATTACK and CAR CRASH over and over and over again.”

  “But why? What do they get out of it?”

  “Same as me. It’s a living.”

  “Not the girls. The company. Who pays them?”

  “Now, there you’ve hit the nail on the head. The Great Enigma of Our Time.” He wiggled his fingers as he intoned the words to give them an aura of mystery. “Figure that out, and you’ll know a lot more about the workings of the cosmos. Does the company have some way of getting cash from the other dimension? Resources from a parallel universe? Information of some kind?” He lowered his voice and leaned over to whisper in her ear. “Personally, I think it’s an alien plot to collect DNA from all those suckers over there, one drop of blood at a time. And the aliens are giving the company bigwigs advanced technology, which they’ll use to take over the world!” By the end of the sentence, he was shouting with his arms spread wide to show the whole world.

  Marka laughed. “Do you really believe that?”

  “I dunno.” He shrugged. “Maybe the aliens are benevolent, collecting the DNA so that they can engineer cures for all the diseases and make the Death Machines obsolete.” He looked at his watch. “Well, my break time’s over. Why don’t you come back inside? Enjoy the party. Maybe even feed the machine a line or two of poetry. Somebody’s gotta write all those predictions, after all.”

  * * *

  Story by Karen Stay Ahlstrom

  Illustration by Alexandra Douglass

  MONSTERS FROM THE DEEP

  BECCA’S FIRST CLUE THAT SOMETHING was off was that the buttons were spongy. They looked like regular hard plastic vending machine buttons, and the printing on the letters and numbers was sharp, but they were weirdly mushy to the touch. Pressing B4 to get a Snickers bar had felt like pressing two overripe grapes about to burst with pulp.

  Still, the silver coil inside the machine rotated. Her candy bar dropped into the tray. When she touched the clear plastic flap, she made an involuntary gasping motion that sent a spasm up her arms and pulled her two steps backward. The flap was like raw chicken skin, clammy and rubbery.

  Becca stared at the candy machine, her Snickers bar three feet away but separated from her by an impenetrable barrier of wrongness.

  The door to the pilots’ lounge opened. Footsteps mushed the carpet. The aroma of coffee reached Becca’s nose as Fox stepped up next to her.

  He stared at the vending machine with her. The only sound was the low drone of the television across the room. Some documentary on whales.

  “What are we looking at,” Fox finally whispered.

  “I don’t know,” she whispered back.

  “Then why are we whispering,” he whispered.

  “Because it’s weird,” she whispered.

  “Did it take your money?” he whispered, slightly louder, as if he was going to try to ramp them back up to normal speaking volume in tiny increments.

  “Yes,” she said. “And it dropped a Snickers bar.”

  Fox leaned forward and saw the Snickers bar, sitting perfectly calmly in the tray at the bottom of the machine.

  “Do you need help getting it?” he whispered.

  “Yes please,” she said, and took a step back.

  Fox looked at Becca for the first time. She was serious. She didn’t look at him, her eyes still fixed on the plastic flap that had felt like chicken skin. It didn’t… look strange.

  Fox turned, found a counter to set his coffee on, and set his cap next to it. He bent down and reached through the flap—which moved with a satisfying thunk the way plastic flaps are supposed to—and retrieved the Snickers bar. The flap bounced shut with a kachung that rang through the room.

  Fox handed Becca the Snickers bar and patted her on the shoulder. “Let me know if you need anything else,” he whispered, retrieving his coffee and cap. Without another word, he disappeared through the door to the flight-planning room.

  The Snickers sat cool and shiny in Becca’s hand, its plastic wrapper feeling just as it should. She grabbed a corner to pull it open, and it tore—too thickly, perhaps? It seemed more like cloth than a candy wrapper. Were there fibers hanging loose where the wrapper parted? Becca mustered the courage to look closer. No, there weren’t. It looked just like a candy wrapper. The chocolate looked fine. It smelled all right.

  Becca took a nibble. It tasted basically like a Snickers. A little chalky maybe, but identifiably a Snickers.

  “Get ahold of yourself, Rebecca Ann,” she told herself, taking a deep breath and heading for the flight-planning room. One step before the doorknob she stopped. Her cap was back on the counter. She turned back, grabbed the cap, and caught another glimpse of the vending machine in her peripheral vision.

  Did it—did it look the same as it just had? Was that a Kit Kat in there? Why hadn’t she hadn’t seen that before? She’d have rather had a Kit Kat.

  She shook her head, turned, and went into the planning room, taking a big bite of the Snickers. She really needed to get more sleep. Her mind was playing tricks on her. As soon as they finished this flight, she’d tell Fox she wanted to—

  She stopped chewing. There was a piece of paper in her mouth.

  Carefully, she fished for it. Like a ticker-tape machine, she drew the narrow paper between her lips.

  Stained with chocolate and saliva, it was her death prediction: BREAST CANCER. It had been inside the Snickers bar.

  Fox looked over at Becca right as she started screaming.

  The conference table was covered in shards of candy.

  First, Fox had wanted to call the vending machine company, but the number on the front was scratched and illegible. He’d asked the receptionists, but none of them knew anything about it. He’d even threatened to break into the damn thing, but the Plexiglas proved too strong. So finally, he’d called up Trish (the poor girl hadn’t been due back at the airport for another hour) and sent her to a bank to get singles. Then she and Fox spent thirty minutes buying every single thing in the machine.

  There had been no more Snickers in it—but no empty coils, either. Yet Becca swore she hadn’t bought the last one.

  Now Trish and Fox were using plastic butter knives to dissect every candy bar and pack of gum, looking for anything strange. The only thing out of the ordinary was that some of the items seemed to be Canadian versions, with labels in both English and French. Fox insisted on cataloging everything anyway, flipping his kneeboard notebook to the back and filling pages with his tiny handwriting. Becca hid in the planning room the entire time.

  It was an hour before Fox knocked gently on the door, entering without waiting to be acknowledged. He held the notebook in his hand and studied it rather than looking at her. She was balanced on a spinny chair, knees drawn up to her chin, just staring through the window at the runway outside.

  “We didn’t find anything else,” he finally said.

  Becca’s voice was a croak. “Do you remember last time we were here? It was last month. I remember because Tower gave us the ILS to three-five, which was weird. There was some kind of storm and the wind was all backward. Plus it was raining, and it was bumpy as hell.” She looked around the room without resting her eyes on anything in particular. “Then we came in here, and the first thing we saw was a yellow box. I thought it was ironic—worst landing of my career and then we come in to find a death predictor.”

  “I remember,” he said.

  “Why would there be a death predictor in a pilots’ lounge? That’s the last place you want one. I made a joke to the receptionist. Same girl that’s out there now,” Becca said. “She didn’t remember it being ins
talled. Now there’s a candy machine and she doesn’t remember it being installed. She’s never seen anybody come to fill it. She didn’t even know it was in here.”

  “I’ve never seen a candy machine be installed,” said Fox. “I figured you just planted some Skittles and they grew.”

  “You should be all over this,” she said, looking up at him for the first time. “Creepy Snickers bar is right up your alley. Latest wrinkle in the global conspiracy.”

  “I promise you, I am incredibly intrigued.”

  Becca buried her forehead in her knees. “I’m like the death-prediction Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” said her muffled voice. “Willy Wonka wants me to come visit so he can expose my boobs to plutonium.”

  Fox checked his watch, then looked back out into the lounge room. “I’m gonna help Trish clean up the evidence so we can start preflight. Want me to save you any?”

  “Mash it up and form it into a crab,” came the voice from Becca’s knees. “Let me know when it’s ready so I can come rub my chest in it and die.”

  Half an hour later they were high above the ocean, Boss-Man asleep back in the cabin with three or four martinis in him, giving Fox and Becca nothing to do but stare at the featureless blue and talk. The Citation was on autopilot, like a train riding a ruler-straight rail for two thousand miles, and Fox had his laptop open. Long flights were his office hours.

  Fox was always analyzing, categorizing, and tracking trends in death predictions. Of course, it was the spectacular and gory predictions that captured headlines and the public’s imagination—a blog post about an old lady who’d drawn ICE PICK IN EYE got more clicks than a dozen somber pieces on LUPUS—but Fox, with nothing to do on these hauls but pore over statistics and think, believed there was more to it. In conversations high above continents and oceans, in pilots’ lounges and hotel bars around the world, he had convinced Becca that gory and dramatic death predictions had actually risen in the past eleven years.

  It was tough to track, of course, because there was no unified database of predictions; medical privacy laws saw to that. Predictions were often available posthumously when death certificates were filed (Fox had a paid subscription to a nationwide public-records database), but the records for the more dramatic deaths were often sealed as part of court proceedings, as it was rare for someone to die of SHOTGUN TO BUTTOCKS without there being a prosecution somewhere along the line. And while teens sometimes enjoyed crowing about their fresh-drawn AIR-TO-AIR MISSILE or MONSTERS FROM THE DEEP on Facebook, very few made IMPALED BY BRATWURST public.

  Yet there were, Fox insisted, just as many of the latter as the former—that is to say, too many. More than PNEUMONIA or DIABETES or SEPSIS anymore.

  Before the yellow boxes appeared, the most common cause of death (according to CDC records) was heart disease, followed closely by cancer, then stroke, then chronic lower respiratory disease. All normal, often age-related deaths that pointed to a general level of nonviolence among the public. Accidental and violent deaths of every type, eleven years ago, made up only twenty percent of all deaths reported.

  Last year, as best as Fox could determine, accidental deaths were up to fifty-one percent. The average life expectancy in the first world was approaching levels not seen since colonial days.

  A waypoint beeped on the GPS. Fox switched his gaze from his laptop screen to the horizon with a weary sigh. Something was clearly wrong. But was the problem with society? Were the predictors’ existence causing people to lash out in more volatile and violent ways?

  Or were the yellow boxes assigning deaths to people deliberately?

  That was impossible, of course—the yellow boxes simply printed out what was going to happen anyway. But in the years he’d been looking at this data, every day it creeped him out a little bit more. The line for violent Class F predictions just kept… trending… upward.

  And most strange of all: the increase in Class Fs didn’t correlate inversely with the age of the subject, as might be expected—it didn’t seem that children were being born into an increasingly violent world.

  The increase in Class F predictions issued was simply linear over time. Controlling for the age of the subject changed nothing. The only factor with any correlation at all was the date the subject was tested.

  It was as if the yellow boxes were growing more and more cruel.

  In the copilot’s seat, Becca stretched. She clicked through a few different views on the GPS, then checked her watch. She unstrapped her seat belt, and Fox knew she was heading back to the galley. He closed the lid on the laptop and touched the control yoke, officially taking command of the airplane.

  But she didn’t stand right away, just kept staring at the big blue deck outside, a hand on her stomach, lost in thought or discomfort or something she didn’t want to share.

  “I think I’m gonna have it framed,” she finally said. “Chocolate stains and all.”

  “Put it in a shadow box,” said Fox.

  “Yeah. Right on my mantel,” she said. “ ‘The Last Snickers Bar I Ever Ate.’ ”

  A bigger story hit the news over the next week or so. Blogs had it first, then TV a few days later.

  The predictors were all gone.

  Everybody just assumed that their local yellow box got carted out of their local pharmacy or office building or Costco for some unknown reason and didn’t give it much thought.

  But it seemed that they were gone. From everywhere.

  “The bubble of the prediction market has finally burst,” someone said on talk radio as Becca drove to the airport. “An economically unsustainable product from the start, the company has simply gone bankrupt.”

  Someone else on the program disagreed. “There’s been no filings. No public records.”

  “Well, of course not! Your business goes under, you want to do it as quietly as possible!”

  A third voice. “Who owns the yellow boxes, anyway? Is it a private company?”

  Dead air. Then everybody talked at once, embarrassed by the silence.

  But nobody knew where they had come from. The yellow boxes had just appeared, silently and subtly, in places where people congregated. Most folks had ignored them, then looked quizzically at them, then perhaps had heard a news story or read an article about them. Slowly, as more and more folks stepped into a yellow box to get their prediction, people overheard the term “yellow box” more and more.

  And then it was just a thing that existed, like a bus stop. You knew what it was because you saw it every day. If you ever wanted it, it was there. You didn’t give it any more thought than that. Surely someone had installed it, just as surely someone had put the sign up for the bus stop. But who cared who that was?

  Fox had looked into it once but hadn’t found anything. Presumably the FDA had been involved, or the CDC, or somebody, because of the blood and the needles and so on. But nobody at those agencies could—or would—answer some random pilot’s silly questions. There were no phone numbers, no manufacturer’s plates on the yellow boxes themselves. The only text at all, on any of them, was a neat placard with directions for use.

  And now, all at once, they were gone. In the places they had been were soda machines, DVD rental kiosks, phone booths, mailboxes. Nobody remembered seeing them being installed, either.

  Their next flight was a week later. They dropped Boss-Man into Burbank and had ten hours to kill before the ride home. A loaner car got them into Glendale and they ate Cuban in the shadow of Griffith Park. It was a restaurant that used to be a gas station. An old-timey jukebox watched everybody from a corner.

  Becca kept her sunglasses on, even inside. The sunlight was giving her a massive headache. Fox flipped to a new page in his notebook as black beans cooled on his rice. Trish was vibrating in her restrained way, clearly eager to say something but reluctant to volunteer or interrupt. Fox began, as always, by listing their unanswered questions.

  “Number one: where did the yellow boxes go?”

  Becca looked at her food bu
t only moved it around on her plate. “We didn’t appreciate their horribly destructive contribution to society. They got all huffy and left humanity in peace to go terrorize some other species. Squirrels everywhere are waking up to tiny yellow boxes in their oak trees.”

  Fox wrote Got huffy and moved to oak trees in his notebook. “Sounds plausible. We can check a park when we finish eating. Does anyone think they might have gotten confiscated by the government?” He wrote Gov’t cover-up.

  “Why?” Becca asked. “What does the government know that we don’t? We know as much about them as anybody. You do, anyway.”

  “Yeah, and it’s freaking me out.” Fox could sense Trish’s vibrating begin to enter a spectrum that threatened to spill all their drinks, so he turned to her. “Trish, what do you think?”

  Trish’s eyes were nervous bugs behind her glasses. She wiped her mouth, fumbled with her purse, and eventually produced some photocopied graphs. “I was thinking about the Class F predictions.”

  Becca would have smiled if she didn’t feel like roadkill. The girl had joined up to be a flight attendant and Fox had turned her into a first-rate crackpot within a year. It was beautiful.

  Trish pointed to a graph showing the rising trend in Class Fs—a diagram they were all well familiar with. The right end of the line was a steep future projection that made all of them a little nauseous. Class Fs were growing, and fast.

  To the graph, Trish had added three new lines, shallower and crossing, and had hand-labeled them F1, F2, and F3.

  “Class F predictions are typically sudden and violent, right?” She flipped a page and read from a list. “LIGHTNING STRIKES AIRCRAFT. SHOCK AND AWE. SHOVEL TO THE NOSE.”

  Nobody responded. They all knew this as well as she did.

  “But if the predictions are growing more violent—which they are—because people themselves are becoming more violent—which we don’t know for sure,” she said, “then LIGHTNING STRIKES AIRCRAFT shouldn’t count in that analysis. Unless Zeus is growing more violent along with the rest of us.”