This Is How You Die

by Matthew Bennardo

  “I made subclasses for the F predictions we have records for,” Trish went on. “F1 are circumstantial deaths. LIGHTNING STRIKES AIRCRAFT, SLIPS ON PUDDLE OF OWN VOMIT, and so on. F2 are indeterminate, like SHOCK AND AWE. This is still the biggest group by volume. And F3 are—”

  “Deaths caused deliberately,” Fox finished.

  Trish nodded. “This is SHOVEL TO THE NOSE, ICE PICK IN THE EYE, that kind of thing.”

  They looked at the hand-drawn lines on the graph. F2 stayed pretty level for the most part. The indeterminate deaths didn’t tell them anything interesting.

  F1 had a hump at the beginning, and then it dropped off. The circumstantial deaths were slowing down. Nature and clumsiness were fading away as dangers.

  F3 started rather small and quickly climbed at a startling rate.

  “So people are going to start killing more and more people,” said Becca.

  “Something,” said Fox, “is going to start killing more and more people.”

  They were due out of Burbank at ten p.m., so after lunch, they holed up at a hotel to catch a nap. But Becca had a hard time sleeping. She tossed and turned in the overly air-conditioned room, full of fluffy, stifling pillows and drapes that didn’t quite keep out the light. Late-night flights were the worst because the day before was always a shambles. Same-day ins-and-outs were worse yet. But Boss-Man had a business to run, and she was on duty. She counted herself lucky to have the gig.

  She couldn’t get comfortable, with what felt like a knot in her stomach no matter which way she lay. It wasn’t indigestion, it wasn’t bathroom pain, it wasn’t nausea—it was a sharp, piercing weight, like she had a stone in her insides that was too heavy for her guts to keep contained. She stood, and she stretched, and she bent over and crouched and drank water, but nothing seemed to budge it. It had an insistent sort of sideways gravity that didn’t match the world’s. When she lay, it prompted her to roll over. When she stood, it pulled her off balance. When she sat down, it wanted her to tumble onto the floor.

  Finally she pulled her shoes on and lurched, tipping and clutching the doorframe, into the hallway. She didn’t know where she was going, but her room had suddenly become thick, its air a blanket that smothered her. She passed the elevators without looking. She was only barely aware of her feet shuffling past each other with increasing speed and insistence.

  When she opened her sweat-slicked eyes, she found herself pressed against the ice machine. It was warm, in a way an ice machine probably shouldn’t be. She watched her hand reach out and feel its big round button. To the ice machine’s right stood a bright, colorful soda machine.

  None of the sodas were anything Becca had heard of before. All the logos appeared to be in Japanese.

  She pressed the ice machine button, and Skittles came pouring out of its spout with a loud clattering sound.

  Becca turned to look behind her and saw an old woman just coming out of a room with a rolling suitcase, slowly lifting a hand to her mouth as she took in Becca and the ice machine and the Skittles. The old woman’s eyes looked like she was watching a horrible animal give birth.

  For her part, Becca only vaguely comprehended the presence of the other person. Her vision had narrowed to a foggy oval, and the stone in her belly was pressing, hard, against the ice machine.

  Then, slowly at first, but with growing intensity, the Skittles on the ground began to chitter like tiny scarab beetles. They slowly vibrated across the carpet in groups of colors, the yellow ones joining with the legs of the ice machine, merging with the metal in a way that seemed impossible. The red ones turned the other way and disappeared under the soda machine.

  The rest flowed underneath the old woman’s suitcase, like cockroaches fleeing the light. The old woman looked down slowly, not sure exactly what she had just seen.

  The suitcase began to roll toward the old woman’s foot. The Skittles underneath it were lifting it, like ants carrying a branch. The old woman’s hand came off the handle. She took a step back.

  The stone in Becca’s belly was a spike now, pressing and dragging itself into the ice machine. The surface of the ice machine began to bunch in Becca’s hands, becoming soft like raw steak, hot and wet and yielding.

  A tiny wisp of smoke. The suitcase was beginning to smolder. Becca smelled the burning but didn’t care.

  The old woman screamed. Becca’s eyes snapped open to a burst of brilliant white heat like an oven door had been opened. The suitcase was burning like a torch. The old woman’s hair was on fire. She batted at it slowly, like a fat wheezing dog trying to catch a race car. Becca tried to reach out, to help the woman, but the warm wetness of the ice machine held her, kept tugging at her, inviting her, asking her to come inside it. To join it.

  And why not? The human race was feeble, a delicate, gullible species, easy to fool, easy to hurt, easy to kill. She hated the human race with a sudden blazing fury hotter than the burning suitcase. Better to sink into the ice machine. The ice machine? No, just a form. Just a construct. It wasn’t a real ice machine any more than a puppet is a real animal.

  How nice it would be to see the human race destroyed—!

  A door slammed open down the hall. A blur of motion. A pillow began to hit the old woman. The woman crumpled. The smell of smoke was everywhere. Someone was stomping the suitcase. A familiar voice. “Becca! What’s happening?” Pained, desperate. Fox, putting out the suitcase. A beeping near the ceiling. Water pouring down. Cool rain, cool on Becca’s skin.

  His rough hands pulled her away from the ice machine. But the stone in her belly was caught—being ripped away from it was like tearing off a scab. She fell clumsily into Fox’s hands. A black mass clung to the side of the ice machine like a rough, lumpy scar. A tiny shape that might have been a chewed-up shard of peanut was still visible in the mass, before sinking smoothly into the side of the ice machine. Becca’s stomach felt warm, but the sideways weight was gone. She wasn’t heavy anymore. She felt light, like a doll in Fox’s hands.

  Fox! Real, human Fox had saved her! Her hatred for humanity began to fade away like a dream. She had hated humanity so much! But why had she thought that? Had she thought that?

  No—it had been a thought pressed onto her mind. It had come from outside her mind, trying to worm its way in and take root unnoticed.

  More voices. Stairwell doors crashed open. Hotel bellmen and security. Noise and light. The brightness of the sun. She was lifted onto her back. She couldn’t bring her hands up to shield her eyes. She heard a rattling and felt a bump. She let out a little squeal.

  “Becca?” It was Fox. His face filled her vision, became her shade. She managed to pull her eyes open again. “Stay with us. She’s awake!”

  Fox looked off to someone else, someone in white. A paramedic? A young man with dark skin. His expressions were hard to read with the sun right behind his head. But he looked her way. “Hold steady, there. Don’t move around. You’re all right.”

  She managed to look down her body toward her feet. She was being pulled on a gurney down a ramp in front of the hotel. At the curb sat a fire truck and an ambulance, waiting, red lights turning silently.

  “The ice machine,” she tried to say, but her mouth was dry and her tongue felt swollen. Her jaw hurt to move. “It wanted me. It wanted it back.”

  “Just stay quiet,” Fox said. “It’s okay. We’re taking you to the hospital.”

  She rolled her head to the other side and saw Trish, eyes wide with worry behind her glasses. Trish, she said, and heard her voice say “Truhh.”

  Trish’s eyes dropped to Becca’s midsection and she screamed. Becca felt a hot stab in her stomach, right where the Snickers bar had pushed through her skin. Fox and the paramedic looked over. Their eyes went wide. Becca struggled to see what they were looking at.

  A green Skittle ran up Becca’s sternum, up her neck, and perched on the tip of her nose. Becca pulled her hands up and clapped them as fiercely as she could.

  When she opened her hands, the Ski
ttle was smashed, and it was colorful inside, sparkling like it was made of a thousand tiny scales. She suddenly realized that it burned, and she jerked her hands away, shaking them violently, yelping in pain. Fox and the paramedic rushed to steady her.

  The ice machine, the soda machine, the Skittles—they were the same thing, the same stuff. A sickening stuff of bright color and hate. A thing that had called a piece of itself back. The Snickers bar in her stomach. It was that stuff. It had stayed in there. For weeks it had waited and festered and poisoned her.

  The candy machine in the Austin airport lounge that nobody had put in there. The yellow boxes everywhere that nobody had installed. The phone booths and ATMs and jukeboxes that had replaced them.

  “Fox,” she gasped, whipping her hands against him and the paramedic, clutching for anything she could reach, fighting against their strength keeping her from moving. “The predictions. The Class Fs.”

  Fox stilled her right hand with both of his own. They were warm and soft and strong. He bent over to make sure his face filled her vision. “Shhh,” he said. “Tell me later.”

  She turned her head to the side in time to see a newspaper machine on the curb suddenly rear up on four legs and smash a woman walking a dog into a light pole.

  They came, and they watched us, and eventually, they asked for little bits of our blood.

  The newspaper machine became rounder, became slithery, became a snakelike, shimmering form that Becca knew was closer to its real, alien truth.

  They sipped our blood, and they liked it. They developed a taste for it.

  Becca tried to shout, but she couldn’t be heard over the crash of the snake dropping its immense weight onto the roof of a parked sedan. Fox and the paramedic and Trish—everybody but Becca—ducked as pulverized windshield dust began to fall like tiny, spiky hail.

  We asked them how we were going to die, and they must have smiled to themselves as they told us.

  The snake grew pincer-tipped forelimbs to raise the smashed sedan above its head. Around her, Becca was vaguely aware of other shimmering shapes, slithering down from telephone poles or suddenly appearing where before there had been only a mailbox or a bus stop or a hot-dog stand. They were suddenly everywhere.

  Fox was fumbling with the straps on the gurney, struggling to keep it from tipping onto the rumbling, cracking sidewalk. “The airport,” he screamed. “We have to get to the airport!”

  Behind him, the road bulged upward, then cracked open like a pimple bursting. A flood of flashing, iridescent snakes came streaming up from the deep. Like a precision aerobatic formation of malice, they broke in different directions, whipping a fire truck into the front of a coffee shop, coiling around opposite traffic lights and pulling closed an entire intersection as easily as folding a bedsheet.

  Everywhere Becca looked she saw what must have been Class F3s coming true. GLASS THROUGH BODY. CONCRETE FACEPLANT. CATAPULTED INTO SPACE. SNAPPED.

  These things that had so nonchalantly predicted everyone’s death were now making good on their promises.

  She felt an ache in her belly and was suddenly nauseous at the thought of what she had carried around inside her. Had they—had Fox and Trish caused this? The yellow boxes had sat there quietly for years. Had they listened in and realized that they were finally outed? Had her own inopportune craving for candy before one of them had finished… changing caused them to realize, en masse, that the jig was up?

  What, in her life, had really been an alien snake? Was her hair dryer a snake? Her refrigerator? Her airplane?

  How long had they been here?

  Fox finally managed to get the last of the straps holding her apart, and she swung her legs over the side of the gurney. Her body sagged into his hands for the second time today. Every direction she looked was filled with flashing, shining, shimmering, whipping snakes. Fox hugged her tightly to his chest, and it was warm. It was strong. The terror that clutched her was paralyzing, but at least for now, there was this.

  She looked over her shoulder for Trish. The girl was gone. She peeked out behind Fox. The paramedic was gone. She looked up in the sky. The sun was gone.

  “This can’t be—I mean, this isn’t, like, the end,” Fox was whispering to her, cringing on the exposed sidewalk but not knowing where else to go, what else to do, with the snakes rushing and destroying everything. “You’re BREAST CANCER. I’m COLON CANCER. We’re going to—we’ve got to get through this.”

  Two futures flashed into Becca’s mind. One, a handful of seconds long—ending here. With Fox. Cut to black.

  The other stretching into years. Watching everybody die, but surviving. Getting breast cancer in whatever world was left. Maybe devouring, kept in stasis in some horrible Skittle-meat pod, until she wasted away from the inside. Maybe awake the whole time. Maybe wondering for years of agony if skipping lunch en route to Austin had begun the extermination of humanity.

  What must have been fifty of the snakes rose like a brilliant thunderhead high into the air, weaved themselves together into a giant shovel shape, and in one earth-shattering movement, scooped up buildings, trees, vehicles, sewer pipes, and rock in a massive, shaking, debris-scattering mound of growing, heaping terror that crawled like a shadow toward Becca and Fox and the gurney and their lives and everything they had ever known or would know.

  If the snakes are capable of this, Becca found herself thinking before the noise took over her senses, then surely—surely—they must also be capable of lying.

  * * *

  Story by David Malki !

  Illustration by Mike Peterson

  TOXOPLASMOSIS OF THE BRAIN; CANDIDIASIS OF THE ESOPHAGUS; CANDIDIASIS OF THE TRACHEA; CANDIDIASIS OF THE BRONCHI; CANDIDIASIS OF THE LUNGS; KAPOSI’S SARCOMA; PNEUMONIA; TUBERCULOSIS; STAB WOUND IN THE BELLY; AND BUS ACCIDENT

  THE LINE OF PEOPLE FILING out of the buses is as long as ever, and on a dry day like today, people are irritable when they have to wait. Even people like these, who have been poked and prodded and injected and examined a dozen times along the path that brought them to the front gate of an internment camp.

  There are rickety chairs outside, hundreds of them, and the people wait there, until a man with a gun ushers their row into the building. Inside, they sit impatiently, most of them doing their best not to meet one another’s eyes. People don’t talk much, don’t laugh much. There are people here from fifteen different countries—and more countries across the continent are signing up all the time—and not everyone has a common language. Some of the Ivoriens and the South Africans couldn’t talk to one another even if they wanted to. But that’s not what keeps them quiet: it just doesn’t feel right so close to the border between the world and the camp—the place where they will be waiting to die.

  Some of them stare with glazed eyes at the ceiling or at the tattered books left lying around, stories written in languages they don’t understand. Others stare at their hands or their knees, their lips pursed silently. Occasionally, there are whites—or white-looking men, at least—among the many black faces. They especially keep their heads down, keep their eyes trained on the distance.

  I am the last face that some of them will see before the point of no return. I try to smile as they walk up to my desk, one by one, in the order they lined up. A short man with a gun tells them where to go—which desk: Miriam’s or Anthony’s or Kuseka’s or mine. I say, “Go ahead,” in English, because I know they know what comes next, but there are signs on the front of my desk in a dozen languages explaining what to do just in case.

  The signs are unnecessary: they’ve all done this before. Nobody who ends up at my desk has come without sticking a finger into one of these machines at least once, whether at some town center, or when a government truck pulled into their village, or after being picked up by the police for being on the street. Nobody who ends up here has never seen a slip of paper roll out of the machine, pronouncing their doom. There are a million roads into this place—and not one that leads out—and there are these machine
s at every point along the way.

  They already know what the machine will say. They know that the answer never changes; at least it has not done so for them.

  They are sure that they will live—and die—in the camp on the other side of the razor-wire fences, and I’m no different from them: that’s what I expect for them too. So I smile and thank them for their cooperation… or I try.

  I try to make the process as painless as possible. “Next,” I say, and smile as if I were serving them in a shop. As if I were not bidding them farewell, seeing them off on the banks of the river Styx.

  When Christopher and I married, it was a bright Saturday at the end of the harvest season. We married at the cathedral in our hometown, Blantyre, like the proper city people we were—him in a beautiful dark suit and me in a white wedding dress, with a veil that covered my face. I was nineteen, and he was twenty-four and had just finished at the Polytechnic college of the University of Malawi, and because his brother was in the civil service it was a leg up, as they say, for him to get work with the civil service too.

  That was during what would turn out to be the last couple of years of President Hastings Banda’s rule, when all Christopher’s friends were protesting for democracy. “Multiparty rule” was what they called it then; we stayed out of it, mainly because of Christopher’s hopes of working for the government someday. On the day we married, there was a demonstration downtown, and we could hear the tear-gas canisters being shot off not far from the church. We could smell the tear gas even beside the altar, and somehow it made us both smile: perhaps, I thought, our marriage will be lived out in a world different from the one where we fell in love.

  The wedding was modern, but at our feast we ate nshima cakes made from the freshest, finest ground maize, and so many relishes it would have scandalized the queen of England. So many relishes: groundnut and rapeseed and chibwabwa, and mlamba fished fresh from Lake Nyasa, and beef relish made from a calf bought for the occasion by Christopher’s brother, and we had a wonderful banana beer my mother brewed for us. And we sang, and we danced, and I loved Christopher with all my heart.