Tomorrow's Money (We All Go to Hell)

Prologue

"Wake up."

The voice was hushed, spit out like an urgent flame desperate to alert her before it was extinguished. Her eyes flickered open before any of her other senses, so what she saw was the first thing she realized as she awoke.

Her bedroom door was on fire. A violent fire, raging, neon and orange and licking away with terrifying speed. She could feel its energy scorching her face all the way from across the room, in her quiet, undistrubed bed.

For a moment she sat and stared.

When she noticed the flames lapping at the ceiling, she was suddenly awake.

Black jacket, boots, the flashlight from under her bed- all were on her in a second. The fire stormed across the walls, screamed at her, and get out, get out, wake up and get out. In a trance, a calm, she leaned over her desk and forced open the window. She pulled herself up to a crouch, the cool night air too foreign for comfort.

Get out now.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the fire leap from her bed to the desk drawers.

She jumped.

She landed on her feet with a deafening thud, but she didn't stop. Run run run, get out now, GET OUT. Her feet pounded the grass. A low whining noise called her attention back to her house; she turned just in time to see the roof collapse over everything she knew.

It wasn't until that moment that she noticed what was happening.

That she saw that her house was not just on fire, it was part of an epidemic.

She slowly turned in a complete circle, desperate for a single bit of proof to wake herself up from whatever nightmare this was, but she wasn't comforted.

Every house she could see, every tree, every flowerbed, everything she had grown up knowing and trusting was entirely engulfed in flames.

Get out.

She didn't stop to think. The voice was still pushing her, commanding her forward. And forward she went. Past Mr. Johnson's burning mailbox, past Liza Hilly's new Audi, covered in a tinted blaze, past the scorched front yard of the new neighbours she hadn't known. Somewhere behind her there was crying; her mind flashed to the Ricton's new daughter. Then to her own sister. Then to what she had just left behind.

Keep running.

Her mind suddenly a numb labyrinth, surrounded in curious flames, she pressed on in her subconscious. She passed the playground she and her older brother had spent years playing on; it was where she had first learned to ride a bike, where her brother had first parallel parked. Now it was only a field of burning metal, smoke reaching up to the night sky as if begging for help. But she kept running. She kept running until her feet ached, until her head spun, until she was sure the smoke surrounding her couldn't get thicker. But then-

her feet hit something soft, and the smoke blew past her and suddenly disappeared, and the voice allowed her to see.

She was standing on the edge of the Mojave Desert, the very edge of the city. In front of her, the sand stretched into darkness, nothingness, pure emptiness.

She turned.

A mass of still-smoldering city stared back at her, laughing sharply and breathing hot, angry air.

Gone.

Everything...

Gone.

She didn't think as she dropped to the sand beneath her

and let the first tear fall.