Little Zombie, Big Warehouse

Violet Lightning, Canned Peaches Part 1/2

The first thing I understood about being dead was that rain didn't feel cold anymore.

It fell on me in sheets, hard enough to sting a living person, and I lay in it with my cheek pressed to cracked asphalt, counting the drops as they hit my eyelashes. Purple light stuttered across the sky. Not lightning-white. Violet, like someone had cracked a glowstick over the whole world and shaken it.

I sat up. Water sluiced off my shoulders. My hand came up to push my hair back and I stopped, because the hand in front of my face was the wrong colour, a soft frozen blue like the inside of a glacier, and there were three pastel pink bandages stuck to my knuckles that I did not remember putting there.

"Okay," I said. My voice came out thin and creaky. "Okay, okay, okay."

That was my thinking word. I used to say it under my breath in checkout lines when the cashier looked at me too long.

I was sitting in the middle of a road that ended, thirty steps ahead, in ocean. Not a beach. Just a road, and then grey churning water swallowing lamp posts, and something enormous and dark moving under the surface that I decided very firmly not to look at. Behind me, houses leaned into each other like drunks. A car had been folded around a tree trunk with the neatness of origami.

And there was a plush rabbit in my lap.

Grey, sodden, one button eye, stuffing bulging out along its back like a small white wound. I did not remember owning it. I hugged it anyway, because my arms wanted to, and something in my chest unclenched half a notch.

Then the hunger arrived.

It wasn't stomach hunger. It came up through the back of my skull, a bright metallic wanting, and my mouth filled with cold saliva and I thought, with perfect clarity and total horror: *brains would be so nice right now.*

"No," I said out loud. "No. Absolutely not. I don't even eat mushrooms."

I'm a picky eater. Catastrophically. I once cried in a restaurant because the rice touched the curry. Whatever had happened to the world, it had clearly not consulted my dietary preferences.

I scrambled up and immediately fell over, because my shoes were four sizes too big, canvas things flapping off my heels like clown boots. My knee hit the road. It didn't hurt. That was worse than hurting. I lay there in a puddle with my rabbit tucked under my chin and made a small noise I would deny making later.

And then a window opened in the air.

Not a real window. A soft green rectangle hovering a hand's width from my nose, glowing through the rain without getting wet, with rounded corners and a little cartoon sprout in the top left. I knew that sprout. I had stared at that sprout for four hundred hours across three years of sitting alone in my apartment, planting digital turnips at three in the morning because turnips never asked me questions.

SPROUTHOLLOW FARM
Welcome back, farmer!
Offline duration: 600,000,000 years.
Storage integrity: 100%.

"Six hundred million," I whispered.