Liminal Space

Rules

It's worse at night. Without the sun on their skin, the crowd looks more like wax figures in an educational model of the city rather than real people. Mothers frozen mid-lecture on street corners, food vendors caught with arms raised, and street performed paralyzed on one foot. Just your stereotypical day in New York City, except every single one has glazed eyes and slack jaws. Even the damn animals-- dogs and cats and birds, all still. It's fucking creepy, is what it is. At least she can convince herself they're still normal when the sun's up.

How long has it been? Three months, give or take? It hit back in September, while Myka was making her way home. She'd been too busy playing sudoku to look up from her phone, but she thought something might've been wrong when a truck came careening off the road and slammed into a tree maybe ten feet in front of her for no apparent reason. And it wasn't just the driver-- her classmates leaving school, the cars at the intersection, the birds in the trees, everyone just seemed to sort of... stop. She'd sprinted back home to find her mother hunched over her book at the dining table, unresponsive, just like everyone else. Even the damn cat was stuck in place on the windowsill.

And that's Rule #1: Everything with a pulse is frozen.

Really, it's embarrassing how attached she's grown to these seven so-called rules. They're nothing more than scribbles on the front page of the journal she started keeping when she left home. But they've helped her find rhyme and reason and meaning from senseless patterns since it all began.

She doesn't even really know what "it" is. No earthly phenomenon can really explain why every living thing on earth save for a terrified teenager would just cease function one day. Maybe there's a supervillain in some skull-shaped mountain somewhere, laughing maniacally about how his freeze ray worked, and she's the only one immune. Maybe the earth stopped spinning and she's the chosen one. Maybe it's all just an elaborate dream, brought on by the questionable cafeteria food, and she's gonna wake up any second now in the nurse's office in a cold sweat. She's given up on trying to explain it. All it really accomplishes is a pounding headache and a pain in her chest.

Back in the city, she slips through the gaps in the crowd like a ghost, wincing when she feels a part of her brush against a part of them. Sometimes she has to reposition an arm or a leg to make her way forward. A shiver runs down her spine each time, but she just blames the crisp wind and pulls the coat around her tighter.

She should probably have a specific goal in mind. Wandering aimlessly through a dead metropolis isn't really the most effective course of action. But what the hell else is she supposed to do? She'd left her home with a very vague plan: find someone else. She spent a week and a half wandering the streets of small-town Caribou, Maine, praying to every god every night that she'd wake up and it'd all be over. And it never happened. But a bigger city means a bigger population means greater chance of someone else being unaffected, right? But Boston hadn't worked out, Providence had been as dead as anywhere else, and now even the Big Apple, most populated city in the country, seemed so damn desolate. "Ghost town" seems like such a hollow descriptor for such a titan of a city. So wander she will. Sooner or later she'll find a new map and a new car and set off for the next city. Maybe she'll drive down to Philadelphia next, and follow through to Baltimore and D.C. Or maybe she'll head west, towards Pittsburgh and Cleveland. Hell, if nothing else, the apocalypse proves to be a wonderful travel guide.

Or she could very well stay where she is. Hold up in some premier penthouse overlooking Manhattan with a stunning view of the city and forget all the people down below. Spend the rest of her days playing video games on a 120-inch TV and hoping the generator didn't fail. Try on all the fancy clothes from the shops down on the street. Do something crazy, like dye her blonde hair bright green or give herself a piercing. Die alone and in luxury, buried up to her chin in lavender bubble bath. But that's just a bit too easy.