The Reverse of Everything Read online

  “Yeah.” I sniffled. “They have two weeks left.”

  “Oh man.” She pulled me in tighter, nearly killing me with the boniness of her. “This is such shit. I talked to mine too. They’re upset and talking crazy. Saying weird things like they want me to go and live and have fun. I mean, who’s having fun with a death sentence looming over them?”

  “Plus, we die right near the end, after we lose everyone else,” I offered quietly, focusing too hard on that.

  “Right, so unfair. I mean, I get why God’s pissed. We’ve totally blown it, but like this is so not cool.” She stroked my hair as best she could. I hadn’t had it done in six weeks. I’d meant to go but the week the nineties died and classes were canceled, my salon also canceled. So now it was getting dry, and soon it would lose the sheen of the blowout. Not that it mattered. Who were we doing our hair for?

  Darius had gone to his parents’ place outside the city when the school closed. We’d texted a few times, but honestly, what did you say to someone you barely knew when the world was possibly ending? Hope I see you in the afterlife I don’t know if I believe in? Good luck?

  We all needed luck.

  We needed more than that.

  We were experiencing the worst fate possible.

  A slow extinction where we were forced to watch our loved ones die before us, and before we had time to grieve each dying person, the next set died.

  It was a fate no one could have imagined. Not even Stephen King. Or my mom.

  My family was dying. Rapidly.

  Nana Eileen had died with the nineties. But she had been in and out of consciousness for weeks so it wasn’t a surprise to us. Though it was still sad. She was my last grandma.

  My parents would go next.

  Then my siblings.

  And I would be all alone in the world, no family left. And then I would die.

  That was a sick and twisted fate.

  No.

  The babies.

  My stomach ached at the thought.

  The last of us.

  That was the most disturbing part of this.

  Hands down.

  Youngest go last. If they even made it to their week.

  That little plot twist suggested maybe there was no God after all.

  And if there was, maybe I didn’t want to see the afterlife.

  4

  The Seventies

  Zoey

  “Just look. Everyone is posting them. It’s crazy.”

  “Stop!” I swatted at Owen’s attempts to grab my arm as I leaned forward in the tree house, squinting to get a better view of the man lying facedown on the road. “Over there. Does he look—is he—dead? Did you see him walk over there or was he there already when we came outside? If he’s dead and body collection didn’t come get him, I need to make a call.” Body collection. How easily those words fit into my vocabulary now.

  Owen’s eyes followed mine. “What?”

  “How long has he been there?”

  “Who cares? Did you see this? It’s a mass suicide in Denver. People are getting desperate.” Owen’s words finally made their way into my brain.

  When I understood what he wanted to show me, I turned, giving him a glare. “What is wrong with you?”

  “I don’t know, a lot. Anyway, this isn’t the only one. A bunch of people killed their kids—”

  “Stop. I don’t want to hear another word. That’s disgusting.” He, like some of the other boys in our small town, had a weird fascination with the dead since this started. I’d run into Mitch, one of our friends, at work and he told me all about how they found a bunch of websites with jumpers. The suicide rates were skyrocketing. “You’re as bad as Mitch. This is nasty.”

  “Sorry, jeeze.” He gave me a wounded look. Boys with dark-brown eyes did the wounded look better than other boys, one of the few things I’d noticed in my whole seventeen years.

  The only years I’m ever going to have.

  “I didn’t mean to offend you,” he offered, batting his inky lashes.

  “You didn't offend me. You just need to stop being so creepy with this.” I pointed at the man on the road, desperate for a new subject. “Or turn your creepiness into something useful. Like helping me decide if he’s dead or waiting to die. ‘Cause this is a crappy spot to wait. He has better odds coming inside and having you cook for him than he does waiting there.” I managed a decent dig.

  “My cooking is way better than yours.” He wrinkled his nose, also leaning forward and squinting his eyes. “Alive for sure. Maybe he’s waiting for a car to come.” He sighed. “And for the record, I’m not the only one who’s checking this out. Everyone is posting the shit. Maybe you’re not mature enough to see this with an adult’s point of view.” He gave me that cocky grin, the one that used to melt me. Back when I melted. Before.

  “Firstly, anyone who’s fascinated with other people dying in mass murders, is a psychopath. Think about that. Secondly, there is nothing mature about relishing in someone's sorrow. And thirdly, these people posting pictures are going to regret it when the younger people are posting their dead carcass for everyone to see. That’s if the power is still working. I watched a report that said at this rate we’ll be facing brownouts soon and then the whole grid will go offline because there won’t be enough employees to run things.” I groaned, losing the steam I’d started out with. The apocalypse was depressing me. Life was depressing me. We were glued to the TV, constantly watching the news. It was a hideous way to spend the last weeks of your life.

  A fuzzy feeling ran over my legs, making them twitch.

  I needed something, a distraction, so I pulled a cigarette from the pack I’d stolen from her—Elaine—before she ran off, and lit it. Trying to figure out how to breathe in poison, I puffed the smoke into my mouth. It tasted funny. I didn’t get it, the sensationalistic view of smoking was lost on me. In fact, I could taste my death being expedited by letting it touch my lips. Almost like sucking on death’s cold ashy finger and breathing in his soul. Had I read that line somewhere?

  “You look very badass with that smoke in your mouth,” Owen mocked me and took it from me, pulling a long drag, before blowing perfect smoke rings. He was an expert smoker, an expert everything, but he quit all the time. His father would catch him and that would be the end again for a while. It was never good. Nothing about his father, or smoking, was good.

  “Are you smoking again?” I cocked an eyebrow in disappointment as he continued with the cigarette.

  “Maybe.” He shrugged and then straightened up. “As of yesterday,” he said proudly, “I am doing whatever I want. Last night I told my dad to screw himself, and I actually held up the vacuum for him and said, ‘You can use this if you want.’”

  “You didn't.” I took the smoke and stomped it out. I still hated smoking, even if we were all dying. “What did he say?”

  “He did his talking with his hands, as usual.” He lifted his shirt revealing a massive bruise over his ribs.

  “Oh my God. That’s a bad one.” I gasped, running my fingers along the bruising.

  “You know he’s not big on words other than ‘little shit.’ He manages those two quite well. Doesn't matter. A week and two days and I’m a free man. Guess I should be grateful he had kids so late in life.”

  “Why do you provoke him?”

  Owen was the opposite of me. The threat of violence didn’t shut him up or down.

  “I don't. Not always.” Owen scoffed. “He doesn’t need a reason to hit me.”

  “I guess.” I hated his dad. I wasn’t big on violence, but I could hurt him. Maybe. From a distance. Like a sniper. Maybe.

  “None of it matters now anyway. What’s one more beating? We have what—a month and a half and then we drop dead randomly? There’ll be nothing left after that. There’s only being alive this week and being dead in six. I refuse to care another minute about my dad.”

  “I guess,” I repeated, unable to fathom the casual morbidity of his joy or indifference
or whatever this was. I climbed down from the tree fort, noticing the quake in the tree when he climbed down after me—lumbered was more like it. Owen was not the delicate or slightly feminine kind of guy I’d always assumed gay men were.

  Supposedly, this was why I’d never realized he was gay. I’d never met one before, at least not anyone I knew was gay. I’d only seen the guys on TV, and they weren’t like Owen. He was ‘the quarterback who’d forced me to be his beard for six months’ type. ‘Course I had thought we were in love. My heart broke into a thousand pieces when he told me we weren’t really in love. Not that kind of love anyway.

  I had watched a sad movie and wished I could cry.

  Jude Law told Cameron Diaz he and his kids were the Three Musketeers, and I dug my nails into my arm because I’d tried to kiss Owen and instead of kissing me, he told me he loved me like a sister and explained what a beard was.

  It was why the smell of him made my entire body ache. It was why him snuggling in was sometimes too much. It stung a little even now as I walked down the brown grass and sat next to the man lying on the hot cement.

  He had on jeans and a tee shirt but no shoes. His feet had calluses, same as my grandma. It was weird seeing a man’s feet like that. Not that I’d really noticed many men’s feet before.

  “Sir, are you okay?” I asked softly. I didn’t normally go out of my way to help people, except at work, but this just couldn’t happen in front of my house.

  “Go away.” His voice was muffled from his face pressing down on the street.

  An ant crawled toward him so I flicked it away, trying to save his life, at least until a car came, or it was his week.

  I couldn’t tell how old he was, and it was the people in their seventies going this week.

  They—the elusive they—didn’t know how it happened, only that it did. There was still no understanding. The scientists said the sun was normal. The earth’s position was normal. The environmental recordings were normal. Nothing was different, except the people dying every week, on the same day, at the same time. We in the South knew what this was, at least the other Southerners did. I wasn’t so sure.

  “Are you hoping to die here?” I nudged the man with my foot, disobeying every rule I was ever given about strangers. “Because it won’t work. There are no cars on this road anymore. Not since the people in their eighties died off last week. It was mostly elderly people who lived around me. A street back, behind the house on the other side of the creek, has lots of young families. More traffic. But here, there’s nothing.” He didn't speak so I continued, “There was an old folks’ home up the road. They took out all the rundown houses and built it a few years ago. But it’s empty now. Obviously. When the news told the people in their seventies to go to the churches to pass with their friends and peers, my road emptied completely.”

  “Great.” He sighed into the pavement, annoyed at my intrusion on his wasted efforts in dying.

  “Just because the world is ending, doesn't mean you have to lose hope.” I nudged him again.

  “Yeah. There’s a train about four miles from here that runs twice a day. It’s a military train. They haven’t stopped it,” Owen offered.

  “Owen!”

  The man’s face shifted to the side a bit. He lay there, staring at Owen with one of his dark-blue eyes, perhaps confused. He was literally facedown as though napping on the road but staring at us as if to say we were the weird ones. “You don’t want to try to stop me?”

  “Not my circus, not my monkey.” Owen dropped onto the cement next to me and squished an ant with his shoe.

  “He’s morbid,” I added.

  “I see that.” The man sighed again and pushed himself up to his knees, dusting the remains of the street off his shirt. “Hey, you’re the quarterback from the high school team. Owen Bradford, right?”

  “Yes, sir,” Owen replied.

  I was genuinely surprised the man was so young. I had assumed he’d be old and crazy, but he didn’t appear forty and was really clean, minus the feet. He was nowhere near the age that would be dropping dead across the world in two days.

  “Saw you kids play at the end of your summer camp there. Best game I think I’ve ever seen,” he said and sat for a second before he started to cry.

  I was uncomfortable but Owen clearly wasn’t. He leaned over, pulling the man in with one arm and holding him to his chest, cradling his trembling body. The man shook and cried for several minutes. Then, just as it had begun, it stopped.

  He wiped his eyes as he pulled back and said, “It was a great game. You won and then they announced it was the last one of the season. And now I realize it’s the last game of football ever, unless the medical crisis gets solved.” He sniffled. “It’ll be the last game of football ever.”

  “It’s a depressing thought.” Owen laughed bitterly. “You know, man, those tracks aren’t so far from here.”

  “I know.” The man chuckled too, but he sounded crazy. “I don’t know what I’m doing here.” He sniffled. “But I don't know where to go. I keep thinking the seventies are all going to be dead in two days and then the sixties are next week. I got weeks left. Weeks,” he said the word like it was the first time he’d really thought about what it meant. “I don't know what to do with so little time, but on the other hand, it’s too long to wait to die. I might have been more comfortable if they’d said you have forty-eight hours.”

  “You just needed someone to talk to. Have you seen on the news, they have those help lines for you to call in?”

  “Yeah.” He nodded at me. “They’re busy, every day. I try to call but it’s always busy. My wife”—he flinched but continued to say the thing I suspected had driven him to come here—“she couldn’t wait. She went on ahead of me last week. Said the suspense was killing her.” He laughed bitterly, wiping his leaking eyes. “I don't think I have it in me. She was always stronger.”

  “There’s another place,” I changed the subject and pointed down the road as if what I was pointing to was right next to us, not two miles away. “Sometimes when I feel—weird, I talk to the minister at the brown church on the right just before town center. He’s pretty nice, and young so I imagine he’s still with us.” Unless he killed himself too. The suicide rates had shot through the roof. Another wonderful tidbit we’d learned on the news last night.

  “You’re a member of the church?” Owen asked, not trying to hide the mockery in his tone.

  “No, but I go in and pretend I am.” I scowled at him before I turned and shook my head at the man. “They don’t ask you if you’re a member of the church. The minister’s a pretty nice man, for a holy person. He isn’t like all creepy and a pedo or anything. And three weeks is better than no weeks.”

  “Jesus, Zo.” Owen rolled his eyes.

  The man nodded. “I know that church.” He turned to Owen. “Thanks for that last game, kid.” He got up, dusted himself off, and walked away.

  After we sat and watched him leave, Owen gave me a grin. “Pedo?”

  “Shut up.”

  “Want a sandwich?”

  “Sure.”

  It was a weird five minutes. It was becoming a bit of a trend.

  We walked back to my yard like it was a regular Saturday afternoon and Elaine was at work. She was a nurse, so she always ended up working weekends, which meant Owen and I had free run of the house.

  I sat on the counter as he made a sandwich and passed it to me. “You’re almost out of peanut butter.”

  “No, I’m not.” I hopped down and went to the pantry, grabbing a new jar. “Before she left last week, she filled the pantry and the fridge and freezer.”

  He took a bite of his sandwich and sat on the counter, hardly having to lift his butt to get on it, he was so tall. “I wish my parents would leave.”

  His words sent a cold shiver over me as I stared down at my sandwich and hated how sad her being gone made me. “No, you don’t.”

  “I do, legit.” He was adamant. “I’m sleeping here toni
ght, speaking of my parents.”

  “Cool.” I liked it when he slept over. I hated being alone at night. I used to love it, but now there was a hollow fear that I could fall into nothingness and no one would know. I’d drown in darkness alone. I wondered if she knew that and left anyway. If she was able to abandon me, knowing.

  “We should get a dog,” Owen said randomly, seeming to read my mind about hating being alone.

  “You’re crazy.”

  “Seriously.” He talked through the mouthful of sandwich as though we had already reverted to being savages. “A dog would make us all happy. And I was watching the news last night, and they said people need to start bringing their animals into the shelters or giving them to younger people so they’re not trapped in houses with dead bodies.”

  “No.” I hadn’t given any thought to the fact there were millions of dogs and cats being left alone, abandoned by the dying. The idea of that stole away my hunger. Not that I felt hungry. I couldn’t remember the last time I was starving or I felt something like it. A need.

  Maybe I didn’t have needs anymore.

  It was weird, eating and not being hungry.

  No matter what, we ate. Somewhere inside me I’d decided we had to. We had to finish it all. The house would rot with the food when I was gone. Everything was going to rot. And she’d left me the food to take care of me; I needed to eat it.

  “If we see any animals we think are starving or abandoned, we’ll help them,” I agreed with him.

  “All right. I’ll keep my eyes peeled for some. Also, speaking of the end, you should try to lose your V-card before the end, Zo,” Owen offered up another random comment, only this one made my cheeks burn.

  “Shut up. You should try to lose your gay card.” It was cruel and petty and insensitive, but it left my mouth before I could stop myself.

  “Really?” He laughed, unfazed. “I don’t even know what that means.”

  “Uh”—What did it mean?—“it means you’ve never had sex with a guy so you’re a virgin too,” I lied and did it well enough he didn't notice my humiliated expression.