Ed knocked on the door, like he did every night. I shook my head, not saying anything about his particular tick. I let it go, just as he let my outbursts go. Everybody was entitled to deal with the end days in their own way. Just like every night, the doors opened by retracting into the ceiling after his knock. It wasn't his knock that opened it; it was him stepping closer to the threshold. I had no idea if these doors had always been programmed to open for anybody who approached, or if this was something that happened after the fact, but no door had ever been locked for us. Not even in the palace, where we had all stayed at first.
All hundred of us.
Before.
Before more and more crazies emerged.
What were the odds of a group of ninety-eight people simultaneously becoming batshit crazy? Nina would have been able to tell me with her degrees in philosophy and psychology, but Nina was… wherever my best friend was, whatever happened to her. I didn't want to think about her. Or my parents. Or my siblings. It was too disheartening. I hadn't even been home when the Cryons invaded. Phone connections had been one of the first things to go; no matter how many times I tried to reach my family, nobody ever picked up. With major cities being hit by the aliens the hardest, it was easy to assume that Dallas was just as much under attack as New York City, the place where I was at the time. I didn’t know if they were dead or alive. Or if they were dead, how they died.
"Hello?" Ed moved carefully forward, and I resisted the urge to push him in. The religious chanting sounded like it was right on top of us now.
I followed Ed as quickly as I could, knowing the doors would close behind us, making this place as indistinguishable from the others as possible. I doubted anybody was looking for us, but it was better to stay off their radar.
Once inside, Ed and I separated as always, checking the rooms of the place we had chosen for the night. In the beginning, we had stuck together, afraid of running into an alien, but over the days, expediency won out over fear, and we decided to make our rounds separately. We linked back up in what seemed to be the kitchen.
"I like the room to the left," Ed said.
I shrugged. I didn't care where I slept. Every place had soft beds, and every place was as alien as fuck. Under any other circumstances, I would have been intrigued by this place. The way the furniture resembled things from Earth, but still appeared non-human-built, made it very different, at least. I would have been in awe of the small cleaning bots still hard at work, even though nobody was living here at present, and it didn't seem like the owners would come back any time soon—or at all. Ed walked over to a machine no bigger than a microwave and waved his hand. The screen came to life, offering a choice of food in alien hieroglyphs that none of us had been able to decipher. "What are you in the mood for? Yellow or green?"
We’d tried red last night, and it had been… better than the others. "Green," I said, because like the bed, this didn't matter either. If the food was too bad, we'd just order something else. A short beep announced the readiness of whatever he had selected. Ed opened themicrowaveand pulled out a plate filled with steaming, unidentifiable food. Mostly green in color. He waited for me. It was my turn to taste test. It started with poison testing, but that luckily had been downgraded to taste testing since none of us had died during the few weeks we'd been here, at least not from the food.
I used the spoon/fork/knife thingy and dug in. "Yummy, yummy, yummy," I overexaggerated, bringing the utensil to my mouth.
Ed watched the green paste vanish between my lips. I shuddered and spit it out. "No thanks."
He stepped aside while I put the plate on the short counterspace next to themicrowave. I was pretty sure that there was probably a cleaning machine here somewhere, too, where we were supposed to put the used plates, but honestly, cleaning dishes was the furthest from my mind.
"What does this button do?" I asked, before pressing it, and lo and behold, the screen changed.
"Oh, wow," Ed exclaimed.
Various images appeared on the window, showing still alien, but more appetizing-looking foods. Round discs that looked suspiciously like pancakes, a steaming bowl of reddish stew with chunks floating in it, something that might’ve been skewered meat—though the color was an alarming shade of purple—and what I swore looked like noodles.
I tapped the one with the noodles. The machine hummed, and a moment later a shallow bowl slid out, filled with thin strands slicked in a pale sauce that smelled faintly of garlic and citrus.
Ed’s eyes went wide. “That looks… edible.”
I twirled the utensil through the noodles, brought a cautious mouthful up, and slurped. My eyes watered instantly. “Okay—too much citrus. But still a massive improvement over the green paste.”
Ed grinned and jabbed at the screen, hitting the icon with the pancake-looking discs. A tray dropped down with three steaming rounds stacked neatly, their surface blistered golden-brown.
He tore off a piece, tasted, and groaned. “Bread. It’s actually bread.”
I laughed, shaking my head. “Figures. All this time choking down slime, and we were one button away from a buffet.”
After the first decent meal in… forever, we took turns in the bathroom. That too had taken some time to figure out, but once we did, it was easy to take a shower and ignore the fact that the water was blue. Thankfully, it didn't dye our skin but left us refreshed and clean, with skin so moisturized it would have been heaven under different circumstances.
It was getting dark, and we had learned to stay away from the automatic light systems; the glow would have been a clear giveaway to the others.
"So you think their electricity still works?" Ed asked.
We sat on the floor—surrounded by pillows, beverages, and snack food we had discovered after pressing more buttons—facing each other.
"If whatever they're using is even electricity." I plopped a small, red, round ball into my mouth that tasted like chocolate. One positive effect of being near death was that counting calories had become mundane.
"Yeah, there's that," he laughed nervously. He munched on black little seeds that he insisted tasted like nuts. I took his word for it; I was not interested in eating something black with green spots.
"Your turn," he reminded me. Last night, he told me how he had been taken by the Cryons and ended up at the auction house, where we met the same fate. It's funny, we'd been forced into close proximity for over a week, but we hadn't shared this part of our stories yet.
