The smell of a hospital always activated some weird fight or flight sensation in Arin. Think it was the smell of disinfectant everywhere, all the sterile quiet that enveloped everything yet somehow made every last step in a hallway echo for hours. That’s how it was now, at least. The waiting room was only her, Cath, and another woman who was sobbing loudly in the corner. Her stomach rumbled and she thought about when she had last ate. Was it the night before? She couldn’t remember if Cath had brought her food when she got there, too lost in the rush of filling her in with what had just happened.
The entire last twenty-four hours had been a disaster. She had met with their her and Cath’s mother for celebration dinner on Friday evening. She had finally sold her first story, submitting wherever she could for the last ten years before finally, FINALLY making it into a massive publisher’s showcase anthology. Mom of course was all about taking her out to celebrate, but not long into that morning she had started talking about being tired and a stomach ache. Arin didn’t think much of it until they got to the restaurant and she finally saw her mother- pale, clammy, and short of breath.
“Mom, what the hell is going on?” Arin asked, holding onto her mother in support as mom tried to guide her toward the door, Arin instead making an attempt to turn around back to her car. “You look awful. You need to go to a doctor. Come on, let’s get you in my car.”
“Oh, I’m fine. Just picked up some kind of stomach bug.” She said before almost stumbling off the curb. Arin’s next few hours were a blur, getting her mom to the emergency room and starting tests while they hooked her up to fluids. The doctor coming and only being able to tell Arin her mother was ‘very sick’ while all she could do was watch her mom turn and writhe in increasing pain, numbers falling further on the monitor.
“…are you hearing me, ma’am?” The doctor was saying, putting a light hand on Arin’s shoulder. It shook her out of whatever haze she had been in. “Your mother isn’t well. Her blood is coming back septic and kidneys are beginning to go into failure. We’re going to have her transferred over to the next county as soon as possible but we may need to intubate. Are you her next of kin?”
“Yeah, yeah I’m her daughter. Please, anything.” Arin stammered, still looking at her mother as the doctor nodded to a nurse standing ready with a ventilator. The doctor touched her shoulder again, trying to turn her away from the sight that was sure to remain in her brain forever, stored away to haunt her when things get worse. The last words she said to her mother, almost incoherent as they loaded her into the ambulance, was “I love you, I’m right behind you.”
That was Friday night and here they were on Sunday evening now. Constant dialysis, intubation, and central IV lines were hooked up to her mother when Cath came in, breathless and exhausted from the long flight in. The doctor in the CCU took them aside, being very forward with them and essentially hitting them head on with a semi-truck of grief and despair.
“Things don’t look good. She’s still extremely sick, we’ve traced the infection back to a combination of strep and pneumonia, which have caused sepsis throughout her body and in her blood. She’s… not likely to make it through the night. Even with the aggressive antibiotics and continued treatment it’s very likely her kidneys may have become too damaged from the sepsis. I’m going to be very honest with you right now- you should say any parting words you have with her now. You’re allowed to stay in the room as long as you need, considering the situation, but I’m afraid it’s not going to be much longer.”
Arin felt herself go numb, dissociating from the moment and losing focus as Cath burst into soft tears beside her. She put a hand around her little sister, trying to put on a brave face and offer support for the hurt coursing through them. Arin felt hot tears stream down her cheeks despite her best efforts to seal the emotional valve running overtime. She had just been speaking to her mother excitedly on Friday morning, joking about how Arin was about to shoot up the bestseller lists in no time. Now she was here, authorizing a do not resuscitate order on her mom’s wishes. She wasn’t even aware she had signed the paper until the doctors had removed the tubing and machines, the beeping on her monitor slowly crawling to a flat, monotonous scream echoing in her mind.
She waited as they removed her from the room, still pulling Cath close and stroking her hair. Her sister wasn’t prepared for this, still just twenty. Arin was always awkward but broke out of her shell. Meanwhile Cath had been one of the unfortunate few to come of age during 2020, when all sense of society went to shit for that brief period of time. Now here she was, still with mom four years later and not sure where she wanted to go in life.
“It’s going to be okay. You can stay with me as long as you need. You’ve got my bed, I’ll take the couch. We’re going to get through this.” She wasn’t sure if she was telling this to herself or her sister, but it wasn’t working for either of them either way. Nothing was working. Arin looked at her phone, almost immediately opening her texts to try and update their few family and small circle of friends. She didn’t realize it until after it sent but she had texted her mother the news of her own death. All she could do was give a sobbing laugh through the phone at the irony of it. She was always the first person Arin would update in situations like this, so it was just the natural path her brain took. Now it just sat there like a memorial, forever saying delivered, never to be read.
She drifted home somehow that night and broke down in sobs, the emotional weight of everything finally crashing down over her in waves. One moment she was fine, the next there was this crushing sense of mortality that would press into her chest like it was desperately trying to implode. The grief overwhelmed her, with long, tearful cries eventually subsided into a fitful, exhausted sleep where she dreamed, even momentarily, that her life was going differently.
———————-
Miles across America from Arin’s current personal, quiet apocalypse, in a small bank in a sleepy Appalachia town, four individuals gather in front of the main entrance. The night is dark and barely lit by the banks outside lights, with the parking lot lamps also only lighting a fixed area. As the individuals speak, they begin to prepare. All wearing similar attire of long pants and dark jackets with bags on their backs. The poorly pixelated sign on the bank door reads “Closed for New Year! See you in the next century!”
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“Ever wonder why this place looks this way?” Said one, pulling a tight fitting mask down over his face before flipping his hood up to cover the rest of his puffy, dark hair. The mask of a Jackal was spray painted with numerous bright colors, and his slender frame made and troublesome gleam in his eyes behind the mask that completed the look. “Like I did the retro game aesthetic but like… who designed this?”
“You saw the same thing we did, you tell me.” Another said, a male voice. This one was a little shorter, terrible posture and long hair making him look just like the bright blue and purple sloth mask he slipped on under his hood. “At least that’s what they told me. Something about a demo version.”
“I don’t care what he said, are you three ready?” A taller woman, lean and sinewy with paint flecked all over her clothes. A fiercely painted bear mask that looks as if it’s had a fresh meal is pulled on under her hood, making her a terrifying sight to behold. “Everyone remember their part?”
“They get the vault, I get the data.” Another woman. She stood shorter, but almost with a dancer’s physique visible even under the form fitting clothes. She finished eating the candy bar she had been munching on, throwing the wrapper to the side behind them. She pulled her mask down, a ferret with exaggerated mask markings in multiple colors. “Probably going to delete a lot of shit while I’m in there.”
“Seriously? You’re littering right here?” Sloth was berating Ferret, who just shrugged it off.
“Oh no, the police are totally going to come after me. See, because this place is soooooo populated.” They gesture around at the empty streets, with only a massive, low-quality moon hanging in the distance against the sky. “We go through that door and it resets. We’ll be fine.”
“Alright, let’s open it.” Bear points to Sloth, who raises a hand to the door and snaps at it, making a white void take the place of the doors. They all walk through into a now crowded bank, full of people and starkly more detailed than the previous setting. People take a moment to notice the masked and hooded figures walking in, but when they do panic sets in fast, with people quickly running through the now normal doors behind the group as they walk to the counter.
A security guard nearby raises a pistol, aiming squarely at the Jackal.
“Damn. Really?” The Jackal says, quickly flicking his hand and suddenly holding the gun, now missing from the guard’s hand. Jackal pulled the safety, ejecting the current bullet and magazine before tossing the gun itself to Bear. She caught it deftly, holding it in her hand and watching as digital interference shimmered around it, making glitched pixels swarm as the gun was reduced to a small, scale model of the bank made from steel and plastic.
She tosses it back to the guard before moving toward the counter and the frightened middle aged woman sitting behind it, cowering with her hands very obviously scrambling under the desk for a panic button. Bear leans on the desk before speaking to her directly through the plexiglass barrier between them. “Don’t they teach you how to be subtle doing that? Don’t worry, none of you are in danger. Jackal, get Ferret back there so she can get started, then you two get the vault.”
They nodded and moved in turn, Ferret nodding to Jackal who snapped his fingers, teleporting Ferret in a digital haze across the security barrier between the tellers and lobby. Ferret approached a computer nearby, typing rapidly on it and clicking through options as she made her way into the bank database, accessing everything from credit cards to mortgages and zeroing out debts wherever she pleased as she went. The teller behind her tried to protest, running over to interfere with her. Ferret gave a wave of her hand and the teller bounced off a thin layer of digital haze in the air, pixelating colors mimicking the surroundings blocking her path as a barrier.
“I’ll be done in a minute.” Ferret replied, waving her hand again and making the digital wall disappear. Meanwhile Sloth and Jackal moved toward the massive vent on the wall, Jackal swiping his hand through the air and causing the massive vault door to suddenly appear five feet to the left of where it previously sat closed, fused with the wall as if it had perfectly clipped through like a game glitch. They stepped into the vault, looking around them at all the boxes on the wall holding who knows what. Jackal raised a hand and closed his eyes this time, concentrating for a moment before twisting his hand mid-air. The deposit boxes reacted, teleporting forward a few inches and allowing them to go through the contents.
“Holy shit, there’s a lot of jewelry in here.” Sloth mentioned as he rifled through everything, clattering various rings and necklaces around in the metal drawers. “Where’s the good shit? I haven’t seen documents yet. Or cash…”
“Do you know how many banks actually carry cash at this point? You can only fit so many zeroes on a dollar.” Jackal was going through files in one lockbox, noting the contents before tossing some to Sloth, “Here’s the physical copies of the agreements and the titles. We’ll have the agreements disappear, she’ll delete the digital ones, and the titles will conveniently end up with the homeowners. Find anything else good?”
“Not really. Small towns, I guess. Mostly jewelry…” Sloth was still going through deposit boxes on the wall, immediately slamming one shut. “Who the hell stores physical nude photos in a BANK VAULT!?”
Jackal started howling with laughter, looking over Sloth’s shoulder and snapping his fingers so the drawer clipped back open. He quickly snapped his fingers and caused the drawer to go too far back, becoming stuck in the wall behind. All he could do was nod, “That’s probably for the best.”
Sloth shook his head and walked back out of the vault, holding his hands up in surrender as Bear was still keeping an eye on the guard and tellers, now pressing her hand against the ATM on the wall. The steel and plastic of the machine pixelated and folded in on itself, peeling back layers and piling them to the side until it revealed the money stored within. Bear started taking stacks of cash out, stuffing them into the satchel on her hip while still looking to the few remaining individuals in the bank. “Okay, line up, come on. Yes, you two can line up too. Just don’t tell anyone about what’s happening. Ferret, you almost done?”
Ferret poked up from the computer screen once again, punching in the last of the numbers needing a change and pushing a red button that said delete. “Gone you go,” she said as the computer showed a small loading bar briefly before giving a confirmation. Ferret stepped out and waved the teller toward the small security door behind the barrier, who opened it and led them through, still terrified.
“Alright, now you all take care of yourselves. Be safe. Don’t tell the cops you got the money. We’re going to get through things, promise.” Bear was telling each person as she handed out massive stacks of cash to them, twenties and hundreds flowing freely to everyone. As she finished up the animals all gathered by the front door, waving a goodbye to the still confused people in the bank who were still staring at the life-changing money in their hands. “Bye!”
Sloth snapped at the doors they came through, this time turning them into a black abyss. Perfectly dark against the beige bank walls. The animals stepped forward through the void, blanking out behind them and leaving the regular bank doors as if nothing had ever happened.