Load times were a thing of the past, but in the brief second between discovering my grandma was dead in and whatever the game had in store next, my mental screen went blank. A tone that sounded alarmingly similar to the extended flatline beep you heard in hospital dramas jarred me out of the game world and back to my high-rise apartment. Multiple red lights were flashing throughout the living room and kitchen. The volume on the beeper decreased and a calm, female voice rose from speakers placed throughout my living space.

  “The shelter in place watch issued for toxic rain has expanded into a full-fledged emergency scenario. A band of clouds capable of forming acid tornadoes is pushing through the metropolitan area. Multiple touchdowns have occurred in the periphery counties. Please avoid panic and proceed calmly down the stairs to the lowest level where you will be directed to one of several community bunkers to await further instructions.”

  She repeated the message. You’d think I would be terrified, but fear had long since burned out of me. When I was a kid, I could remember getting a storm warning and my whole family would gather into the tub of our single, first floor bathroom. I’d fight with my brothers in nervous anxiety while my mom refreshed her phone for updated weather reports. It seemed silly now that a week almost never passed without several large-scale natural disasters. It was just another testament to how dead you could become inside once you had been conditioned to expect nothing but the worst.

  “Tina,” I shouted, “Please text Marci: Oh, for fork’s sake.”

  While I was coaxing the cat into her carrier with treats, my device dinged back.

  “Would you like me to read Marci’s response in an approximation of her voice?” Tina asked.

  “Sure, Tina,” I replied. “That’s always entertaining.”

  Tina was, in fact, very bad at impressions. On my salary, the AI wasn’t exactly the top-of-the-line model.

  “I’m not even going to the bunker,” Tina reported in a voice that sounded reminiscent of an eastern European call girl. Marci was neither eastern European or a call girl.

  “Wow,” I said in mock amazement. “That was a new level of mediocrity even for you, Tina.”

  “I aim to please,” Tina jibed, returning to her own neutral voice. What the AI lacked in impressions, it made up for in sarcasm.

  Another text came in from Marci which said, “Bridgerton season 20 is really heating up. I’m rolling the dice on this storm. My bed is too cozy.”

  An emoji of a smiley face peaking out from covers popped through.

  I grabbed my device and the cat carrier and headed to the front door. Mitzi meowed neurotically as I offered a silent “thank you” to the cosmos that I hadn’t changed into pajamas. Almost nothing was worse than your neighbors seeing you in pajamas.

  As I stepped into the hallway, the lights blinked on and off. A queue had formed at the stairs and screams arose during the momentary blackness. I rolled my eyes and thought folks should have learned to get over this drama by now. It wasn’t like this was our first rodeo with the community bunker. Folks calmed down slightly and resumed a slow and steady march downstairs.

  “Hey, Teal,” a smarmy voice called from directly behind me.

  I groaned. I hoped it was an internal groan, but I wasn’t sure. The voice belonged to my smarmy neighbor, Steve the Skeeve.

  “Hello, Steve,” I said, as if addressing my arch nemesis.

  “Girl, why you got to be saltier than a bag of chips?” he asked in mock injury.

  “Quit trying to make that phrase work, Steve,” I said, still not deigning to face him. Steve thought he was charming. He was not.

  “It’ll be viral,” he said overconfidently. “Wait and see.”

  Steve the Skeeve had made a herculean effort to leap in front of me so I had no choice but to look at him. His big features took up all the real estate on a too small head, like somebody had forgotten to blow the balloon all the way up. Crispy hair was flattened back through great lengths by the application of way too much product. He was wearing a sleeveless workout shirt and Basketball shorts. To be clear, Steve had definitely never played basketball.

  “We’re hanging in the safe room,” he said, a statement not a question.

  “No,” I replied. “We are not hanging in the community bunker, Steve.”

  I plunged past him, bumping shoulders. Steve put his arms up in mock offense, but I didn’t look back to witness more of the undoubtedly brilliant performance.

  “I might be the last person you see on this earth, Teal,” he called after me.

  “That’s a truly horrific thought, Steve,” I retorted.

  We would have gone on like that, tormenting each other like siblings. It was our usual routine. But the acid tornado had other plans. By now we were entering the stairwell. Suddenly, everything shook violently and the lights, which had been fighting a good fight to stay on, gave up. We were thrown to the stairs and plunged into darkness simultaneously. People screamed again, and I rolled my eyes again. Not that it mattered. My eye rolls had become reflex.

  Suddenly, a hand groped my boob from behind.

  “Damnit, Steve!” I shouted. “Get your forking hand off my jiggler!”

  “You have no evidence it was me!” Steve replied from right behind me.

  My rage at Steve hit a few moments after his action. I elbowed the pervert and he yelped like a kicked dog. The lights came back on long enough for us to stand up and start progressing down the crowded stairs again. We heard the sound of wind blowing and rain pelting the side of the building through nearly a foot of concrete. The storm was bad enough that even I felt a pang of fear cut through my normally diamond-hard exterior. Mitzi mewed from her carrier in alarm. Even the cat knew something was seriously wrong.

  Without warning, a massive crash erupted from outside the building and the walls shook. Something must have been caught in the swirling wind and slammed against our building. A scream rose up from below and a baby began to cry. The alarm continued to drone on dully as the female voice addressed the residents again.

  “The status of the storm has been raised to a warning for your area. Funnel clouds have been identified and are making touchdowns nearby. Acid tornadoes have the capacity to produce winds of over eighty miles per hour in addition to the ability to erode organic matter on contact. Please exercise extreme caution in proceeding to the community bunkers of your facility.”

  This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

  “That’s my cue,” Steve the Skeeve said, pushing past me and elbowing several other residents to clear a path downstairs for himself.

  “You suck, Steve!” I called after him, which garnered a few jeers of approval from my fellow residents.

  Steve stopped and looked up at me from the stairway below. He had already made it down two flights.

  “I know you want me, Teal,” he said earnestly. “But you’re really going to have to work through this bad girl energy if you want things to click between us.”

  Steve laughed at his own joke and careened over the mother with a crying baby to continue his frenzied descent.

  I meditated upon my hatred for Steve as I continued to plod down the stairs. I detested him because he was a smarmy twerp, but there was even more lying-in wait underneath the surface. Rumors around the complex held that he was one of the Red Shirts during the revolution. I had never witnessed anything more than petty sexual harassment from the greasy biscuit, but if he been a Red Shirt, there was a far more sinister backstory to Steve. It also meant that Steve could be a very, very dangerous person. If the rumors were true, Steve wasn’t just creepy—he was lethal.

  After ten more tight turns I filed into a large space that housed the residents of my high-rise during our frequent emergencies. I say it was large, because the room had to be, but we were still packed into the space like sardines in a tin can. I was one of the last to arrive, so I took a spot near the back of the room and copped a squat. I got out my device and gasped in shock. I had a long chain of texts from Marci.

  “You there?”

  “This storm looks like a live one, boo.”

  “Any sign of Steve the Skeeve yet?”

  “Mark yourself safe from Steve the Skeeve. I’m nervous for you.”

  “Holy ship, it looks bad out there.”

  “Teal? U there?”

  “Okay, this was definitely not the storm to fork around and find out. Regrets have been had.”

  “Trying to head to the safe room. The place is shaking. I just saw a half-disintegrated Chihuahua fly past my window.”

  “Update: there’s a bottleneck in the stair well. Everybody is pushing. This ship is madness.”

  The last text wasn’t even a full text. Marci had started to type my name and clearly only got through the first two letters. That was over ten minutes ago. I quickly fumbled through a text to her.

  “Girl, are you okay?”

  I checked her location and her dot was hovering several blocks away from her apartment building. My heart leapt into my throat. What had happened? Marci was totally obnoxious and I was never sure we would have been friends if our cubicles weren’t two feet apart. But Marci was obnoxious best friend, and the only one I had really. Nothing was going to kill her but me when I finally snapped one day.

  Without warning, the emergency alarm that had become part of normal operations was suddenly absent. A green light clicked on overhead to replace the blinking red one. A single tone sounded and the AI woman’s voice addressed the residents.

  “Hello. I am pleased to announce that the storm and immediate threat has passed. Initial scans show that your building has sustained little damage, and none beyond external cosmetic issues. These repairs will be completed in time, but the infrastructure of the building remains firm. You may return to your living spaces. Please proceed safely.”

  I wasn’t going back to my room. I slammed into a nearby exit that unlocked automatically once the “all clear” had been issued. I had to find Marci and make sure she wasn’t injured or worse. I hated taking Mitzi along with me, but there was no time to run the cat back up to my room. She mewed sadly as I left the safe room and ventured into the dissipating acid drizzle outside.

  I didn’t look back, which was unfortunate.

  If I had, I might have noticed Steve the Skeeve slipping out the door and tailing me as I rushed away.

  ***

  I followed the blue dot on my device several blocks down the street to the place where Marci had been, unmoving, for at least ten minutes. I did my best to convince myself to expect the worst, but it didn’t prepare me for what I found.

  Marci had to be dead. She was in a nightgown. All of those old shows were super popular as images, even if we had never actually seen them. Her body was crumpled like a used napkin on the concrete pavement of the alleyway. A trickle of blood dripped from her mouth and her blond hair lay spread out on the ground like old straw.

  My heart caught in my throat, and then I noticed an almost imperceptible rise and fall of her breathing. Marci wasn’t dead, at least not yet. I rushed to her crumpled body and fell to my knees.

  “Marci,” I said, brushing the tangled hair out of her eyes. “Marci, wake up.”

  Against all odds, my best friend stirred and opened her eyes a crack.

  “Sup, sloppy biscuit?” she asked weakly.

  I laughed and put my hand on her shoulder. She tried to move and winced.

  “Hold still,” I ordered. “Let me call somebody to help.”

  “No,” Marci cried, slapping my hand away from my device. “I don’t have insurance, you know that. Give me a second and I’ll get up. I can’t afford to pay any doctor’s bills.”

  My face sunk. I didn’t agree, but I knew she was right. I didn’t think things could get much worse, but then a voice interjected from behind us.

  “Evening ladies,” Steve the Skeeve called from the shadows.

  He stepped under a dim street lamp that had been blown cockeyed by the winds of the acid tornado. The loser had a wicked smile on his face, made more garish by the harsh overhead lighting.

  “Get lost, Steve,” I said, trying to sound tougher than my rapidly beating heart felt. “I have this handled.”

  “Oh, I’m not offering to help,” Steve said, smiling. “I have other things in mind.”

  Steve pulled a switch blade from the pouch of his hoodie. He jerked it open and started heading my direction. Light glinted off the metal of the razor-sharp blade. At once, I realized what he had in mind and knew I would die before I let him hurt me or Marci. Pulse pounding, I stepped in front of her and got ready to fight back.

  “Going to put up a fight,” he oozed. “That tracks. You’re a willful girl, Teal. Somebody needs to hammer you down.”

  Mitzi hissed and spat violently from her carrier. I dropped it to the ground when I rushed to Marci and forgot the cat was even there. In an instant, I had a plan. I grabbed the carrier and flung the door open. I had no idea if Mitzi would perform, but I could always rely on her being a bad, bad biscuit.

  The frenzied cat did not disappoint. She lunged forward and leaped onto Steve the Skeeve’s face. He moved to stick her with the knife, but the furious cat made his attack look like it happened in slow motion. Mitzi was on his face, scratching and biting until she tasted blood. Finally, he grabbed her behind the neck and tossed her violently to the pavement.

  Mitzi landed on her feet and spat at him again.

  “You forking biscuits,” Steve shouted. His face was split in a number of places, and blood flowed freely from his temple down to his chin.

  “Get out of here, Steve,” I said calmly.

  “I’ll get out for now,” he conceded. “But you started something big here. You’ll see me again.”

  With those parting words, Steve stumbled back down the alley, wiping the blood from his eyes as he made his escape. I turned to Marci, and she had already pulled herself to her feet.

  “I was going to kick his ass if Mitzi didn’t take him,” Marci said weakly.

  “Uh-hu,” I teased. “Can you walk?”

  “What does it look like?” She boasted. “C’mon, let’s go back to your apartment. Mine is going to be out of action for a while.”

  I looked down the street and noted that her building was practically in ruins. Luckily all the disasters had taught cities how to recover pretty quickly. Still, she wouldn’t be sleeping there for the next few nights. It was probably good. With Steve just down the hallway, I would want some company. An angry cat wouldn’t hold him off for long, and if he returned now, I would be ready.

  ***

  Back in my apartment, Marci took a quick shower and then I tucked her into bed. She almost passed out immediately, but I had one question I still wanted answered. My friend was almost out cold—but I had to know.

  “What happened to you during the storm?” I asked.

  The low lamp-light threw shadows on her face as she winced to call up the memory. Her skin was chapped from even limited exposure to the acid rain.

  “The tornado broke our windows. I know that’s not supposed to be possible, but they must have cut some corners when they built the unit. I got pulled out of the stairwell. After a couple of rotations, the funnel it tossed me into another building. I don’t remember anything else until you showed up.”

  I could tell she was exhausted, so I sat by her and stroked her hair until she fell asleep. I was too keyed up to lay down, yet, though. I crossed to my entertainment area and jacked into the system.

  I had to find out what happened to my grandma.