Extra Credits
“Do you think you can do it? Go to work today?” Greg rasped in a smoky whisper. “God, my throat’s like it’s got knives stabbing it.”
“I don’t think so,” Carolyn whispered. “I’m burning with fever and I can hardly breathe and my bones hurt. But shit, Jay, we’re definitely going to have a massive credit shortfall if at least one of us doesn’t go.”
It had to be the latest designer virus they’d heard about, dubbed Liberty 5.
Moments like this conspired to pit them against each other, although awareness of that conspiracy helped them try not to go down that lonely, adversarial road with each other. After 10 years of The Administration, they knew that the Othering was part of the whole plan, if you could even call the manufactured chaos a plan in the traditional sense of the word. Placing blame on some Other, near or far, known or unknown, was one of the most important parts of the regime. Too many people hadn’t minded when it was someone with a different color skin, or a different nationality, or a different sexual orientation. Plenty had been strangely surprised when it turned out it was also your spouse or your children or your dodgy parents who had voted for The Resident while there were still elections.
Greg groaned. “I’ll do it.”
“You’re the best,” Carolyn said, stopped herself from adding, plus, you make more credits anyway, because you’re a 40-year-old white man.
“Do we have any more medicine stashed away?”
Carolyn groaned, then choked on phlegm. “Do I really have to tell you?”
“I won’t get mad,” Greg promised.
Carolyn knew that wasn’t true but plowed ahead anyway. “I gave it to Helen and Bud when they had Liberty 4.”
“Dammit, are you serious? Those fuckers voted for this guy.”
“Well, I was worried Helen was going to die. She was so sick.” It didn’t sound great in the moment. Their neighbors Helen and Bud had voted for this guy. They also had made fun of everyone for being weak when they got sick, blamed it on amorphous reasons, refused to wear masks. Then they cried about it when they came down with sicknesses, over and over, each time causing increasing long-term effects to their bodies. Cried about it and lied about it, of course. Because anyone who voted for this guy had to toe the party line about how only the weak got it. And therefore, of course they didn’t have medicine for it stashed in their homes. Seeking such medications got you on the List, nicked your stash of credits, and always zeroed out the most valuable credits, too.
Still, somehow, through it all, and after all that time, Carolyn may have forgotten a lot about the Before Times, but she still struggled with the concept of hardening her heart and letting other humans just suffer or possibly even die without trying to help or caring at all.
“We are way too fucked to be getting wrapped up in moral philosophy,” Greg said. “I don’t know why I still have to remind you of this. They’ll take your help and then report you for being an unrecovered libtard in the same exact breath, man. God, I can’t believe you did that. What about us?”
Carolyn gazed out the window, the characteristically hazy sunshine stuffed with pollutants streaming into the room. It had been a long time since they had talked about how hard and heartless everyone had been forced to become. When some new outrage happened every day, it was difficult to remember what things were like before The Administration had come into power. What it was like before “innovations” like the credits system.
All The Golden Olds who had voted for that guy were shocked when he announced a year or two after his coronation — they had called it an inauguration, but as it turned out, and as was no surprise to the folks who hadn’t voted for him, it was far more permanent — that money, as it had formerly been known, was being eradicated. Despite having been a political movement that had been fixated on some better past that had never really existed, to anyone else it seemed strange that greenbacks portraying long idolized dead presidents were being replaced with national credits, a cryptocurrency described as being so much more. The hope of an iron-strong nation, in fact.
The net worth of the wealthy translated quite favorably and straightforwardly into piles of these virtual credits; they had proved their merit already. Wasn’t it obvious? For them, the virtual coin had no strings attached, with no complications attached to obtaining more.
For everyone else, though, credits were fractional, sometimes ridiculously so, and tied to a complicated set of circumstances that shifted daily and nonsensically like day trading or betting pools populated by dopamine-fiend idiots in the old days, only on steroids. At first, some of it had some semblance of sensibility, at least on the face of it, sort of like how things worked in the bygone days; go to work and stay there for eight hours. Successfully complete tasks, tick a box, digitally footprint your time. Skip lunch. Stay late. OK, got it, everybody thought. I guess I can work with that.
Eventually bonus digital coin was introduced for those who had clearly outdone a coworker at a task, but it became more extreme and less sensible from there. Word got around that some sociopath had gotten a huge bonus for screwing over his coworker and taking credit for her work, and the vanguard of wild amoral experimenters started digging in, revealing that doing things in the worst and most underhanded ways possible netted a much sweeter haul of credits.
One guy got major algorithm cred in the socials for a huge win involving a hack to embezzle credits from his employer, auto-pouring them into his account. His managers and even the company’s own CEO publicly applauded and celebrated the sheer deviousness of his endeavor on the news and social media vids, their faces plastic grins; the company went bankrupt shortly thereafter but earned its place in The Resident’s Hall of Fame, and the CEO, too, received a massive haul of highest-tier credits for his pains, which he had taken so gamely, given the fact that the company consequently outright failed.
Getting sick could involve everything from a loss (staying home) to a huge gain (going in sick, while pretending not to be sick, bonus credits for infecting others who would then have the opportunity to prove their passion for the Purpose, which no one was really clear on other than the vague sense it involved abuse).
Carolyn covered her eyes, her temples throbbing. It wasn’t going to be a good month, given this new development. They might not be able to cover their rent and utilities, especially if some of their pay ended up being in junk credits, like the ones that only bought tickets to the propaganda flicks. That happened more often than anyone liked; everyone sitting in the auditoriums for prop movies always looked pained until the lights mercifully went out. Some were there because they no longer had a home to go to, and this shelter was all their credits could buy. It was easier to overlook piles of blankets and tents on the periphery of the auditoriums in cinema darkness.
“Jesus, Carolyn, my toe!” Greg groaned, interrupting Carolyn’s reverie on the descent.
“What?”
“I can’t feel my big toe!”
She glanced over and regretted it immediately. “What the fuck?” The big toe on Greg’s right foot was bright red and intensely shiny; like the cherry red of a new sportscar from the Before Times. It looked so alien and wrong that she felt a wave of nausea as well as a perverse impulse to touch it. She didn’t.
“Holy shit… I can’t feel it at all,” he repeated.
“Have you heard anyone say whether that’s a symptom of Liberty 5?”
“No, but I haven’t had any conversations about Liberty 5 either — safer,” he answered.
“I guess we’ll have to ask Jonas.”
“Wait a minute,” he said. He stood up, then dropped the toe in question on the cold, hardwood floor. “Listen.” He did it again, and it made a distinct tapping sound. “It’s like it’s a shell.” He banged it down harder, making Carolyn flinch. “A hard shell.”
“That’s really weird, Greg.” She reached for the tissues that she hated to use, they were so scratchy. If you used them long enough for nose blowing, the skin on your nose would become chafed and bleed. But to conserve credits, they’d had to resort to the cheapest paper products they could find at the local Official Store with the Greatest, Most Beautiful Goods.
“I wonder if my shoe will fit right with whatever this is going on,” he mused.
Carolyn didn’t point out that that was probably the least of their concerns.
“So here’s another thing.”
“What?” She attempted to blow her clogged nose again; it already pained her.
“I don’t feel sick anymore,” he said. “Huh. Wow. That’s really great, isn’t it?”
“Oh… huh?” Her feelings were steeped in illness and dread. “Yes, that’s great.”
After Greg left for work, his toe freakishly armored and the rest of him otherwise suddenly and shockingly symptom-free, Carolyn peered out the apartment window to see if Jonas’s window was open across the courtyard. Sometimes he worked the night shift at what now passed for a hospital, overtaxed and underfunded, and when he wasn’t home, he tightly closed his shades. Fortunately, today he was off, the window shades open. She grabbed her solar-powered flashlight from its hiding place (now an item on the illegal relics list, categorized under Renewables) and directed three quick bursts of light on his wall mirror to summon him, then doused herself with bug spray, donned a contraband N-95 mask, and traveled outside to the courtyard in between their buildings.
The sun was relentless, the air thicker and more humid than it usually was; she sat and listened to the sound of horses clopping down streets and the ever-present whine of the mosquitos that had overpopulated due to rising waters and rising temperatures.
Jonas joined her within several minutes, masked as well.
“I’m so sick,” she said, “so don’t get too close. Respiratory. Greg was sick, but that’s what I want to talk to you about. Something weird happened.”
“I can guess,” Jonas said. “Some part of his body got a hard growth, and then his other symptoms disappeared?”
“Exactly. What is it? Liberty 5?”
“Yeah, at least that’s what we suspect. Some kind of bizarre mutation. A few cases have shown up at the hospital, but let’s face it, there are probably so many more. Once the respiratory symptoms disappear, most people just go to work to get their credits, plus not getting penalized for going to the emergency room is an incentive too.”
“Should I be worried?”
“Yes? That’s default mode. I mean, I’m not really sure yet. We don’t have much data yet and of course any official data is tampered with. But it doesn’t take much to theorize that it doesn’t sound good.”
“Why isn’t it happening to me too? I’m just normal sick. I guess?”
“I wish I knew,” Jonas answered.
They both stopped talking and sat on opposite ends of a beat-up bench, staring straight ahead, occasionally waving the flying bugs away. Having an honest conversation out in the open could be so taxing.
A dowdy brown, untrustworthy looking bird perched on a nearby branch. It cocked its head, and Carolyn noticed its four ultra-shiny, beady eyes. An AI spy drone. Once you examined them, they were never quite right, but they did the trick in terms of fulfilling their basic surveillance missions. Finally, it took flight, moving on to another potential target of folks who were clearly not earning their credits in that moment.
“Not good,” Jonas sighed. “I guess we’re getting dinged for wearing masks, too.”
“Yeah.” Carolyn fretted about her nose running into her rare and precious mask. “Can you let me know if you figure out anything else about this?”
“Yeah. Usual signal. Take care of yourself Carolyn. Watch your back. It’s never good when something changes like that. They’re designing and releasing viruses they don’t even understand. They love the chaos of just seeing what happens next. Not that they weren’t doing that before, but I think it may be real bad this time around.”
“Yeah.” She sighed. “Thanks, Jonas. Take care of yourself too.” She watched him maybe too casually traverse the courtyard and disappear back into his building and she attempted to sit a while, taking in the muddied sky, the gnarled and moldy tree limbs weakly reaching towards it, attempting to summon the dim remembrance of a time when nature was a beautiful place to escape into, before one had to worry about whether a nosy wren or an elegant praying mantis might, in fact, be a spy; before the climate had been abused by manmade chaos leaving constant fear of destruction.
Finally, she made the move to stagger back into her building and trudged up the stairs, gasping. That short excursion had taken so much out of her. When would she be able to go back to work?
There wasn’t much to do until Greg came home. The thing about turning on the TV was that the TV watched you back. Plus, the programming was designed to be a game for those with means, but a trap for those who struggled. Some programs trickled credits into your account, others shaved them away, sometimes there was no impact at all. Sometimes it made sense, other times it seemed cruelly random.
She opted to read her illegal copy of The Stand, which was disguised with the art deco flex of the dust cover of Atlas Shrugged.
Carolyn dozed off in a viral haze of discomfort until she heard the disparate tones of the keypad activate with their front door entry code. Greg limped into the apartment, quietly shutting the door behind him.
“Oh no,” she said, sitting up, “does it hurt now?”
He sat down heavily next to her on the couch. “No, it’s more a problem with the shoe. Really awkward.” As he extended his foot, she saw what he meant.
The red shell had spread; it was obvious since it had busted his foot almost all the way out of his shoe. He began trying to extricate, finally asking her for their sharpest knife so he could cut the shoe’s material away.
“God, don’t cut yourself,” she said, handing him a knife.
“Well, the good news is, this… whatever it is on my foot is so hard I don’t think that’s going to be a problem,” he said as he sawed away at the pleather.
“Wow,” he said, once his foot was free and he had removed his threadbare sock.
His entire foot was now encased. It was as if he had dipped his foot into a cherry version of Magic Shell, a memory she somehow accessed from the Before Times, only it remained shiny, hadn’t clouded over after it solidified.
“Watch this!”
She let loose a scream and coughing jag when he took a brutal jab at his foot with the knife. His foot was impervious; rock to the knife’s scissors, the knife literally bent to the hilt.
“Oh my God, Greg, it’s so… weird.”
“Right? Good Christ.” He unlaced his other shoe and removed his other sock, sighing heavily as he extended his other foot; those four toes were red tipped, too.
Neither of them spoke, given the situation at hand.
“I could be a mean tap dancer?” he finally said.
Carolyn laughed beyond her stuffy nose and wished it didn’t sound like such combination of pity and fear. “I talked to Jonas. He told me this is a symptom going around, possibly Liberty 5.”
“Huh. Tap dance army forming, then, I guess.”
“Sounds like it can be any body parts that get this from what they’re seeing so far.”
“Oh. Just dandy.” Greg unlocked his phone. “Oh shit, Carolyn. Shit!”
“God, what now?” She sneezed, which sent a pain like fire through her throat.
“I just got a huge deposit of credits. A third of what our monthly rent is. In one day!”
“That sounds like a mistake. A trick. A scam.” They both knew that their current society thrived on every manner of dicking people over.
“I don’t care what it is, my love. With you sick…”
She sneezed again.
When they woke up the next morning, the hard shell had crept up Greg’s right ankle, heading up his calf, and his entire left foot was encased now, too. Carolyn was still blowing her nose regularly, but still, in a panic, she demanded that Greg look all over her body in places she couldn’t see to determine whether she was afflicted too, but so far, her condition remained the same, her skin soft and pliable.
“Stay home from work again,” Greg said.
“But the credits… our bills…”
“Just rest and recuperate.” He sounded so uncharacteristically confident. “That huge deposit I got… don’t worry about anything.”
Carolyn thought about the legions of unhoused people cowering in movie theaters or camped out beneath underpasses. How easy it was to get behind, too soft, too human to compete and comply. And once that happened, at some point you never, ever caught up. Once you’d been jettisoned from the cruel and chaotic web of the system, rarely did anyone get back in the game.
“I don’t know…”
“I do, sweetheart. Stay home.”
Carolyn agreed and lazed around, continuing to cough thick phlegm from her lungs and worry. Her headache was too severe for her to read her contraband book. The skin around her nostrils was red and peeling from the constant nose-blowing with the sandpaper-like tissues.
Her occasional glances at Jonas’s window yielded shades tight shut.
She realized she had chills as her body fought off God knew what.
She also realized that two days home from work and failing to gather credits in her account felt bad in a complicated way. Of course it was about survival, the need to pay your bills, the way the nation tried to conspire against you, like watching you try to sink or swim was all just one big joke. There was also the innate fear of not contributing, relying on someone else, even if it was the man she loved. But the pathetic sense of lack, the sense of feeling the tension of I cannot function without this… come to think of it, the feelings she was experiencing brought to mind how she had felt when she had quit smoking long ago. Afraid, dull, depressed, craving.
And, What else do I do with myself?
She tried to shake it off. Not hungry, she figured she still needed to eat, so she searched through the cabinets and fridge for anything she could work with. Figuring out meals was always a challenge, given the combination of the credits system and the shifting availability of groceries at any given time, considering the protectionist policies that had been put in place long ago had greatly constrained the food supply.
She grabbed a handful of roasted, salted peanuts from their dwindling canister and ran them through the food processor, added a dollop of mayonnaise and mixed them together thoroughly. She then toasted two pieces of sad, stale bread. “We need groceries,” she texted Greg. “I had to make the Sandwich of Last Resort. Cupboards are super bare.”
“No problem, babe,” he texted back immediately, which surprised her. Usually, he couldn’t respond until his shift had ended.
She choked down the sandwich.
Greg’s arrival home was resplendent with impossible things. Stiff-legged, arms overflowing with bags, as the door opened, he thundered, “What do you think of this?”
He poured the bounty onto the kitchen counter, laughing like a child. Tinned meat, canned soups, fresh bread, eggs, and most of all, the glorious colors of actual produce. Lettuce, broccoli, apples, strawberries, oranges, entire ears of corn. Even more shocking, coffee and five chocolate bars, items Carolyn couldn’t recall seeing available for sale for years.
“Oh my God, it’s like Christmas,” Carolyn said, marveling. She paused. “But… how, Greg? Did you… did you rob some rich person?”
“Look, you just have to roll with this, darling,” he said.
“Roll with what?”
“I got a huge promotion at work. Huge! And a gigantic pile of credits for a store I didn’t even know existed, that has all this stuff! We’ve hit the bigly time now! I think we should celebrate by having coffee in a minute. Coffee! Can you even believe it!”
He began thrusting the perishables into the fridge, still with that stiff-legged gait.
Carolyn lifted his shirt. The red shell had progressed to his waist. “But Greg… oh my God.”
“Don’t worry about it! I don’t even care! It’s worth it!”
Carolyn was ashamed, but the unbelievable bounty really did tempt her to agree. Her mouth was watering just thinking about the promise of a somewhat balanced diet, some of it not even canned, not to mention the chocolate and coffee. Maybe there was something to be said for accepting a windfall without fully understanding why.
She heard a tapping sound, meek. “Is that someone at the door?”
“Don’t open it,” Greg commanded, brusque.
The tapping sound continued, a little bit louder, quicker.
Greg grunted. “It’s Helen. I ran into her in the hall, she saw me coming in with all this stuff. The answer is no.”
“But… maybe we could spare just a little –”
“I already said, the answer is no, Carolyn. Fuck those goddamn people always whining and wanting help, eyeing our stuff.”
“Greg, we have so much now. Can we even eat all that produce before it goes bad?”
“Who cares? I’m serious, Carolyn. The answer is no. I absolutely forbid it.”
“You forbid it? What the hell do you mean? Since when do you give me orders?”
“Since my promotion, since my provisioning of all this great stuff, since you won’t have to work anymore, ever again, as is intended for women according to the great Purpose. We have hit the next level. You just need to roll with it.” He paused, took a deep breath, appeared to work hard on softening his approach. “You know, deep down, that this is a better deal than anything you could have ever imagined. You won’t have to work in a dangerous, hot factory anymore. You can just hang out here at home and be a nice housewife. Keep the place tidy. Make lovely meals with all the awesome food I’ll be bringing home. Get a makeover. The way the credits have been pouring in, we can have nice vacations. Maybe even move into a house, with a fence, adopt some kids.”
The tapping at the front door continued, more frequent and frantic, while Carolyn stared at her now half-shelled husband. “Who are you?” she whispered.
“Carolyn, sometimes you’ve just got to recognize a good deal when you see one.”
The next morning, Carolyn gradually awakened, the luxurious aftertaste of chocolate in her mouth disrupted by the memory of an incessant, pleading rapping at the door — at one point, she had wondered if poor Helen’s knuckles were bleeding — and a husband she no longer knew.
Carolyn and Greg had been amongst the legion of politically impoverished strugglers, they had been pretty well fucked and hanging on by a thread, but they had had each other and some shared values from the past while the world had collapsed around them, the only consistency outside being constant flux and chaos, doing their best to adjust and survive.
But was she being naïve, thinking that in radical attempts to retain love and softness in their lives, they had been better off? Greg’s current attitude was hard, and it was frightening, but an end to the constant struggle was tempting. All they had gotten from suffering through was more suffering, constant worries and ever-present fears. Even her latent feminism bristling at being told she could just be a nice housewife couldn’t seem to prevail against a rational voice in her head reminding her that she despised her factory job, where she was grossly underpaid by design and in constant danger of collapsing from heatstroke, losing a limb in one of the machines, or being run over by an errant, malfunctioning robot, of which there were quite a few, since like everything else, the sloppier the unregulated design, the worse and more damaging it was, the more casualties, the better.
The wicked voice in her head whispered on. You hate even going outside, in fact, it reminded her, with the viruses and the AI spies and the human spies, with nature trying to kill you for crimes you always knew would end this way. The plague-carrying bugs, the pollution haze, the mold and mildew, the acid rain, the floods, the dust storms, the smoke from forest fires outside the city. The sad scrawny horses that provided transport to the many who resided between the few who had the money for cars and scarce fossil fuels or self-driving car rides and those who can only walk to their abusive and pointless jobs, walk for miles in falling apart shoes. The empty-eyed children who, instead of going to school as they did in the Before Times, daily head to the exhausted mines or dummy mines, for no reason but to pay tribute with their healthful youth to the ghost of a bygone age, wielding pickaxes that extract nothing. The military police on every street corner; how you see them ahead and pray for the lazy ones, dread the bored ones looking for trouble or just difference in every passing face. How the earth shakes sometimes from all the fracking and tunnels dug for no reason, the random sinkholes opening up, and occasional bombings that are either false flags or real revolutionaries, nobody can ever figure out the difference anymore and gave up bothering to try. Worst of all, all the other people, the constant wondering if they are friend or enemy, the secret wish for connection and understanding, but at some point in the last 10 years, it just got too dangerous to ask, didn’t it?
Carolyn didn’t want to open her eyes. They had fought a long time to try to keep some semblance of themselves, at least in their secret thoughts, in the privacy of their own home. But then again, they had never been offered such an incentive to abandon themselves, either.
When Greg moved in bed, heavily and groaning in a strange way that seemed to echo, her eyes finally did flutter open.
She screamed.
Overnight, Greg had become red-shelled head to toe. At some point during the transformation he must have shed his tattered pajamas, and his nudity revealed an emasculated figure, smooth and almost robotic, lacking body hair, his head shockingly bald.
Again, it was as if her husband were nowhere to be found. His face… his face had taken on an almost generic look, like only a ghost of his former countenance remained.
She screamed again.
“Chill out, Carolyn,” Greg muttered. “It’s worth it. It’s totally worth it. I feel no pain. I highly recommend it. You might want to try it.”
“Jesus, Greg!” She began to weep.
“Look, I’m fine, so there’s no reason for you not to be more than fine.” He stiffly swung himself out of bed, shuffled to the closet and rifled through the clothes for something that might fit over his newly altered body. “We’re living the high life now, I tell you what. God, it’s amazing to just not care.” He shuffled through hanger after hanger, some shirts and pants falling to the floor. “Oh, I meant to tell you. Don’t talk to Jonas anymore.” He twisted his entire cherry-red torso to look at her, and his face seemed frozen in a smirk. “I forbid it, in fact.”
“Screw you,” she hissed, but was ashamed that her voice was so small that she was fairly certain he didn’t even hear her with his red-encased ears. Perhaps it was all for the best, since maybe whatever she did decide to do from now on would probably have to be in whatever subterfuge she could possibly manage.
“Do I even need clothes?” he mused as he resumed his half-hearted search. “I mean, my genitals are gone. Weird.” He chuckled. “I mean, I doubt they’re really gone, just covered over by the armor. Never fear, my dear. I’ll figure out what to do about some of these details.”
As if she ever wanted to have sex with him again, at least in his current state of mind and body.
“Yeah, don’t really need clothes, I think.” He paused. “Do I even need a shower?”
“Jay, maybe you should wear clothes. I mean, you’ll stick out.”
“And I won’t stick out anyway? Shit. I’m red, babe. But I mean, here’s the thing, I don’t care. It’s liberating!”
Carolyn winced as the tapping at the door commenced, faint but there.
“OK, I’m going to have a little talk with Helen. This is ridiculous. You can get breakfast started. I got eggs, you know. You can squeeze some of those oranges for juice.”
“Greg, don’t –”
He didn’t even pretend to listen as he lumbered out of the bedroom and towards the front door.
She fled to the bathroom. As she brushed her teeth with the baking soda paste she’d made the night before, gritty and abrasive, she wondered how she would ever face Helen again after whatever this “little chat” would be. She took her time rinsing her face, over and over, water credits gushing down the drain, then sat on the toilet seat for a long time, literally shell shocked by her new husband and new circumstances. As her head dropped into her hands, she realized her nose was no longer running or stuffy. She no longer felt sick. Had she escaped Liberty 5 unscathed? She glanced at her fingers and toes, her exposed skin. It all looked normal. Sadly, she couldn’t muster much of a sense of relief given Greg’s bizarre transformation.
Finally Carolyn emerged and headed to the kitchen, surprised and a bit unsettled that Greg hadn’t yet returned; she started taking breakfast ingredients out of the fridge, decided Greg’s orange juice idea actually sounded like a crappy way to torment her — so much effort for so little juice, plus all that pulp, as she recalled from the olden days — so she decided she’d just serve it in slices.
It had been so long since she’d made anything with actual eggs instead of substitute, she’d forgotten how it even worked. She held the smooth, shelled miracle in her hand, staring at it. She caressed it with her thumb, admiring the texture. She seemed to recall that if you didn’t crack it just right, you’d fragment the shell and risk finding crunchy bits in your meal.
It was sad to realize having real food instead of pre-fab felt like work, including plumbing the brain’s memory bank for what to even do. Of course, Greg’s insistence that she become a stay-at-home fit perfectly into a life with more resources, including time, to figure such things out. But the cost.
The front door opened, then slammed; she jumped, fumbled, and dropped the egg, staring with dismay at the sad mess on the floor, the shell shattered, the contents oozing out, the yolk broken and spreading. That shell certainly wasn’t armor, and it was so much more fragile than she had remembered.
She felt forlorn. How could anything ever be OK like this?
She turned, and Greg loomed over her, redder than before somehow, dripping with what she believed to be beads of sweat, red running. Had he actually gone for a jog? He touched her arm, leaving a smear of wet red. What fresh hell is this? her mind screamed.
“Oh my God,” she said. “Are you… melting?”
“Oh, geez no. I just killed Helen. Don’t worry, Bud’s OK with it, because guess what? I logged that I took her whining, begging ass off the board and he got a ton of the best credits for taking it like a champ!” Greg replied, then laughed.
Carolyn arrested the scream in her throat as Greg then looked her up and down with intense and possibly murderous scrutiny. “Aren’t you done making breakfast yet?” he demanded, then pointed to the mess on the floor. “Did you seriously just waste an egg?”
Alyce Lomax’s short fiction has appeared previous issues of Gargoyle (and she’s thrilled to be back!), as well as publications such as Maudlin House, Dark Horses: The Magazine of Weird Fiction, Coffin Bell Journal, The MacGuffin, Pindeldyboz, and others. She also has short fiction upcoming in 34 Orchard and Penumbric Speculative Fiction Magazine. Alyce lives in Alexandria, Virginia, with her husband and two cats.