Ash ran into the house to see if her landline was working, and while she was gone, my heartbeat grew until I could feel it in my teeth, like I was chewing on it. I rode Bitchmaster to the van and tried to open the passenger door. It was locked. Slip-sliding in the gravel, I pushed to the other side. Locked. When Ash came running back down the staircase, I was tugging on the handle so hard my chair shook beneath me.

"Phone's no good," she called. "Neither are the lights. Whole town must be—"

I screamed. "Shut up and help me."

My aunt had escaped from the back room of my brain where I had locked her, and now she was running free. I saw her drinking box wine in the kitchen of her house. Her little cottage house, a mile away from school. There was something below Honaw, something that had been buried within the world since light first touched this corner of the universe, and with the prick of a knife it had awoken from watchfulness into despair, from millennia of silence into howling agony, and yet as vast and terrifying as the thought of it was, the fear I felt for Sandy was larger still. Let her be all right. Oh God, let her be all right.

Ash had the van opened and Bitchmaster loaded in thirty seconds. Not fast enough. As she slammed the trunk, I leaned across the emergency brake and laid on the horn. Come on, come on, come on. Billy and Nip were sitting in the back seat, both of them there and not there.

Ash jumped behind the wheel.

"We have to go," I told her. "We have to hurry."

"I know. I know."

She cranked the wheel, and I caught a glimpse of Honaw through her window. The view was disappearing, sky and town melting into pink. At the bottom of her driveway, she stepped on the gas. At the main road, she gunned it. The van rocketed toward Honaw. I clenched my thighs. "Come on, come on."

She twisted toward me. "Do you want to drive?"

I did. I did want to drive.

"That's what I thought," she said, turning back to the road. Her voice softened. "It's going to be okay, Joel. It's going to be okay."

I blinked. The dark behind my eyelids was moist.

A white blur slewed around the bend ahead. A horn blared. Ash yanked on the wheel and the van bounced as its tires veered onto the dirt shoulder. "Where the hell is he going?" she said, looking in the rearview mirror as the car passed out of sight behind us. "There's nothing that way."

"There's the mine," Nip said sleepily. "And your house and Billy's house and all the other houses."

"All five of them," Ash said.

One final curve in the road spit us out into the open, and what waited there silenced even Ash. We had looked down on Honaw from the perch of her driveway, but seeing it from above was not the same as actually seeing it. Power lines hung loose from leaning posts. Fallen trees lay uprooted beside the road. The first building we rolled past remained upright, but the ceiling had caved and slammed open the front door from the inside, leaving it to swing on its hinges. From that point on the devastation only grew worse.

A stop sign had impaled the windshield of a Volvo.

A bicycle stand had unbolted itself and rolled into the road, dragging a bike along with it.

Exploded planters spilled mud in front of Honaw's solitary coffee shop.

The massive wooden post of the Turn Your Money-Dreams into Cash-Money billboard protruded from the supermarket's ceiling like a mast. Every one of the building's bay windows had blown out, scattering pixie-dust shards of glass across the parking lot. Inside the store, I saw someone standing in an empty checkout lane, just standing there behind a cart full of groceries.

A fallen traffic light lay across the intersection of the highway, the one major intersection in Honaw. Ash pulled onto the sidewalk to get around it. To the west, empty lanes curved off between high rocky cliffs. To the east lay a flipped fuel truck and the pulverized wreck of a small car. My brain took in the sight and sealed it away in a glass tomb, let me gaze upon it but not touch it, feel it.

We passed the Taco Bell, its outer wall crumbled to reveal flipped tables and chairs, overturned fryers spilling grease across the kitchen. We passed the McDonald's, its playpen lying in a multicolor heap like a set of smashed Legos. Flames licked out the drive-through window. Behind the glass doors Ronald McDonald waved from a thickening gray shroud.

In the next lot stood a mountain of crumbled stone blocks that had once been the police station. As we rolled by, Ash whispered, "Where do you think the sheriff is?"

"Give you one guess," I said.

The cruiser sat parked one door down, in front of Thunderpaw. The bar's log walls were shattered, its rooftop a jumble of pointy sticks.

"Oh," said Ash.

She was driving slow, and had been for a while. We had lost our sense of urgency for the time being. We were numb. The air pulled in through the vents smelled of smoke and something else, faint but growing, something I could not and did not want to place. Just like my eyes did not want to look ahead, to the wall of dark pink in the distance.

Nip spoke in the backseat. "Put on the song. I want listen to the song."

Ash pressed a button on the dashboard and there came a grinding chnk-chnk as the CD tried to spin inside the drive. "Not today, bud."

"Put on the radio then. It's too quiet."

Ash sat up in her seat. "Shit. The radio." She fumbled at the switch, her right cheek sucked in between her teeth. For the first few turns of the dial only static came through the speakers. Then a man spoke, his voice so clear he might have been sitting in the van.

". . . reeling from a natural disaster—"

"Natural?" said Ash.

"—after an earthquake rocked Sawtooth County late this morning. So far there have been more rumors than facts regarding the occurrence, but we here at S.C. Broadcasting have the privilege of speaking with geologist Nicholas Crathers, who has just described the event to us as "supremely baffling," not only for its distance from any major fault line but also its localization. Would you care to explain yourself, Nicholas?"

A second voice, softer and tinged with a faint English accent, responded. "Thank you, Jack. Yes, baffling. Typical earthquakes show equal and opposite shockwaves traveling in two directions from say, a hundred miles of fault line. What we have here is a much more confined disturbance. Underground radars surrounding Widow's Peak demonstrate, instead, a circular pattern radiating outward from the tiny community of Honaw, with by far the most severe shockwaves spreading south through the Clusterly Foothills. Think of the ripples when you drop a pebble in a pond. Now imagine a boulder."

The van rolled to a stop in the road. My gaze was locked to the dashboard and so was Ash's, both of us leaned forward, hushed. We didn't know it then, but this conversation on the radio would prove to be our last window to the outside world.

"To our listeners out there, Honaw has a population just shy of five hundred with a remarkable working, moving population that numbers well over half that. What are you implying for those currently in town, Nicholas?"

No comment.

The host cleared his throat. "A brief internet search brings up something comparable on the east coast several years ago."

"Yes. The 2011 earthquake near Washington D.C. showed a similar pattern of shockwaves."

"Certain parties believe underground nuclear testing was responsible for that event. Your opinion?"

"My personal opinion is of no importance. As for my professional opinion, I don't have one."

"In regards to these phone calls reporting heavy military activity on the highways outside of Honaw, what do you have to say?"

"My degree is in rocks, not the machinations of the U.S. Government."

"As for the other rumors, the ones mentioning a strange cloud over—"

"Again, my degree is in rocks."

"Of course, Nicholas. Of course. What I mean to ask is, in your knowledge of the goings-on underground, can you think of anything that might possibly explain this pink, or burgundy, as some have described it . . ."

The host's voice dipped into silence and then the geologist's voice resurfaced for a single word:

"No."

The reception dropped. Ash twisted the volume dial, but nothing came through the speakers, not even static.

A whisper from the back:

"Look."

I glanced up from the dashboard at the same time as Ash. My hand inched over the seat divider, found hers, and grasped it.

From far away the fog had appeared to move slowly, but that had been an illusion. It washed toward us, swallowing the road block after block, gobbling up the crumbled and burning remains of the town, devouring smoke and daylight alike. In our final seconds in the sun, I saw the fog for what it really was, not one single mass but a mass of many, thousands and thousands of glistening tendrils, all of them reaching out, groping . . .

It took us.

Everything turned still. The world outside the van became a place of shadows, buildings silhouetted black against pink. Droplets collected on the windows, clinging to the glass like morning dew, until all trace of anything beyond the van disappeared. I was too busy watching the view dissolve to notice the air around me. By the time I saw the feelers of pinkish red sneaking through the vents, into the van, it was too late.

It had always been too late.

Ash's hand tightened in my grip and her hips jerked up, like somebody had tied a rope to her waist and yanked on it. A sound escaped her throat, not a whimper or a moan but something in between, a gasping release of breath through clamped jaws. There was a convulsive movement in the back as Billy and Nip twisted in their seats. I looked at the three of them, contorted and stiff. I watched the fog thicken inside the van and felt the oxygen thin inside my lungs.

"Fuck it," I said.

And pulled in the breath I had been fighting to hold.

A taste, like I had cut my mouth. A scent, like I was standing by the sea. Then a white-hot flashbulb exploded inside my right eye, and the eye waiting behind that eye pushed forward through the warmth and the waste, through the blood, and as my socket gave birth to new sight, the flashbulb went off again—brighter, hotter. I saw as Carl had seen down in the cave. I saw a one-winged raven squawking from the carcass of a tree. I saw a man with shredded legs crawling down a staircase turned to treacherous spikes. I saw children, broken children, twisting and moaning among splinters that had once been school buildings, and I saw the pearl-white mountains those splinters were caught between, teeth in a smoky canyon, teeth in a mouth that had cracked open the earth. I saw and did not see, I saw and I did not see. I saw and I saw and I saw and I saw and I . . .

. . . lifted my skull from the dashboard, drool hanging off my lower lip. Someone was playing the drums inside my right eye. The beats came softer and softer, a song winding down, pain fading into memory.

It was dark inside the van, no light but the dashboard's glow.

Ash sat limp behind the wheel. She turned her head to me, crying down her right cheek. Only her right cheek.

I knew what she was going to say.

"It hurts."

I nodded.

In the back Nip was lying across the seat, his head in Billy's lap. The sight tugged something up to the surface inside of me.

"You aren't my football," I said.

"What?" asked Ash.

I looked down at my hands. They were empty. Of course they were empty.

"Gedoff," Billy slurred.

Nip blinked up at him. "Yougedoff."

Billy gave him a good hard shove, and a second later Nip was rubbing his head where it had bonked against the window. There was nothing outside that window, or any of the windows. Red coated every inch of glass. We were entombed in blood.

"How long have we been . . . ?"

"I don't know," Ash said. She reached for the windshield wiper with a shaky hand. "But let's not stay any longer, yeah?"

"Yeah."

The rubber blades slopped back and forth across the glass. First the hood appeared, dripping, then a short length of road. Five yards. That doubled to ten with the low beams. Ash eased on the gas. I felt the tires fight for traction on the slick asphalt.

We began to move.

Something materialized from the fog, staggering toward us down the double yellow line. A crown of jagged shadows bobbed above its head. Black eyes caught the headlights.

The deer's antlers hung lopsided and broken. Its left foreleg dragged along the ground, clinging to its body by a strand of sinew.

As it limped past, the fog closed back around it.

____ ____

Author's Note:

Thank you for reading! If you're enjoying Poor Things, please consider hitting the vote button—it will help other readers find the story. Comments are always appreciated, too. Seriously, I love them.

Coming up: dread, devastation, and Aunt Sandy's house . . .