19-year-old Chrystina Donath had been obsessed with studying Death ever since she learned about the North Bay Bridge and Flight 180 disasters. She knew to always look out for signs of Death. She had witnessed several "freak accidents", including the deaths of Carter Horton, Evan Lewis, Candice Hooper, Alex Browning, and Ian McKinley. She had also witnessed the Devil's Flight derailing and the Train 081 crash.
She walked into her bedroom and looked for the keys to her car. She was wearing a red t-shirt with a car exploding on it. She also had blue jeans and black sneakers on.
"Alright," she said. "I wonder what type of car I will buy today. Let's see, I'm trading in a Ford Mustang, so not that... Maybe I should look at what the dealership has."
She found her keys on top of a newspaper titled, "PILE-UP ON ROUTE 23 KILLS 18." She quickly read the headline as she grabbed her keys. Chrystina walked to her door. However, at the last moment, she remembered that she needed the keys to her apartment, too. She grabbed her apartment keys and walked out the door.
She got a text from her brother, Justin. It read, "C U AT MY WEDDING. REMEMBR, 3 MONTHS LEFT TO LIVE. b4 it :)." Chrystina was a little freaked out by the text, but Justin was always scaring her. Therefore, Chrystina had hated him for years. She decided she would rather die than go to his wedding.
She got into a red Ford Mustang. She started the car and got onto the highway. An hour and a half later, Chrystina arrived at a car dealership called 180 Car Company. Chrystina had heard it was a branch of some business called the 180 Incorporation. An electric sign below said, "WE HAVE 180 CARS LEFT IN OUR LOT." Chrystina pulled into a parking lot and got out of her car. She knew to be cautious, seeing as there were two signs that had 180 on them. She noticed a junkyard next to the dealership, fit with a crane to crush trash to burn. She walked inside and immediately saw many people in line to buy cars. There was no one but her there to sell.
She managed to sell her car in about five minutes, which was about the time it took for the buy cars line to get one person shorter. Justin texted her, asking where she was. A television on the wall closest to her had a news channel on. The reporter was talking about a major racing accident that caused the stands to collapse on the guests.
About two minutes later, a teenage girl named Ashley Lighter was walking on the road in front of the dealership and nearly got hit by a purple SUV that swerved to avoid hitting her, therefore colliding with an oncoming F-250, which started to roll. An eighteen-wheeler carrying gas and about to hit the SUV ended up sideways in a ditch trying to go around it. The F-250 rolled into the gas tank, which made both vehicles go up in flames and explode. Ashley called 911.
By that time, everyone was watching as a flaming part from the F-250 made a big hole in the SUV and ignited it, which made a big explosion and sent flaming parts at cars in the lot, which in turn exploded, thus expanding the range of cars on fire. One part from a green Chevy Malibu ended up hitting and holding a control in the junkyard crane, which was carrying an abandoned car. The crane started spinning.
The rope holding the car broke and the car smashed into the dealership building and crushed a redhead woman named Blake Moore. The crane continued to spin until the bottom lit on fire and blew into pieces. The crane fell onto the dealership, crushing a teenager named Cheng Tzun and a toddler named Harvey Moore.
Everybody ran out of the building, only to get showered by car pieces. A van next to a man named Dustin Lube ignited and exploded, launching him into the windshield of a fire engine, which swerved and caused a pile-up of first responder vehicles, which were lit on fire by parts in the dealership. The first responder vehicles blew up in a huge explosion. The electrical sign under the dealership name fell on a teenage girl named Cindy Lighter. Her older sister, Joplin Lighter, screamed.
Joplin was then crushed by the sign with the dealership name. Chrystina saw an elderly car saleswoman named Hailey Cunningham hiding under a car with a flaming engine. The car exploded, sending the woman flying into a bulletproof window, which then broke.
Chrystina and a man named Spencer Rattle started running with several other people. However, a Dodge Ram exploded and sent a flaming door flying, which bisected all of them except Chrystina, Spencer, and a select few. A man named Ling Zhu tripped and fell. He was then crushed by a flaming car engine. A firefighter who had survived the explosion, Timothy Chi, was obliterated by a car tire sent flying from a car blowing up. Another man named Dave Lawton kept running, only to be propelled by an explosion into a sideways pole, which impaled him through the side. Spencer was then killed by another flying tire.
Meanwhile, Ashley watched the entire thing from the road and got her phone out to call 911 for more first responders to come, since the ones that came were all killed. An abandoned car in the junkyard that had not been crushed yet caught on fire and exploded. A part of the windshield was propelled towards the girl and vertically sliced her head in half from the back.
Chrystina kept running, but she tripped and fell. She attempted to take her phone out to call 911, but the entire dealership exploded, burning her to death.
Chrystina woke up in reality with a scream. The people in the buying line next to her looked at her like she was crazy. Chrystina immediately knew she had a premonition and tried to remember the signs to see how much time she had to get everyone away. As she thought, Justin texted her asking where she was.
The lady at the counter said, "You going to sell your car or what?"
Chrystina looked at her like she was Death itself. Then she realized that the lady behind the counter was Hailey Cunningham, who was slammed into a window by an explosion in the premonition. The TV nearest her started playing a news story about a racing accident that caused the stadium to collapse on the guests.
Chrystina got up and said, "We all have to get out of here. The whole dealership is going to explode as a result of a car accident. We're all going to die!"
Everyone looked at her like she was on crack.
Hailey looked at her and told her, "If that is a joke, it's not funny. People dying is not funny!"
Chrystina said, "I'm serious. This is not a joke. We have to get away from here!"
They all heard a horn honking and saw a purple SUV swerving to avoid hitting a girl but ended up hitting an oncoming Ford F-250.
Chrystina told them, " That's the accident that set off a chain reaction that kills all of us! Come on!"
Chrystina ran, as the F-250 crashed into the gasoline tank of an eighteen-wheeler, which exploded, sending flaming parts to cars in the lot, which in turn caught on fire and exploded. Several people followed her. They got to a safe distance.
Chrystina saw the van explode and a man hit the windshield of a fire truck, which caused a pileup of emergency vehicles. She ran to a fire truck and pulled a firefighter out. They ran over to the other people that left the dealership as the emergency vehicles exploded in a huge ball of fire. The dealership signs fell and a few more cars exploded, one of them being near a sideways pole.
Chrystina knew that the girl in the road was next to die, and so she ran over to her and jumped to the ground, carrying the teenager with her as the windshield shard flew over them.
The dealership exploded. All the survivors had trouble staying on their feet with the force of the blow.
Later that day, all the survivors except the toddler were sitting in a room in the Mount Abraham Police Department. An FBI agent with a nametag that said "Agent Lisa Dong, Interrogation" came into the room. She told Chrystina to follow her.
"So, you are Chrystina Donath, 19 years old, and you claimed to have had a vision of a chain reaction that resulted in the 180 Car Company dealership exploding, moments before the chain reaction started. Correct?" asked Lisa.
"Yes, that is correct," replied Chrystina.
"Earlier this day, a young man named Nick O'Bannon had a premonition of the McKinley Speedway collapsing on the guests as a result of a racing accident. Do you have any relations with him or his girlfriend, Lori Milligan, at all?"
"No."
"What about their friends Hunt Wynorski and Janet Cunningham?"
"No-wait. Cunningham? That's the last name of the car saleswoman I saved. Her name is Hailey Cunningham."
"I already talked to her," said Lisa. "She is Janet's grandmother. So, Mrs. Cunningham is the only relation you have to Hunt, Nick, Janet, and Lori?"
"I think so," answered Chrystina.
"You are good to go then. I already found out the cause of the chain reaction. I just wanted to know if you had relations to Nick and his friends."
Chrystina walked out of the room and went to see the other survivors. She found them, and she sat down to talk.
"Have any of you heard of the North Bay Bridge collapse?"
None of them nodded or said anything.
"What about Flight 180?"
Everyone started nodding and talking at once. When they stopped, Chrystina spoke up again.
"Have any of you heard about the Route 23 pileup and the Devil's Flight derailing?"
Immediately, an earsplitting roar erupted from the others. Several police officers ran into the room with guns, tasers, and handcuffs in hand. They saw that there was nothing to worry about, and they left. The other survivors already knew about the accidents, and how someone had a vision and saved them. But they didn't know that the survivors started dying one by one in the order they were meant to. Chrystina informed them about the "freak accidents" after each disaster and how they could all see signs.
Chrystina realized how lucky everyone was that they all believed her. Every other disaster had at least one person that didn't believe all the stuff with Death.
Three days later, all the survivors met up at a cafe called Koffee King. A purple SUV swerved to avoid hitting a cat in the middle of the road. Dave noticed the purple car was about to crash into the cafe. When it drove inside and towards Chrystina, she froze. Dave threw himself onto her and pushed her out of the way. She was safe.
"Backwards," she said.
"Backwards?" asked Dave.
Chrystina replied, "Death is working backwards. There must have been another disaster before this that still has survivors."
"Do you think," questioned Ashley, "that maybe there are survivors from the Train 081 derailing that were meant to die?"
"Wait a minute," said Chrystina. "Agent Dong said there was some crash at a speedway in McKinley, Pennsylvania."
"The location of the Devil's Flight derailment," added Hailey. "But we don't know anything about the visionary or the survivors."
"With all due respect, Miss Cunningham," said Chrystina, "That is not true. You do know one of them- Janet Cunningham."
"Oh, right. I must've forgotten with grief."
Spencer spoke up. "I'm going to go out for a smoke," he said.
"Be careful," said Joplin.
"I will."
Spencer walked outside the cafe and took a cigar out.
"I still am surprised that a car managed to drive into the cafe," said Cindy. She looked over, and the car was gone, and the window and wall were good as new.
"Where's the car?!" exclaimed Cheng.
"I don't know," replied Dave.
Meanwhile, a propane tank on the roof of the building above Spencer started to move towards the edge with the high winds pushing it.
"We may never know all of Death's mysteries," said Chrystina. "I mean, Death even managed to create a bomb out of oxygen, therefore killing Clear Rivers and Eugene Dix."
The propane tank fell off the roof.
"Hear, hear," replied Dave.
The propane tank landed right next to Spencer and exploded. The explosion sent a large window shard at Ashley. It cut through her head right above her mouth. The smoke finally cleared, and Chrystina saw that Spencer was still alive. His lung, however, had been punctured. Chrystina also saw Ashley's dead body. They all heard the ambulance sirens coming.
Spencer became unconscious. Dave performed CPR on him but couldn't revive him. Spencer was dead.
Dave backed up in horror as the ambulance approached. The speeding ambulance almost hit Dave- but Chrystina pulled him out of the way.
The next day, Chrystina was at home watching TV when a news story about a mechanic being pushed by a CO2 cannister into a fence, which diced him in the back of the torso. After all this death, she decided to visit Bludworth Funeral Homes, where she would be able to get information on how to completely cheat Death.
"You can't cheat Death," said mortician William Bludworth the next day, who was pushing a large tray, which was carrying the body of Spencer on it, into a fire.
"Not true," said Chrystina. "Kimberly Corman and Thomas Burke cheated it. Sam Lawton and Nathan Sears cheated it, even if it was for only two weeks. How do you beat Death? There is a technique you are keeping from us."
"Well," started Bludworth as he used a lift to move the body of Ashley into a black coffin labeled 180 Coffin Company, A Branch of The 180 Incorporation. "There is one way to get Death off your back until you're old. Follow the signs, stop the start, and save many at once. But be careful. It's nearly impossible to tell red herrings from real things or nothing at all. If you can do it, all of Death's Lists will be invalidated."
"Stop the start?"
"I cannot help you figure out this puzzle," replied Bludworth, who was now walking away.
"Thanks for the advice," said Dave. "Creepy guy."
"Dave Lawton," said Bludworth as he turned around and came back.
"How do you know my name?"
"You want to be cremated after you die. Similar to how your son so tragically died on that plane."
"What is he talking about, Dave?" asked Chrystina.
"Sam Lawton. He was my son."
"He was your son?"
"Yes," replied Dave.
"Well, I have to clean up this tray now," said Bludworth about Spencer's ashes.
The survivors started leaving, one by one. When Dave and Chrystina were walking out the door, Bludworth turned around, pointed at them, and spoke.
"I'll see you soon."
Five minutes later, all the survivors were in a red van driving to McKinley, Pennsylvania. Dave was trying to think of what Bludworth had meant.
"Does anyone here think they may know the meaning of 'stop the start'"?
"Follow the signs, stop the start, and save many at once, is what Mr. Bludworth said," replied Chrystina. "Maybe he meant that if we stop a major disaster and save lots of people, we can live to old age."
"Well, that obviously leaves out amusement park disasters," said Timothy.
"Not necessarily," said Dave. "Let's say, something happens and a roller coaster derails and causes a chain reaction that makes every ride malfunction and fall apart, killing thousands of people."
"And how are we supposed to stop that?"
"Apply the emergency brakes on the roller coaster."
"Let's just stop at a hotel, stay there a couple days, and figure out what the mortician was implying," Chrystina said.
Two days later, they had figured out that Chrystina was right. They got back on the road and eventually arrived at the Springfield Centre Mall. They stopped to check it out, since they would figure out where the survivors of the McKinley Speedway crash were later.
While they were shopping, they saw a woman get her shoelace stuck on an escalator. The lace broke and the woman told her friend, "I should have seen that coming."
A while later, a chain reaction caused a fire to start in a theater from Tagert Theaters. The fire made it onto barrels of combustible fluids, and they exploded, sending debris to kill almost everyone in Theater 13. Two people ran out of the theater right before the whole thing exploded, killing many more. An escalator broke, and the woman with the broken shoelace got caught in the gears. The chain to an air conditioning unit fell into Chrystina's hand, and all the other survivors were crushed by the unit behind her.
Chrystina woke up with a scream.
"What's wrong?!" exclaimed Dave.
"The mall."
"Well, what starts it?"
"Wait, I think this is a red herring. I don't die in the premonition. According to several survivors of Death's List, when the visionary doesn't die in the vision, that normally means it's a lure by Death."
All the survivors ran out of the mall to see if they could find anything to prove otherwise. They saw smoke coming out of one window, but it went away after a couple minutes.
"Wait," started Chrystina. "There was smoke. That meant there was a fire. Did someone else also have a vision and did they put it out? Was this a lure for someone else?"
They heard sirens, and an ambulance arrived at the scene. A few minutes later, the medics put a stretcher with a man with a bandage around his arm into the back of the ambulance.
A news van with the label 180 News Media, A Branch of The 180 Incorporation was driving to the mall. The survivors walked across the street, with Chrystina at the front and Timothy at the back. The news van got closer. Timothy was the last one on the street...
The speeding news van hit Timothy at full force. Blood was splattered everywhere.
It took weeks to track down Nick, Janet, and Lori, the last survivors of the McKinley Speedway accident. Chrystina found them inside a cafe called Death by Caffeine. Surprisingly, so one else had died in that time period. When they walked in, Chrystina saw a woman and a man at one table, two women and a man at another, and a table by the window with Nick O'Bannon, Janet Cunningham, and Lori Milligan.
"Janet!" exclaimed Hailey.
"Grandmother!" replied Janet.
"I'm sorry about Hunt," Hailey said.
"It's fine. I broke up with him before the racetrack accident."
"Ugh," said Lori. "Why are you mentioning that again? Now Nick is going to get into the whole Death stuff again."
"Death stuff?" asked the man with the two women, who appeared to be sisters now that Chrystina could get a better look. "It's not just stuff. Guess who we are."
"Who?" asked Nick. "Who are you?"
"I'm Kevin Fischer. This is Wendy Christensen," he pointed to the older sister. "And this is Julie Christensen," he pointed to the younger sister.
"Wait a minute," said the man at the other table. "I thought you hadn't seen each other since Train 081."
"And I thought you two hadn't seen each other since the death of Brian Gibbons. What do you say about that, Kimberly Corman and Thomas Burke?"
Kimberly spoke up, "How do you know our names?"
"We were bound to look up the names of all known visionaries and their friends," said Julie.
"Honestly, all the times we have been skipped by Death, I'm surprised it didn't come up with a foolproof plan to get us all," added Wendy.
A few minutes later, most of the survivors were talking to Wendy, Julie, Kevin, Kimberly, and Thomas, as Nick, Lori, and Janet needed a break. Only Hailey was standing in line for a drink. Some scaffolding fell into the street in front of the cafe, and a truck swerved to avoid hitting it. Nick said something to Lori and Janet, and they all looked out the window to see the truck about to crash into the cafe. They stood up, and Janet got crushed by a wheel, Lori was internally decapitated when she was crushed against a pole, Nick was slammed against the wall and broke his skull, Hailey was crushed by the pole, and a large piece of debris crushed Joplin's head against the wall. Kimberly and Thomas were both nearly impaled by a flying pole, but Chrystina and Dave pulled them back.
Cindy was receiving therapy the next day while there was construction for a building outside. There a slightly malfunctioning crane that ended up short-circuiting, and a fire started on it. It exploded, and it sent a fiery chain through a window to behead Cindy.
Three days later, everyone was in Mount Abraham, New York. Blake was safe proofing the house to keep her and Harvey safe. Cheng was safe proofing his apartment. Wendy, Julie, and Kevin were buying a new house and making it safe. Eventually, every home was safe.
Or so they thought. The ceiling to Harvey's room collapsed on him that night after lightning weakened the structure. Shortly after, Cheng was killed when lightning struck his house, broke his window, and electrocuted him.
The next day, Wendy, Julie, Kevin, Blake, Chrystina, Dave, Thomas, and Kimberly met up at the Coffee Beanery cafe. They discussed where they should go to stop a disaster.
"Maybe we should go to New York City," said Blake. "That may be the best place here in New England."
So, they all drove to NYC. They parked at the Empire State Building and went inside. They went up to the 50th floor to see if they could see any potential disasters. Meanwhile, a silver truck parked on the side of the street in front of the building. There was a timed bomb in the back. The guy inside got out of his truck and walked away.
After five minutes, the bomb exploded, completely destroying the lower levels of the skyscraper and several nearby buildings. The Empire State Building started to fall over, and Blake, Thomas, and Julie fell to their deaths. Chrystina held on, but she started to fall. She was saved by Dave. She grabbed on to a pole and Dave fell. Kevin was killed when a sliding desk pushed him out. Finally, the Empire State Building hit the ground and Wendy, Chrystina, and Kimberly all died at the same time.
All three woke up in reality. They started talking at once.
"Girls, girls!" said Dave. "What's going on?"
"That truck," Wendy pointed at the silver truck.
"It has a bomb!" added Kimberly.
The survivors tried to take an elevator down, but the down button didn't light up and the floor sensor didn't show anything different other than ^76. It took them three minutes to run down fifty flights of stairs, mainly because people kept tripping and falling. They got in the bed of the truck and lifted up a sheet to find the bomb.
"How do we disable it?!" asked Blake.
"There's no buttons, keyholes, anything!" said Thomas.
"Wait!" said Chrystina. "It has a reset button. One of the tiny ones. Does anyone have a pencil or something?"
"Yeah, I do," replied Julie. She gave her pencil to Chrystina.
The timer was down to 13 seconds. Chrystina put the tip in the hole and pushed the reset button. She noticed the bomb number was 18008166613.
7..6..5..4..3..2...
The timer had stopped. The bomb reset, and the Empire State Building was safe. Death had truly been cheated for the first time. All of Death's Lists were invalidated.
Meanwhile, Bludworth was walking nearby when he saw the survivors. He stopped and looked at them.
"Good job, Blake, Dave, Chrystina, Wendy, Julie, Kevin, Kimberly, and Thomas. You all just be careful now."
THE END