TWENTY-ONE
Wendy and Kevin crept uncertainly through the dimly-lit rows of gardening implements and construction supplies at the Home Land home improvement warehouse. Home Land was one of those giant, nationwide franchise joints that show up in small towns and put all the local hardware stores out of business.
The store's logo was a sort of humanoid creature with a house for a head, windows for eyes and a door for a mouth. It was holding a hammer and a measuring tape. Clearly it was meant to look friendly and helpful, but to Kevin it just looked creepy and sinister. The store had been closing up for the night when they got there, but Wendy had convinced the manager on duty that they needed to talk to Ian and Erin right away. He has waved them back to the lawn and garden section and forgotten about them the moment they were out of his sight.
The huge, ceiling-high steel shelves were crammed with plywood, sheet rock and every tool known to man, all looming over them like deadly traps as they wandered through the enormous, warehouse-style store, looking for signs of the two Goth kids. Rakes and chainsaws, axes and garden weasels, and screw drivers and hammers all glinted menacingly from the shadows. Wendy was anxious beside Kevin, glancing nervously around, and Kevin realized that they were surrounded by a thousand possible violent deaths. If there was a place where one could expect a horrific, accidental death, this was it.
As they turned a corner, they heard a strange, loud, compressed air sound from nearby. FWWWT! FWWWT! FWWWT! Then something squeaked up above, and with a flutter, a pigeon dropped to the floor in front of them. It twitched for a moment, then lay still, dead. Wendy and Kevin froze in their tracks, but nothing more happened.
"What the fuck was that?" Kevin whispered.
"I don't know," Wendy said.
They jumped as a tinny walkie-talkie crackled somewhere near by. Kevin recognized Erin's voice beneath the static.
"Hey, Zip," she said. "Cut those plywood orders yet?"
Ian's real world voice answered her electronic one, very close by.
"No, not yet, Pip," he replied. "Trayne's been all edgy and impossible since his girlfriend have him the boot and he says he wants me to get rid of these pigeons first. Stupid rats with wings keep setting off the motion sensors."
Wendy and Kevin looked around the next shelf and saw Ian, his skinny body with its safety orange employee apron, green polo shirt and tan pants looking like it belonged to someone else, strangely incongruous beneath his narrow, white face, dyed black hair and heavy steel piercings. He was striking an action movie pose, looking up at the ceiling with a huge hydraulic nailgun held in both hands like some futuristic ray gun. He aimed and fired again.
FWWWT! FWWWT! FWWWT!
Another pigeon dropped, its wing bent at a strange and unnatural angle.
"They're coming out of the walls," Ian cried in mock terror. He fired again, convulsively squeezing off ten shots in a row. "Game over, man. Game over."
Nails clanged off the girders high above and tinkled down through the shelving. Kevin shook his head.
"Stay frosty, Hudson," Kevin said.
Wendy looked at Kevin as if he had lost his mind –clearly not a big Aliens fan.
Ian jumped at the sound of Kevin's voice and spun around, drawing down on Kevin and Wendy like a commando on street patrol in Faluja. Wendy and Kevin threw their hands up.
"Jesus Christ, Ian," Kevin said. "Don't shoot."
"You scared the shit out of me," Ian said. He relaxed his pose, lowering the nailgun. "What the hell are you two doing here? We're closed." He looked down at their clothes with a nasty sneer. "And what on earth are you wearing? Why are you dressed up like College football players?"
"We've got something to tell you," Wendy said. "It's about the crash. And what's happened since."
Ian made a disdainful face. "Oh please," he said. "Spare me more of your superstitious, anti-rational claptrap."
"You can decide that for yourself after we tell you," Kevin said. "Where's Erin? She should hear this too."
Ian sighed and pulled his walkie-talkie from the pocket of his apron. "Hey, Pip," he said into the mic. "Where are you?"
"The land of nuts and screws," Erin's voice said, jittery with static.
"That pretty much describes this whole town," Ian said.
Erin's laughter bubbled from the little speaker. "Aisle six," she said.
"I'm coming to you, with outland interlopers no less," Ian said. "They are here to tell us of their quaint native superstitions."
"Who?" Erin asked.
"You'll see," Ian said.
He pocketed the walkie-talkie, then stepped up into a Raymond Gofer Easi Order Picker forklift. Ignoring the safety harness that hung from the seat, he fired up the electric vehicle. He looked at Wendy and Kevin.
"Want a lift?" Ian asked.
Wendy and Kevin, both intensely sensitive to the possibilities of potential mechanical mayhem, shook their heads adamantly.
"No thanks," Wendy said. "That's okay. We'd rather walk."
"Well," Ian said as he put the forklift in gear and started down the aisle, "I hope you can keep up with my mighty four miles an hour."
They followed him through the cavernous space, waiting as the forklift made slow ponderous turns, until they at last found Erin, also wearing an orange apron and the bland, weirdly normal Home Land uniform, pushing an industrial size shopping cart piled high with random items. She put a box of three-eighths inch screws back onto a shelf of screws of various sizes.
"Look, Pip," said Ian, as he swung into the aisle. "Visitors."
Erin looked up. She raised a questioning eyebrow. "Well, well," she said. "If it isn't the popular kids, come to mock us in our wage slave shame. What do they want?"
"We want to tell you something about the crash," Wendy answered. "Something important."
Erin sighed and rolled her thickly lined eyes. "I'm sick to death of the stupid crash," she said. "If I never hear anything more about it it'll be too soon."
"It might be too late if you don't hear about it," Kevin told her, feeling testy and trying not to let it show.
"All right, all right," Erin said. "But walk while we talk. We can't get out of here until I restock all the stupid shit our pinhead customers can't manage to return to the shelves themselves. I don't want to spend another minute more in my itchy polyester norm costume than I absolutely have to."
"Al right," Wendy said.
Kevin could see her steeling herself for this difficult task as they began following Erin while she pushed the shopping cart down the aisle at a snail's pace. Ian move slowly alongside them in the forklift.
"Well, the first thing you should know," Wendy continued, "is that Lewis… Lewis is dead."
"You mean Frank Cheek," said Ian. "It was all over the news this morning. Revolting. I thought you two where there?"
Wendy nodded. "We were," she said, "but that was yesterday afternoon. Lewis died this morning. He was lifting weights and he slipped and fell on one of the machines. His head…"
She stopped, shuddering with the memory and unable to finish.
"His head was crushed," said Kevin, completing her sentence for her. "We were there too. Close enough to get a fucking brain shower. Hence the change of clothes."
Erin and Ian stared at them, mouths agape and silent.
"Lewis is really dead?" Ian finally asked. "You're not just fucking with us?"
"He's really dead," Wendy said. "It'll be on the news tomorrow for sure."
Erin frowned, shaking her head so her dreadlocks quivered around her pale face.
"Holy shit," she said. "You guys are like the fucking twin angels of death. People keep on dying all around you."
Wendy tuned white at this accusation. It was way too close to the fears she had expressed before, but Kevin shook his head, vehement.
"We don't think it has anything to do with us," he said. "At least not in that way. We were actually going to see Lewis to warn him that we thought he was in danger."
"Danger from what?" asked Ian. "You knew that he was going to slip? Don't tell me McKinley's own low rent Cassandra had another one of her mystical visions."
"Well no. I mean yes, kind of. Not a vision… Just…" Kevin sighed. "I guess we better start from the beginning."
"Kevin's theory," Wendy said, "is that everybody who got off the ride before it crashed was supposed to die that night. That somehow us getting off threw some sort of celestial accounting out of whack, and now something –Death, the universe, fate, whatever- is trying to balance the books by killing us all off one by one."
Ian and Erin stared at them.
"That is without a doubt the single stupidest thing I have ever heard," Ian said at last. "There is no such thing as fate. Death isn't some malevolent entity with a scythe and a book of names. The universe is just a series of random events. There is no order. It is only the deep-seated human desire to have reasons for everything, to assign blame and motive to accidents, that makes people think there's some grand scheme behind everything. You guys are thinking like medieval peasants."
Kevin resisted the urge to reach out and shake Ian and make him listen. Ian had gone into full lecture mode now and was not even remotely willing to listen to anything they had to say.
"Show them the pictures, Wendy," Kevin said through gritted teeth.
Wendy nodded and fished in her bag until she found the picture of Ashley and Ashlyn. She handed it to Ian, who held it with one hand while he drove with the other.
"Great," Ian sneered. "Two scoops of dick bait and a school of hungry dicks. What exactly is the significance of this supposed to be?"
He held the photo out to Erin, who looked at it with similar dismissive contempt.
"How did Ashley and Ashlyn die?" Wendy asked.
"They burned up in tanning beds," Erin replied. "A more fitting death for a pair of looks-obsessed fashion whores I truly can not imagine."
"Now look at the picture," Wendy said. "See, they look like they're on fire."
Erin rolled her eyes. "Oh, please," she said. "You have got to be kidding."
"Come on," Ian said. "They're just lit up by an off screen red light. Are you trying to tell me that somehow predicted their deaths? I'm sorry. I'm afraid you are just not overwhelming me with your application of the scientific method."
"Okay fine," Wendy said, snatching the picture back. "Laugh all you want, but I'm not done." She took another picture out of the pile, but held it close to her chest. "So, tell me. How did Frank Cheek die?"
"It was the cooling fan from Kevin's truck, right?" Erin said. "They said it broke loose when that moving truck rear ended Kevin's ride, and it flew out and chopped Frank's head off."
"Right," Wendy said. She handed the picture of Frank to Ian. "So, what does that look like to you?"
Ian pulled back, eyes wide. He curled his lip. "Well, isn't this charming," he said. "Surely it wasn't you who shot this piece of panty fetish pornography."
Kevin flushed. "I took that one," he said. "But that's not important."
"Your vulgarity exceeds even my expectations, Fischer," Ian said, arching a withering eyebrow. He passed the picture to Erin. "And exactly what are we supposed to gain from this bit of lowbrow sleaze?"
"You're totally missing the point," said Kevin. "Look behind the skirt. Who's behind the skirt?"
Erin peered closer, squinting. "Is that…" She touched the surface of the photo with one black fingernail. "Is it Frank?"
"That's right," Wendy replied. "And what's that right up above him?"
"A ceiling fan. It looks like… well…" Erin faltered as the truth started to slowly sink in. "Like it's chopping his head off."
"Give me that back," Ian snapped, reaching for the photo.
Erin passed the picture back to him and he examined it more closely. He frowned, as if troubled, but then tossed it back at Wendy.
"Random nonsense," he said. "It doesn't mean a thing. It could have been anyone in the background of that shot."
"That's the point," Kevin said, slow and deliberate. "It could have been anyone, but it wasn't. It was Frank. And now Frank is dead."
Ian made a skeptical face. "And I suppose you have a picture of Lewis too," he said. "A shot that is somehow suggestive of him getting his head crushed by weights? I can't even imagine what that would look like."
Wendy tucked the picture of Frank back in the pile and pulled out the one of Lewis, appearing headless with the weight blurring above him. She passed it to Ian. Ian stared at it for a long moment, and licked his lips. He passed the picture to Erin. She paled, kohl smudged eyes wide.
"Wow," she said quietly.
"You are not actually buying this bullshit, are you?" Ian said to Erin. "I mean, really, how do we even know whether or not these pictures are actually legit? You can fake pretty much anything with Photoshop these days."
Kevin's brows creased, baffled. "Why the hell would we bother to fake something like this?" he asked.
"Oh, I don't know," said Ian. "Maybe to give credibility to your new girlfriend's mystical vision?"
Kevin narrowed his eyes, coldly furious. "Wendy is not my girlfriend," he said through clenched teeth.
Ian shrugged, irritatingly casual. "Could have fooled me," he said. "And with poor sainted Jason less than a month in the ground." He made a mild, scolding tut tut sound with his tongue against his teeth. "You don't waste any time, Fischer, I'll give you that."
Kevin felt a red flush of rage and he cocked his fist back to let Ian have it, but Wendy grabbed his arm, pulling him back.
"Don't," she said. "This is not helping."
"Yeah," Erin said, stepping in front of Ian. "Come on, knock it off, Ian."
"Wendy," Kevin said, shaking off her grip and turning away, fists clenching and unclenching at his sides. "Please tell me that I am not in Ian's photo, because I'll tell you, I'm about an inch away from killing this smug little fucker myself."
"All right," Ian said. "Look… Even if these photos are real, that doesn't make them magical oracles of future doom. I can see how, to a superstitious, under-educated mind, this series of pictures might seem to give an impression of prescience, but… but it's all bullshit. I bet if you gave me any random pictures of kids who had died, and then told me how they died, I bet I could find something in each picture that would seem to suggest some 'warning' from beyond. But it's all after the fact. It's like looking at a Rorschach inkblot after the psychologist has told you what to look for. You're going to see whatever you want to see whether it's really there or not."
"So," Erin said, uneasily, as she handed the picture back to Wendy. "Is there really a photo of Ian? Is there one of me too?"
"Yeah," Wendy said. "There is. It shows the two of you together, but it doesn't seem quite as obvious as the others. Still, it seems clear that something's going on."
She sorted through the stack of photos until she found the right one and then handed the picture to Erin. Erin looked down at it, silent and Kevin looked over her shoulder. It showed her and Ian standing together at the shooting gallery counter. A row of pointed tan banners hung above them. In the foreground, Erin held a rifle in one hand, and was holding her other hand up before her face like a famous celebrity trying to avoid being photographed by paparazzi. Her glossy black fingernails reflected the flash of the camera, like glistening drops of crude oil. Ian was slightly behind her. His arms were also up, trying to block his face, but they were a little too high, forming an X just above his forehead. He looked more embarrassed than frightened.
Erin scowled, relieved that the photo wasn't scarier and clearly happy to be able to scoff again.
"So what?" she said, sarcastically. "This proves that I'm going to OD on nail polish? And Ian is going to die of acute embarrassment?"
She handed the photo to Ian. He looked relieved too, though he would probably never admit it. He laughed, a short, derisive snort.
"Okay," he said. "See, obviously your theory kind of runs out of steam on closer examination." He tapped the glossy surface of the photo. "I don't exactly see the specter of Death leaning over me and tapping me on the shoulder with his bony finger here."
Kevin glowered, annoyed at Ian's flippancy and still wanting very badly to knock some sense into him.
"Well, I don't know," Wendy said. "There's a gun in the picture. You don't see that as significant?"
"Do you own a gun?" Kevin asked. "Either of you?"
"Of course," Ian said, voice dripping with sarcasm. "Bin Laden ain't got nothing on me. Don't you watch television? All us doom and gloom, gothy geek, trench coat Mafia types are armed to the teeth and ready to go on a wild school shooting spree at the drop of a hat."
"He's kidding," Erin said. "We both own several antique knives, but honestly, guns are just so… I don't now… so uncouth."
"How about any crazy relatives with guns?" Kevin asked. "Any neighbors with itchy trigger fingers?"
"The McKinley's don't have neighbors," Ian said. "And all my crazy relatives are long dead."
"I don't know any of my neighbors," Erin said. "Except Mr. Show, the old hippie, but he has a poster on his door that says 'Make Love Not War' so I'm guessing he's not much of a gun nut. A dirty old man maybe, but not a gun nut."
"Okay, fine," Kevin said, more annoyed than ever. "We're just trying to warn you. Just trying to save your lives. We thought, since you're both so smart, maybe you could help us figure out how to get out of this, how to stop it, but forget it. Me and Wendy have plenty of time. See, you guys come before us, so that means that until you're dead, we're safe."
"What do you mean, 'we're next?'" Ian asked, looking up sharply. "What kind of vindictive shit is that?"
Wendy looked over at Kevin, as if trying to decide whether to subject themselves to further ridicule by telling Erin and Ian the rest of the theory. He nodded in silent support.
At last Wendy sighed and spoke.
"So far," she said, "everybody who has died after the crash has died in the order they were seated in the roller coaster –in the order they would have died." She held up her fingers and started counting them off. "Ashley and Ashlyn in car seven. Frank Cheek in car eight. Lewis in nine." She looked up at Erin. "You and Ian were in car ten right? And then we were behind you in car twelve."
"The only people we can't account for are the two who were sitting between you and us, the ones in car eleven," Kevin said. "Wendy has a picture, but it's blocked and we can't tell who they are." He looked from Ian to Erin. "You two don't happen to remember who they were or what they looked like?"
"Wait a minute," said Ian derisively. "You're trying to tell us that everybody was supposed to die in this neat regimented order, just like they were seated on the ride? That is completely preposterous. Death is anything but orderly and crashes are by their nature chaotic and unpredictable. A person closer to the front could be mortally wounded, but survive a few painful minutes longer, while someone further back could be killed instantly. There is no 'order.' It's an accident, not a line at the ice cream truck." Ian frowned. "And what do you mean you can't remember the people sitting directly in front of you? How is that possible? Or were you just too busy making goo goo eyes at each other while your respective keepers were out of site and out of mind?"
Kevin had to turn his back on Ian and start a slow count to ten. It would feel so fucking good to beat the miserable little shit into a bloody pulp, to send him tumbling ass over end into a pile of hedge clippers, but that sudden violent fantasy made him shudder. What if Kevin was part of Ian's death? What if Ian was supposed to goad Kevin into shoving him and starting off the whole deadly chain reaction? Kevin let his breath out slowly. If that was the case then Death would just need to find another method. Kevin flat out refused to play that shit.
Oblivious to Kevin's inner conflict, Wendy sighed with annoyance and turned back to Erin.
"You don't remember either, huh?" she asked.
"Sorry," Erin replied, shrugging. "Not a clue. No wait," she cried suddenly. "Yes I do. Now I remember. It was this guy, with, like, a big black cloak with a pointed hood. And you couldn't see his face, only these two glowing red eyes. The attendant took away his sickle before the ride started."
"Okay," Wendy said, snatching back the picture of Erin and Ian. "Okay. Go ahead and laugh. You think I care if you think we're crazy? If it saves our lives, I don't care if the whole world thinks we're crazy. At least we're trying to do something about it. At least we're not just giving in to it."
"Giving in to 'it?'" Ian asked. "Into what? There is no 'it.' Death isn't a person. We just covered that."
"I don't know," Kevin said. "Maybe it's more like some kind of force."
Erin hefted a ten-pound bag of plant food out of the shopping cart and tossed it to Ian.
"Third shelf," she said.
Ian draped the bag over the rail and pushed a lever. The forklift platform began rising.
"A force is just… a force, like gravity or magnetism." Ian jogged the lift a bit to the left to get closer to the shelf. "It's only transferred energy. It has no consciousness, malicious or otherwise."
As Kevin watched Ian rising above them, a tiny wind chime tinkled gently beside him. He saw Wendy turn towards the colorful chimes, hanging from a sign offering them for sale at a discount, and he followed her gaze. The chimes were swaying slightly, though there was no breeze inside the store. He turned around to look first one way and then the other. There was a display of electric fans on sale nearby, but none of them were on or even plugged in. He turned back to Wendy and saw her shiver, face suddenly pale and lips pressed down into a tight line.
Ian continued his lecture as he positioned the lift next to the shelf.
"A force has no goals, no desires," he said. "It has no awareness that it is a force."
As he rose to the third shelf, he came near a line of garden flags and banners that were hung above him from the top of the shelf. Several of the flags tapered to a point at the bottom. Wendy frowned at the flags and looked back down at the picture of Erin and Ian in her hands. Kevin looked over her shoulder at the photo. The flags looked a lot like the line of tan banners that ran above Ian's head in the picture, like a row of serrated teeth. What did it mean? Was Ian's death happening now?
"Kevin," she cried, pointing up. "These banners, they're in the picture."
Kevin looked up and saw Ian returning the bag of plant food to the third shelf, wedging it next to a stack of boxes. Each box was labeled "Muriatic Acid." The boxes rocked slightly. Kevin moved to pull Erin out of the way and shouted up at Ian. "Watch those boxes!"
Ian ducked reflexively and spun the forklift wheel. It reversed and swerved, and Ian was thrown away from the controls. Kevin pulled Erin out of the forklift's path. Ian grabbed the wheel again, trying to regain control, but before he could, the lift banged into the shelf on the opposite side of the aisle, knocking a bag of birdseed loose. It fell, exploding on the concrete floor as Wendy, Erin and Kevin leapt aside. Birdseed scattered and bounced everywhere.
Erin grimaced. "Oh great," she said. "Clean up on aisle seven."
Wendy and Kevin looked embarrassed.
"Sorry," Kevin said, shrugging.
Ian shouted down at them from the forklift. "Fuck, man, what are you doing? You said the boxes were falling."
"I said 'watch those boxes,'" Kevin said. "They were… Well… they looked like they might…"
Ian shook his head, pissed off now. "They weren't doing anything," he spat. "Christ. You two are a couple of paranoid freaks."
Wendy put her hands on her hips. "We're not going to apologize for trying to save you," she said. "You haven't seen what we've seen. You haven't been through what we've been through." She looked round at the maze of potential death that was the Home Land home improvement warehouse and shuddered, wrapping her arms around herself. "At least not yet."
"You don't have to apologize," Erin said, handing Wendy and Kevin push brooms from a nearby shelf. "You just have to clean it up."
She pulled a trashcan and a dustpan out of the shopping cart and dropped them beside the bag of seed. Kevin and Wendy dutifully began sweeping all the birdseed into a pile and scooping it up with the dustpan, as Erin continued restocking the shelves. Ian began lowering the forklift.
"So tell me," Erin said, voice casual, but sounding just a little forced. "Who's next in this theory of yours? Me or Ian?"
Kevin paused in his sweeping. "Well…" he said, "we know the order that everybody was sitting on the roller coaster, but we don't have any idea how it works with two people who were sitting together."
Wendy looked up and nodded. "That's right," she said. "There's not really any way to tell whether Ashley or Ashlyn died first, and Frank and Lewis were both sitting alone."
Erin laughed, a sound that didn't seem to have much to do with mirth. "Who knew Death was so fucking complicated?" She pulled a large box labeled Sure-Gro out of the cart and hefted it to Ian. "Third shelf again, Zip."
Ian caught it and pushed the lever that raised the forklift.
"Death is not complicated," he said. "It's very simple. See, people die. End of story. That's how life works. One hundred and fifty thousand people a day, every goddamn day of the year. We are biological entities. Simply put, death is the end of biological function. There's nothing mysterious or complicated about it." He found the stack of Sure-Gro Boxes and started slipping the return into a gap in the stack. It hit the edge of a box in the second row back and got stuck. He pushed harder, trying to manhandle it into place.
Kevin craned his neck up to continue the argument. "Okay, maybe death is simple," he said, "but how can you 'simply' explain a premonition that caused us to get off a ride that then immediately killed all of its passengers in a catastrophic accident?"
"See, you're suffering from an illusion brought on by a…" Ian gave the box of Sure-Gro a final shove. It pushed the boxes behind it back, causing a four-pound box of three inch roofing nails, facing the aisle on the other side of the shelf, to teeter precariously. "By narrowness of focus. You're not looking at the big picture."
"What do you mean?" Wendy asked, clearly growing impatient with this snooty lecture.
"Okay, it's like this," Ian said. "Wendy had a 'premonition,' though I think we are safe in calling it a 'fear,' that the roller coaster was going to crash, and 'Whoa, dude,' it crashed. Amazing. Incredible. What you aren't thinking about is all those times the ride has run, and I'll bet that every single time, somebody on it thinks, 'Oh my god, we're going to crash,' but it doesn't. So, the one time out of the million times it has run that it actually crashes, you think its an other worldly coincidence that you thought it was going to crash."
"But it was more than just a vague feeling," said Wendy defensively. "I saw the whole crash. I saw how it happened. I saw what caused it. I saw you die. I saw Erin die."
"You saw what caused it?" Erin asked. "What was it?" What caused it?"
"Frank Cheek dropped his camera when we went through the loop," Wendy told her. "Then the train ran over it and jumped the track."
Ian barked out a laugh. He pounded the shelf with his fist as he started lowering the lift again.
"Oh, you're killing me," he said. "You're killing me. Do you hear yourself?"
On the far side of the shelf, in the next aisle, the heavy box of nails shook from the blow and tipped off the shelf. Below it was a forklift, abandoned at the end of the day in the middle of the job. A pallet sat on the forks, which were raised to the second shelf. The box of nails fell on the edge of the pallet and teetered there, then came to rest, halfway off.
"What?" Wendy asked. "What did I say?"
Beside her, Erin was carrying a stack of little boxes of screws to their place on the shelf. As she started to put them back, one slipped and fell to the ground, spilling screws across the floor of the aisle. She sighed and plucked a telescoping, magnetic nail retriever out of its slot on the shelf and began sweeping it above the screws. They jumped up and stuck to its tip.
Ian managed to recover himself from his overwhelming mirth. "You said Frank Cheek dropped his camera and caused the crash," he said. "Don't you see why that means that your 'vision' is a total lie? Frank Cheek wasn't on the roller coaster when it crashed, right? So he couldn't have caused the crash. It invalidates the entire premonition."
Wendy and Kevin paused and looked at each other. Neither of them had thought of that. It seemed to make sense.
"But…" Wendy said, desperate now. "But everything else coming true. It did crash. And everybody who got off is dying, in order."
"Except for the two people you can't account for," Ian replied. "And a bunch of other exceptions."
Erin pulled the screws off the magnetic retriever, letting them drop into their box, then shoved the retriever back into its tube, but with a little too much force. The magnetic tip came to rest on the far side of the shelf near some spindled spools of metal chains.
"I'm done here, Zip," she said. "Finish cutting that order so we can get out of here already. Not that I'm not enjoying the evening's entertainment."
"Rightie oh, Pip," Ian replied.
Erin turned to Wendy and Kevin, who were just finishing dumping the last of the birdseed into the trashcan.
"Come on, you two," she said. "We'll have to let you out."
In the next aisle, the end of one of the chains was pulled toward the magnetic nail retriever. The chain began to unspool and a link got caught on the magnetic tip of the retriever. The chain began pulling the retriever forward and down as the spool turned, and more and more chain began to droop to the floor. After a moment, the nail retriever was pulled completely off the shelf and fell down onto the forklift's controls. The chain came too, and hooked itself over the on/off key.
As more chain piled down, the weight of it and the nail retriever pulled the key into the "ON" position. The forklift whirred quietly to life. Above it, the end of the chain flipped off the spool and whipped out into space. The very last link hit the heavy box of nails that was sitting on the pallet that was resting on the forklift's raised forks. The force of the blow was just enough to hip the box off the pallet. It fell to the forklift below, and landed squarely on the round pedal of the machine's dead man switch.
The driverless forklift jolted forward, then smoothed out into its usual four mile and hour crawl, heading down the long aisle. At the end of the aisle, Wendy and Kevin, and Erin and Ian circled around a shelf piled high with stacks of plywood that ran perpendicular to the other shelves, on their way to the cutting area. The forklift rumbled toward the shelf.
When they got there, Ian muscled a four by eight sheet of plywood off a stack. He walked it toward a vertical saw system, which was mounted against one of the massive shelving units, then slipped in a patch of sawdust. He caught himself and kept going, laughing to himself.
"Whoa, I almost died," he said. "Almost completed the prophecy. My god, it's all true."
He set the sheet into the saw frame and bolted it into place.
"Come on, Ian," Wendy said. "This is serious. Something is happening. If you can't see that, then your precious logic is blinding you to reality."
Ian pulled his goggles down over his eyes and turned on the saw. The motor roared to life, loud in his ears. The canvas bag that caught the sawdust inflated like some sort of shuddering egg sac.
On the other side of the shelf, the driverless forklift reached the end of the aisle, and bumped into the structure of the shelf. The forks and pallet slipped in between the second and third shelves. It stopped the vehicle's forward motion, but the forklift continued to press forward. The impact knocked a few sixteen-ounce claw hammers off their hooks. Two of them fell on the pallet, but a third bounced off it and fell to the forklift below. The claw of the hammer caught on the handle of one of the lift's gears, pulling it down.
The gear engaged and the forks began to rise, lifting the pallet with them. The forks pressed the pallet into the underside of the third shelf. The wood of the pallet began to crush and splinter, and the shelves began to groan with the pressure. At the base of the shelves, the heavy bolts that fixed them to the floor strained against the shelves' metal feet.
On the other side of the shelf, Ian took the cut pieces of plywood off the saw frame and put them aside. He took another un-cut sheet and fixed it to the frame, talking over the whine of the saw.
"Okay," he said. "Just for shits and giggles, let's go with what you're saying. Let's say that Death is a conscious entity, and it has a plan, which it has now set in motion."
The saw whined as it chewed through the wood, masking the sound of the straining metal shelves as the forks pushed at them, and the shifting of the stacks of plywood on the top shelf as they tipped forward with the shelf.
Ian pulled his goggles down again, but paused before cutting the second sheet so he could shout forth his proposition.
"And let us further say," he continued, "that Newton's third law of motion, which as we all know is 'that every action has a equal and opposite reaction,' applies to death, oh I'm sorry, that's Death, with a capital 'D' of course, when he operates in this world."
On the other side of the shelf, unheard by any of them, the forks continued to press into the metal shelving supports, twisting and buckling them, and bending the bolts that held them in place. The stacks of plywood continued to shift forward as the angle of the shelves got more and more acute. The boards strained against the green vinyl bands that held them together.
"So," Ian continued. "If Death takes an action, we could take an equal and opposite reaction, and… and thwart Death's intent."
Wendy's eyes looked away from Ian's face and dropped to the ground. Kevin saw a curl of movement at her feet. The sawdust was swirling and rising as if in a light breeze, but there was no breeze. Her face was tight and pale.
"You're being a smart ass fucker," Kevin said to Ian, moving protectively closer to Wendy. "But go on."
"Well," Ian said. "What if…" He glared pointedly at Wendy and Kevin. "What if the last in line were to make a noble sacrifice, and… kill themselves." He grinned, triumphant. "That would thwart Death's plan, and save the lives of the people who were skipped." He held out his hand to Wendy and Kevin like a game show host. "Any takers? Anybody want to do the noble thing? Anybody?"
Wendy and Kevin looked at each other. It was an unsettling theory.
Ian laughed and turned away from them. "Didn't think so," he said.
Wendy bent her head to check the photo of Erin and Ian again. Kevin strained to see the photo, wondering what she was looking at. Those tapered banners over Ian's head in the photo. Where had he just seen that shape? He searched the shelves behind Ian, but saw nothing until Wendy pointed up at the shape drawn on a price marker for surveyor stakes. The second shelf was divided into three bins, open at the front, containing hundreds of the one by three by twenty-four inch wooden stakes. Individually they were as sharp as daggers, collectively they were as heavy as a small car. Their points matched the color and shaped of the tapered banners.
"Those," she yelped, pointing at the bins of stakes. "There."
Kevin and Ian looked up, just as, on the far side of the shelf, the constant pressure of the forklift's rising forks finally snapped two of the bolts that held the shelving to the floor, and the entire shelving unit began to tip. Kevin and Ian gasped as the shelves trembled and began to loom over them.
Another bolt snapped and the shelves rocked forward. Hundreds of surveyor stakes tumbled out of their bins and flew down toward Kevin and Ian. Kevin, just a little more prepared by his paranoia, grabbed Ian and pulled him out of the way. The stakes hit the floor tip-first, striking chips out of the concrete, and bouncing and clattering in every direction.
Kevin and Ian stumbled into the shelves, gasping in simultaneous terror and relief, as the rain of stakes tapered off. Kevin let out a long breath.
"Shit," he said. "That was close. Those things almost…" He stopped as he felt the shelves leaning into him. "Hey, the shelves…" He and Ian looked up.
Above their heads, on the third shelf one forty-eight count stack of plywood sheets slid and slammed into another. The impact snapped the already straining green vinyl blinding straps, and the four by eight sheets of plywood began spilling down toward Kevin and Ian one at a time, like cards being dealt off the top of the deck. Kevin and Ian ducked left, away from the falling sheets as they came down like guillotine blades and splintered and ricocheted off the concrete.
The stack beside the first stack of plywood broke too, and more plywood began sheeting down.
"Run!" Kevin cried.
He leapt away. Ian tried to follow, but a falling sheet caught him a glancing blow on the shoulder and he went down, feet tangled in the pick-up-sticks pile of surveyor stakes that was strewn across the floor. More sheets were raining down towards him. Kevin looked back and grabbed Ian's wrist. Hauling with all his strength, he dragged Ian clear as the plywood crashed, cracked and splintered, inches from his combat boots.
The last board landed on the tips of some of the surveyor stakes, flipping them up and catapulting them through the air, straight at Erin. She ducked, and the stakes shot past her. Their sharp tips punctured the exhaust bag of the circular saw and clouds of fine sawdust shot out of the bag and engulfed Erin. She backed up, covering her face with one hand, and coughing violently.
Erin's foot slipped in a drift of loose sawdust and she fell backward against Ian's forklift. Her hand still half covering her face, Erin's head banged flush against the nozzle of the nailgun Ian had left there. With a staccato FWWWT! FWWWT! FWWWT! Her head and hand were riddled with a dozen nails shot from the gun at incredible velocity. The nails protruded slightly from her cheeks, chin, and lips, glinting like new facial piercings. One stuck out of her open, staring eye, the wickedly sharp point of the nail glistening with ooze from her slowly deflating eyeball. Her hand was nailed to her face. The nails stuck through her palm like steel stigmata. The photo of Erin and Ian at the shooting gallery fluttered down and landed on her chest. Her pose in the picture mimicked her death pose exactly.
Wendy, cowering nearby, screamed and covered her eyes. Kevin ran to her, pulling her close.
"Fuck," he whispered. "Not again."
Ian stared at Erin, eyes full of grief and disbelieving horror.
"Erin." He took a step toward her, then another. "Erin?"
His hands reached out toward her involuntarily, but then he stopped. His eyes lowered to the photo on Erin's chest, and then flicked back up to her face. His eyes widened as he saw the similarities.
"It's true," he whispered. "It's all true." He caught his breath. "That means…"
His eyes darted up at Wendy and burned into her. She flinched away from their intense hatred, burying her face I Kevin's chest. Ian took a menacing step toward them.
"If she hadn't taken Erin's picture…" Ian said.
"Now wait a minute, McKinley," Kevin said. "The camera doesn't cause the deaths, it just…"
"Ian? Erin?" A deep male voice called. "What the hell is all that noise?"
Kevin, Wendy and Ian looked up as bustling footsteps grew louder. The supervisor, shift manager and some other employees in orange aprons rounded a rank of shelves and started toward them. The big warehouse space was filled with gasps and exclamations of horror. Ian backed away, wordless, eyes never leaving Wendy.