LEGAL A/N: Buffy the Vampire Slayer and all characters belong to Joss Whedon, 20TH Century Fox Television, UPN, The WB and CW. The Dead Zone and all characters belong to Shawn & Michael Piller, Stephen King, Lion's Gate Television and USA Network. Monk and all characters belong to Andy Breckman, Mandeville Films, Touchstone Television, NBC Universal Television and USA Network. Psych and all characters belong to Steve Franks, Tagline Pictures, NBC Universal Television Studios, GEP Productions and USA Network. The 4400 and all characters belong to Scott Peters & René Echevarria , Renegade 83, American Zoetrope, Paramount Network Television Productions, Viacom Productions Inc. and USA Network. Final Destination and all characters belong to James Wong, Jeffrey Reddick & Glen Morgan, Hard Eight Pictures, Zide-Perry Productions and New Line Cinema. No profit is being made off of this and no copyright infringement is intended or implied. All ownership not mentioned here is acknowledged and respected.
2: Death's Design
Flashing red and white lights illuminated the whole street in front of the remains of Haynes' Country Grill. Fire trucks and ambulances were spread across the street with police cruisers at the ends controlling the road blocks on either ends of the road, rush-hour traffic buzzing around them. Paramedics assisted the blood-and-dust-covered wounded on the sidewalks, some of them carried away in stretchers for transport to the nearest hospitals, while coroner vans were on the scene to carry the dozens of body bags being pulled out of the wreckage – not one of them containing a single complete body.
Adrian Monk held a lemon-scented, antibacterial, moist towelette in his hands as he wiped the remainder of the dust off of his face, standing across the street from the charred building with the bright sun raining down on him directly overhead. He looked up to see a young, dark skinned woman walking in front of him aimlessly, holding her left wrist protectively in her arm. He saw the bloody scratch reaching across her forearm. Adrian dug into his pocket and retrieved another moist towelette package, handing it to her quickly.
"Here," he offered with concern. "Don't… let that get infected." She took the package from him and nodded gratefully, walking away towards the nearest ambulance.
Adrian stepped back down the street, paying close attention to the lines in the pavement as he moved away from the devastation and crowds. A middle-aged man wearing an apron with the embellished logo of the competing diner at the end of the street rushed up to Adrian carrying a cardboard box. Mr. Monk stepped back nervously as the man offered the box full of bottles of Aquafina.
Adrian looked down at the box, then back up at the helpful man. "Th-thank you…" he said, picking out three and taking them with him. He continued down the sidewalk until he reached Johnny, Shawn and Xander as they sat on the curb with bewildered expressions. Adrian wiped off each bottle carefully, then handed them down to the three men.
"Thanks, man," said Johnny as he took the bottle, opened it and took a long drink. He wore a bandage around his right wrist and tiny scratches on his forehead from meeting the pavement. Shawn took his bottle and leaned his face against it tiredly with an ice pack covering the bruise on his other cheekbone. The palms of his hands were grated and bleeding from his cement slide. The last bottle went to Xander, whose green plaid over-shirt was charred by the heat of the flames as blood leaked from his busted lower lip.
Adrian leaned over and examined the singed fabric on Xander's back. "Is that… okay?" he asked.
Xander opened up his bottle and took a sip, his lip stinging. "We'll just call it one hell of a sunburn."
Silence fell over them as Adrian stood next to the three sitting men. They looked around at the chaos in front of them. A hydrant across the street from a small parking lot supplied water to the fire hose which the firefighters used to put out the flames reaching to the surrounding buildings.
Shawn ignored his pounding skull momentarily as he noted the amount of water leaking from the hydrant and running across the street to the parking area. There were far too many things to observe in the muddled scene around them. He was currently trying to rid his photographic memory of the faces of the people sitting around him and every nametag in the diner – three hats total.
"Why didn't I see it coming before?" Johnny whispered aloud. He gazed at the broken restaurant, thinking of all the people inside. Shawn and Adrian looked over at him remorsefully. "When I came in, when I sat down… I touched just about everything in there."
"You can't… blame yourself for this," Adrian declared. "It was an accident."
"I was in there for thirty minutes," Johnny replied in disbelief.
"Twenty-six," Shawn corrected, trying to help.
"Doesn't matter," Johnny declared coldly as he gazed at the monstrosity of the damage. "I could have… I should have stopped this." In the five years he had been a psychic, he had received thousands of psychic 'visions' revealing a ton of information he would've been happier to never know about. In a way, he'd convinced himself that he could see anything coming – a surprise party or the future nuclear holocaust. But not today. Not this.
"Why didn't I see it coming?" he repeated at a loss.
"Maybe you weren't supposed to," Xander declared, staring across the street. They looked over at him with puzzled expressions. He turned to them with worry. "Don't you see what's happening here?" he asked. "This is just like that movie Final Destination."
The three detectives glanced back and forth at each other. "Never heard of it," Shawn replied.
"The movies are about these people who get visions of horrible accidents before they happen and then do something to stop them, or at least save themselves and whoever they can," Xander explained. He began to speak aloud as he mulled over the facts in his head, raising his fingers to his temples as he tried to contemplate the situation. "Now back in the hotel room, I wanted to watch Final Destination while everyone else wanted to watch USA. I sat on the couch and… fell asleep! That's it! I'm dreaming – this is some sort of wacky nightmare dream which puts the two together."
"Before you were weird," Shawn said as he, Adrian and Johnny stared at him incredulously, "but now it's just disturbing."
"What are you talking about?" Adrian exclaimed, shaking his head with mystification.
"We're in the movie!" Xander shouted. "Or… maybe a crappy sequel. But this is it." They stared at him in worried silence as they questioned the very fabric of his mental stability. With a frustrated sigh, Xander turned away, realizing that they were a million miles away from believing him. Instantly, his expression changed to horror.
"Wait," Xander breathed with a face of dread. "I think I've just thought of something." Several moments of silence passed before he added, "Damn it, I did think of something." He looked up at the others with a fearful expression. "We cheated death! We saw its design! It's gonna come back for us!"
"What's your malfunction, dude?" Shawn blurted in sheer bewilderment.
Xander began to look around the street and jumped up off of the curb. In the gust of wind, a few newspaper sections had been rolling across the street. He grabbed the nearest section and came back to the curb. "Does anybody have a pen?" he asked dramatically.
"Uh…" Johnny replied, glancing down into the inside pocket of his jacket. He reached inside and removed the pen when Xander snatched it from him quickly. Johnny glanced down at Xander as he got on his hands and knees with the newspaper and began to draw a picture. He turned to Shawn and Adrian who were also unsure of how much to indulge the psychopath.
"That could've come out of garbage," Adrian exclaimed, staring down at Xander's frantic writing. "You don't know where that's been…"
"Okay," Xander began, still drawing, "in all of the movies, after the characters have cheated death, Death comes back for them."
Johnny shook his head in confusion. "What?"
"Just hear me out," Xander pleaded. "They messed up the fabric of the universe or some crazy crap so the only way Death can set it right is if it kills the people that should've died in horribly gruesome ways. Gore and box office dollars ensue."
"Tell me," Shawn responded, "do you work the morbidness on holidays, too?"
"My point is that sooner or... sooner than that, Death is going to try and set things 'right,'" Xander answered, coming to a stand. "It's going to try to kill us because we were meant to die in that diner."
Johnny stared at him blankly. "And in no way does this appear to you as simply a freak accident?"
"There are no accidents!" Xander shouted at the top of his lungs. "No coincidences! No escapes!"
"Are the people you're usually… with… this melodramatic, too?" asked Adrian.
"Look at the design!" Xander said, holding up the newspaper.
The three detectives were silent as they stared at the page. "That's the National News section," Johnny told him.
Xander sighed in frustration as he pointed to the squiggly-lined picture he drew in the center of one of the articles. It was a collection of uneven rectangles and stick figures with the labels 'stove,' 'Johnny,' 'Shawn,' 'Monk,' and 'me' written across the picture.
Xander pointed to the 'stove' rhombus. "This is the point of origin for the explosion which traveled across the diner and would've killed us here if we had stayed in our seats."
"Wait, that can't be me." Shawn shook his head, pointing at his stick figure. He nodded over towards Johnny and explained, "I'm clearly taller than he is, so my stick figure has to be taller than his—"
"It's just a representation!" Xander exclaimed. "A representation of Death's design!"
"With stick figures," Johnny nodded with an incredulous expression. They turned to him and could see the obvious disbelief planted firmly on his face.
"The point is, that I would've died last," Xander sighed. "But since you all were sitting in a row, I'm not sure the order in which you would've died."
"Why would you need to know that?" Adrian asked.
"Because Death is going to kill us in the order that we would've died in!"
Shawn stared at Xander with a serious gaze of resolve. "Dude, don't worry." He grabbed Xander by the shoulders. "I won't let it get us both." Xander yanked himself away from Shawn with an annoyed glare.
Adrian glanced over at Shawn and Johnny, then back to Xander, trying to wrap his mind around the puzzle. "So… what you're saying is… Death is a killer?"
"No, more… more like a force," he answered.
"Like Star Wars?" Shawn asked.
"No," he quickly replied, then reconsidered his response. "Well, not quite… but you're thinking right."
"No, he's not," Johnny stated in firm disbelief as he came to a stand. "This is ridiculous. You're having delusions about a movie that doesn't exist!"
"Hey!" Xander snapped, offended. "Don't you talk about Final Destination like that! You… don't exist!" Johnny's expression fell flat as he stared at him blankly, amazed by the strange man's amazing stupidity. Xander realized the silliness of what he had said and tried to clarify, "You just… don't know it yet." Shawn and Adrian were stunned into silence as they glanced at each other, and then stared back at Xander with suspicion and growing fear.
"Well," said Johnny sarcastically. "Thank you for that twist, M. Night. I'm going home." Johnny Smith turned away from the group and began to march off towards the parking lot where his SUV was parked.
"Wait!" Xander called after him. "We've got to stick together if we're going to look for the signs!"
"Signs?" Shawn exclaimed, Xander's story getting wilder by the minute. "What signs?"
"They're clues about how we're going to die," Xander said with a sigh as he turned back to face Adrian and Shawn. "Damn it – how am I ever gonna do this? I wouldn't recognize a sign if it hit me in the head."
A gust of wind slapped Xander in the face with the newspaper page which he had drawn his design on. He flailed his arms trying to pull the paper out of his mouth. Shawn gazed at the lettering across Xander's face as his eyes widened. "Get off!" Xander hissed as he grabbed the newspaper and tossed it aside angrily.
"Wait," Shawn exclaimed as he reached over and grabbed the paper before it blew away. He turned to the page with the design drawing on it.
"Who cares if your stick figure doesn't accurately represent you?" Adrian declared.
Xander nodded and observed, "And that's coming from a guy who's obsessed with detail."
"No, did you see that photo on this page?" Shawn declared, opening the section up to the third page of the National News section. He, Adrian and Xander gazed down to see a photo of Johnny Smith taken at a Maine power plant. Shawn read the lead of the corresponding article aloud, "'The Penobscot County Power Facility was shut down promptly and averted disaster yesterday after officials received a warning from psychic Johnny Smith about an accident involving faulty wiring which proved to be factual after a police-ordered inspection.'"
Xander grabbed the paper and viewed the photograph of Johnny Smith carefully. He stood in front of a gray wall with Sheriff Walt Bannerman and the head engineer of the plant. In yellow stenciled paint, the words 'WARNING: HIGH VOLTAGE' were printed next to the psychic's head.
Their thoughts were immediately interrupted by the squealing of tires in the distance. Xander, Adrian and Shawn looked up to see a Chevrolet Cobalt swerve at a high-speed to avoid the police cruiser which had been blocking the entrance to the street. The driver losing control of the vehicle, the car ramped off of the incline in the road. The high speed and strange angle of the ascent caused the Cobalt to rocket twenty-five yards through the air before colliding with the mid-section of a nearby telephone pole which stood above the occupied fire hydrant.
The jolt of the crash caused the pole to break lose, the wires snapping at the top and sparks raining from the transformer. The bystanders on the street, including the diner survivors, stared up at the exploding transformer in awe. Shawn's eyes fell back down to the street, remembering the water covering the ground below which rolled into the parking lot. He gazed over to see Johnny only feet away from his SUV, walking through the downhill river of water.
Shawn and Xander broke into a mad dash down the street towards Johnny as Adrian gazed up at the trembling telephone pole, the weathered wood midsection creaking and cracking with tremendous strain. The muscles of the pole finally tore lose, the giant snapping at the point of impact, bringing the spaghetti bowl of live electrical wires down to the water-covered street.
Johnny turned around to see the electrical pole falling through the air with wide eyes. He felt two pairs of hands grab him as he was lifted off the ground. Johnny, Shawn and Xander leapt onto the SUV just as the wires collided with the wet pavement and sent a net of electricity across the ground and under Johnny's car.
"We're grounded by the tires," Xander breathed as the three of them struggled to catch their breaths. Johnny turned to Xander with horrified eyes as the young man asked with exhaustion, "Now do you believe me?"