“Some kids from my Behavioral Economics class are coming over Saturday.” Christof lounges on my bed, eating a slice of sausage and garlic pizza for breakfast.
“That’s nice,” I say with a mouth full of toothpaste. According to my watch, I have six and a half minutes before I need to be out the door.
“You should hang out with us.”
I step into the bathroom that connects our bedrooms, spit, and turn to pull on my freshly polished shoes. They’re gone. I know for a fact I left them by the shower, but all I see are dust balls and tumbleweeds of body hair.
“We’re going to Mulligan’s,” my brother says. “They’ve got live music on Saturdays.”
“Have you seen my shoes?” Five minutes to go. The fringes of panic creep in as I rip back the shower curtain and search behind the toilet, picturing myself blowing the interview over a pair of lost shoes.
As Christof searches my bedroom, he asks, “Do you think you could get me a job there after I graduate? I figure an insurance company must have a ton of openings with all the weird shit going on. I hear it’s getting worse.”
“Yeah. Sure. I’ll see what I can do.”
At last, I check behind the bathroom door and find my shoes waiting for me on the scale.
Three and a half minutes.
Sitting on the toilet, I pull them on. There’s no reason I shouldn’t knock this interview out of the park. My boss, who’s been insisting I want this promotion, says I’m the strongest candidate.
I step back into my bedroom and find that Christof, who is still looking for my shoes, has pulled a clear plastic tub out from beneath my bed.
“Don’t touch that!”
He looks up, wilted slice of pizza in hand.
I shove the tub back where it belongs. “I found them. Thanks for helping me look.”
He’s clearly about to ask about the tub when Dad starts shouting again.
“He must’ve lost another client,” Christof says.
Two minutes.
“Probably.” I rush back into the bathroom and wrap my tie around my neck. Put on my jacket… get in the car… take Lockwood to avoid traffic… park … use the bathroom… answer their questions… get promoted…. finally afford to—
The lights blink off.
“Did we lose electricity?” I step back into my room. “Christof?” My brother is gone.
One minute.
As I walk down the hall the various ways a power outage could interfere with the interview race through my head. “Christof?” He’s probably just checking the circuit breaker.
I turn into the kitchen and glance out the window.
The sky is crimson.
The sun, clouds and blue expanse are all gone, replaced by a solid, fiery red ceiling. There are stars, though. There are more stars than I’ve seen in my life. Every single one glistens oily black, like bottomless holes threatening to suck me in.
I stumble back, hitting the pantry door. “I can’t be here.”
I’ve seen this sky before, in illustrations drawn by people half the world believes are either delusional or lying.
“I can’t be here.”
With tremendous effort, I pull my eyes from the sky and take in what is waiting for me on the ground. The porch, lawn, and trees are all gone, swept away to make room for a sixty-foot golden-brown wall. There are gaps in the wall, corridors leading God-knows-where.
I slide to the floor, shutting my eyes. “I can’t be here.”
It’s after midnight. Graduation is in less than nine hours and I’m huddled in my dorm, unable to take my eyes off my laptop. I should be hanging out on the theater roof with Sean, Michelle, and Leo, the socially awkward Freshman who fit so well into our group because we’re all socially awkward. I should be getting drunk on boxed wine, prepping myself to see Dad in seven hours.
But instead of enjoying one last evening before I walk across the stage and enter the “real world,” armed with my brand-new art degree, I’m watching YouTube videos about the end of civilization.
For weeks now I’ve been aware that something was shaking the world beyond my college campus, but it has been so easy to bury my head beneath finals, friends, and midnight runs to Waffle House. Then, just this evening, Christof sent me a video with only a string of exclamation points in the subject line.
In the video, a bunch of high school kids kick a soccer ball up a field. A girl with a long black ponytail sends the ball flying toward the goal, but before it hits the net, she vanishes, as if swallowed by an invisible mouth.
From there I click on another video, and then another. The blood vessels in my eyes balloon as I watch.
A man in Delaware disappears while teaching his daughter how to bowl.
A woman in California evaporates from her cell in a maximum-security prison.
A boy in Alaska vanishes while leaping off a swing set.
And even more incidents have taken place in Santiago, Lagos, Rio de Janeiro, Hong Kong, Berlin…. Everywhere.
Against my better judgment, I scroll through the comments. Many claim this is some elaborate experiment conducted by various governments. Others blame aliens, fairies, angels, or witches. Several believe we’re living through a slow-boiling rapture.
They all insist their views are confirmed by a man in Toronto who vanished a year before anyone realized this was an “epidemic.” What sets him apart is that he returned, reappearing in a field over fifty miles from the house where he disappeared.
“I was taken,” he says, sitting on a couch between his wife and daughter. “They took me to another place. Cameras don’t work over there, but I ran into a man who was also taken. He was an artist, and while we were trying to find our way out I learned a few things from him. I painted this to show my family where I was.” He holds up a painting of a crimson sky dotted with oily black stars. Beneath it, a seemingly endless labyrinth stretches toward the horizon.
Holding my breath, I spray-paint an X at the base of the labyrinth wall.
The hundreds who’ve passed this way have already left their own markings. Messages of love and pleas for mercy accompany smeared collages of piss, puke, and shit. I try not to notice the dark red stains.
Sticking the spray paint can in my jacket, I continue through the labyrinth, corridor by corridor, leaving behind a trail of green X’s, just in case I need to find my way home.
When people appear in the Labyrinth, they arrive in the places they were taken. The passages are littered with houses, stores, cars, barns, parks, and fields. Once I saw a bouncy castle. But no matter where you go, the golden-brown walls loom overhead.
However, the places we are taken from still remain in the “real world.” I have no idea if the aliens/fairies/angels/witches made an exact copy of Dad’s house – down to the soap scum in the shower – or if there are infinite versions of the tan bungalow – and its soap scum – throughout the multiverse.
The Labyrinth also contains ruins made of timber, bricks, and furniture nailed together. They are the remains of towers built to scale the walls. Not a single one makes it halfway up.
Years ago, when dozens of people started returning every week, I watched an interview with a professional mountain climber who figured getting to the top of a sixty-foot wall shouldn’t be a problem for someone who’d scaled K2. But no matter how hard she pounded her pitons – those climbing spike things – she couldn’t make a dent.
One guy from Texas tried breaking the walls with sledgehammers and explosives but soon realized, “The only way out is to play the Labyrinth’s game.”
Everyone interviewed said there was nothing significant about the moment they escaped. There was no glowing archway, no final boss. They just turned a corner and found themselves back in the real world.
I stagger on, continuing my trail of X’s, bent beneath my backpack.
There are no sunrises or sunsets here, just a perpetual crimson sky. We don’t have days, just sleep cycles. I walk for a few hours, sleep on the labyrinth’s stone floor, head buried within the darkness of my sleeping bag, then I walk on.
When I pass buildings, I keep my distance, only searching for food if I’m certain no one is around. I go hungry a lot.
There are more and more pseudo-permanent communities popping up around supermarkets, convenience stores and other food sources. Sometimes people call me over, asking if I have something to trade or just looking for conversation, even if we keep our distance. Sometimes they scream, threaten and brandish homemade weapons.
One elderly man followed me for miles, trying to spit on me.
I can go for days without finding a working electrical outlet so I only allow myself a few minutes every sleep cycle to look at photos on my phone. However, as I walk I press the phone to my ear and pretend I’m talking to people back home. I speak with Christof the most. We reminisce about the summer afternoons we spent building a dam by the stream and the time we used a zucchini to make an anatomically correct snowman.
Dad points out that a real man would’ve escaped ages ago.
My college friends promise a reunion as soon as I find a way out.
When Mom tries to comfort me, I ask why she ditched us.
“Your father suffocates everyone in his life,” she says in an agonizingly calm voice.
“That’s why you should’ve taken us with you. You could’ve at least taken Christof. His first memory is of you waving goodbye from the airport van. Why couldn’t you—”
Even during imaginary phone conversations, she always hangs up on me.
I spend my first twenty-four hours in the Labyrinth huddled in my bedroom, packing and repacking supplies, assuring myself, “This is going to be an adventure.”
One of the first people who found her way out was a woman who was taken while mopping a Burger King bathroom. However, after she returned she published a book detailing her escape. It was turned into a movie starring Jennifer Lawrence (72% on Rotten Tomatoes).
I might not end up with a movie deal, but if I survive this, anything else the universe throws at me should be a breeze, right?
I sort through Christof’s hiking backpack one more time. I’ve stuffed every piece of non-perishable food in there, a can opener, extra clothes, a compass, and my phone.
Dad supposedly kept a first aid kit somewhere. It’s not in any of the places that make sense, so I search everywhere that doesn’t. That’s how I end up rummaging through the plastic tub under my bed.
At the beginning of my sophomore year of college, I got into the habit of bringing my sketchpad to parties where I’d sit in a corner with a friend and draw their portrait. It was a trick I came up with, a way to interact with one person at a time instead of having to deal with crowds. I even drew portraits of people’s friends and families totally based on descriptions. No photo necessary.
Art seemed so vital back then. While I was in school there were classes, contests, and professors encouraging me to pursue my passion.
Then I graduated, the world turned upside down, my student debt ballooned, and my art ended up under my bed. When Dad realized my creativity had fallen to the wayside, he’d smiled, as if this was a plot twist he’d seen coming a mile away.
People are coming.
“Run!” Christof shouts at me through my phone.
Shoving the spray paint can into my pocket, I run in the opposite direction.
A full-sized baseball diamond waits for me around the corner. Working plumbing is as rare as electricity, so most places with dirt are used as massive toilets. I pull my jacket over my nose and duck behind the backstop.
Two men and two women turn the corner. They’re laughing, arms wrapped around each other. Three of them hold nightsticks. The smaller of the women carries a double-headed battle-ax.
I try to make myself as small as possible. Back in the real world, I watched YouTube videos about how people in the Labyrinth formed alliances, creating armies who’d devour anyone they came across. There’s usually enough food to avoid starvation, but this is the sort of place where people turn to cannibalism just for the fun of it.
The group has almost passed when the woman with the ax stops and smiles. I almost choke when I realize her hungry grin is directed at me. “Hey, greenie!”
They halt and stare. The chain links between us feel tissue-thin.
“Asshole!” shouts the taller of the two guys. His hair is pulled back into a ponytail and he wears a NASA T-shirt, “We can see you.”
“Can you see this?” The woman with the ax drops her pants, revealing a pasty white ass.
They laugh and continue on their way. The woman who mooned me walks several paces before bothering to pull up her jeans. “Welcome to the real world, shit head. Grow a spine or you’ll be dead in a week.”
It’s been sixty-eight and a half hours since I arrived in the labyrinth and the final slice of sausage and garlic pizza has developed a distinct body odor flavor in the room temperature fridge. I sit on my bed, where my brother sat when I was taken, and flip through Dad’s collection of Arthur Miller plays.
Believe it or not, Dad used to have a creative side. From the age of eight all the way through college, he stared in everything from Our Town to Hamlet. Then Mom got pregnant, and they discovered you can’t buy diapers with applause.
Every once in a while, Mom would point out that the community theater was putting on auditions. Dad always responded by glaring at her until she lowered her eyes and left the room. He hadn’t acted in years, but he was above such “amateur trash.”
These days, Dad mostly lives in the basement, trying to sell office supplies. Once I explained that he’d be better at it if he’d unwind a bit, joke around with his customers. He went off on one of his patented rants about how I didn’t know anything about the real world.
Christof is living with that bullshit, by himself, 24/7 now. We don’t have any other family. Even after he graduates, he’ll be stuck at home until he makes enough money to move out, and that could take years. When I was in college, he texted me every day complaining about Dad.
But he’s older now and has friends. He can escape whenever he wants, right?
I throw dad’s copy of Death of a Salesman against the wall. As I gnaw on the final, stale crust of pizza, my eyes scan the room, searching for any kind of distraction. They fall upon the open bathroom door. From this angle, Christof would’ve seen me disappear.
I picture Mom waving goodbye from the airport van.
The oversized hiking backpack still lies in the corner, already bloated with supplies. I should sort through it one more time, or at least search for that damned first aid kit. But all I’ll find are more excuses to stay.
Dropping the half-spoiled crust, I pick up my bag, and head for the door.
I sit on a park bench, clutching the three tattered sketchpads full of maps and faces.
Tears burn my eyes.
Sunlight scorches my neck.
People stare, whisper, take pictures. Parents grip their children. There are too many eyes on me.
The sky is blindingly blue. It’s too vast. No walls block the horizon.
A police siren screams.
“I can’t be here.”
“How does this look?” I slide the illustration toward Jason on the far side of the dining room table. He examines the portrait of the fourteen-year-old girl with short brown hair and braces and places a hand over his mouth. “That’s her. That’s my Emma.”
Typically, Jason looks like the kind of man you’d expect to see braving the Canadian wilderness, chopping down evergreens with a single blow. But at the moment, he resembles a little boy wearing a fake beard, on the verge of tears.
Heather leans in close and rubs his back. TJ, who sits in her lap sucking on a spoon smeared with chocolate pudding, reaches out to comfort him.
One way or another, not one of them has a single photograph of their loved ones. Heather lost her phone in the labyrinth. TJ was only four when he was taken. And Jason wasn’t “a phone-owning sorta guy.”
I’ve done my best to give them portraits of their loved ones based on descriptions. Since arriving at the farmhouse, I’ve drawn Heather and TJ’s families so many times I dream about them. Now Jason’s daughter will join the gallery in our living room.
“You’ll see her again,” I say.
He shakes his head. “Nicole will never take me back.”
Heather’s arm drops at his ex’s name.
Jason doesn’t notice. “She’s got a new husband. Emma’s got a new dad. They don’t need me. It’d just be easier if I….” He stands and begins to clear the table.
We’ve all had moments like this.
After we wash the dishes – the farmhouse actually has a working spigot – we gather in the living room for story time.
When it’s TJ’s turn, he shares tales about his dads and their dogs, adding sorcery and talking animals. I tell embarrassing anecdotes from college. Jason regales us with a continuing saga based on Nordic myths. But tonight is Heather’s turn. Therefore, she takes the place of honor beneath the bull’s skull – which hangs on the living room wall, haloed by our family sketches – and tells the story of: Star Wars Episode XVII: The Return of Finn.
As she describes comic-relief droids and Star Destroyers crashing into planets, I sit on the floor, staring at the crimson light peeking through the blinds and think of the last Star Wars movie I saw in theaters. Afterward, Christof and I stayed out until two in the morning, eating hamburgers and talking about…. I don’t even remember. It had all seemed so vital at the time.
After Episode XVII wraps up –on a cliffhanger, of course – Heather and TJ head off to bed, leaving Jason and me to our books. Whoever lived in the farmhouse before us was addicted to old-school spy thrillers.
My eyes are drifting shut when Jason says, “Some people actually want to come here.”
It takes me a moment to realize he means the Labyrinth.
He goes on. “They spend thousands of dollars on trinkets and make pilgrimages to ‘holy sites’ that’re supposed to attract this place. When my buddy, Rob, told me about that, I thought they were all crazy.” He stares up, as if peering through the ceiling at the golden-brown walls surrounding us. “But now I understand.”
“I thought things would get better when I got back. Or at least go back to normal.” I lean forward in the foldout chair on the edge of the circle. “But everything changed while I was away. My brother moved to Seattle. All my friends started families. My dad sold our house. And I can’t even leave my apartment without a bag of supplies, in case it happens again. I came back months ago, but when I see people I knew from before, I feel like an actor trying to….” The words fizzle in my mouth as the door opens.
Whenever I attend group – held in a church basement that perpetually smells of burnt coffee – I sit so I’m facing the door, in case Heather or Jason walk through. It would be better for everyone if I saw them before they saw me.
However, the woman who enters the room is almost a stranger. She’s barely five feet tall with short midnight purple hair. I don’t know her, but I recognize her.
Someone thanks me for sharing, and we continue. Others share their experiences returning to careers, catching up with families, friends, and sports teams. A few allude to things they did while traveling the Labyrinth, acts that would’ve sent them to jail for life if they’d occurred in a place that legally exists.
I nod along, looking everywhere but at the woman with the purple hair.
It isn’t until the meeting concludes and I’m helping the others clean up that I realize how I know her. I drop the chair I’m stacking, grab my backpack, and rush outside.
The almost stranger is sitting on the church steps, talking on her phone. She’s gained twenty pounds, but there’s no doubt it’s her.
For a moment, I hover at the top of the stairs, feeling like a creep. From what I can hear, she’s talking to someone about fostering a dog. I should walk away and find another group. Reconnecting with this person wouldn’t be healthy. But before I can leave….
“You need something?” she pockets the phone.
“Sorry.” I open the door. However, instead of scurrying inside, I say, “I think we ran into each other over there.”
“I ran into a lot of people.”
“You mooned me.”
She turns and stares like I’m a distant cousin she hasn’t seen since he was a toddler. “You’re the greenie from the baseball diamond?” Her eyes flicker up and down, taking me in. At last, her face breaks into a smile.
One way or another, we end up in the tavern down the street with a pitcher of their cheapest beer. Her name is Mulberry. “I had a different name before I went in.”
I tell her about a theory I’d heard that people arrive in the Labyrinth with wherever they are because it’s a physical manifestation of how we carry our emotional baggage.
She shares a theory on why so little plumbing worked over there. “I hooked up with this one plumber who’d dismantle working pipes. She thought they’d all connect to a shortcut. Honestly, I didn’t buy it. It sounded too Super Mario Brothers.”
“Did she find any killer turtles?”
Mulberry shrugs. “I didn’t stick around long enough to find out.”
By ten o’clock she’s told me everything, from the moment she stepped outside the classroom where she taught kindergarten and discovered the sky was crimson, to the moment she found herself standing in a busy Baltimore intersection. “I walked all the way across the Labyrinth just to almost get creamed by a Dodge Caravan.”
By midnight I’ve told her my story, every word of it, except for how I left the farmhouse. In the version she hears, Heather, Jason, and TJ slipped out of my life just as easily as they slipped into it. The same is true of the three people she traveled with. One minute she’s talking about them like they’re closer than family, then they’re gone, vanished in the time it takes to down a beer.
“I’ve got a really important question for you,” Heather says, walking along beside me. “In fact, it’s the most important question you’ll be asked all day.”
“What?”
“Why can’t a nose be twelve inches long?”
“Probably has something to do with cartilage….”
“Because then it’d be a foot.” She makes a “ba dum tss” sound.
“I’m not talking to you anymore.” I pick up speed, carrying my box of supplies along the corridor that connects the farm to the warehouse. Among the endless rows of canned food and bottled water I’d found boxes of sketchpads. They’re the Strathmore 400 Series, nine by twelve inches, a hundred sheets each. Just like the kind I’d used in college.
Heather hurries after me, a middle-aged mom eager to embarrass the younger generation. “Did you hear about the fire at the circus? It was in tents.”
“I never should’ve told you I hate puns.”
“I’m sorry,” she says, clearly not sorry at all.
I stare at the golden-brown wall beyond the farmhouse. From here you can’t see the pleas for mercy written at the base. “Wanna know how you can make it up to me?”
“Only if it involves more puns.”
“Convince Jason.”
Heather stops short. “That’s not funny.”
I face her. “If we hide stockpiles of food and map out the surrounding corridors, we can make our way further and further out.”
“Leaving is suicide.”
“Thousands of people have already—”
She places her hand over my mouth. “While you were wandering the Labyrinth, did you ever notice how most people were from the mid-Atlantic region?”
I pull my face away from her hand. “I didn’t make many friends out there.”
“There’s a theory that everyone in the same part of the world appears in the same part of the Labyrinth. That’s why we never run into folk from Hong Kong, or even Chicago.”
“I know. I saw a bunch of YouTube videos on that.”
“Did those videos also point out that if you can wander around for months and only encounter people from the same region, then the Labyrinth must be tens of thousands of miles across? Why should we risk our lives out there when we’ve got infinite supplies here?”
“Canned food eventually goes bad. And without a sun, we can’t grow anything.”
“But we’re safe for now. All that’s waiting for me in that other world is an arrest warrant. And what’s waiting for you? A lousy job? A world that doesn’t appreciate your art?”
“TJ needs his family.”
“We’re his family.” She walks away so fast I can barely keep up.
“What’s he gonna do?” I ask jogging beside her. “Grow up reading spy thrillers and eating canned potatoes?”
“That’s more than most of us get.”
I shove the bathroom door open and shine my flashlight inside, ready to bolt at the hint of a trap. Normally I never enter a room with only one exit, but someone has scrawled two beautiful words across the gas station’s wall. “Working toilet.”
After checking every corner at least twice, I rush inside, drop my pants and sit on the frigid plastic seat. I try to enjoy the novelty of using an actual toilet. However, even though the room is empty, I’m not alone. Heather, Jason, and TJ have joined the pantheon of loved ones who visit when my mind wanders. They come for me when things get quiet and make me relive my escape from the farmhouse.
After I finish, I flush and head for the door. I’m almost out when my eyes land on the mirror. The man glaring back, his face under lit by my flashlight, is older than he should be. His features are ragged, half hidden beneath a tangled beard. It’s his eyes that have changed the most, though. Staring into them, I see the countless miles he’s walked beneath an alien sky. This is what people see when they look at me.
I punch him in the face.
I mean for my fist to strike the mirror, but it hits my right eye. The intruder tumbles backward, through the bathroom door, into the crimson light.
I catch up with him.
Or he catches up with me.
We beat each other, tearing and clawing. I rip into him, trying to bring back the boy who once drew comic strips about the sparrows in the park. But I’m all that’s left.
Shrieking, I fling my backpack across the labyrinth’s corridor. It crashes against the wall. Picture frames shatter inside.
Turning my back on the bag that’s held me down this whole time, I walk on, leaving behind canned food, bottled water, the spray paint can that ran dry eons ago, and my cracked and battered phone. I won’t ever take another step under its weight again.
I’ve almost reached the end of the corridor when I stop, run back and pull out the sketchpads and pencils I took from the farmhouse. As soon as they’re tucked under my arms, I begin to walk again.
Without the pack, there’s a lightness to my step. I feel as though I could fly over the walls.
“You okay?” I call to the boy sobbing on the far side of the bowling alley’s parking lot.
“Are you stupid?” Dad shouts through my phone. “The labyrinth is full of psychos who’d use a crying child as bait for idiot greenies like you. There could be a sniper on the roof. That kid could have a razorblade up his sleeve.”
“I know.” I turn down the passage leading to my left. The boy continues to cry, hands pressed against his face like he’s trying to smother himself. My walk slows to a crawl.
“Get out of there,” Dad orders.
I stop and glance about, searching for any sign of an ambush. When my eyes fall back on the boy, I notice that he’s peeking at me, face soaked with snot and tears.
“Adam, I swear, if you get your throat slit by a toddler you deserve to—”
I tuck the phone into my jacket. “I won’t hurt you.”
His eyes call me a liar.
“My name’s Adam. What’s yours?”
The kid opens his mouth, closes it, and tries again. “TJ”
I’m still not convinced this isn’t a trap. I could stand here for the rest of my life and not be convinced. “Do you have friends around here, TJ?”
He nods. “I went exploring and got lost.”
“Were you looking for a way out?”
“Heather says there isn’t a way out.”
I almost point out that this “Heather” is either mistaken or lying, but instead I approach him. I’m already certain I’ll regret this, but the boy looks too much like Christof.
I crouch down a few feet away. “Do you want me to help you get home?”
“Where are we going?” TJ asks.
“Shhh,” I whisper, placing a folded-up letter on the farmhouse’s kitchen counter. Seven other versions of that letter lay shredded on my bedroom floor. My backpack is stuffed with so many supplies I can barely stand. Now that the letter is in place, there’s nothing left to do but walk out the door.
“Where we going?” TJ asks again. There’s a shrillness in his voice. If I don’t answer, he’ll make enough noise to wake the others.
I drop to his level and whisper, “I’m taking you back to your dads.”
“Where are they?” He looks over my shoulder, as if expecting to see them standing in the living room.
“They’re still in the other world. We’ll need to travel through the Labyrinth, but—”
“Heather says we’ll die if we go into the Labyrinth.”
“Heather’s…mistaken.”
“How do you know?”
“I don’t know for certain, but—”
“So we could die?”
“Please don’t shout.”
It’s too late. Feet clatter against floorboards. I’m tempted to just grab him and run. But before I can decide if I have it in me, Heather tears down the kitchen steps, baseball bat in hand. Jason is behind her with a crowbar. They were both prepared for this.
Heather reaches out to TJ. “Come here, baby.” He runs forward, embracing her. Clutching him close, she stares up at me. “Don’t ever come back here again.”
“There’s a way out. Thousands of people have already—”
“Empty your pack.” She rises, aiming the bat at me. “That food doesn’t belong to you.”
“It doesn’t belong to you either. You just found that warehouse before anyone else did. We need to invite more people in, get organized, and figure out a way—”
“Empty the pack, Adam,” Jason raises the crowbar, ready to embed the curved end into my skull.
“Okay! Okay!” I unzip the bag and tip it over. Cans crash to the floor, denting the tiles. “Keep your damn food. But I’m keeping these.” I charge into the living room and grab a portrait of Heather’s parents off the wall.
“Don’t you dare,” Jason growls.
With tears blurring my vision, I stuff the sketches into my bag. I’ll find more supplies. There might be a few sleep cycles where I’ll go hungry, but I’ll be damned if I leave my art behind.
I reach for the portrait of Jason’s daughter, grinning with a mouth full of metal.
He charges, swinging the crowbar. I duck out of the way and reach for the closest weapon. My hands clasp the bull’s skull, ripping it off the wall.
Jason raises his crowbar. Before he can swing, I smash the skull against the side of his head. Bone shatters. He crashes against the bookcase and slides to the floor.
My teeth dig so deep into my lip I taste blood. I only have a moment to regret what I’ve done before the world shatters.
When I open my eyes, I find myself lying with my cheek pressed against the hardwood floor. TJ stands over me, gripping the crowbar. Something warm trickles down my face.
Heather pulls the boy back and raises her bat. My head rings so loud I can’t hear my own thoughts, but her lips form the word, “Out!”
Somehow, I pull myself up. With my backpack in hand, I stagger out the door and half-tumble down the porch steps. Dizzy and disoriented, I push myself forward, gripping a bag full of other people’s families.
Mulberry and I sit on the Rehoboth Beach boardwalk. It’s unseasonably cool for late September but her girlfriend and the rest of our group splash in the water, laughing and screaming and annoying everyone trying to relax on the sand.
For a while we just sit on our bench, watching the waves, listening to our friends. Then, I startle myself by asking, “Do you want to see what I’m working on?” Next thing I know I’ve pulled my laptop from my backpack, where it’s always tucked away along with a week’s supply of non-perishable food, bottled water and a first aid kit.
I open a file and hand her the computer. For a moment she stares at the screen, as if trying to determine what she’s looking at. At last she asks, “How many have you drawn?”
“Thirteen. Some are a little rough but….”
I trail off as she stares at the first comic in the series, the one where I disappear before Christof’s eyes. Without saying a word, Mulberry opens one file after another, examining each of the black and white strips until, at last, she reaches the one where we met on the baseball diamond. “And there’s my skinny ass.”
“I drew it so my shoulder covers most of you. I won’t post it if you don’t want.”
She continues opening files. “These are good.”
“I had plenty of time to practice over there.”
Mulberry reaches the latest one, in which I’m expelled from the farmhouse. She stares at this one longer than the others, clearly reading the twenty-one panels over and over. It’s stupid to feel uncomfortable. I’ll be launching the website in a couple months, and then the whole world will see them. Or at least the friends I send links to will.
“You never told me TJ did that.”
“I know.”
Seagulls scream overhead. A ceiling of storm clouds roll in over the ocean. A lifeguard whistles for people to get out of the ocean.
“Do you ever miss it?” I ask.
Mulberry keeps her eyes on the screen. “Sometimes.”
I lean back on the bench. “I’ve been back for three years, six months, and eight days. That’s almost twice as long as I was over there, but I still can’t sleep without a red light.”
“I still check the sky to make sure it hasn’t turned crimson.”
“So, what was the point?”
“The point?” She turns toward me.
“While I was over there, I figured everything would be perfect if I could just get back. But I’ve gone right back to the same shitty job, only it pays less. My dad’s still miserable, only now he lives in a tiny apartment. Christof and I haven’t talked since that blowout fight last New Years. The whole reason I tried to escape was to get back to him, and now he won’t even answer my texts. So what was the point?”
Mulberry turns back to my web comic. For a moment I assume she’s going to ignore my question but at last she asks, “What were you doing when you escaped?”
We’ve gone over this a hundred times. “I was just walking along a random corridor. There wasn’t anything unusual about it. I was just walking. Then I realized I wasn’t in the Labyrinth anymore. I was in a park surrounded by people staring at me. It wasn’t until they took me to the hospital that I realized I wasn’t hallucinating.”
I’m still not entirely certain I’m not hallucinating.
“What happened right before then?”
“It was just another day in the Labyrinth.” But that’s not true. “I’d thrown all my stuff away. A few sleep cycles earlier, I’d sort of freaked out in this gas station bathroom. I figured I’d never escape, so I chucked everything but my sketchpads and pencils.”
Mulberry nods, staring at my laptop. “A little while before I escaped, I realized all I ever wanted was to help animals.”
“Hey love,” her girlfriend runs up to us, a towel wrapped around herself. “They’re kicking us out of the water. Ready to get changed and grab pizza?”
“That’s why I love you,” Mulberry pecks her on the cheek. “You only have good ideas.”
The rest of our friends join us, and we head down the boardwalk. As we walk into our hotel, Mulberry and her girlfriend tell us about the new dog they’re fostering.
“How does this look?” I turn the sketchpad so TJ can see the illustration. It’s of two men, both wearing glasses. One is totally bald while the other has short brown hair. I expect him to tell me what I need to change, but he takes the sketchpad and stares at it with a smile of recognition.
“I bet they miss you,” I tell him.
He nods.
“You’ll see them again, when we find a way out.”
“There isn’t a way out.” He says it so quietly I barely hear him.
“Says who?”
Jason sticks his head into the living room. “Dinner’s ready.”
TJ presses the sketchpad against his chest, and we walk into the kitchen.
After we take our usual spots, we go around the table, sharing one thing we’re grateful for. It’s a tradition they started before I arrived. Heather is grateful for each of us. Jason is grateful for the warehouse of food. TJ is grateful we’re not having canned asparagus tonight.
I say I’m grateful that we’ll someday go home.
Both Jason and Heather shift in their seats and lower their eyes. “Well then,” Heather says not looking at me. “Aren’t we all lucky to have so much.”
Unclasping our hands, we pass around the steaming bowls of canned food and dig in.
Among other publications, Michael Barron’s fiction has appeared in “After Dinner Conversation,” “Metaphorosis” and “Uncharted Magazine.” He is the vice president of the North Baltimore Chapter of the Maryland Writers’ Association. He blogs at michaeljbarron.com and tweets @Barron_Writer. Michael is a member of the neurodivergent community, and his experiences inspire his writing.
When he is not writing or reading he is either training for a marathon or working as a librarian at the Baltimore County Public Library, where he leads creative writing programs. He has undertaken a never-ending quest for the world’s greatest hot sauce.