Countdown

“...Five!”

Anya’s fingers stop dancing across the keyboard.

“...Four!”

Her eyes drift to her phone.

“...Three!”

Happy New Year, Anya!

“...Two!”

Here’s to a better year!!

“...One!”

Happy New Year, Sis.

Her screen goes black just as the clock strikes midnight, and fireworks erupt into the sky. People around the city are ringing in the New Year with toasts and well wishes. Yet, Anya is sitting at her desk on the upper floors of a tall skyscraper that’s mostly dim. She picks up her phone, but the screen doesn’t turn on like it usually does. She taps it a few times, and her brows come together when it still doesn’t respond.

Ding!

Anya looks at her laptop screen and sees her co-worker’s message: Coming up.

She leans back, sighs loudly, and looks up at the ceiling. Who works on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day? A psycho. That’s who. But Anya needs all the money she can get. She closes her eyes, and an image of her younger brother lying on a hospital bed appears in her mind until…

She opens her eyes and looks to the right, where her coworker walks in. Josh has his laptop in one arm, but his hand is busy with his phone. He’s walking slower than usual, his eyes glued to the screen.

“Josh!” Anya calls. He briefly looks up, only to have his eyes back on his phone again. “You’re only making the suffering worse by looking at those social media posts, you know. The faster we get this done, the faster we can get out of here.”

Josh quickly puts his laptop down on the table next to hers. “I guess this is God’s way of telling me”—he pulls out the chair and sits down—”to stop procrastinating.”

“What?” Anya asks with a small smile, looking back at her laptop. “What are you talking about?”

“My phone,” Josh answers, not bothering to hide his annoyance. “It suddenly stopped working.”

“You sure it’s not just dead?” She side-eyes him. “You know… From using it too much when you should be working?”

“Ha ha,” Josh answers flatly. “Very funny.” He slides his chair closer to hers. “For your information, I barely used it today.”

Anya’s gaze drifts toward her phone, the screen still black. She thinks about trying it again, but Josh suddenly mentions work, and her attention is back where it needs to be.

xxx

The night is chilly, but Anya feels colder than usual. Perhaps it’s because the city, usually pulsing with energy and rhythm, is far quieter than she’s expecting, especially on New Year’s Day. The cafes and bars that are normally buzzing with conversation are nearly empty. Something feels off—like a song that’s slightly out of tune or something lurking beneath the surface. Her hand is in her coat pocket, occasionally playing with her phone, which is still refusing to cooperate.

As she and Josh walk together towards the station, he’s still trying to get his phone to work. “Just leave it alone,” Anya says. “It’ll come around sooner or later.”

Josh sighs and puts it in his pocket. “What a way to start the New Year.” They come to a red stoplight, and he glances at her. “How’s Jun, by the way? I bet he was looking forward to spending the New Year with you.”

A car speeds by as Anya forces a small smile. “It’s all for the future. A better one.”

She hopes, at least.

A car speeds by as Josh says, “Hey, don’t forget…” He extends his arms and smiles. “You have me!”

“And your kindness is all that’s needed,” she says, looking at him with the warmth of an older sister. “We’re getting by just fine.”

And that’s mostly the truth. But Anya isn’t going to say anything more.

“Sis,” Jun said softly, taking her attention away from the flowers she was putting in the vase next to the hospital bed. “I want to live.”

Bzzt. Bzzt. Bzzt.

Anya and Josh quickly take out their phones that have lit up, casting ghostly halos in the night. “Oh, finally!” he exclaims.

Anya is about to open her messages when she notices an unfamiliar icon on the screen. A dark, slightly pulsing shape against the brightness of her screen. Anya thinks she imagined it, but the number zero seems to be flickering. 

Hour 0

She’s about to tap on it when Josh suddenly says, “Hey, we can go.”

Anya slips her phone into her pocket before crossing the road. She notices a man and a woman in the car in front of the red stoplight. Their eyes are glued to their phones, but their puzzling expressions mirror each other. The woman leans over, showing her phone to the man, who quickly nods and points to something on his phone.

“Huh…”

Anya looks over at Josh, who’s tapping away on his phone. “What is it?” she asks.

Josh, without looking at her and still going through his messages, says, “Turns out a lot of people’s phones went down.”

Suddenly, Anya’s phone goes off, nearly startling her. She quickly pulls it out of her pocket, and upon seeing her brother’s name, she answers it.

“Sis? Oh, I finally got through.”

“Hey,” Anya says, relieved. “Everything okay? You aren’t asleep yet?”

“Everything’s fine. I couldn’t sleep,” Jun admits. “My phone suddenly went down. Couldn’t get it to work until, like, now.”

Anya stops just as she reaches the other side of the street. “Yours did, too?”

Her brother’s reply is muted by a sudden unfamiliar voice coming from Josh’s phone. Josh is standing next to her, and when Anya leans over, she sees it’s a video of a girl who looks in her early twenties.

“I swear, guys. Every single person I talked to said that this weird app just appeared on their phone after the blackout.”

Then, Anya sees the same app she saw on her phone earlier: Hour 0.

“It’s so creepy! Like, oh, my God! I opened it and looked at what it showed me!”

The girl shows her black phone screen to the camera, and soon, words in white begin seeping onto the screen as if it’s stepping out of the shadows.

how do you want the world to end

“Sis?” Jun’s voice drags Anya back to their conversation. “Everything okay?”

“Y-yeah… Hey, listen, did you see an app on your phone when it turned back on? Something called Hour Zero?”

A pause.

“I’m not sure,” Jun says. “But I’ve never heard of it. Why?”

With her eyes still on the video and trying to make sense of it all, Anya says, “I saw it on my phone when it turned back on... Anyway, I… I’ll call you tomorrow morning, okay? Get some sleep.”

As soon as Anya ends the call, Josh says, “God, is this some kind of joke or something?”

Anya quickly returns to her main screen and finally opens the mysterious app. Her screen goes black, but once she looks closer, she sees faint lines of white resembling spiderwebs. Soon, the same words in white seep onto the screen.

how do you want the world to end

No punctuation. No capitalization. The screen flickers, and five options bleed into view below the question.

let the ocean consume us

let the asteroids erase our existence

let the dead rise

let illness turn us into waste

let us sleep forever

“What the… What the hell is this?” Josh deadpans.

“A joke,” Anya mutters.

“This… This is a lot for just a joke, don’t you think?” His finger hovers over the options. “Are you going to vote?”

“No,” she says, stating the obvious. “Why would I do that? It’s ridiculous.”

Josh puffs out his cheeks and exhales. “I think so too, but holy hell. This app is weird.” Then, he long presses it and tries deleting it. Except every time he tries, nothing happens. “Can you delete it? Because I can’t.”

Anya’s blood runs cold as she exits the app and tries the same, only to be met with the same result.

“It might be a glitch.” Then, she restarts her phone. “Sometimes all you need is a little reset…” Suddenly, an icy breeze sweeps past her. But instead of feeling cold, she feels hollow, like the wind has taken a piece of her. She nervously long presses the app, but the action opens it instead.

“Hey…” Josh says quietly, pointing to a number in gray that’s suddenly visible at the top of the question. “That wasn’t there before.” 

Anya and Josh glance at each other. None of this makes sense, but the shared look tells them they are on the same page about this mysterious number.

“365,” Anya mutters.

“There’s 365 days in a year,” Josh says, his voice almost lost to the howl of the wind.

Why does it sound like a countdown?