Fallout

May lay in her room, staring at the ceiling. It was how she’d been for the past several days. Maybe it’d been a week? She wasn’t counting.

She drew her phone from her pocket. Bianca hadn’t been replying for days now. She opened up her messaging app.

May > Hi Bianca
May > Please respond. We can talk about it

Her head fell back to the pillow, and her phone fell onto her chest. She spread her arms out, groaning lowly to herself. Ever since a few weeks ago, and even before that, she’d been struggling terribly to motivate herself to do much of anything.

The looming catastrophe, time moving her ever closer to a fate that seemed more and more inevitable with each passing moment, along with the crushing loneliness that she felt inside, was too much for her mind.

It felt like her mind and body pulled her a dozen different ways at once. She wanted to rot in bed, but knew she should be productive, or at least do something. At the same time, she wanted desperately to connect, and to move, and to lie still, and to search for Bianca, to embrace her sister and father, and to shut them out until death took them all. And so, she simply did nothing. At all.

Day after day.

“And there’s no point in doing anything anyway,” May mumbled, rolling over.

Three light knocks resonated from her door. “May?” came her father’s voice through it. “I brought you some food.”

“Okay!” she responded, her voice hoarse and cracking. “Just… leave it at the door.”

“I’m coming in.”

“No, Dad. Please don’t—” May gritted her teeth as the door opened anyway. She rolled over further, face pressed into the pillow.

“Ugh, don’t you have somewhere better to be, Dad?”

He hobbled in, holding the plate of food in one hand and hopping between a single crutch and one foot to account for his missing one. “No, I don’t, May. Not at this hour. Here’s your food. Please eat it this time.”

She didn’t reply. She just lay there on the bed, staring at the wall on the other side.

“May, can you please roll over?”

“No.”

“I want to talk to you.” He sat on the edge of her bed, placing a hand on her shoulder.

“No, you don’t.”

“Why don’t I?”

Again, May just lay there in silence.

She wanted to roll over, to embrace him. To feel that warmth. But she… didn’t. She couldn’t.

“I need you to talk to me, May. Please.”

Nothing.

Ken stood up, sighing. “Well, I’m not gonna make you.” She felt his steps as he hobbled back out the door. She heard him struggling down the stairs, his footfalls beating an irregular rhythm into the stairs as he went.

She sighed, sitting up. Her eyes turned to her cluttered desk, research sitting idle on it.

“I guess… I could continue that.” She considered it. But… what if she just messed it up again? What if her research somehow… made things even worse? What if Bianca had been right?

Bianca…

The most interesting person she’d ever met. Genius, helpful, kind, warm, and now gone. All because she’d said something, but she wasn’t even sure what anymore. She’d accused Bianca of lying…

Because she was lying, her inner voice reminded herself. Or, she was trying to get me to believe something untrue.

She drew her phone from her pocket with a sigh. A news notification flashed across the screen. The headline read, “Six Men Missing: Foul Play In the Suburbs?”

Weird, she thought. Third incident of missing people since Opal Tower. Of course, it might have just been the end of the world getting to people. Making people antsy. Her father, being rather paranoid about security, had installed an alarm system very early in her life. So… she was safe.

But then, there was the possibility that it was not just people being riled up independently. That there was some concerted effort by some single body to make these people disappear.

And… for so many to go missing without substantial evidence…

Extirpation was a possible connection among the dots forming in her head. It was a possibility that someone was killing these people by putting them inside extirpations.

It wasn’t necessarily the most likely scenario… but it was possible. She opened the article, reading,

At 11:00 PM Tuesday night, authorities received a report by the wife of a man named Richard “Dick” Wheeler that her husband had gone out and not returned to their home. Authorities launched an investigation into the area surrounding his home, as well as around the gas station he purportedly visited before going missing.

Though nothing turned up, that same night, three more calls of the same kind came to the authorities, with two more the following morning. Six disappearances on the same night is spooky in itself. But one question loomed, unanswered: Were these men related? Why did they all go missing at once? And how?

When our organization asked the chief of police, he simply said, “We’re investigating the missing persons, and believe them to be separate cases.” He refused to comment further. He refused to answer any questions about how soon further investigation will be conducted.

However, when asked about these men, people not affiliated with the law told a different story: that these men were all part of the same gang, known in the area as the Crowns, formed recently by Dick Wheeler himself.

The crew rose to infamy since The Announcement for perpetrating assaults, rapes, and killings in the town, scaring the suburban population into submission. The waning incidence of law enforcement makes their reign over the suburb all the more complete, with people reporting fearing for their lives on more than one occasion doing things like buying groceries, or heading to work.

In spite of their lackluster results initially, law enforcement have since found, now restricted as part of a “crime scene,” the site of a scuffle, bearing the common signs of a struggle. Spots of blood, along with a broken pair of glasses, identified as belonging to one of the missing men by his wife, were found on the corner of Washington Street and Railway Boulevard.

So, was this an act of vigilante justice?

The article continued babbling on about the state of the town and its regrowing hospitality now that the gang was gone. But at the bottom, she saw something else interesting: a link pointing to a different article that noted the disappearance of a grove of trees in the suburban town, leaving a large, spherical scar in its image.

Clearly an extirpation. May questioned their decision to omit it from the text. Though, perhaps steering clear of the word drove more interest? She doubted it, given the rate at which sensationalism sold in the past.

Wait, she thought. Closing out of the news site, she launched the map application on her phone, and searched for the town in question—specifically, for that street corner.

It was… two blocks from the site of the extirpation. Odd. Maybe a coincidence. But… May couldn’t shake the feeling that they were related somehow. A pack of gangsters, disappeared the same night as an extirpation a few blocks from a crime scene? It was a bit too obvious, the way May saw it.

One question loomed in her mind, though: assuming the men did disappear thanks to the extirpation, how had the killer, whoever they were, known? Was it a coincidence? Did an extirpation just happen to appear a few blocks over, and they lured the men to it, somehow trapping them inside while escaping themselves?

It didn’t add up. There were two possibilities: first, and probably the true explanation, the two occurrences were coincidental. Some rival gang might have just killed them all, and hidden the bodies. The image her mind conjured to illustrate made her shudder.

Second, the extirpations can be predicted. It was the only way that killing the men by means of one made any sense, given the distance of the site of the scuffle from the remains of the forest.

May hopped on her butt across the bed, swinging herself forward on her hands to the corner of her desk. She opened her laptop, and searched, “extirpation locations.”

There had to be some method to it. Some rationale. Some predictability. That, or she could confirm to herself that the former explanation was the truth, after all.

A map appeared in the search results. Published by a news outlet, it showed the locations of all confirmed extirpations. They looked like a jumbled cloud of dots, strewn about the area surrounding the city in which she and her family lived. There was… no structure to it at all. Utter chaos.

But… as she looked at the pattern, she couldn’t help but think of Bianca. Her understanding of them. It always felt like she knew more. Like she had other information she was refusing to share.

A spiral? May thought. She continued staring holes in the map, eyes trained on the blob of dots and searching for any structure. She held up her hand to the screen, covering the dots in the center of the image.

It was… faint. And noisy. But the points that now traced her hand… They swept over a large enough area that they were more plain to see.

The points collected from the past five incidents formed a sweeping arc around the outside of her hand. Points collected prior to that looked like they violated that pattern, being too far from where she would expect to be attributed to the noisiness she found affecting the others around the curve she visualized.

“I need more,” she muttered, taking her hand off her laptop’s screen.

She sighed. It wasn’t much, but she had nothing else to go on. Her other research had failed. Her father was… not around. Not to mention that he wouldn’t let her work with him and her mother anyway. Her sister wouldn’t know. And now, Bianca had just… disappeared.

May tore a sheet of paper from a notebook lying open on her desk, pressing it to the screen, and taking up a pen, traced the curve formed by the extirpations. If there was any merit to this, it should be able to have some predictive power.

That much, at least, she’d picked up from her studies.

She fell back onto her bed, breathing deeply. Maybe there was a pattern. She hoped that there was. Then they would see.

Now, there wasn’t much to do but wait. It might take a few months to even see the pattern more completely—the extirpations had been slowing down a little bit as they grew larger.

So... she could at least stomach some food here and there in the meantime.