Dead On Arrival: The Survival Diaries of a Horrified Horror Writer

I hear them before I open the door. That's the part nobody tells you about betrayal — it's not the image that breaks you. It's the sound. The specific, unmistakable soundtrack of your life detonating from the other side of a door you haven't even touched yet, while you're still standing in the hallway with your work lanyard around your neck and a takeout bag sweating grease through your fingers, thinking about whether you want a shower before or after the noodles. I stand there for four full seconds. I know because I count them. I'm a horror writer. Counting is how I manage situations where my brain wants to go offline and restart in a safer decade. One. The takeout bag crinkles when my hand tightens. Two. I recognize Lex's voice. Obviously I recognize Lex's voice. I've been listening to it for two years. Three. I recognize the other voice too. Because I grew up with it in the room next to mine, bleeding through drywall, asking to borrow my clothes and never giving them back. Four. I open the door. --- The living room light is off. The bedroom light is on. The bedroom door is not fully closed and that gap — that casual, careless, couldn't-even-be-bothered gap — is the detail that stays with me later. The detail that means this wasn't a mistake that happened to them. This was a thing they did with enough comfort to leave the door open. I set the takeout bag on the kitchen counter with the careful, deliberate movements of a person whose brain has temporarily left the building to go scream somewhere private. "Lana?" Lex calls out, before I can decide what to do with my hands or my face or the last twenty-four months of my life. Like he heard the door. Like some part of him — the cowardly, self-preserving part — knew. I cross the apartment. I push the bedroom door open the rest of the way. Here is what I see: my boyfriend of two years and my sister, Cora, looking at me from my own bed with the specific expression of people who have been caught and have not yet decided how to frame it. Here is what I think: "I wrote a short story called "The Bed Remembers" in 2022 and it was about exactly this and it won a regional award and I cannot believe my own subconscious saw this coming before I did." "Lana—" Lex starts. "Don't." My voice comes out remarkably steady. I'm impressed by it. I don't know whose voice it is, but I've decided to let it keep talking. "Don't do the name thing. Don't say my name like that's going to — "reboot" me or something." Cora pulls the sheet up. This offends me more than almost anything else that has happened in the last forty-five seconds, which is genuinely saying something. "It's not what—" she starts. "Cora." I hold up a hand. "You and I both know what this is. We have the same parents. We grew up in the same house. I know exactly how smart you are and I need you to not insult that right now." She closes her mouth. Good. At least one of us remembers how to be embarrassed. Lex is sitting up, running a hand through his hair, doing the face — the face I have watched him do in every argument for two years, the one that means he is about to explain to me what I'm actually feeling and why I'm wrong about it. I know this face the way I know my own handwriting. I have loved this face. I have written characters with this face. I have, in retrospect, been a catastrophic i***t about this face. "Listen," he says. "We need to talk about this like adults." I laugh. It surprises all three of us. "You're right," I say. "We do. So here's me, being an adult: get out of my apartment. Both of you." "Lana, this is — we should—" "It's my apartment, Lex." I say it very gently, the way you'd explain something to someone who was concussed. "My name is on the lease. My furniture. My Netflix password that you have been using for fourteen months without asking. My bed." I glance at Cora. "My sister." She at least has the decency to look at the wall. "You work too much," Lex says, and I hear it shift into something harder, something that's been waiting — something rehearsed. "You're never here. I've been telling you for months that I feel like I'm living with a ghost and you just—" "Oh, we're doing the "my fault" section. Great." I press my fingers against my eyes. Not crying. Not yet. Furious in the boneless, airless way that comes before crying, the stage where you're still mostly made of disbelief. "Lex, I work too much because I'm paying for the apartment that you are currently cheating on me in. With my sister. While I brought home food." I point at the kitchen. "There are noodles out there. I got your order right." He doesn't have anything to say to that. Neither does Cora. I pick up my bag from the chair by the door. My hands are shaking. I'm watching them shake from a slight distance, like they belong to someone else, someone who is handling a very reasonable amount of crisis and will be fine in a minute. "Lana, don't be dramatic—" "Goodnight," I say. And I leave. --- The hallway is fluorescent and smells like the neighbor's cooking and I walk down it with the long, swinging stride of a person who is absolutely not falling apart right now and will definitely not be falling apart in the elevator either. I hit the lobby. I hit the street. The city hits back — noise, exhaust, the particular sensory assault of 9 PM on a Thursday when everyone else is apparently still alive and going places. I walk. I don't know where. Forward. The direction that is not the apartment. "Two years", my brain offers, helpfully. "Two years and he didn't even pause the—" I walk faster. "You knew something was wrong. You've known for months. You wrote three horror stories this year about women who ignored warning signs and you KNEW—" "I know," I say out loud. A man walking a small dog gives me a look. I give it back. I think about calling someone. I run through the list and land on no one. My best friend is in a different timezone. My mother would make it about herself within four minutes. My editor would ask if I wanted to turn it into content. I keep walking. The city blurs at the edges — streetlights, storefronts, the red tail of someone's bicycle disappearing around a corner. My chest feels like someone is sitting on it. Not grief. Not yet. The stage before grief, the stage that is just — "oh". Just the sudden understanding of how much weight you've been carrying by telling yourself it wasn't there. "You are twenty-three years old", I think. "You have published thirty-one short stories. You know how this goes. You know exactly how this—" I don't see the car. I don't see it because I'm looking at my hands again, watching them shake, and then there's a sound — a very loud, very sudden sound — and then there is impact, and then there is the sky, and then there is the pavement, and then there is— Nothing. Just nothing. Clean and sudden, like a book snapped shut. --- I expect pain. I've written about dying enough times that I have opinions on it. Specific, well-researched opinions, catalogued by genre and subgenre and cause of death and narrative function. I've described it in thirty-one different voices. I know what it's supposed to feel like. It doesn't feel like anything. I'm lying on something cold. The air smells wrong — like burnt rubber and old rain and something underneath both of those things that has no name I can reach for. There's a sound somewhere, a low mechanical wheeze, something idling. I open my eyes. There are no streetlights. There are no city sounds. There is no Lex, no Cora, no noodles going cold on a counter in an apartment I paid for and cannot go back to. There is a bus station. Abandoned, from the look of it. Cracked concrete and broken glass and weeds splitting the pavement with cheerful indifference. An old sign overhead, letters long since faded into suggestion. And there — at the curb, engine running, door open — a bus. Ancient. Wrong. The kind of vehicle that would fail a safety inspection just by existing. I look at the open door. The open door looks back. The thing is — and I want to be very clear about this — I write horror. I have catalogued, studied, annotated, and published thirty-one stories about exactly this kind of moment. I know what getting on that bus means. I take one step back. From somewhere inside the darkness, a voice drifts out — low, bored, and aimed directly at me: ""Being a scared newbie."" Laughter follows it. Someone else, farther back in the dark. I raise my fist. And then an arm comes through the darkness so fast I don't see it until it has my wrist — and the next second I'm being pulled forward with the kind of force that doesn't ask — and then I'm on the bus, and the door sighs shut behind me, and I am standing in the dark looking at the most objectively, unreasonably handsome face I have ever seen in person. He doesn't speak. A speaker crackles to life above us, and a voice — cheerful, automated, completely unhinged — fills the bus: ""Welcome to THE Survival Game. Congratulations — you are all dead.""