No one was certain who first made the connection that many of the residents of Berkshire Commons, those who had been tested at least, would die of FIRE or HEAT or some like variation of INFERNO. A Death Notice was a private thing, not something to be shared, particularly if it dealt in DISASTER or PLAGUE. Like a fortune cookie’s power only proved true when convivially shared over Moo Shoo Pork and good-sprits, so those who held a particularly ominous Death Notice hoped the reverse applied: a secret kept was a fate deferred. But once the similarities amongst the neighbors became clear, it was all anyone would ever talk about. In the washing room, in the elevator, collecting their mail.

“What was yours?” a neighbor would ask and, getting the inevitable reply, nod grimly. “The walls seem so sturdy,” the neighbor would say, pounding his or her fist on the cinderblock wall above the dryer. “Just doesn’t seem like this building could BURN.”

Then, still muttering, the neighbor would measure out detergent or fabric softener and go about his or her laundry, forgetting momentarily the horrifying fate that was promised them all.

In the elevator, the awkward silences as previously distant neighbors stared at the slowly ascending lights eased with certain knowledge of a shared future. Sometimes a neighbor would simply say, “You too?” and the other would nod in silent affirmation of brotherhood.

There was a meeting of the Homeowners Association and it was decided that a letter would be drafted to the Property Manager. The secretary of the Homeowners Association even went to the copy shop and had a packet of Death Notices collated in an attractive booklet to accompany the missive:

Dear sirs, given the broad occurrence of deaths by means of FIRE and/or FLAME by the resideints of your building, it seems a prudent decision to employ any and all state-of-the-art fire-retardant devices and/or materials in any future rehabilitation of the building along with the present installation of fire alert and control devices forthwith. We would very much appreciate your compliance with this request at the earliest possible date.

Sincerely,

The Residents of Berkshire Commons

The Property Manager hemmed and hawed a bit to be sure, but after speaking with their lawyers and the insurance company who informed them that 

the Death Machine Clause could possibly apply in this scenario—that is the insurance company was not liable for damages the Property Manager had reasonable foreknowledge of—the Property Manager installed smoke detectors on every floor along with fire extinguishers in the hallways and even, when time came to repaint the same hallways, used a newly developed fire-resistant paint whose makers claimed could actually repel and even suffocate a fire before it had a chance to spread.

These improvements satisfied many of the tenants, though not all—most of the renters moved out when their leases expired, but this was a small percentage as it was a point of pride that most inhabitants of Berkshire Commons owned their condos. Nevertheless, everybody went back about their business and forgot the supposedly forthcoming fire except to chide other inhabitants of the building who still smoked cigarettes and pass a Homeowners Association directive that banned the use of barbecue grills on the condominium building’s many porches—a great selling point. Barbecues could still be held in the common lawn area however, and the prohibition on individual barbecues simply served to enhance the renewed community spirit of the building as more neighbors found that cooking burgers and chicken with other neighbors was more fun than doing it with family members one had already talked to a million times anyway.

It was at one of these community events that Janice McKendrick, 12B, admitted between bites of her hotdog that she had yet to be tested. “What?” came the incredulous reply. “I just figured it would be FIRE,” Janice said, dabbing at the mustard on the corner of her lips with a napkin. “What’s the point?”

Billy Jensen, 6F, Bob Jensen’s young son hadn’t been tested either. Neither had Nora Jackson, 11E, Steve Probert, 7D, or either of the Farnsworths, 6A, who spent half the year at the shore anyway. It seemed that several of the neighbors hadn’t been tested, and several of the children hadn’t yet had enough life to do so.

“What if it isn’t FIRE?” asked a neighbor. “Maybe we can beat the prediction, maybe things have changed?” Though everyone knew the predictions of a Death Machine never changed and were never wrong. But, given the new information, the Homeowners Association decided when a Collector came back through town, they would hire him for the day and everybody in the building who hadn’t been tested could, and would, undergo the process. If they couldn’t escape fate, perhaps they could alter it slightly.

The Collector set up the Death Machine in the lobby on a folding table the super dug out of the basement—in the past it had been used for Selden Peachmaker’s, 2G, Voter Registration Drive and Bonnie MacNamara’s, 11B, Global Warning Awareness Week until the Homeowners Association made a prohibition against that as well, much to Bonnie’s chagrin. “Fucking Fascists,” she’d said to her husband Frank, who unfailingly, and secretly, voted the conservative party line.

The Collector looked like he could have been seven-hundred-years old and wore a dusty grey suit that was threadbare around the collar and joints. His deep black eyes swam in the hollow caverns of his face. His nose was sharp and thin like a knife that came to a point above his lips, dry blue lines on his pancaked white face. Like all Collectors, he wore rouge on his cheeks. The Death Machine looked almost as old as the man, like a meat-grinder from the Middle Ages. Rusty joints held bulbs of softly pulsing metal, its openings akin to a human digestive system: a pleading mouth sucking fate and excreting prophecy. A strange smell grew pronounced in the lobby too, a thick curtain of stench like blood and copper. None of the neighbors could say if the Death Machine or its operator was responsible.

“How come they haven’t updated these things?” said one neighbor, wrinkling his nose as he looked askance at the strange metal contraption on the beige plastic table. “Or that guy,” another responded under her breath. “He gives me the willies.”

“They have to make them all the same,” said the tall, well-coiffed divorcee Bruce Donaldson, 6L, loudly, happy to share his knowledge of the Death Machines. His pungent aftershave tempered the copper smell with a hint of cinnamon for the neighbors in his close proximity. “Something about the integrity of the results. They tried to computerize it, but it just didn’t work anymore. As far as the Collectors, the same guys—always guys—have been operating the Death Machines since they were first invented—most of them are as old as dirt. I heard they were going to start training new operators, but I guess for some reason they haven’t. Probably some union bullshit.”

Janice McKendrick, the tennis-playing, perky mother of two who had yet to be tested and stood first in line, nodded at Bruce and swallowed loudly.

“Don’t be scared,” he said smiling, eyes fixed on the drooping V-neck of her unbuttoned polo shirt. “I know it seems like a lot of blood but you got plenty.”

Janice stepped up to the table and the Collector slowly raised his head from its position of reverence to the machine, extending a long, thin finger towards the box of vials that rested on the table along with an antique silver knife with a bronze and leather handle.

“What about this knife?” she asked and Bruce just grinned again and said, “It’s all part of the tradition.”

Janice picked up the knife, it was even heavier than she had thought it would be, and held it in her shaking hand. The Collector looked on impassively; such delays did not concern him, but others in line grew fidgety.

“Get on with it already, we’re waiting back here!” called a neighbor nobody liked from the back of the queue.

“It’s okay,” Bruce encouraged, then glared at the man behind him. “Take your time.” Janice looked down at the knife in her hand, at the two dancing wolves etched into the base of the blade. “Bruce, can you do it for me?” she asked meekly.

“Nope,” Bruce replied, crossing his arms in front of his chest in a mock display of helplessness. “That’s part of the tradition too.”

Janice was braver than she let on and merely shrugged and said, “Okay then, here goes nothing,” before making a long slit across her palm. She held her hand out, extending and stretching one finger after the other, and watched the blood collect in the vile. The Collector, almost invisible in his immobility before, seemed to awaken from his somber trance, his eyes shining at the sight of Janice’s dripping blood. Seeing his glinting eyes, so alive for the first time, Janice shuddered and grabbed a paper towel from the table to staunch the wound.

“That enough?” she asked as the Collector eagerly grasped the vile from where Janice placed it on the table and held it before his eyes, seeming to calculate the exact number of milliliters she had left behind. Days later, Bobby Jo Wood, 12J, who, standing in the corner of the lobby behind the Collector had a different view than the rest of the neighbors, swore she saw the Collector’s dark tongue flick out and retrieve a stray drop that perched on the lip of the glass vile. So fast that she almost didn’t see, but she did. She knew she did.

After measuring the blood with his eyes, and, according to Bobby Jo at least, tasting of Janice, the Collector nodded ever so slightly and unlatched and opened the hinged metal top to the funnel that led down into the curious guts of the Death Machine. Slowly, with absolute precision, he poured Janice’s blood into the funnel with his right hand while simultaneously turning the crank that stuck, Jack-in-the-box-like, out of the machine’s side with his left. The crank needed grease and creaked eerily with each rotation.

The process altogether couldn’t have taken much more than thirty seconds, but seemed longer with the machine’s noise and the expectant silence of the neighbors. When the yellowed scrap of paper wormed its way out of the machine’s front orifice, some of the more dramatic neighbors gasped.

Janice’s quivering hand reached out to grab the slip, but paused and she turned her head and looked again at Bruce. “Go ahead,” he quietly mouthed, eyes twinkling. Janice took the slip and, holding it with both hands, looked down at the Death Notice with a puzzled expression on her face.

“Well,” shouted one anxious neighbor from the back, “what’s it say?”

“Is it FIRE?’ asked another.

Janice shook her head and frowned. “No, it’s not FIRE,” she said quietly. But no further and the neighbors’ expectation grew.

Bruce intervened, his impatience won over, moving behind Janice and peering over her shoulder down at the slip in her hands—breaking decades-held rules of Death Notice decorum and receiving a disdainful look from the Collector in the process.

“STEPS?” he said.

“STEPS.” she replied.

The neighbors sighed.

“STEPS is good,” a neighbor shouted out, relived that not everyone in the building would perish in the INFERNO, maybe there wouldn’t be an INFERNO at all. “STEPS is old,” he continued. “Lots of old ladies die falling down steps, right? I mean, it’s not the greatest way to go, but it’s better than some.”

“Don’t forget, building’s got an elevator,” one neighbor added brightly.

Other neighbors nodded and grunted in agreement. STEPS wasn’t bad, and at least it wasn’t FIRE.

The spirit of the residents of Berkshire Commons improved more over the course of the day as only one of the newly-tested neighbors received anything approximating death by FIRE or HEAT, and his was FRY, which could just as well have meant he was eating too much fatty food. Curiously however, was that of the new Death Notices, many shared a commonality similar, though perhaps inverse, of those already held by so many residents of Berkshire Commons.

Billy Jensen, Bob’s son, was first to receive word of the other emerging theme. WINTER, his Notice read.

“Hmmm,” Bob sounded upon reading his son’s Notice. “WINTER, that’s a strange one.”

Billy was scared by his father’s lack of certainty, but more so by the prospect of freezing to death at some later date. “I don’t want to freeze, Dad,” Billy said as he stared crying. “I’d rather BURN like you.”

“No, no,” said Jack Johnson, 7F, as he grabbed Billy by the shoulder, eliciting a cold look from Bob. “WINTER’s good, Billy. WINTER’s good. It’s like a metaphor you know, you know what a metaphor is Billy?”

Billy looked at Jack tearfully, snot bubbling from his nose. “Like something that means something else,” he whined.

“Exactly,” said Jack. “Something that means something else. And in this case, something good! WINTER is old age, Billy! All the great poets know this.”

Bob looked at Jack, softening to him for his quick witted compassion for Bob’s young son, despite his insistence on revving his motorbike outside the building at all hours of the night and having questionable guests of the platinum-blonde, fake-breasted variety from time to time. “Yes son,” Bob, said, patting Billy on the back. “Jack’s right. WINTER’s good.”

There were other variations of COLD, one DARKNESS, and a DUST, but, while scary, they were equally vague and could be rationalized into several different options varying from old age to disease contracted in old age to losing one’s sight in old age and falling down the STAIRS—much how Janice McKendrick explained her Notice. Most importantly, they weren’t FIRE, so when The Collector packed up the Death Machine and moved on to the next town, the tenants of Berkshire Commons relaxed and went about their lives: school and work and barbecues and making babies.

It was coincident with this last activity that the troubles started anew. Most of the neighbors figured Janice McKendrick and Bruce Donaldson were having an affair—it was obvious the way they looked at each other or conveniently found themselves doing laundry at the same time. Even greater clarity lay in James McKendrick’s sudden depression. Never the friendliest of neighbors, James now could barely be trusted to bring a six-pack to the weekly barbecue and volleyball tournament, if he showed up at all. But Janice and Bruce were sure to attend, and while their friendly conversations were to all casual appearances harmless, it wasn’t hard to see they were falling in love.

Bruce and Janice at the organic co-op, Bruce and Janice at the flower show, the two grew inseparable. Worse yet for James Kendrick, his children Jacqueline and Jeremy also seemed to take a shine to Bruce. Neighbors saw Bruce and Jeremy kicking the soccer ball around, Bruce helping Jacqueline with her homework on the picnic benches near the barbecue pit. James, of course, noticed too. Yet when he confronted his wife about the fact that she, and their children even, seemed to be spending so much time with this strange man Bruce from 6L, his wife called him a jealous fool.

“Don’t you trust me?” she asked. “We have two beautiful children, a full life together, a beautiful condo, and still you don’t trust me. He just got divorced, James. He misses his kids, that’s all. You should be happy Jeremy finally has someone to play soccer with.”

These last words stung James as he had never been much of an athlete and, years before, had even resented the other boys at school who were fond of sports. James had spent his teenage years winning the regional science fair two years running and turned his success into an advanced degree in chemical engineering and a supervisory position at a nearby genetics laboratory. That he chose to marry Janice who, in her youth, had been a tennis player of some renowned, despite a lack of surface compatibility, was not terribly difficult to understand.

A few weeks after their heated conversation, weeks filled with the slow degradation of his role as a husband and a father to the sweet-smelling usurper Bruce, James McKendrick woke from a fitful night’s sleep. He had dreamed of a long line of prophets dressed in white robes walking through the desert under a hot sun. The strange figures marched single file from a past of ash and smoke towards a mountain that met a red sky. With knowledge born from a place deep inside him, James knew that below the mountain in the horizon there ran a river of blood. Lying alone in bed—Janice was already up, hitting tennis balls in the courts behind Berkshire Commons—he could smell the dry air of the desert, feel the sand beneath his feet; his heart strained for the mountain of blood, his lungs screamed as he breathed in the waves of heat. James knew he must reach the mountain.

As he slowly became conscious that the mountain he longed for was only a dream, that he remained in bed staring at a dresser strewn with cosmetics, Janice’s sports bra carelessly thrown over the small television set also on the dresser; James was still in his bedroom in the condominium he shared with his family. The proof of his life in vacation and wedding pictures hung on the walls in cheap aluminum frames Janice purchased at Glorious Containers, Janice’s stacks of fitness magazines under the coffee table, her 20-year old tennis trophies clogging the mantle, his children Jeremy and Jacqueline’s mediocre report cards magnetized to the refrigerator. At the painful moment the awareness came to full fruition, that he was fully awake and far from the red mountain, James McKendrick decided to poison his wife Janice.

And so he did: with a discrete chemical addition to each morning’s bowl of shredded wheat that created and expanded a small hole in her aorta until one afternoon she collapsed in the midst of her cardio on an elliptical machine in the Berkshire Commons community exercise room. Chest and face flushed pink and beaded with sweat, she lay on the carpeted floor of the exercise room, a trickle of drool running from the corner of her lips. A quick-thinking Nora Jackson rushed over from her nearby treadmill and attempted to resuscitate Janice—Nora had taking good advantage of the previous year’s Friends of Berkshire Emergency CPR Seminar—but it was too late. Janice McKendrick, age 36, mother of two, lover of one, was dead of a heart attack.

The residents of Berkshire Commons were stunned by Janice’s untimely death and uniformly disgusted with the directness, haughtiness even, of her Death Notice.

“That just ain’t right,” said the mailman to a neighbor upon hearing the news. “STEPS is elderly-like, you know? Not some freakin’ exercise machine.” He shook his head wistfully and handed the neighbor her mail, “New Glorious Containers catalog. Looks nice.”

Some neighbors directed their anger towards the Collectors, who they viewed as taking greater pleasure in the cryptic, or even worse, direct, pronouncements of the Death Machines.

“Where do they get off?” asked a bitter neighbor. “Who said they were the only ones who could run the Machines?”

“Yeah,” added a neighbor in agreement. “What kind of person would even want that sick job, if they are even people, with that crazy makeup, those outfits...” the neighbor trailed off in evident disgust.

These were questions that had been asked before in other towns and other condominium buildings to be sure, and the feeble replies were just as unsatisfying: “It’s just the way it’s always been.”

A few neighbors went so far as to wonder if the Collectors could somehow be responsible for the death, given the veracity and timeliness of the Death Machine’s prediction. “Makes you wonder alright,” said one neighbor to another walking from the parking lot after a long day of work and tense commute home, the car radio chattering with news of the faraway madness of insane dictators. “Those Death Notices, just how are they so right on all the time? Really makes you wonder…”

In fact, so befuddled were the neighbors by Janice’s death and the Collector’s peculiar visit—Bobby Jo was still known to pull alarmed neighbors aside, tugging at their elbows, spittle flying from her mouth, “I saw him drink her blood!”—James, cuckold and chemist and obvious suspect in his wife’s murder, might have gotten away with the crime had it not been for the attentive ministrations of Janice’s grieving paramour, Bruce Donaldson.

“She was too young,” said an unshaven Bruce, choking back a sob. “Too young.”

“I know buddy, I know,” said the neighbor Bruce rode in the elevator with. “My floor, okay? Take care of yourself pal.”

“James had something to do with this, I fucking swear it!” Bruce growled later in the washroom, his sadness turned to anger.

The neighbor, sorting her whites and colors, looked at Bruce quizzically, “You really think so, Bruce? Maybe you’re overreacting. Thirty-six is so young though, and she was so fit, you really think James could do that? Geez, they had children together.”

“Goddamn right I do,” said Bruce, fuming. “Jeremy and Jacqueline are with Janice’s parents now. They couldn’t stand to be in the same room with that murderer.”

“Hmmm,” the neighbor said, feeding change into the machine.

And so rumors—correct rumors it turned out—of James’s involvement in Janice’s death spread throughout Berkshire Commons and caught the attention of Freddy LeBouef, 5C, Homeowners Association Safety Subcommittee Chairman and local police sergeant. Freddy began to make discreet inquiries.

“Man, so sad about Janice McKendrick, huh? Poor thing. You know her well?” Freddy asked a neighbor intently munching his corn on the cob at a Saturday afternoon B & B (Barbecue and Badminton). The neighbor nodded as solemnly as a mouthful of corn would allow.

“What about James? You know him? How’s he holding up?” Freddy continued. The neighbor’s eyes took a slit cast that uniformly signified disdain or at least profound misunderstanding.

James’s strange change in demeanor did nothing to ease the concerns of the neighbors. Depressed for so long, following his wife’s death James seemed to be possessed of a newly meditative quality—he floated through the world of Berkshires Commons without care or concern.

James didn’t even make pretense about his non-attendance at volleyball, but instead took long walks on the nature path that circled Berkshire Commons, pausing to smell a flower or kick a pinecone. He sat in the middle of the adjoining soccer fields and recited strange archaic poetry. James was seen reading a book on Chiropterology.

“It’s the study of bats,” Billy Jensen clarified for his confused father who was relating the story to Billy’s mother.

“Bats?” Bob Jensen asked his son.

“Bats,” Billy repeated. “You know, like the flying mammal.”

“Hmm.” Bob intoned and looked at his wife. Since receiving his own peculiar Death Notice, Billy had grown somewhat withdrawn and devoted an increasing amount of time to reading nature texts. His parents were concerned.

“That’s very nice honey,” said Doris, Billy’s mom and Bob’s wife. “Why don’t you go play outside and let dad and me finish discussing the news.”

“Don’t encourage him,” Bob said quietly as Billy shut the door behind him, a book identifying various regional flora and fauna clasped in his hand.

“So,” Doris continued with her son safely out of hearing, “you’re saying the Machine made James do it somehow?”

“Not that exactly,” Bob answered, taking a sip of his gin and tonic. “More like gave him the idea, you know?”

While Bob and Doris’s line of conversation was not uncommon among the residents of Berkshire Commons, it seemed to most neighbors—those who didn’t put much sway in complicated metaphysics—in the case of the elliptical demise of Janice McKendrick, her husband James was the sole responsible party. Blaming the Collectors or the Death Notice or the Death Machine seemed as arbitrary as blaming the exercise machine, her lover Bruce Donaldson, or the cereal she ate each morning that her husband happened to fortify with poison.

When Freddy LeBouef had acquired an appropriate amount of circumstantial evidence and his colleagues in the police came to arrest James for the murder of Janice, he was strolling in the woods on one of his “constitutionals,” as he liked to call them to any neighbor brave enough to ask how he was coping. He did not resist the officers.

Hands cuffed behind his back, James was led by the police past a throng of neighbors assembled beside the barbecue pit. He shuffled along, head down, so the neighbors assumed, wracked by guilt and shame. But then James stopped, tugging the two police officers who escorted him around and tightening his handcuffs to a painful degree James was wholly oblivious to.

James raised his head, running a vacant gaze over the gaping neighbors, comfortably attired in their cargo shorts, T-shirts, and sandals. His dull eyes took in the barbecue pit, the sand volleyball court, the stacks of paper plates and plastic cups of plastic utensils next to bowls of coleslaw and baked beans in plastic containers on the faded red wood of the slatted picnic tables. He looked at all these things, a crystallized moment of his life in Berkshire Commons that he forever left behind when he saw the mountain in his dreams, heard the rushing river of blood, and a wry smile formed on his lips. At the conclusion of his reverie, as much melancholy as untoward, the placid look James had worn the past weeks returned and he spoke quietly, though audible to all present, “We needed her blood.” Not another syllable escaped his mouth until he too died.

James’s last words were taken as a confession by the police and neighbors alike and his trial was a cursory affair—though there was an obvious unspoken reluctance to identify the plural “we” to whom he referred. In something of a departure from the country’s legal precedents, James’s Death Notice, CHOKE, was even used against him by the prosecution. Given the likelihood of the death penalty for James’s crime—the country used the gas chamber as its means of execution—it was damning evidence.

Janice’s parents brought Jeremy and Jacqueline to the courtroom for the announcement of their father’s guilty verdict. The two children seemed at sea in their adult frock, two capsized orphans sitting astride the floating detritus of their lives. While the parent’s cheered, the children simply looked confused and finally, resigned to their father’s new role in their subsequent dysfunction. When the bailiff took James away he did not look at his children or former in-laws, but remained in the blissful heat and wind of the hot desert of his imagination, where he spent the entirety of his trial, each day a step closer to his release from the fetters of his current existence and rebirth in the caverns that ran red beneath the mountain.

The children moved permanently to live with their grandparents and Bruce Donaldson moved on too, finding satisfaction with whiskey on his lips between the legs of a liquor store attendant from across town. Bruce and Bernadette met a few short weeks after Janice’s murder; Bruce had developed a serious habit of booze-fueled voyeurism following Janice’s murder—a craving satiated by Bernadette’s place of employment and its proximity to Pablo’s Peep Palace. Neighbor Jack Johnson, of the quick poetic justification of Billy Jensen’s Death Notice, even occasionally accompanied Bruce on his sojourns to Pablo’s, a place of which Jack was intimately acquainted.

The murderer James, preternaturally aware of what was to come, tried to hasten his journey across the desert by hanging himself in his cell on death row, but failed. The jury-rigged noose snapped and he fell to the floor of his cell, hitting his head against the latrine and fracturing his jaw and eye socket, where he lay unconscious, choking to death on his own blood. On another day perhaps the guard might have seen James’s fall on the closed-circuit monitors of the prison and been able to save him from his fate until his later fate, but the accident happened the same night the deranged dictator from across the sea chose to make his momentous announcement.

All across the country, television broadcasts of Surveyor, Intern!, and Murder Science were interrupted by news bulletins of a short, balding man in military dress speaking vociferously in a strange foreign tongue. The up-to-the-second translation scrolled along the bottom of the screen. Tired of the country’s preeminent place in regional politics, its capitalist ideology and fantastic barbecues, the rotund potentate whose epaulets reached his ears chose that night to fire his heretofore-unknown arsenal of strategic nuclear ballistic missiles at the country. The impact would come soon. As regrettable as it was for the apologetic despot to say, the inhabitants of the country should prepare for their inevitable demise. But alas, he whimsically added, they brought it on themselves.

In the weeks and months that followed, as the survivors crawled out from their caves and crude shelters to see the devastation firsthand and burned and buried the dead, it became clear that the Collectors had foreseen this most unlikely outcome. It was even thought the Collectors conspired to prevent just the type of collective knowledge that forewarned—if ineffectually and ultimately incorrectly—the residents of Berkshire Commons. The Collectors had apparently staggered the Death Notices, leaving commonalities to isolated apartment buildings or blocks, but never whole towns or swaths of countryside. They were never dishonest per say—a Death Notice was always correct—but with careful manipulation the Death Machine’s operators managed a certain creative vocabulary: COLD became SLOW, INERTIA of cells dying in the FROST. HEAT was SPEED, as atoms, and skin, EXPLODED. The Collectors knew that while their skill with the Death Machines was highly valued, their product was also endlessly justified, explained away, or ignored; no one, save their breed and a few sagely academics well-versed in the foreign policy of the hemisphere, ever saw the country’s true fate take shape.

Further word spread amongst ragtag bands of radioactive survivors that the Collectors had prepared for years even, stockpiling supplies—including, some said, many thousands of liters of blood pilfered from hospitals and blood banks throughout the land—in a vast series of underground caverns in the mountainous Western region of the country. Some surmised the Collectors had abducted a number of young children, apprentices in blood, to repopulate the country after the Collector’s own curious image: a race of seers, immune to death, travelling the land in ghostly caravans. They had not only seen the coming apocalypse and done nothing to stop it, warned no one, but had taken the opportunity to one day create a strange new Eden on the dusty soil of the old, dead world.

None of the children of Berkshire Commons had been so lucky to have been selected for the divine task of replenishing the country; many, however, did escape the fate their parents and neighbors suffered when one of the deranged dictator’s warheads landed not far from the barbecue pit that had become so popular with the tenants. The majority of school-age children—save Jeremy and Jacqueline of course, having moved onto a new school, new friends, and new neighbors, having died alone in strange surroundings—had been on the yearly field trip to Stuckley Village, a historically accurate 19th century community replete with a blacksmith shop, cobbler, and costumed townspeople.

With the deranged dictator’s announcement, Stuckley Village’s intrepid staff broke policy, after some argument, by moving all the children from the dormitory-style bunk-bed lodging in the Olde Cider Mill to the cement cellar of the Olde Meetinghouse—a historically inaccurate (unpublicized) component of Stuckley Village allowed for the sake of “administrative necessity.” When the staff, forced by the needs of hunger and sanitation, eventually pushed away the rubble that opened onto the razed and barren ground of their once proud village, many were driven insane by the enormity of the historical incongruity that surrounded them—an unfortunate turn given the staff’s familiarity with pre-industrial means of production. The children then forced to spread out, alone or in small packs, foraging the land for scraps of meat and potable water.

Such was how Billy Jensen, son of Bob and Doris, found himself scrambling over cement blocks and debris when the geography surrounding him clarified in his eye and he realized where he was. His mind and soul had aged many years in the few months since he had last looked upon Berkshire Commons, but there was no doubt he was home. Thinking after his dead parents and neighbors, vaporized in white FIRE when the missiles hit, Billy Jensen looked up into the sky—at noon it was the color of dark slate—pulled his tattered coat around his shoulders and shivered. The long WINTER had begun.