Midtown Massacre

The two lay in bed, the blackout curtains giving the impression of late night, though she knew it was sometime in the mid-afternoon. Tuesday, she thought. Sandy lay with her head on his chest, her left leg entangled in his. They lay in a pool of stillness that might have resembled utter contentment. But there was something in the wideness of her eyes and the tension trembling in her hands that gave a sense of impending disaster. The room was scattered with bits of two depressingly normal lives. Bookshelves filled with remnants of college: Kierkegaard and Austen. A computer sat on the floor in one corner, covered in dirty laundry. Wires still crossed the room in awkward places, running under the door to the generator in the closet, though there had not been any gas for it, even on the black market, for months. The ceiling was blackened by the candle smoke. Sometimes Sandy would look around and she could see their life before the war under the pieces of their new half-life.

They had gotten this apartment right after college. It was a studio the size of a closet, but they didn’t really care. He was starting grad school, and she had found a job that would cover the rent and utilities, so they figured they were set. His hair was long, hung in his eyes like a shadow. She always threatened to cut it in his sleep, or get him on Queer Eye just so they’d cut it. They both knew she was joking by the way she would tangle her fingers in it every time they kissed. Sandy stopped herself from thinking of those days—the days when they had thought they had it made.

She could hear an explosion from a few blocks away. She considered for a second getting up to find something to eat, but though her stomach was achingly empty, she couldn’t quite see the point. There were sounds of more gunfights outside, and she wished they were closer. She could hear anti-aircraft fire from somewhere near the park. She was tempted to get up and take off the blackout curtain, to let in a little bit of light, but she wasn’t quite ready to let the rest of the world into their apartment. It had been the last place they had together.

She began to think again, of the past few years, and how they had gotten to where they were that Tuesday. The war had at first barely entered her consciousness. She had been a senior in college, in love, and excited to be ready to start her new life. People had been complaining non-stop and declaring the imminence of WW3 since Trump had gotten elected in 2016. By the time his second term had started in August 2021, the US’s recovery from the global pandemic had already been devastated by the Delta2 variant. Thinking of the pandemic brought to mind the memory of the morgue trucks parked outside the hospitals, the smells as the city ran out of the money to keep the refrigerators going. Sandy shook her head, trying to shake away the memories.

It was only because of her love that she had even gone to the protests. The second year of the war she had complained and bitched the whole day, but had gone anyway. It had seemed the war was over, why were they still protesting, she had said. By the third anniversary she was making signs and leading chants, but this was because one of the reactionary terrorist attacks had been in her hometown and suddenly she was angry. Looking back now, she was almost amused at how her life had just seemed to keep going, though the world was slowly descending into chaos. They had lived together for five years, somehow still dreaming of the future, though they began to talk about getting a handgun, just for protection.

It was five years after the start of the war when the oil fields began to blossom slowly into flame. It was then that everyone understood that the changes had been irrevocable. Sandy had bought the generator after the first attack (he had called her rash), cleaning out their savings, but she was justified when a month later the pipelines were destroyed by aerial attacks. Soon there were blockades, food shortages and black outs. When suicide bombers began to destroy whole street corners and department stores, martial law was declared fast. They had battened themselves into the apartment, banding together with their neighbors, and agreeing to block all strangers from entering, sure the enemy was coming at any moment. To everyone’s surprise, that unreality had lasted for almost a year. A year of soldiers and their M16’s on every corner, black-market fruit and gasoline, and a suspension of almost all normal activity. Sandy had, guiltily, felt like it was an adventure for a little while. But quickly she began to see that this was no adventure. What drove her crazy was the lack of concrete news. Sometimes trucks would drive down 2nd Ave, declaring that peace would be returned soon, or that the army had scored another major victory on the battlegrounds of Long Island, but the rumors circling the neighborhood were more about the chemical gas attack someone’s sister had died in on the West Side and the way the food trucks were being blocked from crossing the Triboro.

He had been caught in the attack when trying to see if an old friend had survived the bombings in Brooklyn. The gas had entered his lungs and begun a slow decay that took days to take him. Sandy was so glad he had managed to get home. She had held him for those last few hours. He had told her that he had found the friend, a journalist with good connections. The friend had told him that the bombings in the city were as much the US government as the invaders. That the government was still talking in the Midwest of “acceptable losses in the name of peace.”

It was this thought that drove Sandy to finally rise from the bed. His body was long cold, his eyes glassy and seemingly forever tracing the cracks in the ceiling. Sandy’s face resembled something of stone—maybe a statue dedicated to fallen heroes. She walked to the closet and dug in the back, finally returning with a dress the color a woman in the store had called “antique rose.” She hadn’t worn it since her high school prom, but thanks to near starvation it wasn’t even snug. She took out all of the candles they had remaining and lit them all. The glow softened the angles of his cold body. She lovingly stroked his face and, though it was difficult, she fit his stiff limbs into his favorite suit. She didn’t close his eyes. She smiled at the way the room resembled a romance scene in the chick flicks she’d watched growing up. She carefully applied some makeup she hadn’t touched in a year. She put on the heart-shaped locket he had given her on their first anniversary. She admired herself in the mirror. Yes. This is how she had imagined it. She grabbed the AR-15 and began to load it. Catching another glance of herself in the mirror she reminded herself of a different sort of movie: one of those horror movies she would go see with dates during high school—maybe Carrie.

One of her few remaining neighbors saw her on the way out of the building, but thought it better not to say anything. He was right. When she entered the street it was empty, but she could hear some fighting down on what she guessed was 57th St. She walked along, her heels crunching glass and broken looted electronic equipment. When she reached the fighting, she saw that it was a standoff between what appeared to be the looters and a platoon of soldiers. She held the gun along her thigh, hiding it somewhat in the folds of her dress. The two groups slowly began to stop shooting, taken aback by the young white girl in the pastel pink prom dress walking into the middle of a battle scene.

They were even more taken aback when she lifted the gun, braced herself and began to spray the soldiers with bullets. She had surprised them so much she managed to make a complete sweep of their line with her gun before they reacted. She saw more than one man fall, and even heard the looters behind her cheer and begin to run before the bullets began to hit her. The blood spread like cracks in a ceiling along the seams of her dress.