They Both Die at the End Read online

  “You gotta pick it up, Roof,” Tagoe says. He was recording the beat-down because watching fights online is his thing, but now he’s staring at his phone like he’s scared a call is coming for him too.

  “The hell I do,” I say. My heart is pounding mad fast, even faster than when I first moved up on Peck, even faster than when I first decked him and laid him out. Peck’s left eye is swollen already, and there’s still nothing but pure terror in his right eye. These Death-Cast calls go strong until three. He don’t know for sure if I’m about to take him down with me.

  I don’t know either.

  My phone stops ringing.

  “Maybe it was a mistake,” Malcolm says.

  My phone rings again.

  Malcolm stays shut.

  I wasn’t hopeful. I don’t know stats or nothing like that, but Death-Cast fucking up alerts isn’t exactly common news. And we Emeterios haven’t exactly been lucky with staying alive. But meeting our maker way ahead of time? We’re your guys.

  I’m shaking and that buzzing panic is in my head, like someone is punching me nonstop, because I have no idea how I’m gonna go, just that I am. And my life isn’t exactly flashing before my eyes, not that I expect it to later on when I’m actually at death’s edge.

  Peck squirms from underneath me and I raise my fist so he calms the hell down.

  “Maybe he got a weapon on him,” Malcolm says. He’s the giant of our group, the kind of guy who would’ve been helpful to have around when my sister couldn’t get her seat belt off as our car flipped into the Hudson River.

  Before the call, I would’ve bet anything Peck doesn’t have any weapon on him, since we’re the ones who jumped him when he was coming out of work. But I’m not betting my life, not like this. I drop my phone. I pat him down and flip him over, checking his waistband for a pocketknife. I stand and he stays down.

  Malcolm drags Peck’s backpack out from under the blue car where Tagoe threw it. He unzips the backpack and flips it over, letting some Black Panther and Hawkeye comics hit the ground. “Nothing.”

  Tagoe rushes toward Peck and I swear he’s about to kick him like his head’s a soccer ball, but he grabs my phone off the ground and answers the call. “Who you calling for?” His neck twitch surprises no one. “Hold up, hold up. I ain’t him. Hold up. Wait a sec.” He holds out the phone. “You want me to hang up, Roof?”

  I don’t know. I still have Peck, bloodied and beat, in the parking lot of this elementary school, and it’s not like I need to take this call to make sure Death-Cast isn’t actually calling to tell me I won the lottery. I snatch the phone from Tagoe, pissed and confused, and I might throw up but my parents and sister didn’t so maybe I won’t either.

  “Watch him,” I tell Tagoe and Malcolm. They nod. I don’t know how I became the alpha dog. I ended up in the foster home years after them.

  I give myself some distance, as if privacy actually matters, and make sure I stay out of the light coming from the exit sign. Not trying to get caught in the middle of the night with blood on my knuckles. “Yeah?”

  “Hello. This is Victor from Death-Cast calling to speak with Rufus Emmy-terio.”

  He butchers my last name, but there’s no point correcting him. No one else is around to carry on the Emeterio name. “Yeah, it’s me.”

  “Rufus, I regret to inform you that sometime in the next twenty-four hours—”

  “Twenty-three hours,” I interrupt, pacing back and forth from one end of this car to the other. “You’re calling after one.” It’s bullshit. Other Deckers got their alert an hour ago. Maybe if Death-Cast called an hour ago I wouldn’t have been waiting outside the restaurant where freshman-year college-dropout Peck works so I could chase him into this parking lot.

  “Yes, you’re right. I’m sorry,” Victor says.

  I’m trying to stay shut ’cause I don’t wanna take my problems out on some guy doing his job, even though I have no idea why the hell anyone applies for this position in the first place. Let’s pretend I got a future for a second, entertain me—in no universe am I ever waking up and saying, “I think I’ll get a twelve-to-three shift where I do nothing but tell people their lives are over.” But Victor and others did. I don’t wanna hear none of that don’t-kill-the-messenger business either, especially when the messenger is calling to tell me I’ll be straight wrecked by day’s end.

  “Rufus, I regret to inform you that sometime in the next twenty-three hours you’ll be meeting an untimely death. While there isn’t anything I can do to suspend that, I’m calling to inform you of your options for the day. First of all, how are you doing? It took a while for you to answer. Is everything okay?”

  He wants to know how I’m doing, yeah right. I can hear it in the stunted way he asked me, he doesn’t actually care about me any more than he does the other Deckers he gotta call tonight. These calls are probably monitored and he’s not trying to lose his job by speeding through this.

  “I don’t know how I’m doing.” I squeeze my phone so I don’t throw it against the wall painted with little white and brown kids holding hands underneath a rainbow. I look over my shoulder and Peck is still face-first on the ground as Malcolm and Tagoe stare at me; they better make sure he doesn’t run away before we can figure out what we’re doing with him. “Just tell me my options.” This should be good.

  Victor tells me the forecast for the day (supposed to rain before noon and later on as well if I make it that long), special festivals I have zero interest in attending (especially not a yoga class on the High Line, rain or no rain), formal funeral arrangements, and restaurants with the best Decker discounts if I use today’s code. I zone out on everything else ’cause I’m anxious on how the rest of my End Day is gonna play out.

  “How do you guys know?” I interrupt. Maybe this dude will take pity on me and I can clue in Tagoe and Malcolm on this huge mystery. “The End Days. How do you know? Some list? Crystal ball? Calendar from the future?” Everyone stays speculating on how Death-Cast receives this life-changing information. Tagoe told me about all these crazy theories he read online, like Death-Cast consulting a band of legit psychics and a really ridiculous one with an alien shackled to a bathtub and forced by the government to report End Days. There are mad things wrong with that theory, but I don’t have time to comment on them right now.

  “I’m afraid that information isn’t available to heralds either,” Victor claims. “We’re equally curious, but it’s not knowledge we need to perform our job.” Another flat answer. I bet you anything he knows and can’t say if he wants to keep his job.

  Screw this guy. “Yo, Victor, be a person for one minute. I don’t know if you know, but I’m seventeen. Three weeks from my eighteenth birthday. Doesn’t it piss you off that I’ll never go to college? Get married? Have kids? Travel? Doubt it. You’re just chilling on your little throne in your little office because you know you got another few decades ahead of you, right?”

  Victor clears his throat. “You want me to be a person, Rufus? You want me to get off my throne and get real with you? Okay. An hour ago I got off the phone with a woman who cried over how she won’t be a mother anymore after her four-year-old daughter dies today. She begged me to tell her how she can save her daughter’s life, but no one has that power. And then I had to put in a request to the Youth Department to dispatch a cop just in case the mother is responsible, which, believe it or not, is not the most disgusting thing I’ve done for this job. Rufus, I feel for you, I do. But I’m not at fault for your death, and I unfortunately have many more of these calls to make tonight. Can you do me a solid and cooperate?”

  Damn.

  I cooperate for the rest of the call, even though this dude has no business telling me anyone else’s, but all I can think about is the mother whose daughter will never attend the school right behind me. At the end of the call Victor gives me that company line I’ve grown used to hearing from all the new TV shows and movies incorporating Death-Cast into the characters’ day-to-days: “On behalf
of Death-Cast, we are sorry to lose you. Live this day to the fullest.”

  I can’t tell you who hangs up first, but it doesn’t matter. The damage is done—will be done. Today is my End Day, a straight-up Rufus Armageddon. I don’t know how this is gonna go down. I’m praying I don’t drown like my parents and sis. The only person I’ve done dirty is Peck, for real, so I’m counting on not getting shot, but who knows, misfires happen too. The how doesn’t matter as much as what I do before it goes down, but not knowing is still freaking shaking me; you only die once, after all.

  Maybe Peck is gonna be responsible for this.

  I walk back over to the three of them, fast. I pick Peck up by the back of his collar and then slam him against the brick wall. Blood slides from an open wound on his forehead, and I can’t believe this dude threw me over the edge like this. He should’ve never run his mouth about all the reasons Aimee didn’t want me anymore. If that’d never gotten back to me, my hand wouldn’t be around his throat right now, getting him even more scared than I am.

  “You didn’t ‘beat’ me, okay? Aimee didn’t split with me because of you, so get that out of your head right now. She loved me and we got complicated, and she would’ve taken me back eventually.” I know this is legit—Malcolm and Tagoe think so too. I lean in on Peck, looking him dead-on in his only good eye. “I better never see you again for the rest of my life.” Yeah, yeah. Not much life left. But this dude is a fucking clown and might get funny. “You feel me?”

  Peck nods.

  I let go of his throat and grab his phone out of his pocket. I hurl it against the wall and the screen is totaled. Malcolm stomps it out.

  “Get the hell out of here.”

  Malcolm grabs my shoulder. “Don’t let him go. He’s got those connections.”

  Peck slides along the wall, nervous, like he’s scaling across some windows high up in the city.

  I shake Malcolm off my shoulder. “I said get the hell out of here.”

  Peck takes off, running in a dizzying zigzag. He never looks back once to see if we’re coming for him or stops for his comics and backpack.

  “I thought you said he’s got friends in some gang,” Malcolm says. “What if they come for you?”

  “They’re not a real gang, and he was the gang reject. I got no reason to get scared of a gang that let Peck in. He can’t even call them or Aimee, we took care of that.” I wouldn’t want him reaching out to Aimee before I can. I gotta explain myself, and, I don’t know, she may not wanna see me if she figures out what I did, End Day or not.

  “Death-Cast can’t call him either,” Tagoe says, his neck twitching twice.

  “I wasn’t gonna kill him.”

  Malcolm and Tagoe are quiet. They saw the way I was laying into him, like I had no off button.

  I can’t stop shaking.

  I could’ve killed him, even if I didn’t mean to. I don’t know if I would’ve been able to live with myself or not if I did end up snuffing him gone. Nah, that’s a lie and I know it, I’m just trying to be hard. But I’m not hard. I’ve barely been able to live with myself for surviving something my family didn’t—something that wasn’t even my fault. There’s no way in hell I would’ve been chill with myself for beating someone to death.

  I storm toward our bikes. My handles are tangled in Tagoe’s wheel from after we chased Peck here, jumping off our bikes to tackle him. “You guys can’t follow me,” I say, picking my bike up. “You get that, right?”

  “Nah, we’re with you, just—”

  “Not happening,” I interrupt. “I’m a ticking time bomb, and even if you’re not blowing up when I do, you might get burned—maybe literally.”

  “You’re not ditching us,” Malcolm says. “Where you go, we go.”

  Tagoe nods, his head jerking to the right, like his body is betraying his instinct to follow me. He nods again, no twitch this time.

  “You two are straight-up shadows,” I say.

  “That because we’re black?” Malcolm asks.

  “Because you’re always following me,” I say. “Loyal to the end.”

  The end.

  That shuts us up. We get on our bikes and ride off the curb, the wheels bumping and bumping. This is the wrong day to have left my helmet behind.

  Tagoe and Malcolm can’t stay with me the entire day, I know that. But we’re Plutos, bros from the same foster home, and we don’t turn our backs on each other.

  “Let’s go home,” I say.

  And we out.

  MATEO

  1:06 a.m.

  I’m back in my bedroom—so much for never returning here again—and I immediately feel better, like I just got an extra life in a video game where the final boss was kicking my ass. I’m not naive about dying. I know it’s going to happen. But I don’t have to rush into it. I’m buying myself more time. A longer life is all I’ve ever wanted, and I have the power to not shoot that dream in the foot by walking out that front door, especially this late at night.

  I jump into bed with the kind of relief you only find when you’re waking up for school and realize it’s Saturday. I throw my blanket around my shoulders, hop back on my laptop, and—ignoring the email from Death-Cast with the time-stamped receipt of my call with Andrea—continue reading yesterday’s CountDowners post from before I got the call.

  The Decker was twenty-two-year-old Keith. His statuses didn’t provide much context about his life, only that he’d been a loner who preferred runs with his golden retriever Turbo instead of social outings with his classmates. He was looking to find Turbo a new home because he was pretty sure his father would give ownership of Turbo to the first available person, which could be anyone because Turbo is so beautiful. Hell, I would’ve adopted him even though I’m severely allergic to dogs. But before Keith gave up his dog, he and Turbo were running through their favorite spots one last time and the feed stopped somewhere in Central Park.

  I don’t know how Keith died. I don’t know if Turbo made it out alive or if he died with Keith. I don’t know what would’ve been preferred for Keith or Turbo. I don’t know. I could look into any muggings or murders in Central Park yesterday around 5:40 p.m., when the feed stopped, but for my sanity this is better left a mystery. Instead I open up my music folder and play Space Sounds.

  A couple years ago some NASA team created this special instrument to record the sounds of different planets. I know, it sounded weird to me too, especially because of all the movies I’ve watched telling me about how there isn’t sound in space. Except there is, it just exists in magnetic vibrations. NASA converted the sounds so the human ear could hear them, and even though I was hiding out in my room, I stumbled on something magical from the universe—something those who don’t follow what’s trending online would miss out on. Some of the planets sound ominous, like something you’d find in a science fiction movie set in some alien world—“alien world” as in world with aliens, not non-Earth world. Neptune sounds like a fast current, Saturn has this terrifying howling to it that I never listen to anymore, and the same goes for Uranus except there are harsh winds whistling that sound like spaceships firing lasers at each other. The sounds of the planets make for a great conversation starter if you have people to talk to, but if you don’t, they make for great white noise when you’re going to sleep.

  I distract myself from my End Day by reading more CountDowners feeds and by playing the Earth track, which always reminds me of soothing birdsong and that low sound whales make, but also feels a little bit off, something suspicious I can’t put my finger on, a lot like Pluto, which is both seashell and snake hiss.

  I switch to the Neptune track.

  RUFUS

  1:18 a.m.

  We’re riding to Pluto in the dead of night.

  “Pluto” is the name we came up with for the foster home we’re all staying at since our families died or turned their backs on us. Pluto got demoted from planet to dwarf planet, but we’d never treat each other as something lesser.

  It’s been fo
ur months that I’ve been without my people, but Tagoe and Malcolm have been getting cozy with each other a lot longer. Malcolm’s parents died in a house fire caused by some unidentified arsonist, and whoever it was, Malcolm hopes he’s burning in hell for taking away his parents when he was a thirteen-year-old troublemaker no one else wanted except the system, and barely even them. Tagoe’s mom bounced when he was a kid, and his pops ran off three years ago when he couldn’t keep up with the bills. A month later Tagoe found out his pops had committed suicide, and homeboy still hasn’t shed a tear over the guy, never even asked how or where he died.

  Even before I found out I was dying, I knew home, Pluto, wasn’t gonna be home for me much longer. My eighteenth birthday is coming up—same for Tagoe and Malcolm, who both hit eighteen in November. I was college bound like Tagoe, and we’d figured Malcolm would crash with us as he gets his shit together. Who knows what’s what now, and I hate that I already have an out to these problems. But right now, all that matters is we’re still together. I got Malcolm and Tagoe by my side, like they’ve been from day one when I got to the home. Whether it was for family time or bitching sessions, they were always at my left and right.

  I wasn’t planning on stopping, but I pull over when I see the church I came to a month after the big accident—my first weekend out with Aimee. The building is massive, with off-white bricks and maroon steeples. I’d love to take a picture of the stained-glass windows, but the flash might not catch it right. Doesn’t matter anyway. If a picture is Instagram worthy, I slap on the Moon filter for that classic black-and-white effect. The real problem is I don’t think a photo of a church taken by my nonbelieving ass is the best last thing to leave behind for my seventy followers. (Hashtag not happening.)

  “What’s good, Roof?”

  “This is the church where Aimee played piano for me,” I say. Aimee is pretty Catholic, but she wasn’t pushing any of that on me. We’d been talking about music, and I mentioned digging some of the classical stuff Olivia used to put on when she was studying, and Aimee wanted me to hear it live—and she wanted to be the one who played it for me. “I have to tell her I got the alert.”