David wakes on cold pavement with his cheek against the curb and no idea where his shoes are.
For a moment he lies there, because lying there is easier than the alternative, which is sitting up and finding out. His t-shirt sticks to his back. He is wearing the sleep pants with the hole in the pocket. His feet are bare and the asphalt is cold enough to ache, and the ache is useful, it is data, it tells him his feet are still his.
Inventory, he thinks. That is what you do when a system goes down. You inventory.
Hands: scraped, the right palm stinging where he clawed at the bedroom floor. He remembers that now, the clawing, the wood solid under his fingers while the light narrowed to a thread. Arms: bruised at the shoulders from bracing. Ribs: sore. Head: ringing, like a bell struck once and left to fade.
Duke: gone.
The inventory stops there, because the next line item is a scream, and he is not doing that on the curb. Not yet.
Then the smell hits him. Lemon cleaner. Wrong here, out in the open air, lemon cleaner and cut grass and underneath it something metallic, like a battery leaking.
He sits up.
It is his street. It is his cul-de-sac, the seven houses with the same bones. And it is not. The houses are too tall, stretched a full story past where they should stop, their windows black rectangles with no reflection in them. The sky is flat and gray, the exact gray of a monitor with the power cut. No sun. No clouds. No birds. The sprinkler three doors down chatters in the dark of its own yard, throwing water in a perfect arc onto a lawn that is too green, the green of a screensaver.
His house stands at the end of the curve. The garage door hangs half open, crooked on its track. The front door stands wide open onto dark.
“Duke?” His voice cracks. “Sarah?”
Nothing answers. The quiet here is total, padded, like the inside of a server room after the racks go down.
He gets to his feet. The pavement bites his soles. His first coherent thought, the IT manager’s thought, is phone, and he pats the sleep pants, the pocket with the hole, and of course it is empty, of course, because his phone is on his nightstand in a bedroom with a whole floor, in a world that made sense.
He takes a step toward his house, and the words arrive, placed inside his skull the way they were placed at 03:47, tile by tile:
«SURVIVAL PROTOCOL: ACTIVE»
«SUBJECT: DAVID MERCER»
«INITIALIZING ATTRIBUTES»
«BOND: 1»
«WILL: 1»
«CLARITY: 1»
«COMBAT: 1»
«RESOLVE: 1»
«OBJECTIVE: DESCEND. SURVIVE.»
«FLOOR 1: THE SUBURBS»
«HOLD FAST TO WHAT IS REAL.»
He stands in the middle of his wrong street with his bare feet going numb and reads the words twice, because reading them twice does not make them make sense either.
“Where is my dog?” he says out loud, to the gray sky, to whatever is placing tiles in his head.
A pause. Then, cool as a helpdesk auto-reply:
«QUERY RECEIVED.»
«ANSWER: BELOW.»
“Below where? How far below? Is he hurt?”
«ANSWER WITHHELD. DESCEND AND LEARN.»
“That’s not an answer, that’s a fortune cookie.”
No reply. The tiles stop coming. David stands in the street in his sleep pants and laughs once, a short broken sound, because of course the apocalypse runs on the same logic as his company’s ticketing system.
“What do the numbers mean?” he tries. “BOND, WILL, all of it. Give me the manual.”
«MANUAL: LIVE IT.»
“Very helpful. Is there a tutorial? A help file? Anything?”
«TUTORIAL: YOU ARE IN IT.»
David closes his eyes. “Okay. Fine. IT rule one: when the documentation is useless, you poke the system and watch what happens. IT rule two: you keep the user calm. The user is me. I am not calm.”
«NOTED.»
Despite everything, the corner of his mouth twitches. It is the most human exchange he has had all morning, and it is with a voice in his head that talks like a router.
“Okay,” he says. His breath fogs. It is cold enough to see his breath and he is in a t-shirt. “Okay. Okay. Ticket opened. Priority one.”
His house is at the end of the curve, five doors down. He starts walking, because standing still feels like agreeing, and the street performs its morning for him as he goes.
Number two: the Hendersons’ place. In the real world their yard is a cheerful mess, toys everywhere, a plastic slide bleached by sun. Here the toys are lined up along the walk in a perfect row, sorted by size, and they are all facing him. A tricycle. A doll with both eyes open. He walks faster.
Number three: smoke rises from a grill in the backyard, and he can hear laughter, the easy kind, and for a second his body leans toward it the way a plant leans toward light. He looks through the side gate. Six people sit around a picnic table with paper plates. The grill smoke smells like nothing, like warm air. The plates are empty. They are all chewing, jaws working in rhythm, smiling at each other, eating nothing, and the laughter goes on and on, and one of them, a woman with a sunhat, sees David and waves him over, mouth still moving.
He keeps walking. His bare feet are going numb and he tells himself that is fine, numb is fine, numb means he can keep going.
Number four: the teenager’s house. The bike leans against the porch rail, and David stops, because the bike is the first thing that looks right, scuffed and ordinary, and he almost touches it, just to feel something true. Then he sees the wheels. They are not touching the ground. The whole bike hovers a finger’s width above the concrete, like the street cannot quite commit to it.
“Don’t,” says a voice behind him, and he spins, heart hammering, but it is only the teenager, standing at the end of his own driveway, feet dangling that impossible inch above the pavement. “It doesn’t like being touched. Nothing here likes being touched.”
“What is this place?” David asks.
The teenager smiles the fixed smile. “Home,” he says.
David walks on. He does not touch the bike.
His garage comes into view, the door hanging crooked on its track, and from inside he hears a faint clinking, metal on metal, like wind chimes made of wrenches. His tools. His pegboard, his workbench, the toolbox Sarah reorganized. Something in there is touching his things, and he stands at the mouth of the driveway with his fists clenched, caught between the urge to go in and set it right and the cold knowledge that whatever is clinking is not wind.
Not yet, he decides. The front door first. Sarah is humming in there. Sarah, who was gone from the bed. Sarah, who might be real, who might be in there, who might know where Duke is.
He leaves the garage for later. The clinking follows him up the walk like a question.
A screen door slaps, two houses down. Mr. Abernathy’s house. Mr. Abernathy comes down his front walk in a bathrobe and slippers, carrying a newspaper that David can see, even at this distance, has no headlines, just gray blocks where the text should be.
“Morning, David,” Mr. Abernathy calls, cheerful. “Hell of a night, huh?”
David stares. Mr. Abernathy’s smile is wide and fixed. His eyes do not blink.
“Mr. Abernathy,” David says carefully. “Do you know where my dog is?”
“Dog?” Mr. Abernathy chuckles, folding the blank newspaper under his arm. “You don’t have a dog, David. Come on now. Everything’s fine. Come have coffee. Sarah’s making coffee.”
Sarah is making coffee. The words land wrong, like a step that isn’t there. Sarah is gone. Sarah’s side of the bed was cold. Duke was taken, he felt the ruff slide through his hands, he watched the light close.
“Duke,” David says. “Brindle greyhound. White star on his chest. Six years old.”
Mr. Abernathy’s smile does not change. “You’ve been under a lot of stress, David. We all have. Come inside. It’s cold out here.”
More doors are opening up and down the street. Mrs. Kowalski in a housecoat. The teenager from number four, the one with the bike, except his bike is gone and his feet do not quite touch the ground. They stand in their yards and on their walks, all of them smiling, all of them watching him.
“Morning, David.”
“Come inside, David.”
“Everything’s fine.”
The denial has a texture. He can feel it pressing on him, warm and sweet, offering him the shape of a normal morning. Come inside. Have coffee. There is no dog, there never was a dog, you imagined the dog, you are having an episode, the neighbors agree, look, everyone agrees.
Mrs. Kowalski crosses her lawn toward him, housecoat flapping, slippers silent on the too-green grass. “David, honey, you look half frozen. Come in, I’ll put the kettle on. You always liked my tea.”
He never drank her tea. He is almost sure he never drank her tea. The uncertainty is the worst part, the way the street makes him audit his own memory like a failing drive.
“I don’t want tea, Mrs. Kowalski. I want my dog.”
Her smile stays. “You don’t have a dog, honey.”
“I have a dog.” He hears his voice rising and hates it. “His name is Duke. He’s brindle. He has a white star on his chest. He leans on people. He—” His throat closes. “He was in my bedroom four minutes ago. Somebody took him through the floor.”
The teenager from number four drifts closer, feet dangling. “There’s no floor thing, David. You had a bad dream. Happens to everybody.”
“It wasn’t a dream.” But the street is so calm, the sprinkler so steady, the smiles so sure, and for one vertiginous second David feels the morning offering him a trade: believe us, and you can go back to bed, and the sheets will be warm, and there will be coffee, and the dog was a dream, a good dream, the kind you wake up sad from but then the day starts.
His hands are shaking. He presses his fingertips to his thigh. Left. Right. Left. Right.
The taps land like four small anchors, and with the fourth one his head clears a fraction, enough to see it: the seam. Mrs. Kowalski’s housecoat has no shadow. The teenager’s feet dangle an inch above his own walkway. Mr. Abernathy’s newspaper is blank.
Not real. None of it is real.
He backs toward the Kowalski house, testing. The front door stands open, the way every door on this street stands open, inviting. Inside: a living room with no dust, no clutter, no mail on the table, a television showing a test pattern. No photographs. No coat on the hook. A house with nobody ever having lived in it, wearing the shape of a home like a costume.
“Don’t go in there, David,” Mrs. Kowalski says pleasantly. “You don’t want to see what’s in there.”
He believes her. He steps back onto the lawn.
“Duke is real,” David says, and his voice shakes, but the words are his. “Duke is real and he is down there and I am going to get him.”
The smiles go away all at once, like lights switching off.
Mr. Abernathy moves first, faster than a man in slippers should move, crossing the lawn in three long strides, and his hand closes around David’s wrist. The fingers are cold. Cold like a doorknob in winter, cold like something that was never warm. The grip tightens, and David feels the cold traveling up his arm, a numbness spreading, and some distant part of his mind notes the tactic the way he’d note a failing service: isolate, freeze, contain.
He does not get contained. He wrenches sideways, putting his whole shoulder into it, and the cold fingers hold, and then something in the wrist gives with a dry papery tear, and he is free, stumbling, a strip of gray skin stuck to his own wrist like wet paper.
He does not look at it. He runs.
Bare feet slap the too-green lawns. The grass is cold and wet and wrong, each blade identical, and behind him the whole street is calling his name in cheerful voices, “David, David, come back, everything’s fine,” and the sprinkler keeps chattering its perfect arc, and Mrs. Kowalski is keeping pace with him somehow, gliding along her property line, calling “You’re going to catch your death, honey,” in the tone of a woman discussing weather.
Something sharp bites his sole. He does not stop. He runs the curve of the cul-de-sac the way he has driven it four hundred times, past number four, past number six, and his house rises ahead of him, too tall, the windows black, the garage door hanging crooked, the front door standing open onto dark.
He hits his own walkway and his knees nearly give. The concrete is real under his feet, or real enough. And here, at his own house, the street plays its cruelest card: it offers him the morning.
Look, it says. The porch light is on, warm. The door is open. Sarah is humming your song in the kitchen. Come inside. Sit down. This was all a bad dream, the floor thing, the light thing, and if you just come inside and sit down, it will stay a bad dream, and the coffee is on, and Duke—
Duke.
The offer snags there, because the porch has no water bowl beside the step, and the leash hook by the door is empty, and the street cannot fake those absences fast enough. It offers him the morning with no dog in it, and David understands, with a clarity that feels like cold water, that this is the price of the trade. Believe us, and the dog was never real. Come inside, and you get the warm house, the humming wife, the coffee, and in exchange you surrender the brindle shadow, the chin on your foot, the white star, all of it, unhappened.
“No,” David says to the porch. “No deal.”
The porch light flickers. From inside, the humming stops for one beat, then resumes, a fraction faster.
The lawn is wrong in small ways he catalogs without meaning to: Duke’s water bowl is gone from beside the step. The leash hook by the door is empty. The welcome mat says WELCOME in letters that are slightly too large, like a word shouted.
No dog bed on the porch. No brindle shadow in the window. The house has been edited, and Duke has been edited out of it.
Rage comes up through the fear then, clean and hot. They took his dog and then they took the bowl, like they could unhappen him with housekeeping. David puts his hand on the doorframe and breathes, and under the heaving, under the terror, under everything, he feels it: a thin pull behind his sternum, a fishline going down through the floor of the world, faint, so faint he might be imagining it.
He is not imagining it. He knows the difference. He has held that end of the line for two years, in the grass, on the porch, with a chin on his foot. He remembers the track rescue’s parking lot in Florida, the van, the woman handing him the lead rope and saying “He’s gentle, he’s just shut down,” and the dog pressing his whole shaking length against David’s legs like David was the first solid thing he had ever leaned on. He remembers, and the remembering is a handhold.
«BOND 1: TETHER DETECTED. FAINT BUT PRESENT.»
«THE DOG LIVES. HE IS BELOW YOU.»
David closes his eyes. The fishline tugs once, like something at the other end shifting in its sleep.
“Duke,” he whispers. “Hang on, buddy. I’m coming.”
«WILL +1: YOU KEPT MOVING.»
«BOND +1: YOU REACHED FOR THE TETHER.»
He opens his eyes. The dark inside his house waits. Sarah is humming in the kitchen.
The entryway is his and not his. The key bowl is there, his keys are not in it. The bench holds no laptop bag. The air smells like roasted chicken and lemon, yesterday’s dinner still hanging in it, and under that the metallic tang, stronger here, like a battery leaking inside the walls.
The humming comes from the kitchen, clear and tuneless and wrong in a way he cannot name yet. Tap tap tap goes the knife on the board, keeping time.
David steps through the door. The floorboards are cold under his bare feet. Ahead of him the kitchen glows, warm and yellow and inviting, and Sarah’s shadow moves across the far wall, knife rising and falling, rising and falling, and she is humming, she is humming his name into the tune, Da-vid, Da-vid, the way you would call a dog. His hands curl into fists at his sides, and he makes himself uncurl them, finger by finger.
He moves down the hallway one silent step at a time, past the photographs. He does not look at them. He knows what they show: the wedding, the track rescue day, Duke asleep across his feet in a patch of sun, Duke with his whole head in the treat bag on Christmas. He knows, and he does not need to check, because the frames on this wall are all turned slightly toward him, like faces, like an audience, and the glass of every one of them is dark, and in the dark glass something moves that is not his reflection.
The kitchen doorway is three steps away. The humming stops.
“David?” Sarah says, bright as morning. “Is that you?”