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Everybody knows how this show is gonna end. Rain becomes a Renshaw. She gets her happy little family back. They have two-point-five kids who can dunk from the foul line and don’t even need therapy. The. Fucking. End.
I wait for her to catch up. Only a jealous, bitter asshole would turn his back and keep walking right now, and I’m not jealous.
Nope. I’m just so fucking bored.
Rain’s face looks tortured as she approaches, and I feel the fire inside me die down. Her right cheek still has three pink claw marks on it from when she got attacked at Burger Palace. Her lips are chapped. Her hair is matted. And her big, round eyes look like two empty swimming pools now.
Drained.
Dull.
Desperate.
I hate how badly I want to be the one to fill them back up.
A moment before Rain closes the distance between us, gasps and shrieks and, “Oh my God!”s fill the food court. I look past her and see that every digital monitor behind every fast-food counter is on and glowing red.
“Wes?” Rain’s voice is barely a whisper as she comes to stand beside me. “What’s going on?”
I watch as the black silhouette of a hooded horseman holding a scythe flashes on-screen for less than a second.
“Did you see that?”
I nod.
Another one flashes—this time, the horseman with the sword. Then, another and another. Faster and faster, their images appear and disappear until the screens are just pulsating black-and-red pools.
People scream.
Sophie dives for her mother’s arms.
And Rain grips my bicep so hard that her nails break the skin.
“Maybe this is just the nightmare,” I say in a half-assed attempt to make her feel better.
“It’s not, Wes. It’s real.”
“None of this is real, remember? It’s all just a hoax.”
“Citizens,” a female voice with a French accent booms through the speakers, drawing my attention back to the screens.
The face of a middle-aged woman with mousy-brown hair, sharp features, and dark red lipstick fills the left side of the screen while the word citizens is written in at least twelve different languages on the right side.
“My name is Dr. Marguerite Chapelle. I am the director of the World Health Alliance. If you are seeing this broadcast, congratulations. You are now part of a stronger, healthier, more self-sufficient human race.”
Rain and I look at each other as dread slithers across her face and into my veins.
The camera zooms out, and Dr. Chapelle is sitting at a sleek white table with an older man on either side of her. Behind them, on risers, are at least eighty other assholes, all wearing suits that probably cost more than the mortgage payments on their Malibu summer homes.
The smug bastard front and center is our fucking president.
“For the past year, the World Health Alliance has been working in conjunction with the United Nations”—she gestures to the world leaders standing behind her—“to implement a solution to the global population crisis. A correction, if you will. We call this correction Operation April 23.”
“Wes, what is she talking about?” Rain whispers, gripping my arm tighter.
“Approximately three years ago, our top researchers discovered that, at the rate that our population was growing, Earth’s natural and economic resources would be depleted in less than a decade. To put it bluntly, human beings were facing extinction, and the cause was simple—our species had abandoned the law of natural selection.”
The camera pans to the man on her left, a skinny guy with a haircut like Hitler’s. The caption below his face says, Dr. Henri Weiss, World Health Alliance Researcher. “Every s-species on the planet is s-subject to the law of natural selection,” he says, tugging at his collar and taking a sip from his glass of water. His accent sounds German, and he looks like he’s about to shit himself. “It is the very f-foundation of evolution. Since the dawn of living organisms, the weaker, more infirm members of the s-s-species die off, and the strongest, most intelligent, most well-adapted members live the longest and procreate the most. This p-process promotes the survival of the species by ensuring that each g-g-generation inherits only the most adaptive genetic traits and by p-p-preventing resources from being depleted by nonproductive s-s-s-subgroups.”
