The purple mist forest screamed of horror.
And I screamed back.
I screamed until my throat burned. I screamed because I had a diaper still clutched in my right hand, a clean one, the kind with the little cartoon animals on the front, and I had no idea where Lily was, or Chloe, or Mia.
I screamed because the man in the bathrobe wasn't moving and the teenager in pajamas was crying and the woman with the cat carrier was calling a name I couldn't make out.
I screamed because my kids were alone in our apartment. Chloe was probably still crying about the crayon. Mia was probably still hissing. Lily was naked from the waist down on the changing mat, watching her mother vanish into purple light.
And I was here. In this place. With this diaper.
Slowly, the screaming stopped. Not because I was calm,I was the opposite of calm, I was a shape that used to contain calm but now contained only static,but because my lungs ran out of air and my throat ran out of sound.
I sat up. The purple mist clung to my clothes. The ground felt wrong under my knees, too soft, too warm, like breathing earth.
Around me, the other fallen citizens were doing the same. Sitting up. Looking around. Crying. Some were already moving, stumbling toward the tree line or away from it, no way to know which direction was safer. There were no directions here. Just purple and mist and the distant, layered scream.
I looked down at the diaper in my hand. Cartoon animals. A little elephant. A little giraffe.
"Okay," I said to no one. My voice came out cracked and small. "Okay."
I stood up.
I didn't know where I was. I didn't know how to get home. I didn't know if my children were alive or dead or somewhere in between, lost in this nightmare or still in that apartment, waiting for a mommy who might never come back.
But I had two hands. One of them was holding a diaper.
That was something. Not much. But something.
I took a step. Then another.
Behind me, the purple rift hung in the air like a scar, pulsing gently, waiting for the next batch of victims. Ahead of me, the screaming forest stretched on forever.
Somewhere in my apartment, a one-and-a-half-year-old was probably still screaming for her mommy.
And somewhere in this hell, I was going to find a way back to her.
Even if I had to burn the whole purple forest down with my bare hands. Even if I had to do it holding a diaper.
But it wasn't easy.
One second I was holding a diaper, the whole stupid menagerie, and the next, a massive pair of eyes opened.
Not like someone waking up. Not like a camera shutter.
Like the ground itself grew eyes.
They were huge. Not big. Not large. Huge in the way mountains are huge, in the way the sky is huge when you're a child and you lie on the grass and realize there is no end to it. These eyes blinked at me,once, slowly,and I felt that blink in my chest, like a bass note so low it becomes physical.
Purple irises. Vertical pupils the size of subway tunnels.
I didn't scream that time. I couldn't. My body forgot how. My lungs forgot what air was for. I just stood there, frozen, diaper in hand, staring into the face of something that had no right to exist.
Then the mouth opened.
I have seen movies. I have seen Godzilla. I have seen the big budget ones with the good special effects, the ones where the monster roars and the buildings fall and you eat popcorn and think wow, that's cool. This was not that. This was real. And real is different.
The teeth were the size of buses. I am not exaggerating for effect. I am a mother of three, I have no time for exaggeration. Bus-sized teeth. Rows of them. Going back into a throat that looked like a purple tunnel, like the rift itself had grown a face and decided to eat me personally.
I felt the wind change. Felt the pull of that mouth breathing in, and I was light enough to move with it. My feet left the ground again. The diaper left my hand. I watched it go,cartoon elephant, cartoon giraffe, tumbling end over end into that abyss of bus-sized teeth,and I thought, well, at least that's one less thing to carry.
And then I closed my eyes.
I prayed. I am not a religious person. I haven't been inside a church since my wedding, and that was mostly for the photos. But I prayed to whatever might be listening that those teeth would kill me quick. One crunch. One munch. Done. No suffering. No slow digestion while I screamed for daughters who couldn't hear me.
Please, I thought. Just make it fast. The blinding light came before the teeth.
White. Pure white. The kind of white that erases everything else, that makes you forget there was ever such a thing as color. It filled my eyes, my nose, my mouth. It filled the spaces between my thoughts.
Then darkness. Then nothing.
I think I fainted. I think I died. I don't know which one feels like that,like being unplugged from a machine, like a candle snuffed out by a giant hand. Maybe both feel the same. Maybe there's no difference.
I don't know how long I was gone. Hours. Days. Years. Time doesn't travel well through whatever happened to me. All I know is that eventually, something pulled me back.
Sounds first. A low rumble, like distant thunder. Then voices,not voices, exactly, but something that used voices the way a human uses a fork. Functional but foreign. Growls. Chants. A rhythm that vibrated in my bones.
Then the smell. Incense. Blood. Something floral and rotten at the same time. Then touch. Cold metal under my hands. A seat against my back. Something heavy on my head.
I opened my eyes. I was seated on a throne.
What the...