---Crawford---

     "Let's play a game," says Mya, in that low, whispery sort of voice that gives me a healthy dose of ASMR. The four of us sit in a circle, like nice little kindergartners, passing around the bag of potato chips I won from Em. Up on stage in front of the sea of empty seats, I realize this is the closest I'll ever get to being a rock star.

     "A game?" Gisela gawks at Mya incredulously. That's a funny word. Incredulously. Makes everything sound all sophisticated. Jun yawns, incredulously. I scratch my beard, incredulously.

     "Yeppers."

     "A game sounds nice," Jun mutters, staring up at the balcony seats. I can hear a pterodactyl screech every now and then.

     I uncross my legs, which ache like I just ran a marathon. Even at our brisk pace, we only made it to the outer rim of the city before the pterodactyls took to the skies and we were forced to duck into this abandoned opera house to take cover for the night. Who knows if we're even going the right way? Gisela claims she's still tracking Jewel, but I haven't seen anything that suggests we're not just wandering around blindly.

     Gisela rolls her eyes: a perfectly executed eye-roll, I might add. Notice the advanced papillary—I mean pupillary—technique. Slip of the tongue. She's not my type anyway. Don't make me scoff incredulously.

     "Crawford?" Mya nudges me.

     "Huh?"

     "Are you in?"

     "Incredulously," I mutter, nodding like a zombie bobble-head.

     "So," she says in her soothing British accent, "it's called 'The Most Disturbing Thing I've Ever Seen.' If you can't guess already from the name, we each say what's the most disturbing thing we've ever seen. Whoever has the most disturbing story wins. Or loses, depending how you look at it."

     We all stare at her... some-other-adverb-that-I-haven't-used-to-death-ly. My kind of game usually involves complex item builds and hardcore mouse-clicking, but I guess this beats being pterodactyl chow. I've always hated people who feed birds. It's not like our avian acquaintances ever pay us back or anything, those beaky bastards.

     "Your enthusiasm is overwhelming," says Mya, twirling a strand of her hair. "All right, I'll start. So back during the zombie apocalypse there was this girl, right? Theresa. Well Theresa was more than a little bonkers. She, uh... had a thing for the zombies, yeah? She used to get up close and whisper to them instead of killing them. Sometimes she even claimed they whispered back. Someone always had to rush in and brain the zombie before she went and got herself bit."

     "That is pretty messed up," says Gisela, twirling her pistols.

     "What? Oh, that's just the preamble. So anyway, one day we catch her snogging a zombie. At this point, our leader, Rainer, locks her up in the bunker. About a week later, she manages to escape. We find her out in a parking lot, without any clothes on, with a zombie chewing her face off." She pauses. "I reckon that's not what she'd meant for it to eat."

     Gisela bursts into laughter. I wouldn't have thought her capable of it. I wipe the sweat from my brow. Mya didn't even blush telling that story. Who knew she had that side to her? I gulp.

     "Speaking of cannibalism," Gisela begins. "Wow. I never expected to say that. Anyway, back where I come from, we had these weasels that people kept as pets. They were nice and all, except that if you croaked, they'd eat you."

     "That's convenient," says Mya. "You don't even need to be alive to feed your pet."

     "I know, right? So there was this woman I used to baby-sit for who lived down the street. She was a bit of a nutcase—that seems to be a recurring theme. But the kid was nice enough. Three years old. Well, one summer, she—the mother—takes up this yoga class, so she has me baby-sit every Thursday. No big—I play with the kid and let the weasel out to run around in the backyard. One week in late August, I show up and find the door slightly ajar. I don't think anything of it at the time. I go inside to see what's up. I find the woman dead on the living room floor. Poor thing had an aneurysm. And—"

     "Let me guess," says Mya. "The weasel was going to town."

     "Worse than that," says Gisela, shuddering. "It was tearing off scraps of flesh and feeding them to the kid."

     Mya raises her hands in defeat. "I have been dethroned."

     "You're making that up," I say, in a well-meaning attempt to defend Mya's title. We all jump as something smashes into the roof, shaking loose dust from the rafters. I'd completely forgotten about the pterodactyls going nuts outside. Hopefully the ceiling will hold. If it doesn't... I'm the slowest one here. You know what they say. The early bird gets the worm, and the fattest worm gets eaten first.

     Mya nudges me. I ignore her so that she does it again. And again. "Crawford!"

     "Hm?" I feign ignorance.

     "Your turn."

     "Oh. Right. So I was browsing the deep web this one time, and I found this log about these experiments done on human subjects. Some of them—"

     "You didn't see that," Mya objects. "You only read about it. That's cheating."

     "Says who?"

     "Says me." She smirks, flaunting her authority. "You're disqualified. Jun, what about you? What's the most disturbing thing you've ever seen?"

     "My father's face," says Jun, staring blankly ahead, "after I strangled him to death."

     Drawn-out ellipsis.

     Even the pterodactyls go silent.

     "Well, that escalated quickly," I say. "Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go scrub my brain so I don't have nightmares about zombie make-out sessions and cannibalistic toddlers."

     What I really need to do is take a leak. I exit the auditorium and make for the restroom. The shadows seem to swallow me up. The sun has already set, plunging us into darkness. Something furry brushes against my leg.

     "Weasel!" I shout, flattening my back against the wall.

     "Just a rat," says Mya, who managed to sneak up on me. "Though I reckon that's not all that reassuring, considering."

     "You—"

     "Little ladies room."

     "Ah."

     "You?"

     "Ditto. Well, not the little ladies room, obviously."

     Mya chuckles. Glances over her shoulder at the shadows surrounding us. The gothic architecture of the opera house isn't exactly helping to dispel the eerie atmosphere. "You scared?"

     "Me? Scared? Pfft." I wave my hand dismissively.

     "So terrified then?"

     "Out of my mind."

     "All right," says Mya, rubbing her hands together. "Here's what I propose. We'll go in shifts. I'll go... relieve myself while you stand guard. Then I'll return the favour."

     Another screech rings out, followed by what sounds like a howl. "I think I'll take you up on that." Assuming I don't wet myself first. Mya heads off to the restroom while I stand guard, shifting my legs to try and distract myself from the urgency. For once, no unpleasant surprises. She makes it back in one piece, and I head on in. Once I've finished emptying my bladder and meticulously double-checking to make sure my fly is zipped up, I meet up with Mya back in the hallway.

     "Teamwork," Mya says, winking at me.

     "That human experimentation stuff was really messed up. Would've blown your zombiephilia story out of the water."

     "I'm sure."

     We start making our way back to the theatre. When we get there, everyone's struggling to keep their eyes open. We decide to sleep in shifts, so that nothing can get the slip on us. Gisela and Jun take the first shift.

     "Come on," Mya says once they've fallen asleep. She grabs my hand and leads me out onto the floor. What's this about? We sneak into one of centre rows and occupy what are presumably the best seats in the house. Right smack in the middle of the theater. We're totally going to make out, aren't we?

     "So," I say, my heart racing, after we've passed a couple minutes in silence.

     "Shh." She puts a finger to my lips. It wasn't her finger I was expecting, but okay, I'll take it. "Can you see it?"

     I squint at the stage. I can just barely make out Jun tossing and turning in his sleep. And Gisela a little further to the left, her chest rising and falling steadily. Must be nice to still be able to sleep peacefully.

     "I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be looking at," I admit.

     Mya sighs. She turns around to face me. "Sometimes I like to pretend that things are still... how they were before. Like now, for instance. Pretend we're all posh, out at the opera. Try and imagine the other audience members. The singers up on stage. Can you see them?"

     I play along. Truth be told, imagination was never my strong suit. But clearly she wants me to see this, so I damn well try! I squint, rub my eyes, and then squint again. And suddenly the place is alive. Men and women, dressed in ironed tuxes and sparkling dresses respectively, surround us, grasping their programmes while the actors trounce about up on stage. A lady wearing thick mascara and a flowing blue gown leaps across the stage and belts a note that rattles the chandeliers above us. Well I'll be damned. So this is the power of imagination? I've been missing out.

     "I can see them!" I nearly shout. One of the patrons turns around and gives me a dirty look. My heart stops. I glance at Mya.

     "I can see them too," she says, her face pale as a sheet.

     "Do you mind?" asks an elderly lady, tapping me on the shoulder. I turn around. She gives me a stern look, with her eyeball dangling out of its socket. Up on stage, the actress in the blue dress wipes away her mascara, revealing rotting, sagging strips of skin that barely manage to adhere to her face. A gentleman who's nothing more than a skeleton with bits of pus-coloured flesh clinging to his bones joins her at the front of the stage, and together they start singing a tune that sounds like backwards vocals and white noise.

     Mya whimpers. "Crawford..."

     "Shh!" Another patron, this one with half his face melted off, shakes his fist at us. "Some of us are trying to watch the show."

     Mya grabs my hand and squeezes it. I squeeze back. We sit there, watching the patrons rot away before our eyes as they all chant satanic verses in unison. The actors on stage call up members from the audience once by one and dismember them with a meat cleaver. Every time the skeleton man licks the blood from his cleaver and glances up at the audience, I fear that he'll call on us next. I want to scream. But if we even breathe too loudly, the patrons all turn around to give us the evil eye. So we stay perfectly still. Petrified. And we remain that way all throughout the night, neither of us budging even an inch.

     By the time the sun rises, the apparitions have all disintegrated into nothing. Mya and I remain frozen, squeezing each other's hands. Gisela sits up, yawning, and shakes Jun awake. They make their way over to us.

     "Why didn't you wake us up?" Gisela asks, wiping her eyes.

     Mya releases my hand, slinking back into the seat. She stares at me with her bloodshot-red eyes. My eyes sting like a mother. I don't think I blinked once throughout the entire night. I'm surprised I'm not blind.

     "Ah, I see." Gisela smirks. "I'll bet you guys enjoyed yourselves, huh?"

     Mya and I exchange a look. "It was... one hell of a night," she mutters. Literally. She means that literally, I want to say, but I'm too numb to move my lips. "Now can we please get as far away from this place as humanly possible?"

Author's Note:

Will Crawford and Mya ever have their moment?

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