California Under Attack: The Tragedy of Kassie

Chapter 2

I can feel my copy of Hamlet folding over itself inside my coat pocket as I sit up. With eerily steady hands, I pull my trusty bread knife out of the boy's shirt and cap it, keeping my eyes trained at the sky. Anything I can do to avoid the blood still pouring out beside me. Believe it or not, I'm horrible with blood. It makes me want to pass out.

To my chagrin, the sunset beyond the mothership is looking to mock me. It grins down at the earth with a mouthful of red wine, like the silk you'd only see in the theaters. I can hear the trees around me rustling their applause as this cloudy crimson curtain in the sky settles itself over my little tragedy.

Show's over today, folks. Come again tomorrow for another showing of The Tragedy of Kassie: Killer of California (that is, if she can find another costar).

My insides twist up into knots, and I let my gaze drop down to the floor. But the boy is bleeding everywhere, oozing out onto the ground by my knees.

Blood in the sky, blood on the soil. There's no escaping it.

Red used to be my favorite color, but for fonder reasons. There was a time, far gone as that time may be, when I didn't look at the color red and think of blood. It used to mean love, passion, warmth, and various other myths I've long since stopped believing in. Alien invasions surely take the warmth right out of you.

"Shakes," I call out to the wasteland. "Are you still here?"

The silence that follows doesn't surprise me. Shakes only ever shows up when I've found another human being he wants me to kill. That being said, hearing his voice return in my head isn't always the most exciting thing in the world, especially when I've had enough time to decide that I am absolutely insane for believing there's a voice in my head telling me to do things, and that Shakes doesn't really exist. But just when I've settled on never killing again, he comes back with a big smile on his face, calling out, "Did you miss me, sunshine?"

He always, always comes back.

While he's gone, I do a lot of living by myself. Of all concepts of my life that have changed in the apocalypse, this has been one of the biggest adaptations I've had to undergo. After growing up in a house with four sisters, and always sharing a room with a twin, being alone is an extraordinarily foreign concept to me. While I would like to believe I manage well alone, that is a lie. Most of the time it drives me crazy, if it's even possible for me to get any crazier. It sort of explains why I talk to myself so much, and create friends out of literature and the terrain around me--I'm too used to having someone around to share my remarks with.

The Red Tsunami may have been wicked, but the solitude that's followed us survivors is an epidemic all on its own. I'm sure the Others are looking down at us stragglers from the mothership and laughing. Look, everyone! There's little Kassie the Killer, who stabs everyone she meets and despises the loneliness that follows. A contradiction like that surely can't go unnoticed up there.

I point at the spacecraft, giving it the sort of head nod I used to see boys at school give to their bros all the time.

"Joke's on you," I tell them. "Loneliness is for losers. I have imaginary friends."

Lucky for me, one of them is coming right now, possibly the only good thing to come out of this blood-red sunset. It is the night, which has evolved from a childhood fear to my favorite time of the day. He might not be much for my small talk, but along with my pal Hamlet, I can really identify with the night. He's a monster with the ranks of us. While Hamlet and I are busy wishing we didn't have to kill people like our ghosts are forcing us to, he eats away at the world's words and actions of the day and digests them into the stuff nightmares are made of. He's the focal point of every scary story you've ever heard. He's the canvas for the worst corners of our imagination.