“I’m a smoker. Camel Lights.”

Carl’s voice was a desperate whine, edged with an unmistakably nasally midwestern tinge. I could no longer tell if the droplets spilling from his cheeks were tears or perspiration.

“Same! Same! Cowboy killers!” Jessica still retained some semblance of hope in her eyes. Her voice was full of hope and a painful Alabama drawl, the sort you’d imagine a mediocre British impressionist adopting for a gag.

“What the fuck is a ‘cowboy killer?” Marlon snapped.

Though he’d never show it, I could tell he was suffering the brunt of this worse than any of us. At least 6’5 and probably 280 pounds, he could have saved the rainforest with the monsoon of sweat gushing off his crouched frame.

“Marlboro Reds, “I said quietly.

“Gee, thanks, Tex. Well, I smoke kools. You gotta smoke, right?” Marlon’s irate tone belied the panic in his eyes.

I was lost in thought, balancing between trying to muster a fraction of meditative calm and using my wits to try and discern the answer to the damning riddle, when it happened again.

All 4 walls of the windowless room moved.

The haunting shriek of cement on rock.

Our lives, so large in our minds, trapped inside a tiny, shrinking room.

“I don’t smoke. Chewing tobacco only for me. And the name’s Pappy.”

Marlon punched the wall and howled in pain. “That’s close enough, right? Tobacco’s tobacco, right, you fuckers?!” His scream had a slight tremble to it, like a wounded animal trying to scare off the slinking predator, a last, desperate move against inevitable doom.

“I don’t smoke, dip, vape. I’ve never touched tobacco or nicotine in my life.” Vanessa’s knees were curled up under her arms. You could hear the clear sob in her tiny voice.

“Me either,” muttered Marcos. He seemed to be weathering it the best he could, but the hope had dissipated out him twenty questions ago.

“What is it?! THE WALLS ARE SO FUCKING CLOSE.” There was no question now – Carl was crying.

It had been this way for hours. Who knows how many? Time didn’t exist in here, and space just shrank.

A thousand guesses. A thousand misses.

We’d woken up in an enormous, windowless room. Sprawling, utterly empty, and freezing.

None among us could recall past few days. I figured we’d been drugged, probably given IV fluids judging by the pinpricks in our arms.

We were scared, but energetic, healthy, albeit too cold.

There were no instructions, no secret doors, no ominous voice or eye in the sky.

Just tattoos.

We had a single word freshly tattooed on our right hand.

My tattoo read “common.”

String them together – “What do you have in common”

It took some wrangling, but we all eventually calmed down and started delving into who we were.

We were shaken, certainly, but it wasn’t like we woke in some Saw gore porn scenario. So, we began guessing. It seemed like the logical way to maybe get out of here. What choice did we really have?

It wasn’t long before it began. The initial movement of the walls was deafening. We all dove down, expecting gunfire or the remnants of an explosion. Fire bombs inbound.

As dust engulfed our world, we caught sight of the walls settling.

We humans fancy ourselves something…. different. Better. Above. Give us a high functioning cerebral cortex and we’ll convince ourselves we’re gods. But it doesn’t take much to reduce us to animalism.

And seeing those walls begin closing in, you’d think we were just antelope as the lioness came blitzing in. Shrieks, whines, screams, flailing ligaments, panicked leaping. It went on and on.

We finally composed ourselves and tried to dive back into humanity when the walls moved in again.

We tried to track how far in the walls would move using ripped pieces of our clothes to guesstimate. I kept time in my head the best I could between each torturesome crawl. They’d taken our watches and phones.

A few problems were plainly evident right off the bat. First, the walls seemed to move arbitrarily in both time and distance. There was no way to predict how long we had. That realization made it hard to steady down the herd.

The second was that with each lurch, the temperature in the room increased. Over the hours, the arctic chill had given way to the scorching desert. Soaked clothes warned us dehydration was setting in.

Third, we had next to nothing in common.

Carl was a white 45-year-old grocery store assistant manager from a small town in Minnesota. Jessica was white, as well, 28 and ran her family’s farm along with her husband in Alabama. Marlon was black, 23, and a graduate student in sociology from Michigan. Vanessa was a 27-year-old accountant from New York City, Puerto Rican descent. Marcos was a second generation 31-year-old Mexican American from SoCal who owned a dispensary. And then there was me. 34, born to Irish immigrants, a professional poker play from Texas.

We ran down the list of things almost everyone had in common. The ubiquities, generalities, the obvious. We all breathed oxygen. We all needed food to live. Little by little, we narrowed it down to traits people usually share. We all liked TV and ice cream. The walls didn’t stop. Sexual orientation didn’t work – Marlon was gay. Politics didn’t work – Carl was a die hard, Qanon-subscribing Republican. Family composition. Education. Cars we drove. Were you a bully? Do you bite your nails? Were your parents alive?

Our questioning turned dark. Secrets began to spill out. Nothing was consistent. Affairs. A BDSM lifestyle. A string of DUI’s. A recovering addict. A wife beater. Kleptomania.

We couldn’t find the link. Either our answers were disparate, or the few ties that connected us were clearly incorrect. It was getting awfully Edgar Allen Poe and we were oscillating between unhinged panic and morose resignation.

My skin felt like it was liquifying. Breathing became a privilege. It had to be north of 100 degrees. The walls were so close I couldn’t extend my arms fully out in any direction. Claustrophobia, meet heatstroke.

“FAVORITE FUCKING DEPARTMENT STORE?!” Marlon was hellbent to defy death till the end. Hail Mary, full of grace.

“Target.”

“JCPenney.”

“FUCK! FUCK! FUCK!” Marlon was shoved in so tightly he could hardly rage about.

I hadn’t been responding for some time. It wasn’t submission. I was wracking my brain.

My thought was interrupted by the loudest lurch yet.

We all screamed in unison, a hellish chorus of the dying, different pitches desperately trying to delay the same end.

When the walls stopped, we were all standing, crushed together, pinned. Air was a precious commodity. The horror of watching people die in a crowd of the news, brought to us in real time.

“We only have one more. The next one turns us to jelly.”

Marlon’s voice was quiet now, like the last bubbles of carbonation hissing out of a soda bottle gone flat. The walls were pressing his frame the hardest. He might already be dying.

I know why I said it.

We’d tried our few rounds of dirty secrets, trying to see if the worst of us maybe united us. While it was a lesson in how Machiavelli might’ve been right about humanity, there was no common thread. Just the varied awfulness of a cross-section of humanity.

I didn’t say it to solve anything. A few minutes, a couple seconds, who knew? Death loomed. Like an over the top Cormac McCarthy theme, we just couldn’t stop what was coming.

So, in the end, I just wanted to confess before I went. Unburden myself a little of what had been chewing away at me for the better part of 16 years.

“I killed someone.”

No one made a peep. I didn’t care.

“I was 16. I was a coke dealer back then. A guy tried to jump me during a deal, pulled out a pistol. I put three rounds into him before I could think. I collected the shells. Destroyed the gun. There was nothing electronic connecting us. Not a lot of working cameras in the hood back then, I guess. Middle of the night, nobody to notice the white kid. Guy who set up the deal never said a peep. I just got away with it.”

I expected judgment. Condemnation. Reassurance. A “who the Hell cares?”

“I’m the Vexatious Vile Villain. Always hated that name. Completely moronic.”

Carl’s voice was an eerily cold whisper. “The media credited me with killing 7 women 17 years ago. Truthfully, I killed 24. The 7 just fit a pattern. I thought about stopping after a few, but it was just too much fun. And the more I taunted the media with letters, the more the nation became obsessed. And by then, the killing was just…the rush…man becomes God when holds the power of death over life. Hell, I killed one girl just because I was pissed off about that stupid ass name.”

“You…you signed your letters V V V, right? What did it stand for?” I had to know. He might be a monster, but if the cat was going to be killed, might as well have a bit of curiosity.

And wasn’t I a monster, too?

Carl let out a raspy laugh. “Not a fucking thing. This country and serial killers, man. They want it to be profound. A luddite manifesto from a math professor bomber. Cryptic letters from mysterious California killer. It’s just some crazy form of societal masturbation. My letters were just bullshit, having fun. I just threw three V’s in the signature to see what they came up with. Didn’t think it would be that stupid. It never meant a damn thing.”

Carl’s laughter was rife with wheezes and devoid of any regret.

If I could move, I would’ve attacked him. I wanted to kill him. I hated myself for what I did, and yeah, I shouldn’t have been a dealing poison, but he drew first, and I was a kid, not some serial rapist murderer. All I had were my protestations, which were immediately interrupted.

“There’s a dead drifter buried on my farm.”

Jessica’s voice quaked. “My…my daughter said he raped her. My chickenshit husband wanted to go to the police. But she would have been ruined and he would have just gone to jail for a little, if it at all, or or some bullshit. This country is just “he said, she said” and “she” always gets screwed. Fuck that. I beat his head in with a shovel and buried him in one of the fields. No one knew where he was, who he was. No would miss him.”

The venom oozed in Jessica’s voice as she trailed off.

“My friends and I burned down a warehouse in Detroit. It had been abandoned forever. We looked around, threw some rocks at windows, got drunk, and set it on fire. Just screwing around, man. We didn’t check the upstairs office. There was a homeless family asleep. They…they didn’t hear us. They didn’t get out. The news….it had pictures of them. They had 2 kids, man.”

Marlon rasped out his admission, barely audible, but rife with pain.

“I ran over somebody when I was crossfaded on a backroad in Arizona. Was coming back from making a run to Texas. Never got out of the car. Didn’t need to. No doubt he was dead. Still don’t know what old boy was doing out there. Nobody ever came for me. I…I just drove off, man. Like a fucking coward.”

The shame in Marcos’s voice was palpable between the intermittent sobs.

“I killed my friend at a party. Marissa. We were upstairs alone. She was drunk and made a joke about my weight. When she turned around, I shoved her. She tripped on the rug and smashed her head into the corner of a desk. I told the cops she just tripped on her own. Her BAC was so damn high, nobody looked twice.”

The screeching began, the walls preparing to make jelly of us all.

“WE ALL KILLED SOMEONE AND GOT AWAY WITH IT!”

I screamed, a banshee’s dirge, with every ounce I had to be heard above the raucous din of the stone explosion.

The walls stopped.

And then, miraculously, receded.

The four horsemen of our little Apocalypse returned to their original positions, leaving us panting once again in a massive warehouse.

Waves of cold air crested down on us, chilling our boiling skin.

Sprinklers descended from concealed compartments, cascading water.

We drank greedily. What’s time to a hog?

And then….nothing.

“What the fuck? WE GOT IT RIGHT! LET US FUCKING GO!”

Marlon started screaming demands, but he soon had us all backing his play.

We all began to grow listless, the exhaustion and upheaval overtaking finally overtaking the adrenaline.

“How could they know? Who are they? HOW COULD THEY KNOW?”

Animalism in question form.

No answers forthcoming.

Then the lights went out, turning the gargantuan windowless room into a cave.

With a buzz and a snap, the light shifted.

Blacklight engulfed the room.

A new tattoo. A single word on each of our left hands.

It took us a minute to sort it out. It was the period after “again” on my hand that did it.

“Now do it again. one survives.”

With a sizzle, the blacklight gave away to sharp fluorescence.

There weren’t any humans left in the light.

Just animals.

Practiced animals.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I don’t know how much time passed.

I woke up in a hospital bed in Houston, not far from my house.

A doctor was examining my wounds. Gashes, tears, bruises, split lip. A snapped wrist. Three broken fingers, four broken ribs. An eye swollen shut. Some manageable internal bleeding.

He riddled off my injuries. His voice was disconcerting. Full of wonderment and awe instead of the typical monotonous, clinical tone one expects from an overworked physician.

“Don’t worry about the police, Pappy. Our people are in the right places over there. The report says you were mugged and left to die but fought off your attackers. Managed to pull through. Got some good punches in fighting, too.”

His grin was inhuman, painfully wide, like the Cheshire cat had fucked a B horror movie ghoul.

“After all, one survives.”