Orion, Apt. 707

Orion had been staring at the window for four hours now and he hadn't heard a sound or seen any hint of movement. Maybe they were gone. Maybe he was finally free. He crept quietly towards the window, trying to keep THEM ignorant of his presence. Peeling back the aluminum foil that covered the window, he peeked outside. As if on cue, the mad cawing started again. A long black beak snapped at his face, hitting the window. Orion quickly drew back, terrified. He ran to the cabinet and took out the duct tape, quickly resealing the hole in his barrier. Although the window was resealed, its dull silver face unbroken, he could still hear the cawing and screaming and yowling and singing and could see things move beneath the foil. It had been too close this time. He resolved to never again tempt fate by seeing if THEY were gone. THEY would always, always be there, he realized, no matter how quiet and still THEY might seem.

Orion could still remember a time when THEY had not existed in the world. When he was a young man, nothing at all troubled him and he was free. Then, one day, he had begun to notice signs. Swirling bits of newspaper, the arrangements of a flower bed, even the sounds of insects had begun to relay garbled messages to him. After months of meticulous note taking and decoding, he finally realized what they were trying to tell him: that in sixteen months and sixteen hours, the world would end in a mad jeering holocaust of madness and death. That the only way to save anything in the world was to lay four candles devoted to the four Evangelists in the cornerstone of a building. Without telling his doomed wife or his doomed parents or his doomed co-workers, he slipped away in the dead of night, bound for Baltimore. He knew that Baltimore was the only city in the whole world that would survive, thanks to the messages he had received. His first few nights, he slept in various churches, hoping that the holiness might stave off destruction just a little while longer. Soon, he was known in all of the churches and forced to sleep beneath the streets. Searching the newspapers for any useful news (besides the messages telling him that the end was drawing closer and closer), he finally read about a new apartment building going up called Washington Heights. Sneaking into the construction sight at the dead of night, Orion placed the candles and knew, knew that this building would be the Alamo of sanity and goodness and logic and right, against the horrible, horrible THINGS that were to come after everything was gone. As soon as the apartments were complete, he rented out the seventh room of the seventh floor.

Sure enough, the world had ended, just when the messages said it would. Orion had been wide-awake when it happened. There had been a loud blast, followed by a long rumble, followed by nothing. He had been curious then, and looked outside of the window to see what NOTHING looked like. He screamed. Ten thousand crows, THEIR bodies constantly melting and swirling into one another cawed at him and pecked with THEIR razor beaks at the windows trying and demanding to be let in and take the last refuge of mankind. Monsters with bison skull heads and black liquid bodies grinned idiotically at him as THEY danced and screamed and laughed and bellowed with fury and glee. Giant red worms digging through the nothing hissed at him and bared teeth which were horribly alive little THINGS that danced and reproduced and died all at the same time. He had wailed. He had cried. He hid beneath the bed. But he never for a second had considered damning himself and everyone else in the building by opening the window and inviting in THEM. For the first six months, it was all he could do to keep his sanity. Then he discovered that aluminum foil could at least muffle the sounds and cover the movements of the dead world outside. Things became much more bearable after that. It had been twenty five years now since he had moved in.