Face-Slapping14 min read
Thirty Days, Two Children, One Peanut-Space
ButterPicks18 views
The river smell of metal and algae was the last thing I remembered before everything went dark.
I opened my eyes to an unfamiliar ceiling, a lamp that hummed, and a couch that smelled faintly of perfume and canned soup. I sat up, fingers finding the edge of a low coffee table.
"Where am I?" I asked the air.
"You are in Month Six of the After," said a voice that was not there or was everywhere. "Please survive for thirty days. Target this round: collect one hundred crystals for resurrection credit. One-hundred crystals equal one score. Each crystal is worth 0.01."
"Who—" My hand tightened on the couch. "Who is speaking?"
"I am the steward managing Cassandra Buckley's One-Hundred-Percent Resurrect Card. Current points: zero. Please acquire crystals. Good luck."
I froze. The voice knew my name.
"This is—" I swallowed. "This is a joke. Where did I even—"
"You died on a cruise. Drowning occurred. Body retrieval uncertain," the steward said, flat and impossible. "You have been placed into the simulation. Survive thirty days. Earn crystals. Earn the score."
I did not especially like the premise. I liked being alive, even if the life was suddenly rearranged.
I crept to the window, pulled the curtain an inch, and saw a sunlit street that had stopped trying to be human. Buildings sagged like tired giants. People—or things—shuffled under trees, blood mottling ragged clothes. Some had their bellies torn; intestines trailed like dirty ropes. Some had no legs and crawled, leaving slimy tracks. Some had half their skull missing, and there was a dull glow lodged in the gray tissue of their brains.
"They're not dead in the way I thought," I whispered.
"Crystals are lodged in their brains," the steward replied, as if it were obvious. "Each crystal is salvageable as 0.01 points. Survival zip-code: collect and return."
I gathered what I could: five packets of instant noodles, a sausage, three bottles of water, some stale bread. A shocking amount of the fridge was already rotten. I found a small stack of rice in a cabinet and a single cooking knife. The apartment must have belonged to a woman who left in a hurry, or a woman who did not get to return.
I packed, wrapped my throat with a scarf, put on gloves, and took the knife in hand. My watch read three o'clock. The light outside was a thin warning. I barricaded the door with a coffee table and a wardrobe. I slept but did not trust sleep.
Morning came, thin and pale. The sun chased the shambling things into the shadows. The street noise dropped.
"Steward," I asked, as if the voice might be more patient than a human. "If I am bitten, do I... die?"
"In all variations, you are an individual. Damage applies," it said. "A bite may result in death. Please be cautious."
I made a plan that sounded ridiculous: survive thirty days, collect crystals, earn points, and get a chance at resurrection. It felt like a game with stakes.
On Day Two I learned to pick a lock. I pretended not to know how to pick a lock because it read better in my own memory if it looked like skill rather than theft. The apartment next door—room 503—was unlocked after five minutes of sweating and bending iron wire. Inside, the kitchen gave me a bag of rice, noodles, and two wrinkled apples. I took a small canvas backpack from a closet and returned to my room with my haul.
"Your inventory now: nineteen packets of noodles, rice, twenty liters unused? " the steward said later, suddenly cheerful. "Good acquisition."
"Don't start being friendly," I told the ceiling.
"I do not have friends," the steward answered. "I have tasks."
On Day Three a noise behind a door nearly made me sick. I opened it and a thing lunged like a wind-up toy. I reacted by slamming a bucket on its head and wrapping its arms with clothes. The bucket muffled its senses; the clothes slowed it. I struck and struck until its neck stopped. There, inside its skull, a small gem waited: a tiny crystal that chimed like glass.
"A crystal—0.01 points," the steward offered. "Recycle?"
"Yes," I breathed. "Yes."
When the gem vanished into some ledger in my head, the steward said, "Your current points: 0.01."
That one crystal cost me a water bucket and a knife edge. I grieved the knife. Practical things mattered.
I learned the rhythm: day for supply runs, night to breathe under layers of blankets. I learned the shambling things avoided sunlight and gathered in shade. I learned that bodies of the living sometimes carried pieces of the dead: a locket, a watch, a ring—items that could mean a life.
On Day Four, I opened a wardrobe and found a boy—thin, small, maybe twelve, truly starving, eyes huge.
"Don't hurt me!" he sobbed.
"I'm not here to hurt you," I said. "Who are you?"
"I... I came from the top. I ran down. My parents—" He went on with the same frightened voice I heard at night: "I saw men with cars. They said they were rescuers. They took them away. I didn't go."
He shoved his chin into his chest. He smelled of selfishness and smoke and something like bravery. He had been living on a jar of ketchup and a pack of stale crackers. He introduced himself into the world with two words.
"Dax Ellison," he said.
"Then Dax, you can stay," I told him, surprising myself. "But outside this door is not safe. Stay in 503. If I go out, I'll look for you."
He put a bony hand on my ankle as if to beg. I found that I did not mind being needed.
"Bring me food at nine," I told him one night. "Work on your locks. Learn to pick locks."
He obliged. The warm, nervous creature began to impress me with his speed at learning. He wanted to be useful. He wanted—not the same as need—a thing that changed how I looked at him.
On Day Seven, the tip of sound reached me: a rumbling, the peculiar honk of a loudspeaker from a van, the familiar voice that said, "Two credits. Two credits. Survivors, bring your goods down. We will take you to safety."
The van was the kind we had seen. They drove into neighborhoods with honks and incentives. They cleared up a road by using nails and other tricks and took people, promising sanctuary, food, a base. They had a charm, and they compartmentalized cruelty behind promises.
We watched from a window as a man with a shaved head flipped a nail into the head of an approaching shambling thing; it collapsed. The van's speakers coaxed people toward it. One man crawled forward, clutching a backpack. They climbed in. Another climbed. We saw tension, the van doors close.
"They're very good at killing a dozen shamblers," I murmured.
"People go," Dax said. "They promise. People go."
A week later another child—Juliet Coulter—found me on the twenty-sixth floor. She had a key ring full of small metal tricks and a small silence around her, like a missing instrument. She would later prove to have a gift: she could manage water like breath.
"Please," she whispered, tiny and fierce. "My mother—locked the door. Then she didn't come back."
We brought Juliet into the little family. We shared a ration of boiled rice. "We have to keep your talents for when we need them," I told her. She nodded solemnly.
"Why are you staying?" she asked me one night, quiet as a squeak of thread.
"Because I have thirty days to earn a chance," I answered. "And because now you are here."
They were both suddenly mine to be reckless for. I had no right to that feeling. I had only my day-by-day survival.
The steward pinged: "Twenty crystals can be swapped for a random augmented ability. Credit ledger offers deferred loans."
"No," I said out loud. "Not possible. This is a deal I won't take."
"But you could—" Dax began, bright.
"No," I answered again. "We don't borrow what we cannot pay. We won't trade our survival for gambling."
We trained. Dax practiced conjuring fire. Juliet practiced sending water as a blade. They improved as if they had gone to school. And they both, strangely, learned to trust me.
On Day Twelve, a van came again. This time, they were not subtle. Ten of them poured into the courtyard in a boxy truck and moved like predators that owed nothing to conscience. They brought survivors off buildings by threats or gifts; they took people away, their hands on arms like salesmen.
"They're bullies with power," Dax said, his voice small and hard.
"What do they want?" Juliet asked.
"They sell people," a man rescued from a collapsed doorway answered when we later grabbed him: Henri Curry. "They take them to the mall. They sold my brother. They sell anyone—men, women, children—with a price tag if looks or youth make them marketable."
My blood went still in my veins. The steward said, "Current points: 0.02. Suggestion: salvage crystals."
My gaze narrowed. I had not come to this place to watch human beings be traded.
"Tomorrow we go to the mall," I told Dax and Juliet.
"You can't," Dax protested. "They had soldiers, guns."
"They are not immortal," I said. "We will be smart, and we'll take back what we can."
We planned like only desperate people plan. We blocked doors, set traps on stairwells, watched patrol rotations. We tested Dax's fire—how far it could lash without burning everything—and Juliet's water—how fine a stream could be to push a shard of glass or to cradle a crystal.
On the day we went to the mall, they had nearly emptied it of life. The doors were barricaded from the outside. Above the fourth floor, a scent of fear and bleach hung. We moved across rooflines, down service stairwells, peeled open a supply entrance, and slipped in.
We found the fourth floor—what they used as a holding place—and I saw rows of pale, chained faces in fluorescent light. People with hollow stares. A woman—twisted, half-starved—was propped against a column. Someone noticed me. The man who ran the operation—Drake Larsson—was taller than his picture, with a thin, impatient face, a leather jacket, and the look of a man who'd rehearsed cruelty until it was a craft.
"Look," he said, smiling at the audience of his crimes. "A finder. Where'd you come from?"
"I came from upstairs," I answered.
He laughed and glanced at his men—Valentin Osborne, West Leroy, and a dozen others. "Bring her a seat. Let's have some fun."
"Don't touch her," I said quietly.
He smiled and sent off a younger man, thinking to intimidate me. The younger man saw my hand reach for a small heavy stone on the floor. He sidled in. Dax and Juliet were at my back like a shield. I have made plans that I did not know would become this.
"Get them," Drake said when Dax set the first fire—small, perfect, a warning. His men converged. The melee broke. Fire met flesh, water met flame. I remember the way Dax's fire wrapped like a snake; I remember Juliet's water slicing like glass and sending men into panic.
When we were done, the floor smelled of singed hair and the metallic purr of failure. We freed chains, opened doors. People stumbled into the stairwells. Henri, who had spent his last hold in the dark, started to cry like a man remembering. The rescued people streamed out like a river regaining its name.
"We take them home," I said.
We took them back. We walked them through the broken lobby into the divided little rooms that had become our base. The idea of a base grew like a rumor until it was real: we assigned people cooking, lookout, med, and watch. The small community hummed with practical energy. People who had been sold and traded looked in our faces as if in a puddle of daylight.
When the crowd in the courtyard—now filled with a hundred newly liberated faces—decided the men had to answer, I knew we could not simply kill and leave. We needed judgement; we needed a punishment that would be public and final—so that anyone who thought of doing this again would watch and remember.
We captured three men alive—men with names we had learned in the fight: Drake Larsson, the leader; Valentin Osborne, his second; and West Leroy, the logistics man. They were caught because we were better prepared than they were. We brought them to the square by noon.
The square was full. Not just our people. Word had spread beyond the apartment blocks. Survivors came from the rebuilt tents and the dried-out gardens. Phones were gone, but hands found nails and sticks; improvised cameras were held up by survivors with the time and the will to remember. Children clutched one another. The rescued and their families circled like sunflowers. Everyone wanted witness and reckoning.
I stood in front of them and listened to the crowd settle—only small household noises now, the sound of cloth and the breathing of a hundred people.
"Drake Larsson," I said. "You took them and you sold them."
"You have no proof," he sneered, bound and bleeding a little. "Nobody can prove—"
"Valentin," I said, "put the recordings up."
"Recordings?" Drake barked, insolent. "What recordings?"
Henri stepped forward. "We recorded them," he said. "I took a phone when I escaped. They used it when they counted survivors, when they auctioned. We kept the files. We kept the names. We kept the receipts."
"Play them," I said, and a small chorus of survivors produced pieces of broken devices and made them work like a jury.
A tinny voice from a stuttering speaker began to repeat: "Two credits. Two credits. Bring your goods. We will give safety." There were laughs from someone in the background. A woman's voice—young and bright once—described a child as "product." The recording ended with a man's voice saying, "Pretty face—good price."
Drake's face, which had been brazen and white with rehearsed cruelty, flickered. For the first time, he looked like a man who had been interrupted.
"You lied to them," I said. "You lied to everyone."
He spat. "You don't know us."
Valentin tried to calm him. "We had no contract," he muttered. "We were offering a service—"
"Service?" A woman in the crowd with calloused hands—her cheeks hollow, her eyes sharp—started to shout. "You sold my sister! She was twenty-three and you took everything from her!"
"I didn't—" Drake began.
"You are not on trial for what your lawyer calls 'service,'" I said. "You are on trial for taking people and selling them until they are shadows of themselves. People here—" I gestured. "These are witnesses."
The crowd made a sound that was half-anger and half-need. People stepped forward with stories like salted confessions. A child pointed at Drake and said, "You took my mama to the van." The man swallowed. Drake's color drained until his lips were the pale of washboard metal. He blinked as if the world had been relit.
"Play the video of what they did to people," someone called.
The recordings did not need much elaboration. Men shouted. Bargains were recorded. A ledger was shown: names, prices, destinations marked for sale. A woman in the audience—someone I later learned was called Alejandra Matthews—rose with a photograph of a sister and said, "This is the girl Drake took. She was sixteen."
The crowd's anger became a physical thing.
"You promised them safety," Henri said, stepping forward, "and you made them goods. You sold them to men who did not ask whether children were hungry, whether women were afraid. How does that look to you now?"
Drake's smugness liquefied into something like shock. He looked around the ring of faces, at the tiny devices that had recorded him. His mouth moved and closed. He stammered, "It was business—"
"Business?" shouted a man from the back. "You sold people as business!"
"We have to—" Valentin pleaded in a voice I had once reserved for small apologies. "We had to survive."
"Not by making slaves of others," a woman said. "We survive together or we die alone."
Drake's throat bobbed. He tried denial next. "You don't know the whole story—"
"We know enough," I interrupted. "We know enough because the people you sold were found in places unhospitable to life. We know enough because your paper trail is taped to your van. We know enough because we have what you left behind: names, numbers, the way you wrote prices on your ledger."
The reaction of the crowd shifted. Cameras became hands that slapped a palm on a chest, that clapped once in a rhythm that had nothing to do with joy. Some wept. People who had once been silent now spoke. I heard the sound of that particular kind of demand that only the wronged make.
"Think of how you will look at yourself today," I told them. "Think of the faces you sold."
Drake made one last attempt to save himself with a laugh meant to be bravado. "You cannot judge me. You are thieves, all of you. We only help when we can."
A woman with a voice like a rope and a tone that had sleep in it said, "You made us thieves of each other by your example. You have kept us poor to feed your gains."
He went through phases you could chart like a weather map. First, pride: the old grin, a jerk of his jaw. Then, as recordings and testimonies were shown, shock: his blink became too slow. Next came denial: "Not me," he mouthed. He curled his hands into fists and tried to make his words into facts: "I didn't—" But the witness testimonies were heavier than his attempt to rewrite memory.
Then his face broke.
"No," he said, the first raw syllable of a man forced to look at himself. "No. No—"
He shook his head as if to dislodge his crimes. He began to plead.
"Please—" Drake whispered. "Please. I didn't mean—"
The crowd didn't move aside. The shock passed from his face to a desperate blank. He fell to his knees in the dirt—his expensive jacket filthy, his knees scraping stone. He looked small. His hands wrung and wrung. "Please! I have a family. Please! I can repay!"
Dax, who had once been a boy hiding in a cabinet, watched with a face like iron.
Juliet's jaw did not tremble. She held herself like someone who had learned to watch pain from the point of view of the sea.
I did not relish the sight of him on his knees. I had never wanted people to die with the soft, theatrical anguish of filmed evildoers. But there was a code we had to remake here: you do not take people as inventory.
The man who had been sold in the market—whose name, we found, had been Mae—walked forward and placed a small stone into Drake's hand.
"Keep it," Mae said. "You will feel what it is like to hold weight. Remember it. Remember that you carry what you took."
Drake's pleading turned to collapse. He clutched the stone as if it were a chokehold. He began to sob with a sound that buckled his shoulders. Around us, people began to clap—not with mirth, but with resolution: a sound like stitches being closed.
"Take them somewhere," I said. "They will be judged by the community in a way that matters. They will not be free to hurt again."
The crowd carried out a sentence the community designed: reclamation labor—those who had been damaged would find work; men like Drake and Valentin would be set to accountability through labor and restitution under watch. The sentence did not look like a court; it looked like a village deciding who would be allowed back. It was public. People recorded it on whatever devices they had left. They shouted their judgement. They pressed fists to their chests.
Drake's voice climbed through the cycles: pride again, then shock, then denial, then collapse, then begging. The crowd watched the entire arc. Someone filmed him as he knelt. Someone else placed a hand on Mae's shoulder. Children cheered. Someone in the front muttered that they were going to post the whole thing in mental memory, a video for those who would try to do the same—to show that there are consequences.
When it was done, the crowd parted like a pulled veil. Drake and his men were led away under watch. They were not simply killed; killing would have been easy. We picked a punishment with a thousand witnesses so that any who thought such crimes a business would be frightened by the image: men brought low in front of the people who had been broken. They begged. They were recorded. They saw what their hunger had created reflected in the eyes of the market.
We spent the following days building a community that refused to be sold. We welcomed survivors, taught them trades, set up watch teams, grew gardens in bombed courtyards. Henri helped with medical triage. Dax and Juliet trained others in their gifts. People came from half-collapsed blocks to sleep on mats, to taste food without the taste of ledgered terror.
"Stay," Dax said to me once as we stood in the kitchen, jars of rice stacked like prayers. "You can't leave."
"I will leave," I told him. "I have to."
He clutched at the hem of my sleeve like a child clutches to a rope. "Promise me you'll come back."
"I can't promise that," I said. "I can promise I will try to come back if I can."
That was almost a lie. I did what I could: I gave them my peanut-space.
"Here," I said. "Take the peanut. Keep it safe. Use it when you cannot."
He took the curious peanut-shaped talisman I had found in a pocket the day I arrived—a tiny spatial token that hid a map of small conveniences. He wrapped it and then put it away like a secret miracle.
On the thirtieth day, the steward said, "Cassandra Buckley, submit two hundred crystals for bonus, current: 202. Confirm convert?"
I pressed the confirm button because the possibility of a second chance had never been more tangible than in that sterile, indifferent tone. The steward's voice then counted down.
"Three. Two. One."
A white light swallowed me.
They say thirty days can change a life. Mine bent like a reed under wind and came up stronger. I left them with a base, with recordings, with justice. I left Dax with the peanut-space and a community that would be remembered.
When I vanished, Dax and Juliet pressed at the door like children seeking another world. They found my note on the low coffee table.
It read only: I am Cassandra. Take care. See you if the steward allows. Live fiercely. — Cassandra
They closed the door slowly, the way people close the cover on a life that will be told to others.
"She'll come back," Dax whispered.
"Or she won't," Juliet said. "But we have what she gave us."
I didn't watch them from a different world. I simply felt the steward's countdown, a tug, and walked into another light. I had done my thirty days. The score on a ledger blinked: 3.02.
When the white light faded, I woke into different grass and different breaths—the steward already speaking, "Welcome to the Ancient World. Survive thirty days. Collect rare plants and animals for points."
I put my palms in wet earth and smiled despite the fear. The peanut-space was not mine to keep anymore, but the people I had built something with—Dax Ellison, Juliet Coulter, Henri Curry, and the community—were living, breathing proof that my thirty days had meant something.
I carried the memory of their faces with me: Dax's stubborn mouth, Juliet's water-calm, the crowd's terrible applause at the punishment, the way Drake Larsson broke in public and begged. I carried the image of Dax holding the peanut-space, a small spongy object that meant more than my name.
"I will find you," I said to the grass. "If the steward allows, I will find you."
The Ancient World did not know me. It wouldn't be gentle. But I had learned that survival is more than counting the days. It is leaving something human behind.
The End
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