When the emergency warnings began, everyone in the hospital gathered in the cafeteria. They rolled all the air scrubbers there. All the med carts. All the beds they could fit. The oxygen tanks. They handed out surgical masks. They taped up vents and holes around pipes, everything as best they could. There were hundreds of people—patients and staff and a few stragglers like Izabel.

That was the day Izabel and Kaito met, assessing how much food there was, calculating rations. Malik chose both of them to work with him to figure out that particular problem. Izabel didn’t say, This is pointless—we’ll all be dead soon, but she thought it. She also thought Kaito was the most beautiful man she’d ever seen.

That night they stayed up watching news coverage of the dead. People on their porches, in their cars, whole families on their sofas. Someone wearing a gas mask took the footage and sent it to the local station. They showed his twitter handle on the bottom of the screen as the video played, @survivalsnotahoax. Izabel took Kaito’s hand.

    Chapter Three

Izabel and Kaito left the reruns on. Every hour Luis checked on them, and every hour he found them still awake in the reclining chairs next to Cami’s bed. Eventually he offered them something to help them sleep, but they refused. He pointed at the button on the wall that would reach him. As if they didn’t know.

Someone on the television was singing for the judges. Someone who was probably dead now. But no one complained about the reruns. Izabel wondered if everyone was like her, if they wanted to bury themselves in the past, like her app offered, like the Turning hadn’t happened. But, no, probably not. They probably liked that the show was funny sometimes, and that other times it made them cry, when mothers in the audience cried, when children were darling. It was feel-good television.

On the second day of the emergency warnings, the second day quarantined in the hospital cafeteria, the local news featured clips that were sent in from all over the Northeast. In every clip, the survivors were wearing masks of all different kinds, kinds Izabel didn’t know the names for then, but would come to learn: half mask, full-face, canister type, continuous flow, self-contained, particulate, cartridge. Usually a family or organization had seen the warning signs across the world, and they had prepared. Some were still sheltering in their unsealed houses, their furniture and floors beginning to turn yellow.

“Kuchi-sake-onna,” Kaito said under his breath as the footage poured in.

Izabel prodded him.

“An old yōkai story my brother used to tell me, to scare me.”

“Tell me,” Izabel said.

“Just a woman who would go around in a mask asking people if she were pretty and then take off the mask to reveal that the corners of her mouth had been slit to her ears.”