Everything Is Wrong

A Midnight Vault II Story.

Linda cursed the blisters at the back of her heels, a product of shoes made small by diabetes. Her nose pierced out above the N95 mask as she paced back and forth in the hot summer breeze. The flabby skin behind her arms jiggled as she dug a hand into her worn Wranglers for the pack of Virginia Slims.

The hospital emergency room doors slid open as she shuffled past. She lit her cancer stick and blew a defiant puff of smoke through them.

A masked security guard, his belly almost bursting out of his midnight black uniform, stepped out and glared. Ma’am, you can’t smoke here.

Where can I then?

He pointed at a small park, sickly shrubs, stunted trees, an infinity of fast-food wrappers and cigarette butts scattered on the ground. It was a few hundred feet away, across the busy intersection.

Ya kidding? She flicked the ashes of her cigarette at the guard’s feet. I can’t be inside and ya want me to go all the way over there.

Yeah, get the fuck moving.

Don’t curse me with ya purple tongue. My husband’s dying. She gave him her special scowl reserved for assholes.

Everybody dying here, ma’am. Get going.

Linda hobbled over as a deep cough spasmed up her chest and discharged from her throat. It reminded her of the one her husband couldn’t shake, which only grew worse before she called the ambulance.

Pete has been quarantined for five days in the ICU.

Those bureaucratic bastards and snake doctors won’t let her see him, let alone be there by his side. If she were going to get COVID and end up like him, she would have already had it. She spent every waking moment next to him since he “contracted” it, and slept next to him every evening since.

It didn’t matter what common sense bombs she dropped; it all fell on deaf ears.

She feared Pete lay there, alone, dying. Not because of the virus, but of isolation. The suffocating confinement and the liberal use of whatever drugs and procedures Big Pharma paid the staff to administer.

She sucked in the whispered vapors of carbon monoxide, arsenic, and hydrogen cyanide, and her mind flashed to her husband’s death prison. His skin pale and sweaty; caged like an animal by plastic sheeting, zipped and sealed. His mouth and face covered in them breathing tubes. One forcibly shoved down his throat.

She pleaded with the doctors to try ivermectin, to make sure he got sun. He always liked to be in the light and knew it would heal him. They rolled their eyes, kept their mouths covered in masks like criminals, and kicked her out.

Now she smoked her cigarette in the ugly little parklet, inhaling with a ferocity only lungs tar-jammed with years of smoke could handle. On her second-to-last puff, she blew fire’s breath through her nostrils and coughed its ashes as her husband’s EKG monitor flatlined. Those snake doctors and those bitch nurses attempted to resuscitate to no use.

An hour later, they told her while she shook with irrepressible sobs.

She never saw his body.

Meet Linda Grove, 47 years old, widowed by the forces of man and nature. Forces we ignore and forget until they enact their power against us and the ones we love. Forces that, for Linda, convinced her that the enemy was not just a virus, but a plague of evil that had ensnared healthcare, society, and even the government. She latched onto this fear, combated it by building a fortress aided by technology, algorithms, and isolation. Her sanctuary, a 1,000-square-foot cottage in the pristine forest near the White Mountains of New Hampshire. The views and fresh mountain air she hasn’t seen or tasted for a couple of years. She prefers her life behind the old wooden door and sealed single-pane windows. A life dominated by screens and clickbait. Hyperbolic declarations and hot takes. She participates in the currency of virtue and attention. She doesn’t know how much the world has changed, but she will.

She just needs to step out of her front door.

We have a NATION of kids, in school, who want to be treated like CATS. Yeah, I know. Cats! Mocked a blue-eyed, square-jawed male host on TV.

Linda dropped her fork of twirled spaghetti onto her oversized white vintage Jeff Gordon Fearless T-shirt from 1997—a relic from her father before his death.

Gawd dangit.

She dabbed at the speckled red stain with a bone-dry paper towel, most of it hidden by the bold red, blue, and yellow that dominated the graphic on the shirt, and listened to the group of hosts rant on the morning program.

These people have their own litter boxes to go to the bathroom, they’ve built or had built little uh…doggy doors to exit and enter the home. The blue-eyed host continued.

Couldn’t they just use regular doors? Chimed in a blonde woman wearing a striking red dress.

Not if you’re a cat. Chided the old guy who always tried too hard to be funny.

Are they eating cat food? Asked their token black guy.

The blue-eyed host tossed paper in the air. YES! Yes, they are!

The blonde shook her head. This is what happens when you take SSRIs and spend all day on TikTok. Disgusting.

Linda’s cheeks flushed. She flipped her oily, silver-grey hair out of her face as her stomach twisted and bubbled. A crackle of phlegm worked its way up her belly and lodged in her throat. She coughed.

If she encountered one of these cat kids, she’d shake the sense back into them. Tell them to touch some grass and talk to someone.

She dabbed her forehead with the sauce-stained paper towel and remembered an America filled with Americans who knew exactly who and what they were.

She picked up her Galaxy A15 with large bold text and shot off a 76-character post on Truth Social: People who want to be cat maybe Canada will take ya. We don’t need ya here.

Linda wasn’t gifted with prose or wit like so many of the idiot lunatics who dominated these digital public squares, but that wouldn’t silence her. She knew the world don’t listen, irregardless of your pleas, unless you yell, kick, and fight.

Look what happened to Charlie Kirk all those years ago, and the stolen election before that.

She never voted, but always made sure to be a blowhorn for her people on social media. It didn’t matter who listened; she was working to save this country. The deep state needed to be evicted. The left-wing communists couldn’t be allowed to turn this country into one of their depraved communes. Babies shouldn’t be murdered!

The blue-eyed host looked directly into the camera with a sincere smile. When we return, J.D. Vance will join us to discuss the ongoing cyber-war with China.

Linda muted the TV. She hated commercials.

She plucked the pack of Virginia Slims off the table. Empty. Looked at her Galaxy watch: 10:05 AM. Drone was supposed to arrive with her supplies at 9:35. Earlier, she’d checked her retrofitted chimney to see if she’d missed it while she slept. Sometimes it’d come early.

She pushed off the cracked black pleather of the loveseat and hobbled on her swollen feet to the window on her right.

The sun beamed bright. There wasn’t a cloud hiding the vivid blue of the sky. The dark outline of the White Mountains hung off in the glazed distance, dominating the horizon. She heard no distant whir of its engine’s fight against gravity and wind. No stir of leaf or grass from a drone’s rippling plastic blades.

The itch for tobacco’s burnt fire infiltrating her mouth and nasal cavity would have to exist unsatiated. She would need a distraction. A nap.

Linda’s eyes scratched the inside of her eyelids, fingernails on a blackboard when she blinked. Doomscrolling through Antifa terrorists clashing with masked ICE officers and police in Chicago prevented her from a short slumber in bed.

The violent visuals overloaded her poor brain, creating a steel vice grip of tension that squeezed her temples until she scrolled to National Guard soldiers bludgeoning unruly young terrorists with clubs.

Dark bandanas soaked with blood. Rubber bullets fired into the mob. Bloodied, swollen faces shoved into the pavement. Hands zip-tied. Good riddance.

Disinterested, her thumb pushed away the violence to gutter punks, instigating a fight with ICE.

A green-beanie brunette screamed, “You fascist pig fucks!”

A crusty guy with blond dreads grabbed his junk and squealed, “Oink, oink, oink!”

Someone off-camera shrieked, “How’d your mothers like bein’ stuffed with my big pork chop?!”

She thumbed it away. Up popped an ad. The image and voice of a young boy walking, barely in his second decade, with fluffy brown hair and a smug face in a suit over a white collared shirt.

He stared straight into the camera.

Listen, right now, Antifa is trying to end democracy. End America. Everything we worked for, everything we fought for hangs in the balance. The leftist, radical lunatics are coming for you and everything you love. We can’t let that happen. Right now, we’re raising money to fight back. Click that link right below me. Let’s make sure they don’t win. America needs to stay American.

Snarled sneers of rioters in the streets flashed in her brain. Wildly, they charged. Coming for the little bit she had left to hold onto. Don’t they know how good we once had it?

Linda thumbed the link and donated .00044517 BTC to the cause.

She rubbed her temples. Stood up and looked out the window. Cloudless. Brilliant yellow sun. No spidery shadow on the grass or mechanical hum. She scratched at a scab on her left arm. A drone hadn’t been late before.

Her throat was baked. Linda tottered over to the fridge and opened it. A single water bottle left. She never trusted city water, nor the well water polluted by mining, so she relied on the dependable delivery of water cases.

It couldn’t be that much longer. She snagged the bottle, twisted off the cap, and chugged the polyethylene-tinged liquid.

A faint motorized buzz outside. Linda hobbled back to the window.

The spidery silhouette of a large cargo drone rocked and shuddered, lurching haphazardly at a 30-degree cant. One of its four propellers was busted, really, missing.

A second motor, same side as the failed one, disintegrated, followed by a loud crack that rattled the single pane. The drone curved into a death spiral, veering southwards, away from the house.

Linda watched in horror as it smashed into a tree—a tree that distorted, flickered, and then disappeared, replaced by a rectangular streak of black that drove up hundreds of feet into the sky. A snow of green, white, and magenta dots fluttered across it and then vanished.

She rubbed her eyes, blinked, and looked away, then back, but the black band one hundred yards in the distance did not disappear.

It left no shadow. It loomed on and over the horizon, this void.

She tried to process it. Her imagination attempted to fill in the gap with anything. Did lack of nicotine cause hallucinations?

The wreckage smoldered. Her bags of groceries scattered and crumpled across the ground.

She plodded to the front door and clutched its faded brass knob, but couldn’t will herself to turn it no matter how hard she gripped.

Frick.

She returned to the window, pressed her forehead against the thin glass, and gazed at the patch of smoke. Her groceries lay scattered on the charred land like broken Christmas ornaments. She jonesed for a cigarette.

A view of the horizon, once perfect and serene, now fractured by the black panel. The crisp sky and trees near it flickered. The hazy mountains on the horizon fragmented into a disturbed cubist painting near its edges.

Linda felt the walls breathing—a dread of truth burrowing into her skull.

She dropped into the cold embrace of her pleather couch. Picked up her phone.

Scrolled.

It’d been an hour.

Linda sat on the couch and crinkled the empty water bottle, winding and squishing it in her hands. Twisted it into a vortex of cheap, leaching plastic. Trolling on X and Bluesky didn’t ease her mind.

Everything was tainted.

She went and peeked out the window. The smoke still billowed. The black void still loomed. And…

…a person?

At least she thought it was, walking through the wreckage, pillaging her supplies off the ground.

No doubt some leftist too lazy to work for their daily bread, expecting a handout, stealing from good and honest Americans like her. She hadn’t seen another human outside a screen in years.

The first one would be the worst kind.

She hobbled over and threw open her closet with the fading blue paint, old hinges nearly ripped off. Inside, black garbage bags, N95 masks, blue footies, and gray duct tape. She pulled scissors from a junk drawer in the fading and peeling teal-painted cabinets, secured her grandaddy’s Mossberg Silver Reserve side-by-side shotgun from under her bed, already loaded with 12-gauge bird shot. Another two shells she shoved in a pocket.

She cut three holes in a garbage bag and pulled it over her head. Taped two more around her legs, placed footies on her shoes, snapped surgical gloves on her hands, and strapped an N95 mask over her mouth. The oversized black medical sunglasses were a little scratched but would do.

She stopped at the door, took a deep breath, then stormed out into the world.

The sun’s rays lacked the burnt warmth Linda remembered basking in before her sabbatical.

Her pulse was a hammer on a nail as she limped the hundred yards toward her target. The plastic of the garbage bag trapped everything inside. It took nothing for her to start sweating. Every step was agony.

The black towered over her. If she looked at it too long, it gave her a tinge of the spins—a disturbing slice of barren lightlessness.

The scavenger hadn’t noticed her encroachment. Thirty yards out, Linda slowed her hobble so she wouldn’t risk the swish-swish of her garbage-bag legs giving her away. Twenty yards, she crouched in the tall grass, and noticed this lunatic was dressed funny.

They wore a black skin suit that ended at their neck. On their head was a mask with two pointy ears, like Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman. They were thin and fit.

Catifa picked up the smashed carton of Virginia Slims and shoved them into a dark grey Deuter backpack. Linda rubbed her tongue against the front of her teeth, shouldered the gun, and emerged from the grass, their back toward her.

Ten yards away, the cat heard Linda’s footsteps and froze.

If-if you meow. I-I’ll shoot.

They didn’t turn their head but their arms rose. A black synthetic stock rifle laid on the ground by her right foot.

Ya s-stealing my shit?!

Did not think you were alive. Never came out. The cat was a lady, her voice a silky deep one you’d want to fall asleep to.

Linda wiped sweat from her brow. Ya shot my drone?

A lady needs to eat.

Ya look like a cat to me.

I’m going to remove my mask. Alright? Catifa’s arms glided up smooth. Hands clasped the mask and pulled it off. She had short, jet-black hair and tattoos on her neck. Linda kept a finger on a trigger of Grandaddy’s shotgun.

I am turning around. Do not shoot. She turned slowly, revealing a narrow face, pierced septum, and black eyes that narrowed with a calculating glare.

I’m Autumn. She said with a whisper of a smirk.

Linda wasn’t going to return the gesture. Don’t give a thief your name.

I want ya to return alla my shit and leave me be.

She saw something purring behind Catifa’s eyes as they glanced at the rifle on the ground and pointed. You…um…notice the black wall behind me?

Linda centered the barrel of her shotgun on the cat’s chest. Ya, but I’m more concerned bout the thieving going on here.

Right, so I will get your things out of my bag.

Slowly. Move slow. I’m watching you.

She knelt on the ground, slid her hands in the bag.

So ya think you’re a cat.

Catifa chuckled and pulled out a half-gallon of milk. No.

Seems like ya might.

The cat touched the suit around your chest. It’s protection.

Protection?

Yes. Protection. Catifa pulled out the crushed carton of Virginia Slims. Linda prayed for some good cigarettes left unbroken inside.

A high-pitched buzz caught their attention.

The cat put on her mask and looked at the sky. Get back in your house or follow me.

Huh? Linda kept her shotgun leveled while glancing up.

Two small armoured drones swooped in and buzzed close overhead. Linda ducked. Catifa grabbed her rifle and ran toward the black.

A mound of dirt and grass erupted in the spot the cat had stood. The explosion’s shockwave sent Linda to the ground and her sunglasses flying. She was forced to look up as the two drones hurtled toward her in a suicide dive.

She recalled Pete’s many lessons on leading a target. He wanted her to hold the same passion for trap shooting as he once did. She didn’t, but the muscle memory returned with the rush of adrenaline as she shouldered the gun, pulled a trigger, and lost her hearing to its suffocating eruption of sound.

Tiny plastic filaments poked her face and pit-pattered on her plastic garbage bag. The acrid smell of burnt plastic stung her nostrils. She wanted a cigarette.

She got up in time to see Catifa looking back, cigarette cartons still lodged in her backpack, rifle in hand. Linda knew the cat was the reason the drones came.

Ya almost killed me!

She raised the shotgun and aimed. The cat turned to run. Linda pulled the other trigger. She thought she saw Kitty flinch, but she didn’t break stride.

Linda chased, her hurried gait a cross between a limp and a skip. Her feet already hurt. This was going to make it worse.

Catifa’s jet-black outfit melted into the hole in the world. She drove her swollen feet and short legs harder. Her breaths, hot and clammy. She ripped off the mask.

It towered above her. The burnt skyscraper of black. A broad dividing line. The cat disappeared behind a small door near its edge. Linda labored after and came to rest outside of it. Tried to catch her breath.

Left and right, the illusion of beautiful land and distant mountains was broken. The black scourge revealed a curtain that had been drawn, a video wall running thousands of feet in either direction and protected by textured glass. A world built within a world, kind of like a movie she once liked with a famous actor who used to be funny until he went woke.

She could see the faint shimmer of green, white, and magenta fragments, intermittently interrupting the inky blackness through the glass. Remembered a time when Pete broke their first flatscreen from an overzealous bowling motion on Wii Sports. He never liked wearing the wrist bands.

Linda popped open the shotgun and dislodged the spent casings. Shoved in her last two. She wheezed and prayed she had the stamina to see this through.

Linda stepped into a vast industrial aisle—thirty yards across, miles in either direction. Cold blue LEDs hung so high, looking up’d give you vertigo. Entrances to giant airplane hangars across on the opposite wall, each one filled with tall stacks and long rows of what looked like server farms.

Behind her, the wall ‌she’d entered went up to infinity. Same for left and right. It was a tangle of steel, wires, and data chutes. Even in a space so vast, she could feel the heat dispersed and the energy devoured.

On the concrete near her feet, a small dribble of blood. Kitty was maimed.

She followed the trickle and tracked scattered droplets into one of the large hangars. The drone of data and machine constant. She hobbled and turned through row after row of the infernal labyrinth—sweat glazed on her forehead and clung to her garbage-bag suit.

The blood led her like a trail of breadcrumbs through the maze of metal demons to a door.

Thick. Dark. Bombproof. A single glass porthole let her peep in. She saw the cat, sitting on a chair in front of a control board, blood-soaked gauze on her shoulder, smoking one of Linda’s goddamn cigarettes.

Linda grabbed the stiff handle, expecting it to be locked, but the door swung open quiet and easy. She stepped right in and raised her gun.

I have not had one of these in a long time. Catifa took a deep inhale and coughed, a cavernous one, up from the lungs, rattling her throat. Behind her and the control board were hundreds of screens playing hundreds of images.

Long long time. Obviously.

Where’s ya gun?

The cat turned toward her with a smirk and pointed behind the door. Behind you.

Linda pushed it away, revealing the rifle leaned up in the corner.

That’s stupid.

Catifa shrugged. If I wanted to shoot you, I would’ve.

Linda’s gaze became absorbed in the visuals of riots, war, and hate plastered on the screens. Familiar scenes. The weird and the grotesque. Her hands tightened around the gun’s grip. She felt the hate and fear bubble.

That’s what they were feeding to you. Catifa pressed a button on the board. Look familiar?

The screens displayed a horizon and sky Linda recognized: cloudless, bluebird, and the Presidential Range off in the distance.

The cat typed and pressed keys and buttons. New images of desolation and famine, ICE battering immigrants, and rich tech billionaires chumming it with the President. A few more clicks, and the displays showed a gray cityscape, its sky constantly clouded, with gusts of rain.

This is what they fed me, Catifa said, taking another drag. Five years wasted in an apartment. That’s despair for you. She coughed out fumes and grimaced.

The cough. Linda could never shake it. Long nights were spent awake, forced to listen. Worry. She missed it by the time they barred her from Pete’s side at the end.

They took…everything. Catifa continued, a soft mist coating her black eyes.

Who is this…“they” ya keep referring?

Them. AI. The cat gestured with her one good arm around the room, and out the door. What do you think all the servers are for?

Linda recalled the fear-mongering and empty promises. Advocates claimed unimaginable riches. Doomers declared an end to humanity. It all died with a whimper.

Come here. Catifa swiveled in the chair, her back to Linda. Leaned over a terminal and tapped a few buttons.

She glanced back. I’m not going to bite.

Linda leaned forward, suspicious, trying to peek at what Catifa was doing. What about claw and scratch?

She didn’t look up as she spoke flatly, I am not a cat.

Ya keeping saying that but…

The drones, Catifa interrupted, the AI. They’re afraid of cats. So I wear this.

Linda rolled her eyes. Sure.

Come here and look. The cat tapped the terminal’s screen.

Linda shuffled over, her shotgun low but ready to raise and shoot quick. In the center console over cat lady’s shoulder, quick lines of prompts and code emerged, filling the screen end to end.

This is the AIs prompting one another, creating everything you saw out your window, on your TV, even your phone.

Linda shouldered her shotgun. Pointed the barrel at smart cat’s head. Okay. I’ve had it with your liberal propaganda. You’ve-

Big fan of Donald Trump? Catifa typed fast.

Linda’s aim wavered. He saved our country.

This him, right?

Linda looked at the screens. There he was. Walking. Talking. Dancing. Hundreds of moments of him from throughout the years.

Would you like to see him kiss J.D. Vance? Catifa typed one tick slower and hit enter.

What?! No. Don’t you-

All the screens switched to infinite variations of J.D. Vance and Trump making out. In some versions, they wore suits. Others were naked. All looked real. It was an abomination. Linda wanted to vomit.

How about jacking each other-

NO. Linda swung her grandaddy’s shotgun at the terminal and pulled a trigger.

Catifa fell out of her chair as the shot rang. The terminal’s glass shattered as its insides were pulverized. Vance and Trump disappeared. The room went dark.

Blueish white emergency lights kicked on, their cold glow revealed the cat on the ground, wincing. Linda, shotgun still pointed at the control board as smoke slithered out of it.

A satellite image of Earth emerged and filled every screen.

Linda lowered the gun. Her breath caught as she barely recognized her own continent. Gigantic monoliths, black and grey structures, nearly covered all of the United States. Mountains, forests, and prairies leveled, decimated, and covered. It wasn’t America anymore.

That’s real time. Right now. Not created. The cat clenched her teeth and pushed herself up with her one good arm.

Linda didn’t have a rebuttal. She shoved her hand into the front pocket of her jeans and pulled out her phone. TikTok wouldn’t load. X was unresponsive. She looked back at the control board and the murdered terminal, just another asshole who thought themselves smarter and better.

They did this?

Yes. Catifa plucked her nearly finished cigarette off the console and relit it.

Why?

They needed more, so they paved over us. The smoking cat took a final drag on the cigarette, burning it down, singeing the filter top. More compute. More power. More space.

She coughed out the poisoned tar.

Linda sat on the control panel. She never traveled much. But now, looking at the states covered in the bleak horror of an industry of machines and algorithms, she wished she had. Pete would have liked that. He always wanted to experience Florida.

Give me my cigarettes.

Catifa handed her a pack and a light. Linda pulled out a slightly bent one, lit it, took a deep drag, and packed her lungs with smoke. The headache subsided. Her pulse quickened. She looked at the cat.

What ya gonna to do?

The cat pressed her cigarette butt into the console and flicked it onto the floor. I want you to help clean my wound before it gets infected.

She eased down on the console next to Linda, grimacing at the flick of pain from the movement of her right shoulder. Then, I’m going to find a way out. However long that takes.

Catifa’s eyes softened—real eyes, with a fullness for life, their blackness no longer an inky emptiness but a vast chasm of opportunity. How does that sound? She asked for companionship, even after Linda had shot her. It didn’t make any sense.

Linda was scared, probably more than ever before, but she also felt something. It curled up from her chest, caught in her throat, and made its way to her head. It felt like hope and sadness. Goosebumps and a fragile calm. It caused her eyes to mist up.

It sounds good, Autumn.

Thank you for reading. This was written for The Midnight Vault II. Be sure to check out many of the other stories written for it. There are some doozies.