Sycamore Connelly's returning to her hometown of Edenmouth, Maine, after dropping out of college. Sebastian Do is stuck living with his parents, having never left to begin with. Adrian Steiner, once a drifter, is starting to put down roots. All three's plans are disrupted when Edenmouth begins to swarm with zombies, and time itself becomes caught in a loop. Now the trio must work together to find a way out. But strange forces are at play, and they may not be alone...
Boop-boop-boop.
Through the fog collecting on my windshield, the rest stop is in front of me once again. I’m back in the driver’s seat. The parking lot around me provides a single moment of silence.
Then I remember what just happened.
“SEB!” I yell. Without thinking, I pull my car into reverse and floor it back onto the turnpike. My vision becomes a narrow tunnel. I don’t– I can’t– care about anything else. All that matters right now is that my best friend is okay. Bile rises in my throat, my foot pushes harder onto the gas, as the images replay in my mind. I’m doing something like 80 at this point. It’s not until I reach my exit that I even think of slowing down. Even then, every turn is taken just a little too hard. Potholes and patches of ice threaten my wheels. I keep going.
Those same exact zombies are lurching around outside. It’s the same three men outside that cluster of townhouses, the same oddly underdressed people stumbling around aimlessly, the same, the same, it’s all the same. I don’t recognize any of their faces. Maybe it’s because I don’t give enough of a shit to look right now.
Even as I pull into the cul-de-sac, the same woman in the black coat is there in the middle of the road, though Adrian is absent this time. She staggers in my direction and I do the only thing I can think of. I drive right into her.
My car slams into her with a jarring THUD that shakes the whole chassis. She bounces off the hood and rolls onto the windshield, tumbling unceremoniously to the ground. That’s my cue to keep going before she gets up. I come to an abrupt halt in front of Seb’s driveway, my brakes making an ungodly shriek as I slam them at the last second. The two cars parked there don’t give me much room to get closer. It’s not until later that I register one of them is the same blue Jeep that Adrian was driving.
Speaking of Adrian, the door to the house comes crashing open. He stands there, hands on either side of the doorframe as though he’s guarding the interior with his body. He shouts something I can’t hear and gestures frantically for me to get inside. I don’t need to be told twice. Without even thinking, I dive out of my car without touching the ignition and sprint to the door. I’m moving faster than I ever have.
And then I trip.
Seb’s frozen front lawn smacks me in the nose as I hit the ground face-first. My heart drops. Something’s roaring with bloodlust as it approaches me, close enough to be right on top of me, this is it, I’m gonna die, just like Seb did, everything’s gonna reset again and I’m gonna die. There’s a second roar– wait, is that Seb’s voice? Then a loud, meaty crunch, and the first roar stops. I turn over and look up to see Seb standing near my head, clutching his crowbar for dear life, and the crumpled form of the zombie in the black coat.
Heavy footsteps run up towards the two of us. A firm hand grabs my own hand and pulls me to an upright position. Adrian.
“Inside. Now.” His tone is clearly terrified, but not to be argued with. I get back on my feet and run the remaining distance to the door. Adrian slams it behind us and audibly turns the deadbolt closed when the three of us are back inside. The warmth and light of my best friend’s house washes over me with an unearthly relief that I can only imagine is akin to heroin. Without warning, I pull Seb into a hug. He makes a little noise of surprise, but doesn’t fight it. This time I’m the one crying.
We stand there hugging for a long few minutes, until finally Adrian pipes up. “Y’all okay?” he asks gingerly.
“Yeah,” I say. I finally pull away from Seb. “Yeah, I’m fine, I just…” I sniffle. “Can I use the bathroom?”
The downstairs bathroom, cramped and disorganized as it is, brings a wave of welcome familiarity. When I was 9 I once threw up in this bathroom at a Halloween party, and had to be taken home early by my grumbling mother. When I was 16 I cried in this bathroom after getting broken up with for the first time, and emerged declaring to Seb that I’d never date anyone ever again. Now I’m 23, and the situation we’re in makes me feel like both throwing up and crying, in any order. But here, surrounded by dust and the Do family’s collection of oddly shaped soaps, at the very least I’m safe. Plus, as I wash up after taking care of business, I notice the water heater’s actually working.
Huh.
Second thing I notice as I look into the mirror: the tuft of hair on the back of my neck has grown back.
Huh. I dry my hands off & step out into the living room. We need to have a talk about this.
Adrian is sitting on the overstuffed blue couch in front of the TV, resting his elbows on his knees and chewing on his thumbnail, brow furrowed. Behind him, Seb is up pacing back and forth the way he does when he’s formulating big thoughts. It looks like they’ve both taken off their shoes since I disappeared into the bathroom, and I suddenly feel a little embarrassed for violating the “no shoes in the house” rule.
“But is there an end point?” Seb asks his boyfriend (that still feels weird as hell to say) as I do the walk of shame to go take my boots off.
“What do you mean?” says Adrian.
“You know, like Groundhog Day. If none of us die, if we wait for 24 hours or whatever, do you think it’d reset?”
Adrian puffs out a sigh. “I dunno. I mean, I never– I’ve never seen Groundhog Day. I don’t know how any of this timey stuff is supposed to work.”
My boots are stubborn, but I finally manage to get my feet loose from them. “I do,” I pipe up.
The boys turn to me as I walk over to where they are. I plop myself down on the red armchair next to the couch, sinking slightly into the dent that a long history of sitting has left. “My dad got his undergrad degree in physics. He used to talk to me about time-space stuff all the time.”
Adrian raises an eyebrow. “What, including time travel?”
“Well, kind of,” I say. “The thing he really fixed on was how gravity stretches time. You especially hear about this with black holes. The way he tells it, he thought that if you could somehow reach the singularity without getting ripped apart, you could achieve some kind of time travel. There was some stuff about whether your body would physically travel, or if it’d just be your consciousness…” I shrug. “I don’t remember the details very well. All that was based on outdated research anyway.”
“So what you’re saying,” Seb says, “is that Edenmouth is some kind of black hole?”
Out loud, it does sound kinda stupid. I deflate a little. “I mean… it’s the best theory I can think of,” I mumble. It’s not like my undergrad degree was in physics. How am I supposed to account for the fact that if one of us dies, the whole loop resets? How am I supposed to account for the zombies? It’s more like the logic of a video game than anything my dad told me about.
Adrian leans back. He’s gone from worrying his thumbnail between his teeth to stroking his chin. “Better than nothin’,” he muses.
Seb finally stops moving. He rests his forearms on the back of the couch, right over Adrian’s shoulder. “What if we tried to… I dunno, escape past the event horizon?”
“Huh?” I ask him.
“We leave. We go back the way you came, past the rest stop. See if that changes anything.”
Adrian frowns again. “That’s not much of a plan. If something bad happens–”
“The worst has already happened. To both me and Sycamore.” Seb glances towards me for a second. “Both times, the whole thing reset. Why wouldn’t it just reset again? Besides, it’s not like we have any other ideas.” He’s standing upright now. Aside from what he did to that zombie (was that seriously just a few minutes ago?), this is the most determined I’ve seen Seb get in a while. At the mention of what happened to me, Adrian looks sheepish. He avoids eye contact with me for a second.
“Fine,” I sigh. “We can try going back down the turnpike, past the point where I started. But if anything even feels like it’s going wrong, we bail, alright?” I don’t even want to think about Seb getting hurt again. Hopefully the road will still be empty.
Leaving the warmth and safety of Seb’s house once again is agonizing. Like we did while entering the Dunkin’, we exit in a line, with me in the back this time. The cul-de-sac is darker, tinted that strange shade of blue that winter air takes on before the sun sets. Streetlights haven’t come up yet, but there’s enough visibility to see that no zombies are lurking around the sidewalk. I relax a little.
My car is still idling outside, likely eating up a lot of battery. Probably too risky to drive it. The last thing we need right now is for it to stall. Some part of me is nagging me to go turn off the ignition already, but what the hell good would that do?
“We’re taking the Jeep,” Adrian says. “I’ll drive.” Neither of us argue with him. He frees one hand from his gun to extract the key fob from his pocket, quickly pressing the button to unlock it before returning to a steadier grip. Now that I’m closer to his car, I can actually make out two of the bumper stickers: a faded gay pride flag and a decal of the Team Fortress 2 logo. A strange little detail to notice through the fog of all this adrenaline. Doesn’t matter. I maneuver into the driver’s-side backseat and slam the door behind me as fast as possible.
As soon as I put my weight on the seat, something loudly crinkles beneath me: another empty Monster can. Tons of them litter the interior of the Jeep, mostly in the standard black-and-green flavor, with a few variations. Naturally, there’s one sitting in the cupholder, too. The pouch thing on the back of the driver’s seat is stuffed with a fistful of ratty old papers, and a dented toolbox full of squashed protein bars takes up half the legroom back here. This place is almost as messy as the trunk. Even the machete that we found last time is laid out across the other backseats.
Wait.
What’s it doing here?
It’s in a sheath this time, with a long strap attached for carrying over one’s back like a sword. This makes no goddamn sense. Last time, it was unsheathed and buried in the trunk under a bunch of Adrian’s random detritus. Did he lay it out like this for me? That idea doesn’t hold much water; from what little I know about him, it seems wildly out of character. My thoughts are confirmed when Adrian & Seb enter the car, and the first words Adrian utters are “When did that get there?” I follow his eyeline; in the legroom of the passenger’s seat is the rusty crowbar that Seb used.
“I didn’t put it here.” Seb turns to look at me. “Did you–”
“What? No,” I say. “When would I have had time? Besides, look.” I hold up the machete for the boys to see. “This ended up in the backseat somehow.”
Adrian’s eyes widen, then narrow. “What the fuck,” he mutters. He looks at Seb, who just kind of looks back in befuddlement. “What the fuck,” he says again, then rubs his eyes. “If I didn’t move them, and y’all didn’t move them, then–”
“Someone else did?” Seb asks.
The car is silent for a second as the three of us process the implications of that. It would not only mean someone else in Edenmouth is alive, but that they’re following us.
They might even be stuck in the time loop with us.
Seb lets out a shaky little sigh. “What do we do?”
“Let’s just stick to the plan,” I say, surprising myself. “We can figure… that… out later.”
Adrian gives me kind of a strange look through the rearview mirror, but he nods. “Fine,” he says, and turns the keys in the ignition.
The drive out of town is, thankfully, uneventful. Adrian doesn’t need directions towards the turnpike, so the car remains pretty quiet. Fine by me. Being a passenger gives me a chance to truly space out a little. At points, I look at the zombies lurching outside and try to see if I recognize any faces. I don’t. None of them even ring a bell. It’s almost like they’re randomly generated background characters. As we leave sidewalk territory, I start to see fewer and fewer of them, until finally we’re on the turnpike. This is kind of peaceful. Meditative, even. I’m almost nodding off.
Something’s wrong.
A deep, inexplicable instinct, a primal lizard-brain certainty that I’m in danger, snaps me to attention. They say one of the symptoms of a heart attack is an impending sense of doom. I didn’t understand that until now. This isn’t just panic, this isn’t just anxiety, it’s a horribly calm knowledge that something very bad is about to happen. My instinct is confirmed when we suddenly swerve off the road.
The passenger’s side of the Jeep lists to the side and is welcomed by the hard-packed earth of a ditch. Someone screams– wait, that’s me– as the tires unceremoniously smack into solid ground. The wheels keep rolling, though, until we come to a smashing halt into the beginning of the guardrail. A crack spiderwebs across the front windshield. It doesn’t shatter. No one’s hurt. I can finally stop screaming.
“Jesus fucking Christ!” Seb yells. “What just happened?”
“I– I don’t know,” I stammer. For some reason, the words feel slower on my tongue, as if they’re taking longer to form in my brain. “Probably… ice. Is everyone okay?”
“I’m fine,” Seb says, quickly unbuckling his seatbelt and reaching for the door handle. “Adrian?”
No answer. Adrian’s staring into space, almost looking shell-shocked. His eyes, visible in the rearview mirror, are glazed and barely focused. Then, slowly, insidiously, blood begins to leak from his nose.
It’s quicker than I can register. Adrian’s eyes focus again, he unbuckles his seatbelt, and he lunges out of the car to collapse between the ditch and the asphalt.
“ADRIAN!” Seb follows him immediately. I fumble for my seatbelt buckle too, but my hands barely seem to work right. An agonizing second passes before I can free myself from the car to where my best friend is kneeling next to his shaking, bleeding boyfriend. Adrian’s face is now so pale it’s practically blue, the only color on it currently dripping ghastly red buckets from his nostrils.
“Whuzzgoinon?” My tongue doesn’t feel right in my head. Was my peripheral vision always this blurry?
Adrian doesn’t look at me. “I am about to die,” he says with a horrible monotone clarity. Seb’s about to say something, but he grunts and clutches at his head before he gets the chance to. Now blood is starting to ooze from his nose. The sight of it makes me woozy, enough that my knees give out and I crumple to an awkward seated position.
Oh. I know what this is. The lizard-brain certainty is back. It’s neurological damage. We’re all about to die.
The last thing I see is Adrian collapsing before