(EDITED REGULARLY. Thanks to everyone who has been kind enough to check in and comment! As I've gotten a chance to tell some of the readers, this is turning into a long-form novel, but the chapters are so short that I've been posting them here as they come-- this is why, as a single body, it isn't clear yet where this is going! Earlier expository and set-up chapters will be placed here, middle-body issues go in "Exit, Middle" and later stuff ends up in "Exit, Last." I keep writing the chapters out of order, so that's the only way I can think of to organize them.

Date of last update: 4/6/07)

I.

My death was interrupted by the end of the world.

The next thing I know I'm the only one left. I'm walking, and all I can see is a haze of sulfur-colored dust. I can hear glass beneath my boots, I can feel fragments powdering. The sun is the same color as my jumper.

I'm thinking that maybe I'm not still alive. The smell in the air, I've never smelled anything quite like that before. Paint, plaster, glass, heat, and blood. I don't know where I am, but it's miles away from green grass, white fences, and damaged innocents.

Humanity is over, I'm thinking. I might be dead. I should be. If I'm dead, then this is a righteous world.

Maybe this is Hell.

The wind boxes my ears, coarse white noise, layers upon layers. Maybe it's the sound of someone screaming. A dull ache starts behind my eye, and I feel something sticky on my forehead. I hold my hand up to my face real close, and I can't move a couple of the fingers.

I'm alive, I think.

I feel a tremor, like something far away, falling apart.

II.

This is not real.

The vista is familiar, like a burning Polaroid of a home I haven't seen in years. The dodge and burn of unreal colors, the caustic fume, everything orange and black, haloed in a perverted sheen. The pain in my body is dangerous, tempts me to believe I survived.

A sky like this should not exist, I'm thinking, one dead foot in front of the other. It's huge and high, with a fuzzy corona, and slashes of vivid light have shredded it open, roiling cloud escaping the wounds as if God has ripped up his toy.

I don't know when I stopped walking, but all of a sudden I know where I am.

A lunar crater, a dustbowl opens up right in front of me, an arrangement of collapsed structures and blanched foliage. An iron fence, crumpled like tin foil. There are bones, and something spongy yields under my boot.

I know this smell. I've scented it on my heels for all the years I was sitting in that place. Lunchmeat and cheap linen. Today's pungent newspaper, a mounting clarion call for my end.

The end came. The skyline has imploded on itself, wicked away from the edges of my vision like blown ash, like a melting image, a curling photograph, but I'm here. Something lurches in my gut; it feels wet inside my hand, broken gears grinding.

It's a beautiful day in the park. I'm choking on the smell of death.

Laugh or cry, I can't say, but I sit down, feeling life catching ragged in my lungs, in my throat.

III.

Her parents were getting a divorce, so I figured she could use a hand.

It wasn't that she was pretty, it was that no one was watching. The way I see it, that's not such an uncommon story. If I had been about ten years younger then, even her blood might have been okay. I would have been a lot better off in the days and years to come if she had cried then.

She was too easy. It was her own damn fault.

As for me, I'm the one who's crying, sitting on a park bench in the limbo before my damnation. The metal is unnaturally cold, the air is hard to breathe, and it's as humid as sin, with flecks of ash falling from a sick yellow skydome for as far as the eye can see.

I'm not the crying type. I think I must have a head injury. My hair is sticking to my scalp; I can't remember anything. One minute, antiseptic brick and the next, my life upside down, and I'm still completely alone. A few yards away, a severed electrical wire lashes and sizzles against oil-slick concrete. I should move. I would want to live, except it's been so long since that was a possibility.

I stumble through my memory, desperately seeking the last moment of my life. I try to summon that last room, my executioner, but those moments don't exist.

Would she have been there? Would she, a woman now, have watched in satisfaction while I gave up my ghost? She, maybe with a new husband, bringing the news, white flowers, to her parents' graves.

My skin aches and I know this isn't a dream. I see her face as it looked on our first time. I should have paid my dues.

I can feel the emptiness of a dead world stealing the air from my blood. The city looks like a dollhouse world, mantled in a kind of dust I've never seen, choking black disease out of hollowed windows, while the horizon burns. I smell her blood. I see her face, naked bottomless eyes.

With my head between my knees, I heave out my guts and the world doesn't stop spinning.

IV.

There's a kid in the Laundromat by the gumball machine.

I lost count of how many blasted-out windows, how many decimated storefronts I walked by. Without knowing where, I just keep going. I step over a two-thousand-dollar TV, face down on the bleached asphalt, surrounded by glass powder. There are corpses, but they look like piles of towels, soft and mangled, shapeless.

The avenue bows in the middle, a trench of distortion driven through it, and in the hollow more of the masses have collected limply. I can't make out any faces, but I recognize the logo on a broken hot dog cart. Everything is black and white and smells acrid, like smeared newsprint, since the sky turned gray.

When the wind howls, it sounds like a chorus of last breaths, echoing in an empty room.

I pass the shattered panes, naked display racks fallen out into the street. Inexplicably a mannequin, bleached and nude, stands alone in a department store window; her eyes are gone but her lips are still red. In the distance, I think I can hear things breaking.

This is right before the first time I ever set eyes on Lanie.

At first I thought she was just another doll, she was standing so still, in the middle of a plain of gray tile. It used to be a Laundromat, I think; the washers and dryers are gray and silent, staring with rows upon rows of black, hollow eyes.

But then I see her shift, one foot to the other, holding her elbow behind her back, just staring at this thing, this glass sphere on a red lacquered pedestal, full of five different colors of gumballs. The Laundromat, with its defunct equipment, its yawning doors and empty mouths, looks more like a morgue, and yet there is blue and red and white and yellow and pink, bubblegum pink, the only colors I've seen all day.

She turns around as I approach, stepping up onto the foundation. She's got denim shorts and a striped tank-top, red and white. Stringy, chin-length red hair. Maybe thirteen years old.

She isn't pretty, but there's no one watching.

'Hey,'� she says, spreading five skinny fingers. And she smiles at me. 'You got a quarter?'�

V.

My voice is hoarse when I answer her; it sounds like a file rasping an iron bar. All I can croak out are a few words.

'Where are your parents?'�

I never was good at foreplay.

She shrugs, and pokes at the base of the gumball machine with her toes. Her feet are real dirty, and there's a faraway look in her eyes. There never was much green in this city, and now there's none at all, except this kid's eyes. 'I wanna get some gum,'� she says. 'Can you give me a quarter?'�

I pat the flanks of my jumpsuit to show her that I have no pockets. 'What's your name?'� I ask her, leaden tongue picking through a mouthful of ash.

'Lanie,'� she says. 'Let's go make change at the deli.'�

'Lanie,'� I say, and for a minute that's all. She looks at me expectantly, and I don't know what to say. I hear a sound; I think it's thunder. Maybe God's done toying with me and is on his way over here to strike me dead. I feel a little dizzy. The edges of my vision fray, turning white.

'Lanie,'� I ask her. 'Are we still alive?'�

'Yeah, maybe,'� she says, with an adolescent's practiced ambivalence. She thinks a moment, and looks sidelong at the gumballs. 'I'll bet there's no one left at the deli,'� she says, disappointed.

'That's a pretty good bet,'� I tell her. It's just me and Lanie; my private Hell, my own Heaven. Somebody's sick joke.

'Then we don't even need quarters,'� she concludes. Then Lanie gives the gumball machine a big, hard shove. It tips over and bursts open, the glass bubble shattering, hundreds of little colored balls scattering, noisy tap-tap-tapping, a Technicolor explosion from the point of impact, bouncing and rolling to every corner of the gray tile floor.

She's startled at first, and then she bursts out laughing, scrambling around and handpicking gumballs off the floor as they roll by. Her shouting rings off the brick cornerstones, echoes sepulchral in the dead-blanketed city. 'You can have the white ones,'� she tells me. 'I don't want them.'�

I watch her running around. Her shorts are too short.

'Come on,'� I tell her. 'Let's go.'�

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