Blix held on tight as Alf carried her piggyback through the dust swept campus. The rough weave of her tunic thingy chafed something fierce. She couldn’t be sure, but things felt way too breezy, like the magic pixie dust had dissolved her underwear. Which was just wrong.

Everything was eerily silent. No traffic, no airplanes, no air-handlers or voices or movement of any kind. All she could hear was the distant clank of metal on metal. Alf was right. They needed to get out of the city fast.

She searched the surrounding area. Streams of dust flowed all around them. Up hill, down hill, it didn’t seem to matter. And they were tinted different colors.

Alf tried to jump a rust-colored rivulet but landed short and stumbled a few steps before regaining his balance and pressing on. Poor guy. His arms were trembling like newborn kittens. He was absolutely exhausted. But here she was, latched onto his back like an eighty-pound tick. Sucking him dry while the world crashed down around their shoulders.

She was a horrible person. She should have made him leave her behind. She should have insisted. But he’d looked so sad with those big brown puppy eyes... And she was a selfish, blood-sucking parasite, after all. It was in her genetic programming.

“The secret is not caring,” she whispered in his ear. “They need you way more than you need them. Who cares what they think?”

“What?” Alf stumbled a bit—which was kind of satisfying. Probably because she was evil.

“What’s your IQ?” she asked. “A hundred and sixty, maybe? A hundred seventy?”

“What are you talking about?”

“The cure for social anxiety,” she said. “The secret is not to care. Compared to you, everyone else is stupid. Who cares what they think?”

“That’s ridiculous. Of course, I care,” Alf sputtered. “You’re saying people are… No, IQ doesn’t matter. Kindness, empathy, friendship,… Everything else is way more important.”

“I’m not saying you have to believe it. You just have to pretend to believe it. It’s all about attitude. Reality is irrelevant.”

“You don’t believe that,” he said between huffs. “I know you don’t.”

“I believe whatever it takes to get through the day. So should you. Which is better: to believe in friendship so much you’re too anxious to make any friends or to not care about friendship and have all the friends you want?”

“That doesn’t mean reality’s not important.”

“Just because something’s important, doesn’t mean you have to believe it. Look at this discussion. The world is disintegrating all around us. We’re exhausted and freaked out and probably going to die, but dwelling on that reality isn’t going to help us at all. It’s much better to talk about something inane like not believing in reality so we can at least walk without being tired.”

“Now you’re just twisting words.”

“Which are in turn twisting reality.”

Alf groaned—she’d take it as a concession of defeat—and headed for the ribbon of trees growing along the creek. “You’re not going to die,” he said stubbornly. “I won’t let you.”

“Is that reality talking, or are you merely attempting to twist reality to conform to your belief?”

“I’m serious.”

She heaved herself higher onto his back and nuzzled into his neck, you know, to distract him from his fatigue and stuff.

The silence tingled with an enchanted kind of energy as they walked through the dust streams winding this way and that through the underbrush. One of the streams terminated at the body of a dead squirrel. They stopped and watched as the dust stripped the carcass to the bones and then, like one of those time lapse decay sequences in a nature film, dissolved the bones to nothing, washing away all traces that it had ever been there.

“Over there,” Alf ground out between heaving breaths and nodded up the hill to where a river of dust was burying a classroom building beneath a mound of soil and rock and sand.

“What the heck?” Blix could only stare. Her brain was supposed to be this unparalleled wonder of super-parallel-processing efficiency, but it had long since thrown up its neurons in surrender.

“Holy crap…” Alf jolted to a stop and started backing away.

A stream of pink-tinted dust was pouring into an enormous rat. As in ridiculously enormous. As in the size of a small hippo.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” Blix hissed in his ear. “We’re almost there. Just one more block.”

Breaking into a stumbling trot, Alf carried her up the steepening hill. By the time they reached her dorm, he sounded like he was about to have a heart attack. “Whoa…”

She followed his gaze to the roof of the five-story building—or at least where the roof would have been if the dust wasn’t in the process of dissolving the building from the top down.

“Inside, quick!” she shouted. “I’m on the first floor. We still have time.”

The world shuddered as Alf ran to the entrance and threw open a glass door. He darted inside and immediately skidded to a stop.

All along the hallway, spaced at regular intervals, were dozen and dozens of… What did you even call them? Monsters? Corpses? Former human beings?

Right at Alf’s feet lay a greenish-gray monster with six inch tusks protruding from its lower jaw. It stretched all the way across the hallway. He’d have to step over it to get to her dorm room. Was it even worth it?

“It… doesn’t seem to be breathing.” He inched forward. “What do you think?”

Blix shook her head. “No idea.” She fixed her eyes on its chest, but it was still as death. “What is it even wearing? Is that supposed to be armor? Why isn’t it covering its stomach or chest or neck?”

“I think it’s supposed to be an orc.”

“But why?”

Alf shook his head and stepped carefully over the monster’s legs.

Four feet beyond the orc lay a giant wolf-looking man. And beyond the wolfman lay a ridiculously well-endowed girl with green hair and long pointy ears.

“They’re like video game characters.” Alf stared distrustfully at the wolfman as he edged past its feet.

But Blix couldn’t look away from the pointy-eared girl. She looked eerily familiar—like a massively Photoshopped version of Amanda Seville from next door. Only the original Amanda had been about a hundred pounds overweight. And this Amanda was ridiculously ridiculous—even by video game standards.