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not? Or if Jamie was? It only mattered that she was pleased—or maybe if Kelsey would have been, too. Yeah. There was always that last one.
    Would Kelsey have been pleased, to see her dancing on the graves of six billion people?
    “I have to…go upstairs, now,” she said, but it came out abrupt and awful. Like something only a total social reject would say. If she’d crouched and pooped on the carpet she didn’t think it would have made her seem any dumber, or more awkward, or what was that thing she was supposed to be aware of, now?
    Oh yeah. Social ineptitude.
    Though thankfully, neither chose to remind her of how much she sucked at living. Or at the very least neither of them shouted the words social retard up the stairs after her, which was a bonus, she felt.
    Though it was less of one when she finally shut herself in the bedroom, and realized she couldn’t have made sense of anything that had just happened with a map, a flashlight and a guidebook entitled How To Navigate Social Landmines Before You Poop On The Carpet.
    She hadn’t meant for it to all go that way. Dancing and saying where she had to be hadn’t seemed like social landmines, before. But that was the thing about landmines, wasn’t it? You didn’t know they were there, until you’d already blown yourself up.

 
     
     
     
    Chapter Four
     
     
    They’d tied her to the bed. Of course, they had. She’d gotten wise to these sex-dream-pretexts by now, and what was better at taking responsibility away from you, than tying you to something? Especially when they had an excellent reason for doing so. She’d become a danger to herself, and they’d caught her trying to run away into the landmines, and so they’d just had to tie her up.
    Of course, the nakedness was something of a question mark. And contrary to the nonsense person her dream-self apparently was, she did actually find the wherewithal to ask why they’d taken all of her clothes.
    To which they answered that her clothes were dangerous. Very, very dangerous. They’d become infected with zombie viruses. Of course, they had! And so she had to be naked and tied to a bed.
    It all made total sense. Even in the places where it didn’t and the places where it should have been totally frightening. Only it wasn’t, and that was probably the worst part. If they’d done this in reality when she’d first gotten to the cabin, she’d have known and understood that it was a terrible thing. That they were using some insane pretext, in order to justify their mad lusts.
    But this far down the line and in dream land? It just wasn’t like that. Instead, she found herself wanting to squirm. And maybe beg. They kept standing over her—on either sides of the bed like those breakwater posts she’d thought about—talking and talking about stupid scientific things like clothes viruses until she wanted to kill them.
    Why didn’t they care that she was naked? Because that was the overriding feeling. Even her conscious self was completely aware of it—this sense of being ignored in some fundamental, probably psychologically damaging way.
    Even though the opposite should have been true. She knew it should. This was her nightmare—being caught by two big, hairy guys. Strapped naked to a bed, to be used at their convenience. That was the psychologically damaging part. The apocalypse was the psychologically damaging part.
    And especially when she thought about all the ways in which nothing could ever be the same, anymore. Like sex. Sex could never be the same, now. No dates, no courtships, no picking someone because you loved them or desired them or even if you did, maybe they wouldn’t want you because they’d experienced something awful that had fucked them up inside.
    Or maybe they just couldn’t have you because you’d picked someone else, instead. It wasn’t as though there was a lot of choice, anymore. People couldn’t just go out and get a new girlfriend to blot out the memory of the old one. Or