“Hello,” she said flatly.

“Um…hi,” a faintly familiar voice replied. “Sorry to bother you, but you gave me your phone number yesterday?”

“Oh—hi!” Now that she had the context, she thought she recognized the voice of the woman with the kids and the suitcase. “Are you okay? You never came to the hospital after the accident.”

“Yeah…I had somewhere to be.”

“I’m Zinnia, by the way—well, everybody calls me Zinn.” She shoved mail into the box and made her way down the steps, phone held awkwardly between her ear and shoulder.

“Cherie,” the woman said simply. “Thanks for giving me your number yesterday. That was…a lot.”

“Yeah, I wanted us all to be able to compare notes without anybody interfering. Anyway, did something happen? I got a few texts, but not much real information. Is somebody hassling you?” Zinn started walking to the next house, legs following the familiar route on their own.

“No…nothing like that,” Cherie replied. She sounded deeply uncomfortable for some reason, and she trailed off, leaving behind an awkward silence that Zinn didn’t rush to fill. Cherie found her voice again after a few beats.

“Um…has anything strange happened to you last night or this morning?”

“Huh. That’s exactly what the person who texted me asked. But no, nothing weird besides the accident itself—everything’s been normal on my end.”

“Oh, I wonder… I was thinking that there might’ve been chemicals in the air underground that messed with everyone’s heads. My son, he’s been acting, well…confused since it happened. And…I think I am too?”

“What, like hallucinations?” Zinn asked. She couldn’t help but think back to the stuff she knew wasn’t real—the weird cloud of smoke especially. She hadn’t mentioned it to anyone, since it just seemed too ridiculous to be anything but a vision brought on by a blow to the head. But if other people were seeing things, a chemical or drug could explain it.

“No… Well, maybe,” Cherie said, still hesitating. After another moment of silence, she gave up on subtlety and blurted, “My son says he can talk to the cat, and I think I believe him.”

Silence. Zinn’s unstoppable mail carrier walk ground to a halt.

“Okay…”

“My son doesn’t lie about things like this,” Cherie said, the words rushing out, “so at the very least, I think he believes it’s true. And…okay, I know this is insane, but he got the cat to do tricks? And he didn’t seem to give any commands, just told me what she was going to do, and then she did it? She’s a totally normal house cat, and there’s no way he could’ve been training her somehow without me knowing about it. And he kept…laughing, like someone was telling him jokes I couldn’t hear. I haven’t heard him laugh like that since…”

She trailed off, something even more uncomfortable in that silence. Zinn took pity and didn’t make her finish the thought.

“Huh, that does sound like something messed with your heads. If he’s high, that could make him laugh too much. But you’re nearly twenty-four hours out from the accident, so whatever it is should be leaving your systems soon. Or, y’know, stress can cause a ton of strange reactions, and maybe this is a coping mechanism—for both of you. I think your next step is to go to the doctor. Ideally a doctor you trust, not someone at the hospital from yesterday.”

“Okay…yeah,” she replied, seeming to wilt a little. “You’re probably right. There have been, well, some other stresses in our lives lately, and maybe this accident just pushed us over the edge. It’s probably a medical issue. Right. Thank you.”

“No problem,” Zinn replied, voice going gentle. “Listen, keep in touch, yeah? Give me an update on how you’re doing.”

“All right,” Cherie replied, seeming a little surprised. “I should go. Thanks for hearing me out.”

“Take care,” Zinn replied and ended the call.

She started walking again, her feet traveling the familiar route on their own. Cherie’s story about a talking cat didn’t really match up with anything Zinn had experienced, which made the idea that they were drugged more likely—a bunch of drugged people would all have their own personalized delusions. A shiver ran up her spine as she thought about some unknown chemical entering her bloodstream against her will, making her see things that weren’t there and doing who-knows-what damage to her body and mind.

We need to figure out what it is, Zinn resolved. We can’t handle the fallout if we don’t even know what we’re dealing with.

She was about to shove her phone back in her pocket when she noticed something—she’d received some texts while she was talking to Cherie.

Holy shit…he said “smoke monster.”

He saw the smoke monster too!

Zinn’s mind raced. Cherie’s drugging theory didn’t hold up if Zinn and someone else had seen the same thing. If she and the other passengers were having shared delusions, that meant something worse—and she still didn’t know exactly what. What could cause a shared delusion? She shoved the bundle of mail she was holding into her mailbag and started typing on her phone with both hands:

But nothing she found made sense. Everything she skimmed through about shared delusions was about tight-knit, repressive communities coming to believe the same thing as a powerful leader figure. She’d only just learned this Alvin guy’s name. And drugs all worked the way she thought, with each person’s trip specific to them; she couldn’t imagine how a shared trip would even work.

If this was a prank, it was incredibly elaborate, and she really didn’t see the point. They should’ve all jumped out to laugh at her by now, right? The prank video should’ve showed up online? She typed “Grisby subway prank” into Google just in case, but the only relevant result was some harmless dance thing from five months ago.

If nothing else made sense, the unthinkable started to seem like the only option: that there were real, actual monsters living in the Grisby subway system.

Zinn shook her head. These disjointed calls and texts were getting stupid; what she needed was actual, solid information. If they all got together, they could test things—see if Alvin’s grandmother’s health was really better, if Cherie’s kid had taught his cat tricks, or if they all had bloodshot eyes and spaced-out expressions.

Or maybe they didn’t exist at all, and everything was in her head. She didn’t feel that far gone, but she wouldn’t know, would she? She had to believe she wasn’t in a coma or something, living out a life that only existed in her own mind.

But assuming the people she’d been talking to weren’t all part of her own personal hallucination, she wanted to look each of them in the eye to see if they seemed legit. She considered herself a pretty good judge of character, but it was hard to tell what they were really thinking and feeling in a few awkward sentences over the phone, or in a handful of what really seemed like prank texts. If this Alvin guy was messing with her for some reason, she was going to be pissed.

She opened her phone and quickly saved all the numbers from people who’d contacted her: Cherie, Alvin, “2 texters 1 asshole.” She paused for a moment, then added the spam call from earlier. Maybe the silent caller was someone else from the train going through their own weird shit. She created a group text and added them all.

Zinn got back to her mail truck and melted into the seat. She’d made it to lunchtime, thank God. Now she could drive back to the plaza near the Dunkin, use their bathroom, get a massive coffee, and maybe buy a bacon-egg-and-cheese or something to fuel her for the rest of this absolutely cursed day.

The phone, still in her hand, buzzed.

Zinn dropped her phone. It bounced on the pavement with a screen-shattering crunch.