My Two-Way Ticket To Suicide Station

Trigger Warning:

This story contains themes or mentions of gore, suicide, and violence.

Central Florida, USA - 2026

When I was 7 years old, I'd left my younger brother to die, and I’ll never forgive myself.

“Irene, you were just a child.”

“Of course you ran. You were scared.”

“He couldn’t have suffered long. There’s no way he’d made it ‘till morning.”

And, for the past 11 years, every one of these consolations from others has been a load of well-meant bullshit. I knew damn well what I’d done. That I’d deliberately abandoned Adam to save myself, that he’d been torn apart in my place. It’s odd to think that a twin could act so abhorrently to their sibling. Weren’t we supposed to be able to read each other’s minds? Have a special, unmatchable bond? I’d heard things from the wanderers that came through our camp, how the rifts changed people, brought about an infection, Violaceo-Coeruleus-15 (VC-15), that’d inoculated the world with chaos. The virus, transmitted by body fluid contact with a wound, had spared none: mutating the exposed into sadic aberrations or awakening the animalistic side of the untainted—

Whhhhhhhht! A whistle trilled from our captain’s mouth, one hand lost in his scraggly beard, the other grasping a fist of straws. My fork kicked around the bitter remnants of my unidentifiable dinner one last time before I looked from the earthen, torch-lit walls of the mess hall to the solemn faces of our faction. Two-dozen of us gathered in a circle; one man turned and retched. Our captain began a speech out of formality but we already knew the drill. Everyone’s heard about Suicide Station: the farthest outpost in our territory, a converted fire watchtower bordering the original rift. Every night, one unlucky bastard climbs to the top as a lookout. If the large torch at the top is lit, they’ve sighted a swarm. If the light remains after we’ve intervened, a new watchman is chosen. No one’s ever returned home.

“Sissy—No! Stop! Help! Sis—ssaaaghhh!”

My eyes clamped shut the same way they had when I’d ran from Adam’s screams—when the aberrations had climbed through the rift and caught him after he’d helped me to my feet; they’d pinned him down and had started to chew apart his neck.

When our captain reached mid-speech, I strode into the middle of our circle and swiped the stack of straws from his hand.

“The hell you think you’re doing, soldier?”

“I’ll go.”

He laughed at the absurd break in tension. But, when his worn eyes met mine, there was no more need for explanation.

Ticked that he’d challenged my decision, I threw the straws with our names at his feet. Normally, such blatant disrespect to a superior would’ve been harshly punished. No one jumped to discipline their only volunteer.

“Irene,” his voice lowered. “You sure?” He swallowed, a bit hesitant because of my youth. “You won’t come back.”

“Yeah.” That was the point.

The next morning, I hiked through the dense, soggy forest. We could travel safely by day; it’s still unclear why the aberrations only came out at night. Snippets replayed in my head: Adam’s and my muffled laughs as we’d snuck out the downstairs bathroom window, how eerie the moonlight was that night as it’d shined through the fog and trees, the crisp circle of electric, blue-violet light that’d illuminated the rim of the rift, the stark void of darkness that’d eclipsed its center.

“Sissy,” Adam had exclaimed, his reluctance turned to excitement. “You found it!”

He was four minutes younger than I and the wiser of the two of us. It’d taken days to convince him to come searching with me, after I’d overheard mom and dad talking about something strange that’d appeared in the woods.

My attention jolted to the present once I noticed that the sun was about to set. I knew I was close; the trail I’d mindlessly followed had disappeared. I unsheathed my machete and furiously hacked through the brush, pretending each branch and bramble was another of the horrid creatures that’d killed my brother. So was I. We all deserved to die.

An hour later, the watchtower loomed 100 feet over my head, jutting from its thickly-walled, barbed wire nest; its exterior had been reinforced with heavy timber, the lower windows barricaded with layers of metal salvaged from car doors and hoods. My relief was short-lived when, from around the corner, I was greeted by the upper torso of soldier Miles. I stifled a scream. Blood and intestine trailed from his gut like a comet, 30 feet across the yard. His face and neck had been chewed into a mutilated mess, disfigured beyond recognition; a hole with teeth gaped where his mouth once was, his right hand severed but for a single tendon. If I hadn’t witnessed his straw drawn a few months ago, I would never have known this to be him. My stomach churned; I felt weak at the thought of Adam, how he’d fallen to a similar fate.

“No—Sissy! Help!”

The sun had disappeared so I hastily threw a tarp over the corpse, which silenced my mind. Miles was a ‘tomorrow problem’. Following my 9mm handgun, I peered through the front door into the living quarters. “All clear.” It was modest with a quilt-covered bed, wood-burning stove, and crudely-fashioned work bench. My pack slid to the dusty floor and I trudged, weapon drawn, up all 120 steps. “Clear,” I breathed and immediately my limbs and eyes became heavy. My muscles screamed to shut down for the night but the day was only half over. This would’ve been so much easier with cameras, drones, electricity really, but such luxuries of the past only felt like rumors. After extinguishing the flame Miles had lit, and following multiple hauls of wood, I buttoned up my coat and plopped wearily into my watch chair. My eyes scanned the immediate area for the blue-violet glow of an active rift before focusing on the horizon. If this place hadn’t contained such danger, it would’ve been beautiful. All I could hear were the sounds of the trees as the wind moved through them, the occasional calls of wildlife that lived beneath. When the veil of night covered the land, the moon and stars joined me in the sky. Now began my watch.

A little over a week into my mission, the isolation started to gnaw at me. I’d promptly given what was left of Miles the best burial I could but reality became hard to swallow knowing the closest human was now six feet under. In the early hours of my watch, I’d catch myself looking out over the trees, wondering where out there Adam’s body had been finally laid to rest. Surely, it wasn’t in the cenotaph we’d erected in his honor.

I rarely took breaks but, after dredging up such thoughts, I headed downstairs to eat an extra portion of my rations. As I continued down the spiraling staircase, I stopped beside one of the tower’s windows. The firelight from below shined in such a way that it appeared as if my reflection were another person looking back. I hadn’t seen my face in so long, I almost didn’t recognize the woman beneath that bedraggled, matted hair, her dirt-covered cheeks, and depleted eyes. The person staring back looked so much older, weathered from a life of scrounging everything out of nothing, carrying the fullness of torment in her heart each day, for all these terrible years.

As kids, when I wouldn’t say what was bugging me, Adam would press his forehead against mine. I’d always get mad, ask him what the hell he was doing.

“Reading your mind,” he’d tease, referencing our ‘twin connection’.

“No, you’re not!” I’d shout and start to wrestle him away.

It’d always ended with him landing on his butt and us both finding everything hilarious.

I trembled as I rested my forehead on the glass against my reflection, wishing I could speak to someone, anyone, again. As much as I despised the atrocity humanity had turned into, tonight I longed for company. I wished I would’ve listened to Adam, listened to my parents, stayed away from the woods like he’d wanted. He’d always been the more cautious one of us. And, if I’d done as he’d said, he’d be standing next to me now; we’d both be somewhere else, far away from this hell pit—

—A flash of blue-violet shot through the darkness outside.

“No, shit!”

The light charged in my direction!

I booked it up the stairs, leaping three at a time, until I’d reached the top.

WHAAAAAM! Something barreled into the tower.

Shhhht! Shht, shht! Violently shaking, I fumbled with the flint, unsuccessfully striking it over and over beside the torch’s tinder. “Come on, come on!”

CRASH! Just as the main door of the tower busted in below, the striker flung from my hand over the edge and fell to the ground. “Dammit!” I stood in terror as something scrambled up the metal stairs; the blue-violet lights grew as aberrations continued to emerge in the night from the shining, open rift below.

“I’m dead.” This was it. My first watch alert and I’d failed everyone. A week ago, I would’ve been more useful had I been dead. At least my comrades wouldn’t be getting ambushed.

A dark blur leapt from the hatch and landed on the observation deck. It slowly turned. I’d never seen an aberration this close before, not alive anyway. It was terrifying, human-like, except for its grossly enlarged muscles. They forced its enormous body to hunch forward while standing. Black, bulbous boils protruded off random areas, rope-like ligaments twisted over its body. Beneath its sickly, gray skin, its veins pulsed with a blue-violet energy.

The face of a devil stared at me. It lifted its lips, revealing rows of long, serrated teeth within its disfigured mouth. Two predatory, glowing irises floated in the darkness and locked onto me. It flexed its claws and unnaturally-long fingers.

I clambered away until my chest pressed against the cold, metal railing. My stomach lurched as I teetered forward and glimpsed the 100-foot drop ahead. “Coward!” I thought as I slung one leg up, hooking the railing with my heel. “After everything, you’re dying a coward!” I didn’t care anymore; falling to my death was preferable to being ripped apart. The aberration swiped at me, catching the fabric of my pants with its claws, and flung me back onto the deck. I gazed up to the horror above, as it reeled back its arms to disembowel me, and tightly shut my eyes. I could never handle the sight of my own blood.

My arms twitched painfully with jolts of anticipation. And, when I couldn’t stand to wait any longer, the world I’d so desperately wanted to leave had appeared around me once again.

The aberration stood in its same place over me, arms now lowered to its sides.

“What sick mind game is this?” I thought, the agony of defeat already tormenting enough. “Kill me!” I screamed, my throat burning and raw. “You bastard! Kill me!” But, when nothing happened, I held my knees in the middle of the deck and started to weep. “Why? Why won’t you…just kill me?” I was here to pay my price, to be finished with this once-and-for-all. That was the whole point of doing this, of coming to Suicide Station.

I drew my gun as a pair of strong arms scooped me up. When the aberration’s eyes connected with mine, my weapon tumbled to the deck. In the moonlight, I noticed the slant of its eyelids, recognized the scar across its left cheek from when we’d defiantly provoked the neighbor’s dog across the street, saw in them the wisdom that’d completely bypassed me in the womb.

“A—Adam?”

Knowing full well the atrocity I’d done to him all those years ago, he pulled me in closer and cradled me gently, preciously like an infant. I couldn’t believe this, that in some insane, miraculously, horrific way, somehow my twin brother had survived!

“Adam is alive!”

His heart beat steadily next to mine.

In all my astonishment, I could barely will my eyes to blink, much less lips to move, to say the words I’d yearned to speak to him all these 11 years. That I was so very, truly, shamefully, excruciatingly, regretfully, “S-sorry.”

He rested his forehead against mine and it brought me back to a time I’d almost forgotten, to when we were just a pair of silly, curious, carefree kids. Those eyes I used to know, so well so long ago, closed. Adam nodded quietly in understanding and, yet, with this smallest of gestures, he’d set me free. My brother carried me stealthily down the tower and through the forest, his powerful legs propelling us forward with exorbitant speed until he’d reached the edge of the woods. Any further and he would’ve become another target.

“I’m sorr—” I began but his embrace cut me off. Tears blurred my eyes. “—Thank you.” I cried and hugged my little brother tightly, like a big sister should. And then, as soon as I let him go, he turned and vanished into the darkness of the woods. I chuckled. Little, wise Adam had once again taught his older sister another life lesson. Alone, shaking in my boots, I trudged the rest of the way home, Suicide Station at my back.

Today, a flame of hope had illuminated within the tower of my mind, showing that something extraordinary had indeed been discovered: that it is possible to communicate with the aberrations, that perhaps this was the first step in finding a way to coexist. It astounded me how the aberrations I’d once believed to be monsters were in fact sentient and that, under the right circumstances, could be reasoned with. And, if accepted, this knowledge had the power to save every single one of us. Adam’s act of forgiveness and mercy had saved my life and infected me with a new mindset and purpose. Now, I carry this message back my faction to spread onward to the rest of the world.