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The media won’t pick it up until a few months from now. After the new team is all here, after games start. In all likelihood, it’ll be the TV crew of another team that breaks it. When they do, someone will stick an enterprising tagline on it:
Kansas City, Home of the Living Dead
They’ll pass the paper around in the locker room and Hops will roll his eyes. It’s like it’s a zombie movie - like nobody got hurt, like no one is missing still. A spectacle instead of a real place.
But the attention will mean it matters to someone other than the group of them that’d found themselves stuck there. That’ll be a welcome change. And an in to finding people, maybe. Hops will think back and decide, even if he doesn’t say it, that things could always be worse.
~
When Hops Chen falls back down to Kansas City, they feel relieved for a good couple minutes. That is to say, the holes don’t show at first.
KC is his hometown. Hops hates his hometown like any self-respecting piece of shit, but it’s familiar. He knows it. The shape of the downtown skyline. The bus routes. He pulls himself out of a crater in a public park and realizes he knows how to get to his parents’ condo from there, and that’s enough.
It doesn’t take long for things to poke through the illusion. It’s quiet. Still might be the word. Like the trees don’t have as many birds in them as they used to. Maybe they don’t have any at all. He sees a squirrel and jumps, then realizes he hasn’t seen any other squirrels.
Kansas City is… there’s a voice in Hops’s head that wonders if they’re really there. That’s the irrational part of their brain talking. They’re around the corner from their high school. They walked down these streets twice a day for years, back and forth from basketball practices and home. They could draw a shitty picture of it from memory. It was never anywhere exciting, never anywhere that was different from any other place, but it was set deep into them.
So the part of him saying he’s somewhere else, this isn’t home, where is this is wrong. The Black Hole talking. The scattering talking. The fall talking even, he hit the ground hard, maybe he’s fucking concussed.
The sun is setting. Hops is a block away from his parents’ place when the streetlamps turn on. It brings something sentimental out in him - the street he grew up on is cast in familiar yellow-glow shadows. Then, Hops realizes that there aren’t any lights on in the windows.
Something chokes him. He stops dead in his tracks. It isn’t odd to be one of the only ones out walking, this part of the city had never been loud. But the adrenaline floods Hops’s veins as they realize how alone they are.
Dark, empty windows. A sky going grey. No cars passing by, and they can’t hear any on the next street over, and, God, even it being quiet enough for the next street over to matter is wrong.
Hops puts their forehead on their arm on a street light. Their breaths rattle in and out like crumpling paper. They’re suddenly putting all of their energy into not falling into the street and not spilling their lunch. “Shit. Shit shit shit shit shit.” The words echo around them.
~
“Really, it’s lucky that this place was unlocked.” Hops laughs, a little forced. “I mean, I guess I would have been safe sleeping outdoors if nobody was there, right? I guess. But yeah.”
The Chens’ dining room table is old, scratched and worn down but clearly made of good materials. It was kind of Hops to bring them here, Hatfield thinks. They’d fallen from the sky a few hours earlier, in roughly the same spot as he had, and he’d picked them up. He’d made dinner, too, which they’re plenty thankful for - falling from the sky hadn’t put them in the mood to cook for themself. Hops had had time to adjust, and clearly knew the city. Hatfield had gotten pretty lucky, all things considered.
So they sit and eat and talk and Hatfield doesn’t ask where Hops’s parents are. She doesn’t ask how he spent the week between his fall and hers. She doesn’t comment on the shake in his hands, or the one he’d had in his voice when he found her. Not her business, she figured, and the end of the world didn’t mean an end to human decency.
“It’s just,” he continues, “It’s creepy as hell out there. Something’s different.”
She picks at her food. “Could just be all the people missing.”
He shakes his head. “It’s not just that. I mean, that’d be creepy enough, but-”
“I’m just saying,” she says, “I’ve been here before. We used to play the Breath Mints pretty often.”
“Something about it…” She shrugs. “It’s never totally… seemed like a place.”
Hatfield is on the tall side, curvy but obviously athletic and tattooed to shit. She’s roughly humanoid except for an extra pair of arms below her normal ones. She looks… she looks like a blaseball player. She’d started off in the shadows like he had, but the Millennials had pulled her out as soon as they’d gotten the chance, before he’d even been in the league.
Hops snorts again. Not mean, exactly, but they do roll their eyes. “Spoken like a New Yorker.”
“No, it’s not that-” They search for the right words. “Every game I’ve played here, it’s always seemed… thin, maybe. My girlfriend used to say the same thing. Even the smallest towns have something special about them but-”
“Okay, you don’t, like, actually need to talk shit-”
Hatfield lets out a frustrated noise. “I’m not trying to! It’s-it’s more like Hades than New York, is my point.”
“Right, well I’ve never been.” He rolls his eyes again, and this time it is a little mean. “I know y’all on the active lineup are going to the fucking underworld on a weekly basis, but I’ve only ever been in the shadows and we don’t go anywhere.”
She rubs between her eyes. “Well, where have you been?”
He stills. “LA. I was in the Mints’ shadows for seasons 17 through 23, but that’s where I was before… y’know, before things went down.” His words are measured.
Hatfield leaves that be. “Y’know how LA is everywhere?” They almost clarify, but Hops nods. Hatfield can tell they know where she’s going with this. “KC is nowhere. And I don’t mean that in a bad way, just-”
“No, I get it.” He does, if only for the way every other city reminds him of KC.
He’s looking down at the table. For a split second, Hatfield can see him at this table, decades earlier and half this height, and she wonders what it was like walking back into this still quiet room. Then it’s the present again, and he’s standing up and clearing their plates. “Do you want to go look at the stadium tomorrow? I haven’t been since I’ve been back.”
~
There is someone mowing the grass at the Kansas City FreshDome.
Hops has seen exactly one other human being in the last week and a half. Her name is Hatfield Suzuki, and she is currently elbowing them in the side. “Hops, there’s- there’s someone-”
“Yeah, I can fucking see.” They grip the railing in front of them. Their knuckles would be bright white if they could tear their eyes from the field long enough to look at them. “What the fuck are they doing?”
“Mowing, looks like,” Hatfield replies.
“Great, thank you captain obvious.”
“Well you asked-”
“Okay, who! Who are they, Hatfield?”
Hatfield stares down at the field. The stadium is quiet, just like everything is. Hops doesn’t wait for her answer - another second and they’re off down the nearest stairs, twisting and turning down to grass level.
A breath later Hatfield is coming down behind them. “You don’t even know how to get down there, idiot-”
“I still had to try out for the team, Hatfield, I’ve been here before.”
They’re making a break for the nearest staff only door when she grabs one of their shoulders. “Please at least think about this, Hops, who knows what kind of freaky weird league construct they could be. That could be a rogue fucking umpire down there.”
They cross their arms. “Has one of them ever killed somebody outside of a game?”
“Elections,” they reply.
“You know what I mean, Hatfield-”
“What does it even matter what they’ve done before? Players didn’t use to fall from the sky and umpires didn’t use to kill whole teams in one shot.”
Hops’s spine goes cold. He wants to reply, but nothing comes out. His heart is beating harder than it was when he was running down the stairs, which is stupid but he can’t stop it.
Hatfield looks almost guilty. That makes it worse. Thankfully they don’t apologize for bringing it up. Instead, they carefully say, “I just think you shouldn’t run down there. We have time to figure out whatever’s happening.”
So they don’t. The two of them wander the stadium instead, up and down rows of seats, through the sections off limits to the public. No one is there to stop them entering any of it. Technically, they may not have the right to stop them; they’re the Breath Mints now. Hops Chen on the active lineup, and all it took was everyone else dying. They do a full loop around the field, then another one on the level above that, and then Hatfield notices that the person mowing has definitely gone over the same patches of grass more than once.
“They’re like…” Hatfield always talks with her hands. Annoying, especially since she has four of them. She makes vague, shaky hand gestures while she tries to find the words, and Hops fights off the urge to tell her to cut it out. “They’re like a wind-up toy,” she says at last. “Like someone just set them going.”
~
A week after Hatfield, another player falls from the sky. It’s Plums Blather, a bookish Spies shadow newbie who was good enough to get pulled out. That takes up most of Hops’s day, and means he doesn’t see the messages until a couple hours after they come through. The three of them get back to his parents’ place, and he cooks, and he scrapes off the dishes, and he walks into his childhood bedroom while carefully not thinking about how his parents’ room is empty, and when he looks at his phone there’s-
There’s a text. Several texts.
Hatfield must hear the sobs. She’s too nice and too nosy - she knocks, and takes the grunt Hops makes in reply as a prompt to open the door. “You good?”
“The, uh-“ Hops is curled in a ball around a pillow. His words get caught up in a sob. He’s shaking, Hatfield notices, fighting hard to get his breaths steady enough to speak. “The Mints- they- two old Mints fell.”
The world slows down. Hatfield doesn’t have to ask if any others have fallen so far - she’s been keeping track of that, but Hops’s reaction would have been enough. “Holy shit.”
Hops just tucks their face down.
She’s- she’s not sure if she should go to them or not. She stands in the door and bounces on the balls of her feet. “People you knew?”
They nod. “I thought they were…” they choke out.
“Well, y’know-” The words they were get caught in her mouth as Hops shoots her a nearly-violent glare. “But they’re okay now?”
Hops takes a breath. “Two of them are.”
For lack of anything else to say she says, “Well, that’s something.”
~
“And there’s no one else? In the whole city?”
They go back to the FreshDome the day after Plums falls. Plums was quiet the handful of times Hatfield played against them, and now is no different. Since the two of them picked them up, they’ve mostly been staring out at the city. They at least ask good questions when they ask them.
“No one that we’ve seen,” Hops says. “I drove out of the city on one of my first days down. Started seeing people again once I got, I don’t know, five miles outside of city limits?” He shrugs. “They didn’t seem any different. Or, like, concerned at all, even.”
Plums goes hm. “So just us and… those two?”
There are two people mowing the grass today. They look totally normal. Not identical, not obviously monsters, not obviously eager to fry anybody. They’re silent, only the echoing motor roar in the empty stadium providing any proof they exist.
“More than there was yesterday morning,” Hatfield mumbles.
“I don’t know how fast the league thinks the grass grows for them to need two mowers. It’s not like there’s any real rush,” Plums says, with a gesture around the empty stadium.
“I think you’re being too logical about this,” Hops deadpans. Hatfield snorts - she can’t help it.
“Maybe.” Plums turns around to face the two of them. Hatfield doesn’t know how they can put their back to any league shit so easily. “Have you looked around the city since you first did, Hops? It’s been, what, a week and a half?”
“I have,” Hatfield says. Hops hadn’t felt like it, frankly, but they’d gone out a couple times by themself. “Just on foot, though. Hops wouldn’t let me take the car.”
“Wow.”
Plums just nods. “Tomorrow let’s go look again.”
~
In downtown KC there are, as Plums puts it, obvious signs of life. Litter. A broken window. Disturbances in the three little craters they’d left in the park, the kind that didn’t look like animals would have caused them.
That’s what keeps them looking long enough to find someone. They spend a whole day casing downtown from one side to the other and by the time Hatfield yells, “Stop!” from the passenger seat, the sun is mostly set.
Hops slams on the breaks. She points and, sure enough, there’s the shape of a human in one of the storefronts. “Fuck,” they breathe.
“Park the car, Chen,” she replies.
It turns out to be a fancy furniture store. The big overhead lights aren’t on, but the reserve lights are; they leave the room pale and dimly lit. Whatever music they usually play is off, and the showroom is filled with the echo of a distant banging radiator. A bell chimes when they come through the front door, but the girl at the counter doesn’t react.
She’s on the short side, Black with braids in her hair. Her gaze is fixed dead ahead like she’s keeping her eye on something. Hops finds themself double checking to make sure no one else is there, but no, it’s just the three of them and her.
Hops approaches. They’re half expecting Hatfield to stop them again, but they don’t. They rap their knuckles on the counter in front of her. “Hi. We were just passing by, and we, uh, noticed someone was here.”
It’s a long moment before she reacts. Her head turns slowly to face them. Her eyes are glassy - it’s only after a couple long, slow blinks that she’s really truly looking at Hops. Her eyelids flutter again and she breathes out, “Hi.”
“Uh, hi.” They gesture back over their shoulder. “We were, uh- we haven’t- you’re-”
“My name is Hatfield,” she says, stepping forward. “This is Hops, and that’s Plums. What’s your name?”
She blinks at Hatfield, then her gaze unfocuses again. After another long moment, she whispers, “Brooke.”
Hops decompresses a little, and he can see Hatfield’s shoulders loosen too. “Nice to meet you, Brooke.” Hatfield steps a little closer to her. “Brooke, have you… seen anybody recently? Aside from us? We’ve been here a couple weeks and you’re just about the only person we’ve run into.” It takes another moment for her face to shift. When it does, she looks confused. They say slowly, “Do you… understand what I’m saying, Brooke?”
There’s something panicked in Brooke’s eyes. “Wh-where am I?” She has an accent, Hops notices - British, maybe. Not anywhere close, that’s for sure.
“Kansas City, Missouri,” Plums replies.
Brooke’s eyes widen. “I don’t- how- where am I? Where am I?”
“Shhhhh, hey, it’s okay,” Hatfield says.
“I don’t know-” Her breaths are loud and shaky. “How- what’s going on? Who are you?”
Hops puts their hands up. “It’s okay, Brooke, whatever’s happening, we can help you.”
One of Brooke’s hands lands on the counter. There’s mud under her fingernails and soaked into the hem of her sweatshirt. “I don’t- I don’t-”
Suddenly, she goes still. It’s like a switch has been flipped - Brooke straightens and her eyes glaze over again. The radiator is louder than ever, like someone’s banging heartbeat.
“Jesus Christ,” Hops says under his breath.
~
He had started to think it wouldn’t come up. Plums had been in the Spies’ shadows, but they couldn’t be expected to have a personal relationship with every rando who was there. Maybe Hops would get lucky and the two of them never would have met, or Plums wouldn’t put it together, or-
“Hey, this might be weird, but I’ve been meaning to ask,” Plums says as they’re washing dishes from dinner, “do you know a Catmint Chen?”
Hops sighs. “That’s my twin sister.”
“Oh!” They looked at him for a second. “I can see it now that you mention it.”
They’d looked more alike in high school. Cat had always been cool - Hops had been the popular kid, sure, the basketball star, the one who was on prom court, but it had a natural aloofness that people orbited around. It’d always been welcome around the team, but never came to parties or anything unless Hops had specifically asked. And they had, a handful of times - they’d been close back then.
Hops shifts under Plums’s gaze. “Were you two, uh, friends?”
Something odd colors their expression. “In a manner of speaking?” He’s about to hit them with a what the fuck does that mean when they continue. “We went out a couple times, actually.”
“Oh!” Hops says lamely. “Oh.”
They rub at their arm. “It wasn’t anything particularly serious-”
“Right. Right.”
“I didn’t know it had a twin. And you probably didn’t hear anything about me, right?”
Hops hadn’t heard much of anything about their sister’s life in Dallas. They hadn’t asked, and it hadn’t volunteered, and they’d put effort into not imagining what it was doing while they were running errands and cooking meals.
Plums must see the answer to their question on his face. They nod. “Right. Like I said, it wasn’t that serious.” They go back to drying the dish they’re holding, and after a moment Hops goes back to washing.
~
Things start to fill in:
By the time the next fall shows up (Jesse, a late addition to the Spies shadows who Plums seems happy to see), there’s another handful of people in the stadium. The two people mowing are still there, now joined by a handful of people wiping off clean seats and changing empty trash can liners. They warn Jesse off trying to get any of their attention. They instead stand in the aisles of the FreshDome, carefully staying out of the new people’s way, watching the action spin around them like it’s a theme park ride.
There’s a hollowness in their eyes. Glassy might be the word. Hops doesn’t point it out, but Plums does.
Hatfield and them are watching a person mechanically wipe off seats. Ve’s maybe thirty feet below them - thin-shouldered, middle aged, Latino if Hatfield had to guess. Ve’s strangely well-dressed, nice shoes and a shirt with a collar. Ve wipes the chair down from the top to the bottom in one jerky motion, then takes a single step to vyr left and does it again.
Plums leans closer to them and lowers their voice. “Do they all… do they remind you of the girl from the furniture store?”
Brooke, she almost says. She’d spent the whole rest of that day, and really every day since, spinning that interaction around in her brain. The panic in her eyes. The abrupt shift back to the way she’d been when they’d walked in. She’d half expected Hops to say they should bring her back to his parents’ place, and she’d almost suggested it herself, but neither one of them had.
Hatfield just nods.
They rock on the balls of their feet. “Do you think the League put her here too? Or do you think… I don’t know, that there’s something else going on with all of them? Like Kansas City is just weird?”
“I don’t know that I think there’s a clear line between what’s blaseball and what isn’t,” she says honestly. “Or maybe there used to be, but then-”
“The Mints all died,” Plums murmurs.
Hatfield’s gaze is pulled to the other side of the field. Hops and Jesse are over there, walking between concession stands and checking to see if anyone is back in any of them. Hops notices her looking and shoots a little two-fingered wave.
“Right,” they say. “So who knows.”
~
The two of them having gotten this far without getting into an absolute blow-out is, frankly, a crowning fucking achievement. Better than the old basketball trophies gathering dust in Hops’s bedroom, better than the time Hatfield spent on the idol board, and certainly better than anything either one of them had accomplished otherwise since landing in KC.
Plums and Jesse are out in the living room, politely pretending that they can’t hear anything. A lie, of course - the condo isn’t huge, already a little tight for the four of them. A person speaking loudly means they can be heard through the walls, much less someone actually yelling.
“I just think they might be able to help-”
“I’m not going to ask them-”
“What if it’s our best shot?”
“Hatfield, they died!”
Jesse is bouncing his leg. Plums almost wants to tell him to stop, but that’d require making a sound.
“I know they died, asshole! You’re the person here who’s not willing to face that!”
“Because my friends died, Hatfield! I spent fifty fucking years here and everyone who was here with me died-”
“You act like you’re the only person on the planet who anything bad has ever happened to.”
“Wow, okay-”
“What if this is the way to find your parents, Hops?”
Plums winces. Jesse lets out a pained noise next to them. They glance over and catch his eye - he raises his eyebrows.
All this to the sound of Hops stammering. “How about you go fuck yourself.”
A door slams. Heavy footsteps move out from Hops’s bedroom. He doesn’t look at the two of them as he grabs his jacket and shoes, then storms out through the front door. Plums goes to the window to see him coming out the front of the building and walking off around a corner.
Hatfield appears in the entry to the living room. “They’ll come back.”
The three of them spend the rest of that day waiting. Hops doesn’t come back that afternoon. They eat, and then they play cards in the Chens’ living room, and Hatfield spends the whole time glancing at the door and out the windows like that’ll make them appear. They don’t, though, not then and not after they put the game away. When Plums wakes up the following morning, Hatfield is awake and Hops is still gone.
It’s around 11 when the door finally opens. Hops is grimey; he gives Hatfield a hard look as he comes in. “Don’t say shit,” they say, pointing one finger at her. “Just don’t. I’m gonna shower and then we can call him.” With that, he disappears back into the rest of the condo.
~
The Breath Mints shadows used to do all kinds of social stuff. Hops only went a couple times - they were here for money while they took care of their parents and for a distant chance at being a sports star, not to make friends - but everyone had been nice. Not enough to make them feel like any less of the new kid, but nice.
Anyways, that’s how they first met James. In the brief period in Hops’s life when they weren’t the kind of asshole they were in school and hadn’t turned into the kind of asshole they were now, James had seen them and decided they needed a friend.
“I don’t want to drag him into this,” Hops says for probably the thirtieth time. “He takes shit hard. And he died, and now he’s in fucking Mexico City-”
Hatfield replies for probably the thirtieth time, “We don’t really have another option.”
They hiss a breath out. “No, I know.” They do - the more time they spent wandering the empty streets the night before, the more they knew she was right. “Fucking wish we did.”
She just says, “Right.”
“We could always call the guy on the Flowers instead,” Plums points out.
“No, James’ll be happy to help, I just-” They shake their head. “Let me just do it. Stop fucking around.”
Hops hits the call button and sets the phone down on the table between the four of them. It’s an eternity before James picks up. “Hello?”
They shift. “Hey, James, what’s up?”
“Uh, nothing much, man, is everything okay?”
Hops feels a pang of guilt at the anxious note in James’s voice. “Everything’s good, dude, I just wanted to call because, uh-”
“James? This is Hatfield Suzuki,” she cuts in.
“Oh!” He doesn’t sound any calmer. “Hi-”
“Nice to meet you. You’re on speakerphone right now, the two other Mints falls are here as well.” Plums and Jesse both say quick hellos before she continues. “We’re sorry to interrupt whatever you were doing, but… I don’t know what Hops has filled you in on, but things are strange here. We were wondering if we could ask you some questions.”
“Uh, sure, um…” Shifting sounds come through the line. “I’m with the team. Give me ten minutes to get back to my room and I’ll call you back.” James doesn’t wait for an answer - the line goes dead and the four of them are left in silence.
Hops groans. They cross their arms on the table and bury their head down in them.
Hatfield says next to them, “It’s our best shot-”
They interrupt, “Don’t, Hatfield, please.” She stops, thankfully.
It’s been more like fifteen minutes when the phone rings again.
“So you died,” Hatfield says after they’ve said hellos again.
James laughs uncomfortably. “Right.”
“Have you noticed anything weird since you’ve, y’know, come back? Any lingering side effects?”
“Not really,” he says. “I’m pretty much how I was before. Somehow.”
“Sure.” She’d taken the grocery list notepad off the fridge and now scribbled something down on it. “I assume you fell from the sky like all of us here did?”
“That’s right. I, uh, compared notes with my teammates so to speak, and it seems like we all experienced about the same thing. I didn’t, like, have a moment of feeling like I came back to life.” He lets out another nervous laugh. “Or, at least, I didn’t notice it while hurtling towards the ground.”
“Sure,” she says easily. “Can I ask about the team incin?”
“Sure,” James says weakly. “Assumed you were working towards that.”
Hops’s stomach turns. “You don’t have to answer anything you don’t want to,” they say.
“No, I’ll be fine. Fire away.”
“We really appreciate it,” she says. “Can you just, like, walk me through how it went down?”
“Uh, sure.” He takes a breath. “I was at home. The shadows players had discussed, like, trying to go to games if the Mints got hit with instability. I don’t know what it would have done, really, but that’d been the plan. But we weren’t unstable, so we thought we were relatively safe. But I realized that I’d left a jacket at the stadium the last time I’d been there. So I figured, y’know, I’d run and grab it and be in and out.
“I got into the stadium right as the umpire was starting to go rogue. I’d, um-” He pauses. “I’d never seen one in person. I’d seen pictures, y’know. Enough to know what was happening. And I was freaking out, obviously, like, I thought someone was gonna get incinerated. But then the, uh, the umpire didn’t, like, focus in on one person. It just got bigger, and when the flames started they just… it was like a tidal wave.”
Hops takes a breath. He balls his hands into fists. Plums and Jesse shoot them concerned looks from across the table, but he waves them off.
“I saw the flames coming,” James says. “Didn’t get my head together fast enough to run. When they hit me it was like… I mean, it was like being set on fire.”
“Jesus,” Hatfield says.
“Next thing I knew I was in the Hall,” he says simply.
A silence stretches out. After a second, Hatfield says, “I’m sorry you had to deal with that-”
Hops cuts in, trying to keep their voice steady. “Did you notice any effects on the crowd? Or the city more broadly? Did anyone nearby die too or disappear or anything?”
“I- there wasn’t really time, uh-” He takes a breath. “Hops, is everything… are your parents okay?”
The room feels suddenly quiet. Hops can feel three pairs of eyes drilling into them. They swallow hard. “They weren’t here when I landed. And they haven’t answered any calls.”
“Jesus, Hops, I’m so sorry-”
“Thanks, James. Did you see anything else?”
A pause. “Not really. Like I said, it was quick. But it was… it was everywhere. Like the world was ending. I wouldn’t be surprised if it had an impact beyond just us. But I’m sure your folks are fine,” he adds quickly, “I mean, I doubt they would-”
“Thanks, James,” they say again.
“Yeah, thank you,” Hatfield cuts in. “Very helpful. And, again, I’m sorry.”
“Oh. Yeah, thank you. I’m, y’know, I’m dealing with it.”
“Right,” she says. “All you can do. Thanks again for talking, though.”
Hops barely hears the rest of the goodbyes. He says one last thanks before James hangs up, then gets up from the table without a word. Nobody tries to stop him on his way to his room. The second the door is closed, he lays back on his bed and throws his arms over his face.
~
Over the next two weeks the city begins to repopulate in earnest.
It’s most noticeable in the stadium. Now, some of the concession stands do have people behind them. They stare out glassy eyed, or heat up fry oil with nothing in them, or mop the tiled floors. None of them are feeling bold enough to find out what happens if they ask for something, not the four of them and not their next two falls. Ji-Eun and Mindy are old teammates from the Mechs and mostly stick to themselves, which Hatfield doesn’t mind. It makes their logistics easier, seeing as Hops’s parents’ car only seats five.
There are other people in the rest of KC now too. They walk the streets aimlessly. They lurk behind the windows of the stores. One notable person sits cross-legged in the middle of an intersection with a vacant expression on their face. Hops honks at them the first time they see them, and after that Hatfield notices him taking the next street over instead.
It’d be easy to imagine the city feeling more normal with more people in it, even if they were… Brooke-y, for lack of a better word. That’s the reaction she should be having. If anything, though, it makes it feel more like a diorama. For all the people, more every day, the city doesn’t get any louder. The roads are always empty, too, except for people sitting in them.
There could have been thousands of people in Kansas City, and it still would have just been the six of them.
Hops isn’t taking it well. Not that he’d had a sparkling attitude about any of it, but the idea that his parents were more than likely just gone, that the city has changed in some fundamental way, that there’s no explanation for any of it - it all clearly weighs on him. Their surveying of the city has been getting more and more lackluster.
On the morning the next fall is set to happen, he doesn’t emerge from his bedroom. Hatfield, Plums and Jesse are all still sleeping in the front room (Hops had been resistant to anyone staying in his parents’ room, but relented to Ji-Eun and Mindy once there really and truly wasn’t room on the couches). That’s all to say, it’s not like he could have snuck out.
Hatfield steels herself and knocks on his bedroom door. “Hops, are you up?”
“Yeah,” he replies.
“You should get moving, we have a new team member on their way,” she says, fake-cheery.
“Just go without me. You can take the keys.”
Jesse and Plums look just as confused as she is when she turns around. Hatfield just shakes her head and shrugs. “Okay, sounds good.”
~
“There’s something weird about this place.”
Those aren’t the first words out of their newest addition’s mouth, but it’s a close thing. Conrad Twelve is perfectly friendly when they all trade introductions, but ze spends the walk to the car staring around them at the city.
“That’s truer than you’d know,” Plums says. “We’ve spent the last few weeks trying to get a handle on it.”
“That’s probably why I’m here,” ze says. The rest of them must give hir a look, because ze continues, “Supernatural shit loves me. I wish I could explain it, but that’s just how it is. Frankly it’s annoying as hell.”
Hatfield suppresses the urge to roll her eyes. “I think it’s just random.”
“It probably is for other people,” Conrad says with a shrug. “Point being, I’m used to this crap. If you want to figure out what the deal is, I could help brainstorm at least.”
They spend the ride back to the Chens’ place throwing ideas back and forth. Conrad is certainly knowledgeable - they suggest everything from an alternate universe to time travel and ze gives points against each idea.
At one point, ze points out the window. There’s someone standing stationary on the sidewalk, looking blankly out to the street. “And what’s up with all of them?”
“We don’t know,” Plums replies. “All of the people we’ve seen have been like that, like they’re in a trance. Except for the blaseball players, that is. There’s a bunch more at the stadium.”
“We talked to one a couple weeks ago,” Hatfield adds. “She was… confused. And freaked out. And then she just… stopped and went back to how she was. Fucking freaky.”
Conrad hums.
“What?” she asks.
“Was she alive?” ze asks casually. The three of them all break into stammers. “No, like,” ze continues, “Blaseball does weird shit with death. Really weird shit. This wouldn’t be outside the realm of possibility. Hatfield, you were on the Tigers, right?”
Hatfield considers it. As a show of good will at first, but then something slots into place. “Shit.”
One of the biggest points of adjustment when she moved to Hades was the shades. She’d spent so many calls home talking about how weird she found them that Patty had had to ask her to cut it out. Everywhere you went in the city, there’d be the impressions of the long-dead - like shadows on the wall, but without the wall. Most long-term residents had just learned to ignore them. Sometimes, though, they’d do something that made it clear that they were people, or had been not too long ago.
A couple of the Tigers were locals. They knew what Hades had been like before. According to them, there’d been more shades before blaseball started back up. One of many ways Hades had allegedly changed.
“Oh my god,” Hatfield says, burying her face in her hands. “Fuck. Really?”
“So you see what I’m getting at,” Conrad deadpans.
“God. I mean, it fucking makes sense.”
“Wait,” Plums says, “So, what, you think KC is some sort of, like, purgatory?”
“Maybe,” ze replies. “Blaseball’s done weird shit before. And the Breath Mints getting got was a step further, y’know, who knows what else that could have done. And it sounds like it would make some things make sense.”
Jesse cuts in, “Doesn’t explain where everybody went.”
The car goes quiet. Hatfield swallows. “It’s something, at least.”
~
For whatever Hops is dealing with, he appreciates the urgency of the situation. They’re only home long enough to explain. Then, they’re piling back into the car and headed towards downtown.
Brooke is, unsurprisingly, right where they left her. Hatfield walks right up to the counter. “Hi, Brooke. Do you remember us?”
She blinks slow, once, twice, before her gaze fixes on them. Relatively speaking - they still feel like she’s staring through them. “Hi.”
“Hi. We’ve met before, I don’t know if you remember.”
“I-I-” Her eyes flutter. She’s stock still, like something had frozen her in place.
Conrad whistles behind them, and Hatfield fights the urge to glare.
Something clears on her face, just barely. When she speaks, a little note of panic has risen in her voice. “Wh-where am I?”
“I know you’re confused. We want to help.” She steels herself. “We think… we think you died.”
Brooke goes still. Something changes in her expression.
“Brooke?” Hops says slowly.
She’s breathing hard. “I-I-”
It had been a party. She’d been picking fights like usual. With her boyfriend, and with the friend who’d always had a thing for her, and with anyone who stood near her for long enough.
And she was drunk. Too drunk, because everyone was too pissed at her to tell her to slow down.
The host of the party was in one of her classes. He was the wrong person to pick a fight with for any number of reasons, but that didn’t stop her. It was one of those bad nights, and she wouldn’t have been able to stop herself even if she’d been sober.
If anyone noticed her getting kicked out, they didn’t follow. They probably assumed she’d call an Uber.
She didn’t. She drove off, and the wind in the car windows scratched the same itch that picking the fights had. It pulled something out of her. Squared the image she had of herself with the one people reacted to, maybe. She was stuck this way, so there wasn’t any point in acting otherwise. The weight of that and the wind and the radio all felt as tangible as other people in the car.
That was the last thought she remembered having before veering off the road into a tree.
She didn’t die right away. It might have been easier if she had. Instead, she was blearily conscious when they pulled her out her window. Her body was one big patch of hurt, a scream that she couldn’t totally stifle. She didn’t make it to the hospital, but she was still there when a paramedic fished her wallet out and asked if she was-
“Brooklyn.”
Hatfield stops flat in her tracks. “What?”
She mumbles, “Not Brooke. Brooklyn.”
She glances at Hops and they meet her gaze. “Right.”
Brooklyn blinks, long and slow, then shakes her head. “You… you said I died?”
“We think so,” Hops says slowly. “We’re not sure-“
“No, I-“ She takes one long, slow breath. “I think that’s right. I remember it.”
That settles low in their chest. “I’m sorry,” Hatfield says quietly.
She still looks dazed, but clearer by the second. She blinks again and looks around like she’s just now registering the room around her. “Where am I?”
“Kansas City, Missouri. In the US,” he adds.
“Christ,” Brooklyn says under her breath, and it sounds so normal that Hatfield could just about cry.
~
The league sends out an announcement that there’ll be three more falls. A point of anxiety when so many people are still missing - Hatfield’s girlfriend, Hops’s sister, any number of friends from their years in the league. Other old Mints, hypothetically alive but with nothing to show for it.
Waking the living dead is a welcome distraction. The first thing in a while that feels worth the time.
Brooklyn turns out to be a big personality. She’s young - 22, she says - and Hops thinks that himself at age 22 would have liked her. Fought with her constantly, probably, but that was how he’d been with most of his friends. She’s a welcome addition of energy, and seems less Brooke-y every day.
Plums and Hatfield have someone else in mind for their attempt at a repeat. One of the many glassy-eyed people lurking in the stadium, which seems uncharacteristically risky for the two of them but which Hops isn’t going to object to. It’s a thin Latino person, maybe late 40s, who’s been mechanically wiping down rows of seats. Hops stands back while Plums, Hatfield, and Brooklyn talk to vym. They watch the panic, then the abrupt shift in vyr body language after the three of them have explained. When ve slumps down into one of the seats, Hops can’t stop a grin.
So that’s how they fill their days. Brooklyn and Noah, as ve introduces vyrself, are both interested in helping out, but not every person is. There are plenty who stick around until they’ve mostly cleared their heads and then wander off.
“Do you think it’s good for them to be just leaving like this?” Plums asks. “Kinda worried we’re jump starting some sort of temporal anomaly.”
The dining room is a tight fit for nine people. Hops wishes he could ask his parents when the last time they’d had this many people in here was.
Conrad shrugs. “I think people showing up here is already proof that something is broken. Doubt breaking it a little more would be that bad.”
“And some people have lives to get back to,” Noah adds. There’s a collective questioning look over towards vym. “I taught high school math,” ve says, “I was ready to get out of there anyways.”
Their eighth and ninth falls are long term shadows from the Jazz Hands and Steaks respectively. That leaves just the tenth fall.
“Whatever happens,” Hatfield says, “Let’s not make it the new guy’s problem.”
It was just the two of them today. Everyone else had elected to stay back or to spend their day doing something else. Probably some of them were tied to their phones, hoping they’d hear from someone. They all had people they were still waiting on.
Hops was glad to not be spending all day waiting around. Knowing Catmint, who knows how long it’d take for it to actually text them.
They drum their fingers on the steering wheel. “Fuck the new guy for not having to wait around.”
She takes it as the joke it is, for once. Hatfield laughs from the passenger seat. “Seriously. Fucking agonizing.”
They sit there for maybe twenty more minutes before the fall happens. A tenth little crater in the park - Hops can only make out the one he landed in because he knows where it is. The new Mint is not Catmint, and it isn’t any of the dead Mints shadows, and it isn’t Hatfield’s girlfriend.
The new guy is a Crabs player named Lorcan. If ey notices that the two of them are quiet on the drive back, or that they both twitch for their phones as soon as one buzzes, ey doesn’t comment.
Hatfield speaks low to them as they get out of the car. “Weird shit happens all the time,” she says. “Maybe everyone’ll just walk out of a fucking secret base.”
“I’d be pissed. Fall from the sky and hit the ground like the rest of us.”
She huffs a laugh. “Right.”
~
Somehow, despite any number of people that they’ve informed of their deaths, the stadium is packed to the edge of the upper deck on opening day. The crowds look even more warped than anyone they’ve seen vacantly loitering in the city. It’s quiet, uncannily so, right up until they step out onto the field when-
The world breaks into noise. Great waves of it, like a plane bearing down on them. It’s a physical sensation.
It’s wrong to say the crowds love the new Breath Mints. They cheer, certainly, and cheer and cheer and cheer until Hops is hoarse from talking over them. But, he thinks, they cheer for them less like it’s a ball game and more like it’s a monster truck rally.
The other team seems more put off than anyone on the Mints does. Silver linings. Hops pictures the city through their eyes - the quiet streets, the vacant expressions. If someone tells them that this place is some sort of purgatory now, they’ll believe it.
But for him, by the last inning the surrealness has become mundane. Another little impossible thing he’s adjusted to. What’s harder, he thinks as he waits to pitch again, is not scanning the crowd. Who knows if he’d even recognize someone he knew if they were like this. But he looks just in case.