The hurricane is coming.
That is what the screen says.
Red letters crawl the bottom. Sirens whine from plastic speakers.
I sit up in bed. Dawn outside is pink and harmless. The bay lies flat as a hand-mirror.
Still the screen howls.
Category Six, weaponized by climate change, they say.
Stay tuned they say.
I stay tuned.
Coffee drips in its small machine. I sip and scroll.
Channel 7 hands the baton to News Central.
News Central hands it to the late-night clip.
The comedian squints into the lens, half joke, half sermon.
Record everything, he says.
History needs your eyes.
My eyes widen.
I open a blank account.
@TruthSeekerX1
A pale face in the forward camera.
Good morning, I whisper.
This is ground zero.
Outside a gull laughs.
Inside the crawl throbs.
I film each number.
The hurricane downgrades before lunch.
Category Five. Four. Three.
Reporters kneel in curb-water.
They hunch against imaginary wind.
I hunch with them.
I gasp into the phone.
Look how the tempest bends iron, I say.
Ten viewers. Fifteen.
A bot drops a skull emoji.
I nod as if to scripture.
An afternoon special panel debates supply chains.
Dow slips two hundred points.
Graphic pulses crimson.
Black Monday Two they call it.
I own nothing to lose but I perform a symbolic sell-off.
I delete the trading app on camera, eyes glassy, lips trembling.
Caption: Capitalism Cancels Itself.
Applause emojis bloom.
Two humans, fifty bots.
Progress.
I drag the blinds shut.
The studio shrinks to a blue glow.
My face floats like a drowned moon.
I declare a vigil.
History needs unbroken lids.
Morning again.
A new meter on the crawl.
Waterborne pathogen detected in storm zone.
Super-cholera.
Unstoppable.
I wrap three T-shirts around my mouth.
I address the lens through cotton and panic.
Every exhale fogs the glass.
Viewers jump.
Seven hundred. A thousand.
I feel the algorithm's warm hand on my neck.
The comedian returns in a clip gone viral.
He's somber now. No music.
If the powers won't save us, he says, make yourself a beacon.
Visible dissent he says.
Shave your head.
I fetch the clipper.
Buzz on.
Hair drifts in black snow.
I carve a bald river.
I nick the skin.
Blood beads like stolen rubies.
#NoHairUntilNoWar spikes upward.
Follower count leaps to twelve thousand.
I stand in the hair-littered bathroom like a monk at the end of the world.
I rip the smoke detector off the ceiling.
Its red eye blinks judgment.
I broadcast a public execution.
The hammer falls.
Plastic shards scatter like teeth.
The chat cheers.
Noon brings riots.
LIVE MIAMI PROTESTS scrawls the screen.
The footage is winter coats and bare trees.
Miami has no winter.
Still I believe.
I press my ear to drywall.
I hear only Latin pop and an ice-cream truck.
I mute the wall and trust the feed.
Video Diary Four begins.
I try to cry on cue.
Tears will not fall.
I slap myself.
Now tears.
The heart, a lazy hireling, needs a beating manager.
Mom texts.
Your aunt is in town, barbecue tonight, come.
I watch the letters fade in the notification coffin.
Barbecue is complicity.
I am busy saving the species.
Night again.
A panel of generals scowls under flag-light.
Troops moved, war certain, nukes on hair-trigger.
DEFCON Two maybe One.
I start a Peace Vigil on TikTok.
I chant NO BOOM BOOM for three hours.
My voice frays to wet sandpaper.
The feed adores the suffering.
Pain is prime real estate; outrage rents by the minute.
I promise a hunger strike.
I last forty-three minutes.
Cold pizza calls from the fridge.
I eat in the dark, phone propped, chewing as martyrdom.
Caption: Last Meal Of A Dying World.
Hearts explode on the screen.
Bots feast on the lie.
Day blurs into day.
I have not opened the blinds since the downgrading that never mattered.
The apartment ferments.
Sweat, coffee grounds, rotten cheese.
I tell the feed the stench comes from the carcass of democracy.
They believe.
They can't smell otherwise.
I pace like a rooster on a chessboard of extension cords.
Every crisis overlaps.
Markets implode.
Plague mutates.
Riots burn.
War advances.
New banner: Asteroid the size of Houston.
Then carnivorous algae.
Then microwave brain attacks from space.
I drink them all.
I am a trough for terror.
A late-night segment premieres a sting graphic.
Fireball. Gong crash.
BREAKING: WHITE HOUSE EXODUS.
No footage, just echoed claims.
I repeat the claim until it is mine.
I fill the gap between unknown and known with screeching certainty.
Sleep fractures into needle naps.
I blink and dream while awake.
Anchors float like jellyfish across my walls.
Ticker tape spools under my eyelids.
Day nine, maybe ten.
The feed returns.
New banner: GOVERNMENT COLLAPSES INTO ARK OF THE COVENANT SCANDAL.
I do not parse it.
Parsing is privilege.
I swallow.
Hairless, sleepless, shirtless, I smear dust across my chest like war paint.
VD-Six begins.
I scream until language fails, then I scream in vowel.
Only one viewer remains.
Username string of numbers.
Probably a bot.
I beg it to testify that I lived.
It sends a single thumbs-up.
I feel absolved.
Three in the morning.
Thunder rolls real this time.
Rain needles the windowpane.
Lightning flickers and I see myself in glass: a gaunt prophet of a faith no one joined.
The phone battery bleeds red.
I click Live anyway.
It's over do you hear me it's all over.
I spit each word like broken glass.
Veins rise in my forehead like blue rivers on a dead map.
The phone shakes in my hand.
Pixels smear, voice cracks, meaning leaks out.
I keep shouting.
A last devotion to the god of fright.
Battery at three percent.
Another alert barks across the screen:
BREAKING—SUB-ATOMIC DEMONS BREACH EUROZONE.
I nod to it.
Of course.
Of course they have.
The camera vibrates under my pulse.
All the world funnels through the lens, then back into my skull.
A closed loop of lunacy, loud and hungry.
I have become my own sewage system.
And then—
Bang bang bang.
The real door, not the digital one.
Hard knuckles on soft wood.
My throat stalls.
"Evan? You okay up there, man?"
Diego.
Lives in 3B.
We once shared an elevator ride and two sentences about garbage pickup.
I don't answer.
The feed is still live.
A single bot waves.
Battery at two percent.
"Heat game's on. We got wings. Come yell at the refs with us."
I lower the phone.
Silence rushes my ears like ocean surf.
I hadn't known the crawl had a whistle under it until it stopped.
The door.
The knob.
I touch cool metal.
My hand leaves a sweat print like a ghost thumb.
I unlock.
Swing.
Fluorescent hallway.
Clean.
Smells of charcoal and cilantro.
Diego stands with a sweating six-pack.
Normal as gravity.
His face falters when he sees me.
A bald skull reflecting ceiling light.
Eyes red as rust.
Dust-stripes on chest.
Mouth a trembling hole.
"Bro." Diego's voice drops. "You look… intense."
I work the hinge of my jaw.
No words exit.
The phone's screen is black now, battery dead.
Diego lifts a beer.
"Modelo Especial. Ice-cold."
I stare at the can.
A bead of water slides down the gold label.
"You earned one," he says. "Whatever you've been doing in there."
I shake my head.
Words finally surface, thin and cracked.
"The hurricane," I murmur.
He frowns. "What hurricane?"
"Veronica. Cat Six. Biblical."
He laughs once, unsure.
"Man, that thing veered west a week ago. We got drizzle."
The hallway tilts.
I plant a hand on the jamb.
He keeps talking, gentle, as to a concussed child.
"Market bounced back too. Heat beat the Knicks."
My vision blurs.
Not tears—just overload.
Too much living proof.
I stare at his face.
His normal, unbroken face.
No fear in his eyes.
No crawl beneath his words.
Just a neighbor with beer and basketball scores.
A sound escapes my throat.
Not quite laugh.
Not quite scream.
Something between cough and sob that grows.
"Drizzle," I repeat.
The word tastes like ash.
Like everything I swallowed for nine days.
The sound grows louder.
My shoulders shake.
Diego steps back, alarmed.
"Evan, man—"
I double over.
The cackle erupts.
Full-throated, unhinged, a laugh that tastes of blood and broken pixels.
I laugh at the hurricane that never came.
I laugh at the war that never started.
I laugh at my bald head, my dust stripes, my nine-day vigil for nothing.
The hallway spins.
The fluorescent lights pulse like cameras.
I laugh until my ribs crack.
Until Diego backs away.
Until the elevator opens and strangers stare.
I laugh at the prophet of a faith no one joined.
At the witness of events that never happened.
At the last man standing at the end of a world that never ended.
The dead phone falls from my pocket.
Hits the tile with a plastic crack.
I laugh at that too.
At the altar that went dark.
At the god that was only code.
Diego calls my name but I can't stop.
Won't stop.
This is the only honest sound I've made in nine days.
The only truth the algorithm never taught me.
The laugh of a man who chose the screen over the storm.
Who chose the lie over the light.
Who chose the feed over the real.
I laugh until the sound breaks.
Until silence swallows everything.
Until the hallway holds only the hum of normal life.
And me.
Bald, mad, alone.
Still laughing.