[ WP ] People can donate their life span to others , a couple of hours or all of their remaining time , as much as they wish . One day on your way back from work various people crowd around you , only to drop dead as you feel your life span increasing .


 
 They were absolutely the most terrifying minutes of my life. I had just escaped the subway—and oh, people talk about how crowded the subway is, with people packed in like sardines, sneezing and sweating and breathing on each other. 
 
 Believe me, it is indescribably worse to have people careening towards you, only to collapse lifelessly when their flesh slaps against yours. The bodies piled up around me, and I thought I would be crushed by a wave of fresh corpses. There was nothing I could do to protect myself from the crowd, so I went limp, and allowed myself to be passed around like some sort of crowd-surfing grim reaper. 
 
 At first, I tried to extricate myself gently, not wanting to step on anyone ’ s stomach or hands ( or look too closely at their faces ) but that was impossible: I was enmeshed in dead human flesh. I couldn ’ t help but touch it or look at it, and my mind gave way to hysteria. 
 
 An insistent beeping woke me from my daze, 
 
 I patted myself down, but my phone was absent. Gingerly, I reached into the pants pocket of the body lying to my left and pulled out its phone. There were two notifications active on the home screen. 
 
 The more recent one said, “ Congratulations, Adam! Your lifetime has reached zero. ” I closed my eyes and fought back my rising nausea. 
 
 The earlier notification read, “ Warning! Disaster is imminent. Please activate Van Winkle protocol. Your target is Jessie Sanders. ” My driver ’ s license picture and my current coordinates were provided. 
 
 Of course I knew what the Van Winkle protocol was. In the face of a nuclear strike, volcanic eruption, or other unstoppable disaster, a percentage of the population would be designated at random to “ survive, ” and the rest of the population would avoid horrifying, painful deaths by committing suicide by time donation. It seemed that I was one of the not-so-lucky few. 
 
 With the number of people who had touched me, I was looking at 5000 years in hell. 
 
 *** 
 
 Three days later, I found a fellow sitting completely nude in Times Square. I was so thrilled to see another live human that I could have hugged him, but when he saw me jogging towards him, he sprang to his feet and shouted, “ Not another step closer, lassie, if you know what ’ s good for ya. ” 
 
 He must have been another designated Rip. Funny, cause it was everyone else who was resting in peace. 
 
 Then his words sunk in. “ Are you actually threatening me? When some sort of fiery absolution is going to rain down on us at any moment? ” 
 
 The man didn ’ t respond, bouncing back and forth on the balls of his bare feet. I realized that in a city the size of New York, there should be a lot more of us survivors hanging around. 
 
 “ Hey, ” I called. “ You know of any more of us around? I haven ’ t seen nobody. ” 
 
 The man laughed—a bitter, cracked sound I had made many times over the last three days. “ Yeah, I seen them all right. They ’ re real happy to see me, and happier to touch me so they can die. ” 
 
 When I finally convinced the man I wasn ’ t going to use him to commit suicide, he told me his name was Carver. He put on some pants and we found the nearest bar. 
 
 *** 
 
 “ So what is it? ” I asked a week later. “ What ’ s coming that everyone was so afraid of? ” 
 
 Carver and I had set up camp in the lobby of a swank Madison Avenue apartment building. When we had busted in the door to one of the actual apartments, we ’ d set off an alarm that just wouldn ’ t shut up. I couldn ’ t stand the noise and Carver was going nuts looking for a way to shut it off, so we ’ d moved a couple mattresses and a table downstairs and called it a day. 
 
 “ The emergency broadcasts didn ’ t contain that information, ” he said carefully. 
 
 I rolled my eyes and stretched out on my mattress. “ Yeah Carver, I know. But shouldn ’ t there have been the phase two message? ‘ Hello survivors, the Eastern Seaboard is collapsing into the Atlantic. Please enjoy a brief period of beachfront property ownership before your eventual demise. ’ ” 
 
 Carver sighed. “ Jessie, there is no phase two message because there is no disaster. The Rip VW activation was a scam, a hoax. Everybody killed themselves for nothing. ” 
 
 *** 
 
 A few days later, probably, I stood at the top of the Empire State building with a pair of wire cutters. There might not have been a hell to escape from, but there sure was now. New York was quiet, dead, and I could only imagine that the rest of the world had died with us. Hell, I thought, clipping away at the chain link fence, there ’ s no better way to go than a fall off the most famous building in the world
