#dublin.txt

[brightmaidenproudyouth]

dublin-v1.txt

[collapse, heatstroke, apocalypse]

The Independent's fourth-floor conference room had become a pressure cooker. Thirty journalists crammed shoulder-to-shoulder around the oval table, laptops generating even more heat in the already stifling space. The wall-mounted TV cycled through news channels, each showing the same haunting footage: Dublin's skyline bathed in a deep arterial red that had been intensifying since noon.

Will McCarthy's fingers hovered over his keyboard, the cursor blinking accusingly. He'd been trying to write the same sentence for twenty minutes, but the words kept swimming. The loading circle on his browser tab spun endlessly – just like everyone else's. The internet had slowed to a crawl about forty minutes ago, right when the temperature started spiking.

"This is properly biblical stuff," someone muttered from the back. "Like the plagues of Egypt."

"Shut it with that shite," Monica from Politics snapped, but her voice wavered.

Tristan Burke slouched in the chair beside Will, his red ponytail dark with sweat against his neck. He was doing what he did best – using sarcasm as armor. "Well, if this is the apocalypse, at least we won't have to file our stories for tomorrow."

Will tried to laugh, but his throat felt like sandpaper. When had he last taken a drink? His water bottle sat untouched by his laptop, condensation beading on the plastic. Strange – he couldn't remember why he hadn't been drinking. Something about being too focused, too busy trying to make sense of the contradictory statements coming from government officials who seemed just as confused as everyone else.

The room's air conditioning wheezed overhead, fighting a losing battle. On the TV, a meteorologist was gesturing at satellite imagery, her movements jerky with barely contained panic. Will squinted at his screen, trying to decipher what he'd written. The letters seemed to shift and rearrange themselves, refusing to form coherent words.

"Hey," Tristan's voice cut through the fog. "Did you see this about the temperature readings from Phoenix Park? They're saying-"

Will heard the words, understood them individually, but couldn't string them together into meaning. The room tilted slightly, like a ship in high seas. His tongue felt too large for his mouth, and there was a high-pitched ringing in his ears that hadn't been there a moment ago.

The water bottle. He needed water.

His hands were clumsy as he grabbed it, like they belonged to someone else. The first swallow was heaven – cool relief flooding his parched throat. The second brought something else: a sharp, metallic tang that hit the back of his tongue and sparked an instant, primal wrongness.

The bottle slipped from his fingers, bouncing off the table and spraying water across someone's notes. Will tried to apologize, but his mouth wouldn't cooperate. The words came out as a slurred mess of consonants.

"Will?" Tristan's voice seemed to come from very far away. "Mate, you alright?"

The room's red-tinted light began to pulse in time with Will's heartbeat. He tried to stand, to ask for help, but his legs wouldn't support him. His knees buckled, and suddenly he was looking up at a forest of legs and chair bases. Faces appeared above him, distorted like reflections in a funhouse mirror. He could hear voices, sharp with alarm, but they were muffled as if coming through water.

Tristan's face swam into view, unusually serious. Will tried to focus on his friend's features, but they kept sliding away, breaking apart and reforming like oil on water. He wanted to tell Tristan something important – about the water, about the wrongness – but his thoughts scattered like startled birds before he could catch them.

The red light was inside his head now, behind his eyes. It throbbed with each rapid heartbeat, bringing waves of nausea that made the room spin faster. His fingers scrabbled against the carpet, trying to find purchase in reality as his consciousness began to fray at the edges.

"…need an ambulance…" someone was saying.

"…networks are down…"

"…happening all over…"

The voices blended together into meaningless noise. Will's vision tunneled, the red light consuming everything until only a pinprick of awareness remained. The last thing he registered was Tristan's hands gripping his shoulders, his friend's face a pale blur against the crimson sky visible through the window.

Then even that was gone.