There’s seven of them at the meet and greet, all eighty or older, clustered around the corner table at the Mellow Mushroom. The youngest person had her birthday three days ago: Jenny, a retired lawyer with a strawberry blonde bob that’s silver at the roots. The rest have names like that, ending in y—Tiffany, Barry, Amy, and another Jenny. It’s a Gen X thing. Only Dennis and Mark break the pattern. All but Dennis, who is Asian, are white. And all are ready to end their lives.
The Extreme Sports Club for Octogenarians (ESCO) was enfranchised a week after the Easy Passage Law was passed, legalizing self-directed death in the wake of new advances in longevity research. Don’t have the money or desire to live forever? Enjoy a host of newly legal mortality options. Unfortunately, illicit drugs often had unanticipated side effects. Death cruises, with their nude balls and THC buffets, were garish and hedonistic; one-way space flights were prohibitively expensive. ESCO provided the pursuit of adventure and excitement, one last grand story to tell before, or while, biting the big one. Its tagline, “Die Awesome,” is emblazoned in big letters on all the brochures that litter the table.
Lawyer-Jenny is used to assuming leadership positions, so she asks the question: “How do you want to die?”
“Hang gliding!” giggles Amy, then shields her mouth with her hand. “I’m a birder.”
“Wrasslin’ a gator.” Barry thumps his chest with one meaty fist, priding himself on being the most in-shape guy at the table. “But the gator don’t eat me. I die of a heart attack because I eat it.”
“But alligator is a lean meat,” the other Jenny, the one with the wig, says. Barry shrugs.
Bull running. Parachuting. White water rafting. All of their answers are predictable, except for one.
“Naked, on a hill, struck by lightning,” Tiffany says, her voice high and childlike.
The first outing is wreck diving. Mark used to dream of swimming with great white sharks and, while it’s not the time of year that they visit Florida’s panhandle, he’s excited by the possibility of any dangerous sea life.
They drop down one by one into water the color of a cloudy emerald. Almost indistinguishable in their gear, legs streamlined by flippers until everyone looks like mermaids. Even Tiffany, who walks with a cane, feels as active as a seal as she shoots down toward the wreck, which rises from the seabed like a jagged black tooth.
Frilled sponges flute up like vases. Wig-Jenny takes photos for her grandkids with an underwater camera. Dennis and Lawyer-Jenny explore the wheelhouse, where white anemones cluster so thickly, it is hard to see the pitted hull beneath. Fish dart in and out of windows and vents, and a slate-grey wolf eel flickers into a crevice, hovering just within reach of Barry’s headlamp, its jutting jaws making it look like an ancient boxer. The beams of refracted light dip in and out of the water like fingers the sun is dabbling in a bowl.
On the other side of the ship, Mark waves to get everyone’s attention. Where he’s pointing, the hull seems to be collapsing, bubbling outward under some pressure. One rocky arm and then another unfurl, and finally everyone can see it for what it is—an octopus detaching from the side of the wreck, its color shifting as it moves. Mark claps his hands together soundlessly; through his faceplate, his eyes are wide and happy.
Everyone pairs off and starts surfacing, catching a strong current as they crest the hull, resting for two minutes at twenty feet, then again at ten. At this depth, the water looks hardly any color at all and the sun wobbles overhead. When they get to the surface, Lawyer-Jenny signals for the boat.
Only Mark has trouble ascending the ladder. The pilot of the boat helps haul him in, stretches his legs out on the deck, and peels off his mask. His skin is waxy, his face slack and peaceful.
“Is he breathing?” Wig-Jenny asks, her scalp gleaming beneath her thin cropped hair. “Check his pulse!”
The pilot checks. He’s not breathing; his pulse is there, but thready.
“He came up too fast,” Amy says, nodding. Her bun, secured with a crocheted scrunchie, flops on the top of her head. “Do CPR!”
“He’s DNR,” Dennis reminds her. “We all are.”
“But…he just needs some air!” Amy’s cousin almost drowned as a child. She remembers the thin stream of water he vomited after the lifeguard performed mouth-to-mouth.
“What do you think the point of this is?” Barry bellows, stripping halfway out of his wetsuit, the skin of his broad chest fish-pale in the daylight.
The six of them gather around while the pilot huddles over Mark, fingers on his throat every few minutes. It doesn’t take long before the pilot stands, shakes his head, and returns to the helm.
They stand there, still dripping, clutching fingers, until Tiffany says, “He saw an octopus.”
Everyone nods, repeating sadly, finally, “He saw an octopus.”
By the time they make it back to shore, a coroner’s van already waits.
The next outing is spelunking. Dennis brings his wife, whose badly dyed black hair sticks out wildly from her head at all angles.
“I love bats!” she says in lieu of introduction.
“This is my wife, JiYeon.” Dennis slings an arm around her shoulder, kisses her cheek. “She loves bats.”
The group’s spirits are high in the wake of the loss of Mark the week before. Only Barry feels a little lost without his friend, the only other guy’s guy in the group, although if he’s honest with himself, it’s just because Mark was tall. The rest take the diving expedition as proof that ESCO works, that they, too, can have an exciting death. Wig-Jenny tells everyone about the rerun of Matlock she watched the night before, as the cave guide points out different cave features.
“This is a curtain.” The guide passes her light behind a rippling wall of mineral deposits, making it glow amber. “No touching, please,” she says to Barry, who has reached out a hand. “The oils on your skin can damage the formations.”
When she turns her back, Barry traces an M on the curtain, mouthing “Mark.”
Ahead, the cave opens into a cavern, hung with what looks like patches of dark moss. Dennis points, grinning his perfect dentist’s grin. “Myotis lucifugus!”
JiYeon gives an impromptu lecture on bats to Barry, Wig-Jenny, and Dennis, while Tiffany, Amy, and Lawyer-Jenny huddle next to a hump of rock at the mouth of the next passageway.
“I’m not afraid of them,” Lawyer-Jenny says. “I just don’t like their little hands.”
Tiffany pats her back.
“Did you ever go to camp as a teenager?” Lawyer-Jenny changes the subject.
“That was the first time I got laid!” Tiffany says brightly. Amy coughs.
“You ever sing camp songs?” Lawyer-Jenny ticks off names of songs on her fingers: “Kumbaya,” “Home on the Range,” “Going on a Bear Hunt,” “Hole in My Bucket…”
“Hole in My Bucket!”
Amy starts singing, a quavering alto. “There’s a hole in my bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza…” The others join in, giggling. “There’s a hole in my bucket, dear Liza, a hole!” The walls of the cave dampen and echo their voices, until they sound like a choir stuck down a well.
When they get to the second Henry verse—“With straw, dear Henry, dear Henry…”—other voices join them. The group stands in a ragged circle, singing the rest of the song, while Barry backs them up with a “dum dum dum” in an ear-rattling bass. At the end, Tiffany lets out a sigh like she’s just eaten a delicious meal, and the group laughs.
Half of the group is already out of the cave when a sharp cry comes from behind.
“Is everything okay?” Lawyer-Jenny pushes her way past Barry and Dennis, peering down into the entrance.
“It’s okay,” the guide calls. “She’s sprained her ankle.”
“It’s broken.” Wig-Jenny sobs. “I heard it crack.”
Dennis climbs back into the cave, places fingers on her ankle, probing.
“You’re a dentist, not a real doctor.” Wig-Jenny continues to sob as a couple park rangers assist the cave guide in carrying her to a vehicle. The group gathers around the truck door to say their goodbyes before the ranger drives her away.
“The hell is she carrying on for?” Barry asks, while the truck rolls away. “I’ve broken plenty of bones in my time.”
“That’s it for her,” Lawyer-Jenny—now the only Jenny—snaps. “A broken ankle, at her age? She won’t be able to join us again.”
Before the skydiving outing, the group welcomes a new member: Zeke Koran, a compact man with short brown hair and a beard.
“Can I ask how old you are?” Jenny says suspiciously.
“I’m thirty-eight,” he smiles, then taps his chest. “I have terminal lung cancer. Was in remission for a while, but now it’s back.”
When they reach altitude, they can see the Gulf in the distance, shreds of cloud lacing the horizon. Below, the ground is a patchwork of green.
Barry goes first.
“Like a Band-Aid?” he jokes, then falls backward out of the plane. Against the backdrop of the ground, he looks like he is floating.
Amy, Tiffany, and Jenny approach Zeke.
“Can we go together?” Amy asks. “We want to make a star in the air, you know, holding hands?”
Zeke nods, and one by one they fall, maneuvering into a circle, grabbing hands, then swinging them in rhythm like they are skipping down the sidewalk together.
“Hoooo!” Zeke yells experimentally, to hear his own voice. Tiffany joins in, a long bellow, and Amy and Jenny begin hooting on their own.
“Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck!” Amy says, shouting toward the plane. “I’ve always wanted to say that!” she yells.
They pull the tabs to deploy their parachutes and drift toward the ground. When the ground comes, it rushes them. They scramble for several steps, dragging chutes behind them.
Barry is already there, several yards away, staring into the sky and shielding his eyes from the sun. Jenny looks up, then gets the attention of the others, points overhead.
Two people, falling through the sky, holding hands, with no parachutes.
“Dennis and JiYeon,” Tiffany says, feeling like she’s swallowed the names.
The five of them track the couple with their eyes, willing their parachutes to deploy until they disappear, two specks, behind a line of trees bordering the field. Amy winces, bracing for a sound, but all they hear is vehicles from the airfield rushing past. The cloud of dust they stir hides everything in sight.
On the drive back, Barry stares out the window, wishing he’d thought of it first.
They don’t meet for a couple weeks. When they do, it’s back at the Mellow Mushroom where they first met.
“I still don’t understand why I feel this way,” Jenny says, picking at a pile of nachos.
Zeke sucks his teeth. “Maybe it was like a suicide pact. Dying together. Kinda romantic, no?” He twists a silver band around his finger.
Amy dabs at her eyes with a paper napkin and nods.
“Look, Big D just wanted to die awesome, not from something stupid like diabetes or heart failure.” Barry doesn’t look up from the menu when the waitress comes over, just orders the whiskey-glazed sliders.
“I never cared about dying awesome,” Tiffany sniffs, her breathing finally under control. “What I really want is a beautiful death.”
“What do you mean?” Zeke asks. There’s no beautiful death for him. Lung cancer is painful and exhausting.
“I painted a picture once,” she says dreamily, toying with the plastic umbrella in her drink, “when I was in my twenties, of a woman standing at the top of a hill, naked, arms stretched to the sky like a tree. She was being struck by lightning, but she was happy.”
She looks around the table. “That’s what I want. To die like that picture.”
They go for a few more outings. Dirt biking. Horseback riding on treacherous mountain trails. Base jumping. Then one night Jenny calls them each to tell them that Tiffany’s had a stroke.
They meet at 10:45 at Tiffany’s house out in the suburbs, surrounded by lawn art. Giant moths and dragonflies made of twisted wire hang from a big oak and a bird bath in the center of her front yard is covered in shards of pottery.
Inside, Tiffany sits in a wheelchair near her television, which is showing a documentary about ants. Her face is tilted toward the television, her mouth twisted down on one side as though her skin is weighted with invisible ballast. The group huddles around her, no one sitting on the mismatched floral furniture. Amy is wearing bedroom slippers; Barry still has one ear-plug in. Only Zeke looks fully awake.
Tiffany mumbles something out of the side of her mouth, jerking her head toward the window.
Jenny and Amy shake their heads, uncomprehending, but Barry translates. “One last adventure.”
They crowd out into the night, pack into Zeke’s van, lifting Tiffany gently into the passenger seat and stowing her wheelchair in the back. For a while they just drive around Tallahassee in the dark. Zeke has the radio on, some loud eighties station—Elton John, then Queen.
“Bicycle, bicycle!” Barry sings loudly, and after a few repetitions, everyone joins in. They stop at Dairy Queen and everyone orders a different flavor of Blizzard and shares bites across the back of the bench seats.
It starts to rain and the air turns silver. Their conversation dulls as everyone listens to the thunder, watching the lightning glow behind distant clouds.
“A big storm,” Amy says, and everyone nods.
Tiffany says something, but Zeke can’t quite make it out at first. “What’s that?”
“The hilllll,” she says again, elongating each word so as to be understood. “The one. From mmmy paintinnnng.”
The radio deejay announces another song, and Tiffany reaches laboriously under her chair to pull out an umbrella, brandishing it for a moment with one hand like a sword.
“Take me,” she says.
Zeke slows the van down, pulls off on the shoulder of the two-lane road. He keeps his hands at ten and two while he says, softly, “Honey…the likelihood is that you’ll just get sick. You’ll get cold and wet and get pneumonia.”
“Don’t,” Tiffany grinds out, fixing him with a stare. “Don’t. Call meeee. Honey.”
Jenny leans forward from her position in the middle of the bench seat and puts a hand on Tiffany’s arm. Tiffany’s shaking underneath her windbreaker, and she doesn’t bother trying to turn toward Jenny. She just nods again, harder, and Jenny responds with a squeeze.
“Take us there, Zeke.”
They take a few detours, because Tiffany isn’t exactly sure where this hill is. But then Amy looks on her phone. “There’s a page here about it, they say that lightning has struck there 120 times in the last five years. Is this it?” She pushes the enlarged text into Tiffany’s face, who nods.
When they arrive, no one else is around. They park the van on the gravel road, then push Tiffany’s chair through the wet pebbles. Near the top of the hill is a pine tree, but the ground is actually sloped from the tree, coming to a point, an exposed bald with a few rocks in outline against the storm.
“Is this going to work?” Barry’s voice sounds uncharacteristically doubtful as he huffs.
Jenny slips a little in the gravel. “Hey, asshole, get over here and help,” she yells at Barry. He blusters a bit, but takes a handle of the wheelchair from Jenny.
When they reach the tree, Zeke and Barry stop with Tiffany under its branches. She turns on her flashlight, aims it at her face, then giggles.
“We’re all scared enough as it is,” Amy says, impatient. “So now what?”
Tiffany shines her light up the hill, the top of which is a dozen feet above the ground where they now stand.
Zeke and Barry grunt, trying to roll the chair the last few steep feet of the hill. The wheels keep getting stuck in the mud, though, so Zeke lifts Tiffany out, cradling her in his arms, while Barry and Jenny walk the chair to the crest. Once there, Zeke sits Tiffany back in her chair, tucking the edges of her jacket tighter around her.
“You got your umbrella?” he says.
She lifts it into the air and he flinches, then laughs. “Not yet, Tiff!”
She grins into the flashlight. “I’m rrrready.” She pats her pocket. “My phone.”
They nod, half-sliding down the hill, and make their way back to the van. They open the back doors, facing the hill, and kneel on the bench seats, still listening to the radio in silence.
“It’s about to get bad,” Zeke says, holding his phone with the Doppler map highlighted in reds and yellows. “Should we close those doors?”
“No way,” Jenny says stalwartly.
The rain pounds the earth, bouncing to shower the back seat of the van with spray. It makes the air gray, almost opaque. But now and then lightning flashes above, outlining the clouds in electric white and lighting them from within as if they were lanterns. When this happens, they see Tiffany, holding the umbrella as high as she can, the flashlight still trained on her face, her white hair, her soaked nightgown.
Flashes come faster and faster, the time between the flash and rumble decreasing. The ground shakes after a giant crack and Amy gasps.
“Behind us,” Jenny says, patting Amy on the shoulder.
The lighting seems to be directly overhead now, crackling in waves within the masses of clouds that made them seem alive, nuclear, like the face of God hidden from Moses, hidden in the burning bush.
One finger of lightning reaches down, almost touching the tree, before splintering and dissipating. But the clouds overhead are incandescent. And Tiffany’s light moves.
“What’s she doing?” Barry asks. “Standing?”
Another crash, overhead, and they see her, standing stoop shouldered in front of her chair, stabilizing herself with one hand on the arm and the other reaching high in the sky, lifting her umbrella. Her wet hair gleams, plastered to her scalp and her neck, and she smiles, face turned to the sky.
Another crash, and she’s lifted her hand from the handle of the chair, stretched it out to the sky as if in supplication.
When it comes, it’s a rip in the sky. It hits Tiffany’s umbrella, which goes up in a flash of flames, polyester burning so fast there’s no chance there’ll be anything left.
She stands, paralyzed, stiff, her spine almost perfectly straight, her head thrown back, a halo of light surrounding her, limning her clothing, her chair. Nothing else is on fire except for the umbrella, but the arm holding the umbrella is struck rigid, coursing with electricity, each muscle locked. Which means that her smile is locked, too, her eyes fixed on the sky as it bends down to embrace her.
Zeke whoops. Jenny and Amy gulp and bite their lips in the same expression.
“That’s how I’d like to go,” Barry sighs.
Kate Lechler’s work has appeared in Shimmer Magazine, PodCastle, Fireside Fiction, and previously here in The Deadlands, among other places. Kate lives in Chicago with their good dog Charlie, and teaches first-year writing for the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. When they are not working on a novella about sexy vampire-pirates, there’s a good chance you’ll find them making magical collages or foraging in the woods of Cook County.