I stared down at the D20, tears welling in my eyes.
20.
The fourth one I’d rolled.
Ishaan and Kayla stared at me. Their eyes were wide, filled with fear. I opened my mouth to say something, but I couldn’t. Saying it would make it real. And I couldn’t—
“It could just be a coincidence,” Kayla cut in.
“Yeah, just last week I got two eights in a row,” Ishaan said with a nervous laugh.
But we all knew what was really happening.
I’d gotten lucky.
And in this town, getting lucky means you’re going to die.
***
Corey Isenberg was a physics major who lived in an off-campus apartment about a block away from us. Last year—only weeks from graduating—he died in an accident.
“Accident.”
His death could have been plucked right out of a Final Destination movie. On a bright Monday morning in April, he took the elevator downstairs. Unbeknownst to him, a rat had chewed through the elevator cable that night. As soon as he stepped inside it would snap.
That’s not what killed him, though.
Not even close.
He only lived on the second floor. The impact wasn’t bad at all. In fact, he was able to press the help button, call the fire department, and calmly tell them that he needed rescue. They dispatched someone, and everything seemed like it would be fine.
But.
Apparently, on the way down, the cable whipped around inside the shaft and got wrapped around a pipe. When the firemen got there, a rather heavyset one stepped on the top of the elevator. It rocked back and forth, pulling the cable taught—
It started spraying water.
Now, I know what you’re thinking. Water meets a live wire, and crack, he’s gone. But nope. The electrical wiring was well insulated. No, what happened was that at that very moment, the fireman started axing through the top of the elevator—and his axe got stuck.
But he’d made a hole.
And the water pouring from the pipe dislodged by the elevator cable chewed by the rat began to leak into the elevator. Drip, drip, drip. The fireman tried to retrieve the axe, but it was stuck. One of the firewomen tried to pry the ceiling off the elevator, but it was sealed very, very well.
In fact, the whole thing was sealed extremely well. So well… none of the water leaking in could leak out.
Corey Isenberg drowned to death inside an elevator.
His death came at the end of an incredible stroke of good luck. I remember reading the headlines in the university newspaper—how he’d won ten grand playing the slots in Atlantic City. There were other things, too, like the time he ran into a tech CEO at Starbucks and ended up getting a job offer. Never would’ve been there at the right time if his shower hadn’t broken earlier that morning.
But his good luck wasn’t always so obvious.
It started small—very small. Like the balance in his checking account being $1234.56. Or breaking the wishbone of a chicken exactly in two. Or the random number generator in a line of code popping out three 100’s in a row.
Or…
Rolling a die, and getting a natural 20 every time.
***
I stared at my reflection.
My phone read 2 AM in big fat letters, but I couldn’t sleep. Corey’s death pounded through my mind. His look of terror as the water level rose. Slamming his fists against the wall of the elevator, screaming for the help that was right on the other side.
But he didn’t have a chance.
Fate, luck, chance—whatever you call it—had already marked him to die.
Is that what’s going to happen to me?
Corey wasn’t the only one. There were several bizarre deaths like this one, spanning across a few decades. In the ‘90s, Laeta Montgomery burned to death after tripping over a jack-o’-lantern. She’d tripled her wealth at the horse races a week before. In the ‘00s, Jen Lu was attacked by a rabid squirrel while on a hike with her family. She’d just inherited the entire family business, after her brother announced he’d be moving to England with his fiancee (whom he met in a chance meeting.)
But they might all just be tall tales. None of these details were public—they were passed down from townspeople, from generation to generation. Even with Corey—from news articles I knew he’d died, and that he’d won at the slots, but all the other stuff about wishbones and code was hearsay. Even the details of him drowning in the elevator weren’t public. Ishaan told me that.
I shook my head and turned the water on. Splashed some water on my face. Just a ghost story, I thought, rubbing the water on my face. And I’m going to be twenty next month. Aren’t I a little old for ghost stories?
I reached for the towel, to dry my face—
My arm whacked against my phone.
It fell onto the tile with a sickening crack. “Dammit!” I shouted, diving for it. I snatched it off the floor, praying the screen wasn’t cracked—
My heart stopped.
The screen was cracked. But it was cracked perfectly. One solid line in the glass, running vertically from the bottom to the top. Not a single split or fracture.
Cold sweat broke out on my arms.
I set the phone down, my hand shaking.
I don’t know what’s going to happen to me. I don’t know if I have months or years or days. I don’t know if the legend in my town is just a tall tale—snowballing with each generation, as it’s told around smoldering campfires on cold autumn nights.
But I don’t like my chances.