They slept in separate beds so they wouldn't kill each other.

           As they'd killed their daughter.

           The night the Super Bowl blew up.

           Cradling dead little Katie in his shining arms, the blood from the holes in her body scorching in contact with the heavy volleys of weapons fire erupting from his skin, a terrified, confused Henry Busler had struggled to glean an update from CNN while his wife screamed in the corner, flailing as she involuntarily fired upon the neighbors, taking down the wall and knocking the Mahlers down dead from where they stood in front of their own television. Sandy turned her attention back to Henry, the sweep of her eyes crazy and deadly, before something passed between them and they stopped waging war.

           CNN was offline, the jittery image of a gutted anchor pierced by a billion lights the only broadcast.

           Henry wouldn't begin to understand until the next morning after a sleepness night listening to the city die. He wouldn't understand until he remembered he'd DVRd the Super Bowl. He started the recording, skipped to the end. The DVR had stopped recording at two hours, nineteen minutes. Sirens blared in the place in his chest reserved for core terrors.

           He'd hoped the Giants would win. He'd hoped for a replay of Norwood's 47-yard missed field goal. He'd hoped to be among the 230,000 attendees, had hoped to at least be able to watch the game, but Katie was sick and Sandy enforced an early bedtime.

           Just after halftime, the war started.

           Watching the recording, he felt Sandy approach in a way that tugged somewhere behind his eyes. He didn't need to look. He knew something inside of him was getting ready for the assault. She didn't touch him; she brushed a bloody lock of Katie's hair from the girl's forehead. Nothing happened.

           Sandy sat down next to him, and they watched in the flat glow of the panel as a fireworks display began in the near-capacity crowd at Ralph Wilson/Reynolds-Alcoa Stadium.

           Someone threw a cosmic switch—not far from the truth—and bodies lit up. Almost a quarter of a million bodies went to war with each other.

           Both teams lost. Football became extinct.

           He'd learn later from the government bulletins left in stacks on street corners that the Super Bowl had probably been the staging point in America because of the proximity of the attendees. The entire Bosnywash metro swathe had been dragged into the conflict within an hour. Most people were dead within two.

           "Hen?"

           He rocked the debris of his daughter.

           "Henry?" Sandy reached to offer a hand to his shoulder, considered, rested it for an instant until his riders strafed a warning volley across her palm. She jerked back, the skin all pinpricks and smoke, and she sobbed.

           "I have to bury her."

           Sandy shook her head, sucking blood from her index finger. "We can't go out—"

           "She stinks." His face crumpled as his jaw worked over words he couldn't form. "She's starting to fucking stink." Katie's skin was loose now, hung in draped, translucent sheets over her bones. Their war had involved chemicals and artillery. A thin crust of black foam bounded her mouth like a clown's paint. Her eyes were gone. He loved his daughter enough to hold on to that forty-pound disaster.

           "Do you think it's safe?"

           He held up his right hand, desiccated and dancing with the tracking lasers, the communications arrays of the riders. He reached toward Sandy, the lights drawing focus on her chest. They both felt it—the silent shiver of communications between their passengers, the cool detante between the two alien civilizations that had taken root within them.

           "No."

* * *

           No one knew why it happened when it happened. At the Super Bowl. On that Sunday night. Some of the bulletins the drab trucks scattered at the corners had Op-Ed sections written by scientists and astronomers and generals and priests and professors, but those precious few people brave enough or lacking in the desire for self-preservation enough to actually venture outside in the cities and pick up the bulletins were seldom interested in what the staff of Cal Tech or IASA or the Army had to say anymore. Everyone was an army.

           Something had activated the aliens that had been riding inside of humans for nobody knew how long, and that activation forever fundamentally changed the way people existed. Humans had flaunted independence and individuality for a long time. The riders had slid the final puzzle piece into place and forced true independence. On a planet where the dominant species can no longer touch each other without sparking microscopic conflict from their pores, you have to rewrite the rules.

           The riders had activated on Super Bowl Sunday during a live television event broadcast into five billion homes. Almost everyone had witnessed the beginning of the war, the first shot heard round the world as Giants quarterback Butch Faso dropped the ball in mid-pass and instead emitted a blinding sphere of phased nanoflak that dropped everyone on the playing field. The stadium erupted in a quarter-million battles.

           Each and every human being, seeded with an incomprehensible, individuated alien civilization, declared open warfare on each and every other human being. Nine billion societies woke up and screamed.

* * *

           He wrapped her in a tarp.

           He folded the edges gently over the place where her face had been, folded, rolled her over onto the packing tape, wrapped her tightly. She was small. He was no longer crying.

           Sandy smoked a cigarette at the kitchen table. Tiny sorties of fireflies orbited her head, avoided her exhalations. Some landed in hangars just below her hairline. Strobes flashed behind her eyes.

           Henry stood and observed his work.

           "You want one?" Sandy held out the pack of smokes. At his nod, she threw it to him. He was getting good at catching things. The truce was tenuous at best.

           That first night, Katie coughing feebly from the trundle bed, Sandy and Henry had literally blown each other out of bed in the first attack, she falling to the left, he to the right, knocking his head against the nightstand and drawing blood. The wound had infuriated him at a base level, an other level, one that hadn't been there when he'd gone to bed, one that hadn't been awake yet. He'd stood over Katie, feeling the thrumming of the war machine he had become, and Sandy had joined him, crisping at the edges as their respective defensive fields collided. A look had passed between them that had been an acknowledgement of temporary alleviation of hostilities. They'd stood over their daughter and forged an alliance. Her riders had been weak, barely able to throw a handful of toxins at the armies above her. They had savaged her from life, shock and awe, unrelenting, until nothing more than a pile of child stained the floor and two confused, steaming adults surveyed the damage.

           He lit the cigarette and they wept from across the distance of a corpse in a blue tarp.

           "What are we going to do?" Sandy's hand shook. A larger detachment of rider vessels emerged from her mouth and surveilled the kitchen.

           "I'll take her to the park." Henry felt something growing along the length of his spine, which was now a shipyard. A destroyer. Something that would eviscerate him when ready for launch.

           "I'll—"

           "Stay here."

* * *

           The riders had kept Katie intact for three weeks. Such is the timeline of the end.

           Henry carried her slung over his shoulder, a loose bag of meat and dissembling aliens. For the first week after her death, he'd held her in awe of her pristine form, before her skin became translucent, before the survivors inside had launched their ark and taken off through the hole into the Mahlers' apartment. Not long after Katie's riders' departure, the real evidence of her death had arrived. The rising chest expanding from the pressure of harvested fuels, a guttural death rattle from flayed vocal cords. Bones in which vast cities had been carved now collapsing under their own weight, no longer supplied with that alien je ne sais quoi that had kept them hidden for perhaps an entire history of a species.

           Hen wondered what had activated them. The new Febreze commercial? The contested mid-term elections? Global fucking warming?

           He adjusted what had been Katie and kept walking.

           The cities weren't dead, but alliances were rare. Walking out into the street carried with it the risk of meeting someone with an imcompatible (or just plain stubborn) body of riders. He'd seen old friends reunited, running to embrace, both torn apart and splashing to the pavement in strings and shards. He'd seen a man compelled to smash a stranger's head open with his own, both falling gushing and dead to the sidewalk as the riders emerged in vast fleets of golden dust, lasers riving, swarms of something filled with ancient hates.

           And now nothing would ever be the same.

           Assuming the infrastructure could be restored by the fraction of humans not slaughtered in the first waves of the wars, there would never be a guarantee that riders who seemed to get along wouldn't suddenly declare war on each other. He fantasized the tiny delegations of ambassadors, the politicians bridging between an ear, a lip, infecting and reinfecting, sometimes coming to hesitant peace but mostly just killing each other.

           He felt blessed that the truce with his wife had lasted most of the last three weeks. Tensions were high between their riders, but at least her touch no longer made him want to gouge her eyes, bite out her throat, launch a trillion fighters from every pore to break her. Ten feet was a safe distance. Their beds were in separate rooms. His was a couch.

           Each morning he woke up expecting to see her standing over him.

* * *

           He'd walked to the park, holding Katie's hand, a hundred times. A thousand.

           It was an empty day in an empty city, but he saw some people out, blocks away, turning corners and glancing back furtively, sometimes dodging into doorways. It was a city of peering out curtained windows, listening for footsteps and an increased buzzing. He'd once crossed paths with his high school gym teacher, a bear of a man, a football coach reduced to a somber nod, the quarterhearted raise of a hand in greeting, the diversion of eyes as he continued walking silently through the quiet, quiet expanse.

           In the first week there were roving gangs of punk kids dancing through the streets, murdering people with no directive from their riders, no glistening jets of alien vessels spurting from their eyes, no instructions at all from within, just a newfound freedom from without. He'd found piles of their bodies in alleys, along the edges of the streets. Most had been abandoned and self-destructed.

           There was a humming, an unheard song, the negotiations of the civilizations he passed hidden away in frightened people waiting for the world to start again. But it wouldn't—it couldn't. Everything had changed now that no one could touch without wanting to kill.

           He'd tried to post-trauma fuck Sandy one night. She'd been all for it. The alert fighters sweating out from her thighs had been against it. Henry had been left prone on the bedroom floor feeling like he was on fire for ten minutes as his riders struggled to contain the damage of contact.

           It had taken four days for the aliens to allow Henry and Sandy to be in the same room again. Peace talks had apparently been successful.

           So what to do in a world where most people were dead and the vast majority of the survivors could no longer be within ten feet of each other? He'd learned to throw things Sandy needed. Learned to shout. Learned that leaving the seat up on the shitter really can be the basis for war.

           And CNN still broadcast the rotting remainder of an anchor.

           Eventually the drab trucks stopped dropping bulletins on the corners.

* * *

           It took him a few hours to claw enough dirt from the grass of the park to conceal the blue tarp.

           He rolled Katie in.

           Watched a surveillance fleet swarm, searching for someone else. Another society of microscopic douchebags to shoot.

           Henry wanted to scream at the riders, but his voice was hoarse. They were diverting fluids for a new weapon. They had cannibalized his neck for parts.

           So he started to scoop city dirt back into the hole that would hold Katie for whatever was left of time. A used condom, a dozen cigarette butts, a ceramic duck's head, needles pine and hypodermic. He shook with it. Burying her.

           When it was done, he didn't bother wiping his hands on his pants.

           Hairs on his neck stood, antennae, early warning systems.

           "Hen?"

           Sandy stood beside the trunk of a tree no one would ever again carve with initials. His instinct forced a step backward. Somewhere in the city, something enormous exploded. He could feel world wars spinning out beyond control, beyond a person, two, a group of punk kids murdering for the fudge of it, a football coach looking sadder than coaches should.

           "I had to come."

           He nodded. Of course it was her right to watch him bury their daughter in the park. She stepped closer and he warned her off without a word, feeling the ratcheting of the siege machines sliding into place in his throat, the destroyer burning to life up the length of him. He grumbled out a: "Stay back." It sounded a siren.

           Her fingers went rigid as guns drove home. Hair fluttered in the no wind as fleets took to the air. She stepped closer.

           And he knew the truce was over between their riders.

           Her eyes asked for forgiveness but her chest glowed. "Baby, I can't—"

           "I know."

           He walked closer.

           Targeting lasers arced across them, fighters buzzed and strafed. Trees flew apart around them. Negotiations were over. Diplomatic crisis had boiled over.

           Across the city, they felt it. Survivors subtracting that concept from their self-definitions.

           As the war raged and peaked between them, Henry and Sandy held each other one last time until it was over. No one won.