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The CEO of Fuller Aerospace looked up from the clippings Iris and Paul Campbell had laid down on her desk. A construction executive falling off a high-rise project when the scaffolding screws all popped out. A city councilwoman who had been impaled by flying hubcaps from a nearby car collision. The Councilwoman’s husband, somehow electrocuted in a room made of rubber. And four others who had all been at the Sky View that day the woman before her had pointed to the cracks in the floor and prevented a disaster.

“Fuck do I need a drink,” Beatrice Fuller muttered. She gave her husband an entreating look and he took some brandy down from the shelf with an affectionate smile marred by his own clear worry. It was evident how upset he was when poured himself a drink along with hers, then refilled his for another shot.

“You were right to come here,” said Beatrice.

“You believe us?” asked Iris, a mix of shock and ecstasy in her voice and expression.

Beatrice glanced at Bertrand, who gave a nod of approval. So she told them about the family papers Bertrand had delved into for inspiration while writing his seventh Broadway play, a musical-comedy set in Victorian times. His grandmother Juliet’s haunting unpublished autobiography about her escape from Death had initially seemed insane enough for Bertrand to have himself tested for hereditary mental conditions. But he had been curious enough to hire researchers to investigate similar phenomena, and they had found more than enough to make believers out of Bertrand’s branch of the vast Fuller clan.

“You showed us yours,” he gestured at the headlines on his wife’s desk. “Now let me show you mine.” He walked up to the safe, dialed the combination, and removed a thick folder that he handed to the newlyweds.

Looking over the papers, Iris momentarily felt like she might miscarry her baby. “The children died to?” She whispered as she gazed upon an analysis of an immigrant ship that had been saved from wreckers by a passenger’s vision. Paul’s eyes widened and he unconsciously moved in front of the slight bulge in her stomach

Bertrand nodded sadly. “The next fifteen years saw first the entire crew and then m one family of passengers after another die, down to babies born a full decade after the wreck.”

“But it stopped,” his wife reminded him. “A third of the way through the passenger list, suddenly they stopped dying.”

“Maybe they hit on an acceptable definition of new life like my grandmother,” said Bertrand. “Or maybe they found some other way to cheat Death. No one left a record to say. At least nothing I’ve been able to find. But another tale, there at the bottom, ha ways to save not just you two, but your baby and any future babies you want to have after that one, and their descendants to, and even a good deal of our fellow Sky View survivors and their families.”

“What about the two of you,” asked Paul.

“Oh, we wouldn’t mind dying of old age instead of in a fire or fall, but we’ve already lived just long enough to accomplish our greatest goals in life, and we did that because you saved us at the tower. Bertrand just had his first Tony sweep aware ceremony last week. And I just finished laying out a mission goal for a kind of new jet engine that will let us keep flying people around without filling the sky with so much awful smoke. Well, that’s the hope anyway. It will take a few decades to set up, and the longer I’m around, the more likely my board will see it through after I’m gone. But it’s a hope, and it would have died on the drawing board without you. And, to top all that off, you let us give to see our first grandchild. You gave us half a billion dollars’ worth of happiness these last couple of months. And so, we’re going to repay you that, with interest.”
“If you’re thinking what I think you’re thinking, all of our millions may not be enough,” cautioned Bertrand.
“Then we’ll hire those researchers of yours to dig up all the blackmail dirt we can find on people in our circle who deserve blackmailing,” said Beatrice firmly. “It’s time that Death stopped thinking he had the sole right to dictate when someone’s time is. Someone or something gave Iris the visions that saved us at the Sky View and told her and Paul come here tonight. If they wanted us to live a few decades longer, then it’s time Death took a hint.”

To be continued (in at least two timelines)

Chapter Text

Twelve days after Paul and Iris’s visit, Mavis Martin received an offer of an annual $40 million to be divided among her family and ten charities of her choice. All she had to do was commit to spending her life in a cabin where she would regularly be brought newspapers and photos of the outside, a few luxuries carefully selected to be the kind that Death couldn’t use against her there. That tactic had bought an extra twelve years of life to a quartet of gold miner’s who’d escaped a cave-in thanks to a premonition. When the man isolating himself that way had died, none of his companions had been selfless enough to follow his example and save the others, but it inspired the Fullers in a big way seventy-five years later.

It was fourteen years before Mavis felt that all the money she’d gotten donated had done its good work and decided to take a chance that the Campbells and Fullers had been wrong in their warnings when she started hiding. Her funeral was two weeks later, and by that time, the foundation the Fullers had set up had made the same offer to Bradley Fitz, Attorney at law, while being able to cite Mavis’s mysterious death as further proof of what had happened. Bradley spent thirty years in the cabin before Death found a way to kill him and blow it to atoms. But the foundation just set up another cabin and made an offer to Fitz’s family. His older sons thought it was silly and refused. They were both dead in a month, further convincing their younger brother that he’d made the right choice and making true believers of the next generation.

It took Death two hundred years to get through the Fitz bloodline, but the Fuller Foundation remained strong. They couldn’t convince anyone from the next two survivor bloodlines, but descendants of a long-dead woman named Lynn Stoppy were more open-minded and willing to take up the burden. Death managed to destroy four more cabins, and plenty of more Stoppys lost faith or their will to live and left, but there was a big enough pool of descendants to replace them. Another six isolated cabins were destroyed one way or another over the next four hundred years, but the Fuller Foundation learned ways to guard against future attacks each time, and that led to a solid 2,000 years of Death only ever being able to kill a Stoppy descendant near the end of their natural lifespans anyway.

During that time, the foundation board also found itself approaching survivors of The North Bay Bridge, Flight 180, Route 23 (or rather, the people who would have fallen victim to that accident in another world if not for Kimberly Corman having a series of visions much earlier than before due to an earlier brush with death that needed her psychic abilities to manifest right then), the Devil’s Flight, and McKinley Speedway, managing to buy them and their descendants extra years in a similar manner.

And the Fuller Foundation had been doing more than just maintaining a cabin and getting people to go there. They had also been conducting genealogy research. On the day that their databases estimated that every single living person in the world was now descended from a Sky View survivor, the Foundation put a pause on its project, allowing the current Stoppy to venture outside and test whether this latest development had made Death abandon his design, or if they needed to keep isolating people for the rest of time to keep Death from trying to slaughter all of humanity.

No further isolation was required. Humanity moved on, and the Sky View became completely forgotten by history in the most blissful way possible.

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It was a good two months after Paul and Iris’s meeting with Beatrice and Bertrand before stories about their efforts fell off the front page of more than half the world’s newspapers. Fuller Aerospace’s sudden shift into space travel and space habitats stunned the world.
The file at the bottom of Betrand Fuller’s folder had been the story of a squadron of Korean War pilots who’d been saved from flying into a deadly ambush because of a vision. They were survivors, and more than half escaped Death’s initial attempts to kill them. But once he reached the end of the list, he could always start over, and start over he did, making their numbers dwindle further.

Nick Wilson, the last survivor of the squadron had decided (according to his widow, who described him as a possible narcissist) that, if Death was going to kill him, then he might as well die with the eyes of the world on him. So he’d qualified for a Gemini spacewalk. There’d been thousands of ways Death could have killed him up there, but not a thing happened to him until his return to earth, when he and his crewmates ended up drowning on the way to the boat picking up his shuttle’s crew after re-entry. His selfishness had doomed them along with himself, but Death would have done better to spare the other astronauts. Killing them made it clear to Bertrand Fuller that it hadn’t been compassion for the innocent that made Death hold back throughout the long mission itself. He theorized that, instead, Death’s ability to cause premature accidents to kill those who’d cheated him was bound to Earth itself and didn’t extend into space. He was right.
Paul and Iris had been reluctant to leave their planet behind, but horrific premonitions far of the far future and the fate that otherwise awaited their family had changed their minds.

Thousands of people across America with the widest variety of jobs received incredibly lucrative and prestigious offers to join the project. Many of them were experts in their field. Others came from the Sky View. Still others were invited because of visions Iris had of them marrying Sky View survivors, or their children marrying survivors’ children. Whole towns were recruited to hide the oddity of some recruits.

Every talk show host and anchorman in the country expressed incredulity about Beatrice Fuller (and the partners she was blackmailing into donating their own fortunes) saying that they would have self-sustaining spaceships with almost cruise ship levels of luxury ready in just eight years. They ate their words.

Death was busy for those five years. Iris wept bitter tears for her husband Paul. But not because she lost him. Death’s attack on him was too fast and sloppy, such was the murderous force’s desire to hurt Iris. Paul Campbell lost an arm and a leg in the hospital emergency room, and Death had to move down the list and hope for another chance at him later. The Fitz and Stoppys proved far less long-lived than they would have been in another timeline with the Fuller Foundation and its cabins. A waitress named Christina Bailey and her little boy died. So did Chuck the singer. Congressman Julius Ramer and his young children. Almost twenty others. The last, a World War II veteran named Paul Clarke, died in a bizarre animal attack thirty-six hours before blastoff.

But if Death had the capacity to kill survivors as fast as he would have preferred, there would have never been a timeline where either of Iris’s children ever exited the womb, opened their eyes, and drew breath in the first place. More than three fourths of the Sky View survivors were still alive when the spaceships blasted off after the most through and expensive safety inspections in history. Clarke’s two daughters were among the passengers. A few people rejected every offer they had to join the project, even being let in on the secret of the mission’s true purpose. The cold-hearted maître d’ was no great loss, but those in the know would weep quietly when news about the deaths of Graham Shukma brought tears among his wife and daughter, who had taken the trip. And their deaths just proved how those in orbit were effectively off Death’s list. Iris and her husband watched Darlene and Howard grow up and get married. Iris taught Stefani and Julia how to dance. They Erik give them tattoos of each other’s face. She and Paul watched old sitcoms with Charlie and told him about what watching Hogan's Heroes had been like during the original run. They helped Bobby name his pet turtle. By the time they died, were great-grandparents six times over.

As hard as Death tried, he couldn’t take out a single one before they cleared orbit. His realm was filled with screams of fury. He prepared for a long wait for them or their descendants to come back to Earth and meet the punishment he felt they so richly deserved. Instead, their ships made first contact with aliens in 1997, during the elected co-admiralship of Mary Jansen and Shiri Whyne, and soon found themselves travelling to other planets were their passengers would settle down for good. Death felt too defeated to ever target another band of premonition survivors again.

Chapter Text

When Iris and Paul learned what was at the bottom folder of the file, they knew that following that recommendation would probably hound them the rest of their lives, and make them objects of unwelcome hatred, mockery, or intense reverence (which may have been the scariest of all) for large groups of people. They agreed anyway.

The next two months were full of newspaper headlines about how bad the Sky View disaster could have been, while emphasizing the fact that the woman who’d prevented it claimed to have done so through a psychic vision. The building owners who’d been downplaying the story of the delayed Sky View opening found themselves unable to silence the countless Fuller-backed news stories.

Almost immediately, letters and phone calls (most but not all also prompted by Fuller money) went out to the Vatican, some very important Mosques, and prominent Jewish, Buddhist, and Hindu Temples, The Mormon Tabernacle, and several prominent Protestant churches.

The Buddhist and Hindus were the first to classify what had happened as a Siddhi, the closest equivalent their religions had to a miracle. Iris herself was a Christian and clearly ineligible for the spiritual practices necessary to declare a Siddhi, but she’d grown up with a nanny who’d practiced those disciplines and always sought to keep her safe, and the spiritual accomplishment of that vision could he laid at that door (quietly, so as not to turn away the other Faiths). The informal process of having the Mormons consider Iris’s vision and the lives saved a miracle occurred just a day after that.

All this was accomplished before Death found the time to kill even one more Sky View survivor. By the time an Imam and Rabbi both agreed to classify the incident as divine intervention a week later, he had made an attack on Mavis Martin, but Iris was waiting close at hand and managed to save her from it.

She couldn’t save Bradley Fitz the same way but did keep his pregnant wife and unborn son alive when it was their turn. And by that point, more Protestant voices had jumped on the miracle bandwagon. The gawkish stares Irish was getting at work, the beauty salon, the library, church, and even family reunions were just as bad as she and Paul had feared, but the more she thought about all the lives that would be saved, and the more she could feel the little boy growing inside her, the more worth it those stares felt.

The fortuitous presence of members of an interfaith collegiate organization at the Sky View had helped tremendously for getting so many different religions to declare a miracle or a similar equivalent. But, while the Catholic presence at the gathering was far from insubstantial, the more formal Catholic processes for declaring a miracle took more time than the other, less-centralized, faiths. Beatrice and Bertrand Fuller pulled a lot of strings to convince high-level clerics of the urgency to speed up the investigation, but that was all they could do.

The last file in Bertrand’s folder had described five cases where a visionary had tried to get a stay of execution from Death by having the vision declared a miracle. Three had gotten the seal of approval from some religions but not enough of them. One had bribed clerics to declare it a miracle and that hadn’t held up. Only the Iroquois Theater Fire visionary who’d gotten honest and legitimate miracle rulings had been able to force Death to leave the remaining survivors of that vision alone.

In the months that followed, twelve more survivors died, but Iris saved seven more (including Paul) before her pregnancy became too advanced for her to be able to risk around doing that anymore.

Then, the Pope gave his seal of approval, and it was done.

Well, not quite done.

The year was 2009, and Iris Campbell was hosting her first annual barbecue without Paul, who was in the hospital getting some work done on his back.

She looked around at her guests and smiled. Bertrand and Beatrice Fuller were long dead of old age, but a few of their grandchildren were in attendance, along with a distant cousin named Patti who worked as a journalist and was writing a human interest story about the gatherings of premonition survivors. Plenty had dismissed the whole story as lunacy from the beginning and others had gradually stopped coming over the years, but there were still over thirty Sky View families coming, and it would probably be some time before all this shrunk down enough for them to fit in a backyard.

Old Chet had barely finished telling Patti about the elevator museum he owned a modest piece of when one of Mary Jansen’s granddaughters asked if maybe she could get a summer job at that museum. Benjamin Parker and Peter Rocks little tribes were pleading with Iris’s little grandson Bobby, Janet Clarke’s boy, the Wos, and Brandy Edwards Jr. to join their respective sides of a tug of war match.

Chuck the bandleader was singing "Shout!" with the same energy and melodious voice he’d had back in the sixties. Stefani, Julia, and Charlie were up their dancing to the beat while Erik filmed them on his cellphone and zoomed in with a good-natured giggle whenever one of them made a misstep. Behind him, Malcom and Manny Shepherds were having a whispered argument about whether it would be funny or mean to take advantage of Erik’s distraction to tie his shoelaces together.

And then, there stood J.B. with his wife and sons, his ever-present look of jovial contentment widening as he waved over the survivors of other premonitions who he’d started inviting around the turn of the century. Alex Browning, Clear Rivers and their little boy. Carter Horton, Terry Chaney and their twins. Even Tod Waggner, who had been seconds away from Death when the Catholic seal of approval cemented the universal miracle and forced Death to let him go (although a distracting news story about his near-death experience after his parents found him half-dead had still saved the life of one Kim Corman, who was present in a crowd representing Route 23 survivors). Iris marveled about the good fortune that had led to all of the religions that had recognized the Sky View miracle deciding to treat any similar verified premonition incident as related to that one rather than requiring something new.

That had got things moving fast enough to save everyone from Flight 180, Route 23, the North Bay Bridge, the school shooting Eugene Dix had stopped, the shootout Tom Burke had prevented (although since everyone else who’d survived except his partner was currently serving life sentences in prison, not many people from that incident got party invites) that theater Rory Peters had seen collapsing, and the B&B where Kat Jennings and her coworkers had nearly died of a gas leak, and even the Devil’s Flight disaster. The growing publicity and classification of such events miracles might be why Alex Browning’s vision on Flight 180 had ended up saving a full third of his class and hadn’t just had a handful of people listen to him.

“I hear the McKinley Speedway survivors are safe,” said Darlene, checking a story that had been texted to her. “Not fast enough to save two of them, but one of them probably had it coming anyway. A card-carrying Klansman.”

“I wonder if Death is just getting madder about all of this or is finally taking a hint,” said Howard, in an indulgent voice that betrayed how, as much as he’d come to believe in the visions, he still wasn’t quite sold on the story about Death’s role in killing survivors. With so many of them having cheated Death to live full lives, perhaps it was no wonder that some people were losing their fear of Death as an omnipotent murderer.

Iris looked up at the sky and prayed for some sign that Death would grant any future visionaries the same mercy and sweet gift of a long life that he was giving her, her family, and so many others. She prayed for that hope to be true, and she prayed for a sign that it was. When she opened her eyes, she and the other picnickers bore witness to the first ever daytime shooting star any of them had ever seen as it streaked across the sky, a bright meteor just barely visible from Earth for just a second and a half before it was gone, never to be seen with the naked eye again.

Chapter Text

The last file was the one with family papers about Bertrand’s grandmother Juliet. The woman who had survived because of New Life.

A big part of the reason the Fullers had gone to the Sky View opening that fateful night had been because the world-famous desert chef was a man whose meals they had devoured with great joy on eleven prior occasions, and they wanted to make it an even dozen. The same chef, ironically, whose flaming desert had killed Mrs. Fuller in Iris’s vision.

Indulging in his own deserts a little too much had given the chef two strokes in six years, and he was due for a heart transplant in three weeks. When Paul and Iris heard what the Fullers had in mind, they were initially appalled and refused to go along with it. They only changed their minds after the Fullers brought in five top doctors to explain the risks to them and the chef himself was told what they had in mind and gave his explicit consent in exchange for his family receiving ten million dollars and stock options in every one of the twenty most prestigious restaurants on the Eastern seaboard if he died.

During his heart transplant, Chef Edouard requested the services of a specific team of doctors. The leader of the team was Bertrand Fuller’s golf partner, Dr. Cordell Reddick a renowned surgeon and medical theorist whose habit of rambling about potential what ifs in new surgical cases was proving to be of far greater use than either old friend had ever guessed. He had taken a whole week to convince to take part in this operation but had caved in the end. Part of Reddick’s acquiescence was because of his third review of the files compiled by Bertrand’s researchers about Death’s curse. Another reason was a pledge of a billion-dollar donation to various underfunded pediatric wards from the Fullers and their various blackmail victims. But, last, and most importantly was the blessings of Chef Edouard himself.

It had taken the chef much less time to convince him of Death’s curse than the doctor. He had been watching Iris Campbell’s odd movements right before she grabbed Chuck’s microphone and warned everyone about the floor. He had plenty of time to reflect on just how all those events could have come together to make a far deadlier catastrophe than most survivors realized.

He had listened to Iris’s story and knew that, per her vision, he would be safe for a few weeks, months, or even years before Death got around to him. Therefore, by the logic of the order Death had to attack people in, he was guaranteed to have a smooth transplant. But he would also be guaranteed to die before he and his wife both got too old for the cooking jobs that felt addictive to them and finally got them to retire to Florida with no distractions but each other. He wanted that more than anything, and so he was ready to do his part to thwart Death’s plan, while also making sure his wife would be amply rewarded in the event taking this risk did kill him earlier than he would have otherwise died. He had told Dr. Reddick all of this with the eloquence of an Oscar or Tony-winning speech maker.

Then there were his coworkers and the customers to think of. Rarely had he been in a restaurant where he had received such nearly unanimously nice treatment from everyone around them. So many of them were far too young to have enjoyed the happiness he’d had so far in marriage and his career. People had risked their lives for far less noble reasons to give so many people a chance to live the way life was meant to be lived.

In the days leading up to the operation, the Fullers insisted on the doctors staying in the hospital’s old bomb shelter, where there was nothing Death could manipulate to kill then the way he had occasionally killed other people helping his targets throughout history. Such historically acts of bloodthirsty hypocrisy that had done much to reassure the Campbells and Fullers that their survival wasn’t undermining some great destiny and design if Death felt fine breaking his own rules to punish people helping visionaries. It was a wise precaution: once they were in the operating room, there was nothing Death could do that wouldn’t also kill Chef Edouard and throw the whole list out of order.

Edouard went under the knife and got his new heart. But, during the finishing stages of the transplant, the doctors hesitantly delayed a few finishing touches that would delay any Primary Graft Dysfunction. Reddick and his assistants sat still as minutes passed and Edouard experienced cardiac arrest and his heart stopped. The moment that was done, and he was truly and undeniably dead, the team went into a frenzied state to restart his heart and correct the surgical procedures that had made it stop beating in the first place. They succeeded.

It was another six years before a Sky View survivor died: when the maître d’ succumbed to a heart attack of his own, after being too arrogant about his self-care to go see a doctor in time to save him. The customer who had been next on Death’s list during Chef Edouard’s surgery lived another twenty-eight years before hanging himself rather than die of lung cancer. The next person to die after him was Alfred Milano, the sticky-fingered boy who would have been third to last to die if the disaster had gone ahead with no vision to warn anyone and was knifed in a prison fight. His daughter Francesca lived to be a grandmother. Edouard lived to the age of ninety before his current heart gave out.

Death’s list was ripped up, burned into ashes, and scattered to the wind. That failure didn’t deter him from going after the visionaries and survivors in other disasters, but as whispers about the loophole of new life spread, desperate emergency efforts to revive Candice Hooper and Terry Chaney (if only temporarily, in one case) managed to spare most of the doomed Flight 180 and North Bay Bridge survivors. Kim Corman knowing about exactly what new life entailed a lot faster proved to be good news for a group of witnesses to the Route 23 pile-up. Kevin Fischer telling Ashley Freund about those stories would have fateful and fortunate consequences for the Devil’s Flight survivors after for similar reasons. Jonathan Groves spending forty seconds clinically dead in his hospital room while the on-duty resident was distracted with a phone call from his cousin Erin and then being shocked back to life would save four lives besides his own after the McKinley Speedway tragedy.

Iris Campbell still got cancer, but it was 2029 instead of then, her husband was still alive (although taking meds for Alzheimer's and anemia), and James William Bludworth would live to be celebrated as the oldest man in the world. Two years before that diagnosis, she watched her grandson Charlie and Dr. Cordell Reddick’s great-granddaughter Jenny exchange their vows, be pronounced man and wife, and happily walk down the aisle.

Looking at how happy and fully in love Jenny looked and silently thanked the long-dead surgeon for the umpteenth time. She hoped that, somewhere, he still existed and knew how much his help had ended up contributing to his family’s happiness.

He did.

Chapter Text

“This is gonna be tricky,” said Paul. “You sure we shouldn’t just try new life like your ancestor?”

“It’s worth considering,” admitted Betrand. “But she lived back in the Gaslamp era. These days, there are a lot more moving parts that Death could use to lash out and stop that. So many machines, so much toxic and flammable stuff…This idea, on the other hand, has been proven to work, but only if it gets tried before anyone actively tries fighting back after the premonition.”

“A lot of people aren’t going to believe me,” said Iris. “They might not want to do this.”

“Whether they have open minds or don’t will be immaterial when we offer ten million dollars to every one of them,” Beatrice said firmly. “If any refuse, then our private detectives will start digging like Howard Carter until they have dirt to blackmail those pig-headed fools into doing this.”
“This will take some time to set up,” said Iris. “People may die in the meantime.”

“Maybe,” Bertrand agreed sadly. “But maybe not. Maybe Death will give us all a stay of execution when he sees we’re working toward this. It’s a lot more people getting down on their fucking knees than the last time it worked.”

Sadly, Bertrand was wrong. It took another three weeks to use pay stubs, a guest book, and the like to track down a list of every single person who would have been at the Sky View, track them all down, and make them the offer. In that time, people kept dying, so that, by the time the survivors were ready to make their try, everyone who’d immediately fallen through the shattered glass floor in Iris’s vision without prolonging their life by grabbing onto the edges was dead. But bad news came with good news. Bertrand Fuller had underestimated how much the almighty dollar meant to the kind of people who wouldn’t believe the warnings about the danger they faced. There was no need to blackmail a single skeptic: every single one said yes to the money.

There were a surprisingly large number of people who would have come without the money. People who straightened up when they listened to the reports of recent deaths or could tell there was more than simple observation skills to how Iris prevented the disaster. Nonetheless, with only a small amount of resentfulness, Beatrice paid them each ten million dollars (whether from her own coffers or blackmailed away from other tycoons) anyway. It would have been a very, very bad idea to make any of them bitter and abruptly uncooperative if they learned some of their companions were being paid but they weren’t.

Almost two hundred people, all of whom had signed non-disclosure agreements, were gathered together in a Fuller Aerospace hanger officially closed for maintenance. Then, as one, they all got down on their knees, bent forward, and spent the next ten minutes reciting chants saying they knew their fate was in Death’s hands, and that they asked for him to be generous with his power, to show mercy, and to grant them the lives they could have had if there had never been a disaster to trigger Iris’s vision in the first place. They pleaded with him to account for their recognition of his power over them and how they were leaving the matter in his hands. Many people found themselves sounding embarrassed or feeling blasphemous by the end of that. A few almost gave up and began getting up to leave before the end. Fortunately, they were jerked back down by less dubious companions and, in the face of that benevolent peer pressure, resumed chanting.

Once a buzzer signaled it had been ten minutes, they all got up and went their separate way. Many were hoping to never see each other again, whether to too finding the whole situation silly, or because they had felt the cold chill of Death’s presence as he watched the unofficial ceremony and weighed his options, and their degree of respect.

Three weeks later, A Sky View waiter took a fatal fall down a staircase while hurrying to the kitchen at his new job. His newly pregnant wife and three older children would avoid homelessness because of the $10,000,000 payment he’d gotten, but many other survivors took this as a sign that Death might still be after him. Two became alcoholics almost overnight, and a third killed herself. They were all wrong to do so, and the other survivors began to realize the fall had merely been a dark coincidence when two more years passed before the next death. An old man who would have fallen to his death when the staircase collapsed got skin cancer from deciding to take early retirement to Hawaii and spending too much time in the sun. Then came the maître d’ with his heart attack, and a car accident or two, but by then it was clear that survivors were dying out of the prophesized order. In a few more years, some of the first people to die in Iris’s vision were having babies or reaching retirement age.

In May of 2005, Iris took a nice sip of milk and watched Stefani and Julia playing monster truck races with their barbie dolls (perhaps for the last time in Stefani’s case, judging by her look of waning interest) and occasionally pause to talk about whether they should have gone on a camping trip or stayed put. She unrolled the morning newspaper and saw a newspaper article about some teenagers who’d mysteriously gotten off a rollercoaster in McKinley, Pennsylvania right before it crashed.

“Pay it forward,” she muttered, quoting a move that Brenda and Howard had insisted on rewatching with her three times in two months. And with that, Iris got out a pencil and paper and began writing the letter that she prayed would be enough to save those kids.

Chapter Text

Iris looked at the file in Mr. Fuller's hand, and let out a long, almost scary laugh. “I’m in,” she told him. “I’ve never been in for anything more, more, more in my life besides maybe making our baby with Paul.”

Paul grinned bashfully at this, then looked over the file, and swallowed nervously. “If this doesn’t work, then Death is probably gonna make us die screaming louder than one of the Fullers airplane engines,” he whispered.

That dampened Iris’s enthusiasm a bit, but then she thought about the horrible vision she’d endured on what should have been the happiest night of her life. She thought about the way the people from that vision she’d saved were being brutally killed before some of them could ever have moments like the one that she and Paul had experienced in her vision, and that Paul never had gotten to properly experience in real-life due to how Iris had been diverted stopping the disaster.
She started to say that she would be okay, that it would be a long time before Death got to her on the list. Then she remembered how much earlier Paul had died in the vision and thought about how he might still be in danger for the kind of fate he’d just described. It made her hurry over to a trashcan and be sick for more reasons than just her pregnancy.

Seeming to read her mind, Beatrice Fuller said, “We can do this before he gets to Paul. All the survivors of the Sky View who practice Abrahamic religions have already been asked to come to an interdenominational service outside the Sky View thanking how no lives were lost, and I heard everyone has already agreed, including the four of us. And this trick doesn’t need the atheists, agnostics, Hare Krishnas and the like. It will take a lot of back-door introductions, but I think I can get the speakers at the service to say what we need said and tell them to always keep appropriate symbols on them in case Death gets mad and that works at warding off evil.

It was a week (and seven more deaths) later that all of the survivors necessary for this ritual knelt down in prayer, listening to clerics preach about the miracle of their survival, one by one. Then, those speakers asked them to utter a prayer thanking the Angel of Death for passing over them, and to ask that it protect them from future harm at the hands of the cruel and unrighteous, and let them use their lives well and never deliberately or even indirectly send an innocent into that Angel’s arms themselves. Almost none of the listeners knew about a fire at a monastery where the visionary had been a scholar writing a thesis about the discrepancy in power and importance between what was recorded about the Angel of Death that guided souls to their proper place and the powers that caused death itself and made it necessary for the Angel to step up

As they spoke, a sports car in the parking lot’s handbrake had shifted into fear, and it was slowly moving forward, toward an oil tanker truck that a now unemployed waiter had gotten a ride in from his brother-in-law. The truck was parked just far enough away from where the praying survivors were gathered that it would take out everyone left ahead of Paul Campbell (who Death was saving a more special fate for) on Death’s list. No more. No less.

All of those people were standing in a group together at the edge, having been herded together through a series of odd things. things like following a $100 bill blowing in the wind. Or racing back a few yards to avoid being knocked over by a banner that had blown loose. Or a woman breaking a heel and needing a bench to repair it on right before the service started. Or a bathroom door having been inexplicably locked when a man tried to relieve himself before the ceremony so he wouldn’t have to be waiting near the edge of the crowd to hurry off at the earliest appropriate moment.

But then, as the survivors and the speakers finished their prayer, the handbrake snapped back into place and the sports car stopped. Every survivor outside the Sky View suddenly felt a strange, triumphant comforting presence. Then, they felt like they’d heard a horrified scream, as if a force of pure evil had been slashed across the face with a razorblade, kicked in the balls, and dragged off by the scruff of its neck.

Iris still remembered every word, every face, and every feeling from that meeting in 2015, as she and Paul watched a news report about fifty people who might have died in a ski lift malfunction if not for a certain alleged vision.

“Fifty is big,” said Paul. “Bigger than anything since those fifty people-including those two left over from the North Bay Bridge- got off Flight 180 in time. Even bigger than the seventy people who called on the Angel after that little Corman girl had a vision of the flood at that theme park Joshua Perez’s son built. Think that they’ll all turn out when the Fuller Kids give them the warning about calling on an Angel?”

“More of us did,” pointed out Iris, briefly hiding a smirk at the idea of Beatrice and Bertrand’s ninety-four-year-old twins and their two eighty-something siblings being referred to as “kids,” just because of the absence of their late parents.

“Yeah. But most of the others didn’t know about the whole Angel speech. They thought it was an ordinary memorial.”

“All those plays Bertrand Fuller wrote and non-fiction books he financed have done a lot to lend credit to visions and knowing about Death’s list,” Iris pointed out. “Most of the survivors from Club Kitty, the Coral Clipper, and the Hotel Grand Tzolk’in were lapsed believers, but they started believing for real hard and fast when the evidence was before their eyes and were there for the service. These people have a chance, Babe.” The doorbell rang, and she smiled and said, “Now let’s go tell Stefani and Darlene how gorgeous those new dresses they’ve probably bought for Brenda’s nephew’s wedding look.”

Chapter Text

Iris had been a straight-A student her last year of high school. She had outsmarted Death at the Sky View to a degree that he never would be again by a visionary. nonetheless, it took her less than five seconds to realize how completely baffled she was by these scientific scribblings. It took Paul even less time to come to the same conclusion. The Fullers chuckled at the looks on their faces and confessed to having had similar reactions until they hired a scientist to summarize it.

"The man who wrote that was a physicist who was slated to be the last person to die before the visionary who kept some machine from blowing everyone at their lab to kingdom come. He had just enough time to work out a theory that if they just let Death kill everyone on his list and then have someone else go change history so there never would have been a disaster, then that would stop Death."

"How is that different than surviving from a vision? And why not use a Time Machine yourself before everyone died?" Paul asked.

"This journal speculates how letting Death work through his list first means that even if it all gets undone, he technically isn’t cheated and will let it go at that. Also, changing history so there never is a disaster may be enough to fool Death into never realizing he had a list. There's is a lot more ethical debating than fundraising going on about time travel right now. Our money and that of some other blackmailed donors can change that."

"But this is just a theory," said Iris. "He died before he could test it." Bertrand nodded sadly. "Then you get started on this, and good luck, but in the meantime, I say we try to survive this our own way, so it never comes down to that."

The following decades would fade Iris's optimism. One ignored warning became three dozen, as more survivors and their bloodlines perished. Even people who believed her weren’t much better off. When Death came for Paul, the blood splatter made Iris look like Carrie White at her prom. Beatrice Fuller got to die in her own bed instead of the Sky View lobby, but she still burned alive. Her husband died sedated in a rabies ward after an innocent-looking squirrel had nipped at his finger and he hadn't thought to do anything in time. Chef Edouard been on the phone with her when he died, sobbing, screaming and praying. Peter Rock took a whole two hours to die. Chet the elevator operator fortified his house like Fort Knox right up until the day it went plunging into a sinkhole. Sheri Whyne swallowed a bottle of pills after the loss of her mother and sister robbed her of any hope for the future. Mary Jansen’s last grandchild burned alive just a room away from thirty fully-equipped firefighters.

And then there were the Bludworths. As his mother and sisters' turns approached, William stuck by, hoping to as God he was losing faith in that he could save them. Iris had felt a stronger urge to vomit than during either of her pregnancies as he described how he'd failed. The family had been driving up a hill to escape a flood when they saw trees across the road. They stopped the car and started to exit, but only William was out before the winds slammed the doors shut. As he glanced inside, some unseen force shifted gears into reverse back toward the floodwaters and made the doors lock. As he raced after the car in a panic, that same force made the windows go down just an inch and turned up the radio full volume. He had broken down sobbing at the memory of his family’s screams mixed with the blowing winds and the cruel, mocking words of Paul Williams blaring from the radio at the former Sky View band member.

"Good for nothing, bad in bed

Nobody likes you and you're better off dead Goodbye (Goodbye)

We've all come to say goodbye (Goodbye) Goodbye (Goodbye)

Born defeated, died in vain

Super-destructive, you were hooked on pain

And though your music lingers on

All of us are glad you're gone"

More years and more bodies followed. Then it was the turn of Iris and her children, and her grandchildren, and then poor William himself. And then it was time for the scientists to step up. They had completed their tests around the same time Stefani and Charlie were trying to outrun a train full of logs. The plan about what to do next had been completed long before that. Death had less than twelve hours to revel in having completed the Sky View list before Dr. Emmett Browning went charging onward back in time with a suitcase containing five million dollars and detailed Sky View schematics about everything from Iris’s vision.

Emmett’s parents had named him right after watching Back to the Future. They had also been the aunt and uncle of a certain Flight 180 passenger named Alex. Nor was he the only project scientist with a personal investment in all of this. Two of the twelve faces standing near control panels and watching Emmett leave belonged to Eugene Dix’s stepsister and her husband. Professor Tyler Halperin-Kelly had shared a room with her half-sister Ashlyn for the first fifteen years of her life, until Ashlynn had died burning and screaming not long after a classmate’s vision saved her from the Devil's Flight. Reed Henry, a wizened technician who could claim neither a Ph.D. nor a professorship had only been able to enjoy a few short years of marriage with Mary Jansen’s daughter Pat before the deaths of Pat and their unborn twins once Death reached the Jansen bloodline of Sky View lives. Further back in the room, a long-serving gofer for the team had been a former foster child and spent three years with Dennis Lapman and his family in Dennis’s younger and more warmhearted and idealistic days.

Then there was the Fuller family's corporate representative, Wheaton Docker. Docker was a former lacrosse teammate of Hunt Wynorski, who had given his teammate his blessings to try and date Janet Cunningham after she dumped Hunt. Janet had been more than willing when he tried, and he had been planning to show her an engagement ring as soon as he came back from a semester abroad. Before he could finish that semester, the McKinley Speedway found its name joining the long list of American tragedies. All of them had signed onto this project for enough money to get by, and for permission to undo just about every tragedy they could find records of where some power had seen fit to hand out a timely premonition. To them, it seemed like less than a minute before Emmett returned, although a single gray hair in his black beard showed that it had been longer for him.

"Worked like a charm," he said. "Made a few loans to the Sky View owners right at the time they would have started cutting corners on construction. Just like that, they didn’t need to cut corners anymore, and as a condition of my loan, I got oversight over the building process to make sure they didn’t blow my money and stayed on the straight and narrow. Have the ripples come yet?"

Wheaton took a clipping book of Sky View survivor obituaries out of his book, flipped it open, and found himself staring at blank slips with no paper inside. But that was quickly diverted by cries of surprise as Reed Henry seemed to gain fifteen pounds in front of their eyes, his wedding ring suddenly looked shinier and freshly-polished, the tired lines on his face that made him look so much older than his years vanished, and a tattoo on his arm changed. It was a standard lovers’ tattoo: two names inside a heart. Now, four lines in different kinds of ink came down from that tattoo, with more hearts surrounding more names.

Reed helped a little and clutched his head, then blinked in shock. "None of the science-fiction books I’ve read could have prepared me for this. It's like I have two memories. I still know everything that happened before you went back, when Pat was dead and the kids were never born, but now I also remember all the years we’ve had together with them still alive." Glancing down at his gut, he chuckled ruefully. "I never could settle for just one serving of Pat’s cooking." The cheers that statement brought lasted for over a minute before Eugene Dix’s brother-in-law cried out that he two was feeling something different. He could remember having just been watching a basketball game with Eugene the other day. He could remember Eugene talking endlessly, year after year about how Eugene had talked about the time he’d cheated Death when the police identified and talked down a potential school shooter who was on his way to Eugene’s classroom. Beside him, his wife was too overwhelmed with joy to speak.

"But how did he even end up there instead of at Mount Abraham?" Tyler asked in confusion.

"Because Volée Airlines merged with Fuller Aerospace in a world where Beatrice Fuller lived to be 100," said Wheaton, a goofy grin appearing on his face as his own new memories appeared. "She did it under the advice of a board member whose father would have been the very first Sky View survivor on Death’s list. Fuller planes always worked hard to avoid the kind of insulation deterioration that brought Flight 180 down."

"So that saves my cousin and all the others without any of us ever even having to go back for them," said a dazed Emmett Browning. "But what about Eugene Dix?"

"I remember some puff piece story about stuff like the crazy kid at his school getting stopped by policies of a State Police bigshot who did a lot for early crime detection policies and being harder on some kinds of cases and easier on others way before the wisdom of that seemed as obvious to some folks. Lady named Yuki Saito."

Team members traded glances as they remembered the name of one of the people they were trying to save, a Sky View survivor's daughter who never had lived long enough to do anything like that in the timeline they had just destroyed. They would later discover that those same policies of Yuki Saito had also gone on to take the criminals who would have killed Tom Burke and his partner and Kin Corman and her mother off the street, along with a safety inspector whose corruption would have led to a gas leak claiming dozens of employees at Kat Jennings’ company and substandard chains causing the Route 23 pileup. Her people had also taken Rory Peters off the street at just the right time to keep him from taking a fatal trip to Paris.

Tyler Halperin-Kelly went back in time next, taking with her enough money to buy the fault Devil’s Flight ride right before the carnival came to her hometown and have it legally broken down for scrap in a salvage yard. She even got to see her own sister alive a bit earlier, when Ashlynn and Ashlynn came by to check out the carnival in advance as rides were being set up and the Halperins had a distant view of each other as Tyler completed the paperwork. The scientist whose turn it was to prevent the North Bay Bridge disaster had no personal disaster to any victim of any premonition, but what she had just seen still filled her with a strong sense of purpose as she took her brief sojourn back to call in a bomb threat designed to have investigators notice the construction flaws that would spell the bridge’s doom if not corrected. Reed Henry, eager to do his part to repay the project that had reminded him what true bliss felt like, went back next. His job was to buy the McKinley Speedway six months before the accident there, shut it down, and sell the land to a skatepark company.

Within ten seconds of Reed Henry's return, a wedding ring suddenly appeared on Wheaton Docker’s finger. Wheaton raced toward Reed and embraced him in a grateful hug for over a minute, he was weeping so hard with joy that he almost fell down twice on his way up to Reed. Before anyone could make another trip into the past, there were noises at the door, and in came Ashlynn Halperin. She was middle-aged now, with a wedding ring, skirt suit, and a Black Lives Matter necklace, and a more intelligent and educated tone that she’d never had in her first life. She was crying as she looked up at Tyler, awe in her voice.

"You saved my life. You kept me from ending up in that awful…." She shuttered, unable to complete the sentence. "Somehow, I never knew. All those extra years you bought me, and they went by in bliss, right up to this point. Even when you talked about working on time travel, saving lives, I tuned you out faster than I did even my lamest teachers in high school. It wasn’t until now, the day you actually did it and made that difference, that it all comes crashing back to me." Emmett Browning let out a gasp of fascination and began writing something down, then, pausing as the implications of that began to sink in, he got out his cellphone to call his cousin Alex and let him talk about this right away, assuming he was experiencing something similar, which Alex was. Most of the others never took their eyes of the Halperin Sisters. "It seems like half the time we talked those last years or two, I was bailing early from your trivia nights, arriving late for your dance recitals, and telling you to change your wardrobe and look cooler, or wishing you could be more like Ashley," Ashlynn was crying as heavily as Wheaton, now. "And you devote all these years to saving me."

Tyler chuckled. “You showed up for trivia in the first place and tried to give it a go. You were the one who taught me my dance moves. And when a friend clicks the way you and Ashley did, spend time with that friend while you can. Family, you see all the time after high school, but not always friends, although I do respect the people who manage their time well enough for both. You helped dad pick all those cute stuffed animals for my first ten birthdays. You and Ashley stopped speaking to Sondra Remmick after she started slut-shaming me over a French Kiss. Your fashion tips helped me get people to pay attention during my class president speeches. Yeah, I saved you sis. That's what sisters do, when they can, and if you even hint that you weren’t the kind of sister absolutely worth doing it for, then I'll slap you silly."

This little reunion was interrupted by another one. Janet Docker burst through the door, her watery eyes settling on her husband, and her face making it plain that she’d had a sudden surge of memories just like Ashlyn and Alex. Without a word, she went racing up to her husband, hugged him tightly, locked lips with him for a full forty seconds, then gave him at least forty more deliriously grateful and happy kisses across his face. Ashley Freund wasn't far behind to also thank Tyler and then sit down with her best friend to talk about the sudden memory of their shared death. Eugene Dix, Dennis Lapman, and Pat Henry would also be making their own similar visits to the lab in the next few days. They were all on vacation and needed longer to travel.

But even before Eugene, Dennis, and Pat came, first thing the next morning, the scientists found still more visitors waiting for them. More than twenty Sky View families, looks of mixed gratitude and slight anxiety about being told that they were mad. A few more words alleviated those worries. Right there at the front of the crowd stood Paul and Iris Campbell and their children and grandchildren.

Erik kept touching his piercings nervously and then began taking them out as he remembered a certain MRI. Howard and Julia were whispering comforting things to Brenda, who still had a guilty look on her face over some of the family secrets of another timeline and their devastating impact both when revealed and when hidden. Bobby cracked a joke about how he could still remember the taste of M&Ms. Charlie wore a junior lifeguards' jacket with pride. His mother, who’d arrived in a sensible sports car with her husband Marty, glanced at another families RV with open bemusement at the memories of her time in one. Stefani was praying almost nonstop, gazing at the scientists like they were a parting Red Sea. As for Iris, she just nodded slowly and made a soft comment about looking forward to the time she might see the Fullers again somewhere and praise them on how well there plan had worked.

It was almost 12 hours before the scientists managed to break away from busy visitors and get back to work. There were still more disasters to avert. The Hotel Grand Tzolk’in, the Coral Clipper, the South Hill Metroline, Mornington Crescent Street, the John Doe serial killings, Club Kitty, a bridge near the Harrisburg Bus Terminal, the 34th Street subway station, Merlin’s Tower in Las Vegas. All of them undone in a year (with a tip to the police thrown in about a certain unsavory survivor in the Mornington Crescent incident). The past looked bright, the future looked brighter, and the miser of human lives and futures never even realized he was being "cheated."

Chapter Text

"This here is the diary of an accused fence from a convict ship that went down on the way to Australia," said Bertrand Fuller, gesturing at the paper at the bottom of his folder. "One of the first ships that tied to reach Austalia after the Revolutionary War stopped the Brits from packing most of their convicts off here."

"You mean the early colonists were convicts?" asked Paul.

"Are you surprised?" joked Iris. "Look at all the stuff some of those blue bloods keep getting into these days."

"Not all of them came over like that, but some did," said Beatrice with a chuckle of her own. "Obviously, it's not something they shout from the rooftops. These fellows made it out in a lifeboat because of a vision. They decided to try and sacrifice other lives for their own after Death started killing survivors and slaughtered a native tribe, and lived long lives, althought not exactly peacful ones after another British ship of soldiers found them and made them spend the rest of their lives at hard labor. Only the young fence who wrote the journal refused to kill another person and ran off away from the others before that ship came. He never did harm an Aboriginal in his life and even tried to argue against subsequent and far less extralegal massaceres of them, at least if his journal is to be believed."

"You make it sound like he stayed alive somehow," said Iris.

"He did. For another forty years. He was confused at first, until he realized that he'd killed and eaten a turtle not long after he left the others. A kind that lives about 40-50 years. Apparently, a human life isn't the only thing you can trade for your own."

"So you want us to kill a bunch of baby turtles, or some other animals that live a long time" said Paul, sounding intirgued, but not exactly enthusiastic.

"In a sense," said Bertrand. "I don't like the idea any more than you do. Always liked animals. But, I've got an idea in mind that can be implemented real fast with a little blackmail and bribes toward some people on the board of a research institute that should be able to work just as fine for the four of us and anyone else we can persuade without even the biggest animal lover of us losing a night's worth of sleep about this.

Over thirty years Later, Dr. Darlene Campbell-Reyes looked up from the catalogue she was using to buy Stefani and Julia a play wagon and nodded at the Route 23 survivors nervously filing in and led them to the laboratory.

"Glad that all of you could make it here before..."

"Any of us died?" asked Rory Peters, the only member of the group who'd brought a companion not from the pile-up, an androgynous woman with a stoner look and a "Bi the Way" t-shirt who had a protective hand on Rory's shoulder.

"That's right," said Darlene. "What you do now is look through that microscope and move those knobs until you bring those tortoise shells together and you form a tortoise clone in the very earliest stages of life. Then you wait a mintue or two to use those same two knobs to break it apart. Then I tweak them a bit and the next person comes up and does it all over again. These cells won't combine exactly the same way, so it's always a new life that comes into being for you to trade than the person before you, but, at the same time, the cells are still there and eventually will get permanently merged into something that grows up to live a full tortoise life of maybe a century."

"A life formed like that really counts? Sound like a slogan at an abortion political debate," joked Evan Lewis.

"The Fuller Foundation's scientists did do a lot of work to specially enhance these particular cells so that they're already a lot more formed than they naturally would be," Darlene replied with a wry look of acknowledgement. "We're well aware of how picky Death's standards might be and don't want to make him feel too cheated by the quality of these lives, especially with the old, old ages we all have the potential to live to."

"We?" asked Kim Corman.

Darlene pointed to her family photo and smiled. "Me, everyone in my family and more than 3/4ths of the people who might have taken some deadly falls from a substandard Space Needle ripoff have all done this, most before we were even old enough to quite get it like all of you and your friends Alex Browning and Clear Rivers from last year. If any of you ever have kids, come back here sooner than later. Any more questions?" There weren't any. "Then let's start living like animals." She sighed good-naturedly at all the laughter. "You know what I mean."

Chapter Text

"What's a genie?" Iris asked, looking at the archaeologist's diary at the bottom of Bertand's folder. Five weeks later, she and Paul were back in that very room, looking down at the ring that the Fullers had brought from an up-and-coming liberal politician in Kuwait. It looked no fancier than the engagement ring Paul had given Iris at the Sky View, but it cost $700,000,000 in cash and securities from the Fullers holdings and those of the many tycoons they blackmailed. Iris tried to offer it to Bertrand or Beatrice, but they insisted that she'd done just as much to deserve it. If she hadn't been pregnant, she might have asked for a week's worth of stiff drinks as she thought over the wording of what she wanted for herself, Paul, Baby Howard, the Fullers, the Bludworths, and all those other people, not to mention the two other wishes after that.

Steeling herself, she rubbed the lamp, gaped in awe at the figure who appeared in a puff of smoke, then bowed in reverence, earning a grateful smile from him before he spoke in an odd tongue that she could somehow understand, but that none of the people who hadn't rubbed the ring could. "I wish for Death never to harm another person who he's planning on targeting because of my vision and let us die like we would have if there'd never been a Sky View in the first place. I wish for everyone in the world to have the kind of access to food, housing and medicine that I have by the first anniversary of my death. Finally, I wish that no human ever deliberately uses another weapon of mass destruction against even a single other person."

It took a few months of checking obituary notices and international relief fund newsletters be sure, but her wishes were granted. The Fullers decided to use their own surplus millions and the blackmail material they had on so many other potential philanthropists to get started on making sure that second wish came true across the world. The ring was tucked away in a vault. The archaeologist whose journal Bertrand had found had strongly believed that no one except those marked by Death and with an appreciation for the preciousness of life should ever be trusted with the ring. Thinking about the way certain politicians they had been forced to have drinks with might use it, Bertrand and Beatrice agreed.

Years later, when the Fuller Foundation brought that ring to Alex Browning and started to tell him that they had a way to make his wishes, he didn't even let them finish saying just what the ring was before he started talking while absentmindedly wiping a speck of dirt of the gem on the ring. "Wishes? You mean like how I want murder mysteries to stop making suspects who you actually like commit murder for reasons that honestly shouldn't have ended in someone dying? Or how I wish dramatic TV shows and blockbuster movie franchises wouldn't kill off so many characters just because the actor died or quit? Or how I just wish that everyone in my French class who died on the plane, got killed, or is going to get killed by Death comes back to life with no negative consequences?"

Alex had been speaking from the heart with those first two wishes, yet at the same time had been speaking half-sarcastically, while shooting his visitor a look that made it obvious what hypothetical wish would really matter the most. Years later, Alex would thank God, the strength of how much he missed his friends, the odd tinge of purple smoke he’d noticed in the air, and the look of horror the Fuller Foundation's representative was making for adding that last wish right then instead of throwing in a few more frivolous ones as gallows humor.

He, Billy, Carter, and Clear all died, but they came back, and so did Terry, Blake and Christa, Mrs. Lewton, Mr. Murnau, and all the others. Mr. Murnau had even gotten thirty kids to board another Volée Airlines flight for a second and far less disastrous trip to Paris. Tod, Billy and Mrs. Lawton had been a little peeved at Alex for not just stopping their brutal deaths from ever happening to begin with but had mellowed out after hearing how their deaths had inadvertently saved Kim Corman, Tom Burke, and Eugene Dix. Blake and Christa going on their first double date with Tod and Billy after the two boys helped Clear and Terry talk Blake and Christa through an existential crisis also helped the two boys see another bright side of having died and came back.

The media frenzy behind their return from the dead in perfectly healthy bodies almost made up for the sense of humiliation and loss he felt over his wasted first two wishes. That being said, he wasn't going to complain about how much less depressing shows like Bones and Murdoch Mysteries felt without the nice guy suspects killing someone and throwing their lives away over poor communication so often. Or about Lennie Briscoe ending up an offscreen deputy mayor and Claire Kincaid’s death being retconned in Law and Order after the death of Jerry Orbrach, Han Solo and Princess Leia surviving the Star Wars Sequel Trilogy, D.L. Hawkins and Elle Bishop ending up as the lead characters of the Heroes revival where no returning characters got killed off, and the return of Dr. Scott in the final season of The Last Ship, just to name a few.

Nonetheless, whenever visionaries who'd wished on that ring and their families got together to talk about the things no one else could quite understand, that stood out as Alex's biggest embarrassment. Rory Peters and his fiancée even requested a wedding toast jokingly thanking Kim for Using her other two wishes to combat redlining and request scientists never deliberately lie about pollution or climate change, even if their truths were unexpected or uncomfortable to her, whatever it was. Then came the day where he and Clear could only massage their foreheads as their youngest son and eldest daughter made the brothers from The Swiss Family Robinson's feud over a shared love look like a model of chivalry after the Browning kids challenged each other to a ren faire joust over which one of them would get to ask Julia Campbell out on a date. From that day on, his wish to the genie was only the second most embarrassing moment of his life.

Chapter Text

Three weeks after the Campbells meeting with the Fullers, quite a lot of money had changed hands and the Fullers were staring hard at a very, very old looking Aztec statue as they waited for the arrival of a Romani family. 

"Are you really telling me that this statue is the only one in the world old enough for this to work?" asked Paul.

"The only Aztec one not in a museum, broken pieces, or off the maps," said Beatrice. "We might be able to find a few more from other pantheons if necessary. But the professor whose journal I showed you tried this little experiment on twenty newer effigies before deciding that one from an era where people were a lot closer to the idea of Death walking among them. Death triggering a damn Earthquake to kill him right before he could get at another piece this old suggests he was on to something."

"I can't believe we're really going to send Death to Hell?" asked Iris, her eyes looking almost as wide as her breasts. "I mean, that's great for us. Great for most of the world, in a lot of ways. But would that mean we never see Heaven? That all the people with cancer, or bad burns, or paralyzed from the waist down just stay that way forever, whether they're at peace with it or not?"

"Don't worry," Bertrand assured her. "The visionary whose journal this is might have lived if he'd set off right away instead of having those same doubts. He spent almost a year going through old, old books which maybe a hundred people might look at in twice as many years until he found stories of how, back when he could walk the Earth in plain sight, Death would boast to us puny humans about how he won his job in a fight, killing a lot of his brothers. His job. If he's gone, then someone else will be there to fill in. Hopefully, they'll be more reasonable, but if not, then we keep on doing this again and again."

Iris nodded and looked hard into the statue's face. "You've sent a lot of people to Hell, Death. You of everyone must have a good idea of what it's like there. Eternity must seem even longer for you than it would for us. Unless you want a close, intimate relationship with fire, then you let every one of us from the Sky View, and all our descendants live. Every future visionary and the people they save to." She thought about how haunting those memories of the horrible deaths in her vision were. How they made her whimper, and cry in her sleep every few days and had even made her wet the bed twice. She thought of all the other people who Death would put through the same thing one day. "You know what? Scratch that. You have to stop any, and I mean any, incident in the future that someone would have a vision about. Stop it before it happens, so that no one dies, whether they'd have heeded the vision or not, and those poor visionaries don't have to share the kind of nightmares I have." The doors opened, and the Gheorghescus walked in with their equipment. "You have two hours to send a sign that you understand and will comply. If you try and do anything to stop us as we start up, then consider the end of that deadline reached."

Not even two minutes later, the radio suddenly switched itself on, and the Campbells, Fullers, and hired occultists listened to a dazed announcer talking about how all of the Sky View customers who had died since Iris's vision had suddenly reappeared alive, wandering naked and confused into the campaign speech of a segregationist political hopeful (who never would recover his momentum, or his placement in the polls, after a photographer caught him looking at a naked woman with a quite unsettling leer). The people had no memories of their apparent deaths, they just knew who they were, and that they felt something about the Sky View. A police investigation would find their graves empty, leading to all kinds of conspiracy theories about who could have faked their deaths. More than one poor medical examiner found that the only way to save their credibility and career was to make up stories of sinister, trenchcoat-clad figures who'd threatened the doctors' families to get falsified death certificates. 

The Gheorghecsus never did cast any spells on the statue but were still well paid for their time. Iris heard later that a black sheep of the family's misdeeds would later go on to inspire Ram Raimi's Drag Me to Hell, although he never did admit to being inspired by real life and gave the unfortunate young bank employee in his movie a far darker fate than her inspiration. 

Iris and Paul both lived past their hundredth birthdays, long enough to see all of their grandchildren become grandparents. They ended up stuck in an elevator with Peter Friedkin for a few hours once and passed the time talking about the Adam West Batman show with him. Stefani was on the committee that handed Eugene Dix (who still found his life being prolonged because of one Yuki Saito, just like in another possible future with a certain time machine) his first Teacher of the Year award out of five just three years after he moved to her hometown. Blake Dreyer and her little sister Carrie, Ashlyn Halperin, and Ashley Freund, and even a blushing Wendy Christensen would all end up buying skimpy bikinis (and, in Wendy and Ashley's cases, even skimpier speedos for their boyfriend's Christmas presents) from a department store that Paul was working at as a promotions director and all of them had lunch just a few tables away from him at the food court that day. Two years after that, Paul convinced Iris to let Wendy and Jason Wise have their table at an overbooked restaurant after seeing something in Jason's posture that reminded him of himself and iris all those years ago at the Sky View (and for good reason, as he saw in his favorite paper's wedding announcements a few months later). The year that Nick and Lori O'Bannion's daughter, Lori Jr. entered and won the Tour de France, she hired Erik Campbell to give her a racecar tattoo on her shoulder as an odd little boast.

There were about five hundred little moments like that with just the next two generations of Campbells after Paul and Iris alone. Because there had never been visions, never even been disasters, none of those moments really meant a thing more than normal to anyone involved. Yet, every time one of them happened, whichever member of Iris's bloodline was involved would go to bed that night with a twinkle in their eyes and something especially melodic about the beating of their heart.

Lori Jr. 

Chapter Text

"Color TV, I already miss you," Said Kirby Dylan, staring at the Time Machine. It was less than a week after the Fullers had shown the Campbells the scribblings of the late physicist who had come up with this idea, but they had given the lawyer in charge of organizing and funding the time travel project a letter ordering the scientists to appear at the end of that meeting (before the letter was even written) if they ever succeeded in the endeavor. They had, and the Fullers, Campbells, and scientists had wasted no time in tracking down the next survivor marked for death and making an offer he couldn’t refuse.

"Would you miss fifteen million dollars more?" asked Paul.

"Not even close," replied his fellow Sky View survivor, a baker who had only gotten into the Sky View with his sister when an old college classmate with a trust fund made the VIP reservation for him for his birthday.

"Beatrice Fuller giveth, and Beatrice Fuller can take that away if you violate this contract and don’t mess up the timeline or get yourselves killed. Live a risk free life, only marry someone from this list of women in that city who never get married in the timeline we remember, and only use the money for your publicity and maybe charities like getting more Jews out of Europe and better housing in segregated neighborhoods," said Beatrice. "Otherwise the regular couriers we send back with the occassional modern luxury might sicc the IRS on you instead." Kirby nodded. His own mother, uncles, and maternal grandparents lived in such a neighborhood in 1919, and he would be glad to do that for them.

Kirby looked over his 1919 appropriate wardrobe, shook hands with his benefactors, and left. He was the next person on Death’s list, and Death never could find him. Kirby and his descendants were all alive and multiplying in 1970, but since they were using different names and not of the ages Death expected, 1970 Death never could find them, while 1919 Death noticed some odd things about them but never realized they had been marked.

Because Death could not kill Kirby, he could never move on to the next name on the list or his growing family even as survivors further down the list got older and closer to a natural death. Death did what he could to keep them alive, but he could only focus on one at a time, and once twenty of them were hooked up to life support machines at a time, that meant that, eventually, someone (by coincidence a great-great uncle of future McKinley Speedway survivor Jonathan Groves) died out of order.

Like Ian McKinley would speculate in a future many years later (where he would manage to kill himself out of order to join his girlfriend in Death and save the remaining six survivors of a rollercoaster accident), for every action, there was a reaction. A broken list.

Every time Death claimed a member of the Campbell bloodline, he would bar his teeth in hatred while escorting them to Heaven (and it was always to Heaven, never to Hell, no matter how much Death longered for the day) as he thought of all the trouble the family had caused him.

Even with more than one relative in the military, it would take until 2308 for there to be a Campbell descendant who died younger than the age of 75.

Chapter Text

Iris and Paul looked down at the file Bertrand was showing them: typewritten pages with a writing style and series of names that they quickly recognized.

"That's right," said Bertand. "You're looking at a chapter of Joanna Fawley's autobiography that her publisher made her cut to keep the sales out of the toilet and the two of them out of the loony bin." A blonde woman with faint Puerto Rican features from her mother's side of the family, Joanna Fawley was the great-granddaughter of a railroad baron whose hatred for his eldest son Vincent had caused him to leave 15% of his fortune to that branch of the family, but tied up in investments and trusts, with his son to only receive a fraction of the dividends, and Vincent's issue to only inherit equal shares of the 15% and any accumulated money once Vincent was dead. Consequently, Joanna had attracted some media interest as a rare blue-collar heiress, working two jobs as an electrician and a blackjack dealer at a Seminole casino.

She and her three brothers had marched with Martin Luther King Jr. at Selma and gained further public attention by being among the people narrowly saved from a KKK bombing two months after the march. The bomb had been serendipitously uncovered by one of King's fellow ministers, saving up to fifty lives. Now that Paul and Iris thought about it, seven of those survivors (including a Fawley brother) had died over the next year under mysterious and bloody circumstances that some ascribed to further KKK attacks.

Then, the deaths had abruptly stopped. Joanna and her remaining brothers had lived to inherit millions and surprised the world by buying engagement rings for their respective partners, nice but modest house, and a few stocks that looked likely to build up modest retirement funds before donating the rest of the money to charities devoted to food banks, hospitals, and literacy programs. When asked why, the siblings had said that being poor and being happy weren't as closely associated as some romantically-minded writers liked to say, but that there were other people with a lot less than they'd had growing up who deserved the benefit of that money more, especially when they felt blessed and lucky to still be alive to inherit anything in the first place after that bomb scare.

"So that minister who found the bomb, Cowell, had a vision like Iris," asked Paul, holding his wife's hand a little tighter as he thought back to the Sky View and how sick to his stomach he'd felt after Iris pointed out the various dangers there.

"Yep. Then people started dying, just like with you. Until they hit on a way to stop Death. When he came for his next victim, they had a hypnotist waiting nearby. World-class guy that Joanna knew from when he'd perform at the casino where she worked. And with him, they had an occultist from the old country named Gheroghescu, some cousin twice removed of Joanna's boyfriend, a tattooist named Antonio who’d loved and lost a visionary of some earlier disaster and was the one to help her and Cowell figure out the threat in the first place. The older Gheorhescu’s job was to rub a few medallions so that hypnotist could see Death. with Joanna and Reverend Cowell tagging along with the two of them to make sure neither ducked out early. When Death appeared, the hypnotist talked to him about how much extra work killing these people was, and how bad of a reputation it got Death, and how didn't he just wish that he could completely forget all about this people, and their kids, and these weird people who could actually see and talk to him? Didn't he wish that he could never hear anyone ever talking about them and their defiance of Death ever again, no matter who was saying it? It worked, and they got to live."

"I can kind of see why her publisher was afraid to put that in her book," said Paul. "But right now I feel like saying more prayers than Reverend Cowell ever has in his life over how she wrote that down. Does she say the name of that hypnotist?"

"She does."

"Then let's hope that whoever is next on that list is willing to have him and Gheorghescu stay with them while they wait for Death to come."

"So many people fell at once, I'm not sure who that is," said Iris, voice breaking a little.

"So, we get anyone it could be together at once for this," said Mr. Fuller. "It might take some spending, but I think we can manage it."

He was right. The closest any of the Campbells came to death of anything but old age for the next seventy-five years was when Bobby got his first and only concussion on the college football field. The same was true of Alex Browning and Clear Rivers' eldest son. Their own narrow escape led to the Fullers setting up a trust for apprentices of Gheorghescu and the hypnotist to save future visionaries and their companions. Although Joanna Fawley never knew it, one of the people that deleted chapter of her memoirs saved would be her own granddaughter, Lori Milligan.

Death no longer actively targeting the descendants of a survivor didn't mean that some of them couldn't' be coincidentally present at the scene of a disaster with a different visionary. That would happen four more times over the next century, including with Stefani Reyes and her husband and daughters. Every single time, that descendant was saved anyway thanks to a hypnotist and an occultist.

Chapter Text

Stepping into the crowded hospital room, Craig 'Chet' Carnes gazed down at Beatrice Fuller, lying there in a bed surrounded by flowers, looking weaker by the second as the chiming clock signaled the beginning of her 106th birthday. He hadn't been there when Paul and Iris Campbell convinced the Fullers of the danger Death posed to the survivors, but he'd heard the stories about how Bertrand had pulled out a file describing the secret inspiration for Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, as told by Shelley to a biographer who'd decided the world wasn't ready for the story.

If Shelley was to be believed, a third cousin of hers had been a visionary who performed such an experiment on a friend of his after Death had killed the man. Having already killed that survivor once, like it was within his power to, Death suddenly lost his power over that man and couldn't do it again, with his whole plan being messed up. New life through such artificial and contrived means (in the scientific sense, not a moral one) was still new life.

Chet and his daughters sat down next to Iris and her family. Iris was busy telling a story about Paul to a barely comprehending little Julia and Stefani, while Erik seemed uncomfortable being so close to Death and was distracting himself reading a Hardy Boys book. If not for the solemn occassion, Chet would have chuckled about that. He had gotten his nickname from that series, after, like its famous sidekick, he'd spent high school buddying around with two brothers named Hardy with a detective father (although they'd never tried to help him out on a case).

It had taken a a few years for even the Fullers' wealth to finance the building of a device that could bring back the dead under conditions where Death couldn't sabotage it. Paul had died by then, as had many other survivors. The machine brought every one of them back. Just saving Paul might have been enough for everyone else, but the Fullers and Iris were adamanat that everyone deserved a chance. Upgraded versions of the reanimation technology had also brought back Candice Hooper and Olivia Castle from the North Bay Bridge (Isaac Palmer had been cremated before they could get his body), the four doomed survivors of Flight 180, Kim Corman's friends Dano, Shaina, and Frankie from Route 23, and many others. Each time, it had been enough to stop Death's list from progressing. A few times, Death had tried to ensure there wouldn't be enough of a body left to resurect, like with a woodshipper, crushing someone as flat as a sheet of paper, or setting off huge explosions), but those kinds of disasters took time to set up, and, with proper warnings, the survivors stayed far enough away from anything that could butcher them that thoughly until it was time to trigger new life and make them safe. Subsequent visions like the Hotel Grand Tzolk’in fire and the roller coaster and speedway incidents in McKinley had seen Death make no effort to kill the survivors, having realized it would be futile and admitting defeat in a manner which seemed sulkier than even Ian McKinley could have ever aspired to be whenever anyone dreamed about it. 

The people brought back by the Fuller-financed machine had blurry memories of what may have be been an afterlife, as well as aches, pains and, odd feelings about where they belonged in the world. But they'd been happy on Earth. Capable of having children, falling in love, and more. Their bodies were restored to a much fresher and more natural state than the monsters in Shelley's book and James Whale's 1931 movie. Nonetheless, they came with an expiration date. The technology had since improved, but the first group of resurrected survivors had only gotten 30 more years of life. They'd spent it well, but in the end, it ran out. Paul had died in Iris's arms as they sat on a porch swing and looked at family photo albums together. None of the other reborn survivors had outlasted him by more than a month. 

That had been not quite eight months ago. And Beatrice Fuller had been next on Death's list when all the past victims were resurected. If Death was going to start killing people again, then he would start with her. Was it just a coincidence that she was dying here and now? Her husband lay in the bed beside her, in an equally vegetative state, but his vitals remained steady for now while hers were fading despite the efforts of a Palliative care team. Once she died, would it be the turn of the people who'd fallen off the crumbling staircase? And then the people Iris had described seeing in the elevator, including Beatrice's husband and Chet himself. Not to mention all of their descendants...

Chet put an arm around each of his daughters' shoulders and hugged tightly. They were here out of frightened curiosity, but also to pay respects to someone who'd done so much for their family. The same was true of the Campbells, the Jansens, the Parkers, and the other ten Sky View families he could see present there. Beatrice had saved them. She had stood up to scorn and frusutration from the public for refusing to use the technology for just anything (just vision survivors and some exceptional cases for people who died in affecting ways at young ages and/or in extreme poverty).

If Death was going to start up again, then at least he'd gotten to become a father and grandfather. Watch his daughters accomplish so much at the school Leia worked and the pharmacy Ava frequented. Had it been fun spending all these years hearing about the shadow of Death? Of course not. But would he have rather just died in the plummeting Sky View elevator? Hell no.

There was a commotion at the door, and William Bludworth and one of his little sisters: Harriet the private investigator, to be specific. Both seemed to be in an unusually buoyant mood and were smiling up until they took in the sight of the Fullers. Lowering their heads, they walked up to Beatrice, and each held one of her hands. 

"You did it," William said quietly. "If you can hear me anywhere inside there, you beat Death. Harriet here just finished tracking down all the Sky View survivors who never really bought into your theories and didn't keep in touch. Three of them have passed on in the last six months: heart attack, a suicide by poison-and the guy left a note-, and cancer. No crazy accidents like the kind Death loved back in the day, just completely natural deaths. And all of them for people who were supposed to die after you in that vision Iris had. Death didn't start up his list once Paul and the others died the second time. Our lives and deaths are still our own. We're free. All thanks to you and Bertie over there."

For just a second, the comatose Beatrice's lips seemed to twitch up in a smile. Two minutes later, she flatlined. Then, twenty minutes after that, once her body had been removed and the visitors had been about to depart, the machines Bertand was hooked up to began to make odd noises. Less than an hour later, he'd followed his wife into death, once again, well out of order than the way he was supposed to have died.

Many decades later, it was Chet's turn to lay peacefully in bed, surrounded by relatives, fellow Sky View survivors, and descendants of survivors himself. There still hadn't been another case of a Sky View survivor or their descendant dying in a contrived and sadistically painful accident. Or a Flight 180 survivor. Or a survivor from any other accidents. Frankenstein may not have stood much of a chance against a few villagers with torches, but he'd been strong and scary enough to chase Death away.