“Hills burn in California
My turn to ignore ya
Don’t say I didn’t warn ya”
She is the beast that stalks the stage, the howling wind through a torn-apart wall. The poison princess. The valkyrie vulture.
Is Billie Eilish a witch?
Drenched in floodlights, mauled by bass, flung to godhood by ten thousand mouths. Stamping, storming, raging. Poison-green hair whiplashing as she headbangs. Ethereal-voiced yet built like a wrecking ball of meat—painted-on boyshorts exploding with ass and thigh, big heavy tits cannonballing up and down beneath a puffer jacket.
Is she a witch?
Few contemporary pop icons reach into their own vulnerability and use it as the reagent for such anabolic mayhem. She is a raw, ragged heart of shrapnel steel. She hurts. She’ll hurt you twice as bad. Billie Eilish is this. This is Billie Eilish.
Witch?
* * *
You weren’t aware that Billie Eilish witch hunters exist.
They gather on the dark web, where screen names and chat logs can be consigned to the flame if law enforcement comes looking. Their Discord and Telegram channels bear sinister, vaguely threatening names, like #PIRATEHUNTERS and #BADGUYS and #(FUN)ERAL(FOR)S(HE) and #KILLBILL.
They believe Billie Eilish is a force spat from hell, and the most depraved among them regard it as their duty to send her back there, forever. Even their less sinister wing—the lorekeeping division—relates to the star in a way that is frankly horrifying to think about.
>@whenthecovensover: guys, listen.
>@whenthecovensover: i stayed up all night again and my marriage is probs over lol
>@whenthecovensover: but i THINK i figured out “Bury A Friend”
>@whenthecovensover: all along, it was SO. OBVIOUS.
>@whenthecovensover: “make you my art and make you a star”.
>@whenthecovensover: star = zodiac.
>@whenthecovensover: “I’ll meet you in the park / you’d fall apart”
>@whenthecovensover: most of the zodiac murders happened in PARKS
>@whenthecovensover: so many things line up. it cannot be a coincidence.
>@whenthecovensover: BILLIE EILISH COMMITTED THE ZODIAC MURDERS
>@hexenhammer666: except the zodiac murders happened in, like, the 60s and bills was born in 2001, so…
>@whenthecovensover: yeah its a little awkward
>@whenthecovensover: you either have to believe @xannyyy‘s “time travel” billielore or @0c34n3y3s’ “immortal vampire” billielore. take your pick.
>@Goldwing69: ban this troll. @BillieSexMagic posted this exact billielore last year.
>@WitchierThanEver: ffs, stop analyzing every lyric in every song like it’s a riddle. we’ve been over this a million times, BAF has nothing to do with the zodiac murders, its an incantation to summon shub-niggurath from its thousand-year sleep beneath billie eilish’s bed.
This kind of obsessive superfan is nothing new and would be regarded with only exhausted familiarity in the Beatles fandom. (Maybe if you play a 45 RPM of “I Am The Walrus” backward at 78 RPM you’ll discover that it was Ringo who died.) For several years, the Billie Eilish witch hunters were ignored, derided, or treated as a weird but harmless freak show.
This year, they started trying to kill her.
* * *
He hadn’t looked dangerous as he paced the sidewalk on 16th Street.
Or so people later said, to excuse the fact that they had mostly done nothing to save Billie.
Just a twenty-something Caucasian male with a matching black hoodie and chinos, kicking an empty Coke can back and forth. Six guys like him on every San Fran street corner.
Chase Center loomed high above his pacing, a cenotaph against a sky of plague purple. Billie Eilish had just wrapped up a sold-out US stadium tour.
Fans flocking to tonight’s show had been confronted by a police cordon, wrapping the venue from Terry A Francois Blvd, to UCSF Mission Bay on 3rd Street. With online threats swirling, Billie had stepped up her venue security, and a weapons-check line was now in force.
Cops had searched the man, found his wallet, his truck keys, and his plastic asthma inhaler case, and allowed him through.
The show had finished an hour ago. Billie Eilish had left the venue, or so it seemed—a limo had driven away over the 4th St Bridge, motorcaded by police escort, with a sea of screaming fans crushing in from each side.
She was gone. There was no reason to stay.
But the man stayed.
Night wore on. Banks of high-voltage stadium lights shut off with loud clunks. Darkness devoured the building one chunk at a time. The crowds surrounding Chase Center slowly dispersed, but the hoodied man still didn’t leave. He kept throwing glances at a certain door.
He seemed highly aware of certain things.
Like the fact that stars of Billie Eilish’s wattage often hire a decoy to leave the venue ahead of them. That they arrive and leave disguised, and at unexpected times.
The back door started to open at midnight. Hoodieguy’s eyes snapped onto the knob before it made a quarter-turn.
The door swung open. Four figures stepped through, out into the street, shrouded in jackets.
Like Hoodieguy, they had dressed like nobodies. Three of them actually were. Bodyguard, press agent, mother.
The fourth was a generationally famous pop singer and one of the most famous women alive.
The man’s stare went right onto her.
He began to walk forward, unscrewing the cap of his asthma inhaler case.
Billie Eilish’s entourage filed toward the crosswalk on 16th Street, where another limo waited.
The man began to run.
* * *
Billie’s bodyguard saw Hoodieguy make a play for his client, and stepped in.
Hoodieguy found himself blocked by a wall of muscle. Knuckles closed with rock-crushing force on his shoulders.
“Going somewhere, shitbird?” Billie’s bodyguard was a 6’4 steroid-pumped bruiser from Gavin de Becker & Associates who likely had more muscle mass in his neck than Hoodieguy had in his whole body.
But that neck suddenly had a fifty-thousand-volt taser pressed against it.
Fssst. Crackle.
The bodyguard’s eyelids burst open wide, then he fell to the sidewalk.
Billie—! Billie’s mother screamed. The scream cut out as Hoodieguy shoulder-charged her out of his path. Her head rang a sharp note against a flagpole, then she joined the bodyguard on the ground.
Hoodieguy stepped past the bodies—stepped toward Billie. She did not move. Black on black, he moved smoothly, with intent, pouring out of the night like nacreous oil. He seemed inhuman. Like a shadow severed from its body.
A dozen bystanders froze.
Billie’s press agent froze.
Billie froze.
Just one person on the street seemed to know what happened next. Hoodieguy.
“Billie…” he whispered. “Billiebilliebillie…”
He smiled. In his wet teeth, distorted reflections of streetlights coiled and surged like voltage.
“You know what’s coming next, slut. Just like in the Bible. Twenty-two. Eighteen. Get it?”
Lunging, he snatched Billie’s wrist.
* * *
She was too shocked to scream.
He was strong and fast. His hand closed like an iron band on her slender wrist, and she was pulled forward.
She tried to pull back, and stumbled instead. The stacked platform heel of a Chuck Taylor caught an upraised jag of sidewalk, and ripped off the shoe. Billie unbalanced still further, pitching over sideways.
As she was dragged across the ground, her shock-fractured expression swept left and right at the people around her. Help me! Do something!
A dozen people were watching. And doing nothing.
Every celebrity believes—somewhere deep, below conscious thought—that their fans don’t love them. That it’s all fake, and will soon disappear. Often, they’re right.
Billie’s face distorted as horrified understanding plunged into it, like a stone breaking still water.
She was simply not a human being to anyone on this street. She was bread and circuses, she was entertainment, she was a sound ebbing like a draught from their Airpods on the SFMTA Muni to school—a fad they’d soon grow out of, and then forget.
Hey, remember Billie Eilish? Damn, haven’t thought of her in years. I was there the night she got raped and murdered. Wanna see the pics?
Not long ago, she’d stood before eighteen thousand fans, their faces melting into one ecstatic scream. I LOVE YOU!
Two hours later, she was about to die and nobody cared except her.
* * *
Billie Eilish was dragged by her arm across the street. The most famous sack of potatoes in the world. Hoodieguy’s fingers were like claws on her wrist.
He’d made it to the crosswalk when—
—blurring motion, feet pounding sidewalk—
—a tiny shape crash-tackled him from the side.
As a sudden impact folded him like laundry, Hoodieguy lost his grip on Billie’s wrist. She crashed to the pavement, blinking in shock.
A 5’4” stockboy from inside Chase Center had heard Billie’s mother scream, and had done what nobody else had done. He fearlessly threw himself at Hoodieguy, punching, kicking, biting, not letting him regain his balance. Hoodieguy staggered, turning his face into a nose-breaking left. Followed by a right hook that rocked him sideways.
As gale-force destruction beat against him, he went for the taser he’d used on Billie’s bodyguard. He lashed out with it, felt the metal prongs drag against bare flesh, and grinned. Blood and light flared on his dentition.
“Got you.”
He squeezed the trigger on the taser. The kid didn’t fall.
Hoodieguy’s face twisted in an expression of confusion—whaaa?—which a fist promptly smashed off his dial.
It didn’t matter that the little stockboy was 5’4” and probably half Hoodieguy’s weight. He broke Billie’s assailant like a stick of firewood, pounding him to his knees and then to the ground. The black hoodie flipped back off his head, exposing a dazed face craquelured in blood. Blinking, he tried to rise. A fist cracked against his temple. The punch was raw and visceral. Red droplets sprayed the sidewalk. Hoodieguy faceplanted, and stayed down this time.
The kid landed on top of Hoodieguy, pinned him with a knee to the spine, and snick-snicked his wrists together with the nylon zip-tie gun he used on his job.
He lifted his head and shouted at the street.
“He’s down. Someone call the cops!”
Billie’s press agent dialed, frantic that the record showed she’d done something during the attempted abduction of her client.
While she fat-fingered 911 four times, the kid rose from his position on Hoodieguy’s body. He gazed at a street of onlookers, and shook his head ruefully.
“You people suck. Seriously.”
* * *
Billie had regained her feet, in certain senses.
She stood quivering, spiraling into trauma shock. Her face became a gallery of twitches and shudders under the streetlights. She hyperventilated, sucking air in wild, horrified breaths.
No one comforted her. She was alone, on the worst night that had ever fallen on her.
Her mom lay moaning on the concrete. Her bodyguard was a jerking heap of twitching muscle, as if Doctor Frankenstein had failed to pay the electricity meter partway through his experiment. Billie’s press agent had been connected to San Francisco’s fire department by mistake and was screaming into the phone.
Bystanders began moving in on Billie, circling her. With her assailant down for the count, the spell broke, and a familiar situational dynamic asserted itself. Star and fan.
“Ohmygod, what’s going on?”
“Sucka got his ass beat, yo! WORLDSTARRR!”
“Wait…is that Billie Eilish?”
“Holy shit, it IS her!”
“Wait, was that man kidnapping her?”
“BILLIE! WE LOVE YOU!!!”
Camera flashes sprayed harsh light over Billie’s face, pushing shadows onto her jacket from her trembling hands, which rose to cross over her chest. A discordant sea of noise rose up, surrounded her, swallowed her. Raw, unalloyed need. More more more.
Ashen-faced, Billie stared at her fans like they were vultures gathering for her corpse. Over and over, she rubbed the wrist her attacker had seized.
Curling her arms protectively over herself, she tried to shrink away. But there was nowhere to shrink to.
* * * 
The stockboy stepped forward, and folded his hand over hers.
“Billie? It’s over. You’re safe.”
Billie flinched at the touch.
“Gwaa…” she murmured.
He released her hand, then squeezed her shoulder.
“Let’s play a game.” He spoke calmly, as if to a spooked horse. “Look around the street. Tell me the first green thing you see.”
“Why?” Her voice was a child’s whisper.
“Just do it. Find something green. Go.”
For ten seconds, she shook and quivered in his grip. Barely there. Her lungs pulled the night air in and out of her in senseless lurches.
Then she answered. “Buh…buh…bus stop.”
The kid glanced over his shoulder, where a bus stop advertised the NBA preseason home game. He guessed the blue Golden State Warriors logo was kinda green under the light.
“Fine. I’ll allow it. Green bus stop. Tell me five other green things on the street.”
Billie’s breath calmed as she played the strange game. Her eyes did abstruse, yet focused zigzags all up and down 16th Street.
“Green leaves. Green grass. Green flagpole. Green spotlight. Green car.”
“Heck yeah!” The boy grinned. “World’s number one green expert, right here! Slaying it!”
A sudden showstopping grin split Billie’s face. She didn’t stop at five. “Green trash can. Green manhole cover. Another green car.”
Then her eyes went to her rescuer’s jacket, which was hi-viz green. “Um…not sure on a name…”
He tugged the collar. “North Face.”
She giggled quickly, insolently, then shadowed her mouth with her hand.
“No, silly. Your name.”
“Huh?” He frowned in confusion. For the first time, he did not know what to do or say. “Why do you want to know my name?”
Billie stared with hard, piercing regard. Her face seemed to deepen in the queer midnight, as though she existed in four dimensions, instead of the factory-issued three. A lock of black hair slid loose from her bun, and made her skin look like cracked porcelain.
“Your name…” Billie rolled the strand into a clockspring, nibbling her lip thoughtfully. “…it starts with C or B, doesn’t it? I think it’s a B.”
The young man’s face was blank.
“Why are you here?” Billie asked coldly, stepping forward.
He stepped away.
“What do you want?” Billie’s voice gained force. Raw from two hours of screaming into a mic, it rang across the street in command. “Why did you come? Why are you here?”
The boy didn’t seem to have an answer and didn’t have a chance to think of one, because Billie’s mother had just returned to Earth.
“BILLIE!” She yanked her daughter away from the stockboy. “GET AWAY FROM HER! GET YOUR HANDS OFF HER!”
The boy stepped back, hands up. “Sure. Relax. All good. Stepping back.”
Sirens blared. Red-blue lights splashed the street, turning the grimy concrete wasteland to Christmas.
The cops were here.
Billie’s mom howled laughter, veins contorting her face. A bulge the size of a robin’s egg throbbed on her forehead.
“YOU’RE GOING TO JAIL!” Head trauma had simplified the world. Someone had threatened her daughter. This young man was someone. Thus, he had threatened her daughter. “YOU’RE GOING TO JAIL FOR WHAT YOU DID!”
“Mom, stop!” Billie gripped and squeezed her mother’s shoulders. “He saved me! Didn’t you…”
Billie turned back, and found the sidewalk empty.
“Hello?”
Her rescuer had fled.
* * *
Cops peeled Billie’s attacker off the sidewalk. His name was David Spalser.
“I just wanted to say hi!” David wailed as the impromptu zip ties were removed, and replaced with metal handcuffs. “And then her bodyguard attacked me for no reason! I just wanted to say hi!”
This is the unparalleled apex of doubtful.
The whole street had heard what he’d said before grasping Billie’s wrist. You know what’s coming next, slut. Just like in the Bible. Twenty-two. Eighteen. Get it?
Exodus 22:18, in the King James edition, is “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.”
To be fair to David Spalser, he did not specify which book he was quoting. He may have meant Jeremiah 22:18. “Therefore thus saith the LORD concerning Jehoiakim the son of Josiah king of Judah…”
But the Exodus 22:18 reading is compelling.
David had been dragging Billie Eilish toward his truck, which he’d parallel-parked just outside the train station.
In the back, police found a knife and a roll of duct tape.
* * *
The attack on Billie Eilish didn’t just make the headlines. For a couple of days it was the entirety of the news.
Every aspect of it was bizarre. David Spalser, a 25-year-old sous-chef who worked at a Michelin-starred restaurant, did not fit the typical profile of obsessed star stalker. He was an upstanding citizen with no history of mental illness and a criminal record so clean you could perform an immunological assay on top of it.
But even if he wasn’t insane, his plan had been.
He’d attempted to kidnap Billie Eilish in public, in front of a dozen witnesses. They’d done nothing, but he couldn’t have predicted this.
And suppose he’d stuck his taser into the anticonductive Teflon vest that Billie’s bodyguard wore? Suppose Billie had had two bodyguards in her entourage that night? Suppose she’d had mace in her purse or knew karate? His plan could have failed a hundred times and in a hundred ways.
And the kicker was, it was always going to fail at the end anyway. To get back to his truck, David Spalser would have had to drag the struggling, wrestling singer six hundred yards, and then he’d have been stopped at the police weapon search line. He absolutely would have been caught at that point, regardless of what else happened.
The young man’s rescue had been brave, but honestly, it hadn’t really mattered that much.
David’s plot to abduct and kill Billie Eilish was a lunatic’s plan. Its chance of success was zero.
Why had he done it? Why had he thrown away his life?
* * *
The tale had an unlikely villain, and an unlikelier hero.
Billie’s savior had fled the scene, but a fan had photographed him comforting a crying Billie Eilish. They’d put it—and him—on the ’Gram, with the hashtag #DUDESROCK.
The photo went more viral than Ebola.
The guy had a tiny birthmark on his face. This was all ten million Billie Eilish fans needed to unmask him as Brandon Kurzwell, a 23-year-old forklift driver employed part time in the Chase Center loading dock. Within hours, Billie stans had dug up all of Brandon’s socials. They found his Facebook, his X.com account, and his competitive Pokémon teambuilding profile on Smogon.
For two days, Brandon Kurzwell was the most beloved man in America.
This didn’t last. He was no knight in shining armor.
His five-year-old online dating profile surfaced. He had oversized sunglasses and was giving a middle finger in his photo. It gave his education as da school of stackin paper, his job as keepin it real and his desired qualities in a partner no uggos. They also found his Reddit account, asking why his online dating profile was getting no messages. His posts grew increasingly sulky and bitter.
>honestly, fuck women.
>stuck up whores.
>none of you deserve a nice, kind, compassionate man like me.
Public opinion of Brandon Kurzwell was falling through the floor, and then he was discovered in a six-year-old Reddit thread called “most overrated musician?”
>“billie eilish. the literal definition of mid. cant stand the weird ass bitch. fat jugs tho.”
The speed of Brandon’s hero-to-villain arc was really something. Within a week, he’d declined from #DUDESROCK to I agree Brandon is problematic but… to suggestions that he be locked in the same cell as David Spalser.
“I knew Brandon Kurzwhine would turn out to be incel manbaby trash,” a noted Billietoker said while doing her makeup on livestream to two thousand viewers. “Let’s be real… was he even that brave? He beat up a methed-out fry cook. Wow, so heroic. Any of us would have done the same if we’d been there, really.”
* * *
Brandon did the only thing a person in his shoes has ever done or will ever do: freak out.
Deluged by fan noise—love, hate, stalking, cancellation attempts, marriage proposals—he friendslocked his socials and scrubbed every piece of doxx off the internet. His X.com profile now bore a simple message beneath the padlock.
im sorry. leave me alone.
He knew he’d been young and stupid. He knew he’d posted dumb crap on the internet. He’d never wanted to be a hero or a public figure or to have every mistake he’d ever made dragged out and placed under a microscope.
He’d stepped in to help a young woman in danger. That was all.
Most people listened, and left him alone.
But someone didn’t.
* * *
Brandon sat perched on a packing box in his aunt’s house, wearing his thumbs out on Guilty Gear X. The house’s furniture was shrinkwrapped against dust, and he was barred from using any of it for its intended purpose. Packing boxes were his friend. This one had held a Maytag deep-fryer.
He was working on his Roman cancels when his phone rang. He flinched, glared at it in disgust, then took the call.
“Hello?”
“Is this Brandon?” A velveteen-sheathed voice spoke.
He didn’t recognize the caller’s number. “Don’t call back. I don’t want to talk to you, whoever you are.”
“This is Billie.”
Silence.
“Um, hi?” Billie Eilish sounded awkward, unsure. She spoke tight, broken clusters of words with the care of a person stepping across slippery stones in a river. “We, er, met last week. When the thing happened. You ran away. Before I could thank you. Do you have a few minutes? To talk, I mean?”
“Er. Sure. Wow.”
It was Billie’s turn to let silence stretch beyond endurance.
“How are you going?” Brandon gulped, suddenly desperate.
“I’m going…” She hesitated, as though this was the first time she’d considered the question. “Fine? I’m going fine. How are you going?”
“Fine. Glad to hear you’re fine, and that I’m fine, and we’re both fine.”
“Yeah. It’s great. Being fine…”
She trailed away, then dissolved into soft laughter. Laughter that he joined.
How did there suddenly seem to be no difference at all between the two of them? They were a pair of socially-maladjusted twentysomethings, stuck in a conversation from hell.
“Sorry for what Mom said. She’s grateful, now that she knows. She’d just hit her head and woken up on the pavement and…”
“…and I was the first thing she saw.” Brandon scratched his neck, yawning. “I get it. It’s whatever.”
Being read to filth by Billie’s mom was the least of Brandon’s problems.
He’d been fired from his job. It had been seasonal work, and after a Billie Eilish fanclub had mailed a dozen unwanted pizzas to company headquarters under the name Brandon Kurzwell da seXXXy beast 😉, his shift manager had decided that for Brandon, the season ended early: right there and right then.
“Oh my God, I’m so sorry.,” Billie sounded mortified when she heard this.
“It’s okay. I like being on my own. Even if I don’t have any money.”
“You saved me, and your reward is that you lose your job. It’s not fair.”
“Well, you made some songs and your reward is that a psycho decides you’re a witch and tries to kill you, so yeah, unfair describes a lot of things that happen. Great civilization we’ve got here. Ten out of ten, no notes.”
“Do these things happen for a reason, Brandon?”
“I don’t understand.”
Billie’s voice remained soft, but it had an urgent force gathering behind it. “Brandon, I asked this on the night and you didn’t tell me the answer. Why were you there?”
“Er…” He seemed to be groping blindly, like the question was a very large and very dark room. “Where else would I be?”
“That’s my point!” Billie’s voice seemed to tighten to a lancepoint in his ear. “Anywhere! Anywhere in the city! But instead you were there, where I needed you. Is there a plan?”
“I’ll rip a bong and get back to you on that,” Brandon said.
“You sound tired,” Billie’s voice swam in cryptic loops through his mind. ”Tired enough for a great big sleep.” Pause.“Where do you live, by the way?”
“Who knows.”
Brandon’s aunt was turning her charming Italianate townhouse on Valencia Street into an Airbnb, and had asked him to clean it. Instead of payment, he was allowed to sleep on a mattress on the floor.
“So…” Billie said, “Unemployed, and soon you’ll be homeless.”
Brandon didn’t speak. He’d actually finished cleaning the house days ago, and had yet to tell his aunt. He was homeless right now.
“I’m just saying…” Billie murmured. “If you want to disappear…you could.”
“It has a certain appeal,” Brandon admitted. “Just disappearing for a while…”
“What if you disappeared forever, Brandon?”
A chill chain-reacted down his spine. “What?”
“You have nothing tying you to this city. No reason to stay. You can just decide to…become someone else. Or become nobody at all. Very few people can make that choice. I certainly can’t”
She sounded desperately unhappy. Trapped.
Brandon laughed. “Pardon my rude, but where are we going with this conversation? What do you want?”
“I can make you disappear. Come driving with me. Out to a place I know, near the water. Just for a day or so. Once we’re alone, I’ll tell you a secret.”
“I don’t have a car.”
“We’ll use mine. See the matte-black coupe parked in the street? Get packing. We can leave right away.”
He went to the lobby, and stared through the painstakingly cleaned and destreaked glass.
Beyond the fronds curling from his aunt’s trellis awning, he saw a 2021 Dodge Challenger Hellcat parked in the street. It had tinted glass.
He began spluttering disbelieving noises. “No way are you parked outside my aunt’s house!”
“I’m knocking right now.”
Brandon watched four ghostly-pale knuckles rap the window of the Hellcat. They swam into view, and disappeared back beneath the tint. The sight disturbed him. It was like staring into a murky creek and seeing the cold, rotting hand of a corpse.
His disbelief was total. “Billie, that Dodge has been parked there since nine! And it’s three in the afternoon! You’ve been sitting in that car for six hours!”
“I have Nicholas Sparks audiobooks.”
“Why not just call?”
“The stars in my head said I had to wait.”
“The stars said…you had…to wait…”
“I press my thumbs to my eyeballs,” Billie’s voice purred over the phone.“And the inside of my skull gets bigger and bigger. The universe starts spilling into the space that opens up, like an unspooling black thread. It just comes pouring out of nowhere. I have stars and nebulae and galaxies, spinning trapped inside my head. If I listen, I hear the rhythms and messages of the constellations. The stars speak to me, from inside my head. How can they not?”
“Sure, right.” Only the blank fact of the car in his driveway allowed him to not sound skeptical.
“All day, I sat in the car with the constellations saying ‘wait’. The moment was bad, somehow. You would have refused. A few minutes ago, I felt the quadrants change. You were now ready for me to call.
Brandon’s vision distorted. The room seemed to convulse around him like a throat.
“Bullshit! This is bullshit. How did you know?”
He’d had a job interview booked that day.
Until fifteen minutes ago, when the company’s head of HR had called to cancel it. The position had been filled.
Billie didn’t answer, but he sensed a weird lip-curling smile that exposed her teeth.
“Was David Spalser right?” Brandon asked. “Are you magic?”
“That depends…” He heard the smile retreat shyly back behind her face.
“On what?”
“On your answer. If you refuse, I’ve predicted nothing.”
He felt his stare drawn to the car parked on the street.
“Wanna go driving? Out to the silver water?”
* * *
Heading east, to destinations unknown.
The road beneath Billie’s tires sang out a long, uninterrupted note that was almost musical in its sense of order. The Dodge’s $10,000 suspension kit did everything except suck your dick as you drove.
She’s thick. She’s thick. She’s thick. She’s thick.
Brandon wished his brain would stop yapping as they took the I-580 E out of San Fran. Or pick a second thought, at least. Some variety in the yapping would be appreciated.
But he couldn’t stop noticing Billie Eilish in the seat beside him. He’d noticed her a hundred times, and seemed doomed to notice a hundred more.
She’s thick. She’s thick. She’s thick. She’s thick.
Each glance drove a knifeblade of aching physical need deeper into him.
His obsession had started from the second he’d approached the car, when the door had popped open and he’d seen her bisque-white face staring out. She wore a plaid snapback, and there was a black braid fallen over her shoulder.
Oh shit. She’s so pretty.
She’d beckoned him onto the seat beside her. Instead, he’d frozen up and stared and stared and stared and stared and time had just run away from him until Billie smiled, cupping a hand to her mouth. “As a reminder from Billie Eilish enterprises, we are a look but don’t touch exhibit.”
“Shit, sorry,” He looked away, flushing violently with shame. His skin burning. “Sorry…”
She giggled like a brat, and punched him in the shoulder.
“Such a goofball.”
They’d pulled out from the curb, with her playful little punch glowing like a brand on his skin. It itched. He wanted to scratch it, but knew this would erase the feeling.
Such a goofball.
He wondered if she’d let him stop at a tattoo shop, so he could permanently ink her knuckles onto his shoulder skin while the sensation still lingered.
They’d crossed the bridge to Alameda, and she’d sat cool and cross-legged on the black leatherette upholstery, one pretty leg folded atop the other. She did not speak to him. The deep squish of thighmeat dried up moisture in his mouth.
Through hundreds of shy glances, he mentally absorbed her body. She wore a pink Criminal Damage shirt, with a price tag on it. The front ballooned outward, distorted by enormous breasts. The knee-length shirt was rucked to waist-height by the seatbelt, exposing the pale curves of her lower body.
Thick thighs bulged inside torn fishnet mesh stockings. Further up the seat, ragged jorts covered her ass in the lawyerly way a sheet of paper raises you off the floor. Her hemlines were scissored off raggedly, allowing the flesh of her fat ass and hips to spew out onto the seat. It was like sausage-meat bursting from its casing.
She’s thick. She’s thick. She’s thick. She’s thick.
Was the outfit thrifted at Venice Beach and thirty bucks? Or Vivienne Westwood haute couture and thirty thousand dollars? Brandon was as confused by high fashion as he was by the rest of Planet Girl.
He wasn’t confused about what he wanted to do with the outfit, though.
Pull it off. Using his teeth, pull it the fuck off.
She’s thick. She’s thick. She’s thick. She’s thick. She’s thick.
Oakland. Ashland. Castro Valley.
Billie wriggled against the seatbelt. Brandon’s eye was sucked toward the belt, which cut a deep diagonal trench through her enormous breasts. Flesh-rolls wrapped in T-shirt spilled out on each side of the strap. His stomach did a sickening barrel-roll of lust.
Oh, she was beautiful!
Quivering, festering desire infested him, infected him, seemed to detonate decay into his bones and muscle and everywhere else there was strength. His palms felt oily, no matter how often he wiped them on his jeans. Various body parts felt either too hot or too cold, seemingly at random.
“What’s the secret?” he asked.
Billie uncrossed and recrossed her thick gymnast thighs. The mesh strained beneath their bulge and flex, cutting diamonds into her skin.
“Not yet.” She gestured at the bodyguard driving the car. “Alone.”
Brandon nodded, imagining being scissored unconscious between Billie Eilish’s thighs.
Excuse me, sir? His brain had yet another urgent telegram to deliver, signed and registered. Were you aware that a girl is sitting beside you? And she is, in the lingo, “thick”?
Yes. Yes, he was.
This fact was sending him insane.
* * *
He looked ahead instead of sideways.
Billie’s bodyguard—the same one David Spalser had tased—was behind the wheel, overflowing the seat and into the middle console.
He tried to make conversation with the driver.
“So…how does a taser in the neck feel?”
The Easter Island statue driving the car rumbled to life. “Like being set on fire times ten while every muscle in your body is ripped off the bone and reattached in a different postcode. A slightly worse than usual evening by the standards of my company’s Executive Protection training program.”
Billie steepled her black-painted fingernails in her lap. “He tried to taser Brandon, too. Why didn’t it work?”
The bodyguard seemed delighted to downplay Brandon’s heroism. “Because those tiny tasers only hold one charge, which David Spalser had already zapped into my neck. Lucky for the kid.”
Brandon bristled silently. The kid.
“Oh,” Billie said. “I thought you might have been protected. But still…”
“Still.” Still what, he had no idea.
Brandon glanced down at her feet. Her pale ankles were swallowed by pink Vans. Didn’t seem like she was wearing socks under the shoes. Brandon wondered what it would be like to pull the sneakers off and suck on her toes.
Heavy, squeezable buttcheeks oozed from the cutoffs, pooling on the leather seat. He imagined grasping the wild thickness of her ass, filling his palms with the hot meat of Billie’s rump.
The car hit a pothole. A jolt bounced them upward, snapping the seatbelts taut.
He watched two gigantic breasts leap like whales against Billie’s Criminal Damage shirt. Twin bulges exploded into existence, then dropped back down.
Brandon moaned desperately, imagining burying his face into her pink, pungent depths of cleavage, letting those massive, face-swallowing breasts cover him like grave dirt.
I wish I could stop thinking these thoughts. He was disgusted by himself. His penis was erect and throbbing, a sticky river of precum gluing his glans to his thigh. Sweat trickled down his back in a crawling flood.
“You must be really tired,” Billie observed.
“It’s been a week.”
“Super tired. So tired you’re ready for a greeaaaat big sleep.” She grinned sideways, talking to him like he was a toddler.
“Er, I guess…” Why does she keep saying that? Also, why does her right leg keep brushing mine?
There. It did it again.
Brandon gulped, trying not to stare at her thick body. It was like trying not to think about pink elephants. He just did it more.
“I still think you’re special,” Billie leaned across, and nuzzled her head into his shoulder. He nearly fainted as her breath rippled his shirt and cooled his sweat. “Special, but tired.”
“I don’t think I’m special.” His voice was the lowest of murmurs.
“Mmm…” Billie said, resting her head on his shoulder. Her warmth soaked into his skin, like the rays of some ice-white sun. Only her nose was cold.
Her thigh brushed his again, and he squirmed.
As they drove out of town, she suddenly lifted her head off his shoulder.
Playing out a little slack on her seatbelt, she scooted sideways a little on her seat, angling her entire body toward him.
“I want to show you something.”
A breast that seemed as big and heavy as a barrage balloon mashed into his side. The random comings and goings of her bare thigh on his leg became a steady presence.
She got out her phone, and tapped a folder open. It said POLICE SHIT. “Remember what you said on the night? That I’m safe?”
Brandon stared at the rectangle of light as she thumbed through texts from the SFPD. “Yeah.”
“Wrong,” she said. “I am not safe.”
Black-painted nails caught blue fire as she tapped the glowing screen. She pulled up a file marked CONFIDENTIAL, and Brandon began his dive into a secret world.
Certain facts about David Spalser were coming to light.
They were more disturbing than anyone could have imagined.
* * *
Under the online handle grave_of_billie, he was a member of #KILLBILL—a notoriously extreme group of Billie Eilish truthers.
They believed that Billie Eilish was literally the daughter of hell: an evil force sent to trigger the apocalypse. In their half-baked eschatology, the only way to avert the imminent destruction of all creation involved the ritual execution of Billie Eilish—assuming that such a powerful arch-demoness even could be killed.
It was difficult to get a bead on the cult’s plot. Every channel connected to #KILLBILL went dark within minutes of David’s attack.
Police were left to rake through the huge volume of Discord chatlogs that kept bubbling up online. Many were fake, but it was hard to know for sure. Several contained grave_of_billie—aka, David Spalser—psyching himself up to kill the star.
>grave_of_billie: ugh
>INVIS_ALIGN: ?
>grave_of_billie: the mission…
>B1ll1e_D1el1sh: what about it
>grave_of_billie: …i dont think i can go through with it
>INVIS_ALIGN: you can
>INVIS_ALIGN: self-doubt is an insult to everyone here who believes in you, david
>grave_of_billie: lol, easy for you to say
>grave_of_billie: NONE of you know
>grave_of_billie: what its like
>grave_of_billie: to have your finger on the trigger
>grave_of_billie: but
>grave_of_billie: not
>grave_of_billie: know
>grave_of_billie: if you can pull it
>grave_of_billie: i wake up every night.
>grave_of_billie: shaking
>grave_of_billie: i took 2 etizolam and they’re doing fucking NOTHING
>grave_of_billie: i feel like i’ve ALREADY failed the mission
>grave_of_billie: lmao lmao lmao
>grave_of_billie: why is saving the world MY job?
>B1ll1e_D1el1sh: courage bro. you’re strong.
>grave_of_billie: im not.
>grave_of_billie: i started listening to her songs again. comfort food.
>grave_of_billie: the one thats like ‘I’m in love, with my future’…
>grave_of_billie: i like that
>grave_of_billie: the idea that the future is something you could love
>B1ll1e_D1el1sh: dont listen to her songs
>sleighbills1996: shes a witch. keep her out of your head
>INVIS_ALIGN: listening isn’t safe.
>grave_of_billie: i know.
>grave_of_billie: i just need SOMETHING.
>grave_of_billie: i have the whole gd world in my hands and those hands cant stop shaking
* * *
“Welp…” Brandon finished reading.
“David’s under arrest,” Billie said. “All of his friends are still out there.”
“Do the cops have any leads?”
“They have some IP data, but they don’t think it’s reliable. Those guys might have been using… a thing. A ‘Vee En Pee’, that hides your address.”
Brandon didn’t quite think the word for that was ‘VNP’, but didn’t want to disagree. He’d flunked out of Networks 101 at Santa Fe.
“And anyway,” Billie said, “it’s not like they’ve actually done anything. If they get arrested they’ll just play it off as a bunch of crazy roleplaying that their friend took too seriously…”
“But they played their hand. And it blew up in their faces.” Brandon tried not to stare down the front of her shirt. “Maybe he was the only one with the guts to try something.”
Billie sighed.
“Swipe and you’ll see why I can’t afford that assumption.”
* * *
>INVIS_ALIGN: david? still there?
>grave_of_billie: ?
>INVIS_ALIGN: you are wrong. you are not one man against the apocalypse.
>grave_of_billie: sure feels like it is
>sleighbills1996: you are part of something bigger. remember the plan we worked on? and how it needed a stage a and a stage b?
>sleighbills1996: if you unalive her, then great
>sleighbills1996: if you fail, plan b activates
>B1ll1e_D1el1sh: she has to die on or before the 11th.
>B1ll1e_D1el1sh: before she immanentizes the eschaton
>B1ll1e_D1el1sh: no matter what it takes, she must DIE
>grave_of_billie: then what if plan b fails too?
>INVIS_ALIGN: then we are all going to die lol
>INVIS_ALIGN: either way, relax. you will not spend a day in prison.
>INVIS_ALIGN: either we kill her and the world sees what she truly is, or the world sees nothing because there is not a world to SEE.
* * *
“So David Spalser’s friends are coming,” Brandon said. “His arrest means Stage B is now in effect.”
“They’re convinced I’m ending the world on December 11, because that’s my birthday, and because of some song lyrics they’ve analyzed to death.” She laughed. “Literally analyzed to death…”
“And since it’s December 9 now…”
“Two days. That’s their window. That’s one reason I’m going away.” She shuddered, and bit her lip in revulsion. “To hide.”
Brandon shrugged. “And the worst part is, you’ll have to cancel your plan to end the world. Sucks. I was really looking forward to that.”
Billie’s eyes widened incredulously. Then she laughed, brightly and brashly. “You’re funny!”
She slung a playful shoulder against him, knocked him sideways, then drew him close.
Conspiratorially so.
“What does this have to do with me?” Brandon asked. “I don’t know anything about this army of freakazoids.”
“You knew even less about them last week, but you saved my life. I think you’re special. So special it doesn’t even matter if you know it yourself or not. You had the plan of space in your head that night. Maybe you still do now.”
Brandon was horrified by the mad, rapturous stare she transfixed him with.
“When I was frozen up,” she coiled her black hair in a clockspring around one finger, “you made me list all the green things around me. Why?”
“I did basic EMT training once. It’s just a trick they showed us to break people out of trauma spirals.”
“How did you know that green is a special color to me?” She started humming a song. “Look at you needing me / You know I’m not your friend without some greenery.”
He shrugged. “I went with green because that was the first color that came to mind.”
“You guessed green because of facts beneath conscious apprehension.” She reached over, and clasped a hand in hers. “But so what? They’re still there. Other people have stars and planets inside their minds. It’s not just me.”
“C’mon…”
“Brandon, you’re definitely magic. You saved my life. You were chosen for this. Handpicked. You knew the plan then, and you know the plan now, even if you aren’t aware that you do. So what is it?”
He spoke again. More firmly.
“I can’t be your savior, Billie,” he protested as she unbuckled her seatbelt. “I did what I could on the night, it almost didn’t work, and it cost me fucking everything. My job. My privacy. There’s no cosmic plan to any of this. I’m a goddamn loading bay operator who was in the right place at the right time—”
Billie Eilish’s mouth seemed to swim into his.
As the singer kissed him deeply on the lips, a shockfront of light and color eddied through his shocked, overwhelmed mind. Her tongue slid into his mouth and started exploring his teeth. She completely ignored the hulking presence of the bodyguard in the driver’s seat as she hungrily welded her face to his, greedily sucking at his head.
The kiss surged on like a tropical storm, growing lewder and hotter and dirtier with each heartbeat. Brandon’s mind seemed to collapse in on itself, narrowing to a singular point, before expanding like a phantom lung. Exploding out to occupy all of space.
Billie twisted and rocked her face, her braid seeming to paint sensation on his neck. She overwhelmed him with her mouth, seeking and hunting and finding, an eager, hungry moon of lustrous white.
Grinning, Billie curled across Brandon’s lap like a huge cat, her lower body pillowing across him. As they embraced, her breasts convulsed upon his collarbones, rising up hugely. She was a delicious, unholdable freightage of meat.
With a trembling hand, he reached inside her shirt through the right shoulder sleeve. He explored, going deep. Through a fingertip, he felt a heart go thudthud.
“Billie…stop…” He shuddered, feeling her voluptuous, fleshy body squirm against him, hot and enchanted. Bulbous tits distorted on his skin, flattening like pancakes upon his shape.
“No…” Her mouth curled insouciant defiance. Her enormous tit-sacks bulged up, squeezed by pressure into his neck.
Black-nailed hands caressed his neck, tapping shivers into his skin. Her other hand drew tight upon his shoulders, pulling him into the pungent jungle aroma of her jiggling, overlarge breasts.
He stopped trying to fight it. Stopped trying to do anything. He just became part of her. So he let go, and let her continue holding him, continue kissing him. He ran a hand through her luscious hair. It felt like a ribbon of night. She purred kittenishly—acute pleasure-pain invaded his sensorium as sharp teeth needled his tongue.
Brandon vaguely saw the landscape change in the front window, a million miles over the hump of Billie’s shoulder.
Her bodyguard had split off from the highway, and was taking them up a narrower road. Tioga Pass Road whipped past the car, on a sign he barely had time to read. The note of the Hellcat’s tires changed slightly—concrete had become asphalt.
Where are we going…?
Then Billie’s hot lips sunk back onto his face, burying him in a bubblegum lipstick taste.
And then her hand scooped up his throbbing bulge, her fingers fitting with the holy precision of Miyadaiku carpentry. Made for this, for only this.
And then even these faint ripples of a world outside Billie Eilish’s sublime face were beyond Brandon…
“I’m sorry, Brandon.”
Billie slid her tongue from Brandon’s mouth.
“Huh?” He blinked stupidly at her. He felt rubbed-off makeup itch on his cheeks.
She dropped her head to his chest, where her breath pulled in and out with tidal rhythm. The cadence of her breathing seemed to howl darkness through the empty spaces of his chest.
“It’s a shame. You’re nice. You’re sweet. I’m sorry to do this, Brandon.”
Sharp pain.
In his neck.
A bright piercing sensation tore into him, flushing heat over his face. Beneath his rippling skin, a stream of coolness swirled into him, as though his body had sprung a cold draught.
The chill washed through him, sucked away into his bloodstream.
Horrified eyes rolled sideways. He saw the needle’s glint in Billie’s right hand. It was inside his neck. He didn’t know when she’d drawn it, or where from. His thoughts were dashed. Sharded. Scattered.
Then a hard sourceless thud struck his chest, even though nothing had hit him. He spasmed, folding around it. Sucker-punched by death.
Billie drew the syringe from his neck, rolled her body off his, returned to her seat, and rebuckled her seatbelt.
Her bodyguard had not reacted to any of this.
“Wuhwuhwuhhhwhat…” A mouth that had been swimming with saliva seconds ago—his and hers—now seemed too parched for words.
“Don’t fight it.” Billie spoke calmly. “It doesn’t make a difference. Just relax.”
Brandon’s eyelids fluttered. He wanted to do something, but what? What could he possibly do?
“Disappear,” Billie said, as though he’d spoken the question aloud.
Darkness poured in, swallowing his vision of the car, and the desert road outside the window. Nerves in his hands failed in a rolling cascade of pinpricks, firing deadness up his arms.
No.
Hands that Brandon could no longer feel rattled at his sides. A tide of froth rose past his gnashing, chattering teeth, spilling from his bloated lips, dribbling down his chin…
Then his eyeballs involuntarily twisted back, rolling dead white in his face.
Billie was wrong or had lied. No planets spun in the back of his mind. No stars shone. He stared into an infinity of nothing.
Moments later, Brandon Kurzwell became part of the great sleep.
To be continued…
* * *
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