Criss-Crossing
by Philip Magdalany

THE STORY: In three identical rooms of an antiseptic modern hotel are a man, getting ready to shoot someone from the window, and his teenage son; a dowdy couple on vacation; and three girls who have escaped from a prison farm—where one of them has murdered an overly amorous guard.

They are strangers to each other, and yet somehow akin through their mutual inability to escape the conditions of life that control them.

Their actions, brightly stylized and quirkily humorous, parallel and intersect, until the hotel loudspeaker announces that a monster is drawing nearer to the city—whereupon, in a spasm of mistrust and violence, they mistakenly destroy each other in their panic to escape the inevitable.