The Fifth Day Read online

  “Or hairy monsters with green eyes.”

  “Those, too. And let’s not mention it to the boys, okay? Ben would probably be scared, and Jeff would think the Antichrist had arrived.”

  “I’m betting Ben would take it better than Jeff,” Margo said.

  “You’re probably right. But still, mum’s the word unless he, or it, shows up again.”

  After breakfast, and a difficult cleanup following the discovery that the water pressure in the house was maintained by an electric pump, they made plans for the day.

  “I don’t want to spend the whole day inside,” Zolzaya said. “If there are other survivors, we should try to find them.”

  “There are others,” Jeff said.

  “How do you know?” Margo asked.

  “God told me.”

  “Did God tell you where they were?” Ben asked, wide-eyed.

  “No.” Jeff gave Ben an expression that held no trace of sarcasm. For him, this was a completely reasonable thing to ask. “He told me we’d meet more today. He said we should look around downtown, because that’s where people would head if they were looking for others, like Margo and Z did yesterday.”

  “Well, I can’t argue with God on that count,” Zolzaya said. “Let’s pack some lunches and head out. Try to use as much in the way of perishable food as we can, but let’s leave the freezer shut. We could get a couple of days’ worth out of it if we don’t open it a lot.”

  “Maybe the power will come back on,” Ben said. “Maybe someone will fix it.”

  “Maybe. But I wouldn’t count on it.”

  —

  AN HOUR LATER, Zolzaya and Ben were wearing backpacks filled with their day’s provisions. Ben apparently wanted to prove that he was as capable as the adults, and insisted on carrying a pack. The packs included bottles filled from a five-gallon jug of water they’d found in the garage. He shouldered his with a grunt, then stood up, straightening his back and throwing his chest out.

  “Water’s gonna be a problem,” Zolzaya said. “We should haul as much as we can from the grocery store, but even so, it’ll run out eventually. And at that point, we’ll have to have figured out a way to purify it. It doesn’t rain enough here to count on rain.”

  “We have a swimming pool in the back yard.”

  “That’ll keep us for a while, although I’ll bet it’s full of chlorine. But even that will run out sooner or later. After that it’ll have to be creek water.”

  “Eww.” Ben made a gagging noise.

  Margo laughed. “Never been camping?”

  “Yeah, up in the Sierras with my dad. But the creeks up there are clear. Cutter Creek has trash in it all the time. And I once saw a dead dog there.”

  “Well, the creek keeps flowing, and there aren’t people putting trash in it any more. It’ll clean itself up.” Margo paused, and then added in a hushed voice, “So will the rest of the world, I guess.”

  “We’ll still need to boil it.” Zolzaya shook her head. “I’m not trusting creek water without sterilizing it somehow, even if in a couple of weeks it looks better than it does now. We can get along well enough with boiling drinking water on the camp stove for the time being, but we’ll run out of propane sooner or later, too. Then it’s burning wood or nothing.”

  They set out. Zolzaya fingered the house key in her pocket. She’d locked the door behind her, hoping that no one would ask why she bothered. No one did. Ben walked down the sidewalk a little ahead of the others, with Jeff in the rear—still with his Bible tucked under his arm— and the two women in the middle.

  “All of the things in the modern world that you don’t think anything about.” Margo scuffed the ground with her toe. “I mean, if someone had asked you, ‘What would happen if civilization collapsed?’ you’d think of no cars, probably, and no electricity, and no internet. But it goes deeper than that, way deeper. We’re not back to the Middle Ages, we’re back to the Stone Age. In the Middle Ages, they had cities and farmers and tailors and leather-workers and blacksmiths. Here? It’s going to be, we make it or we don’t have it.”

  Zolzaya nodded. “Fortunately, there’s a lot of stuff left lying around. It’ll be a while before we’ll be hurting for clothes or tools or cooking pots. Food and water are going to be more of an issue. I hope we find more survivors. It’ll be easier with more people.”

  “More people to feed, though.”

  “True. But I think having others to help with the work, and more brains to come up with creative solutions, will make it worth it. Division of labor, you know? When I was a teenager I used to work on an organic farm in the summer, and having a lot of people splitting the tasks up certainly made it all go a lot more smoothly.”

  “I wonder how long it’ll take before everything’s gone? All the traces of human civilization? Till the Earth has gone completely back to nature?”

  “I’d rather not think about that just yet,” Zolzaya said.

  They turned the corner onto Denton Street, toward downtown, but instead of going out to the beach and the boardwalk, they turned left on First Street, paralleling the ocean heading south. There were more wrecked cars, and what looked like hundreds of crumpled piles of clothes, a good dozen of which were on the sidewalk outside a coffee shop. More than one had a spilled cup of coffee or a croissant on the ground next to it.

  “Coffee,” Margo said, in a sad voice. “I’m gonna miss coffee.”

  “Me too,” Zolzaya said. “That’s one thing we won’t ever be able to make for ourselves. Unless we walk to Central America.” She stepped around the clothes and over the dropped cups and pastries.

  “Wait!” said a female voice from behind them.

  All four turned simultaneously, Ben uttering a squeaky gasp as he whirled around. A long-limbed woman with dark skin, her thick black hair tied back with a bright red scarf, wearing sunglasses, was looping around the cars on a bicycle. She waved at them furiously, and yelled, “Wait!” again.

  Zolzaya smiled. “We’re not going anywhere.”

  She braked to a halt next to them, and said, in a voice with a Caribbean lilt, “If you’re real, you have no idea how glad I am to see you.”

  The woman introduced herself as Lissa George, and the others reciprocated, although Jeff looked at the new arrival with considerable suspicion. Zolzaya wanted to say, Look, Jeff, she’s not the Whore of Babylon, but that would have been hard to explain to Lissa. In the end, she let Jeff stand behind her, looking at Lissa through narrowed eyes, as if waiting for her to do something evil.

  “I was an associate professor of physics at UC-Berkeley,” Lissa said. “Clean out of a job now, apparently. We’d only been done with classes for a week. I was down here spending time with a friend when it happened.”

  It. The biggest thing that had ever happened in any of their lives, and none of them had any idea what to call it.

  “Have you seen anyone else?”

  Lissa raised one eyebrow. “Only one other. Guy named Gary Suarez. I found him yesterday morning, right after it happened. He worked as a mechanic at an auto body shop near my friend’s house. I took the bicycle out, trying to find out what had happened. I didn’t know it was everyone, you know? Or almost everyone. All I knew was that I got up, and my friend was gone.”

  “I had exactly the same experience,” Zolzaya said.

  “I thought he’d gotten up before me, but no. Gone.” There was a moment’s hesitation on the pronoun he, but it slipped past. “I found his bathrobe in the kitchen, in a little pile, like it had slipped off his shoulders.” Her voice cracked. “I’m sorry. I managed to make it through the day yesterday without crying. I thought I was over that stage of things.”

  “None of us will be over the crying for a long time, I think,” Margo said.

  Lissa cleared her throat. “Yeah. But anyway, I got dressed and went outside, and I pedaled around the town. I was in shock. Still am, really. I saw other peoples’ clothes, and the cars, and some bicycles, and I figured out what had happened.” />
  “You know where they went?” Ben said.

  “No. I saw what had happened, but I still don’t know why it happened.”

  “You’re a physics professor, though.”

  “Yes.” She gave him a smile. “That doesn’t mean I know the answers to all of life’s mysteries. And this is one big mystery.”

  “But you found someone else,” Zolzaya said.

  “Yes. I cycled around for a while, mostly because I didn’t know what else to do. No one was answering phones. I had called the university, nothing. Not even the police and the hospital. So I went out to see if there was anyone else left, anyone at all. A few blocks from my friend’s apartment there’s a bank, and there was a guy lying on the grass in front of it, with his hands behind his head, his eyes closed. I thought he might be dead at first, but he heard me coming, looked up at me, half sat up, and asked me if there was anyone else around. I said that I had no idea, but that I hadn’t run into anyone. He said, ‘This is the craziest fucking thing I’ve ever seen.’”

  “That’s it?”

  She smiled. “No. I’m painting him as unfriendly, which he wasn’t. And I’m not judging him for how he reacted. People cope with things differently. So I asked him if he was okay. I didn’t want to leave him, you know? At that point, I wasn’t sure if he and I might be the only two people left in Furness. So we talked for a while. He’s not a bad guy, maybe a bit macho and too aware of the fact that he’s handsome and has big biceps. You know the type.”

  “How long did it take him to ask you to spend the night with him?” Zolzaya raised an eyebrow.

  Lissa laughed. “I think he knew better. We went our separate ways last night. Before he could ask, I told him that I was going back to my friend’s house to spend the night, because that’s where all my things were, but that I’d meet him this morning so we could explore more, i.e.—you’re not invited. He wasn’t happy about it, but he agreed.”

  “You’re lucky.”

  “He’s lucky. I’m a black belt. Biceps or no, if he’d tried something, I’d have made sure he never reproduced.”

  “Wow,” Ben said under his breath.

  Lissa smiled broadly. “But he didn’t. And honestly, Gary’s not a bad sort. He’s really been helpful with searching, not that we turned up anyone. So I went to his apartment this morning, and we made some plans. He insisted on taking his motorcycle, and headed east, up toward Oldenburg.”

  “That’s where I live.” Zolzaya sighed. “Well—lived. Past tense. Maybe there’s someone else up there, but I didn’t see anyone when I was heading down here.”

  “So I said I’d take my bicycle and head south, and here I am. We’re planning to rendezvous at lunch time, near the boardwalk. There’ll be some cafés there we can raid for food.”

  —

  THEY WENT DOWN First Street, Lissa riding her bike slowly as the others walked. The sun was warm on Z’s face, with a breeze off the ocean that carried the smell of salt and the keening of gulls.

  Close your eyes, and you could think that nothing had changed. When would they stop expecting things to go back to the way they were?

  Ben was in deep conversation with Lissa about black holes. Z smiled. Two kindred spirits, that was obvious.

  “But I don’t get what it means to say that space is bent,” Ben said. “Isn’t space nothing? How can you bend nothing?”

  “Don’t think of space as nothing.” Lissa’s right hand made a graceful sweep. “It’s a three-dimensional fabric that we live in. And like a fabric, it can be stretched and compressed. Anything with mass pulls on the fabric and warps it a little bit. The bigger the mass, the more it warps. With a black hole, the fabric is warped so much that once you get close enough, you can’t get out. It’s twisted into a closed surface. One-way traffic only.”

  “I wonder if that’s where everyone is. Inside a black hole. No way out.”

  Lissa shook her head. “No, that’s not possible. Whatever happened here, it had nothing to do with black holes. But have you heard about Miguel Alcubierre?”

  “No.”

  “He’s a Mexican physicist. He said there might be a way to warp space in front of and behind a spaceship, stretching it out behind and compressing it in front, so that the ship would ride on the wave like a surfer. He said it might be possible to go faster than the speed of light that way.”

  “Cool,” Ben said.

  Zolzaya looked up at the empty, featureless blue sky. Alcubierre was almost certainly gone, with ninety-nine percent of the rest of the human race. To heaven, into a black hole, into the void—where didn’t matter much. Gone. So much talent, so much love and hope and passion and curiosity, lost forever.

  But her elegiac train of thought was interrupted by a rough noise from behind them, at first hardly separable from the crashing of the ocean waves, but finally identifiable as the sound of a motorcycle. They turned, a man on a Harley appeared, dodging in and around the wrecked automobiles, sometimes jouncing up onto the sidewalk. He wore a helmet, but his shirt was unbuttoned and fluttered out behind him, revealing a chest and abs that clearly were the product of daily visits to the gym.

  “Gary?”

  Lissa nodded.

  He braked to a stop near them, his engine idling, and pushed up the visor of his helmet.

  “Well, I’ll be damned.” He looked at the group, letting his eyes linger on Zolzaya a little longer than the others. “You found some survivors.”

  “You didn’t, I’d guess,” Lissa said.

  “Nope. Nothing up that direction but wrecked cars and empty houses.” Gary grinned, and once again looked the group over, giving Zolzaya an approving smile, and hardly registering the others. “I’m Gary Suarez.”

  “Zolzaya Dubrovna.” She put out a hand. “You can call me Z.”

  “Nice to meet you, Z.” He flashed a row of perfectly even white teeth and gave her a firm handshake.

  “This is Margo Nishikawa, Jeff East, and Ben Ingersoll.”

  “Cool,” he said in an unenthusiastic voice. “Did you find any place to get food? I’m starving.”

  “We brought food from the house,” Zolzaya said. “We could share, or go back there and get more.”

  “No need for that.” Lissa gestured around her. “Every other storefront has food of some kind. Have at it.”

  Gary turned off his engine and dismounted, leaving the motorcycle in the middle of the street. On the seaward side of First Street was a donut shop, Alessandro’s Pizza House, and a gift shop. “Cold pizza would do the trick. Guess there’s no way to heat it up now the power’s out.”

  “Cold is fine,” Margo said. “Better than the sandwich I brought. And it’ll be the last of the pizza for a while, I’d guess.”

  Gary strode up to the glass-fronted door, and pulled on it. It was locked.

  “Fuck,” he said under his breath. He looked around for a moment, and then pulled a rock out of a little rectangular garden between the sidewalk and the street, and without hesitation, pitched it through the door.

  The shattering glass sounded loud in the silence.

  “You shouldn’t have done that,” Jeff said.

  “Why?” Gary gave a careless shrug. “It’s not like Alessandro is gonna come after me.” He reached through the now-empty frame and turned the lock, then pulled the remnants of the door open.

  Gary walked around the inside of the shop, the soles of his boots scrunching on the glass shards, and peered into refrigerators. There were no pizzas, however, only pepperoni and cheese and ham and pineapple now rapidly warming toward room temperature.

  “Everyone disappeared at a little after six in the morning,” Margo said through the open door. “He wouldn’t have had any pizzas made then.”

  “Fuck,” Gary said again, without looking at her.

  It took another broken window, this one the front door of Sam’s Deli, to procure food for lunch. Lissa followed him in, moving tentatively, while Zolzaya watched from the sidewalk. Gary went behind the count
er, opened a refrigerator case, and spread mayo and laid out not-so-cold-cuts and jalapeño peppers and some limp lettuce on a sub roll. He picked it up and took a big bite, and only then noticed Lissa had followed him in.

  “Want one?” he said through a mouth full of sandwich.

  “Sure.”

  He made a second sandwich identical to his, and handed it across the counter to her, and they walked back out onto the sidewalk.

  Sam’s Deli was across the street from a small park, with a grove of eucalyptus and mimosa trees, a swing set, and monkey bars. They walked across and sat on the grass in a lopsided oval. Ben and Zolzaya shucked their backpacks, doled out sandwiches and water bottles, and they all ate in silence, listening to the gulls and the waves and the formidable wall of the absence of human noise.

  After lunch, Ben said to Margo in a small voice, “I need to pee.”

  Gary overheard him, and laughed. “Have at it, little bro.” He waved his hand around. “There’s no one else here. The world is your urinal, dude.”

  Ben looked back at Margo, who shrugged and gave him a smile. Ben stood, and walked about twenty yards away, and then went discreetly behind a bush.

  “There’s so much that’s going to take getting used to,” Zolzaya said. “We’ve been around hordes of people all of our lives.”

  “We’ll find others,” Lissa said. “By the laws of probability. If we’re a representative sample, there are two million people left in the world, probably scattered pretty uniformly.”

  “Two million?” Gary said. “How do you figure?”

  “There were seven billion people. Furness had a population of about fifteen thousand. If we’re the only five who survived in Furness, then five is to fifteen thousand as two million is to seven billion.” A smile spread across her face. “Give or take a few one way or the other.”

  “That’s beyond me,” Gary said. “I don’t see two million people hiding anywhere around.”

  Zolzaya’s comment was—probably fortunately—cut off by Ben running back across the grass full-tilt. His face was pale, and he was stammering with fear.