The Fifth Day Page 5

  Finally, and with some reluctance, she called her parents. Her dad was recently retired, and chances were, he’d have just gotten up, and be working on his second cup of coffee while reading the newspaper. She had such a vivid image of her father that she found herself relaxing, convinced that he’d be there, that he’d have a rational explanation for why everyone appeared to be missing except her.

  But there was no answer there, either.

  So Zolzaya did what felt like the only possible course of action. She burst into tears.

  Fifteen minutes later, the storm had subsided somewhat, but she had another weepy episode when she first called her former place of employment, then the offices of the village of Oldenburg, and finally 911 and still got no answer. Somehow, the phone ringing ten times without anyone picking up on the 911 emergency line was the emptiest, most despairing sound she’d ever heard.

  She set the telephone down in its cradle, wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, and stood up. What exactly she intended to do, she wasn’t sure.

  And why was she not more upset that Vinnie was gone? The guilt at the realization stung her. When she saw his car in the driveway, for a moment she’d actually been disappointed that he hadn’t skipped out on her.

  Horrifying imagery came to her mind, thoughts of tales she’d read where people got their wishes, only to find out that they’d backfired. What was that story that had freaked her out so badly in tenth-grade English class? Oh, right. “The Monkey’s Paw.” She remembered the end, with the main character’s son come back from the grave, knocking forlornly to be let in....

  She looked into her empty living room, with its shabby, consignment-shop furnishings and absurd beaded curtain and faux-mystical wall hangings, standing perfectly still, as if listening for something. At that moment, there was a quiet knock at the door.

  She stifled a scream, and took a step back, her heart knocking against her ribcage. Goddammit, why had she thought about that awful story? But a surge of hope rose in her. If there was someone knocking, then she wasn’t completely alone. It was no decomposing corpse, standing there in the light of day, waiting for her to open the door. Zombies and monsters and ghosts were fiction. This, on the other hand, was a real, live human being, who might go away if she hesitated too long. And maybe the person behind the door would be able to tell her that there was some sort of explanation for all of this.

  She opened the door again, and standing on the doormat was none other than Margo Nishikawa.

  Both women said, simultaneously, “You’re alive!” in voices that bordered on hysteria.

  Margo had none of the ebullient good humor she’d had the previous day. Behind her thick glasses, her eyes wore an expression that was somehow beyond shock, in that realm where fear passes into utter disbelief.

  “I…” She started, then looked up at Zolzaya’s face as if it were some kind of lifeline to reality. “I—uh—drove here. Because, you know—well, you told me yesterday. You said there was like a disturbance in the Force, or something.”

  “I had several readings that were terrible, yes. About destruction.”

  “So, you see….” Margo stopped, swallowed. Her voice trembled, and she seemed to be near tears herself. “I thought… I thought that maybe because you saw it, because you warned me about it, you might still be here. I drove all the way from Townsend. I didn’t pass a single person.”

  “Did you see cars that had run off the road?”

  Margo nodded. “A bunch of them.”

  “I think people just vanished. My… my boyfriend’s gone.” She hesitated. Boyfriend didn’t sound like something a Bulgarian Wise Woman would say, but at the moment, keeping up her persona was not her prime concern. The pang of guilt over Vinnie was back, but it was quickly buried underneath the more powerful horror that everyone else was gone, too. “So is my neighbor. I went over to her house. Her clothes were there, lying in the doorway, like they’d fallen off her.”

  Margo nodded. “There was a bicycle in front of my house, and some shorts and boxers and a t-shirt, kind of draped over them. It was so creepy.”

  “You called friends?” Zolzaya wondered if Margo realized the extent of what had happened, but seeing how her expression changed in response to the question made that clear enough.

  “Yes. And the clinic where I work. And my brother in San Francisco. And finally nine-one-one.”

  “You, too?”

  She nodded. “No answer. How could nine-one-one not answer? That’s their job.” Her voice took on an outraged tone, as if she hadn’t quite figured it all out yet, as if some part of her still rebelled against understanding.

  “They didn’t answer because there’s no one there.” Zolzaya sighed. Stating it that bluntly called it into reality. As far as they knew, she and Margo might be the only two people left in the world.

  “But how can there be no one there? Where is everyone?”

  “I don’t know. But the fact that you and I are both here means there are bound to be others.”

  “I suppose. But what if there aren’t? What if we’re it?”

  “Oh, now. The odds are very much against that.”

  “I’m not going on odds. I’m going on what I saw. How could I drive all the way from Townsend and not see a single person? That’s eight miles away. All I saw were empty cars in ditches, like their drivers disappeared, and the cars just skidded off the road. What happened to them?”

  There didn’t seem to be any good answer to that, so Zolzaya changed the subject. “Would you like a cup of tea?”

  Margo nodded, and followed her wordlessly into the kitchen.

  Ten minutes later, over steaming cups of chamomile tea, Margo became somewhat calmer and more rational. “So how do we find out if there are other people around?”

  Zolzaya shook her head. “Well, it’s not like Oldenburg is any bigger than Townsend. Maybe we should head over to Furness. There’s bound to be more people up there.” At best, they’d actually find someone. At worst, having a plan of action might keep their minds off this catastrophe for a while—although what they’d do if everyone in Furness was gone, too, was a question she didn’t want to consider.

  One thing at a time.

  “What if we vanish, too? What if what happened to them happens to us?”

  “If it happens, well, it could just as well occur here as anywhere else. My boyfriend disappeared while he was sleeping right next to me. And I’d prefer to do something to take charge rather than waiting here for something to take charge of me.”

  “I suppose that makes sense.”

  So after tea was consumed, they got into Zolzaya’s car for the twenty-minute drive to Furness, California, population 15,000. The roads were silent and empty, but the sun shone down from a cloudless blue sky on the unpeopled landscape with unabated good cheer.

  Somehow, that made it worse. If it was night, with fog or thunderstorms or something, that would be better. But the beautiful weather was terrifying. Humans could disappear, and the sun and the wind and the rain would keep going, forever, without them.

  And the sun wasn’t the only thing acting as if nothing was wrong. The stoplights were still working, turning green, yellow, red, green, yellow, red to control traffic that wasn’t there. After the third traffic light, Zolzaya went through red lights—still looking both directions first—figuring that if they got pulled over by a police officer, it might be a good thing.

  It appeared that whatever had taken the drivers, and apparently the rest of humanity, was sudden. Cars stopped at stoplights had, when their owners’ foot on the brakes disappeared, rolled into intersections and eventually off the road. Some had collided with other cars, and one sat with its wheel over the handlebars of a bicycle. Another, this one in a little village named Santa Eustacia where the houses clustered along the road and had front yards only ten feet deep, had run directly into the front of a run-down white cottage, knocking a significant hole in the wall.

  Its owner was apparently no longer
around to care.

  They saw no one along the highway, although they passed over fifty wrecked cars. Most were in ditches, but two had slammed headfirst into trees and several sat diagonally across the road. Avoiding them required careful maneuvering. They drove down a long decline between vineyards and orange groves into a broad valley, then wound through a low ridge of hills toward the Pacific Ocean and the beach town of Furness.

  Zolzaya parked her car along a street near downtown, near the stone edifice of a Baptist church and right across from a deli and a tattoo parlor. A multi-car wreck completely blocked the road, so it would have been impossible to go farther without detouring, and where they stopped didn’t appear to matter in any case. They got out, slowly, walking like somnambulists. She didn’t bother to put a quarter in the meter. Margo followed her down the road, saying nothing, immersed in the uncanny quiet no one ever hears except high in the mountains, away from all human settlement. Here, amongst all the buildings and bridges and abandoned cars, it was dreamlike and surreal.

  “Maybe we’re it.” Margo’s voice sounded unnaturally loud. “Maybe we’re the only ones.”

  They stepped over a number of piles of clothing. The most peculiar one was a business suit, impeccably tailored, out of which peeped the waistband of brightly-colored My Little Pony boxers.

  Zolzaya nudged the heap with the toe of her shoe and shook her head. “People are so weird.”

  “You mean were.”

  She was about to respond, but stopped when her eyes caught movement across the street.

  Sitting on the steps of the church, a book in his lap, was a middle-aged man with black plastic-framed glasses, wearing a rumpled shirt and a pair of khaki slacks, looking up at them with a strange, perplexed expression.

  “Hey.”

  “Hi.” They crossed the empty blacktop and walked over to the man. He didn’t look dangerous, which was a relief. Ever since this bizarre morning had started, it hadn’t been far from Zolzaya’s mind that if they ran into someone who intended them harm, there wouldn’t be much they could do to stop it. “Have you seen anyone else?”

  The man shook his head. “No. You’re the first ones.”

  “Do you have any idea what did all… all this?” She raised both hands, palms upward, in a gesture that embodied all of the helplessness she felt.

  “Of course,” the man said, with such complete conviction that Zolzaya’s heart raced. He knew? How could he know?

  “What is it?” she said.

  “It’s the Rapture, of course. The biggest mystery is why I’m still here.”

  6

  AND THE SIBYL closed her eyes, and raised her withered hands, wrinkled palms outwards towards them, and her shadow twisted and writhed against the wall of the cave.

  And she said: The woods shall stir, and the deep waters shall be troubled, and there shall come forth legions. Some shall have talons, and some teeth, and some shall spout flames and others spin ice from the touch of a finger. But those shall not be the most dangerous of all, for Man and Woman are both the best and the worst that the Gods have created, for they do what they do with full knowledge, unlike the beasts, who do simply as their nature commands.

  Walk with care amongst your own kind.

  —

  JACKSON ROYCE KNEW the moment he woke up that it had already happened.

  The hectic, sharp odor was gone. The air smelled spent, drained, like the listless sweat that comes after a fever breaks. All that remained was an oppressive silence.

  A pang of disappointment jolted him. It would have been better to witness it. The aftermath, whatever it was, would be important, but there was something about being right on top of a catastrophe, looking straight down the mouth of the volcano as it erupted, that was appealing.

  But there was nothing he could do about it now. It was done, he was certain of it. The biggest event of his whole life, and he’d slept through it. He swung his legs out of bed, and walked into the bathroom to pee, brush his teeth, shave, and shower, in that order. He did all of this in an efficient, unhurried sort of way. There was no rush now.

  The waiting was over.

  Forty-five minutes later, dressed in jeans, a sweatshirt, and a pair of lightweight hiking boots, his .40-caliber Glock in a holster at his hip, he walked down the stairs of his apartment building and out onto East Main Street, Santa Isobel, California, to see what the next world had in store for him.

  The street was empty. In the distance, there was a car nose-downward in the drainage ditch. Nearer at hand was a flopped-over bicycle, with a pair of men’s cargo shorts, a t-shirt, and a bright red bicycle helmet strewn backwards from where it had landed. Nothing else looked amiss, but Jackson had the sensation of being watched by a hundred eyes, as if even the stones and the walls and the trees were waiting to see what he’d do.

  He scanned the scene, swiveling his head slowly from left to right and back again, trying to absorb everything with his senses. It was critical, he knew, not to miss details. Remember it all, even what seems inconsequential.

  And never, ever drop your guard.

  He walked down the street toward the wrecked car. The engine was still running, the rear wheels hanging in the air and rotating slowly. Jackson drew his gun, his tread becoming the quiet footfalls of a predator, his eyes narrowing to slits, and peered into the window.

  There was no one in the car.

  He pulled the door handle, and the door fell outward with a bang that sounded loud in the all-encompassing silence. Resting on the seat was a flower-print dress, a string of obsidian beads, and a sheer scarf. Next to the accelerator was a pair of sandals and a gold ankle bracelet.

  Jackson stood silent and perfectly still, looking into the interior of the car, for almost five minutes.

  Two sets of clothing. The bodies wearing them apparently vanished.

  A car and a bicycle wrecked. Whatever happened, happened suddenly.

  No other evidence of survivors. At this time of day, there should have been cars passing, people outdoors, yet he’d heard nothing.

  And he was still alive. So logically, a significant percent of the people on Earth were destroyed by this event, but there should be other people like him who were spared.

  No information yet regarding what had done this, and what further danger it might pose.

  All of this went into his mental record for possible future use.

  He returned to his apartment, grabbed his backpack, and packed the bare essentials. Three changes of clothes, a razor, a flashlight, and a personal kit with deodorant, soap, shampoo, and a bottle of ibuprofen. The thick notebook he always took with him whenever he expected to be gone for more than a few hours. A handful of pencils. He already had other survival gear—a tent, sleeping bag, camp stove, and tools—packed in his truck, put there months ago when he first scented the danger, like the acrid tang of a distant forest fire.

  He gave a quick look around the place to see if there was anything more he wanted to bring along.

  The photograph. The photograph of Susan.

  He stopped, eyes lifting, gazing at a blank wall. How long had it been since he’d thought of her? Six months? A year? Why now, when he was going to leave this mouse-infested hole, with its rust-stained shower and faulty appliances and the downstairs neighbors who liked to play Mexican pop music full blast at three AM, did her face appear before him like a window into the past?

  She was gone too, of course. The likelihood of her being spared was nil. It was the law of averages. He still didn’t have a good sense of the magnitude of the event. Did 75% of the human race perish? Or 90%? Or 99%? He needed more information to be certain.

  But even at the lower likelihood, Susan was probably one of the missing.

  He went to the little end table that stood next to his ragged sofa, and opened the drawer. Inside was a stack of magazines—Army, Soldiers, Guns & Ammo. He pushed those aside. In the bottom was a faded photograph of a smiling blonde woman, just turned twenty-one, sitting in a swing
with her hands above her head holding the chains. Other playground equipment stood behind her, and in the distance you could just glimpse the sea.

  Jackson put the photograph in the backpack, and zipped it up.

  One more quick look around. Most of this garbage, honestly, was better off discarded. He sensed that there would be no wanting for anything for a while. Whatever he needed would be lying there for the taking, the fallen remains of other people’s lives.

  He grabbed his wallet and keys and walked out without a backward glance.

  He didn’t bother locking the door.

  —

  TEN MINUTES LATER, he was driving through the center of Santa Isobel, and despite himself, his pulse quickened, and a light sweat broke out on his forehead.

  He’d been ready for blood, and ready for destruction. Fire and ice, as was foretold.

  He was not ready for emptiness, and the silence afterwards.

  The little strip mall with the pizza joint, the laundromat, the Safeway store, and Connie’s Hair Palace and Salon, was empty except for a few cars. The only store that had been open when the Event happened was the Safeway, and there wouldn’t even have been many people there. He parked in the middle, still pulling his truck between the yellow lines of a parking space even though there wasn’t much reason to care, then got out.

  A red Ford pickup had driven into the light post in the middle of the lot. When its owner disappeared, the truck evidently had the ill fortune to be pointed toward one of the only obstacles nearby, where it collided and stalled. A trim Mazda convertible, its top down, had jumped the curb, run across a neatly-maintained hedge and fetched up against the corner of Coastal Savings & Loan. There were several other accidents along the road in front of the mall, and Jackson decided that for the sake of data collection, he should take a look inside them. He did so, in his usual methodical fashion. More dropped purses, collapsed piles of clothing, hats that had settled on top of shirts and pants like the Wicked Witch of the West’s at the end of The Wizard of Oz.