The Fifth Day Read online

  By early afternoon—it might have been around one, but Zolzaya had left without putting on her watch—they were back in front of Ben Ingersoll’s house.

  Ben looked up at it, his eyes wide. It was obvious what he was thinking. He was hoping his family would be back. It’d be as crushing when he opened the door and they weren’t there as it was when he woke up this morning to find them gone. Were they all going to have to go through this, over and over again, until they accepted it, until the knowledge of their situation became a part of them?

  He followed Margo up the stairs, both of them carrying bags of groceries. Zolzaya followed, and then Jeff. Margo opened the door to let them in, and Ben walked in and stood in the foyer with a stillness and watchfulness far beyond his thirteen years. Then he looked back at Zolzaya, his eyes wide, despairing.

  But he didn’t cry, and neither did she.

  They unloaded the food from the carts, bringing bag after bag up the stairs into the house. While putting away their haul, she saw the Ingersolls’ kitchen was already well-stocked. There were two dozen eggs, a gallon of milk and two quarts of orange juice, and a large block of cheese in the fridge, along with various fresh vegetables and containers of what appeared to be leftovers. The cabinets had breakfast cereal, flour, sugar, oats, cans of beans and soups, boxes of pasta, and dried fruit of several kinds—including chili-spiced mango, which she’d never had but sounded awesome. They had evidently been foodies. There were racks of nicely-maintained pots and pans, a knife block with a variety of cutlery of various shapes and sizes, and a good many kitchen gadgets to which she couldn’t put a purpose.

  They wouldn’t starve. At least not for a while. And if they really were the only four people left in Furness, they’d be able to survive for a while on what they could raid from grocery stores and other people’s houses. Even when the power went out, there was food that would keep for months, especially some of the dry goods.

  And then what? Eventually, even with what, at the moment, appeared to be a virtually inexhaustible supply, they’d run out of food. At that point, they’d have to have figured out how to procure food for themselves. It was back to the Dark Ages. No electricity, no running water, spending all their time engaged in subsistence.

  One step at a time. Don’t worry about the distant future. They needed to focus on what they had to do now. There’d be time for planning later, once they figured out what the hell happened, and what if anything they could do about it.

  By Zolzaya’s standards, they ate a sumptuous lunch. Heat-and-serve gnocchi with Romano cheese, a large package of barbecue chicken wings from the freezer, and a Sara Lee cherry cheesecake for dessert. She noticed four ribeye steaks in the freezer when she was pulling out the chicken wings, and took those out to thaw for dinner. With luck, there’d still be electricity.

  —

  THEY SPENT THE afternoon in Ben’s house. Jeff disappeared into what had been Ben’s mother’s study, closed the door, and didn’t appear again until dinnertime. The rest were not so quick to choose isolation. Given what had happened, sticking close together was an imperative.

  Ben picked up a Sky & Telescope magazine from the coffee table, and leafed through it without reading.

  “I miss my family.”

  “I’m sure you do, Ben,” Margo said.

  “My mom liked astronomy. She had a telescope. She got me really interested in stars. Sometimes we’d take it down to a beach near town where there aren’t a lot of lights. We’d look at stuff, like Saturn and Jupiter and the Andromeda Galaxy.”

  “That must have been awesome.”

  Ben shrugged, and managed a smile, but his eyes glistened with tears. “The Andromeda Galaxy isn’t very interesting. Looks like a fuzzy white blob.”

  “A fuzzy white blob with billions of stars,” Margo said.

  Ben nodded. “I know.” He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. “I wonder where everyone’s gone.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I don’t think they’re going to come back.”

  Silence fell in the room for a few minutes.

  Margo broke the quiet. “I don’t have any family nearby. My brother lived in San Francisco. Our parents are both gone. I’ve never been married.”

  Zolzaya took a deep breath, held it, let it out slowly. Already they were talking about people in the past tense. It was amazing how fast the brain adjusted. Although she knew they were not done with the adjustment yet, not really. They’d all wake up tomorrow morning, and open their eyes, and go through twenty minutes of realizing once again that it was not a dream.

  “I lost a sister and a best friend.” Then, almost as an afterthought, she added, “and my boyfriend.”

  “I had a sister.” Ben looked up at the ceiling, blinking back more tears. “Her name was Hannah. She was a pest sometimes. But I miss her, too.”

  Margo pursed her lips. “We all miss the people who are gone.”

  “Do you think Jeff could be right?” Zolzaya looked out of the window into the empty street.

  “About what?”

  “That this was the Rapture.”

  “I didn’t think you were religious.”

  “I’m not. But I can’t think of another explanation. I keep picturing the piles of clothes, and the backpacks and purses and briefcases. Wasn’t that the way it was supposed to happen, with the Rapture? People being assumed bodily into heaven and leaving their clothes behind?”

  “I don’t think they talked about that part in the Bible,” Margo said.

  “I didn’t find any clothes for my parents.” Ben gave a mirthless little giggle. “They sleep naked. But my sister’s pajamas were in her bed. Laid out like they’d deflated. Like a balloon when all the air leaks out.”

  Well, that was a terrifying image.

  “I think I’m going to take a nap.” Margo sniffled. “Is it weird that I want to be in here with you while I sleep?”

  “Not weird at all. I’d rather not be alone myself.”

  Ben smiled. “I’ll get my iPad, but I’ll stay with you, Margo.” He trotted out of the room.

  “He’s an extraordinary boy.”

  Margo nodded. “I think at his age, I’d have been curled up in the corner, catatonic.”

  “Me too. I’m twenty-six and I’m not far from that now.”

  Margo lay down on the sofa, and closed her eyes. “We’re all going to need each other, I think.”

  Z frowned, wishing she shared Margo’s positive opinion of human nature. Jeff didn’t seem to need anyone, least of all a trio of penny-ante sinners. He’d kind of shrugged his shoulders when Margo and Z ran into him this morning. He and his Bible were pretty self-contained.

  Z glanced toward the stairs, up which Jeff had vanished earlier, and wondered what he was doing.

  But maybe there was more to him, too, more than what appeared on the surface. Maybe there was more to everyone. All of those vanished souls, dissolved from their worlds, with their hobbies and interests and passions and fears, their flawed humanity, their strange shallowness and unexpected depths.

  —

  BEN RETURNED WITH his iPad, and Zolzaya picked out a book from a full-to-overflowing bookshelf that stood in the corner of the room, next to a Yamaha piano and a cabinet with a stereo. She initially considered looking for a Bible herself, but decided that she wasn’t going to entertain the Rapture as a working hypothesis until all other possibilities were exhausted. In the end, she chose The Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Greene.

  At least she’d find out what the scientists had to say about the universe before she turned toward the monks and the mystics.

  She’d only been reading for a few minutes when Ben came up to Zolzaya, holding out his iPad.

  “Hey, Z. Look.”

  He was on Twitter, and the feed showed the usual string of posts, but there was nothing posted after 6:32 AM.

  “I got on Twitter because there are a bunch of people I follow who post interesting stuff about astronomy. Like Phil P
lait and Neil deGrasse Tyson. But look how nobody’s posted, all day long, not since early this morning.”

  Zolzaya nodded.

  “So that means that it’s not only here. It’s everywhere. They’re all gone.”

  Zolzaya suppressed a shiver at the matter-of-fact way he said it. “Not all. If we’re still here, then there have to be others.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m not sure. But why would this take away all of humanity, except for four people who live in the same area of California? Doesn’t make any sense.”

  “It doesn’t make sense anyway.”

  That was true enough. “Well, at least that answers the question of whether it only happened around here. Whatever ‘it’ is.”

  Ben nodded solemnly and returned to his chair.

  Zolzaya spent the remainder of the afternoon immersed in relativity and string theory and warped space and time without getting any real insights into the bizarre, depopulated world they now inhabited. After a time, she looked up from her reading to see Margo and Ben both asleep, Ben’s fingers still hooked around his iPad.

  Zolzaya tried to nap, too, but sleep eluded her. Her mind kept returning to that first terrifying Tarot cast she’d done. The Nine of Swords—the death card. The Devil. The Falling Tower. The Hanged Man.

  Signs and portents. Wasn’t there a line from the Bible that said something about signs and portents? It was years since she attended the Lutheran church her parents had been raised in, and even they hadn’t taken it very seriously.

  One way or the other, they’d find out if Jeff was right. Because if he was, then everyone disappearing was only the beginning.

  —

  AT A LITTLE after six, the sun was angling down toward the horizon. Zolzaya got up from her chair, set her book aside, and stretched, her back cracking pleasantly and her stiff muscles relaxing. Ben and Margo were still asleep, Margo on the couch with her mouth open, snoring softly, and Ben curled up cat-like in his chair with his legs tucked underneath him.

  She walked into the kitchen, and after a time found a broiler pan and a bottle of a spice mixture labeled rib rub that sounded like it might work for steaks. A few minutes later, she had the steaks sizzling under the broiler, and was cutting up bok choy and putting it in a pot on the stove with some basil-scented olive oil and pepper.

  “That smells good.”

  She turned to see Jeff standing in the doorway.

  “Hungry?”

  “Yes.”

  “Me too. What have you been doing?”

  “Praying. And reading the Bible.”

  She gave the bok choy a stir, then donned an oven mitt and took the broiler pan out to turn the steaks. “Do you honestly think prayer works?”

  “Yes. I do.”

  “Why?”

  Jeff frowned. “Because I’ve seen it work.”

  “How would you tell the difference? I mean, couldn’t things have worked out just because they worked out?”

  “I just know. That’s all.” He looked at the steaks. “You eat meat?”

  “When I could afford it, yes. My boyfriend and I didn’t have a lot of money, so this is a real treat. Why?”

  “You look more like the tofu and wheat grass juice type.”

  She smiled. “Don’t make assumptions.”

  “I won’t make assumptions about you if you won’t make assumptions about me.”

  Okay, that was a bull’s-eye. She’d been right, there was more to Jeff than she’d realized at first.

  “Fair enough.”

  “Can I help with anything?”

  “You can set the table.”

  Ben walked in a few moments later, blinking and yawning, but Margo had to be awakened. Soon after they were all sitting down to a fine dinner, made even cheerier when Ben pointed out that his parents had a nice collection of wines in the basement. The addition of a Rioja, dark as blood, certainly brought out the best in the steak. Margo and Zolzaya had two glasses each, but Jeff refused, sticking to a glass of milk from the fridge. All, however, gladly dug into the ice cream for dessert.

  The evening was awkward. Ben turned on the television, but got nothing but static, further convincing them that whatever had happened was widespread. Zolzaya put a CD on the stereo, but the first thing she pulled out—some piano music by Debussy—turned out to be so eerie and ethereal that she shut it off. Conversation was intermittent and forced, as each of them dealt with the reality of the first nightfall in the new world.

  Finally, it was late enough that they all decided to head to bed. Ben still looked exhausted despite his long nap, and he changed into his pajamas with little urging. Margo took Ben’s sister’s room, Zolzaya Ben’s parents’, and Jeff said he’d be fine on the sofa in the study he’d occupied that afternoon.

  Zolzaya thought she’d be plagued by the worries that had kept her awake earlier, but she dropped off to sleep quickly and easily. She woke up in the wee hours, however, to find that the electricity had gone out. It might have been the silence that awakened her. She knew from power outages she’d experienced before that the quiet was always something of a shock. One didn’t pay attention to all of the small noises—the hum of the refrigerator, the low murmur of the heater during winter, the whispery noise of air conditioners in summer—until they were gone.

  Now, however, the silence was complete. No cars, no background noise. All she heard was the never-ending hiss of the ocean in the distance, a sound that most likely wouldn’t have been audible under normal circumstances.

  She got out of bed. There was probably a robe in Ben’s parents’ closet, but she didn’t try to find it. Who would see her, anyway? She walked, naked, to the window, pushed aside the curtain, and looked out.

  The streetlights were dark, but a nearly-full moon cast its white light on the street, creating odd, sharp-edged shadows. The windows of houses were black, the glass-like sheets of obsidian. Cars glinted silver and gray in driveways, their owners gone forever, where they would sit unused until time and rust destroyed them. A basketball hoop loomed over a garage door in the house across the street, and a tricycle sat near the front door. Further down the street was a house with a sign that said For Sale By Owner. All relics of a life that had vanished without a trace in a single day.

  Down in the yard, something moved.

  She stepped back, heart pounding, but then leaned forward again and looked down. It was near the tall eucalyptus tree in the Ingersolls’ front yard, and it blended in with the mottled bark so well she had half convinced herself that she was imagining things, until it moved again.

  A human shape, tall, with spindly legs and arms, stepped out, and looked right up at her with eyes that glowed green in the moonlight.

  She gave a thin, whistly intake of breath, and crossed her arms over her breasts. But her eyes were locked on those of the figure that was looking up at her, eyes gleaming like emeralds in a hairy, wild-looking face, eyes that regarded her with an expression that was neither hostile nor friendly, but entirely alien.

  The man, if man it was, stepped farther out into the moonlight, and that was when she saw the last thing, the thing that made her run, still nude, down the stairs into the first story of the house to make sure that all the doors and windows were locked.

  The creature had no shadow.

  It was only after she had secured all of the entrances she could find that she dared to look out through the curtains again, toward the eucalyptus tree. By that time, though, the yard and the street beyond it were empty.

  9

  AND THE SIBYL said:

  I am not the only one who has wisdom, for ears that can hear and eyes that can see. There will arise seers amongst you, who have vision and power and understanding. They shall come in many forms; women and men, the old and the young. Your books of knowledge will stand hollow against their words. Fail to listen to them at your own peril; forget their wisdom and you will be walking, unwitting, to your own destruction.

  Take a care that you do not pres
ume, that you recognize your weakness and your foolishness and your ignorance. This world will break first the ones who think that, at a single glance, they have understood it completely.

  —

  JACKSON DID HIS morning routine with little thought for the night visitor that had left its mark right outside his door.

  Events fell into three categories, as far as he was concerned. Things he couldn’t change, things he could change but didn’t care about, and things he could change and were important. Anything that fell into one of the first two categories was summarily dismissed.

  It was a remarkably efficient and streamlined way to look at the world.

  The thing from the previous night fell into the first category. Whatever it was, it was gone, at least for now. It certainly appeared to be dangerous—had he been confronted with it outside, he would not have hesitated to shoot it—but either it had moved on, or else waited somewhere in hiding.

  In neither case could he do anything about it.

  The water in the motel ran on an electric pump, so he had to wash up quickly before the pressure in the tank dropped too low. Afterwards, he spent twenty minutes writing in his notebook, then packed up quickly and efficiently. He considered taking everything to the truck in one trip, but that would require both hands to carry and leave him without a free hand for his gun. He recalled the shadow at the AM/PM the previous night, and how he’d stood in the parking lot, weighing whether he could make it back to the truck without dropping his bags of food.

  Was that shadow the same thing that came to his door last night?

  That was a ridiculous idea. He’d filled up his tank in Las Arenitas, which was a good fifteen miles south of Adelaide Bay, where the Beachcomber Inn was. If the skulking figure at the AM/PM was the same as the nightmarish creature whose silhouette he’d seen cast against the curtains, it would have had to cover fifteen miles in a little over eight hours.