After that, I read for a couple of hours. I mean, I didn’t have anything else going on, my cell phone had run out of battery the night before and I hadn’t plugged it in to charge, so I wasn’t calling anyone. It was kind of a nice day, in a way.
Looking back, I feel pretty guilty about that now. I guess I had one more nice day than the rest of the world did.
So late in the afternoon, I started to get bored, and decided to go outside and see if the whole neighborhood’s power was out. Well, pretty much right when I stepped off my porch, it was obvious something had happened. There were cars all caddywhompus in the road, and I could see windows broken in some of them. Looking around, I saw busted windows in some of the houses, as well.
I kept walking down the road, wondering what had happened, wondering where everybody was. There was nobody around. I knocked on the doors of a couple neighbors I knew, but nobody was home. Not even old Mrs. Emmerson down the street, who was pretty much always home, looking out her window at people as they went by.
It wasn’t until I had circled the block twice that I found the first body. I don’t know the guy’s name, but he lived about five houses down from me, him and his partner. He was lying on his front porch. I don’t know why I didn’t see him the first time I went by. He was just lying there, half-way down the stairs. He was all torn up and bloody.
I ran over there, thinking maybe he needed help, but when I got close enough, I could see he was beyond that. He was just covered in these ragged tears, on his face, his arms, his torso. I could see blood streaking from where he was on the porch, back along the boards and inside the front door. I figured, well, I don’t know what I thought.
I guess I thought maybe his partner was inside or something, and needed help. It wasn’t until I was stepping through the door, stepping over a big pool of blood on the floor, that I thought maybe whoever did this to him was still inside. I stopped, looking around, but the house didn’t feel occupied, you know?
Maybe it was stupid, but I went on in. I figured I’d call the police or something. But as you probably know, when I picked up the phone there was no dial tone. I found a cell phone on the kitchen counter, probably belonged to the guy out front, but it was dead, too.
I got pretty freaked out then, I guess, because all I could think of was that I had to get out of there. I had to get home. I don’t know why, I just did. I got myself out of that house and ran all the way home, ran inside, and locked the door behind me. I called out a few times, to see if my parents had come home yet, but nobody answered. I walked through the house real quick, checking upstairs too, but nobody was home.
My room was in the basement of our house, so that’s where I went. I mean, what else could I do? I tried the phone every once in a while, with no luck, and the power never came back on, of course. So I sat. I sat and I wondered where everybody was—what had happened to that guy down the street.
Next thing I knew, it was morning. I’d fallen asleep sometime in the evening, and slept right through the night. I was still wearing my clothes. I went upstairs to see if anyone was home yet, but they weren’t. I looked out the living room window, and everything was still as it had been yesterday—no lights, no people, cars still abandoned in the street. I thought about going outside, but I didn’t want to find any more dead people. Even worse, I didn’t want to find whoever had killed that one guy.
So I stayed. I ate food from the pantry, the water still worked, so I was OK there. I stayed, and I waited. I guess I was kind of stuck, looking back at it now. Not stuck like anything was really preventing me from going out, moving on, but, like, stuck in my own head, in my own self, not wanting to move on. It was a type of denial, I guess—denying that all this was real, was permanent.
Anyways, nobody came home, I never saw anyone go by, and the power never came back on. I read books, I stared out the window, I ate what I could find in the kitchen.
I lost track of the days after a while, but I’d guess it was more than one week but less than two that I lived that way. It was green beans that got me going again.
I hate green beans. I don’t have a real reason, but they have always disgusted me. It’s more than disgust, really. Something about them repels me, disturbs me. It’s almost a phobia, I guess. Just those long, green little things sitting on the plate… Ugh. So one day I opened up the pantry, and there they were. Three cans of green beans, staring at me.
Of course they’d been there the whole time, but now I’d eaten pretty much everything around them. I’d spent most of the last day eating from a bag of flour and crunching on dried lasagna noodles, and my stomach wasn’t feeling great about that. I opened the pantry, and the only things there were some spices, the rest of the box of lasagna noodles, and the green beans.
Somehow that made me realize this was permanent. The power wasn’t coming back on. Wherever my parents and everyone else in the neighborhood had gone, they weren’t coming back. I knew the only thing to do if I stayed was to open the beans and eat them. To me, that was more frightening than going outside, where everybody had disappeared and there was a dead man down the street.
So I put a few of my favorite books, as well as a sweatshirt, in a backpack, opened the door, and walked away.
It was like I had cut myself free, or something. My former life, closed up in that little house, ended and this new life began. I guess that’s how I put it all behind me, maybe. Probably not the healthiest way of dealing with things, psychologically, but I had to put it behind me to be able to move ahead. But where’s ahead? That’s the next big question, I guess.
---
At the end of his tale he paused, thinking, and seemed to come out of the eloquent trance he’d been in, quickly becoming the tongue-tied teenage boy again.
“So, well, that’s it, really. Since then, I’ve just been walking along, and then I got here a couple of days ago.”
“You never saw what happened to your neighborhood?” asked Shawna.
“Nope.”
“Never saw what killed that man?”
“No,” replied Mark looking down. “I never did. I came across a few other dead bodies as I walked, and I saw a few people go by in the distance, so I knew I wasn’t alone, but that’s it until I got here.”
“Wait,” said Owen, his eyes growing big, “You haven’t seen any of the other crap we’ve all been talking about? Monsters and shit eating people, end of the world, all that?”
“Nope.”
“You just missed it?”
He shrugged again, looking uncomfortable under the scrutiny. “I guess so.”
Owen paused, looking at Mark suspiciously.
“But you believe us though, right? The things we’ve seen? Our stories?”
Mark looked even more uncomfortable. “Well, something sure happened. I mean, I’ve seen all the destruction and all.”
“But you believe we saw what we say we saw?” pushed Owen.
Mark blew air from his cheeks in a long sigh, obviously stalling for time as he marshalled his words.
“I gotta say, seeing is believing. Or, the opposite.” Mark looked down as he made the awkward admission. Owen frowned, looking unsatisfied, and the others looked equally doubtful.
For her part, she understood. She would not have believed the things she’d seen if they were told to her by others. Not, at least, until she had seen similar things herself.
The questioning went on in that vein for a few minutes, with Mark still trying to avoid offending everyone around the circle without having to out-and-out lie and say he believed their stories whole-heartedly, but there was no real hope for a resolution. A person couldn’t truly believe that his world had gone through such a fundamental shift until they saw it with their own eyes.
She wondered, briefly, what future generations would think. Would they believe what their elders told them had happened? Would everything she was seeing be thought of as nothing more than fairy tales in some distant future? Come to think of it, she wondered if there wou
ld be future generations at all.
For her part, she was not concerned with what one teenager believed or didn’t believe. She did find one point of interest in listening to these tales, though. As each of them told their story, she noticed that they differed only in the details. Each began with a description of their past life, dwelling on how good things had been. Each spoke of the confused first days, glossing over the details of friends and family that were lost. They spoke of the horrors they had run from, and the disasters they had seen in recent weeks, all making their aimless way to this warehouse. She wondered how many similar tales there were, out there beyond the walls of the warehouse.
Once Mark had finished, all the stories but one had been told.
Owen looked at her, “Well? It’s your turn now.”
She gazed at him for a moment. It really was of little interest to her, what had come before. But she could see that something was expected.
“On the first day, she was in class, at her school…”
---
It had been an AP Physics lesson, she remembered. It was only the second week of school, so the class hadn’t gotten to anything complicated yet. The students in her class, all Juniors and Seniors, were sitting straight in their seats, using tablets to work physics problems that their teacher had put online. The teacher wandered about the room, looking over the students’ shoulders and responding to questions here and there. The room was quiet, with just the occasional murmured consultation between teacher and student, backed up by the sound of students tapping the keys of their calculators and scratching their pencils across scrap paper as they worked the problems out. She sat in the corner, in the back, as she did in every class. She had finished her work, but still looked down at her tablet. It was the best way to avoid the attentions of the teacher or the other students.
It was a warm day, and the window was open. That may be why she survived, the little bit of extra warning that she and those around her got. She was saved by an open window. She wonders how many other stupid little things have saved her since.
At one point she became aware of the sound of yelling outside the window. She didn’t notice at first, because it sounded very much like the yelling that often drifted across the commons from the elementary school playgrounds. Suddenly her tablet went dark. She could tell by the murmurings around her that everyone else’s tablet had turned off as well. Before anyone had time to really wonder what had happened to the tablets, the lights in the classroom went off as well.
For a moment there was a burst of chatter, but the teacher soon brought the class to order. He assured them that this was some sort of power outage and stated his confidence that it would all be sorted out soon.
But in the silence now, she could hear the yelling from the playground again. The yelling had changed. It had grown louder, and more ragged—and closer.
She drifted to the window, looking out, wondering at the disturbance and ignoring the teacher’s protests. The yelling was coming mostly from her left, which was the direction of the elementary school. She saw a mist that had gathered in the hollow where the soccer fields were, but because of that mist could see no other details. It was a sunny day, so the mist was a surprise. Gazing into the mist, wondering, she soon saw a solitary boy run from that direction, across the commons, and into the main administration building of the school. His uniform was dirty. The secretaries in the office would not be pleased.
The boy was just the beginning, though, of what soon became a steady trickle of elementary students fleeing the grounds of the elementary school. She thought the trickle might become a flood, but it never did. The students she did see arrested her attention though. They were wide-eyed, panicked, and often filthy. Many of them were spattered with a dark mud that must have been hard to come by on such a dry and sunny day.
As she watched the students flee, she noticed that more students from her own class had joined her at the windows. They were leaning in, making speculative noises at each other, making it clear that none of them knew what was happening. The crowd at the windows grew close, and people started bumping into her hips and shoulders as they leaned in to see out the windows. She backed out of the crowd, using sharp elbows to clear a space for herself. None of this was right, and she wanted out. She left the room, but nobody noticed. They were all at the window, including the teacher, watching instead of reacting. She never saw them again.
Leaving the room, she walked down the hallway, stopping to put her physics book back into her locker. She doubted that physics class would resume soon. She saw other students leaving class, asking each other what was happening. They had the feel of rising panic about them. Soon she stepped out the side doors of the high school wing, entering the commons. She saw fewer children fleeing from the elementary school grounds now. She heard less screaming as well. And the mist was growing, spreading across the fields. Its edges had reached the commons.
She jogged across the commons herself, heading for her dormitory. On the way she passed a few straggling children. One tearful girl held the hand of a dazed looking boy and pulled him along. The boy was covered in the black mud she had seen on some of the others.
“Come on Tyler, come on Tyler, come on,” the girl kept saying. The boy did not say anything. He had the empty look in his eyes of a child who has seen too much.
She had not seen that look for many years—not since she had been brought to America. But she recognized it. It was a shock to her, here, in this safe place. She paused briefly, watching their progress and wondering. What had he seen?
Soon the children rounded a corner, and she stepped into her dormitory. She never saw those children again either.
Walking up a flight of steps and down a hallway to her dormitory, she entered her room. Whatever was happening, there would be no safety in that room but there were things she wanted. She grabbed the keys to her parents’ house, and her cell phone.
She also changed her shoes from the clogs she had been wearing to her running shoes. She remembered a commercial she had seen on television once. Two African tribesmen are faced with a lion, and one squats down and pulls on a pair of running shoes.
“You will never out-run the lion!” says his astonished friend.
The first man looks to his friend and smiles. “I only have to out-run you.”
It was an important lesson.
After lacing her shoes, she took a look around the room. Keys, phone… there was nothing else she needed. She looked around at the clothes, the souvenirs, the books, and the obligatory photos of her family tacked to the wall. It did not matter what the counselors said, or how often they said it. She was not attached to any of it. It meant nothing to her.
She left her room, heading down the hall and to the door.
She was seeing other students now, all looking frightened. Some hung together in clusters, and some wandered aimlessly. Only a few moved with any purpose, and those moved in opposite directions as often as not. None gave her a second look as she passed.
She arrived at the door to the commons, and was just about to open it when somebody else pulled it quickly open from the outside. It was a boy she knew, standing there panting. Behind him, she had time to see the mist now rolling across the grounds in force. It was like a white wall, blocking out anything more than twenty feet from the doorway.
Next, she noticed the wide eyes of the boy in the doorway. He had been running. Now he stood, panting, and quivering, looking in her eyes. She saw panic on his face.
He took one panting breath… then he was gone—brushed aside as something large and inky black rushed across the doorway and into the mist. She leaned out the doorway, wondering what it was, but saw only a quickly retreating black shadow, soon lost in the mist.
She retreated back into the hallway, jogging across the building to another door on the other side. This one let out into the school parking lot. This one, too, was full of the unnatural mist. She spent a moment peering out, looking for danger. Once or twice she thought
she saw other black shapes in the mist. They seemed huge, maybe the size of elephants, but moved much too quickly for their size. Perhaps the mist was playing tricks on her sense of perspective.
The parking lot was not a safe place. But she did not think the dormitory would stay safe either, now that it was surrounded by the mist. She needed to move.
She stepped outside, jogging a few steps and crouching behind a parked car. She could hear more screaming now—a lot more screaming. And some of it was coming from inside the dormitory as well. She had been right—the dormitory was not safe.
She saw people, too: students, mostly, and the occasional adult. Most of them were familiar to her—students, teachers, and others that worked at the school. All were running in one direction or another, many with wide eyes, and many spattered with the same dark stains she had seen on the first children to flee the elementary school.
Suddenly a shape loomed out of the mist, crashing full speed into the shelter of the car beside her. She started to rise, but then saw that it was another student. This was a girl her own age. They had a few classes together.
“Ohmigod, can you believe this?” said the girl. “What is happening?”
She didn’t answer. There was no answer and they both knew it.
The girl looked at her. “What do we do now?”
Why had the girl said “we”? She may never know.
“The dormitory is not safe. The school is not safe,” she said. “Perhaps someplace else is safe. It’s time to run.”
“Oh Jesus,” replied the girl, her eyes going wider. “Have you seen those things? You can’t outrun those things.”
She looked at the girl, a small frown on her face. “She does not need to outrun those things,” she said.
She turned away from the questioning eyes of the girl and took off across the parking lot. She saw that girl only one more time.
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