The Apocalypse Seven

by Gene Doucette

  “You’re right; I haven’t heard a car all morning.”

  “Well, the answer is, I swear, I’m just as in the dark about this as you are.”

  She smiled.

  “In the dark,” she said.

  “Sorry, no pun intended.”

  “It’s all right.”

  They fell silent again, waiting, perhaps, for someone to run up and explain it all so that they could get on with their day.

  Robbie was stuck between the usual niceties one went through when meeting someone new—​where are you from, what’s your major, and so on—​and the patent absurdity of their circumstance. He didn’t entirely know how to proceed.

  He pulled his phone out again, just in case it had recovered since the last time he checked. It had not.

  “You don’t have the time, do you?” he asked.

  She laughed.

  “Because you’re late for class? It’s only seven-thirty; you aren’t late.”

  She held up her free arm to show off the featureless disk on her wrist.

  “It’s blank,” he said.

  “It’s in Braille.”

  “But it says it’s seven-thirty?”

  “I checked it when you said you were late, so I could tell you when you arrived that you were not. And then I forgot to do that. But it was seven-fifteen then, so now it’s about . . .”

  She ran her finger across the surface of the disk.

  “Oh,” she said, “never mind.”

  “What do you mean, ‘never mind’?”

  “It still says seven-fifteen. My watch has stopped.”

  “I could be late, then.”

  “Yes, I’m sorry. But I don’t think you’re late.”

  Robbie could feel a vein pulsing in his forehead.

  “You have no way of knowing,” he said.

  “You can’t be late if the class is not happening. It appears we’re the only people here, and I promise, I am not your professor. Ergo, you are not late.”

  “Hey, hey, wait: What if we’re in a quarantine zone?”

  She raised an eyebrow.

  “What is your major, Robbie?”

  “Economics. Not sure what kind yet. I was thinking of . . . Anyway, economics. You?”

  “Bio. This is not how quarantines work.”

  “Wrong word, then. Some kind of . . . emergency, where they evacuated this whole area and they forgot us. Or maybe we’re radioactive right now.”

  “What about Burton? They evacuated my dog, but not me?”

  “I’m not saying it explains everything. It doesn’t explain how someone else’s clothes were in my dresser either. Hey, did you wake up dressed too?”

  “Yes. I did.”

  “Do you remember going to sleep that way?”

  She thought about it.

  “I don’t recall. It isn’t something I ever do, yet . . . yes, I was already clothed. I didn’t even think about it once . . .” She sighed. “I miss my dog, Robbie. I want to find him.”

  “I’m sure Burton’s out here somewhere,” he said.

  Just then, he saw movement at the other end of the quad and wondered if he’d just managed to conjure Carol’s dog into existence by uttering his name.

  But it wasn’t a dog.

  “What is it?” Carol asked. “You stopped breathing. What do you see?”

  There was a deer walking through the open field. It looked nervous, as deer tended to, but this was not the behavior of a wild animal who’d wandered into a metropolis by mistake.

  “Carol, we have got to figure out what’s happening,” he said.

  3

  The walk from the quadrangle to the middle of Harvard Yard was barely a mile, which Robbie had already worked out. The way in could either avoid Harvard Square entirely—​by cutting through Cambridge Common—​or it could skip across the side of the Square, which required taking Garden Street straight down. Both routes involved concerning oneself with some measure of auto traffic, bike traffic, and foot traffic, which grew increasingly heavy and complex the closer one got to the center of the Square.

  He’d expected cars, and knew to look for them. Conversely, he’d nearly been killed by a bike at least twice so far. They occupied the boundary space between pedestrian traffic and car traffic, they were silent, and they moved entirely too fast. After the second close call, he learned to check, even when he didn’t hear or see any cars around.

  He was still doing that as they headed toward Harvard Square, even though there was no evidence of human life in any direction. There were parked cars here and there, but they all looked abandoned: Even with the keys, he was pretty sure none of them was going to start.

  Given all the traffic lights were out, that was probably not the worst thing.

  Three blocks away from the quadrangle, they still hadn’t encountered a single person, or heard an anthropogenic noise. But there were plenty of birds, and the deer he saw was evidently one of many.

  Carol was walking in silence, with one hand under the crook of his elbow and the other holding her cane. It was odd enough for him, actually seeing all of this; he couldn’t imagine what it was like for her.

  “Maybe all the people were turned into animals,” he said, as three squirrels ran past.

  “You suppose Cambridge is under a witch’s curse?” she asked. “If it works both ways, this could mean you are Burton.”

  He laughed.

  “I should be terrified that this isn’t the craziest idea we’ve come up with,” he said.

  “That’s definitely the craziest idea. The quarantine sounded reasonable.”

  “I didn’t mean that. I meant the one where you asked if I was a ghost.”

  “Oh. I thought that was also reasonable, because we had not yet met. Now that I can confirm your corporeality, it seems much more absurd, but context is everything.”

  “Unless we’re both ghosts.”

  “Yes, that’s still on the table.”

  He didn’t think it was really still on the table, but decided that was largely because he didn’t think he believed in ghosts. It wasn’t something he spent a lot of time considering, notwithstanding when he was eight years old. Back then, ghosts were a major feature of his existence, and so were UFOs, dragons, and Egyptian mummy curses.

  “Well then,” Carol said, “let’s find some people to haunt, shall we?”

  4

  There was a hotel a couple of blocks from the center of Harvard Square. It was situated across from the leading edge of the Cambridge Common, and was where Robbie and his parents had stayed when visiting the school during the application process. The stay wasn’t necessary—​the drive from their Connecticut home was under three hours—​but his mom wanted to go sightseeing and his dad had a powerful aversion to night driving. Also, they could afford it.

  It was a nice hotel; Robbie had thought it an interesting combination of quaintly old-fashioned and situationally modernized: oak desks and WiFi, rotary phones and giant flatscreens, tin ceilings and in-room coffee machines. He enjoyed the experience of the place, and thought about popping in again on the three or four times he’d gone past it during orientation. Remember me? he’d say, I was in room 454 last summer. Just wanted to say hi.

  It looked completely empty now. The front doors were locked, and the awning leading to the street looked frayed. The restaurant attached to it was also empty, and likewise locked up. Both places looked abandoned, as if everyone decided to get out of town all at once, but in an orderly fashion. The chairs in the restaurant were still up on the tables, waiting for the morning shift to arrive.

  There was a church next to the hotel. A placard out front listed the upcoming homily subjects. It hadn’t been changed for a while—​the dates were off—​which seemed more like a lazy-pastor problem. Or they lost the key to the lock on the underside of the sign or something.

  The place looked just as closed as the hotel, anyway, which was sort of a shame. The upcoming homily was called “Feeling Alone in the Moder
n World.”

  “Where are we?” Carol asked.

  “In front of the church.”

  “The church. Which church? It’s so quiet, I can’t tell.”

  Robbie was suffering from a failure of imagination, descriptively.

  “We’re not in the Square yet, but . . . I dunno. The church. The church next to the hotel.”

  “There are three churches!”

  “Are there?”

  “Yes.”

  Carol let go of Robbie’s arm and put her hand on the railing that defined the church lawn. She was getting upset, and he couldn’t tell why.

  “Okay,” he said. “If there are three churches, we’re in front of one of them. It’s across from the common. Um. I don’t know what to give you, for landmarks. Name one and . . .”

  Carol started crying, so he decided to shut up. It was only a little gasp at first, but then it came on hard, in body-shaking convulsions that dropped her to her knees.

  “Hey,” he said, quietly. Maybe too quietly for her to hear. “Hey, it’ll be okay.”

  She let go of her cane and rolled over until she was sitting on the pavement, clutching her knees.

  Robbie was torn, because when someone you know is falling apart in front of you, you’re supposed to hold them until they feel better. But he’d met Carol maybe a half an hour earlier, under perhaps the most ridiculous set of circumstances in history. It was not the best situation in which to gauge whether they had, in their brief time together, developed that kind of friendship.

  He did not, in short, want to make it any worse in a misguided effort to make it better. Also, misreading signals from women was basically his major in high school.

  He decided that sitting down next to her and waiting—​for her to stop crying, or to run out of water, depending—​was the best recourse.

  Briefly, he considered whether he should be crying as well, and if not, whether there was something wrong with him. But the situation was so absurd, he couldn’t fathom any resolution beyond it’s all a big misunderstanding. He was sure his parents were just fine because the house was three hours away and therefore well outside of the sphere of influence that resulted in whatever this was. If anything, they were probably worried about him. Likewise, Gertie, his younger sister, would be enjoying her first week at prep school in Groton. That was much less than three hours away.

  The situation didn’t seem hopeless; it just seemed ridiculous.

  “I’m sorry,” Carol said, quietly. She’d taken off her dark glasses to wipe her eyes and was now staring at the space just to his right. “I need you to understand how hard this is for me.”

  “I do understand,” he said.

  “No, I don’t think you do. I thrive on sound. I need to hear the cars going by, and the chirps of the walk signals, and the chatter of other people. Today was my first day of classes. Burton and I were supposed to be paired with a sophomore volunteer, for long enough until I could count the steps to my classes and Burton could learn the route. The volunteer’s name was Derek; I first met him two days ago. Derek didn’t show up this morning, and Burton is missing, and now I’m in an auditory bubble. All I hear is birds, and whatever’s making that sound in the trees. I can’t navigate using birds. I feel . . . really blind now. And I miss my dog.”

  “It’s a squirrel. In the trees.”

  “That’s what a squirrel sounds like?”

  “I guess. Look, we just have to keep going,” Robbie said, standing. “This isn’t a big deal; we’ll work it out. Meanwhile, I don’t think you have to worry about not hearing things.”

  He took three steps into the street. Pointing out to a worried blind woman that on the bright side she wasn’t going to get run over by a car probably wasn’t the best approach, but he had no better ideas.

  “It’s too quiet,” he continued. “I get it, but at least if there isn’t anyone around, there’s less to worry about, right? We can stand in the street if we want.”

  “Robbie . . .”

  “You can try it too. We don’t have to stick to the sidewalks and you don’t need walk signals to let you know it’s safe. Let’s just walk right down the middle.”

  “No, be quiet—​I hear something now.”

  “Not birds?”

  “Not just birds, and not the loud squirrel. Something from that direction.”

  She pointed toward the corner, where Garden Street met Mason Street. Robbie turned in that direction, just in time to see the bike before it ran him down. He and the guy riding it both adjusted, thankfully in opposite directions.

  “Whoa!” the cyclist said, nearly losing control before circling around to a stop a few yards away.

  He did not look like the sort of person one might expect to see on a racing bike. He had on cargo shorts and sneakers with no socks, and a large black T-shirt that read MY IMAGINARY FRIEND SAYS HI. He looked like he’d be more at home with a game controller in his hand.

  “Hey, guys!” he said, genially. “Did you sleep through the apocalypse too?”

  Touré

  1

  Touré screwed up huge this time around: He’d promised delivery on code that was gonna take a solid thirty-six hours to hammer down . . . and then he left himself only eighteen hours to do it.

  It was his own fault. It was always his own fault, but this particular assignment of blame underscored a larger character flaw, to wit: Whenever he saw all the steps needed to get from point A to point B, he got the time commitment wrong. He was great when asked to do something impossible, because then he came in early—​usually earlier than everyone else—​but the stuff that was right there in front of him? Not so much.

  As his second-to-last ex-girlfriend once said, if you asked him how long it would take to cook a three-minute egg, he’d say, About a minute.

  The screwup here was on a big job, with a firm deadline. It was super easy, and it paid well: the best of all possible combinations not involving a winning lottery ticket.

  But because it was super easy, around when he should have been coding, he was down the road at the Science Fiction Interdiction, a bookstore with a too-clever name and a gaming dungeon. The dungeon was a gamer Xanadu, packed on most nights to a fire-code-threatening headcount, with a you-name-it collection of role-playing games.

  It was fair to say his real screwup was going to the dungeon in the first place.

  He didn’t escape the Science Fiction Interdiction due to superior willpower and natural charisma, much as he wanted to believe that; in truth, he only left because they had to close the place down for the night. Then he raced home and got to work on the project he was supposed to have been halfway through already.

  And yet, all of that was just the penultimate screwup.

  He was about six hours into some fine work when he realized he was entirely out of stimulants. There was no coffee, soda, caffeine tabs, or energy drinks to be found in the place.

  He tried to push through using sugar packets and toothpaste, but that really didn’t give him the necessary boost, so after the third time he caught himself falling asleep at the keyboard, he bolted for the all-night spot on the corner.

  That was the last thing he remembered doing before he woke up on the couch in his building’s lobby.

  Clearly, he significantly underestimated how tired he was.

  2

  Even without checking his watch, as soon as the sunlight hit him in the face, he knew he’d really stepped in it this time.

  “Seriously, nobody could’ve woken me up?” he said loudly, for anyone in earshot. There wasn’t anyone obviously around, but he liked to think they heard him from behind their doors, at least on the first floor.

  He started working out stories that could justify how late his code was going to be as he took the stairs. The excuse he’d come up with was good enough—​by the time he made it to his door—​to buy him at least another day, and probably get him a sympathy card.

  He just had to get back into his apartment . . . which he
couldn’t do, because the door was locked.

  That should have been fine. When he ran out in the middle of the night, he sometimes relied on the door to the street to protect his belongings, thinking his neighbors—​a harmless combination of grad students and retirees—​wouldn’t be awake, or if awake, not inclined to steal anything. But this time he’d locked it, which was cool; he had the key.

  Except the key wasn’t working. He tried it every way he knew how, including shouting at it and banging on the door. Briefly, he wondered if he was capable of knocking the door down entirely, but decided even if he was, it should be the lastthing he tried.

  He went back down to the first floor, around the corner of the staircase, and to the doorway of the building’s super. His name was Mr. Elonzo, he was terrifying, and there was some evidence that he was actually a goblin. Touré never saw the man smile, but was positive if he did, he’d have pointed teeth.

  He didn’t like Mr. Elonzo, was basically the problem. Mr. Elonzo didn’t like Touré back, and they were both cool with that arrangement. But now Touré needed Mr. Elonzo in order to get back into his apartment, and so he knocked.

  When this didn’t work, he knocked harder. Then he tried saying Mr. Elonzo’s name loudly.

  A lot.

  By then, someone else in the place should have, at minimum, poked their head out to see what all the ruckus was. Nobody had, so it was possibly even later in the morning than he thought: Everyone could be at work, and/or wherever old people go during the day.

  He checked his watch and quickly decided either it was two in the afternoon or his watch had stopped during the night. The third possibility was that it was two in the morning and a seriously unusual cosmic event was going on outside.

  There was a spare key not involving Mr. Elonzo. Ducks had it, and he was only a mile away. Touré didn’t know if Ducks was home, and the telephonic device necessary to find that out was sitting on the desk, next to his computer, on the other side of the door.

  “To Ducks’s it is,” he declared, to all the sleeping, dead, or absent cohabitants of the building.