Paul believed in all of it when he was younger, even if he didn’t take it all that seriously. Now it seemed like a solid explanation. He’d have to find Jed and Veronica first, to see what their take on it was. Maybe they had a better story.
He left the barnyard, meaning to head to the farmhouse next, when he saw movement around the back of his truck.
“Hey!” he shouted, happy to finally discover a living human that wasn’t in the mirror. He ran over, so eager to get on with the part where all this began to make some sense that he was only about ten feet from the black bear before recognizing what he was getting ready to shake hands with.
There was a large plastic tub in the back of the truck, inside of which was all of Paul’s food, and the bear wanted a taste.
It was an adult male. Paul had seen his share, up in the hills. Most of them were maybe six feet when on their hind legs. This one had to be seven or eight.
If the truck could run, Paul would have just jumped in, started it, and driven it away. That wasn’t an option. Not that there were a lot of better choices. You don’t try to kill bears unless you really, really have to. They were endangered, but that wasn’t the reason. The reason was, killing one was extremely, almost impossibly difficult.
Paul had a handgun on his hip and a shotgun in his hand, neither of which would do more than annoy the bear, and he sure as heck couldn’t outrun it.
His rifle might do the job, if he put the bullet in the right place. But it just so happened the rifle was lying next to the tub of food.
Paul picked up a handful of rocks and threw it at the bear’s belly.
“Ha!” he shouted. “Get out of here!”
The bear took his front paws off the car’s tailgate and turned to the matter of the crazy man throwing rocks.
“Go on!” Paul said.
The thing to do was to continue facing him up, because running wasn’t feasible. Jumping into the truck’s cab might get Paul out of immediate danger, but then he’d be stuck in there until the danger had passed. The bear might eat his whole truck before it came to that; it was sure big enough.
The bear roared. Paul shouted some more, and chucked another rock at its stomach. That made the bear bark and growl, but it also backed up, which was a really good sign. Paul took another step forward.
“Get outta here,” Paul said. “It’s not worth a fight.”
Grumbling, the bear decided Paul was right. It went back down on all fours, snorted at Paul, then turned and walked off.
Paul waited until the bear made it as far as the pumpkin patch before grabbing the tub of food from the flatbed and hightailing it for the farmhouse.
5
The back door to the house was unlocked, as usual. It led right to Veronica’s kitchen. The kitchen didn’t look as if it had been used in a while, which made as little sense as everything else he’d seen up to that point, so Paul just added it to the list.
It was already clear that the Wilsons weren’t home, but so far he’d also found no explanation for why, and how long they’d been away. He added that to the list too.
Paul couldn’t remember when they’d last spoken. Maybe on the prior Sunday, but maybe not; Jed didn’t stop by every Sabbath. He liked to go between Paul’s nondenominational wayside chapel and the Catholic church in town. Paul didn’t take it personally; he figured Jed was just spreading the odds on his getting into heaven.
But maybe it had been a while. The milk in Paul’s fridge had come from one of Jed’s cows, and that milk was old. Was it long enough for his friend to have left town without telling him? All except for the part where they didn’t tell him, it fit the available evidence. Didn’t explain the gigantic black bear camping out in the yard, but sometimes nature happened, and it didn’t always need an explanation.
Paul thought of most of the folks on the mountain as a part of his family. They knew one another’s sins and embraced each other just the same, and it didn’t much matter how long it had been or how little they’d seen one another.
They didn’t just disappear like this on each other. There had to be another explanation.
The next thought he had was that Jed and Veronica were there somewhere . . . but tied up in the bedroom or dead in the basement. Somehow that seemed even less likely than the two of ’em up and taking off on him without a word, but he had to confirm it anyway.
He did, and they weren’t.
After about an hour in the farmhouse, it had become pretty clear he wasn’t going to find the answers he was looking for there. What he needed was to reach someone from outside the area.
Jed had a ham radio in his office for just such a purpose. It was the news hub for the mountainside. Paul didn’t have one himself—he was trying to stay off the grid, which meant no ham license for him—but he knew how to use it.
The dials were marked with the shared local frequencies, and there was a logbook at the desk with the less common ones. Jed liked to see how far he could reach. Paul liked the idea of it himself—skipping a signal across the ionosphere instead of using the government satellites, and talking to someone halfway around the world. It appealed to the rebel Paul used to be.
He turned the radio on, but of course that wasn’t going to do anything because this place had no power either.
Jed and Veronica kept two portable emergency generators in the basement, though. Paul hauled both of them upstairs, left one near the door—no telling how valuable a portable generator was going to be in the coming days—and took the other one into the study.
It didn’t start up. He double-checked to confirm that it had fuel—it ran on gasoline—and tried again. Still no good. He swapped it with the one near the door and got the same result.
It was the battery. They used a 12-volt for a spark to get the generator started, and the battery handling that responsibility was dead. Both of them were, which was downright strange.
Paul popped the battery out of the generator he was working with, and stared at it for a few seconds to see if it felt like explaining itself. It did not, but did call both of Paul’s dead car batteries as character witnesses.
He didn’t even know what could cause all the batteries to die at the same time.
“Add it to the list,” he said.
The good thing about Jed’s generators was that they had a secondary trigger in the form of a hand crank. It took about five minutes, which was roughly three minutes past the point when Paul thought it was broken and he was going to die in the farmhouse because of a couple of burned-out 12-volt batteries, but it worked.
He got the radio plugged into it, and finally, for the first time in a week, Pastor Paul had a way to make contact with the rest of the world.
He turned it to the local frequency first and, using Jed’s call sign, asked if anyone had their ears on.
All static. He put the headphones on in case they were there but the signal was faint, and tried again.
“Anyone out there? Over.”
Nobody was.
Well, except the mountain had no power. He already knew that. If it was only locals on that channel and they were all short of a charge, this wasn’t a surprise. He then switched to one of the channels usually used by law enforcement and was alarmed by the discovery that it was also quiet.
Did they lose power down there too?
Feeling some panic now, Paul began combing through all the channels, from the lowest to the highest, spending a few minutes on each one. The world was a big place, and while the ham radio wasn’t as common as it used to be, the airwaves should still be full of chatter. Tune it right, and it’d pick up AM/FM signals too. Heck, with the right atmospheric conditions it could connect him with someone on the other side of the world. Eventually, he’d find someone—in another state, or another country, or another hemisphere—who could look up northern New Hampshire on the Internet and tell Paul what in the name of the Lord was going on around here.
It wasn’t happening. Every channel was nothi
ng but pure static. That could mean—and probably did mean—that the problem was with Jed’s ham radio and not with the entire world, but after all Paul had been through this past week just to make it this far, he was leaning toward the more drastic explanation.
An hour into it, Paul realized what must have happened.
He stepped away from the radio, dropped down to his knees, and began to pray.
6
Paul didn’t give up on the radio, mainly because he couldn’t figure out what else to do with himself. And that was good, because there was another human voice out there, broadcasting on the emergency channel. He’d listened to that channel at least five times already, so maybe conditions hadn’t been favorable the other times. He was discounting divine providence on the grounds that the Lord was clearly displeased with him.
“. . . recording. If anyone hears this message,” the voice on the radio said, “turn to channel eighteen at sunset. I am on the East Coast. This is a recording. If anyone . . .”
It was a woman’s voice. Bit of an accent: Indian, he thought. He wondered for a moment if she meant the East Coast of India, but no, this was a local frequency.
Paul dropped the headset and ran to the west-facing back porch. The sunset was nearly done; another two minutes at most.
He ran back in and spun the dial to eighteen. He didn’t even bother with the call sign.
“Hello, hello, is anyone there?” he asked.
Silence.
“Hello, I turned to eighteen like you said. This is Paul from New Hampshire. Please be there, I can’t wait another day. Over.”
“Hello?”
Same woman’s voice.
“Yes! Yes, hi! This is . . . this is Paul. Who’s this?”
“I’m Ananda. Did you say you were in New Hampshire? Over.”
“Yes, but . . . Well, I don’t know what happened, or what’s going on. I can’t find anyone else. It’s just me, so far. Do you know what’s going on up here? On the news, maybe?”
“There isn’t any news,” she said. “Whatever happened up there happened here too. We’re both in the dark.”
“Where’s here, for you?”
“Massachusetts.”
“You’re not far at all,” he said. “I was gonna try driving into town tomorrow. Might be, there are some answers there. Over.”
Her being so close meant this could still be a local event. His inability to raise another soul on the radio argued against that, but he wasn’t a hundred percent ruling out other people. Even if he was right about what this was, there’d still have to be more than just the two of them. The world was full of sinners.
“You have a car?” she asked.
“Yes, ma’am, a truck. It’s not running; battery’s dead. Everything else is tuned to go, and I’ve got my hands on a generator. I figure I can rig something to get a spark under the hood. I’m handy—I’ll work it out. After I check out the town, I can come to you if you need help. Over.”
“I think we all need help, Paul. You’re the only . . . I think everyone else is dead. Um, over.”
“They’ve been called, ma’am. That’s my take.”
“Called?”
“The Rapture. They’ve moved on. Over.”
Ananda didn’t respond to this suggestion right away.
“I don’t think we can agree on that,” she said.
“I understand. It’ll do for me. I’ll be talking to the Lord tonight about what I could have done better in my life, but it’s out of my hands. Out of your hands too. Over.”
“Okay.”
“But, look, there’ll be more of us. We just have to find them.”
He felt as though he should be consoling Ananda for having been equally damned, but he was too happy to find another person to worry so much about her soul in that moment.
Outside, the sun had gone down. Jed’s study, which was poorly lit even on a good day, got so much worse that Paul decided to plug a lamp into the generator.
“Exactly where in Massachusetts are you?” he asked, while fiddling with the lamp. “You don’t know how good it feels to talk to another person. Like I said, we should connect, and do this face to face. Over.”
“I feel the same, Paul. All right. Do you know where MIT is? Over.”
“In Cambridge? Sure. And I’ll take the radio with me, and check in when I can. Don’t know how long before I can get there, but we’ll keep in touch—how’s that?”
“I’d like that.”
“I mean, hell, I’ll walk if I have to. Can’t be that far. Over.”
“I wouldn’t recommend that,” she said.
Some kind of background noise came in loud.
“Over,” Ananda said.
“Ananda, what was that?”
“It’s the wolves,” she said. “They hunt starting at twilight. I’m safe. But you should find shelter before sundown. I don’t know what it’s like out of the city, but it’s bad here at night.”
“I’m pretty well armed, Ananda. Over.”
“Well, they’re pretty big, and there are a lot of them. God knows what else is out there. Just be careful. Over.”
“I’ll do that.”
“I have to sign off, Paul. The sound bothers them. Be well. We’ll talk tomorrow, same time?”
“Same time. Signing off.”
He shut down the radio and started laughing. The Lord may have forsaken him, but he wasn’t the only one.
His eyes landed on Jed’s bulletin board on the wall next to the desk. The lamp was showing off everything tacked onto it. The board was mostly used for market schedules and coupons, so that’s just about all that was there to see. Honestly, Paul couldn’t remember spending any time looking it over in the past.
Something caught his eye.
Obscured in one corner was a black-and-white image on a piece of paper. Only the top quarter of it was visible, and the only thing in that part of the photo was someone’s forehead.
Paul’s problem was that it was his forehead.
He unburied it and pulled it down.
It was indeed a picture of Paul. Decent one, too, from maybe four or five years ago. Made no sense that Jed would have a copy of it on his wall, but nothing else about it made sense either, most especially the legend underneath the picture.
It was Jed’s home phone number. Beneath that, in magic-markered capital letters, was a question: HAVE YOU SEEN THIS MAN?
Three
Win
1
Win wasn’t even supposed to be home.
That was what bugged her more than anything. Not the horses running off. Not her mom disappearing with the car sometime in the middle of the night. Not the empty cupboard or the lack of power or the dead cell phone. Not even the part where Mother clearly stopped giving a damn, given the terrible condition of the family homestead.
No, it was that Win should never have been home in the first place. She lived in Providence now, an actual city where hardly anyone smelled like manure, and sleeping past sunrise wasn’t a sign of laziness. She lived there to have a real job, away from a horse ranch in the middle of farmland that was itself in the middle of nothing in particular.
It was, likewise, away from the dream of an Olympics she never managed to qualify for. That was a childhood ambition, and she was twenty-four.
In hindsight, she thought the mistake might have been in picking a city within driving distance. She should have cut the cord entirely—New York City, maybe, or Los Angeles.
Don’t lie, said the voice in Win’s head that did a decent impression of her mother. You couldn’t have tolerated living in either of those places. You can barely stand Providence.
You’re probably right, she told the voice. But let me have this for a little while.
Not being home when “all this” happened would have been much easier. Cities have certain amenities, food within walking distance being a personal favorite. One didn’t need to hunt in order to eat, which is what you resort to when y
ou wake up alone in a house in the woods, fifty miles from the nearest highway on-ramp.
There was a rustling to Win’s left. She leaned forward, looking down over the edge of the old hunting blind, one hand on her bow. It was getting dark, and she didn’t have anything for night vision. Hunting by moonlight was an iffy proposition. All the same, she was hungry, and didn’t have a ton of other options.
She held her breath, nocked an arrow, and was rewarded with the sight of a wild boar.
She loosed the arrow on the exhale. It struck home in the boar’s eye. The beast dropped with a satisfying finality.
“First alternate, my ass,” she said.
2
The pretext of her mother’s call was that Bluebell was sick and Win should come home in case she didn’t last the weekend. Bluebell was a horse, and she was okay as far as horses go, but wasn’t by any stretch Win’s favorite. Win’s horse was Max, and he was doing just fine.
Bluebell was Mother’s favorite, though, so the coded message was Your mother misses you. Can you please come home and spend time with her?
It was the kind of exchange that happened between them so frequently that Win was fully prepared not to engage whatsoever. She’d just claim she didn’t get the message until the weekend was over, complain about her service provider for a few minutes, and then ask how Bluebell was doing. Inevitably, the horse would turn out to be so much better, and then they’d talk for a few minutes about Win’s job, Win would say she really had to go but it was nice talking, and that would be that. No trip necessary.
Except for this time. This time, she’d listened to the message in front of Ted from the office, and she must have made a face because he asked what was the matter. She explained it to him in the best way she knew how without coming off like a horrible person. Then he said well of course Win had to go, and hey, he was heading up to Boston on Friday anyway, and wasn’t the ranch on the way?
The Apocalypse Seven Page 7