Then she began taking things. Dumb things, like a garlic press, or all the refrigerator magnets. She’d return them later, but in weird places, like under the couch. Or she’d swap them: put what she took from one house in another house. One time she found a wedding ring on a holder next to the kitchen sink. She took it, broke into a house across the street, and put it next to the sink there.
It was fun. The only downside was almost never being able to appreciate how these little stunts played out. That was true up until the day her mom sat her down to have an Important Talk.
Bethany thought it was going to be on a different subject—sex, or the first time she bled, which hadn’t happened yet—so she was prepared for all manner of awkward. But it wasn’t that.
Instead, Mom began with “I want you to know that you’re completely safe,” which was a crazy way to go.
“Okay,” Bethany said. “That’s great, thanks.”
Mom then went on about how there had been a series of break-ins in the neighborhood and everyone was worried, but added, “We’re all safe here.”
This should perhaps have scared Bethany into stopping—Mom used the word “safe” seven times, which got increasingly alarming as the talk went on—but her reaction was more or less the exact opposite: This was the best thing ever. Not only did they not know it was her, but they thought some guy was coming into the neighborhood and breaking into their houses in the middle of the night. This was hilarious.
Once she knew the whole neighborhood was trying to outsmart her, she was doubly interested in keeping it up.
Because now it was a competition.
Some of the neighbors got dogs, but they were easy to outsmart. All Bethany had to do was go over during the day and ask if she could pet the new dog, and then she was on the canine okay list and every dog on the street thought she was a friend.
They also added burglar alarms, which were harder to charm. Three times, she nearly got caught by an alarm, although it wasn’t as close as it could have been. There was usually a beep-beep from the house alarm that preceded a full alert. As soon as she heard that, she ran for the back fence.
The cops also rolled up and down the street more often, but that was the easiest to avoid, because they were looking for someone who didn’t look like they lived there.
It was all just for kicks. She never took anything of value, except to put it back where it came from or somewhere else, and nobody got hurt. She figured at worst, if she was caught, she’d be grounded, quietly. Nobody was going to want to admit that the terrible neighborhood crime spree was being perpetrated by a thirteen-year-old girl.
Bethany didn’t remember exactly what happened on that night in May, the last time she snuck out the window. She did recall going down the ladder and heading to one of the big houses on the rich side of Reservoir, and she sort of remembered an alarm going off, and running. She had to take refuge in a tree for a couple of hours that night too, which in hindsight had to mean that the hunt for her was getting more serious. Somehow, in the moment, it still seemed fun and worth pursuing. It was only after the fact that it seemed crazy and stupid.
She fell asleep in the tree, but woke up before sunrise and made it back home before she got busted.
The next morning was when everything stopped making sense.
2
Her room was exactly as she’d left it, so she didn’t even think anything was wrong until she tried leaving.
The bedroom door was locked. Her mom had locked it from the outside, which was, at minimum, a little weird. Granted, Bethany had her own bathroom, so it wasn’t like any emergency short of a fire would have necessitated her exiting into the hall, but all the same, punishment usually works better on a person if they know they’re being punished.
She didn’t sweat it. Whatever was going on, she’d figure it out, either after Mom unlocked the door or after she picked the lock.
Since she was still in her clothes from the night before, she thought it best to wash up. There was no hot water for some reason, so she just did a quick rinse and changed clothes. Then, as nobody appeared to be coming to set her free, she let herself out.
The house was quiet. It was a pretty huge place, with an epic staircase leading up to a rotunda of rooms. At the far end, opposite the top of the staircase, was a grandfather clock that always tick-tick-ticked and chimed the hour. It was the job of one of the maids to make sure it was always going. That involved opening up the middle chamber and pulling until a weight was moved from the bottom of the clock to the top. It’s a magic clock that runs on gravity, the maid told her one time.
The clock wasn’t running that morning, though; somebody screwed up.
“Hello?” she shouted. Her words echoed back, trembling in the glass front of the grandfather clock and in the chandelier at the bottom of the stairs.
She headed down, around the staircase, to the kitchen.
It was an old, old house, the kind of old where the kitchen and its staff were hidden in back, away from the presumption of guests in the front of the place. A whole section was separated from the front, accessible only via a staircase from the kitchen. Dustin played on those back steps all the time, thinking it was a secret passageway, with ghosts and all.
Nobody was in the kitchen. Not even a ghost.
“Hello?” she shouted again. More tinny echoing.
It made zero sense. Mom certainly could not be there, and Dad was almost never there, because he shuttled between Boston and New York so regularly that he kept a place in Manhattan. But Dustin at least should be there, and someone making breakfast for them should be there, and at least one of the maids should be there.
The power’s out, she realized.
To confirm, she crossed the kitchen and pulled open the refrigerator door. The inside was warm, and also empty.
This triggered something like panic in Bethany.
She started running from room to room, for any sign of life, first on the ground floor and then the bedrooms on the second floor. She even rechecked her own room, and the roof of the carport, just in case they were all hiding out there for some reason.
There was one thing of note about the roof, but it didn’t involve her missing family: The ladder was gone.
She climbed out and looked over the side in case she forgot to pull it up, but it wasn’t against the side of the carport, either.
Something else about the outside gave her pause: She couldn’t hear anybody. They lived halfway up Fayerweather and looked down on Brattle, where there was always traffic—but today, there wasn’t any. It was all weirdly quiet, except the birds, who were weirdly loud.
She climbed back inside, closed and locked the window, then ran back downstairs.
The house phone was in the study. Mom and Dad had adamantly refused to give her a cell phone before she turned sixteen for blah-blah-blah reasons that only made sense to them. If you want to call someone, young lady, there’s a perfectly good telephone right there, her father said, without even laughing. Then he’d retire to that very study to do bank stuff, ensuring that if Bethany did have someone to call she wouldn’t be doing it while her father was home.
The study was past the living room, through two sliding doors. She went inside and picked up the phone.
It was dead. She pushed the little button in the receiver cradle a bunch of times. Still nothing.
She got down on the floor and checked the connection. While she didn’t know a lot about telephone maintenance, this one looked like it was hooked up to the wall in all the right ways.
On her knees, beside the desk, she was at the perfect angle to notice the altar.
That’s what it was; there was no better way to describe it. It was through the double doors, in the living room, next to the front window. She must have run past it two or three times already and just not seen it, because she wasn’t used to anything being there.
She got up and went for a closer look.
It had been set up on what looked
like an old vanity. There was an enormous picture of Bethany in the center; a headshot from when she was twelve. In orbit around it were a number of other pictures of Bethany at different ages. In front was a row of candles, and a book.
Wait, am I DEAD? she thought.
She jumped back, her heart trying to pound its way through her throat.
When she was in third grade, a kid in her class drowned. Barney something. She didn’t remember him at all, but she remembered his wake because that wasn’t the kind of event a third-grader should ever attend.
Barney’s parents had a collage on display in the funeral home, with a bunch of photos of Barney playing, and having fun, and smiling for the camera. It looked just like what Bethany was looking at now.
Only now she was the one being mourned.
Trembling, she opened the book.
It was a scrapbook. The first page was a copy of her own birth announcement, and her baby-as-a-burrito photo from the hospital. The next page was just pictures of her: in a stroller, in a crib, in a walker. The next had the first time she crawled.
This was a book about her life, beginning with childbirth and ending with . . . ?
She flipped to the last page. It was a clipping from the Boston Globe.
NO SUSPECTS IN CASE OF MISSING CAMBRIDGE TEEN
Cambridge, MA—Police have no suspects in the case of the missing Cambridge teen, but a local burglar may be the key to the case.
Bethany Jacobs was believed to have been taken by an unknown individual who gained access to her bedroom by way of a ladder and an open window. Police are now saying a series of burglaries in the area may be linked . . .
That was as far as she could read before the tears made it impossible to focus.
“I’m not dead!” she shouted. “I’m right here!”
Nobody was around to hear her: not Mom, or Dustin, her father or any of the house staff.
She ran outside to tell the neighbors she was still alive, but there wasn’t anyone outside, either. A raccoon heard her testimony, but nobody human.
She kept on running, but there was no life to be found.
Bethany stopped running when she reached the river, which was full of every other kind of life.
Her eventual decision to break into the supermarket was made without a great deal of thought: She was hungry, and that was where the food was. She’d only been inside a short while before Touré showed up.
Up until then, as far as she knew, every human was gone.
3
Bethany didn’t tell Carol any of this. She wasn’t sure why—it just felt like there would be consequences if she did. She still woke up every morning half expecting Carol, Robbie, and Touré to be gone, just like her family.
“Why do you think we’re dead?” Carol asked.
“What?”
“I said, why do you think we’re dead? That’s a peculiar suggestion. We seem to be the only ones not dead.”
“I dunno,” Bethany said. “Maybe not dead dead. Like, in another dimension or whatever. Like in a story. Or, what’s that place in between heaven and hell?”
“Purgatory?”
“Yeah, that.”
“If I believed in such a place, then . . .” Carol stopped, and sniffed the air.
“What is it?” Bethany asked.
Carol held her hand out.
“Rain is coming,” she said. “We should go back inside.”
Five
Paul
1
Pastor Paul spent a good part of the next day trying to get power to the truck.
First, he pushed the vehicle around the side of the house, near the kitchen entrance, just in case he needed to sprint from the truck to the house in less time than it would take a bear to chase him down. Then he went about hooking up the battery to the generator to see about recharging it.
He needed a DC current—the generator had a rectifier, so that was fine—and a lot of prayer. If the Lord was of a mind to blow up Paul, this would be when to do it.
It didn’t blow up, but it also didn’t work. He got the car started, but as soon as the wires came off the battery, the truck shut down. The battery wouldn’t hold a charge.
Still, he did get the engine running, which was a positive development. It just wasn’t going to be all that helpful if he wanted the car to drive anywhere.
He scrounged heavy-duty wire, electrical tape, and plastic sheeting by going through Jed’s house. Some of the wiring had to be torn out of a wall, which he would definitely apologize to his friend about if he ever saw him again.
When it was all done, the generator got a new home in the passenger seat, with a wire running from it to the hood of the car. It was attached directly to the alternator—if the battery wasn’t going to work, there wasn’t much of a point in involving it in the transaction.
It worked, but the generator had an exhaust problem, so he had to rig up an exhaust pipe that evacuated through the same window as the wire to the engine.
All that remained now was a fuel problem, which had gotten worse since he’d left the chapel. Whereas before he just had to worry about gassing up the truck; now he needed to make sure the generator had enough gasoline to keep running too.
Out in the barn, Jed had two gas canisters for the tractor. Paul took both, and added them to the haul he was carrying around in the flatbed. The back of the truck now had all his food, water, extra clothes, his guns, a first-aid kit, a couple of knives, twenty feet of rope, the spare generator, and a tarp to cover all of it. If he lost the truck, he’d lose everything.
The ham radio wasn’t really meant to be portable, but he took it anyway and put it on the floor below the generator.
He was prepared for anything except rain. That’d muck up the whole endeavor.
“You’re not going across the country, friend,” he said, either to the truck or to himself. “Boston’s just down the road.”
2
He’d only made it as far as the middle of town before the sun started to set.
It was just as empty as Jed’s farm, but far more ominously so. Most of the cars were gone, but the cars still there were just stopped at intersections. Paul saw a couple of indications that something had gone awry—most dramatically, a sedan had driven through the picture window of the coffee shop—but nothing added up to an explanation.
Animals were damn near everywhere. He began to understand why it was so easy to hunt that deer a week prior, seeing as how they’d taken over the area. Them, and the wild pigs, and goats. It was like Maine had a statewide forest fire and everyone ran south.
Paul steered the truck to the police station. Stewie had a garage Paul could use for the night, so he wouldn’t have to worry so much about someone getting at his food, and while he was there maybe he could figure out why Jed’s family thought Paul was missing. Ideally, he’d get an answer from Stewie himself, but he wasn’t holding out much hope on that one.
The garage door was open and both the cruisers were out, so Paul just pulled in, shut down the jerry-rigged truck, and spent the next several minutes unjamming the garage door. By then, sunset was only about ten minutes out, so he grabbed the ham radio and the generator and took both into the police station. He had the radio up in five minutes.
“Ananda, this is Pastor Paul, over.”
Static.
What followed was a terrifying delay; the thought that something had befallen the only other human in the world was too awful to contemplate.
“Ananda, come in. This is Paul, over,” he repeated, every few seconds. He got silence in return until . . .
“Paul. Hi, it’s good to hear from you,” Ananda said.
“Hah!” he said. He almost dropped the microphone. “Thank the Lord.”
“Sorry, getting to the radio can be a challenge. Were you able to start the truck? Over.”
“I was, and I’m heading your way at first light. I only made it to the town. Nobody here. I think it’s just you and me. Over.”
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“Not just us. I saw someone else, a young man. He was near this . . . this object. I don’t understand what it is. I don’t understand a lot right now. How does the world outside of here look?”
“I’ll let you know tomorrow,” he said. “In person, if this goes well. Did you talk to this young man?”
“He ran off. I’m still piecing together what happened. Like I said—” There was howling on her end of the connection. “I can’t talk long,” she said in a whisper.
“Ananda, where are you right now? Are you safe? Over.”
“The wolves are in the building,” she said. “I can move freely most of the time, but I have to be careful. The radio bothers them. It’s worse the closer we get to sundown.”
“Then maybe we should talk at sunrise instead.”
“You’ll be on the road at sunrise. No, it’s okay. It sounds worse than it is. Over.”
“What kind of wolf are we talking about?” Paul asked. “This doesn’t sound like normal behavior for the wolves I know. Storming buildings and the like. Pigs might do it. Over.”
“They’re bigger than they should be so . . . behaviorally, all bets are off, you know? It’s difficult, Paul. I’m used to knowing everything. And there’s something wrong with the stars.”
“The stars? What do you mean? Over.”
More howling. It sounded like an animal was trying to dig through a wall.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I have to go.”
“Okay.”
“Be safe,” she said.
“You too,” he said. But she’d already signed off.
He held on to the microphone for a few extra seconds and listened to the static fill up the channel.
He probably didn’t hear her right, because otherwise, what she said didn’t make any sense.
There’s something wrong with the stars.
3
After putting the radio and generator back into the truck, Paul looked around the police station for something to help make sense of it all. This became impossible in about two minutes, because there weren’t any lights inside. Power failures were common around these parts, though, so it was with no surprise that he found a store of candles in Stewie’s desk. He got a few lit and continued his search.
The Apocalypse Seven Page 12