by Brian Keene
“Get out of my way,” Volvo growled.
“Not another step, buddy.” Charlie’s expression was grim. Anger smoldered in his eyes.
Volvo stopped in his tracks, shaking with rage. “You guys fucking rear-ended me. I’ve got witnesses.”
“Look,” I shouted. “I don’t know what your malfunction is, but in case you haven’t noticed, you’re not the only one in trouble here. Seriously. Take a good look around, man. Something’s happened. Something is wrong. People are dead—and others are missing. Now, I’m sorry we hit you, but maybe you should have been paying attention to the road instead of talking on your fucking cell phone!”
“You—”
Charlie stepped between us, and drew himself up to his full height. He jabbed a finger at the yuppie’s chest. “That woman’s baby is missing. We’re going to help her find it. When we’re done, if you still want to tangle, then I’ll be glad to kick your ass. But if you don’t back down right now, so help me God, I will fucking kill you.”
“You won’t do shit.”
“Think not?” Charlie smiled. “Try me.”
Volvo’s fists were clenched so tight that his knuckles had turned white. But he backed off.
“You just want to bang her,” he accused Charlie from a safe distance. “Play good Samaritan and then screw her later on tonight.”
Charlie blew him a mock kiss. “Actually, you’re more my type. What are you doing later on, after they clean up this mess and tow away the cars? Want to have a drink with me?”
Volvo’s ears turned deep red, but he walked away. We watched him go as he shuffled towards his car, casting wary glances at us over his shoulder. The sun glinted off his Rolex watch.
“Too bad he’s such a dick,” Charlie said. “He’s kind of cute.”
I chuckled. “No accounting for taste.”
The young mother crawled through the weeds and trash at the side of the road. “Britney? Baby?”
Charlie and I hurried to her side.
“We’ve got to find Britney,” she sobbed. “Her car seat is empty. Where’s my baby?”
“Don’t worry,” Charlie soothed. “We’ll find her.”
She tried to speak, but her words dissolved into tears. Her nose was still bleeding.
“Hey, Steve!”
I turned to see Frank running towards us.
“Sit down here,” Charlie coaxed the woman, easing her onto the grass. “We’ll find your daughter. She’s got to be close by.”
“Do you think so?”
“Sure.” He smiled reassuringly. “With everything that’s going on, we weren’t properly introduced earlier. What’s your name?”
“St-Stephanie.” She wiped her bloody nose with the back of her hand.
“Alright, Stephanie. My name’s Charlie and this is Steve. We’re going to help you look for Britney, okay?”
She sniffed and nodded. Frank came up to us, panting and out of breath.
“You manage to get a hold of anybody?” I asked him.
“Cell phones are all on the fritz now, but I talked to a trucker in that rig over there. Nice guy. He’s got a CB that’s working. Said there’s some weird shit going on.”
Several other people converged on our location and began helping search for baby Britney. Stephanie seemed to regain her resolve.
“My husband’s missing, too,” one woman sobbed, touching Stephanie’s hand. “We were on the tour bus over there on the other side of the highway, on our way back from Atlantic City. I was asleep, and when I woke up after the crash, he was gone.”
“Maybe he’s helping someone else,” Charlie suggested.
The woman nodded. “I guess that’s possible.” She sounded like she was trying to convince herself.
I pulled Frank aside. “What kind of weird shit did the trucker say is happening?”
“People are missing.”
I snorted. “Yeah, I know that.”
“But it’s not just here: it’s happening all around Baltimore; hospitals, schools, offices—everywhere. All of the highways look like this, and the drivers or passengers from some of the cars are missing. The beltway is a disaster area. Four planes have already crashed at BWI and they’ve had a few more reporting that their pilot or co-pilot vanished in mid-air. A runaway train smashed into another one downtown.”
I rubbed my aching head. “Let me guess. The conductor vanished?”
He nodded. “Yep. Same with a passenger ferry down at the Inner Harbor. The pilot vanished and the ferry rammed the pier. And it seems like everybody all over the city heard that trumpet sound, or whatever the hell it was.”
“I don’t believe it.” I shook my head, stunned at how fast the paranoia and rumors had spread. It was the same way on September 11th, when people reported that planes were heading for Baltimore’s Trade Center and the Aberdeen army base and Three Mile Island and Peachbottom nuclear power plants just over the border in Pennsylvania, and that the government had forced down a hijacked airliner over Canadian airspace—and of course none of it had turned out to be true. Now it was happening again.
“Listen,” Frank said, “I’m just telling you what the trucker told me. You said it yourself, Steve: your friend’s missing. And that woman’s baby is missing, too. So are a lot of other folks.”
I lowered my voice, making sure the others couldn’t hear. “Her baby is either trapped in the wreckage or lying along the side of the road. Craig too, for that matter.”
Frank stared into my eyes. “Do you really believe that?”
I opened my mouth to reply, and found that I couldn’t, because deep down inside the answer was no. No, I didn’t really believe that. As impossible as it all seemed, Frank was right. People were missing. Lots of people. All I had to do was listen, and I could hear their loved ones calling out for them, desperately searching through the snarled lanes of traffic.
Again I thought of Terri. There was a lump in my throat. “I need to get home.”
Frank nodded. “We all do. Don’t think we’ll be going anywhere for a while, though. Not until they get a fleet of tow trucks in here and clear away some of these wrecked cars.”
I glanced around for Charlie, and found him in a thin stand of trees alongside the highway, looking for Stephanie’s baby. I walked towards him, and Frank followed along behind me. Charlie looked up as we approached. His face was covered with sweat, and a mosquito was biting his ear. He didn’t seem to notice.
“What’s up?” he asked.
Frank pointed at Charlie’s feet. “Well, for starters, you’re standing in a patch of poison ivy.”
Charlie jumped out of the undergrowth, cursing. I reached out and swatted the mosquito away.
“Thanks.” He rubbed his ear.
“Listen,” I said, “I need to get home. I have to make sure Terri’s okay.”
“Terri?” He looked surprised. “Why wouldn’t she be okay? She wasn’t traveling in this. She’s safe at home.”
“At the very least, she’ll be worried. You saw the traffic helicopter earlier. I’m sure this has made the news already. But it’s more than that. Frank here overheard some things on a trucker’s CB radio.”
“What things?”
“Something’s going on, Charlie. People have vanished into thin air, just like Craig.”
He didn’t reply. His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down.
“Charlie—”
“I know,” he interrupted me. “Just don’t want to think about it. This kind of shit doesn’t happen in real life.”
Another scream interrupted him.
Charlie looked back out to the road. “But it is happening, isn’t it? People are missing. Gone. Like they’ve been abducted by aliens or something.”
Frank pulled a red bandana from his back pocket, removed his hardhat and mopped his brow.
“Steve,” Charlie continued, his voice barely a whisper, “Craig disappeared before we crashed.”
“What?”
He sighed. “I didn’t tell you before because i
t sounded crazy. Shit, I didn’t believe it myself. Thought maybe I banged my head in the crash or something. Got mixed up. Hallucinated. But that’s not what happened. He disappeared in mid-fucking-sentence, dude. I saw it happen. He was there, and then we heard that blast, and he was gone. Then we wrecked, and after that I was confused, and then you woke up and—what the hell is going on?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know, man. But right now, I need to get home to Terri. I can’t explain it, but I’ve got a bad feeling. Come with me?”
Charlie, Hector, Craig and I carpooled because we all lived in the same town, Shrewsbury, which was just across the border in Pennsylvania. Charlie was single and rented a tiny efficiency apartment over the hardware store on Main Street. Terri and I owned a house just a few blocks away, and both Hector and Craig had lived on the outskirts of town in the new development that had gone in after the Wal-Mart. The town of Shrewsbury was basically just a bed-and-breakfast for people like us, people who were born and raised in Maryland and worked in Baltimore, but had moved out of the state to get away from the higher taxes.
“Come on,” I urged. “Please? Let’s go home.”
Charlie pointed at the people combing the road for Stephanie’s daughter. “But what about her baby?”
“There’s nothing we can do.” I hated how callous I sounded, but my mind was made up. “Let’s face it—they’re not going to find anything. Britney is gone.”
“They might,” he insisted. “She could have been thrown from the car.”
“Stephanie’s car isn’t even damaged,” I said. “Her daughter is among the missing. We can’t help her. Maybe when the cops get here, they can do something.”
“If it’s as bad as I think it is,” Frank added, “then I imagine the National Guard is probably out in force. Maybe we should wait for them to show up.”
“And do what?” I asked. “If it really is that bad, their hands are full. If people are disappearing, if planes and trains are crashing like you say they are, then the National Guard are going to be doing more than clearing traffic jams. There’s liable to be riots, looting—all kinds of shit.”
Frank wrung his bandana out and shoved it back in his pocket. “Yeah, I guess you’re right. Hadn’t thought of that.”
Another scream rang out, followed by a horn.
“So where do you guys live?” Frank asked, shuffling his feet.
“Shrewsbury,” Charlie told him. “Just off Exit One on the Pennsylvania side.”
“I’m pretty close to you,” Frank said. “Parkton—last exit in Maryland.”
“That’s where the Park-and-Ride is, right?” Charlie asked.
“Yeah. Listen, you guys care if I tag along with you?”
I shrugged. “Sure. There’s safety in numbers.”
“Safety?” Charlie cocked his head. “Safe from what?”
Instead of replying, I checked my cell phone. There was still no service, but the clock was working. It was 5:30 p.m.
“Britney!” Stephanie screamed from the tall grass. “Where are you, baby?”
Britney didn’t answer.
None of the missing did.
Twenty minutes later, after weaving our way through the snarled traffic, we reached Exit 18—Warren Road and Cockeysville. Those were twenty minutes of dazed and hysterical commuters, wrecked vehicles, and mangled, bloody bodies. Twenty minutes of despair and hopelessness that grew with each tortured cry. Twenty minutes of diesel fumes and burning rubber. Twenty minutes that seemed like an eternity.
We stopped to rest and took seats on the guardrail, right beneath the exit sign. Frank breathed heavily, gasping for air, and the veins stood out in his face. He looked like he was ready to have a heart attack. All three of us were drenched with sweat, and Charlie and I both had dark circles under the arms of our dress shirts.
“Whew,” Frank panted. “Talk about taking the long way home.”
“I’m still not sure we should be doing this,” Charlie grumbled.
“Both of us got banged up when Hector hit the construction barrier. Should we be walking this far? I don’t know about you, Steve, but my head hurts. What if we’ve got concussions or something?”
I cracked my neck to get rid of the stiffness. “I don’t care. Only thing I want to do now is get home to Terri.”
There was a stone quarry to our right, nestled in the shallow valley below. One of the facility’s buildings was on fire. Orange flames flickered across the rooftop, and thick, black smoke poured from the doors and windows, drifting up the hill and billowing over the highway. Workers scurried around the building like panicking ants. A few more employees lay on the ground, unmoving. There were no fire trucks or ambulances in sight. We’d only seen one state police cruiser since the Timonium exit, and it was deserted, parked along the side of the road. I’d wondered if the officer disappeared with the rest or had abandoned the vehicle afterward.
3
My headache grew worse.
“You guys got any aspirin?”
They both shook their heads.
“I’d kill for a beer right now,” Frank said.
I wondered about the bars. Would they be jam-packed tonight, filled to overflowing as word of the disaster spread and people’s loved ones didn’t come home? Would people flock to them, seeking comfort in the presence of others? Or would they all go to church or temple instead? Personally, I’d always thought that there wasn’t much difference between a tavern and a place of worship.
Frank watched the flames spread in the quarry. A second building caught fire.
“Where are the authorities?” he asked. “Why aren’t they doing something? That whole place is gonna be toast. And it looks like they’ve got injured.”
Charlie took off his shoe and shook a stone out. “Busy elsewhere, I guess.”
“They can’t all be elsewhere,” Frank said. “Some of them should have responded to the fire by now. At least an ambulance.”
“Maybe they can’t get through,” I said.
Charlie frowned. “Like we said earlier, maybe they’re shorthanded. Or some of them might have disappeared, too.”
I considered this. There was no rhyme or reason to the missing people, nothing to indicate why they’d been taken. From what we’d seen, it affected all races, genders and age groups. The only thing I’d noticed was that we hadn’t seen a single infant. Just lots of empty car seats. Were all of the babies missing? I wondered if this could be the glorious Rapture that Terri and her parents had talked about, but decided against it. I’d seen several priests, nuns and preachers among the survivors, and a dozen occupied vehicles with Jesus bumper stickers and license plates. Plenty of Christians were left behind. And Craig was a Christian too, and hadn’t necessarily believed in the Rapture, yet he was missing along with the rest. The only common denominator was that everybody had vanished at the same time, immediately after that bizarre blast—except for the black guy, Gabriel. He’d vanished later, after helping me. He’d told me something, just before he disappeared. I tried to remember what it was but the words wouldn’t come. Trying to figure it out made my head hurt, so I stopped.
“Maybe it really was a terrorist attack,” Charlie said. “Maybe they got their hands on some kind of black ops weapon.”
“It isn’t that,” Frank replied.
“How do you know?”
Frank shrugged. “I don’t. I’d just rather not think about the possibility, is all.”
“So what is it then?”
“It just is what it is.”
A disheveled man wandered towards us. He reeked, the stench reminding me of a litter box. The crotch of his trousers had a wet splotch where he’d pissed himself. There was a long, bloody gash on his forehead.
“Excuse me.” His eyes looked dazed. “Do you guys have the time?”
I checked my cell phone. “Almost six.”
“Thanks. How about a cigarette? Got one of those?”
All three of us shook our heads.
Th
e man lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Need a smoke. I keep thinking that maybe I should find an unguarded gas station and steal some cigarettes. But I’ve never done anything like that before.”
“I wouldn’t try it,” Charlie said. “The police are probably out by now, patrolling for that kind of thing. I’m sure things will be back to normal by tomorrow.”
“Normal?” The man blinked at him. “I guess you guys haven’t heard.”
I looked up, holding my breath to avoid breathing in his stink.
“Heard what?”
“Alien abduction,” he gasped. “Everybody’s talking about it. All these folks that are missing? They were abducted by aliens. You know—the Grays, like you see on TV? The ones they talk about late at night on the radio? We’re under attack!”
“Get the fuck outta here.” Frank spat on the pavement. “Little gray men, my ass.”
“I’m serious,” the man insisted. “This is happening all over the world, not just here. New York, Washington, London, Moscow, Budapest, Jerusalem—you name it. I heard they even got the President and some of his cabinet. Disappeared right out of the White House. That’s why he hasn’t addressed the nation. Famous people, too. You guys know that rapper, Prosper Johnson?”
Frank shook his head. Charlie and I nodded. Terri and I had seen him in concert the first year we were dating, back when we still did fun things like that (these days, as we got a little older, we were happy to stay home and play a game of Uno).
“Well,” the man continued, “you know how he was up for the Nobel Peace Prize, on account of stopping the violence in L.A., right? He was giving a speech on TV. All the cable news stations were carrying it. He vanished live, on camera.”
“Seriously?” Charlie asked.
The man raised his right hand. “Swear to God. Disappeared in mid fucking sentence. Fucking aliens beamed him up or something, just like everybody else. People are going nuts. Everything’s in chaos.”
“Alien abduction,” Charlie said. “You really believe that?”
“You got a better explanation?”
None of us did, and the man stumbled away. We watched him stop and bum a cigarette off another man, and tell him the same story.
“So,” Charlie said. “Prosper Johnson is among the missing. That’s too bad.”