by Trevor Zaple
He turned around with a quickness that surprised him and slapped Sarah’s hand, which was still coming back from the flick. There was a slick, satisfying sound of slapping skin and a pained jump to Sarah that gave Jason some small satisfaction. He spoke slowly and with great contempt.
“If you hit me again, I will cut your fucking hand off, and watch you bleed to death out of the stump.”
Sarah drew back and regarded him with hurt confusion. Jason thought for a moment that he might have gone too far, but he shut the thought down with ruthless efficiency.
She just sentenced you to a life of utter fucking nothing he thought, voicing it like a drill sergeant. That’s how little she cares about you. If she really cared, she’d be your Dr. Kevorkian. As it stands, she can burn in hell for all you care.
He tried to regulate his breathing, to find some sort of calm. He needed to act civilly, at least for the moment.
“I’m sorry I hit you. What were you saying?” He said it slowly, trying to fake calm. Sarah seemed to accept it, although she was still wary.
“I said I was going to try calling Dad at work. Mom’s yoga class might have run late but I don’t think I could get ahold of her there”.
“Probably not,” Jason agreed, although he thought privately that this was a pretty basic sentiment that she didn’t need to share. “So are you going to do it, then?”
Sarah picked the number from her contacts and then held the phone to her ear, waiting. Jason, bored of the entire operation, turned back to his computer. He exited out of his attempted-suicide post with another pang of panic and refreshed the main page. The silence from Sarah started to seem a little long. After reading the new posts over
I guess they’re busy; I’ll try again until I get someone
He started to realize that they were all saying the same thing
Wow, no one’s picking up, shit what is that extension dad taught me, Jason do you remember?
They were all saying the exact same incomprehensible thing.
Shit, Lisa’s calling me; I’ll have to try Dad again in a minute.
EVERYONE IS FUCKING GONE, the top post read. WHAT THE HELL? read the second. He darted forward and clicked on the title of the first one. And read. And read.
Uh, did anyone else just see that?
What the fuck just happened? Hello?
I was just watching the Yankees and everyone disappeared. WTF did anyone else see that?
I turned my TV off and then back on but it’s still like that. Did someone hack the TV signal?
I bet someone took over the airwaves. So cool.
LOL totally hilarious troll, bro. 10/10 would rage again.
NO GUYS IT’S FUCKING REAL!!!
YEAH GUIZE, TOTES EVERY1 JUS DISAPPEARED!!!11!ELEVEN
No he’s right, I’m on my phone at the mall and people just seriously vanished. Not everyone but a lot of people. WTF is going on?
Pics or it didn’t happen.
I went to check the news on TV and no one’s there
Holy shit everyone went out for ice cream at the same time!
Good troll God!
The pictures began showing up. Shopping malls that were mostly deserted were the first to show up. Jason thought that they might just be almost-abandoned malls from run-down suburbs, but then familiar sites started showing up. The Mall of America. The West Edmonton Mall. A shopping center in what looked like Tokyo, at least from the signs. A huge center in Berlin, with a few confused looking people in the midground that just contrasted against the empty cement vistas. Next came sports stadiums, where a few people sat in the seats, a few people stood on the field of play, and no one looked as though they had the slightest clue of what to do next. Then came formerly busy streets; someone posted 5th Avenue and the desertion looked like it came fresh from a movie set. Sarah was saying something and her tone was getting higher in pitch as she talked. Jason had stopped listening to her but in the end it didn’t really matter; he knew exactly what she was talking about. It was hard to believe that she was talking about anything else. He pored through the pictures that were showing up; within moments every post that he read through was related to it. He was fascinated. Places that were never without people, at any time of day, looked abandoned. Times Square was mostly empty. That one threw him for a hard loop, and he noticed after that this hand was shaking slightly. He cursed himself for being weak, but the palsy remained.
Sarah left the room and he kept browsing. Kept clicking. It was like an itch that had been maddening him for years that he had finally found the limberness to scratch. He saw cars that had crashed into each other. There was no one in them when they hit each other the post beside the picture read. He saw pictures from subway stations, devoid of the hustle and bustle of people going about their daily lives. Daily lives had been canceled. He stopped reading the posts and captions and just paid attention to the pictures. The pictures carried the narrative here. There was no need to go anywhere else, at least until people’s videos were uploaded.
When the videos were uploaded, he started to gorge himself on them. They told a much more complete story than the pictures did. Mostly everyone had a smartphone nowadays, and these phones all had video cameras built into them. He watched a dozen shaky hand-shot videos of empty buildings that by all rights should have been jam-packed with sweaty, generic lifeforms. The narrators on these videos inevitably had the same high-pitched note that he had overheard in his sister’s phone call. That same note of confused, shocked fear blended with a strange sort of awe, the kind that usually accompanied religious conversions. The voice of people who had just had the rug pulled out from under them, who had been dealt a hand of jokers. Dangerous people.
Sarah reappeared in his doorway. Her face was unfocused, her hand cradling her iPhone and unconsciously feeling it around in her fingers like a crib blanket.
“What’s going on?” By her voice she sounded less than she was; eighteen going on ten. Jason cackled shortly before he got himself under control.
“How should I know, Sarah?” he replied with some heat, “I know pretty much what you know. For once”.
“Fuck off for a minute, Jason, and let’s get real here. We need to figure out what’s going on, we need to, I don’t know, we need too…”
“Why?”
“What…what do you mean, why? Where…I mean, all the…the people…”
“Yeah, they’re gone. Everyone’s gone”.
“Not everyone”.
Sarah was silent for a moment, struggling to find something to say that would put everything into perspective and make everything seem all right again. Her silence was proof enough that she hadn’t been able to come up with anything. Jason felt a surge of pity for her, and didn’t shut it down. At least she’s family he thought suddenly, and it made for a strange stew within him. At least the final joke wasn’t that everyone vanished and left me completely alone.
“We need to find some other people. Where was your friend Lisa?”
“I don’t know”
“Well then call her back”
“I don’t know”
“Just hit redial and call her back”
“I don’t, I don’t”
“SARAH!”
Sarah stopped the line of babble she was working up into. Her flow of repeated denials of knowledge cut off as if Jason had slapped her. Jason felt a smug glow within him.
“We’re going to go meet up with any of your friends who are around. We’re going to find some food, and something to drink, and we’re going to figure something out. First, though, we have to go find some other people.”
Sarah stared at him blankly for a moment, and then nodded slowly. Her phone came up to her face and she began to search her contacts. Jason turned back to his computer. Get what you can he told himself, soak it all in. Nothing’s the same from here on out.
First Interlude
Carter Henderson walked in the door, intent on getting his shoes off and finally letting his feet stretch
out a little. The smell of cooking chicken permeated the house, a warm, homey scent that instantly relaxed him. He could feel the tension of the subway commute loosening; the psychic dirt he always felt gathering on him between Yorkdale Station and his home near Keele washed away in familiarity. He smiled as his shoes rattled against the wall and it widened as he strolled amiably into his living room. It deflated a little when he saw that the TV was on, loudly, even though no one was in the room. He shook his head, meaning to bring this up with his children, but after he turned the television down he noticed something unnerving. Once the volume had been sharply reduced, there were no other noises to be heard in the townhouse. He poked his head into the kitchen, but it was also empty. The oven was on, and (more disturbingly) the tap was running, water trickling out in a low-pressure release. He walked over and shut the tap off absent-mindedly, straining his ears to catch any sounds of life. He slowly made his way to the narrow staircase and up to his second floor. The children weren’t in their rooms. His wife was not in their room. The bathroom was unoccupied. He made his way downstairs and stood in the living room again, his hand resting uneasily on the back of his head. He told himself that they must have stepped out for a moment—all of them—maybe to go to the store, or to see one of the neighbors. He told himself this, although the slowly rising panic he felt burrowing up from within him told him otherwise.
Mohammed Lalani had picked up the guy outside of the Hideout on Queen West; he had already been drunk, and Mohammed had been leery of him from the start. There had been several moments during the tense cab ride out towards Scarborough that Mohammed had been sure that the man would begin throwing up everywhere inside the cab. He had cringed each time; beyond the mess and the smell, he was running a tight operation and the cost of cleaning his cab out would put a severe dent in his profits. The guy was sloppy; his hair was disheveled, his face unshaven for days. There had been a smell coming off of him that had been immediately distinctive from the moment his friends had shoved him into the back seat: it was the smell of vomit, sour days-old sweat, and ripe tequila. It had assaulted Mohammed’s nostrils from the get-go, ratcheting up a sharp nausea in him. Now he was falling over, drooping dangerously into Mohammed’s seat on an angle; he was being held in place, but only until the next corner. In a few minutes he would be on the floor. He cursed the man’s friends in his head. Why couldn’t they have made sure he was buckled in before thumping the top of the cab and sending him on his way? The guy was sure to puke, now, and maybe choke on it while he was at it. Mohammed was blackly sure that, the way his night was proceeding, this was the likely outcome.
There was a blur at his side and he swerved instantly to avoid it, his nerves and reaction time tempered by long years of driving a taxi on Toronto streets. He very nearly hit a pole on the other side of the street, but thankfully there were no pedestrians walking there and he was able to drive over the sidewalk and right himself. He turned to look out of his rear window and watched the thing that had nearly rammed into him speed past; it was a beat-up looking blue van, and it sped across the street and smashed into the front of a boutique clothing store. Mohammed’s eyes widened and his hand went to his mouth. He looked down to check on his fare and he felt as though he had been slapped. His fare had disappeared. Mohammed blinked a couple of times, and stretched his hand out into the empty space where the man had been, moments ago. How had he gotten out? Mohammed glanced at the door and saw that it was locked. He looked back up and out of the rear window; no one had emerged from the stores to check out the wreckage. From far off, he heard the crunching of metal and glass repeating.
Albert Northdancer watched with no small amount of satisfaction as Claire fell forward into her pillows, suddenly boneless and panting heavily. Albert was panting fairly hard himself; they’d been at it for more than an hour and they’d been wrestling each other into new positions on a regular basis throughout that. She was lithe, he would give her that; her conversation was pretty vapid until you got her going about politics, and while Albert usually voted for conservatives, Claire was strident about it. She was starting to bore him, but she still acted like a repressed teenager in the sack, and for him it counted for something. He supposed, in that generous post-coital mood, that if he was interested in her job it might be different; she was a floor producer for Ezra Levant, though, and once he got over the novelty of banging a girl working in television it got old quickly. The acronyms, the quick speech, the jargon; if it hadn’t been for the expert way she used those long, coltish legs in bed he would have moved on from her long ago. As it was, he needed a snack; he left her exhaling into her pillows and made his way to her kitchen, his deflating manhood wagging in front of him like a puppy’s tail.
There wasn’t much, he discovered; either she ate out a lot or she was in sore need of a trip to the grocery store. He scraped together some bread and waffled back and forth between some suspect deli meat in the fridge and some good old fashioned peanut butter. He chose the peanut butter in the end, slapped it all together, and nabbed a bottle of Stella Artois to wash it down with. He took the long route back to Claire’s bedroom, passing through her spacious, airy living room to admire the view from the picture window. Claire lived in a condo building along the shoreline of Lake Ontario, and the view of the lake from her living room was nothing short of amazing. Privately, he was willing to admit that it was another reason that he was still dating the woman.
Munching on his sandwich, he entered the bedroom and stopped short. The bed was empty. He looked around the room to see if she was hiding somewhere, for whatever reason, and saw that she was really gone. He blinked for a moment, unsure of how to react, and decided to check the bathroom, in case she had gone there without his hearing her. The bathroom was empty as well. He walked back into the bedroom to check again, taking a long swig of the Belgian beer and feeling as though there were something happening that was just slightly beyond his ability to comprehend. Absurdly, as he stood blinking in the bedroom for the second time, his first thought was that she must have pulled some sort vanishing trick, a magician’s illusion, in order to troll him. It was the only explanation that he would accept for some time afterward.
For Tessa Sanction, there was no way she could delude herself into thinking that it was some kind of trick or illusion. Slated to be the second guest on an evening television roundtable discussion on pork futures, she had been getting instructions on where to go to get her camera makeup applied when the helpful intern she’d been talking to had ceased to exist. He had been there the first moment, all smiles and wavy brown hair and the kind of soulful eyes that Tessa found her knees weakening for. The next instant, that hot bit of delicious was not there. She saw the vending machine he had been obscuring, clearly; the Out of Stock light was lit up on the 7-Up and for a long moment it was the only thing that Tessa could focus on. She broke out of the trance and continued walking into the studio, but she was greeted largely by silence. A song loop played from somewhere deeper into the building, and there was a metallic beeping noise from a few rooms over, but besides that the din of conversation had ceased. She darted her eyes from side to side as she walked—wandered, really—through the studio complex. She found the makeup area, full of empty chairs and mirrors that reflected no breathing life. She passed it by, no longer interested.
Eventually she found her way to the set she was to have been on. There were a number of chairs, some potted ferns, and a pile of papers that looked as though they had been photocopied from magazines, but there were no people. She called out a few times but was only answered by her own echoes coming back from blameless white walls. From deep back the metallic beeping continued on.
Colin Li was waiting at Lansdowne Station for the next subway train to arrive, keeping his eyes on the dirty white-tile floor and trying to ignore everyone else around him. They were doing the same as well, some of them staring at the floor like Colin, others putting their thousand-yard stares onto the movie posters that lined the metal structure that s
eparated one half of the station from the other. A lot of them were wearing the telltale white plastic earphones that denoted they were blocking the rest of the world out through the use of MP3 players. Colin preferred to keep his ears open, just in case someone got any ideas about clever ways to part him from his possessions or his life. He’d been mugged on Bloor, just around the corner, and ever since he’d been very paranoid about nearly everything. He became extremely nervous whenever strangers came into close proximity with him; his heart would race until he would swear it would burst, and he was continually fighting the urge to run away screaming.
Until recently he had normally stood at the edge of the yellow rubber strip that separated the platform from the train tunnel. He did it to give himself a fighting chance at getting on the train car before anyone else for the purpose of snagging an actual seat. He hated standing in the cars more than anything else; the nausea that welled up in him by the time he got over to Victoria Park was unbearable. He measured the success of his days by whether or not he was able to sit down; there was something vaguely sad in this, but he refused to think too deeply into it. Thinking too deeply would result in having to stand, and avoiding that was the key to his day. He’d forced himself to stand away from the yellow line, however, since a number of news reports had come out pertaining to a man in New York City whose fetish was to push people onto the train tracks. He’d done it to two people thus far, and the police were scrambling to catch him before he struck again. There were no copycat pushers in Toronto that he had been made aware of, but he nervously told himself every day that it was better to be safe than to be sorry.