by Trevor Zaple
He heard the rumble of the next train barrelling down the tunnel; if he’d been standing by the yellow line, he would have felt the tell-tale whispers of air being pushed out ahead of it. Standing against the back wall, his eyes cast down to the floor, that rumble was the only warning he had. As soon as he heard it he began to walk forward, intent on getting a seat. His feet were tired, even more so than they normally were at the end of a day; the grocery store he worked at had been exceedingly busy for some reason, and he’d been hustled along from the moment he’d arrived. He stopped two feet short of the yellow line just as the train came out of the station’s tunnel and into view.
It came in very fast and this was the first thing that clued Colin into the fact that something was going wrong. The train sped into the station and did not slow down. It rushed by, the displaced air battering at him with uncommon force. He stepped back, his mouth falling open and catching the fetid, stale scent of deep tunnel on his tongue. He gagged slightly and put the back of his hand to his mouth to try to block out the taste. He watched the train speed out of the other end of the station, its momentum undiminished. He looked around to gauge the reaction of the others in the station to this somewhat unusual event; trains would often roll through without stopping, if they were behind schedule, but never at that kind of velocity. As he looked around, he realized that he was the only person in Lansdowne Station. The departing train echoed its last sounds around him and he stared, uncomprehending. There had been other people there. He swallowed hard, and told himself this again. There had been other people standing around him and he wasn’t suddenly going crazy. He staggered back a few steps and glared around wildly, blinking rapidly and trying to figure out what was going on. His heart seemed to be beating a sledgehammer rhythm in his rib cage and his mouth had gone dry. To his left and his right, there was no one. His staggered footsteps echoed loudly, with no one to absorb the sound.
Across the station, on the opposite platform, he spotted a man in denim with heavy, ornate cowboy boots. He couldn’t make out the man’s features with any sort of exactness, but from what Colin could see, the man looked shocked. His mouth was open, at any rate; Colin could see that quite clearly from across the tracks. Colin stepped forward onto the yellow rubber strip at the edge of the platform, his concerns about murderous subway pushers vanished for good. He held up his hands and began to wave them wildly.
“Hey!” he shouted. “Over here! What’s going on?” The man focused on Colin; he realized that the man had not seen him before he started to shout. The man shook his head uncertainly, and Colin lowered his hands until he was practically soothing the man from a distance.
“No, no,” he said, still shouting to be heard, but at a lower volume. “It’s okay, it’s okay…”
The man shook his head a final time and then bolted, running off of the platform and up the stairs at the other end. Colin let out one final shouted “WAIT” before dropping his hands with disgust and slumping his shoulders. The man’s panicked footfalls on the stairs echoed back across the station to him. Colin stared after his departed form, his mind running so quickly as to render itself blank. Without any rationale as to where or why, he turned around and mirrored the other man, running up the station's exit staircase as fast as possible.
Everyone had a story, in the days that followed. They wandered in a daze, searching for other survivors and trading stories of where they were and what they were doing when everyone around them just seemed to vanish. The looks in their eyes were all the same, although none of them had the presence of mind to realize it at the time: it was the look of a person who had been standing on a solid floor only to be shown that it had been water after all.
In those early days, they gathered in small groups, dazed, and wandered from immediate concern to immediate concern, searching for some sort of purpose that extended beyond the end of their reach. It is perhaps a testament to the spirit of the species that these groups interacted and existed for the first couple of days in a fairly heartwarming manner. Oh, there were murders, assaults, vile acts perpetrated by one upon another, but it was proportionally much smaller than would have been expected on a given day before the disappearance. In the aftermath of great catastrophe human beings will often knit together in a spirit of togetherness for the first few moments, before the old tired hobgoblins that lurk underneath begin to pull it apart.
Two
Mark Taylor walked back from the grocery store slowly, pushing with indifference a rattling old grocery cart filled to the brim with food and bottled water. There was no need to hurry, as he saw it; for as far around him as he could see, there was no sign of another human being. There hadn’t been for the past two hours, after…
He forced himself to pick up speed, hoping perhaps to outrun the thought that wanted to come. The memory.
He made himself concentrate. He needed to think. Something very important had happened, and he needed to understand it, to fit it logically into what he knew. It wouldn’t come, no matter how sternly he tried to talk to himself. He had been in the snack aisle at the Price Chopper on the top of the hill in Brockville, muttering to himself about Olivia’s request for brand-name chips and silently annoyed with the woman in front of him, who had been taking forever to decide between two identical-looking bags of salt-and-vinegar chips. The whole trip to the store had been an irritation from the beginning, Olivia demanding things from him and using the baby he’d put inside her as a club to get them from him. She’d been quite clear that she could raise the thing on her own, he remembered her holding forth on that opinion at length, and yet she still used the guilt clobbering to extract money and other things from him on a regular basis. It would be a goddamn funny fucking thing if the kid isn’t even mine he had thought, and then…
Nope. It was not going to come right now. It was one flower whose time to bloom had not arrived yet. He pushed the cart a little faster, picking up some definite speed as he came down the hill and passed under the steely length of overhead railway bridge that served as a border between Parkdale and everything else. He approached it just as an impressively fast GO train rattled the web of steel suspended above him. He shrank back from it, watching it shake the bridge and seeing it glide by without acknowledging anything around it. He wondered if there were any passengers aboard. If there was…
He came out on the other side and kicked his way up the sidewalk, trying like mad to outrun that thought. A car came by a fairly placid speed. There was no one inside of it. It approached the bridge and glided under. He outpaced it, putting it out of his head. If the kid isn’t even mine he had thought, and…
With a violent heave he pushed the cart away from him. It shot forward and rammed into a streetlight pole, rattling the contents with a metallic shudder and coming to rest at the edge of the curb. Mark stumbled back from it and found himself sitting on worn concrete steps. He didn’t look at the house whose front steps he had collapsed onto, although it would perhaps be a closer point to say that he couldn’t. The only thing he could do at that moment, it seemed, was search spasmodically for a pack of cigarettes that he wasn’t even sure existed. His hand skittered over his denim jacket and around the pockets of his stretched, faded jeans. One hand eventually found its way into his short, slick black hair, and that hand found itself grabbing onto that short, slick hair and pulling. Hard.
“FUCK!” he screamed into a deserted, uncaring street. The echo bounced around like a manic child, sounding louder at times. He rested his forehead on his palm and wept loudly. His consciousness seemed to fade into a bleak grey for some time. Eventually he found some calm, and floated back up to the surface, much as a dead man floats in water. Something tickled the edge of his consciousness, but he couldn’t quite grasp at it. He had been looking at chips, not No Name chips but fucking Hostess chips, four bucks a bag, thinking it’s a good thing selling computers pays well har har har and the woman ahead had been hemming and hawing, comparing the ingredient breakdown on two bags of –
; Something flickered on the edge of his awareness again but this time he caught it. There were footsteps nearby, within a block or so. Heavy steps, like engineer boots. Walking away.
“HEY!” he screamed, jumping to his feet. “HEY! YOU WALKING!”. He ran wildly in the direction that the footsteps were coming from. “WAIT! PLEASE!”. He turned a corner, ran up a side street and turned again. The footsteps were beginning to fade from his range of hearing. He started to panic. “WAIT! PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE WAIT! JUST WAIT! I DON’T!” He stopped in a huff, resting with his hands on his knees and breathing far too heavily. His breath was whooping in and out like a train whistle and his anxiety was starting to spiral out of control.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” he finished in a harsh whisper, feeling the first stings of tears well up in his eyes.
The walk back to the abandoned cart was dejected, his mind full of black thoughts that couldn’t be fully visualized. He stopped by the stuffed cart and regarded it for a moment, pondering it dully. He wondered what to do and thought of twelve different possibilities, which meant that in the end he did nothing but continue to stare at the cart.
“Everyone disappeared” he said quietly, forcing himself to say it out loud. Once he said it out loud, he thought it might begin to make sense. It didn’t, but he could at least think about it, start to come to some sort of terms with it. “Everyone disappeared” he said again, louder this time. It sounded like a definitive statement in the quiet. “EVERYONE DISAPPEARED!” he screamed. It bounced off the buildings like his previous expletive and Mark stepped back involuntarily, started by its force. A long way off, in the direction of the horseshoe apartment tower in the distance, an inarticulate cry of rage replied.
The reply-scream got Mark moving again. The horseshoe tower, West Lodge by name, was where Olivia lived. He realized as he walked that it was entirely possible—likely, even—that Olivia was vanished along with everyone else except himself and the owner of the mysterious footsteps. It didn’t feel right, though, and when Mark tried to tell himself that it was statistically improbable, that just because he still loved her despite their falling out didn’t mean that she would somehow escape whatever had happened. He would get to the towers, ride up in that shaky elevator, and arrive at her fifth-floor apartment only to find it barren of human life. It didn’t matter. Mark felt himself drawn on the possibility that probability was wrong; sometimes, even though they were heavily stacked, you could still beat the house odds.
He picked up his pace and swung the cart into the street. There weren’t any more driverless cars coming down Lansdowne Avenue and for that he was grateful; the sight was extremely unnerving, and while he had started to become acquainted with the situation he wanted to keep the unnerving sights to a minimum. He had a feeling that this would be an uphill battle.
Across the street was the entrance to West Lodge Park and he took it, although he normally didn’t. It was adjacent to the West Lodge towers and was typically a family hangout, but there was a seedy element that hung out there as well and the summer before someone had been shot. It was in the foot, of course, and was the result of kids acting stupid, but Mark normally tried to avoid situations that he couldn’t get out of. Today, though, there seemed little need to fear anything in the park. Today, fear was about what wasn’t there, as opposed to what was. He pushed the rising panic back down and forced himself to hurry.
The park looked empty, and Mark tightly steered the cart down the parks winding path. He passed by the backstop that demarcated the baseball diamond and had a random memory callback of a Vietnamese man he had witnessed kneeling in the snow there one winter, burning papers in a small pile. They were letters, he had seen, letters written in graceful, stately ideograms. The man had looked up and with a short look conveyed the feeling of having a stormcloud hovering over him without end. The memory shook Mark and he worried at it in his mind as he exited the park through a small chain-link fence that backed on to the towers, which now loomed very large at the edge of his awareness.
“Hey man,” a voice said mildly from his right. He leaped away from it and screamed wildly. His feet caught and he went tumbling backward, landing in the street with a painful, scraping thud. He saw who it was and managed to cut off his scream. He panted like a bellows in the middle of the street, wondering if he was about to lose his mind. It was Carlos, the short Mexican man who never went anywhere without his urban-special miniature hand-cart. He had long black hair that he kept tied back with a leather ring and usually wore a faded denim vest with a Motorhead patch sewn onto the back. He was someone whom Mark saw in the neighborhood, always willing to talk and share the local news. Right now to Mark he looked like the Angel of the Morning.
“Oh, Carlos, hey, sorry,” he said in a clipped fashion. He continued to pant and could not find the energy to get up from off of the street. Carlos regarded him evenly with heavy-lidded eyes and Mark realized that the man was very, very stoned.
“Hey man,” Carlos said again, “good to see you. For real. It’s good to see anyone right now. A lot of people seemed to have just…” He let it hang in the air. Mark nodded emphatically.
“Yeah, everyone’s gone. Do you have any idea what happened?”
“Nah”
Mark watched him, waiting to see if there was anything that would follow that. Eventually he decided that there wasn’t anything coming.
“Have you seen anyone else?” he tried. Carlos nodded slowly.
“Yeah, I’ve seen a few people. Maybe a dozen or so. Saw one of the security guards from the building about half an hour ago, came out of the far building, 105, with his gun drawn. Seemed convinced that he was about to get into a serious fight, or something.”
“Oh yeah?” Mark finally found enough rest to get to his feet. He stretched some of his leg muscles and went to his cart.
“Yeah. Saw a couple people I didn’t know walking through the back entrance a little bit ago too. They seemed pretty out of it, but I know how that is”. He grinned. “No cops around to keep me from smoking right here.”
Mark laughed. “I can see that.” His laugh started to shake ominously and he stopped.
“I saw a woman standing on that balcony over there” he continued, pointing toward the closest half of the horseshoe-shaped West Lodge towers. Mark looked over to where he was pointing, and a wild hope resurged from within him. He forced himself to remain calm.
“Which balcony?” he asked mildly, although he was ready to burst inside. Carlos thought for a moment, and then peered at the building, counting silently on his lips.
“Fifth…yeah, fifth floor, six over from the edge there.”
“A woman?” Mark asked intently. He darted forward and grabbed Carlos’ arm. The little man looked down at Mark’s hand with a small twist of distaste on his mouth.
“Hey man, there’s no call for that,” he protested mildly. “I have to…”
“A woman?” Mark asked again, loudly. He shot a look at Carlos that caused the man to straighten up and cut some of the fog from his eyes.
“Yeah, man, a woman, where I said. Now let go of my fucking arm, already.”
Mark realized that he was gripping Carlos’ arm with almost white-knuckle intensity and instantly let go. He stepped back and rested his arm at his side awkwardly, a little ashamed of himself.
“Sorry, Carlos,” he apologized slowly, “it’s just that she’s my” he hesitated slightly “ex-girlfriend and she’s pregnant and”
“Hey man,” Carlos interjected, “that’s okay. I get you now. That’s pretty lucky, her still being here and me being where I am and all. What do you think the odds are?”
Mark laughed, and for the first time in two hours he didn’t feel as though the laugh was going to lead to cackling, gibbering insanity. It felt good, coming deep from his belly and issuing out of his mouth with authority. Carlos joined in, although Mark was fairly certain it was more out of amusement than anything else.
“I don’t know, man,” Mark replie
d, “but I’ll tell you, if there were dice right here I would roll them, ‘cause they’d probably come up seven every time.”
Carlos laughed even harder at that.
“Oh man, that’s good. I like that, I’m gonna take that”
“Take it away” Mark said, “I gotta get up there, though. Listen—517, ok?”
Carlos stared at him blankly for a moment, and then suddenly understood.
“Yeah, man, 517,” he replied. “Gotta stick together, right? Safety in numbers.”
“Safety in numbers,” he agreed, grinning, unaware then of how ghastly a statement that would seem in less than a year.
Mark pushed the cart into the parking lot behind the apartment tower and brought it up to the back door. He watched the balconies but they remained empty, silent watchers of the deserted street. The only sound that he could hear was the omnipresent hum of the air conditioners rattling on and on. He fumbled in his pocket for his keys and opened the lock. His hands were shaking slightly and it took longer than it should have, but he ignored it as best he could. With some difficulty he got the heavy cart into the doorway and pushed it into the cool dim lobby of West Lodge.
The lobby had nostalgia for opulence. There was a fountain scene locked behind a gate that bubbled continuously. 1970s-vintage art graced the walls in the lobby and along the edge of the steel spiral staircase that started nowhere and rose up into the ceiling to end nowhere. The walls without art were mirrored and had leather couches against them, like corner booths at Studio 54. Normally there would have been people in the lobby; people waiting for friends to come down from their apartments, delivery people waiting for the elevator, heavyset mothers with weighty stares, maybe the punks that lived on the 12th floor. Today the only sound was the burbling of the fountain; he was alone in the lobby with his cart. He went to the bank of elevators, punched the button, and waited with extreme impatience as the system roared into life and lowered the carriage to the ground floor.