by James Sperl
“I'm sorry,” she giggled. “I don't mean to sound so boring. It's just that...well, I don't know...”
Andrew bobbed his head knowingly. “You don't know what the proper decorum is following the revelation that my wife was killed in a mall shooting.”
Clarissa pinched her face into a knot. “Yeah.”
“It's all right. Sometimes I forget how that must sound to someone hearing it for the first time. It is shocking.” He leaned forward to give his next words emphasis. “I appreciate your delicate handling of it.”
“You're welcome.” She smiled, but it felt partially forced. How does one shift gears from something like that? She supposed the best way to move forward was to, well, move forward.
“I don't have one,” she said. “A boyfriend, I mean. There've been a couple here and there, but nothing's ever panned out. I guess I was just never into the guys I dated, which is too bad.”
“Yeah?” Andrew gently shooed away a pair of bees alighting on a sage bush near his head. “Why's that? I would imagine a woman your age would be happy not to be tied down. Isn't that the new rage? Relationship-free hook-ups?”
Clarissa wrinkled her nose. “The new rage? Just how old do you think I am? On second thought, don't answer that.” Andrew grinned. Clarissa shuffled on her knees over to the herb bed opposite him and clipped oregano sprigs. “I love the idea of family. I always wished I had one, even as a little kid. I couldn't wait to get bigger so I could start my own. But now as I knock on mid-thirties' door...” Clarissa shot Andrew a look, which declared unmistakably: Don't ask. “...I'm starting to wonder if it'll ever happen.”
Andrew passed his eyes discreetly over Clarissa.
“Well, don't give up. Especially now.”
Clarissa straightened and sat back on her haunches. “Why not now? If there were ever a time to give up on romance, now seems like the perfect time.”
“Because,” Andrew said, as he backhanded runners of sweat from his forehead, “hope is all we have left. We lose that then we might as well all start sleeping in separate bedrooms.”
It took a moment to grasp what he meant, but once Clarissa did, the implication sent her heart racing: Sleep alone. Don't wake up.
“Besides,” he continued, “you never know what could fall into your lap. You just have to stay open. Sometimes we have trouble seeing the forest for the trees.” Clarissa cocked her head. Andrew read her confusion. “It means that you might be looking too hard. Sometimes you've just got to let things happen and not try so much to make them happen.”
Clarissa puffed a jet of air. “It's good advice, but I'm not sure how well it applies now. Pickings were slim before. They sure as hell won't improve now that people are disappearing in droves.”
Andrew considered this and shrugged with a smile.
“Think of it as reducing the playing field.”
Clarissa enjoyed a chuckle, but it didn't last long. She found Andrew's eyes, her expression becoming as dour as what she was about to say.
“It's going to get bad, isn't it?”
Andrew looked at her, a half-grin clinging to his lips as if he had anticipated something with a little more levity. His smile didn't last long either.
“Yes,” he said.
Clarissa hung her head and thought about what that meant. There would be more people like Travis. Violent sociopaths who would use the otherworldly crisis to bolster his or her homicidal tendencies. Travis was right. It was a new world order. One in which fear and intimidation thrived, backed by the enforceable hand of ultimate violence. That was going to be the way of the land, and soon. It would become like every dystopian and post-apocalyptic movie she had ever seen, where roving bands of merciless criminals prowled the ruins of cities and combed over the wastelands in search of fringe societies in the hopes of satisfying their blood lust.
A bubble of nausea swelled in her stomach. She tried to turn her thoughts to less dire scenarios, but she found it a Herculean feat. She had to remind herself that the present was all that mattered now, and as such, she still had a job to do.
“So, Andrew,” she began, her brain scrambling to replace images of Mad Max-esque road derbies involving cars festooned with human hood ornaments, “I never asked, but what was it you used to do before, you know, all of this?”
“I was a college professor,” he answered without hesitation.
“Really? What subject?”
Andrew collected the last of the thyme leaves he had been harvesting and tossed them into the bin. He stood and started for the house before answering, “Sociology.”
CHAPTER 24
Valentina jabbed the remote at the television forcefully, as if emphatic thrusts would somehow cause a station to appear. Each of the girls had taken a turn cycling through the static in search of a news source for the better part of an hour, but no one had found anything. Just channel after channel of hissing, rolling static.
Then Eureka.
“I've got something! I've got something!” Valentina blurted excitedly. She set the remote down tenderly as if jostling it would disrupt the image that had just popped onscreen.
Andrew cut a path to the sofa from the kitchen where he had been preparing a garden salad from the day's pickings.
“Who is it?”
“Looks like KPIC again,” Clarissa said, as she pulled herself up from the floor onto the couch to sit beside Valentina. Her brows dipped. “But I don't know who that is.”
“Yeah, I don't recognize him either,” Rachel said.
Valentina scrunched her nose. “Man, Tabitha's really let herself go.”
Clarissa gave Valentina a friendly elbow, but her joke perfectly captured everyone's confusion. KPIC's substitute anchorwoman, Tabitha Cousins, was AWOL. Sitting in her chair was somebody who decidedly wasn't.
The man, who might have been pushing his mid-twenties, was clearly out of his element. He fumbled for papers and groped for a pen like an unprepared college student trying to make the best of the remaining minutes of an exam. His hair was a disheveled mop of greasy black hastily combed to a side. The slicked down-and-to-the-left swoop countered his blue-and-red-striped tie, which had been cranked clumsily in the opposite direction and gave his overall appearance an angular look reminiscent of a Picasso cubist piece.
He knew he was live—several glances to the camera followed by a series of head nods to someone or someones off-screen made that readily apparent—but he didn't let that tiny little fact rush him. After he had straightened his pile of papers, he turned his droopy eyes to the camera and inhaled.
“Good evening,” he began, “I'm Lester Moore, filling in for...” He broke then, his voice cracking emotionally, “...filling in for Tabitha Cousins.” He tamped an eye with a closed fist. “Many of you may be wondering who I am, and why I am sitting in Tabitha's chair. Were there any way for her to be sitting here rather than me, I assure you, the crew here at KPIC would have moved mountains to make that happen. Tabitha...”
Lester paused and hung his head, regrouping for the second time inside of twenty seconds.
Clarissa felt Valentina's hand clamp around hers.
“Tabitha was—is the best,” he continued. “Any success I've had here at KPIC has been due in large part to her and her selfless promotion of me. On any given evening, you would find me toiling away in the newsroom, putting together stories and cutting footage for her and the rest of the KPIC News team to report. In more than just a small way, I owe her my career. I will be forever thankful for the day three years ago when she spoke up for me and ultimately got me hired. It's the kind of person she wa—is. I hope you all will permit me to fill in for her until she...” Another pause. “...until she returns. If I can perform this duty with half as much dignity, poise, and grace as she did, I will consider it a success.”
Rachel turned and swept her eyes over everyone on the sofa. “So Tabitha...?”
Clarissa could only lift her eyebrows in lieu of an answer. It was enough. Rachel returned to the TV a
nd curled her arms around her knees.
Lester unnecessarily arranged his papers again then turned to B camera. He launched into the only news story the world cared about. Wasting no time, he called out the names of surrounding cities and reported each one's missing tally, the totals staggering, unfathomable.
Clarissa held her breath in anticipation. Could that many people really be missing? The combined total from the neighboring towns was high enough to populate a mid-size city all its own. And Pastora and a handful of other smaller towns had yet to be mentioned.
Then Lester said, “Pastora,” and Clarissa's heart leaped into her throat.
“...Two-hundred twenty-eight...”
The breath she had been holding vented in a slow hiss. Did she hear Lester right? Had nearly two hundred thirty people vanished from her town?
The number was shocking, and that shock registered differently for each person in the room. Rachel whimpered when she heard the total, while Valentina's hand constricted so tight around Clarissa's, Clarissa had to pry it free. Andrew, meanwhile, remained emotionally detached and only stared at the television sober-faced, arms crossed, body unflinching.
When Lester finished reporting the grim news from the local area, he moved on to world totals. As expected, the amounts were significantly higher. Historic cities such as Rome, Istanbul, Mexico City, Paris, and Hong Kong recorded numbers in the tens of thousands. And that was per city. The impact Clarissa felt for those lost souls was far less than the personal trauma she felt at learning that 230 of her fellow townsfolk had been plucked from existence. She imagined it was the same for everyone. World casualties—if that's in fact what they were—were certainly jaw-dropping, but even their combined numbers paled in comparison to the ones tallied from her own backyard.
Lester laid his papers on the desk then folded his hands in front of him. He leaned toward the camera with pleading urgency.
“There is something else you should know,” he began. “While we here at KPIC strive to bring you the most up-to-date information we can, we are only able to do so much. We are on a skeleton crew now. Many of our staff and interns have chosen to leave of their own free will while others...” Lester adjusted his grip. “We will stay on the air as long as humanly possible. As long as there is power, as long as there is a person who can walk into this building and sit behind this desk, we will be here. But we can't do this alone. We need to ask something of you.”
Clarissa found herself inching forward in her seat, and at that moment her opinion of Lester changed. He may have started the broadcast an unfledged rookie, but he displayed incredible resolve in the few minutes he'd been on the air.
“We need your help,” he said. “Be vigilant. If you see or learn anything, report it to us by any means available to you. With all of us working together, we can defeat whatever it is that's hap—”
The TV cut to black.
Heads turned and spun to learn what had happened—Andrew held the remote. He tossed it onto the sofa. It bounced off the cushion and hit the floor with a clatter.
“What the hell did you do that for?” Valentina said, pitching forward.
“Yeah, Andrew,” Clarissa added, “we were watching that. Listening to him. It was nice to hear a voice of positivity for a change.”
Rachel sat up straight. “Exactly.”
Andrew started back toward the kitchen. Valentina twisted around and called after him.
“So, what, we're just going to leave it off?” She glanced at Clarissa and Rachel in wild-eyed confusion. “What if Lester's got more to say? What if there's more information?”
Andrew stopped abruptly then about-faced back to the couch.
“More information?” He laughed, and it was as real a laugh as Clarissa had heard from him. “Ladies, there is no new information. Stations are dropping out left and right, and services are dwindling by the day. It won't be long before we lose phone and the Internet, and once that happens the world will be cut off from itself. There's nothing else to report. And the reason there's nothing to report is because no one has learned anything. No government has stepped forward with knowledge of an attack nor has any accepted responsibility for one. There's nothing on the ham beyond what we already know. There's only the inevitability of what's to follow. Now, I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but you all need to face the hard truth about our situation.” He took a step forward for emphasis. “We're on our own.”
Rachel climbed to her feet. “But that's not true. There is news. And you told it to us.”
Andrew recoiled and frowned. “What news? What're you talking about?”
Though Andrew had posed his question to her, Rachel responded to Clarissa and Valentina. “About being alone when you sleep. They never told us about that at the town meeting, remember? They only said it was when a person was alone. Andrew learned about the sleeping part over the radio.”
“Yeah, okay,” Andrew said, reinserting himself into the conversation. “And so?”
“So why haven't they announced that over the news yet? Why haven't they told everyone to sleep in shifts like we're doing? If they did, then we could stop whatever's happening in its tracks.” She faced Andrew. “They might even be getting ready to say something about it today in light of so many TV stations going black, but we can't tune in to find out because you're turning things off.”
Andrew exhaled an irritated breath.
“I'll tell you why the news isn't championing the sleep-with-a-friend theory. Because it's just that: a theory. One that no one can prove works. And it's just one of the many floating around out there. First-world governments aren't going to throw everything against the wall and see what sticks. They're going to want to find out beyond as reasonable doubt as possible that whatever precautionary measure they advise is effective and not harmful. And who knows if or when that'll be.”
“Right!” Valentina barked, flailing a hand at the TV. “All the more reason to turn that back on so we can find out.”
Andrew was reaching his breaking point. He didn't want to talk about this anymore. Perhaps if Rachel and Valentina had interacted with him for years like Clarissa had, they would have noticed it too. He acted a certain way when he got perturbed. She witnessed it on numerous occasions when he made his monthly run to Aunt Mae's. A customer would get too chatty with him, or the register line would be too long, or the kitchen would get behind, forcing him to wait an extra pair of minutes before he could grab his meal and go. His reactions were always non-threatening, but Clarissa sometimes wondered how he would have responded to a prolonged, unpleasant experience. With the restaurant, he could have always left if a situation got too much under his skin. But now he lived under the same roof with relative strangers. Strangers that he had voluntarily taken (kidnapped!), but they were strangers no less yet ones instrumental to his survival.
Or were they?
“Andrew?” Clarissa said, aware she risked testing his limits. “Can I ask you something?”
Andrew's body softened at the sound of Clarissa's voice, but he was no less bothered by having to field more questions.
“What is it, Clarissa?” he said. He slid his hands into his pockets.
“Our sleeping arrangement,” she started, turning around to face him, “how sure are you that it works?”
Andrew cut his eyes to each woman.
“How sure am I? I'm not. At all. But of all the theories I've heard, it's the only one that's made any sense in light of what we know.”
Valentina jumped to her feet, kneeing the coffee table in the process.
“Wait a minute. You're not sure? What do you mean, 'you're not sure?' I thought you told us your radio friends or whatever said that people were disappearing in their sleep, not just when they were alone. And now you're saying you're not sure?” Valentina clamped her hands onto her hips. “Man, this just keeps getting better and better.”
“Of course, I'm not sure,” Andrew growled. “No one is sure. Of anything. I'm making best guesses here la
dies, guesses based on information I received from trusted sources around the world. And when those sources start making similar claims, I listen.”
Now Clarissa rose. “Easy Andrew. We're just asking questions. No one's making wrongful claims against you.” She looked directly at Valentina. “Are they, Val?”
“Well, it just smells is all,” she said. “It's a pretty big gamble to abduct three women based on radio chatter no one's even sure is right or wro—”
“Whoa, whoa, hold up,” Andrew said, rubbing his face vigorously. “Abduct? Are we still on that? Is that what you all still think? That I abducted you?” He passed his eyes from woman to woman. Clarissa thought she detected genuine hurt beneath those sagging lids. “Have I harmed any of you? Have I acted untoward or behaved in an inappropriate manner? Have I threatened any of you or verbally abused you? Have I even attempted to do any of those things?”
An uncomfortable silence hung in the air like the reek from rotting garbage. Only seconds had passed, but the stagnating quiet felt like unbearable minutes to Clarissa, who rushed to fill the void.
“No one is saying th—”
“In fact,” Andrew seethed with rising anger, “have I done anything other than provide you all with food, shelter, and a safe place to sleep?” He looked at everyone again, but gone was his wounded pride. In its place was glaring contempt. “So what is it you want from me, huh? What? An apology? Do you want me to admit that I helped you for selfish reasons? I thought we'd already put this topic to bed, but okay.” Andrew bowed and accompanied it with a mock arm flourish. “I apologize from the bottom of my heart for not being more forthcoming with my intentions. I should have told you of my grand plan the moment it occurred to me, which was all of ten seconds prior to pulling up and rescuing you from that parking lot, scared and screaming. I was wrong. There. I said it. I admit it. Now, can we move on, or is this something I can look forward to having to deal with another time?”
Clarissa swallowed dryly. Her heart thumped a percussionist's rhythm. She had never seen this side of Andrew before—and it upset her. She knew there had to be more to the mild-mannered person she saw every third Thursday. Everyone felt anger, didn't they? Everyone reacted to adverse or confrontational situations with a degree of displeasure. Why should Andrew be any different? That he was able to control his frustration better than the average bear was a testament to the sort of man she felt he was. He didn't fly into a rage, throw things, or yell. But his smoldering disapproval was almost as effective as if he had done one or all of those things.