A streak of pain shot up my leg, and I stumbled back, swearing. The glass didn’t even crack. Breaking in was going to be harder than I’d thought. I scanned the street around me as fear prickled the hairs on the back of my neck. How fast were alien imps? Were they following me? The sense of alarm aching in my gut told me I didn’t have all day.
I kicked the glass again and again. My sneaker ricocheted off it like a bouncy ball. I needed a damn gun to get in the gun store. I fumbled with the door handle, trying to pick the lock with one of the other keys on the key chain that came with the Honda. Nothing worked.
Scuttling came from down the street. Was it someone else?
I whirled around just as a pale leg slender and sleek as a baseball bat disappeared into an alley two blocks down.
Oh no. My chest tightened, and my pulse beat in my ears as the world closed in on me. The alien imps were following me.
I rushed back to the car and closed the door. Fighting tears, I turned on the ignition and backed into the street.
Necessity kept me from driving away. To hell with juvenile delinquency—I needed those weapons. Instead of driving forward, I hit reverse and backed up until I had a good length of street to gain momentum. I let it rip and jammed the gas pedal down.
The tires squealed, and I aimed right for the storefront.
Air bags exploded in my face as glass shattered on the windshield. The seat belt knocked the air out of my chest, and dizziness threatened to knock me out. I blinked, shaking my head and regaining my bearings. I didn’t want those things to find me unconscious. Sheer fear kept me awake.
The front of the car had submerged in the display case of the shop. Shotguns lay across the hood. Knowing I didn’t have much time, I kicked my door open and stumbled into the wreckage. Glass rained around my feet.
Static noise fizzled the air outside. They were close. My throat tightened, and I forced myself to breathe.
I scanned all of the different sizes and shapes of weapons, wondering where to start. I’d shot Hailey’s BB gun before, but nothing like this. All my knowledge came from CSI and Castle.
A series of high-pitched beeps came from outside, followed by clicks. My blood froze in my legs.
I had to learn pretty fast, or I’d have an extraterrestrial encounter of my own.
I scrambled behind the cash register and reached for the closest, smallest weapon, a black pistol. I found the gun model listed on one of the boxes of ammunition. My fingers shook as I opened the box, and the bullets fell out, rolling all over the counter.
The static noise intensified, and it sounded like they scuttled just beyond where the front window had been. The car door squeaked like something had opened it wider.
Oh my god.
I ducked behind the counter, jammed the bullets in the pistol, and cocked it. I had no idea if I’d loaded it correctly or if it would work. Glass cracked as the things moved into the store. I huddled against the wall, peering through the guns in the glass showcase that also acted as a countertop.
Please, please, please go away. Maybe, if I stayed put, they wouldn’t find me. But between the weapons in the showcase emerged a pale silver arm glittering like a million diamonds. A sleek back with strange protruding muscles, like a backward rib cage, came next, followed by a long, winding tail with tentacles on the end glowing like phosphorescent dandelion fluff. Their wispy haired, enlarged heads only rose a few inches above the countertop, making them shorter than me by about a foot, but that didn’t mean they weren’t dangerous.
My fingers clutched the gun so hard, they hurt. My heart beat like a wild animal out of control. What did they want with me? Had they taken everyone from their beds while they slept? Maybe they’d cleaned up the stranglers.
The tail swerved through the air as if sensing air currents or sonar vibrations, or something. As it moved, the static changed like someone tuning a radio. It was as if the tail emitted energy. I held my breath even though the glass lay between us. The thing turned around, and black, oval eyes with no retinas stared back at me. It opened its mouth and hissed, revealing pointy teeth.
My sanity unraveled into blind terror. Screaming, I tightened my finger on the trigger, and a gunshot shattered the countertop, spraying glass. I closed my eyes and fired blindly, hoping the weapon was enough to keep them away from me. The sound echoed in my ears, and the kickback jerked in my hand. One of my bullets must have ricocheted and hit the ceiling because drywall rained around me. I crashed against the display wall behind me, and pistols tumbled down, hitting my shoulder and my right foot.
Silence fell as I pulled the trigger and the gun clicked uselessly. I’d used all my bullets. Gritting my teeth, I peered around the countertop. The store lay empty, and I breathed with relief. So, they weren’t all powerful. Scary looking, maybe, but shots definitely drove them away. A strange sense of justice came over me, and I reveled in the sweet aftermath of revenge. If I was right, they’d taken everything away from me, including Mom. It was time they faced resistance.
Take that, people stealers.
Glittery ooze covered the floor of the shop, and I couldn’t tell if I’d hit one of them or if they just slimed everything they touched. I returned to the car. They’d left ooze all over the dashboard and spread the contents of my backpack across the passenger seat. I counted the water bottles and granola bars. They hadn’t taken anything, so what were they looking for?
I stuffed everything back in and packed another small handgun along with cases of bullets. I strapped a large shotgun over my shoulder, refilled the weapon I’d just fired, and stuck it in the pink, metal-studded belt of my skinny jeans. Three guns. That should be enough. It was hard to believe I’d hated them my whole life. I felt like the biggest hypocrite on the planet.
I probably was, considering I might be the only one left alive.
Pushing that thought away, I considered trying to back the car out of the shop. The windshield looked like a giant spider web, and the crash had popped both front tires. The aliens—because I was pretty sure that’s what they were—could probably recognize the car and track me back to my apartment. It was better to sneak away and double back to make sure they weren’t still following me. There was no rush now because I could defend myself.
Empowered, I exited the mess of the shop and took a sharp left at the next street corner. I’d grown up in the town, and I knew the best path to take to lose them and return home.
But, I wouldn’t be able to stay here forever, not with those things around. The thought sent creepy shivers across my shoulders, and I pushed it away. Better to deal with each day as it came. Who knew? Maybe I’d wake up tomorrow and everyone would be back.
The thought brought an overwhelming ache of melancholy spiraling from the deepest part of me. Why hadn’t I been happy with the world the way it was? Sure, I worked at Save ’n Shop, but that wasn’t the end of the world. Not like this was.
I returned home two hours later, having circled the center of town and confirmed I wasn’t being followed. I jammed the main door to the apartment building with a stick and climbed the steps to my apartment.
When I opened the door and saw Mom’s wheelchair, the emptiness threatened to collapse on top of me until I couldn’t move. I walked to the wheels and knelt beside it, running my hands along the armrests, as if she’d left a clue in the metal frame.
Oh, Mom, where did you go? Never had I felt so utterly alone. I’d always had her to come home to, and now, when I needed her the most, she was gone.
I sniffed up my tears. I had work to do if I was going to keep myself alive so I could see her again. I forced myself up to my feet. I locked the main door with the chain we used at night and dragged the bookshelf in my room in front of it, books and all.
My favorite astronomy book tumbled to the floor as I pushed the shelf into place. I picked up the book and flipped to the Aurora Borealis page, looking for some clue to what had happened.
Auroras result from emissions of photons in the Earth’
s upper atmosphere. They are ionized—which means excited—by the collision of solar wind, which could be simulated by a spaceship if it was big enough, and magnetosphere particles being funneled down and accelerated along the Earth’s magnetic field lines.
I clapped the book closed and put it back on the shelf. All that talk of electromagnetic energy reminded me of the static noise and phosphorescence coming from the aliens’ strange tails. It was a slim connection, but it was all I had.
What if they’d caused everyone’s disappearance? If so, what did they want with me?
I dug in the cabinet and found a ready-to-eat mac ’n cheese meal and threw it in the microwave. Thank goodness the power still worked.
Think, Julie, think. If I could figure out this crazy business, then maybe I could find a way out of it, a way back to Mom. First came the asteroids. Then the Aurora Borealis, and now the mass disappearance. What connected them? What made me so special?
I rushed to my room just as the microwave beeped. I wasn’t hungry anymore. I dug in my closet, pulled out the sheet, and unwrapped it. The rock fell to the floor with a thud. The strange markings glowed once then returned to normal.
This rock had to be the answer to all of this. The minute after I’d taken it, I saw one of those things in the woods. It followed us and attacked the pickup. Maybe it was supposed to retrieve the rock from the asteroid, and I intercepted.
If so, that rock was the one reason why I was still alive.
As I dug into the mac ’n cheese, I actually considered handing the rock over. Would the aliens leave me alone, then?
Yeah right, wishful thinking. I’d have no power over them, no reason for them to keep me alive, or to bargain for the return of humans on Earth. They’d probably off me on the spot—just like what they did to everyone else. To get Mom back, and everyone else in the world, I’d have to use the rock to my advantage. I scraped the inside of the container with the spoon to get all the cheese. Guess running around town like Rambo gave me an appetite after all.
After lunch, I called 911, Hailey, the local news, and anyone else I could think of. I even called Mike. Maybe he’d found a similar rock in the wreckage? I had told Hailey I wouldn’t go out with him even if he was the last guy on Earth, so I figured fate might have a field day if he really was. But his phone rang just as endlessly as all the others. My loneliness threatened to swallow me whole.
As night fell, I sat on my bed in the twilight, refusing to turn any lights on for fear the aliens would see my golden-lit apartment from the street. I’d bitten all of my fingernails to the pink part, and there was no nail left to bite off unless I wanted to draw blood. With my computer on my lap, I studied the markings on the rock and scoured the Internet for anything similar, but I found nothing to compare them to. Twitter still lay dormant, and no sites had been updated since everyone had disappeared.
I jumped as a car alarm sounded from the parking lot below. I crept to my bedroom window and peered over the sill. The headlights on Ellen’s silver Buick flashed on and off.
I scanned the parking lot. We only had a few working streetlights, and the dim glow illuminated nothing out of the ordinary.
Yet, something had set it off.
A dandelion-shaped tail disappeared into the shadows on the other side of the street. I clutched the windowsill, nails digging into the chipped wood. They were out there, and they were looking for me, or the rock, or both.
Slowly, I locked the window, reached up and pulled down the yellowed vinyl curtain that had come with the apartment. Could they climb the walls?
Panic crawled up my spine. I couldn’t stay here. The Sparkies—which was what I had decided to call them—would find me sometime, especially if they swept each building systematically. I wouldn’t put it past them. To engineer an asteroid shower, the Aurora Borealis, and the disappearance of mankind was no easy feat. Their resourcefulness and intellect surpassed my own, which left me no chance.
Unless you get off your butt and leave.
Snuggling under my reclaimed sheet amidst all my Gale Williams’ posters and the only home I’d ever known provided me with what little comfort I had left. I wasn’t ready to leave.
CHAPTER SIX
ALTERED HORIZON
June 25, 2013, 9:14 a.m.
Day 2
I awoke to silence so complete, it threatened to suffocate me.
Where were all of the alarms? Had everyone woken up and shut them off?
Hope surged inside me, and I ripped off the sheet. Maybe yesterday had been a nightmare. “Mom?”
I burst into the living room, expecting Mom to be watching Good Morning America and drinking a diet Pepsi, like always in the morning. My stomach pitched as reality dragged me down and squashed my hopes. Her chair stood empty, exactly where I’d last seen it.
So why had all of the alarms stopped?
I jogged back to my room. My alarm showed no time. When I checked behind the nightstand, the cord was still plugged in.
A jittery feeling came over me, and I fought to keep the panic away. Bad news.
We’d lost power. That’s why all of the other alarms had stopped.
No more mac ’n cheese.
I could live with cold food for a while. But, eventually, I needed power to fuel my laptop and turn on the TV—my two windows to the world. Not that they were helping much.
I dug in the cabinets and found a stash of batteries and a flashlight. At least that would help if I needed to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night.
Opening the fridge, I checked the milk. It seemed fine, despite the power being off all night. It might be the last milk I’d ever taste if the cows had gone where everyone else had. A deep ache of melancholy came over me as I poured the cereal and watched the white liquid fall into the bowl. Checking the cabinets, I determined I had enough food to last another day or so if I watched my rations. We never had extra money to stockpile. After that, I’d have to chance leaving the apartment.
At least, now, I had guns.
After making sure they were loaded and ready to fire, I paced around the apartment: first the kitchen then my room then the living room. Back and forth. Back and forth. If I wasn’t careful, I’d go crazy.
The only room I didn’t enter was Mom’s. Her door still lay slightly ajar, as I’d left it when I checked for her yesterday morning. Normally, I gave her privacy, but the threat of loneliness weighed me down. I missed her so much, her absence tore me apart.
I pushed the door to her room open. Stacks of clothes lay piled on her bed, some pairs of jeans so old they were more my size than hers. She always slept in her wheelchair, so she used her bed for storage. Heaps of tattered magazines lay strewn against the back wall. Cracked picture frames cluttered her bookshelf, along with ceramic knickknacks of all shapes and sizes, enough to decorate three rooms, never mind one. A collection of deflated balloons from my birthdays as a kid hung draped over a hanger on the corner of the shelf, the top one with a picture of a pink Pretty Pony saying, Congrats! You’re turning three. Jars filled with bottle caps, elastics, tacks, and pencils were stacked to the ceiling.
I knew Mom had a problem, I’d seen those hoarder shows on TV. As long as she kept her collections in her room, I let her be. This junk was all she had besides me, and I couldn’t always be there for her, so it was.
Staring at the mess, failure slapped me in the face. Had I done the right thing allowing her to accumulate so much? She couldn’t even wheel her chair around her room. Maybe I should have pushed her to live a more normal life. Maybe, if I had, she’d have learned to walk with her fake leg. Maybe she’d still be here today.
Determination hardened inside me like hot lava rock cooling after an eruption. I had to stop blaming myself in order to focus on finding a solution to this mess.
The only reason why you’re alive is because of that stupid rock. Even if she could walk, she’d have disappeared with everyone else.
I climbed over garbage bags filled with who knew what to the
dusty books stacked by the magazines in the back. The edge of a beige photo album poked out from underneath some tattered newspapers announcing Michael Jackson’s death. She must have kept them thinking they’d be worth something someday. If only she’d known how worthless all this stuff was at the end of the world, when all you wanted to do was be with the people you loved.
I pulled the album free and opened to the first page. A picture of me as a toddler with pigtails riding a painted horse on a merry-go-round stared back. Mom stood behind me, her hand protectively against my back. She looked radiant with her wavy shoulder-length auburn hair, sparkling green eyes, and slim figure. That was before the accident, before she lost her leg. That was the mom I liked to remember.
I must have sat for hours looking through that yellowed photo album. By the time I reached the last page, my legs ached and my back ached against the frame of her bed. I took one last look of my elementary school graduation picture, taken a month before she lost her leg. She hadn’t added any other pictures of me and her after that, as if the accident had stopped time.
I put the album back where I’d found it—because she could always tell if I’d moved any of her collections—and returned to the living room for lunch, a peanut butter sandwich on stale bread and a can of peaches.
My laptop beckoned, but I couldn’t squander the few hours of battery life left playing Spider Solitaire or watching Pirate Crusader for the thousandth time. I booted it up, and my screen background of Captain Jay Dovetail brandishing a sword came on. The Internet icon flashed at the bottom of the screen with an X through the center.
Dammit! I’d lost the Internet. Running my hands through my hair, I tried to calm myself as the world wound down around me. What next? Water? Sewage?
This recent loss confirmed the fact I couldn’t hide in the apartment much longer. A thick reluctance to leave built up inside me. How much of my situation did I blame on Mom, and how much of it was my own fear keeping me here in “Nowheresville,” as Hailey put it?
Earth: Population 2 (Paradise Lost Book 1) Page 5