Ross hesitated. “Like I said, we don’t want no trouble.”
“You found it!”
And with a level of speed previously unobserved, he whipped his gun up and took aim at Ross. He might’ve been a gunslinger drawing his weapon in an old Western. It happened with such speed that Zephyr’s only new-world companion stepped backward and nearly tripped over him.
The two men stood there, guns held, each locked on the other, neither blinking, a boy caught in the background. To Zephyr, this standoff seemed to last months, the rainfall not a storm, but a season. In actuality, it played out in seconds and it was Ross who finally broke form. The boy braced for an eardrum-rupturing blast, but one never came. Instead, the older man shook his head and slowly lowered his weapon with one hand, looked away, grimacing, and used the other, palm open, to block his face in a primitive shield against the suit’s revolver.
“Please, don’t shoot. We don’t want no trouble,” he pleaded. “We was just driving around. That’s all. We didn’t see you.”
Zephyr braced for something horrible. A piercing crack followed by a nightmare, perhaps. He wanted to run, but his legs wouldn’t respond; they seemed disconnected in another world and time. The gunman’s aim was steady. He’s going to do it, he thought. He’s actually going to do it. You have to do something!
But no gunshot sounded. Instead, the assailant surveyed them both once more, his composure faltered, and just as quickly as he had raised it, he lowered his revolver.
“Gone,” he said.
That was it — a breath of a declaration that proved nearly inaudible. For the first time, though, Zephyr saw authenticity cross the man’s face, now a contortion of agony. As the rain pelted him, the gunman fell to his knees with a splash. The man looked up to meet their eyes and Zephyr finally understood.
“Please, don’t make me. Don’t make me do it myself.”
“Mister,” Ross said as he bent to one knee and redistributed half of his body weight to the shotgun, butt down — now a makeshift crutch. “I don’t know what happened to you, but I can guess at it. Bad stuff’s been happening all around. This boy here woke up and his parents was gone, too. Even a miserable sumbitch like me lost loved ones. It looks like the shit hit the fan pretty good and now we’re all covered in it. But this thing you’re planning, it ain’t the answer. It just ain’t.”
Ross put a hand on the man’s shoulder and water surged from his suit jacket like a wet sponge wrung out. “What’s your name, fella?”
The man looked away, fixated once more on the concrete. “Jerry… Saunders.”
“Take my hand and let’s get out of this storm so we can do some talking, Jerry,” Ross said and after only a moment’s hesitation, Jerry Saunders did.
They broke into a McDonald’s across the street from the crash site and it was dryer inside. The restaurant speakers played a low static and the florescent lights buzzed overhead. Zephyr peered over the counter, discovered a ruffled uniform on the floor, disrobed and tried it on. It was a perfect fit. Afterward, he surveyed the kitchen quarters and scooped up six cheeseburgers, fully wrapped and still warm under the glow of the red food lights. Then he crawled back over the counter.
“Oh, sweet Jesus,” Ross said as the boy brought the food back to their table. “I think you found your calling, boy. You reckon they got one of those in my size?”
Zephyr grinned. “Afraid not.”
Jerry just sat there, hands clasped on the table, his brown hair and suit still dripping. He didn’t seem to notice or care that he was soaked. Zephyr sat beside the men and tossed the burgers on the table. Ross unwrapped one and halved it in a single bite.
“Eat, ya’ll,” he said, pointing to the pile as though introducing them to it.
Begrudgingly, Jerry unwrapped a burger and bit into it. This man still worried Zephyr. The boy wanted to ask what happened to him, but he was still afraid to broach the subject. It was only twenty minutes ago that he had drawn a gun on Ross. That he seemed on the verge of some botched suicide only added to the boy’s reservations about him. He still looked dazed, sluggish, a little out of it. And the fact that he remained in possession of the revolver, now tucked away in his soggy suit pocket, had not escaped the boy’s attention, either.
“I shouldn’t have done any of that,” Jerry said at last. The man’s eyes were still red, his face haggard.
“Well, it’s all right now,” Ross said, wolfing down his second burger in as many minutes. “I’m not gonna lie, though – I just about pissed my pants out there.” He slapped his hand on the table and then laughed with a mouthful of food until he coughed and choked.
“Excuse me, sir. I don’t mean to be rude, but why would you – well, why would you want to do what you tried?” Zephyr asked, fidgeting in his chair. “My parents vanished. So did my girlfriend. Everyone I know is gone, actually. But we don’t know what the heck is happening around here. Maybe there’s a reason that makes some kind of sense and… I mean, what if everyone is coming back?”
Jerry considered the question for a moment and then spoke. His words came with concentrated effort. “This… is worldwide. It’s everywhere. Your parents aren’t coming back. My girls… aren’t coming back. Nobody’s coming back.” He looked directly into Zephyr’s eyes. “It’s just us. It’s our hell now.”
The boy felt as if he’d been sucker-punched. The possibility that his parents could be forever missing always lingered, but nobody had given power to the notion until now. The implications of eternity clawed at the depths of him. He’s saying they’re dead, he thought. That they could be dead. He wasn’t willing to accept that. Not yet.
“But how can you know?” Zephyr asked.
The man dismissed his question with a wave of the hand and then ran his fingers through his wet hair and sighed. “My girls are gone. My wife is gone. That, I know. And that’s all that matters.” There was a finality to his words that brought a full stop to Zephyr’s line of questions.
“He went camping and when he woke up his little girlfriend was missing,” he said, and nodded in Zephyr’s direction. “Me, I didn’t realize nothing was wrong until almost noon and only because the damn TV stations was out. What about you, Jerry?”
The man began to talk. Slowly at first, but then faster.
Jerry Saunders, dentist, husband, and father, woke at six-thirty in the morning, as he always did on weekdays. Dressed in his bathrobe and slippers, he tiptoed past two rooms housing his sleeping daughters and then to the downstairs kitchen, where he brewed his morning coffee. He cracked the front door for the newspaper, but couldn’t find it, which never happened. He’d wait forty-five minutes and if it still hadn’t shown up, he’d call and complain, he decided. Fifteen minutes later, he sat at his dining room table with a cup of coffee and his laptop, powered on and opened to The Wall Street Journal, which displayed yesterday’s news.
It went from bad to worse. Like Zephyr, he checked all of the big news websites and found them outdated. But he also tried the international ones, including The Guardian and BBC News, and they were equally abandoned. So he turned on the television.
“Did you see the newsroom?” Zephyr asked.
The man nodded. “That’s when I ran to get my wife,” he said, stared at the table, shrugged, and added, “And… you know the rest.”
He recounted the remainder of the last two days, detailing actions that Zephyr had also taken. Then he addressed a question never asked. The man owned one of those hulking satellite dishes – the kind that existed before DirecTV and Dish Network — and it allowed him access to all the international feeds. As the day wore on and nightfall bloomed, he tuned in to the global streams and confirmed only sporadic broadcasts and regular signs of a mass populace exodus, or “extinction,” as he called it.
“You thought the newsroom was bad? BBC is stuck on some kind of crime scene. The title bar says it’s live and something about hostages, but the camera is on the ground and everything is tilted kind of sideways. You can see police cars in the bac
kground.” He leaned into the table, meeting Zephyr’s eyes. “What got me is that right up front on the ground is a big microphone and a wad of clothes.”
“The reporter.”
Jerry nodded. “Just like every damn-body-else who vanished.”
“Christ, Jesus,” Ross said in disbelief. “It can’t be.”
“It is.”
Tears flooded Zephyr’s eyes, he leaned into his palmed hands and covered his face. He wanted to cry but he wouldn’t let himself, so he stifled his emotions like some offensive sneeze. He took great, gasping breaths and held onto them. He’d clung to some tiny thread of hope, however minuscule, that the event was isolated. All of his logic required that. With that, he could concoct theories and explanations. Without that, the well ran dry, the antithesis to his watering eyes. Now, at last, he’d been forced to reconsider his optimism and the last strings of normality that came with it in favor of the unknown, where anything, even the utterly outlandish, was imaginable. His parents would not be resting in some hotel a hundred miles off while the city worked to clear a toxic spill or an outbreak of some virus if it wasn’t just his hometown or even home state that was missing, but the entire world.
Ross put his hand on Zephyr’s shoulder. He started to say something and then didn’t.
11
Zephyr’s tears receded as quickly as they had advanced and after a while he felt guilty for them. He had, since everything walloped him that early morning in the park, fought to keep his composure and his wits, to think and act older than he was, but the outburst had given him away. It was a reminder that he was, as Ross often said, just a boy, and he hated that.
Jerry had more news. In his time alone the first night, as he watched international television and drank himself stupid – Zephyr briefly imagined the man playing Russian roulette through a blur of drunken misery and rage – bright lights radiated his living room and rolled across his wall. He leapt from his recliner and ran to the window, where he saw two red dots speeding into the darkness. A car. Another person alive. And prior to his game of chicken with Ross a short while ago, a woman in a truck had rolled by the man as he wandered around the town.
“She tried to talk to me, I think.”
“Did you happen to pull your gun on her maybe?” Zephyr asked.
“Possibly,” Jerry said.
“Possibly?”
“That’s what I said.”
The man slumped back into his chair, then exhaled long and slow as he stared at the ceiling. “I swallowed a whole bunch of Vicodin this morning. Nine-hundred milligrams – definitely the good stuff. Everything’s been a little hazy since. So I really can’t remember,” he finally said. “Red truck, and blonde. For all the good that’ll do you.”
“Well, least we know God hasn’t taken away Eve,” Ross said. To Zephyr, it sounded like a joke, but when he met the man’s gaze he saw that he was serious.
“Eve was banished from Eden, along with Adam,” Jerry said.
Several minutes later, the sodas finally caught up to Zephyr, who couldn’t find the keys to the outside bathrooms. Finally, he resolved to relieve himself in the bushes near the drive-thru as he held several layers of newspaper over his head.
He could see that Jerry believed, as Ross did, that the disappearances were religious in nature. Both men obviously had shouldered some weighty sins in their day because they so readily accepted that they’d been forsaken. Zephyr endeavored to justify his own predicament as religious ramification, though, and found it difficult. Just two nights ago, he’d been drunk and frisky. It wasn’t smart, and in hindsight, he wasn’t particularly proud of himself. That all being true, though, neither of these acts was theft or murder.
He was pondering whether he was ignorant to the sins as defined by the bible and in the next blink he was kissing pavement, the newspaper tossed to the side in a forgotten pile, his train of thought obliterated. An explosion inside rattled the windows of the restaurant. He jumped to his feet, threw open the doors and ran inside. Ross stared back at him from his place at the table, his eyes wide, both hands up.
Jerry appeared fast asleep against the chair, his head slung all the way back over the headrest as he ogled the ceiling, mouth ajar. His two front teeth were missing and thick, dark blood hemorrhaged from his cavity, as well as a new one on the back of his head. It dribbled down his chin and onto his damp undershirt. A red spray of gore and fleshy chunks painted the wall directly behind him. His revolver lay on the tile beside the chair, finally surrendered.
He’d blown his brains out.
12
The two of them decided not to do anything with the man’s body. What, really, could be done? Ross couldn’t wait to leave. He turned from the scene and pretended to study the rain outside. Zephyr asked him if he wanted to say a prayer and he shook his head.
“I just wanna go.”
He looked stunned — in shock, maybe — and for good reason. He was right there, Zeph, he told himself. Right there. Sitting right across from him when he did that. He has to live with that forever. Of course he’s stunned. Of course he’s in shock. You saw the aftermath and you’re in shock.
The boy wanted to ask Ross how it transpired. He wanted to know how Jerry had done himself in. Had Ross said something to him? Was there some kind of conversational trigger or had he just smiled, winked, pulled out the gun and sent a bullet into his mouth and through the backside of his skull? He needed to tell the older man that he was sorry, and that it wasn’t his fault, that Jerry had obviously made up his mind about this final action well before he had even met them, but he couldn’t think of a way to begin.
He knew they should leave so he fumbled for his car keys, but when he pulled them out he understood that they didn’t belong to him at all. At once, the day’s events came flooding back to him. The stupid car crash. The fact that he now wore some vanished teenager’s uniform. The keys dangling before him must belong to that person. Zephyr pressed the lock button and heard a car horn sound outside. He tapped it repeatedly as he ran to the window and saw headlights blink on and off. They belonged to a blue pickup truck.
“I found us a new ride, I think,” he told Ross.
The man nodded.
“Ross, I hate to do this, especially in light of what just happened, but do you think we should go back to my car and get our… stuff?”
At first, he wasn’t sure if Ross heard him. The older man continued wiping his shirt, as though cleansing the blood would also cleanse the memory. After a moment, though, he stopped rubbing, sighed and said, “Yep. I reckon we better.”
“Is there anything I can do?”
“No. Ain’t much can be done now. Let’s just go.”
Zephyr handed the older man the keys, suggested he try to start the truck and said he’d be right behind him. Ross pushed open the restaurant doors and scurried to the vehicle. He wasn’t fast on his feet, even when he meant to be, and he was soaked all over again by the time he finally humped himself into the car seat.
The boy turned away and looked upon Jerry’s lifeless body – slumped backward, arms dangling, jaw gaping, blood pooling on the tile below. If not for all the rich, dark red that painted his jaw and suit, he might’ve been a man so exhausted that he’d fallen asleep in his chair. Not light rest, but the hard kind interrupted only by desperate gasps of air and erratic snores so loud that they assaulted the ears.
Staring at the man, Zephyr had several unrelated thoughts. The first was that he should do or say something to honor a life lost — he just couldn’t think of what. Then, his eyes came upon the black revolver, discarded on the tile, and he thought he should take the weapon and throw it away so that nobody else would ever use it. And yet, he didn’t want his fingerprints on it supposing the suicide was ever investigated. Absurd, he knew. Seriously. Who the hell is going to investigate this, Zeph? I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but both Law & Order and CSI have been cancelled, dude. He knew it was a ridiculous notion, but it didn’t matter.
&nb
sp; In the end, he said nothing, did nothing, and left Jerry Saunders in McDonald’s at a table for one where he would sleep eternally. He hoped that if there was a God, he might take pity on the man.
13
Ross drove, which was just as well because the truck was a stick-shift and Zephyr had no idea how to operate it. It was a rough ride overrun with hard bursts and slows as the gears caught and ground. Eventually, the vehicle pulled parallel to the Volvo, forever locked in steely intercourse with the overweight minivan, and they transported all of the guns into the backseat.
“What now?” Zephyr asked as he slumped back into his seat.
“Well,” Ross said, “I need a drink, so I guess we oughta go shopping.” The tufts of hair around his scalp had dried some, but his clothes were still wet. He looked pale.
“OK. Sounds good.” He wasn’t going to say anything else, and then he did anyway. “Ross, don’t be mad, but what happened? Why did he do that?”
His friend put the truck in gear. “I don’t know, boy. One minute I was tellin’ that damn fool about my ex-wife and the next he shot his head off. That’s when you come in. You ain’t miss much, but be thankful for what you did.”
“Did he say anything?” Zephyr asked.
“Not a damned thing.” Ross made the shape of a gun with his index and thumb and pointed at his mouth. “Just… pow.”
Five minutes later, the truck rolled off Main Street into a large parking lot home to more scattered cars. Rain pounded the windshield, but Zephyr could nevertheless see clearly enough through the overworked wipers that the grocery store was open, its fluorescent lights still shining behind big, dirty windows. A hulking sign displayed a glowing red logo for Ralphs. The store bled into several other shops including a nail salon and a Radio Shack.
The doors opened automatically as they hurried toward them and they browsed independently, freely pillaging the aisles of the abandoned market, their steel carts loaded with food and drinks of all sorts.
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