by Dan Padavona
What could cause such an event—an environmental disaster, an enemy invasion? Nothing made sense.
At this point he would have gladly traded the silent gloom of Helen Street for the bullying corridors of Kimball High. At least the horror only lasted until 2:15 PM at Kimball High, and the only monsters stalking the halls were the flesh and blood kind hiding behind their own insecurities.
A shadow passed over the backyard windows.
His heart in his throat, Blake slumped against the couch, away from the blue illumination of the television. Can someone see me from outside the house? He flicked the television off, and now the blackness of the living room was absolute. The staccato ticking of the clock sounded overwhelming, as though someone kept hitting a drum.
His eyes locked on the back windows, and as he hid in the darkness, he imagined the intruder standing behind him right now, glaring down at him through the front window. He sank lower into the couch, the sensation that someone was watching him growing stronger.
Scraaaatcchhhhh.
Something scraped along the plate glass behind him. Blake bolted off the couch and ran for the kitchen. He crouched beneath the counter, repeating to himself like a mantra that it was only a tree branch. He might have convinced himself of this after a while, had he not remembered that the front yard apple tree was set near the sidewalk, its nearest branches at least ten feet from the window.
Where are you, Dad?
Crawling on all fours, he sneaked from the kitchen into the dining room. He was below the dining room table, peering through chair legs toward the backyard windows. The starless night dripped with black paint. The back deck was silhouetted like prison bars. A wall on his right stood between him and the living room, but that barrier extended only a few more feet before he was exposed to the living room window again. What would he see glaring at him through the glass?
Ahead, the staircase ascended to the top floor. How many steps to the stairs? Eight? Ten? Would he reach the staircase before the plate glass imploded, and something terrible rushed at him across the living room? He thought again of vampires. Of werewolves. Of psychopaths. He imagined Jack Torrance, straight out of The Overlook Hotel, holding a blood-soaked roque mallet, grinning with insanity into the living room.
Wood creaked along the back deck. A shadow shifted in the corner of his eye. Blake ran for the stairs, taking them two at a time until he was atop the landing.
Now what?
The upstairs hallway stretched away, long and dark. Rooms branched off to the right—first the bathroom, then his father’s room. Blake’s room was at the end of the hall, door opened inward, the gray glow of his computer monitor bleeding out of the bedroom.
Well, that was stupid. If someone breaks in, I’m trapped on the second floor.
He contemplated the windows at the end of the hallway and in the bedrooms. No trees grew close enough to the house for him to reach. A wooden ladder, upon which his father trained grape vines to climb toward the roof, was screwed to the wall a foot outside his window. But the ladder was old, and judging by its slender rungs, it had probably been purchased from a nursery or an antique shop, not from a hardware store. The rungs would likely splinter under his weight, and two stories was a long way to fall.
The deck floorboards squealed under the weight of something heavy. A windowpane rattled.
Somebody is breaking in.
Blake ran for his bedroom as one of the dining room windows shattered. He slammed the door behind him and lay against the door, panting. Blindly groping for the doorknob, he twisted the lock.
The thuds of footsteps rang hollow through the dining room, and then the sounds stopped at the stairs, as though considering. As the footsteps turned away from the stairs and headed into the living room, he allowed himself to breathe again.
To his right was his twin bed, under which he could still fit. Straight ahead sat a wooden study desk, upon which was set his computer and monitor. The screensaver shuffled through nature images, bright like starlight in the heavy darkness of the bedroom. To the right of the desk was the window, and just outside the window, beyond his vision, was the ladder.
He listened. The computer fan emitted a steady, electronic buzz. The downstairs was quiet, and he began to hope that the intruder would loot whatever he desired and move off to a different house.
The steps groaned. The intruder started up the staircase.
This can’t be happening.
As if he could shut the danger away, Blake closed his eyes, the way an ostrich buries its head in the sand. The footfalls drew nearer, rising up the stairs. Closer.
The footsteps stopped at the landing. He imagined the intruder, a silhouette within shadows, peering down the hall and assessing the closed doors. Blake lost all sense of time, and as he stood trembling with his back to the bedroom door, he was uncertain if the silence lasted seconds or minutes.
The floorboards squealed. He silently prayed that the unknown man would search the bathroom or his father’s bedroom. But Blake knew better. The intruder could sense him.
Please. Just go away.
Closer the footsteps came. The sounds paused at the bathroom door, then started again. The intruder stopped again at his father’s door. Blake knew the intruder would not choose wrongly.
This is it. Last door on the right.
The footsteps approached his bedroom, coming to a halt outside his door. Only the thin wood of the door separated Blake from the intruder. He heard the man’s raspy breathing from the hallway and could almost feel the chill of the intruder’s cold breath on his neck.
The doorknob twisted and stopped. The knob jiggled, then it violently shook, as though a freight train passed by. A heavy weight threw itself into the door, and Blake plunged forward onto his hands and knees, his breath driven out of his lungs. The intruder struck the door again, and it boomed like thunder, the hinges screeching in protest. Blake scrambled to his feet, running for the bedroom window as the crashes continued behind him.
Throwing the window open, feeling the humid night air press against his skin, he stuck his neck through the opening. The ladder was nailed to the wall several inches to his right; but those several inches looked like a mile, as he thought of a way to grasp hold of the rungs while suspended out of a two-story window. Leaping for the rungs was suicidal. He wasn’t sure the rungs could support his weight at all, and he was certain they wouldn’t if he threw himself onto the ladder all at once.
The intruder crashed against the bedroom door. The wood splintered where the hinges were attached.
Blake climbed onto the sill, the back of his body extended into the night. His balance wavered, and for one terrifying second he was sure that he would fall out the window. Gritting his teeth, he grasped the ladder with his left hand. The ladder, suffocated in grape vines, trembled.
The ladder is never going to hold me.
Gingerly, he extended his left leg toward the rungs, his right arm wrapped inside of the window, bear hugging the wall to his chest. The intruder smashed against the door, and the knob broke off and clanged against the floor.
Blake’s left foot caught one of the rungs and slipped. He felt himself falling off the sill. Heart speeding, he grasped the interior wall as his arms screamed from exertion.
His left foot righted itself on the rung, and to his relief the wood did not crack under his weight. He clasped the upper rung with his left hand, letting go of the interior wall, and his body swung outward like a hinge, leaving him suspended over the unforgiving concrete of the driveway. As his body rotated back toward the exterior wall, his right hand reached for and clasped the ladder. For several seconds he lay against the ladder, his breaths coming in gasps, as his right leg extended into the night. With the rich scent of grape leaves in his nostrils, the crashes against his bedroom door seemed to come from another world, as the vacant neighborhood and house intrusion took on a surreal, dream-like quality.
His right foot found the rungs, and he began to descend the ladde
r. The rungs moaned under his weight, crackling and splintering. But each rung brought him several inches closer to the ground, and Blake focused on each small victory as though meditating. Now he was halfway between the first and second stories. If he fell from here, he would shatter a leg, but he might survive. He didn’t want to look down. Not yet. But he couldn’t look up, either, because he feared that if he did, he would see the lunatic intruder grinning down at him. So he looked straight ahead, seeing white siding and the weathered ladder through a jungle of vines.
He was so lost in concentration that he was shocked when his right foot touched concrete. Being on the ground had never felt so wonderful.
At the sound of footsteps crossing his bedroom floor, he turned and sprinted through his neighbor’s backyard. He leaped over a toy lawn mower, passed the Gibbons’ above ground pool, and caught a whiff of chlorine as he crashed through a low hedge. Turning back, he saw something watching him through his bedroom window—a cloaked figure whose black robes melted into the darkness. A chill ran down Blake’s spine.
With the Gibbons’ ranch between Blake and his house, he cut left toward Helen Street. When he hit the sidewalk, he ran for Northern Drive, the pounding of his sneakers against the pavement like continuous gunfire.
Empty, dark shells of houses whipped past in a blur. At one point, he thought he heard footfalls running up behind him, but it could have been his own footfalls echoing. Blake didn’t look behind. He ran to Northern Drive, crossed the thoroughfare where abandoned cars slept at stoplights, and cut into another residential neighborhood. He didn’t stop running until several minutes passed, and then he collapsed onto the dewy grass of a suburban Cape Cod’s front yard.
As he lay gasping for air with the acidic taste of bile pushing up the back of his throat, he looked up and down the residential neighborhood, seeing no sign of human life.
CHAPTER FIVE
Darren Takes a Vacation
It took Darren Emerson twelve hours to process that he was the only person in his Lakeland, Florida, neighborhood.
The sidewalks, usually clogged with early morning walkers and bicyclists, were strangely empty Sunday morning, as he walked two blocks to the mini-mart. The store’s automatic front doors hummed and slid open, as though commanded by electronic sorcery. Inside, he found aisles of boxed cereal, canned goods, and candy bars. The television behind the counter displayed static and a flashing message which read, NO SIGNAL. On the newsstand, between the Slim Jim and Florida Lottery display, sat a stack of day-old newspapers.
Ringing the service bell, he said, “Hello? Is there anybody here? Hello?”
After a few minutes, he gave up and checked Wal-Mart half a block away. Here was the strangest conundrum—a parking lot full of vehicles, the store’s interior lit up like a Christmas tree, and not a soul to be found.
“Hello? Can anyone hear me?”
Muzak emanated from the speakers. Dozens of cash registers sat unattended, waiting for someone to loot every penny.
“Seriously. Where the hell is everyone?”
Nobody answered.
As he walked out into the Florida sun, taking in the metallic sea of idle vehicles, he realized something too incredible to comprehend had happened. The people of Lakeland were gone, vanished into thin air. He knew that if he drove to Tampa or Clearwater, he wouldn’t find anyone there, either. Darren didn’t want to think about who or what could have caused everyone to disappear, because that was heady, fire and brimstone stuff, well beyond his pay grade.
The gravity of the emptiness hit him in waves throughout the morning, cresting over him when he unthinkingly wandered up old Mrs. Starmer’s steps to check on her, as he’d faithfully done every day for nearly seven years. Old Mrs. Starmer was gone. Everyone was gone. He needed to get moving, too.
Sunday morning, which radiated thick and hot, made him think about air conditioning. The humidity got him thinking about there being no more meteorologists to tell him if a thunderstorm was coming. What would happen come hurricane season if another Andrew or Katrina came barreling undetected at the sunshine state?
A balding, 36-year-old microchip designer for a Tampa-based semiconductor company, Darren was a modern techie who knew a few things about the old-world power grid. Indoor climate control was a luxury that would long be forgotten in the next 24 to 48 hours once the unmanned power grid began to fail. In Florida, air conditioning was a necessity.
So Darren decided to take a vacation.
Eschewing his Range Rover for his more practical Prius, he packed the bare necessities into his trunk, topped off the gas tank at a still-functioning gas and travel center near the edge of town, and drove east on I-4.
Shortly after 11 AM, he exited the highway west of Orlando and steered the Prius between two ivory arches, past a gargantuan, smiling dolphin that loomed over the commercial road like a gaudy sentry. The booths at the security gate stood empty of rent-a-cops. There wasn’t even a talking moose to warn him, Sorry kids, Florida Coasters is closed because the world is gone. Yuk-yuk-yuk.
A one-day ticket to Florida Coasters theme park cost $107. Their luxury resort hotels, playgrounds of the wealthy, ran $300 per night. The flagship resort, the Bay Palace, ran a hefty $450 per night for a standard room. The Bay Palace was set upon the shores of a man-made lake, offering a spectacular view of the theme park from across the water. Darren knew this because television ads for the resort ran incessantly. Or at least, the ads had run until yesterday.
He parked the Prius in the concierge lot, mere steps from the Bay Palace entrance. The lot, three-quarters full, housed a myriad of vacationing vehicles with out-of-state plates that gave the false impression of the resort being near capacity, as if theme park commercialism was alive and well. The main resort building, adorned in aquatic blues and greens and towering seven stories above the parking lot, was where the check-in desk was located. Victorian and gabled, Bay Palace branched off into six satellite buildings, four bordering a lush garden walkway featuring three swimming pools. The last two were set against the water, across from which stood the theme park.
The theme park and resort had its own emergency backup power. Darren guessed the additional power would buy him three or four days of air conditioned comfort. That gave him time to decide where he was going to live and how he was going to survive. Besides, the idea of sneaking in to the luxury resort for a free vacation thrilled him.
As he entered Bay Palace, cool, climate-controlled air met him like an arctic wall. No wonder Florida Coasters reported a loss during their last fiscal quarter. I’ll have to ratchet down the cooling system to the main building, or there won’t be any power left by Tuesday. A large fountain with leaping dolphins bubbled and gurgled.
Circling behind the winding laminate check-in desk, he discovered the central reservations computer, and after three minutes he figured out how to program the key cards that provided entry to the hotel rooms. He chose a top floor concierge suite overlooking the water—suggested retail price $795 per night, according to the computer.
A glass-encased resort-grounds map next to the fountain directed him to the maintenance room at the end of the west wing, and there he turned off the fountain, set the main building’s air temperature to a conservative 80 degrees, and shut down the power to all five satellite buildings, save for the building he reserved.
The noon sun beat down upon him, reducing his shadow to a tiny, black pool beneath his feet. He walked past the deserted pool area. Folding chairs sat lined along the pools. Many of the chairs were covered by beach towels that dripped rain water from early morning thunderstorms. From the center pool came the roar of a waterfall slide, and Darren was torn between his desire to curl up in his air-conditioned suite or to dive into the blue waters. A brigand’s dream booty of smart phones, wallets, and car keys were left unguarded on round tables between the chairs.
A shiver ran down his back. The resort guests had been here, vacationing by the pool with their families when they—
> What? Died? Disappeared? Were they beamed into space by Scotty of the Starship Enterprise?
Movement caught the corner of his eye. He looked toward the resort building fronting the pool, where a beach towel, suspended over the rail of a third floor balcony, rippled ghost-like in the wind. Palm fronds whispered, as a breeze played through the flora. A disquieting feeling that he was being watched settled over him.
He stood watching the resort for a minute, feeling the harsh sun burning his forehead. A gust of wind broke the beach towel free of the rail. As his eyes followed the towel floating down to the concrete pool deck, he saw a shadow pass across the glass of a fourth floor window. When his eyes darted to the fourth floor, he saw the shadow of a potted palm cast against the window, like grasping claws.
Calm down. You’re not going to let your imagination get the best of you in the Most Awesome Resort in the World, are you?
Darren spent the afternoon sleeping on a round, king-size bed featuring…as advertised…the most comfortable mattress he’d ever experienced. For dinner he grabbed two ready-made turkey sandwiches on wheat from the main building’s food court refrigerator, choosing to consume dinner on the pool deck where the westering sun drifted behind the resort buildings. It was never cool in Florida during May, but as Darren relaxed in the shade with a steady breeze rippling the pool water, the temperature felt pleasant.
He thought about the monorail, which was parked on its tracks outside the top floor of the Bay Palace like a sleeping serpent. He smiled to himself, imagining the keys still within the ignition—
Do monorails have ignitions?
—and what his buddies at work would think if they could see him behind the wheel, speeding around and around the track like he was in control of one of those electric toy race car loops. And maybe he would bring the monorail to a stop outside of Florida Coasters theme park and spend the evening enjoying roller coasters and flume rides. Now for a limited time only or until the power goes out: free admission to Florida Coasters. No lines, no waiting.