by Tom Upton
“What’s that?”
“We haven’t seen any dead people, either,” she said. “Shouldn’t there be dead people?”
She was right-- absolutely right. There ought to be dead people, at least some. If not dead people, dead something: dogs, cats, birds… anything. But all we had seen was property-- homes, businesses, vehicles-- all having been abandoned in a mad rush to avoid-- what? What kind of disaster leaves nothing dead in its wake? It seemed like a curious omission, all right. People get killed, if not from the disaster itself, during the mindless, selfish scramble to flee danger: people trampled to death while trying to escape a burning building. Any time you have thousands of people, each looking out for number one in a life-and-death struggle, you’re bound to have some killed, either accidently or intentionally, by somebody who wants nothing more than to survive, and if you, another innocence human being who also wants nothing more than to survive, happens to get in the way-- oh, well, sorry Charlie, it’s either you or me, and guess what, by the way, I have a gun…so out of your car, jerk-face, mine broke down. Don’t want to go? Let me help you. Bang! Bang!… When everyone is in danger, nobody is harmless.
“It does seem strange,” I finally agreed. “Listen, forget about the firehouse. Take a right up here, and head downtown.” Downtown, I reasoned, was the area that would have had the densest concentration of people. That was where we really ought to see something, gather some clues as to what had occurred.
Rather than taking the expressway into downtown, we stayed on a main street-- the longest street in the city-- which headed straight into downtown and gave us a better view of the desolation along the way. We saw more abandoned cars and trucks, more deserted buildings and businesses, but not a single person, living or dead. The entire ride was eerily remindful of showing up two hours after some massive blast of a party had ended: we saw the mess left behind, but none of the partygoers.
As we approached downtown, I could see ahead in the distance already, even under the twilit sky, that something didn’t look right. Although I’d gone into downtown this way many times before, it suddenly seemed that we weren’t going the right way. I couldn’t put my finger on what was wrong; whatever it was was so vastly wrong that it eluded my senses. I had to check and recheck landmarks we passed-- an old church and schoolhouse, a small park where an ancient army tank was made into a monument-- to assure myself that, despite the way it looked, we were indeed going the right way. But it wasn’t anything nearby that was amiss, but something ahead down the street. The darkness seemed to dip too low, to hover too near the ground in the distance, as though the dark particles in the upper atmosphere were reaching down and blocking out the horizon, the horizon that should have been jagged with the forms of modern high-rises, most of which were constructed of aluminum and glass and on sunny days would sparkle like gems. The downtown area was not large-- not like Chicago, or New York, or even Cleveland-- but it was not small either. Most of the structures were fairly new, built in the last thirty years, and had a modernistic look to them. The skyline of downtown inspired the city’s motto: the city of the future. But now the skyline, which should have been visible, seemed to be cloaked in darkness that appeared to be drifting down from the sky above. I wasn’t sure whether this was an optical illusion or what. I knew that on some dreary days, the clouds could hang so low that the upper floors of some of the taller skyscrapers seemed to be missing, but this was different. The darkness appeared to be so low that it spilled onto the ground, onto the very street on which we now drove. When we were a couple blocks from the edge of downtown, the problem-- fantastic as it seemed-- became apparent.
“Travis…” Eliza murmured. Her eyes were focused on some point down the street.
“Maybe you better slow down,” I suggested. She’d been driving at thirty miles an hour, slowing only now and again to avoid a discarded vehicle. She dropped down to a crawl as we neared the optical illusion that wasn’t an optical illusion.
We could clearly see now that downtown simply wasn’t there. The street ahead ended, and beyond there was a vast sea of nothingness.
Eliza stopped the four by four about a hundred feet from where the street abruptly dropped off. We both climbed out and wandered up to the edge and gazed down into the crater. It was impossible to guess how deep the crater was; its lowest recesses were pitched in dark shadows. But it was pretty deep, all right, as well as being wide and long enough to occupy the entire area on which downtown once stood.
“You think it was a meteor?” Eliza asked, her arms crossed in front of her, hugging herself against the chilly wind.
“I don’t think so,” I said. No, it couldn’t have been a meteor. Everything seemed too neat around the crater; if it had been a meteor, there should have been tons of debris scattered around the crater. The structures around the crater, mostly factories and warehouses, didn’t seem damaged at all. These buildings would have been severely damaged, if not leveled, from the mere shockwave of a huge meteor strike so close.
I squatted down and examined the end of the street. The blacktop ended at a jagged edge. Below the blacktop, there was old cobblestone street, paved over long ago, along with the metal tracks on which streetcars once rode, when streetcars were the primary public transportation. I reached down and felt the end of one of the forgotten metal tracks. It was cold and smooth and unbent. The ends of the cobblestones, too, were smooth, not broken, not even chipped. Again, all very neat, too neat, as though something unimaginably sharp had sliced through the street. Still squatting, I gazed across the chasm and wondered what could have caused this type of damage. The wind gusted up and rattled a nearby street sign. I thought I could hear something distant on the wind, the sound of tittering interrupted by clicking and clacking. Titter click click titter clack click titter clack clack… whatever it was, was so far away I could barely hear it. For a panicky second I thought maybe the sound was coming from the deepest hollow of my own mind-- maybe a coded message from the artifact, which was trying to tell me something. As I listen to the sound, the air seemed to become colder, goose bumps rose on my arms, and I had a sick dropping feeling in the pit of my stomach. When I stood erect, I felt somewhat light-headed. My legs felt weak and heavy. I noticed, then, that my heart was racing as though I was having a major adrenalin rush. Although I’d never in my life had one, I was pretty sure what I was now experiencing was an anxiety attack.
“We have to get out of here,” I said, my breath shortening.
Eliza looked at me. She seemed puzzled. Maybe I had sounded too emphatic. The danger here was gone, the damage done long ago. So why the panic?
“What’s the deal, Travis?” she asked. “You’re looking a little flushed. The headaches coming back?”
“Uh-uh. We just need to go-- now.”
She followed me back to the four by four. Once she had it started she executed a three-point turn, and we were heading away from the crater.
She asked if I still wanted to look for a fire station, and I told her to forget about that for now-- if we happen to run across one, fine, we’ll stop. I gave her directions to get to Norman’s, which was the sporting goods store where I’d bought all my weight lifting equipment. She shot me a funny look, but didn’t say anything, just guided the four by four down the silent street.
Norman’s was fairly big for an independently owned store, carrying just about everything the huge chain stores sold. It was no big surprise that we found a parking space on the street right in front of the doors. It was one of the stores that were locked down pretty tight, as though Norman had been fairly certain that the end of the world hadn’t arrived and that someday he would return to reopen. Security gates stretched across the large front windows of the store, and the glass front door bore stickers that warned of electric alarms. A security grating hung inside the front door, behind the thick safety glass inside which was webbed with wire mesh.
We got out of the four by four and walked up to the front door. I studied the door, trying to
figure out the easiest way to get inside. Having always been a law-abiding person, breaking and entering wasn’t something with which I was familiar. I had only the vaguest notions of how to proceed. For her part, Eliza considered the unlikely possibility that though the place looked locked down like a fortress, maybe somebody actually forget to lock the door. She reached out and tried to push the door open, but it wouldn’t budge.
“No such luck,” she muttered.
“You have any tools,” I suggested. “Maybe a tire iron.”
She retrieved the tire iron from the four by four, and while she stood at a safe distance, I swung it at the front door. The safety glass shattered into about a thousand pieces, most of which remained held in place by the network of wiring inside the glass. Only a few shards of glass flew from the pane, and landed at my feet on the floor of the lobby. I hit the glass again and again, each time breaking out more small fragments of glass, and bending the wire that ran throughout the pane. Finally I knocked out enough fragments of glass and bent the wiring aside enough to make an opening in the pane, near the door lock. I tried to reach inside, to turn the lock lever I knew would be there (it was in the city codes that all retail establishments had to have entry locks that opened with a lever-- not a key-- on the inside, in case of a fire), but my hand was too big to fit under the security grating that hung on the inside of the door.
Eliza came to the rescue with her small hands and tiny wrists. She managed to squeeze her hand past the grating and turn the lever and unlock the door. When she pulled her hand back, I could see her wrist was had three large scratches from having rubbed against the edge of the remaining glass or the sharp ends of broken wiring. It looked as though some small animal had clawed her. I thought she would complain, or make some sarcastic remark about the injury, but instead she kept her mouth shut, and followed me into the dark store.
“Exactly, what are we doing here, Trav?” she asked.
“We need to pick up a few things,” I explain. “First off, why don’t you find us snowsuits? Get one for Doc, too.”
“Snow suits?”
“Sure, you have any idea how cold it’s going to get at night? It’s about forty degrees out now. Imagine what it’s going to be like tonight. Probably five to ten degrees, maybe colder. We need something warm in case we have to go outside for some reason.”
Dim light from outside filtered through the windows, so that the very front of the store was somewhat illuminated, not much, but enough for you to see and not trip over something and break your neck. The deeper you went into the store, though, the darker it became, until you reached the back wall, which was lost in blackness.
I walked over to one of the checkout counters, to the small racks filled with impulse items: batteries, key rings, and baseball cards… all kinds of candy bars so hard by now that they probably would crack your teeth if you tried to eat them. On one of the racks I found some disposable flashlights, square plastic things whose batteries you never had to change; you just used it until its battery died and then tossed to whole thing in the garbage and bought a new one. I had to strip the plastic clamshell packaging from three or four of them before I found one whose battery still had a charge. I went through a couple more before I found another working flashlight for Eliza. I handed her the flashlight, and pointed her toward the sales section, where what was left of the store’s supply of winter sportswear was hanging on racks marked discount and reduced. The world had paused on a mid-April day, so most of the sportswear racks were filled with lightweight clothing: tennis and golf shirts, skimpy and slippery-looking running clothes…
“Is there anything else you’ll be needing?” Eliza asked, walking away from me. “Some skis or curling gear? Or perhaps some swampers?”
“The snowsuits will be fine. But if you happen to spot some lanterns and rechargeable batteries, grab them.”
“What about a first-aid kit,” she suggested. I couldn’t see her now; she was lost among the sportswear racks. “I think I’m bleeding to death, and apparently the artifact is in no condition to heal me.”
“Yeah, grab a first-aid kit,” I said.
“Ohmigod,” she cried.
“What’s wrong?”
“I just found an outfit that is so ugly…”
“Eliza, try to remember why we’re here,” I advised her, and then headed toward the back of the store.
The beam from the flashlight stabbed into the darkness before me, sweeping across baseball bats and mitts, and then golf clubs and bags. I crossed over a couple aisles, and found the fishing section, where fishing rods were set in holders and angled over the aisle and expensive reels were locked in a glass case and all kinds of hooks and lures in little plastic cases lined the shelves. Further down the aisle, deeper into the store, I passed racks from which hung the outerwear donned by hunters: camouflage t-shirts, camouflage jumpsuits, camouflage jackets (insulated and un-insulated), camouflage vests, camouflage ponchos. As the light swept over the endless lines of clothing designed to make humans invisible to animals, it occurred to me what a gimmick the clothing was; no matter how well camouflaged you are, I realized, animals-- whatever you’re hunting-- will still know you’re there because they’ll smell you. They’ll smell you long before you’re in a position for them not to see you or your camo gear. You might just as well go hunting in a day-glo pink zuit suit. The true function of camouflage clothing is to make the hunters look cool and feel macho, and if they feel macho enough, they tend to forget what they’re actually doing: killing animals that are too stupid to recognize a rifle and realize it can kill them…. I finally reached the counter at the rear of the store. Behind the counter, the wall was lined with various rifles, from innocent-looking .22 caliber target rifles to serious-looking hunting rifles with scopes so large you’d swear you’d be able to spot and shoot off a rabbit’s left testicle from ten miles away. The flashlight beam danced across the guns, creating sinister shadows on the paneled wall. I found the rack that held the shotguns, which looked large and scary with their thick barrels. I jumped over the counter and examined them more closely. I found a twenty-gauge double-barrel Mossberg whose appearance was so frightening you could probably kill a goose by holding the gun up and letting the goose get a good look at it. I pulled the Mossberg off the rack. It was fairly hefty and had a pistol grip handle. I set the shotgun on the counter, and started to search the shelves under the gun racks, where boxes of ammunition were stacked and separated according to caliber. When I found the boxes of twenty-gauge buckshot, I grabbed stacks of boxes and piled them onto the counter. I jumped back over the counter, and after a brief search, returned with a nylon duffle bag, into which I dumped the boxes of ammunition. I zipped the duffle bag shut, and threw it over my shoulder. I grabbed the Mossberg with my free hand, and headed for the front of the store.
Eliza was waiting for me out front of the store. She’d already loaded the snowsuits and lanterns into the four by four. When she spotted the shotgun I was carrying, she gave me a look that was a combination of confusion, alarm, and disgust. The look passed quickly, and she chose for the moment to ignore the presence of the weapon.
As we headed home, Eliza started shooting me side-glances as I reached into the duffel bag, which I’d dropped on the floor between my feet, and grabbed a box of shells and began loading the Mossberg.
“First question,” she said finally. “No, wait… let me jump to the third question. You actually know how to work one of those-- things?”
“My father took me hunting last year,” I said. “It was one of those pity things. You know, because he’s always out of town, so when he is in town, and has some free time, he feels obligated to want to do things with me.”
“So you went hunting?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
“Hunting?” She still couldn’t believe it.
“Yup.”
“You went out in the woods or something, and shot tiny defenseless animals?”
“No,” I said simply.
/> Eliza was clearly confounded now, barely able to keep her eye on the road.
“No?”
“The closest I came to shooting anything was when I nearly shot my foot by accident,” I explained. “My father-- he took a shot at something, and missed. He swore it was a deer. He swore he saw the antlers and everything, but I think it was actually a tree branch. That was the highlight of our outing-- how the old man nearly shot a buck. No matter what I said, I couldn’t convince him it was just a tree branch he must have seen, not antlers. I even showed him on the tree trunk where the buckshot ripped through the bark. Anyway, we never got a chance to shoot at anything else. We had to cut the trip short when I lost my boots.”
“How did you lose your boots?” she asked, smirking.
“Well, we were walking along this river, and we came to this spot where the path was broken by water coming off the river. It wasn’t nearly big enough to be called a branch, but just a small area of water that seemed to spill off onto the ground. The water didn’t seem deep-- I could see the gray muck at the bottom. But when I tried to step through it, I found myself waist deep in water. My feet were stuck fast in the mud at the bottom, and I started sinking. It was like there was quicksand at the bottom. I couldn’t even move my legs. The only way I could get out was to slip out of the boots, so that was that. You know, it was one of those really sucky father-son experiences-- I’ve had quite a few of them,” I said, not wanting to talk about it anymore.
“So what’s with the gun?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. Seemed like a good idea to grab it. Just in case we run into trouble.”
“Run into trouble. Have you seen anything that looks like trouble?”
“No,” I said, “but that’s exactly the time you should expect trouble.”
Eliza just rolled her eyes, as though she thought I was nuts. And maybe she wasn’t wrong. After all, what could we possibly run into that we would need a big honking gun to protect ourselves? The danger-- whatever it had been-- had clearly passed long ago. I found myself feeling foolish as I sat there, looking down at the now fully loaded Mossberg, wondering what had been going through my mind. There had been dozens of other things I could have grabbed from the store, things that were a million times more practical. But something compelled me to grab the gun. It hadn’t been like a little voice whispering in my ear-- take a gun; you might need it… no, it hadn’t been that direct, but seemed to be something almost instinctual, something that for the moment seemed totally rational. Maybe it was because we weren’t seeing any other human beings. There is comfort in the presence of other people-- comfort and the promise that everything will be all right-- and without that comfort, the world seemed like a very lonely and dangerous place. Or maybe it had been the sound I’d heard as the wind whistled over the crater that had been downtown-- that creepy clacking sound that might have just been my imagination. Or maybe it had been the artifact trying to contact me through throes of fear, trying to send a subconscious message or warning in the form of clicks, clacks, and cackles. I concentrated hard now to contact the artifact, thinking, Come on, old buddy, I know you’ve had a shock-- I know something awful has happened to you-- but I need you now. We need to know what happened here. We can’t fix anything without your help. Where did everything go wrong, anyway? It was all supposed to be so simple. Put everything back where it belonged, and then hightail it for home. So what went wrong? What has you so scared? What happened to our planet, to our people? If you can, give us a sign, a clue, a vague hint, because we are all alone in the dark, and our species doesn’t thrive under those conditions, our species tends to fall apart. Do you understand what it means to “go goofy?” That’s what human beings do under certain situations. They go goofy, even the sanest of human beings. You isolate them from other people, they go goofy. You take away their sunlight, they go goofy. Even if we on earth have a long string of dreary days, you can see the crankiness or depression in people, in the way they act. If you block out the sunshine indefinitely-- I’m telling you-- it’s a one-way ticket to Goofyville. Look at me. A fairly simple and rational human being, sitting here now with a huge honking gun just in case I have to shoot something that may not even be here…. I waited for some response, but none was forthcoming-- not a feeling, an idea, or an inkling. Who would build such a thing as you, anyway? I wondered. A spaceship, a station, whatever you are-- basically, a machine-- who would build a machine that can become afraid, so afraid as to be nonfunctional? Where is the logic in that? Machines with feelings. And does that mean you refuse to operate when you’re in a bad mood? Or depressed? “Oh, boo-hoo, woe is me, how can you possibly expect me to comply with your orders.” Is that the way you think? How did the people who built you ever get you off the ground, then? It’s time to buck up, bucko; it’s the bottom of the ninth and things aren’t looking to good…. I waited, but still received no response, not the slightest reaction to all the heartfelt information I was shooting toward it. Yet I knew it was there, could feel its presence as it huddle shivering in some shadowy nook of my mind.