by Daniel Price
—
Two of the nurses failed to show up for their Saturday shift. From the moment she threw on her peach-colored coat, Amanda became a whirlwind of activity, spinning between the office’s endless rooms and needs. Along the way, she picked up morsels of chatter about the blackout. Her fingers curled with tension when one of the patients mentioned something about a crashed Navy jet.
Tommy Berber eyed Amanda balefully from the far end of the hall. He was a barrel-chested biker with a bandana skullcap and a bushy gray beard that hung in knotted vines. Mechanical beeps emanated from inside the chamber.
“Yeah, hi. Remember us?”
She held up a bag of clear liquid. “I’m here. I have it.”
Berber followed her into the treatment room, where his son Henry lounged in a plush recliner. The sweet and skinny twelve-year-old had already lost his left arm to osteosarcoma. Soon he’d lose his hair, his lunches, and any last semblance of a normal adolescence. But his long-term chances of survival were mercifully good. Out of all today’s patients, Henry was the luckiest of the unlucky.
Amanda shined him a sunny smile, then adjusted his chemo dispenser until it stopped beeping.
Henry grinned weakly. “Thanks. That was getting old.”
“Twenty minutes!” Berber yelled. “We’ve been waiting twenty minutes!”
Amanda nodded. “I know. I’m sorry. We’re short staffed today and our computers are down.”
“Is that supposed to make me feel better about this place?”
“Dad . . .”
Amanda replaced the empty bag of doxorubicin with a fresh dose of cisplatin. She reprogrammed the machine, then tapped the plastic tube until the liquid started to drip.
“You’re going to feel a hot sensation,” she warned Henry.
“Right. I remember.”
She watched the liquid flow into his arm. “All right, my darling. You’re all set. Anything you need?”
“Yeah, a sedative. For Dad.”
“Oh, he’s just mad because you and I are eloping. We’re still on for that, right?”
Henry laughed. “Absolutely. Did you tell Dr. Ambridge yet?”
“Nah. I’ll call him from the road.”
The moment she left the room, she heard Berber’s heavy footsteps trail her down the hall. He had to wait for a shrieking emergency vehicle to pass the building before he could speak.
“That can’t happen again, nurse. You hear me?”
Amanda turned around to face him. “Mr. Berber—”
“I don’t want his chances going down just ’cause you people don’t have your shit together. You get him his doses on time. You understand?”
She understood all too well. In her two years as a cancer nurse, Amanda had seen every breed of desolate parent—the weepers, the shouters, the sputtering deniers. The tough dads were always the worst. They wore their helplessness like a coat of flames, scorching everything around them.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Berber. I’ll do better next time.”
“You’re just giving me lip service now.”
“I am,” she admitted. “Ask me why.”
“Why?”
“Because I can’t fix computers and I can’t conjure nurses out of thin air. All I can do is apologize and remind you that your beautiful son has a seventy-eight percent chance of outliving the both of us. Being twenty minutes late with the cisplatin won’t affect those odds. Not one bit.”
“You don’t know that for—”
“Not one bit,” she repeated. “You understand me?”
Berber recoiled like she’d just sprouted horns. Amanda had seen that look countless times before on others. You can be a little intense, Derek had told her. You may not see it, but it’s there.
Soon the biker’s heavy brow unfurled. He vented a sigh. “Got any kids of your own?”
Amanda’s face remained impassive as a cold gust of grief blew through her. She once had a son for seventeen minutes. Those memories stayed locked in the cellar, along with her father’s last days and the incident on the Massachusetts Turnpike.
“No,” she said.
Berber eyed her golden cross necklace. “But you do have faith.”
“Yes.”
“How do you reconcile? How do you spend all day with sick, dying kids and then thank the God who lets it happen?”
Still fumbling in dark memories, Amanda lost hold of her usual response. I thank Him for the ones who live. I thank Him for the ones who have loving parents like you.
All she could do now was roll her shoulders in a feeble shrug. “I don’t know, Mr. Berber. I guess I’d rather live in a world where bad things happen for some reason than no reason.”
Her answer clearly didn’t comfort him. He scratched his hairy cheek and threw a tense glare over his shoulder.
“I should get back to him.”
“Okay.”
Amanda heard a high young giggle. She turned her gaze to the reception desk, where Derek charmed the fetching young office clerk with his witty repartee. The moment he caught Amanda’s gaze, his smile went flat. His eyes narrowed in a momentary flinch that filled her with unbearable dread and loathing.
Her fingers twitched in panic as the chorus in her head told her to run. Run. Run from the husband. Run from the house. Run from the sister and the sick little children. Don’t even pack. Just pick a direction. Run.
The overhead lights flickered. A second, then a third chemo dispenser began to beep. Another wave of emergency vehicles screamed their way down the street. Things were falling apart at record speed. To Amanda, this seemed a perfect time to go outside for a smoke.
—
Three hours after her sister rolled out of bed, a half-dazed Hannah finally joined the world in egress. Her Salvador Dalí wall clock—now warped in more ways than one—told her it was 9:41. In actuality, it was nine and a half minutes short. But to Hannah and millions of other battery-powered-clock owners, 9:41 was the new 9:50. There was little reason to think otherwise.
She woke up in a foul mood carried over from last night. An hour after her spat with Amanda, she came home to an unscheduled hootenanny in the apartment. Her two flighty roommates had ditched her premiere in favor of barhopping and eventually stumbled back with a trio of frat boys from the alma mater.
Knowing she’d never sleep in this racket, the actress stayed up with them, brandishing a forced grin as she nursed a Sprite and suffered their drunken prattle. Sometime after the group blacked out, and shortly before the world did, Hannah retreated into her room and drifted off into uneasy sleep.
Now the apartment smelled like stale beer, and every device seemed nonfunctional. Hannah showered, dressed, and gathered her belongings. She had no intention of going back there before tonight’s show. She’d just go to the office and enjoy the Saturday solitude. Maybe she’d update her acting résumé. Maybe she’d send some e-mails. Maybe she’d scan the local apartment listings. Or maybe not so local. In her mind, all the recent annoyances gathered into a clump, like tea leaves. They predicted a bleak future unless she made changes. Maybe it was finally time to consider Los Angeles.
By the time Hannah stepped outside, the sky had turned from misty gray to fluorescent white, a disturbingly uniform glaze that looked less like a mist sheet and more like an absence. To Hannah, it seemed as if God, Buddha, Xenu, whoever, simply forgot to load the next slide in the great heavenly projector. It didn’t help her nerves that the temperature was ten degrees cooler than it should have been for Southern California in July.
She wasn’t alone in her anxiety. As she walked down Commercial Street, an old man urgently fiddled with his radio, testing its many squeals and crackles. A teenage girl shook her cell phone as if it had overdosed on downers. A middle-aged woman tried to control her German shepherd, which hysterically barked at everything and nothing. A young jogger la
unched a futile cry at a fast-moving police car. “Hey. HEY! What’s going on?”
Nearly three dozen people congregated at the train stop. Hannah opted to walk to work. Two lithe young women broke away from the crowd and nervously followed her.
“Excuse me,” said one. “Can you help us? We’re not from around here.”
That much was obvious. One of the pair was dressed as Catwoman, whip and all. The other was decked out in a blond wig and white-leather corset ensemble, clearly some other super-antiheroine that Hannah didn’t recognize. She did, however, know exactly where both women were going. All veteran San Diegans were familiar with Comic-Con, the annual gathering of sci-fi, fantasy, and funny-book enthusiasts that occurred downtown for four days in July. No doubt these gals were shooting for an easy surplus of leers from the geek contingent.
Hannah smirked at them. “Let me guess. You’re trying to get to the convention center.”
Catwoman snickered. “Yeah. Bingo.”
“I don’t know what’s going on with the train. If you think your heels will hold up, you’re probably better off walking. I’m going that way. You can come with me.”
“Oh thank you,” said the fake blonde, rubbing her arms for warmth. “The power went out at the place we’re staying. Our phones don’t work. We’re totally screwed up right now.”
After twelve blocks and twenty minutes, Hannah regretted her decision to serve as vanguard for the vixens. The women were maddeningly slow in their clacking heels, and their worried chatter made her increasingly tense. Not that they lacked cause for concern. As they moved closer downtown, they could see thick plumes of smoke rising up above the buildings. Soon Hannah spotted the edge of a vast rubbernecker pool, hundreds of people gathered at the base of some tumult.
They rounded the corner, turning north onto 13th Street. Just one block away, beyond all the cordons and emergency lights, stood the broken tail cone of a jumbo jet. The buildings around it were devastated with ash and debris. One apartment complex had crumbled to rubble.
Hannah covered her mouth. “Oh my God.”
More than a hundred thousand planes, jets, and helicopters had been up in the air seven hours ago, when all the world’s engines fell still. A third of them plummeted into water. Another third hit the hard empty spaces between human life. The final third just hit hard. San Diego had suffered twenty-two crashes within its borders.
Hannah gaped at the tall gray clock tower of the 12th & Imperial Transit Center, just a hundred yards away. It was a local landmark, one she’d passed a thousand times on her way to work. Now it had been de-clocked, decapitated. Every window on the south side of the building was shattered, with burn marks all over the frame.
All around her, people fretfully chattered. A stringy blond teenager brandished a transistor radio, declaring to anyone willing to listen that he’d heard voices through the static. People in other cities were talking about the same things.
“This is happening all over,” he insisted. “Everywhere!”
Agitated bystanders shouted at him. Hannah took an anxious step back. Perhaps it was time to stop playing Sherpa for the Comic-Con chicks and move on to a much nicer elsewhere.
“Keep your head,” said a cool voice from behind.
She turned around and lost her breath at the sight of the pale and handsome stranger, as tall as any she’d ever seen. He wore a sharp gray business suit without a tie and sported deep blue eyes that nearly blinded her with their intensity. Most striking of all was his neatly trimmed hair, which was chalk-white and achingly familiar. Hannah blinked at him in stupor.
“You remember me, child?” he calmly inquired.
She shook her head, even as old recollections came flooding back. She was just a little girl when she first laid eyes on the white-haired man. Seventeen years and the guy hadn’t aged a day. Hannah was almost certain he was wearing the same suit.
“I don’t . . . know you.”
“Deny it if you will,” he replied. “It doesn’t matter. We saved your life once. Now I come to do it again.”
Seeing the man through adult eyes triggered a disturbing new reaction in Hannah. She found him eerily scintillating now, like a housewife’s vampire fantasy. God only knew what he could get her to do without saying a nice word. Fortunately, she couldn’t sense a trace of desire in him. For all she knew, she stood as the same chubby-faced toddler in his eyes.
“W-what do you want with me?” she asked.
He spoke with a slight accent that she couldn’t recognize. She spun her Wheel of Uninformed Guessing. The needle stopped at “Dutch.”
“The answer would require more time than we have. All that matters now is that you—”
A sudden stillness gripped the area. All the car engines stopped. All the lights on the emergency vehicles went dark and still. All electrics great and small, all over the world, once again fell dead. This time, the power wasn’t coming back.
Panicked voices rose all around her. Bystanders scurried and stumbled in all directions. A shoving match broke out between two teenage boys.
As Hannah watched the chaos, she felt cool fingers on her skin. Something smooth and hard snapped together on her forearm with a loud clack. She jerked her hand away. Her right wrist now sported a shiny metal bracelet, a half inch wide and utterly featureless. It felt cheap and dainty like plastic, but it gleamed in the light like silver.
“What did you do?” she said. “What is this thing?”
The white-haired man grabbed her other wrist, scowling at her with frigid disdain. There was nothing appealing about him now.
“This is the end. For them, not for you. Now listen—”
“Get away from me!”
He squeezed her wrist with cool, strong fingers. Pain shot up her arm like current.
“Don’t test me, child. I’ve had a trying day. It pains me to see all my plans hinge on weak and simple creatures like yourself, but it seems we both have little choice in the matter. If you wish to endure, you’ll keep your head. Stay where you arrive. Help will come.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You’ll be joined with your sister soon enough.”
“Wait, what—”
The white-haired man pressed two fingers to her mouth. “I’ve saved your life twice now. Don’t make me regret my decision. The strings favor you, but there are others who could just as easily serve our purpose.”
He walked away, leaving Hannah shell-shocked, speechless. A shrill scream in the distance briefly turned her around. By the time she looked back, the stranger was gone.
Hannah scrambled to process all the new and urgent developments around her. Her left wrist throbbed. Her right wrist glimmered. The temperature had dropped low enough to turn all breath to mist. The crowd fell into chaotic distress. They screamed and shouted and scrambled into one another like bumper cars.
This is the end. For them, not for you.
A booming gunshot emerged from the police cordon. More screams. A large man grabbed at the girl dressed like Catwoman, and an even larger man knocked him down. Another gunshot.
Hannah felt a strong vibration at the base of her hand. She gaped with insanity at her new silver bracelet. Mere seconds ago, it was a fat and dangly bauble, wide enough for a bicep. Now it rested snugly on the thinnest part of her wrist. Whereas once it appeared featureless, now it was split down the middle by a bright blue band of light.
She glanced up to discover the biggest adjustment of all. A curved plane of silky white light loomed all around her, closing two feet above her head. The outside world took on a yellow gossamer haze.
Hannah tried to relocate but ended up walking into the wall of her new surroundings. The light was warm, steel hard, and utterly immobile. She was stuck here, just a hair north of Commercial Street, in an eight-foot egg of light. That was enough to send her mind into blue-screen fail
ure. She was in full rejection of the events onstage. Suspension of suspension of disbelief.
Nearby strangers caught sight of Hannah’s odd new enclosure. A befuddled young man rapped his knuckles against her light shell.
“What is this?” he asked, much louder than necessary. She could hear him just fine.
“I don’t know . . .”
“How are you doing this?”
“I’m not.”
“What’s happening?!”
Not this, she thought. This isn’t happening at all.
The Great Hannah Given: mental ward alumnus, habitual wrong person, and unreliable narrator. Ergo, no eggo. No crowd. No crash. No white-haired man.
Everyone froze as a thunderous noise seized the area—a great icy crackle, like a glacier breaking in half. Bystanders threw their frantic gazes left and right in search of the clamor until, one by one, they looked up. The eerie sound was coming from above. It was getting louder.
More screams from afar. More gunshots. As the crackling din grew to deafening levels, the sky above turned cold and bright.
A teary young redhead scratched at the wall of Hannah’s light cage. The actress could see lines of frost on the tip of the woman’s nose, though the air inside the enclosure was as warm as July.
“Please!” the stranger screeched. “Help me!”
“I can’t! I don’t know how!”
Suddenly the tallest buildings in the skyline began to splinter at the highest levels, as if they were being crushed from above. Metal curled. Stone cracked. Windows exploded. With a grinding howl, an ailing structure gave out at the middle, causing all floors above to topple and fall in one great piece. Hannah pressed her hands against the light as she watched the other buildings crumble. The sky wasn’t just getting brighter and louder. It was getting closer. The sky was coming down.
Shrieks and cries rose from every throat in the mob. There wasn’t an empty square inch around her egg now. More than a dozen people pounded at the wall, weeping and begging.
The skyline was gone. Now the great white sheet descended on the clockless clock tower, cracking the jagged neck of the structure and sending huge chunks of stone flying everywhere. One of them demolished a police car, along with everyone near it.