Insomnia: Paranormal Tales, Science Fiction, & Horror

by Saul Tanpepper

  I had no idea what he meant and so I tried to call him back, but it went straight to voicemail. He probably wasn’t awake yet.

  “Hey Cal, listen,” I said, coughing as hard as my head allowed. My voice sounded hoarse, but I didn’t bother trying to mask it. “I just got your message. Some party last night, eh? I’m going to get cleaned up and come in.” I checked the time on my Rolex. Five-fifty. “Figure on about eight…thirty. No, better make it nine, since I haven’t even been home yet. I’ll see you then, okay?”

  He probably wanted to ask me how my new-tech project was going. To be honest, I wanted to know, too. For some reason I was totally blanking on it right then. I needed the time to refresh my memory.

  But I didn’t move. I told myself I’d just sit there for a few more minutes, then get up and go back to my apartment for a quick shower and some Vicodin for the hangover. But a few minutes passed, then a few more.

  As the sun rose higher behind me, I found myself staring down into the dark canyons of the city. Right below me was Wall Street, but I couldn’t see it because of the steepness of the angle. I wouldn’t have wanted to anyway, given the current state of my stomach. I recalled that there was a balcony somewhere and it made me wonder what would happen if I happened to vomit off of it. Would it freeze, falling eighty-six stories? Vaporize? I didn’t want to find out, and I didn’t think anyone down on the sidewalks below wanted to either.

  I gave the streets further out a casual glance. They were still mostly in shadow. But then my eyes returned to them. There was something distinctly odd about the way they looked.

  I stared for maybe another minute or so, but my mind just couldn’t process what my eyes were seeing. Then it came to me: the traffic wasn’t moving.

  “What the—?”

  Distance has a way of tricking the eye, so I sat there blinking and staring for another a couple more minutes. By then I was positive. None of the cars was moving.

  I wondered if maybe the streets had been closed for repairs. Or maybe there was a movie shoot or they were preparing for a parade or something. But if that was the case, the closure hadn’t just affected one or two blocks. Every street I could see was still. Not a single thing moved.

  I struggled to my feet and made my way over to the south facing windows. I was feeling woozy and had to lean against them not to puke.

  When my head stopped throbbing and my vision cleared, I saw that Wall Street wasn’t moving either.

  Further out, on the East River, a few boats were bobbing out on the water. I could see the swell and the whitecaps. Seagulls wheeled about far below me. But I couldn’t see any ferries. This time of day, the Upper Bay and the river should’ve been packed with them.

  I raced over to the northern-facing windows. Again, nothing moved. But now I could see columns of smoke rising from several places throughout the city. I could even see the orange of the flames in some spots. Something really bad had happened.

  I had been in London when the Twin Towers were hit, had watched it live on TV when they fell. I hadn’t been here, but I knew nonetheless that something a lot like that had happened again.

  I dialed 911.

  The call connected and the phones rang. And rang.

  “Where the hell is everyone?” I shouted at the phone after the tenth or twelfth ring. It didn’t help my hangover, nor did it help my mental state that nobody responded.

  A quick check of the entire restaurant confirmed that I was alone, so I decided to go down to street-level. The elevator took forever to arrive.

  The whole time riding it down, all I could think about was burning jet fuel flowing down the elevator shaft like lava and the building collapsing down on me. But after I’d gone about seventy floors without stopping, it wasn’t the thought of dying in the elevator that frightened me, it was the realization that I was completely alone in this entire building.

  I started to panic and jabbed the stop button, missing it the first few times, which sharpened my fear. A part of me told me I needed to get out, but another part screamed at me not to. I’d die if I left.

  The jangle of the elevator alarm was too much for my pounding head, so I shut it off and exited on the third floor instead.

  I squeezed my way through the doors as soon as they started to open and raced down the hallway looking through glass into offices to see if I could find anyone.

  The nameplates on the doors told me these were doctors’ offices: Oncology, Rheumatology, Obstetrics. They were all dark, the doors all locked.

  A clock in a waiting area read six-twenty. Perhaps it was too early. Even so, I still would’ve expected to see staff coming in to prepare for the day ahead, a maintenance worker maybe, or security. Instead, I was alone.

  “Too early,” I said aloud, trying to convince myself of it. “Or it’s a holiday. That’s what it is.” But I knew it wasn’t. There are no holidays in August.

  The elevator car was still there, waiting for someone to call it, the doors still open. In this entire eighty-six story building, in the ten minutes I’d spent wandering through the hallways, not a single person had called for it. Was it really possible I was all alone in here? How could that be?

  Close your eyes, I heard someone say, a woman. Inside my head. Close your eyes and make a wish.

  I was terrified. I didn’t want to get back on the elevator. I didn’t want to leave the building. But I also didn’t want to stay.

  “I wish this was just another bad dream.”

  But it wasn’t.

  I paced the hallway for at least another fifteen minutes before desperation got the better of me. I found the stairs and went down them instead. By then I was imagining some kind of failure in the elevator shaft, a burning car, a snapped cable plummeting me down into the basement. The images were just too terrifying.

  The fire door clanged closed behind me. I could hear it echoing all the way up the stairwell as I descended the first few steps. The sound of my breathing was loud and harsh in that claustrophobic space. I sucked in a breath and held it and listened.

  Nothing.

  “Hello?”

  The only response I got was my own voice coming back to me.

  The scraping of my shoes seemed to come from some other place, and every couple steps I’d stop and listen, thinking I wasn’t alone in the stairwell, hoping I wasn’t.

  Silence.

  I finally reached the door on the first floor landing.

  Somehow, I knew exactly what I’d find when I walked through it. I knew and yet I didn’t want to know. I told myself that I’d be content to just stand there forever. At least then I could go on believing that the world hadn’t undergone some kind of strange seizure, had some kind of miscarriage or something, aborting everyone from it, all while I was sleeping off my drunk. I wanted to believe that the same old world was still right there on the other side of that door, and that what I’d seen from the windows in Cliff Dwellers had to have been some kind of optical illusion. I’d been more than eighty stories up after all, and the streets had been in shadow. The smoke was just from…I don’t know. Factories? And the flames could be…

  Reflections of the sunrise off of the glass.

  That was it. I had to have been mistaken. Or hallucinating. My brain wasn’t functioning properly. Hell, I was lucky it was operating even at the basal level that it was.

  The whisper came again: Close your eyes and make a wish. I ignored it.

  “Open it, Trask,” I croaked. “Open the goddamn door.”

  The echoes in the stairwell sounded like laughter.

  I couldn’t move.

  “For chrissake,” I said, nearly crying now, “just open the damn thing.”

  I reached over, grabbed the knob, turned it. I pulled the door open.

  I swallowed what little spit my mouth had produced and walked out into that empty, silent world.

  † † †

  The streets were eerily quiet, just the sound of the wind. You don’t realize how loud silence is, the way i
t whooshes between the buildings. When there are a million people around you twenty-four-seven, walking and talking and driving—even just breathing—you don’t notice the silence at all. You can’t hear it. You need people to drown out its deafening roar.

  There were birds everywhere. Pigeons and doves, mostly, but also sparrows and crows, hawks. Hundreds, thousands, of them, as if they were trying to make up for the sudden absence of human beings, as if the space we normally occupied needed to be filled to prevent the world from collapsing in on itself. There were even some mangy-looking ducks waddling down the middle of Wall Street, not a care in the world, automobiles all around them, some of them still running. I don’t know where the ducks came from, Battery Park, maybe. They seemed so out of place here.

  A dog barked somewhere. Another replied somewhere else. It felt surreal. Hell, it was surreal.

  There were a lot of cars plowed into other cars, or into the sides of buildings, or up onto the sidewalks and into signs and light posts. No one was inside them. There were no bodies, no bones or blood. Nothing.

  As I stumbled from block to block a billion possibilities for what happened passed through my brain. It was the Rapture. It was some kind of new Russian weapon that vaporized people. Or China. Or al Qaeda.

  A biological weapon. Radiological. Electrical.

  It was sunspots.

  Alien abduction.

  Flesh-eating bacteria.

  A birthday wish.

  “No!”

  The shout hit me like a blast, making me stagger while it echoed down the urban canyon and faded away.

  It was too quiet. I didn’t hear any radios playing, and that spooked me even more. I went over to one of the cars that was still running and scanned through the channels, but there was nothing, just static and dead air. The stations were still transmitting, but no one was there to program the content.

  As I sat there contemplating this, I realized that I was sitting in a seat where someone had been when they’d disappeared, and it made me hurry out of it real quick, as if whoever was responsible for all this might notice that I was occupying the very same space, like it might somehow target me for disappearance too, as if that particular volume of space in the world was somehow predetermined, marked. I could imagine alien ships hidden in the skies above me, their computers focused on millions of different coordinates, each one corresponding to a different person.

  But something inside me told me there were no aliens. Just as I knew it wasn’t a weapon or sunspots or anything else. I had done this.

  I had closed my eyes and made a wish and this is what happened.

  “That’s crazy talk,” I mumbled.

  Some of the vehicles I passed had caught fire when they crashed, and the fires had burned themselves out. Some still smoldered. I came across a delivery truck that was still ablaze and I watched it, mesmerized by the swirling black smoke lifting into the empty sky. I stood there for almost a half hour before I heard the muffled sound of an explosion elsewhere in the city. It was hard to tell how far away it was or where it came from. Sounds echoed and distorted in the depths of the streets.

  I hurried away from the truck then, not wanting to be blasted apart after having just survived some sort of mass extinction. Before I reached my apartment building, several more explosions occurred.

  Each time it happened, I imagined yet another person being vaporized.

  † † †

  I hid inside all of that first day. I tried placing a few phone calls—to work, the airlines, my parents—but everywhere I called, either nobody picked up or I got an answering machine or voicemail. The call to the airlines scared me more than anything else, as if it confirmed that what had happened wasn’t a local phenomenon. It was global. For a few hours after that, I sat and stared at the skies outside my window looking for the contrails of passing jets. But there were none. Not a single one.

  The internet seemed to be working okay. A few sites were down, but not many. I searched for news about people disappearing; there wasn’t any. And when I narrowed my search down to posts published within the past eight hours, the engines all came up blank or told me the same thing: No results found. In fact, it didn’t matter what I searched for, I got the same message. Not a single news item had been published since eleven fifty-three eastern daylight time last night. Incredibly, Face Book and Twitter had gone completely silent. I tried posting something, and it got through. I felt like a man on a life raft in the middle of the ocean shouting, but no one could hear me.

  It took me a second day to get up the nerve to go back outside. I thought maybe I’d go into the office, but then I realized that there was no reason for me to go there. Besides, did I really want to go there?

  It was frankly liberating, knowing all that pressure was off of me. I no longer had to answer to anyone. The people I worked with—had worked for—were gone. Vanished. Poof! I hadn’t realized how much I actually disliked them and the job. How much I’d come to resent the rat race.

  Maybe I was just rationalizing.

  I decided to get some coffee instead. There was a Starbucks right downstairs, just outside the front doors of the building.

  The brew in the self-serve urn was cold, so I made a fresh pot, nibbling a stale blueberry muffin while I waited. I drank a few sips and sighed with pleasure before noticing a cup lying in front of the counter. A thick brownish stain covered the floor in an uninterrupted three hundred and sixty degree spray pattern around the spot where the cup had exploded. Whoever had just bought it had dematerialized before the cup hit the floor.

  I ran out of there, splashing hot coffee over my hand as I went before jettisoning the cup onto the sidewalk. I didn’t notice the burns until several hours later, as I sat huddled beneath the sheets of my bed. I’d been absently picking at the blisters, making them bleed. There was blood on the sheets and for the life of me I couldn’t understand why it was so real when nothing else made any sense at all.

  By the third day, I was feeling somewhat better. I was more confident that if I was going to disappear then I would’ve already been gone. In fact, I actually started fearing that people would start showing up again. It made me feel guilty.

  What was probably the biggest relief was knowing I didn’t need to worry about appearances. It didn’t matter how much something cost—not how little, but how much. Everything I could ever want was right there at my fingertips and nobody could stop me or judge me. For the first time in a long time, if I wanted something, it was because I wanted it, not because it would make an impression on someone else. Nothing had value anymore; there was only relevance. And money had lost of its.

  I actually laughed for the first time that day, thinking what an opportunity this might actually turn out to be.

  The water pressure in my penthouse apartment went out on the fourth day.

  Of course, I had no idea how such things worked. I guess I hadn’t really given it much thought before, just assumed water and electricity and food would last forever. Apparently, there’s a lot that goes into keeping things running. You need people for that.

  A few hours later I discovered better pressure in the apartments below me, and everything was fine again.

  Two weeks later the electricity went out.

  I was in the middle of microwaving some soup from a can when it did. A DVD was playing in the background on a seventy-inch TV. I don’t remember what it was that I was watching. Mostly I had it on for noise. It was already dark outside, so when the lights and everything else died, I just stayed in the apartment.

  The place had apparently belonged to a rabid New York Jets fan. The walls were covered in white and green, the couch and floor, too. I actually found I liked it better than the stainless steel and leather that decorated my own place.

  I sat in the darkness and ate the soup lukewarm and contemplated a very different future than the one I was just beginning to get used to. For the past couple weeks, I’d tried not to think about the world falling apart around me. Now I reall
y had to.

  I started going out on little forays into the city.

  A few days later I stumbled upon a building with a gas water heater. There was no power, but there was hot water, and that lifted my spirits again. I started going from building to building, following the water pressure. A million apartments in the city, I thought I could live out my days without any worry of having to go without a hot shower. That’s how self-deluded I was.

  But then the winds shifted and smoke from the fires burning north and east of me became a problem.

  I knew I had to leave New York.

  I took my ‘Ghini and made my way out of the city. It took three days to do it, since I had to move a lot of cars out of the way. I learned real quick to carry a gas can with me, and a siphon, as a lot of the automobiles had run themselves dry.

  Once out of New York, I headed south. It was mid-September by then and I figured I’d better get to someplace with warmer weather before winter set in. The highways were surprisingly clear. Cars and trucks and motorcycles that had been on them when the population count suddenly dropped to one had simply careened off the road and into the ditches or fields alongside. Every once in a while, the sight of the empty cars would haunt me, their insides completely devoid of any trace of bodies, and thoughts of how it had come about would creep back into my mind. I pushed them away.

  I passed entire towns that had burnt completely to the ground. Other towns were untouched, almost as if they were being preserved in a bottle. Fires still smoldered in a few places, but not many. I passed them all without stopping. I had no reason to. Only once did I have to backtrack and find a different way around.

  The weeds were starting to get tall alongside the highways, but since only a month had passed, neglect wasn’t all that prevalent yet. I kept my eyes peeled for people, of course. But I never saw a single soul. In truth, I found it more of a relief than not.

  I’d made it a habit of scanning the airwaves as I drove, but all that empty static started to wear on me after a while, so I decided to limit it for a few minutes a couple times a day. Then I shut the thing off altogether. After that, I mostly just listened to music. I broke into a Wal-Mart and snagged an armful of random CDs—rock, pop, rap—and listened to them in the parking lot with the volume cranked all the way up and the doors flung open. I got halfway through before I dumped the whole lot and went back in and got some classical. I’d never really cared for instrumental stuff before, but now, listening to all those dead voices singing about crap that no longer mattered, about lovers and ideas that no longer existed, it just seemed pointless.