Vanished

by Eden Darry

  It hadn’t seemed to matter to Maddie that Ellery was so introverted. She’d even said she found it refreshing to find someone who listened when she talked. She said Ellery was like the ocean—deep and vast and fascinating—and Ellery liked that. It didn’t last long, though. Maddie was an extrovert. She liked parties and bars and clubs—all the things Ellery hated—and Ellery’s charmingly quiet and unassuming nature soon got boring for Maddie. And then infuriating. Then suddenly Ellery was just a puddle Maddie stepped in long enough to get the muck off her shoes before moving on to something better.

  The storm picked up outside. The wind whipped around the surgery, shook the windows, and howled furiously. She couldn’t shake the sense something was about to happen. A voice inside told her it was something bad. She recognized it as her intuition, the same voice that told her when something was wrong with one of her patients.

  Ellery stared up at the skylight and willed morning to come quickly.

  Chapter Three

  At exactly two o’clock in the morning, a huge burst of light lit up the sky. At the other end of the village, Loveday woke. It felt like someone turned on a floodlight outside her house. At first she thought it might be another flash of lightning, but when it didn’t go away, she got up to look.

  * * *

  At the veterinary surgery, Ellery opened her eyes, blinking immediately into the brightness. Rocky went crazy and Ellery locked him in his cage to stop him damaging his broken leg further. She hurried to the front of the surgery to see what was going on.

  * * *

  At her house, Loveday was surprised Claude joined her at the window. He growled low in his throat, then hissed at something she couldn’t see. The hairs on the back of her neck stood up.

  * * *

  Back at the vet’s, Ellery squinted into the light which obliterated everything else, wondering if it would burn her retinas and make her blind.

  * * *

  Loveday stared out her window. Looking into the light wasn’t like looking at the sun at all—the strength of it probably should have blinded her, but she didn’t need to squint or shield her eyes. The problem was she could see nothing beyond the brightness.

  * * *

  A steady high-pitched whine—Ellery thought it sounded like a dentist’s drill—started up. It got louder and louder until it was unbearable. Ellery felt it all the way to the fillings in her teeth and worried the pressure would work them loose. She put her fingers in her ears to try and block out some of it, but the sound seemed to be coming from inside her head. It didn’t make sense.

  * * *

  Loveday moaned as the awful screeching noise reverberated through her body. She felt pressure behind her eyeballs and thought they would burst if it carried on much longer.

  The sound increased in both vibration and pitch until Loveday began to scream.

  * * *

  Ellery screamed. The terrible noise was so powerful it felt like it was working its way into the muscle and sinew of her being and ripping her apart from inside out. As it increased, so did the intensity of the light, until in one final pulse, it exploded and Ellery knew no more.

  * * *

  Loveday dropped to the floor, unconscious.

  Chapter Four

  Ellery opened her eyes. The tiles were cold under her back. She tested her arms and legs—wriggled the fingers and toes on each—relieved everything seemed to be in order. Her head ached. She sat up and gingerly felt the base of her skull, and her hand came away wet with blood. A little was smeared on the tiles but the wound didn’t feel serious. She must have banged her head when she fell.

  Outside, the sun was just beginning to peek from behind the hills. She looked at her watch and saw it was stopped on exactly two o’clock. Either she’d bashed it when she fell or that awful noise had interfered with the battery. Ellery sighed and stood. Muscles groaned and joints popped from her time on the ground, reminding her that she wasn’t as young as she used to be.

  She heard a bark from the back of the surgery. Rocky. She hurried to his cage. As soon as he saw her he began to yip, his tail thumped manically, and he frantically pawed at the bars. Ellery opened the door and he bolted out and into her arms. She held him close and let him lick her face. “I know, boy, I know. I was scared too.” He trembled and whined, so she tucked his head under her chin and rocked him for a bit.

  Without putting him down, Ellery went into her office and picked up her phone. She pushed the power button but the screen remained dark. She frowned and tried again. It had almost a full battery last night, so it shouldn’t be flat already.

  She put Rocky on the floor and left him to investigate the room while she sat at her desk and attempted to power up her computer. Again, the screen remained black and silent. What the hell? She remembered her watch, how it stopped working too, and decided that the strange goings on last night must have emitted some kind of pulse or wave that had affected anything electrical. It didn’t seem very likely, but what other reason could there be? Not expecting much, she tried the office phone. That was dead too.

  Frustrated, Ellery pushed back in her chair, stood, and turned to face the window. The sun was weak but rising. It must be fairly early in the morning still. She considered driving into town, then realized her car wouldn’t start if everything electrical really had been destroyed by the storm. Didn’t hurt to try, though.

  Ellery glanced at Rocky who was busy sniffing under the door. She didn’t have the heart to lock him back up in the cage. He should be okay to walk for a little while on the cast, and he was only small, so she could easily carry him the twenty-minute journey.

  * * *

  Loveday woke up feeling pressure on her lips—something pushed down and mashed them into her teeth. For a second she panicked. Then she realized it was the same thing that happened every morning. The cat was pawing at her mouth again.

  “Get off me, Claude.” She gave him a gentle shove, and he hopped off her chest with a huff allowing her to breathe much more easily. She sat up and looked around.

  She was on the lounge floor, facing the window. Loveday remembered the light and that awful noise and then…nothing at all. She must have fainted. Claude meowed and pawed her hand. He probably needed the bathroom. Usually Loveday let him out before she went to bed and back in in the morning for his breakfast. He didn’t seem to be very pleased with the break in his routine.

  Loveday reached out and ruffled his head. He tried to duck her hand but she got him anyway. She went into the kitchen. Through the window she saw that although there were a lot of branches and leaves strewn about the garden, there didn’t appear to be much damage. She was surprised because Hilda had been fierce, and Loveday thought a fence would be down at the very least.

  She let Claude out and propped the back door open. It was a mild morning and the sun was already most of the way up over the fields.

  Loveday flicked the switch for the kettle. She needed coffee. She fetched her phone and tried to turn it on. The thing remained dead and she frowned. There should be some battery left because she remembered turning it all the way off last night. Strange.

  Then she noticed the kettle had stayed silent. She flicked the switch a couple more times and decided the power must still be off, which was annoying because she needed coffee to kick-start every morning. Perhaps she’d walk down to the cafe and see if they had any power. Worst case, she’d buy a camping stove from Romans.

  Claude was nowhere in sight, but his bowl was most of the way empty. She hadn’t cleared up the spilt biscuits from last night, so he’d had a good feed and wouldn’t need any breakfast.

  Loveday set off down the lane, surprised at how quiet it was. The position of the sun told her it must be close to eight o’clock, so it was strange the town wasn’t bustling. People’s days started early around here. There were a good few farms in the area, and it was also a commuting town, so there should be at least a few cars passing through to join the motorway nearby. It was eerily quiet, without even t
he distant drone of traffic, or a radio from someone’s house—the general noises of people getting ready for the day were absent.

  She continued on and reached the cluster of shops that constituted their high street—a post office, a small supermarket, a café, and a handful of chain stores. Again, the place was empty. The shop windows were dark and nothing stirred behind them. What on earth is going on?

  Living in London most of her life, and even here to a lesser degree, Loveday had never been alone. When she took long walks in the forest, she would see other people, or a plane would fly overhead. Even in the deepest silences, there had always been a sense humanity existed nearby. Not today. The birds called out to each other, but the presence—the sense—of life had vanished. Loveday felt entirely alone for the first time in thirty-two years. She’d spent the last few years wanting to be left alone, and now she was. And she didn’t like it at all. She felt scared.

  Chapter Five

  Rosemary was pleasantly surprised to discover sixteen survivors from her group, The Children of the Ark. She had hoped for more but planned on less—sometimes sinners were hard to spot, and she wasn’t naive enough to think they didn’t lurk within her own ranks. Still, the number was adequate. There were bound to be others out there like her though she didn’t have very long to find them. Eighteen days if her dreams were right. Though finding survivors would be secondary to finding the girl. Every moment she existed was a threat to Rosemary and the new world she planned to create. So far, her dreams hadn’t revealed the location of the girl, but with every passing day she felt her connection to the child—she was certain the girl was still young—grow stronger.

  Rosemary didn’t come from a religious family. Both her parents were scientists, well respected in their fields, and couldn’t understand how religion and science were able to coexist peacefully in her mind. Rosemary was equally perplexed about their views. How could they contemplate the vast and terrible beauty of the universe and not see God’s hand in it?

  Even though she was deeply religious and there was no doubt in her mind of God’s existence, she was as surprised as the Virgin Mary was when He appeared to her nine years ago in a dream.

  Rosemary had seen it all. The destruction of mankind and the end of civilization, all swept away in less than a few hours. She’d also been shown her own demise at the hands of a girl who would lead humanity on a course so far away from God’s light, when she saw it Rosemary had screamed until her throat was raw and bloody. She hadn’t been able to speak for a week due to the pain. Fortunately, she was blessed with foreknowledge and had a chance to save both herself and whatever was left of humanity.

  This morning, those who survived were treating her as some kind of God. All morning she was forced to remind them of Exodus 20:3. You shall have no other gods before me.

  Rosemary was not God. It was true she had been blessed with a vision, but there was only one God and her job was to serve Him and root out any evil if it still existed. To have any chance in this new world, she would need to begin with her own small group, and that meant putting into practice every dictate of the Bible. There would be no picking and choosing the parts that suited any more. It was all or nothing.

  Over the last few months, she’d been very clear on social media, directing where survivors could come. It would probably be a few days yet before they saw anyone—possibly longer, depending on where in the country they were. They would come, though. Rosemary had been proven right and they would all come eventually. People would be scared. They’d be lost and confused and Rosemary would help them. She would show them the way of God, and teach them about what came next. About what God wanted from his children. It wasn’t hard to understand. It was all there in the Bible. The very way they should be living was written down in black and white, and she would make sure the way was followed to the letter from now on.

  * * *

  Ellery made slow progress down the lane and was tempted to pick Rocky up and carry him the rest of the way. He was having a great time after spending so long indoors, and she didn’t have the heart to be a killjoy. Rocky tottered busily back and forth from one side of the road to the other, sniffing and peeing on pretty much everything he could find. Surely he had to run out soon?

  As she’d expected, her car hadn’t started. There hadn’t even been a splutter. It was dead. Hopefully someone in town would know what was going on. No doubt there would be some sort of emergency plan in place—or she guessed there would be. Wasn’t that how things worked? Governments, town councils had to have contingencies for things like this, didn’t they? Ellery noticed there were no cars going by and the normally busy road was empty. Her intuition continued to warn her something was deeply wrong, despite every effort she made not to hear her inner voice.

  The roads were silent because last night’s storm caused some kind of wave or pulse that shorted everything electrical. This was the only explanation she was prepared to accept.

  Chapter Six

  Terry Pratt woke up with the worst hangover of his forty-two years. He rubbed his face with both hands. They were big hands, rough hands, and he was proud of them. They defined who Terry Pratt was. Hands that had a done man’s work their whole life. Pink scars criss-crossed his knuckles and the backs of his hands, where the hair was still black and coarse, unlike his head, which he’d finally shaved last year after a workmate told him he looked like Bozo the Clown.

  The workmate lost two teeth, and Terry finally lost the tufts that sprouted around the sides.

  They were hard hands—his wife Shirl could attest to that. Not that he battered her or anything. He wasn’t a wife beater. Just sometimes, just now and again, when he’d had a few or she wouldn’t fucking shut up about some thing or other. Like his dad always said, women weren’t made like men, and they needed to be kept in line. Guided like children.

  He started to shout for her to bring him a cup of tea, but the effort of even moving his head set off the bells of hell. How much did he drink last night? He couldn’t remember. He’d been to the football and that bunch of useless, overpaid tossers lost, two–nil. He had a season ticket as well. What a waste of money. Wankers.

  That was all it took to put him in one of his black moods. This headache and the memory of sitting in the freezing fucking cold—of course, they had to sit now. They’d got rid of the stands years ago. God forbid someone slipped and broke a nail. Shirl better have the kettle on and bacon in the pan when he finally managed to get up.

  Of course when he got downstairs, Shirl was nowhere to be seen. He touched the kettle. Cold. Strange, because Shirl drank tea like water. He couldn’t remember seeing her without a cup on the go. He searched through the cabinet above the sink where she kept the medication, and shook two aspirin out of the bottle. He thought better of it and shook out two more. Terry dry swallowed them and flicked the kettle on. Where the fuck was she? Not work, because she’d given that up straight after they got married. His mum never worked, and he’d be damned if a wife of his would either.

  He looked up at the wall clock which read two o’clock. It must have stopped because there was no way it was two—he’d not been that drunk. His body clock told him it was closer to ten. Shirley usually didn’t go shopping until lunchtime, so where the fuck was she?

  Terry clenched and unclenched his fists, the blackness settling even more securely around him like a comfy blanket. He went into the lounge to wait for her.

  Chapter Seven

  Loveday walked up the window of Paula’s Cafe and looked in. The place was dark, with chairs piled on top of tables. No signs of life inside. She tried the small supermarket which was supposed to open at seven o’clock. Locked up and lights out.

  Loveday refused to believe everyone had simply overslept. In her gut, in the place that recognized the truth of things, she knew no one was here. She was alone. Everywhere she looked, curtains stayed drawn, shops stayed closed, and apart from the birds, there wasn’t a sound to be heard.

  One person in to
wn Loveday did know was her neighbour Libby Lee. She wouldn’t call her a friend, but they’d had a few doorstep conversations and taken parcels in for each other. Loveday walked the short distance back to her street and knocked on Libby’s front door. No answer. She went around the back and through the side passage which connected their houses. Libby’s gate was open. Loveday looked through the back door window. It was dark inside like everywhere else, but she knocked anyway. She tried the door handle. Unlocked. She pushed it open and stepped inside. “Libby?” she called out. Still no answer.