by Ike Hamill
Before the two minutes were up, she moved on.
Judy kept to small side streets. She crept her car close to the curb and darted across intersections. Eventually, she found herself back at the church. Sister Glen’s office was a little fortress. She would be safe there.
Judy made herself a little nest under the big desk. She huddled there as the sun went down and the light coming through the windows waned. A box in the hall had the last of the donated canned goods. Sister Glen must have forgotten to take them with her in her haste to get to the shelter.
Judy thanked the memory of Sister Glen. She pried open a can of green beans and drank the water before she chewed on the cold vegetables.
It was a tough night under the desk.
The next day was no better. Nor the next.
Judy didn’t venture far. She used the bathroom. The city water still had a bit of pressure. She spent most of the daylight hours reading one of the Sister’s bibles. Every page had at least one highlighted passage. In the beginning, Judy tried to decipher the significance of the marked phrases. It was impossible. The sister’s code was impenetrable.
And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.
What was the “face of the deep”? Why had the sister marked those four words?
Judy woke up to find the book open in her lap. She pictured her mother hiding under a desk in her Connecticut home. In her imagination, her mother was frightened and cowering. The emotion didn’t look right on her mother’s face. Judy tried to remember a time when her mother had been legitimately frightened. She couldn’t. Her mother didn’t run and hide—she drank and got belligerent. She said she was no good in a crisis, but that was only a ploy to get people to do things for her.
Why on earth had Judy imagined that her mother needed help? The idea was absurd.
Judy smiled, but the smile soon turned to tears.
She was the one who wasn’t strong enough to go on. She needed her mother, but there was only death on the other side of the bridge. As soon as she had seen that corpse she realized—she wasn’t bold enough to go south and find out the fate of her family. If they had died or disappeared it would be too much to bear. Even hiding under the desk was almost too much to bear.
Judy pulled another cigarette from her pack and considered it. She had six left. That was half as many as she’d already smoked that day.
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Halfway through her last cigarette, Judy knew what she had to do. She had to leave the church and go find other people. There must be other people out there. It was impossible to believe that she was the last person in the entire world.
Besides, she needed another pack.
She knew just where to find them. On the other side of the hill there was a gas station. It was open twenty-four hours, even Thanksgiving. Even though the shop was surely deserted, the doors would be unlocked and she could get to the cigarettes behind the counter.
Judy crouched in front of the window and looked at her car. She stubbed out her cigarette on the glass and left the butt there.
She stood up and moved to the door. With just enough time for a deep breath, Judy pushed through the door and walked out to the stone steps. She didn’t turn for the car. She would take this trip on foot, come what may. Perhaps her fate would include disappearing up into the sky like the others. If that was how her life was going to end, maybe it was best it happened sooner rather than later.
She didn’t look up as she marched down the street.
CHAPTER 9: ROBBY
SUNLIGHT FILTERED THROUGH THE trees and woke Robby. The sky that he could see through the trees appeared heavy with pink and purple clouds. Robby looked every direction and pulled his hood down to listen before he got up. The world was still and quiet. His stone wall traced its way through a stand of tall pines—too evenly-spaced and orderly to be a natural forest. Robby walked between rows of pines towards the sun, and saw the sky open up.
He relieved himself in the woods before crossing into the brown, patchy back yard of a two-story cape with a daylight basement.
The houses on the left and right both had swing sets in their back yards, but the house directly in front of Robby had none. Robby was glad of that—he didn’t relish the idea of running into a child’s corpse. The sliding-glass door was unlocked. Robby slid it open and closed it most of the way shut after he’d stepped into the finished basement. He found himself in a comfortable TV room and immediately smelled burned food. He climbed the stairs slowly, still listening for Lyle, even though he’d left him hours before on the other side of a long walk through the woods.
He found no sign of the homeowners on the main floor, and didn’t bother to venture up into the bedrooms. What he needed—the keys to their Hyundai—he found on a hook near the side door. In the driveway, he found the matching vehicle. Robby didn’t pause to learn any more about the inhabitants of the house. He had learned enough from the charred remains of dinner left on the stove. These people had vacated during preparation, and wouldn’t be coming back.
The car was a mess. Plastic shopping bags were stuffed with trash on the back seat on either side of a carseat. Diet soda bottles and cans littered the floors. Mardi Gras beads swung from the rearview mirror as Robby backed out onto the street. They had a GPS mounted on the dash. Robby powered it up and was pleasantly surprised to get efficient directions back to the highway. He went the opposite way.
Robby stayed on back roads, and picked his way north.
Up north, he’d come from an area where everyone had vanished into the sky. Down here, people had died with ruptured eyes. Given the choice, he preferred to move back to a place where he didn’t have to worry about stumbling upon eyeless corpses around every turn.
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The farther north he went, the cloudier the sky became. It hung over him like a cold puffy quilt and Robby found himself hunching over the wheel to get closer to the weak heat coming from the vents. The GPS gave him few options aside from the highway. He had to resort to Route 1 most of the time, but preferred the smaller coastal roads. On the bigger roads he couldn’t shake the feeling that Lyle might somehow be watching him.
He only encountered a few cars, and they were all pulled off to the side or slumped down in ditches. Whatever had popped the eyes and stolen the life from the drivers had first caused them to pull over. Or maybe they lost their eyes and steered to the side in a panic. Robby tried not to consider the options.
As he approached Portland, Robby skirted to the west of the airport. The streets had a thin layer of snow and Robby saw a few tire tracks on the streets. Missing were the corpses. Where the snow got deeper, Robby found the edge of where people’s eyes had exploded and where they’d simply disappeared. Robby turned onto a neighborhood street and cut his own fresh tracks through the dusting of snow.
He surveyed houses from his dirty Hyundai for hours. He doubled back and crossed his own tracks several times, hoping to disguise his real trail. When Robby found an interesting house, he parked nowhere near it. Instead, he pulled into the driveway of a house down the street and made his way through backyards and a small stand of trees.
Along the marsh, Robby found a number of houses with solar power. Their wide southern exposure—afforded by being backed up to the marsh—gave them enough sunlight to warrant the panels. Robby visited several before settling on one. It seemed designed to live either on or off the grid. Inverters, a bank of batteries, and a generator would supply the house with power. In the attic he found a water storage tank that would gravity-feed the taps. A wood stove on the first floor looked big enough to heat the whole space. Robby left the dirty Hyundai up the street and locked all the doors before exploring the house from attic to cellar. He found no signs of the owners except their possessions, which suited Robby fine.
That night he slept fitfully, still haunted by thoughts of Lyle, but at least he slept in a warm bed.
CHAPTER 10: JUDY
&
nbsp; JUDY PUSHED THROUGH THE door to the convenience store. She had pictured the place as a cold, dark, still-life. In her mind the store would be a snapshot of normalcy—undisturbed shelves and a bell over the door that would announce her arrival.
Real life was messy.
A display case of chips had been turned over and she crunched through cheese puffs scattered on the floor. An evil brown ooze was leaking from the bottom of the ice cream freezer. Judy made her way around the counter. She took a pack of cigarettes and put them in her pocket. Her eyes went to the lottery tickets.
Judy laughed at herself as she grabbed one of the tickets and started to pull them from the roll. It was one of those twenty-dollar game tickets that takes about ten minutes to scratch off. She folded up several dozen tickets. and put them in her pocket next to the pack of cigarettes. She started to walk away and then turned back. She pulled another pack of cigarettes and added them to the first.
There were bags behind the counter. It would be easy to take all the packs, before someone else could take them. She didn’t want that kind of commitment. In her head, she was still an ex-smoker, who just happened to cheat every so often. So what if she happened to cheat every single day?
Judy was halfway out the door when she turned back. Did someone knock over that rack and then get sucked up into the sky? Or maybe were they still around? She turned her back on the store and rushed down the street.
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Judy walked down the hill to the foot of the bridge. There was a little snow on the sidewalk. It crunched under her shoes as she looked across the water. Judy lit one of her stolen cigarettes and contemplated. This was a different bridge than the one she’d tried before. It was too much to hope that someone would be alive on the other side. While she watched, she didn’t see any movement at all over there.
Not a single car, or pedestrian, or even a trail of smoke from a chimney—the other side was just as empty as where she stood.
Still, she had to try.
Judy gathered herself and stared across the bridge.
The wind was cold. It cut right through her jacket. Her cigarette almost went out. She flicked it down into the water and stopped to watch it tumble. When it was out of sight she took another one out and lit it. After a single puff, she let it fall too.
It was a pleasant illusion, the way the cigarettes disappeared before they hit the water. They became completely indistinct long before the water claimed them. She could imagine that they’d gone to a safe, warm place. She lit another.
This one, she smoked for a little while. She crossed her arms and looked out at the horizon. The gray sky met the ocean at a spot where they seemed to agree on a common color. The whole world went to gray there.
Maybe this was how everyone died. Maybe the world disappeared one person at a time until it was completely empty. What if all she needed to do was let go? Then maybe she would be at peace.
The idea was compelling. It was simple, and easy to test.
She glanced down at the water. If this were the end, and eternal peace was at hand, there ought to be a guide. A friendly spirit, maybe someone she knew, should appear to her and show her the way.
“Hi,” a voice said.
Judy turned and was immediately disappointed. She didn’t know this kid. He was too young to be helpful. She fumbled inside her coat for the pack of cigarettes. For a second, she thought it would be polite to offer one to the kid. Just in case he was a helpful spirit, she could get on his good side. But he was too young. She couldn’t offer a cigarette to a kid that young.
“I quit,” she said as she let the pack fall over the railing to oblivion. She watched them fall. They didn’t disappear. Instead, she saw them the whole way down until they made a tiny splash.
She turned back to the young man. He looked concerned, and nice. She gave him a little half-smile.
“That’s good,” he said. “Those things are deadly.”
She smiled more. He was a sweet kid. When she laughed, he laughed with her.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
Very sweet—he would be devastated if she leaped over the railing. But it was right there. She grabbed the railing and almost did it. It was right there. But she couldn’t do that to a kid.
“Yeah,” she said. “I’m fine.”
She backed up until she reached the concrete barrier. He took another step forward. Judy read a lot into that single step. He wanted to help her, but he was keeping his distance out of deference. He was kind and thoughtful. Judy decided in that moment that she liked this young man. Now that she knew him, she wouldn’t be alone anymore.
“My name is Rob,” he said.
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Black Friday
Thank you for reading this novella. I appreciate the gift of your time, and I hope you enjoyed another brief visit with Judy and Robby. Parts of this book were details I couldn’t fit into Extinct & Instinct, but I still wanted to tell. These characters touched me and I found their relationship compelling. Sometimes I meet people who feel very important, but I’m only granted a short time with them. Robby and Judy should have spent decades learning from and supporting each other. Their meeting was briefly mentioned in the other books, but most of that time was undocumented. At least now, this quick tale covers a day or two.
The story of how Robby got to the rest stop was covered in Extinct. Judy’s life before Thanksgiving is undocumented, but touched on in Instinct. The direction that their friendship takes them is covered in both Extinct, and Instinct, although some might argue that it’s not explored thoroughly enough. Please let me know what you thought of this book. You can always reach me at [email protected]. I try to reply to every email.
If you have a second, I hope you’ll rate and review this book wherever you picked it up. While you’re there, I hope you check out some of my other novels.
Thanks, and Happy Reading,
Ike
