Black Friday (5 page)

Judy’s pulse quickened and she gulped down air. Panic overtook her.

She climbed the stairs on hands and feet, clawing her way up the dirty treads. Judy regained control of her breathing as she closed her apartment door behind her. She shot the deadbolt and then lunged for her phone. She scrolled through the icons, back and forth, not able to register what she was seeing. Her thumb found the call icon and she stabbed her finger at 9-1-1.

Judy clamped the phone to the side of her face. It rang three times and then switched to a jittery busy signal—too fast to be normal. She put the phone on speaker and set it down on the bookcase next to her bedroom door. The busy signal became the soundtrack to Judy’s packing. First, she tossed everything on the bed. Next, she dug around under the bed until she found her largest duffle, covered in dust bunnies. Judy shook the dust from it frantically before cramming her clothes into the bag. Her bathroom was easier. The medicine cabinet was tiny, and the bathroom didn’t have any shelves, so she kept all her toiletries in a bag that unzipped and hung from the back of the door. Judy had all her bathroom stuff packed in seconds.

She stopped and listened. The busy signal had ended.

Judy ran back up to the phone. The display showed a connection, but the busy signal had silenced.

“Hello? Hello?” Judy said into the phone.

She ended the call and tried again. Silence.

“Shit, shit, shit,” Judy whispered. The phone went in her back pocket and Judy returned to the bedroom to grab the duffle bag.

The power went out.

Judy stopped in her tracks, wondering for a second if the power outage should change her plans.
 

“No,” she said. “I have to go. I have to go now.”

She slung the duffle bag over her shoulder and then dropped it to the floor again at the door. She needed a coat.

Her apartment was small, messy, and cozy. Despite the heat pouring from the uncontrollable radiators, Judy had blankets hanging on the backs of the chairs and sofa. Pillows and lamps defined pockets of space, where she could curl up with a book or a movie. She’d only lived there a few months, but she still felt a deep loss at the idea of leaving—retreating from a crisis and fleeing from the apartment which marked her independence.
 

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Judy left the fedora on the antenna of her car. She didn’t want to touch it. Outside, she’d found no traces of the people who had disappeared except for the hat and the dog’s leash. Before she got in the car, she glanced up and down the street—empty. Her street had once contained giant single-family houses with sprawling floor plans. At some point in the evolution of the city, these houses had all been split into apartments. Staircases and kitchens were added. New walls divided the houses into little self-sufficient living areas.

Looking up the street, Judy saw that the doors to some of these houses stood open, inviting her into the darkness. At the top of her block, just visible through the falling snow, the traffic signal swung back and forth on its wire. It was dark. Judy started her engine and used the wipers to clear the accumulation from the windshield. She crept the car slowly up the street, leaning forward to look up in the sky. The streets were deserted. Judy didn’t see any faces in the windows of the houses she passed. The radio produced only static on all the local stations, so she turned it off.

Judy took a right and found a car pulled over to the side. It had left fresh tracks through the light snow, and the driver’s door was hanging open. She saw no sign of the driver, save for two footprints on the pavement. Judy swerved wide around the car and took in these details.

She pointed her car up the hill and headed for the heart of the city to look for signs of life.
 

CHAPTER 5: ROBBY

R
OBBY
DIDN
’
T
MAKE
IT
.

Before he reached the emergency exit at the end of the hall. One of the other doors swung open and Lyle lurched through. The man squinted into the light from Robby’s flashlight and banged against the cinderblock wall as the door swung shut behind him.
 

“I tried to be friends with you and you sprayed me,” Lyle said. “What kind of person does that? We don’t have any doctors here, no medical attention I can seek. We’re the only two people left, and you pepper-sprayed me?”

“I told you,” Robby said, backing away, “we’re not the only two people left. My friends are coming. Now don’t come closer or I’ll spray you again.” He held up his flashlight with one hand and rummaged with the other, trying to find the can of spray in his jacket pocket.

Lyle stumbled forward as Robby retreated.
 

The can sprayed inside Robby’s pocket when his finger accidentally triggered the nozzle. Robby pulled out the can and held it out, next to the flashlight. With the can and beam of light, he willed Lyle to stay put, but it didn’t work. The man kept coming and Robby kept backing away. Robby’s elbow hit the door handle and he reached back to press down on the lever.

“Keep back,” Robby said. “I said, I’ll spray you again.”

“I don’t know how it could be much worse,” Lyle said. He punctuated his sentence with another fit of hoarse coughing.
 

“I barely got you last time,” Robby said. “It will be much worse next time.” His own hand, where he’d accidentally sprayed his skin in his pocket, was starting to heat up. Robby opened the door just enough to slip in and fired a warning shot at Lyle as he let the door close behind him. He waited a second with his outstretched arms a few inches from the door. When Lyle pulled the door open, Robby shot another blast of spray his direction. Lyle shut the door fast.
 

Robby didn’t wait. He turned and sprinted for the front of the kitchen. He remembered the tomato sauce spill, but stepped in it anyway. His stolen shoe slipped and he nearly ran face-first into a pizza oven. When he regained his balance he picked up speed and left the kitchen behind.

Robby felt trapped in the small building, running from one side to the other. This time, he detoured through the gift shop, remembering one of the items on display behind the register. He slipped behind the counter and jumped up, trying to reach the signed Red Sox baseball bat mounted next to the photo of Fenway Park. He grabbed it with his pepper-spray-hand and dragged it down from its mounts. From the direction of the food court, he heard Lyle crash into a table and the sound of chairs toppling.

Robby took the bat and headed back for the main lobby.

Several more corpses had awoken and they formed a cluster over near the glass doors.

Robby put his flashlight—still on—in his pocket. He didn’t need it with the moonlight now streaming through the glass. He picked the smallest pane, the lower half of the door that didn’t have dead people clustered around it, and swung the bat at it. His first blow, one that didn’t have much behind it, just bounced. Robby tightened his grip and swung for the fences. Each blow reverberated through his shoulders as Robby bounced the bat off the pane of glass. Less than twenty-four hours earlier, Robby had used a brick to smash out a glass door of a grocery store. That glass had given way immediately.
 

Robby glanced around for something heavier and harder to hit the window with. His eyes landed on Lyle, who had crept down the hallway and now regarded Robby through squinted eyes.

“I’m all done screwing around with you,” Lyle said. “Put that goddam bat down.”

Robby shifted the bat to his left hand and re-armed his right with the pepper spray. He shook the can twice before he said, “There’s still plenty of spray left in here. I can keep hitting you with it all night.”

“I said I’m all done screwing around,” Lyle said. He pulled his hand from the deep pocket of his long coat and held it straight out towards Robby.
 

In the cold moonlight, Robby saw the blue rectangular metal of Lyle’s gun.

CHAPTER 6: JUDY

“T
HAT
’
S
ALL
VERY
INCREDIBLE
,” Sister Glen said.

“It’s the truth,” Judy said.

“I did catch a glimpse of your car as you pulled up, and I don’t remember a hat on the antenna,” Sister Glen said.

“It fell off on the trip,” Judy said. “The wind is quite strong.”

“Well the phones are out, and the power is out, too,” Sister Glen said. “Let’s go down to the Bayside kitchen and see what we find, yes? We’ll just drive carefully. You made it here, I suppose there’s no reason to think we won’t be perfectly fine going a few blocks?”

“Yes, sure,” Judy said. “I’m just glad to have found another person. I was getting pretty freaked out when it seemed like I was the only one left on Earth.”

“I’m sure that was quite a shock,” Sister Glen said. She smiled and nodded at Judy before slipping down from the big chair and rounding the desk. “Come now.”

Judy let Sister Glen lead her back to the front door. Judy pushed open the door.

“I’ll just lock up and get the van. I’ll pull up right there on Ackley Street. You can follow me down the hill.”

“Thank you, sister.”

The old woman pulled the door shut and left Judy back on the steps. Judy ran down to her car. She turned it around so she would be facing the correct direction when the nun pulled out. Judy checked the clock on her car’s radio compulsively as she waited. It read twelve-thirty-seven when she got in. It seemed stuck on that number. Judy looked in every direction—looking for the nun, or looking for any trouble—and then back to the clock. She repeated this sequence again and again until the clock finally changed to twelve-thirty-eight. Judy was ready to give up on the tiny woman by the time the clock read twelve-forty-one, but then she saw it. A dark gray van pulled up Ackley Street and stopped at the sign. The nun’s little black hat was barely visible over the steering wheel. The van sat at the intersection for several seconds and then the blinker came on.

“Thank God,” Judy said. She turned her wheel and readied herself to pull away from the curb. Reflexively, she checked her rearview mirror for traffic. When she looked back to the van, it was still sitting at the stop sign. The blinker flashed on and off.
 

Judy noticed that the van’s blinker stopped flashing at the same moment that she noticed her car had died. It hadn’t just stalled, it was completely dark, like the traffic signals. None of the lights on the dash were on and the clock on the radio had shut off as well.
 

The van moved very slowly. It rolled backwards down the hill, away from the stop sign. Judy put her car in park and tried turning the key off and on several times. It wouldn’t respond. The van was picking up speed. As it rolled away, it revealed the little nun, Sister Glen, kneeling on the pavement in the fresh snow. She must have exited the van just before it started rolling, Judy figured. Judy watched the little woman raise her clenched hands to the sky in prayer and turn her horrified face up to the clouds.

The nun’s arm shot out to her side and her little hand emerged from beneath the cloak. Her finger pointed directly at the front doors of the church. The nun rose slightly and then vanished. Judy had a good look at the disappearance this time, but she still couldn’t make sense of it. The little woman, dressed in her cloak—formal and conservative, yes, but not exactly ‘habit’—had been kneeling in the middle of the street one second, and the next she jerked up and back and vanished.

Judy threw open her car door and ran. She hunched over, afraid to look at the sky, and lunged up the steps to the church doors. She’d heard the heavy doors lock behind her when Sister Glen showed her out, but she reached for the handle anyway. When she tugged, the door swung open easily and Judy plowed through the gap. She pulled the door shut behind her and found the lever to lock it shut. Judy ran the length of the lobby to the window which overlooked the intersection.