Black Friday (8 page)

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She passed quite a few abandoned cars. It wasn’t until the other side of the bridge that she saw her first car with someone behind the wheel. Judy pulled over behind the car and sat for a long time looking at the motionless head.

“They must be dead, right?” she whispered. He hugged herself and then put her hands gently back on the wheel, like it might shock her. “I mean, why would they just be sitting there?”

She pulled out her cell phone and checked it again. It was a useless gesture, but it was ingrained behavior. She couldn’t stop. Judy bit her lip and looked around. There was no help coming. She opened the door and left the engine running. The car dinged its disapproval as she gingerly put a foot down on the pavement. It would be so much easier just to drive on by, but what if the person needed help?

Judy made sure the door would stay open on its own and then she headed for the car. On the way, she stuffed her hands deep in her pockets. Her fingers found the lighter in her left pocket. She gripped it like a talisman.
 

Her footsteps sounded too loud on the pavement. Judy swung wide around the car and slowed as the person’s head came into view through the driver’s window.

She stopped.

The man’s eyes were red, bloody sockets. They looked like they had been gouged out with a spoon. Judy’s hands freed themselves from her pockets and flew to her face. She stood motionless. She didn’t know what to do. Watching people disappear had been disturbing. This was worse.

Judy ran back to her car and slammed the door. She didn’t even bother with the seatbelt. She jerked the wheel around and then spun her car in a tight little u-turn. She kept glancing in the rearview mirror as she fled back over the bridge. What if the person was infected with something? What if she had already been exposed?

Tears streamed down Judy’s face as she drove as fast as she could towards her apartment.

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She parked on the street for almost two minutes. It seemed like an eternity. She was too exposed in the car—people had disappeared just a few feet from where she was parked. Still, she couldn’t bring herself to go back in the apartment. The building was haunted by her old life. It seemed dangerous to fall back into that life. Nothing was normal anymore. To ignore that fact was insane.

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

S
UNLIGHT
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

J
UDY
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.