A.N) song lyrics by Our Lady Peace.

Share and enjoy…

(-----------------------)

I don’t pretend to be perceptive, but I can tell you, when I woke up that morning I knew there was something wrong.

It was almost as if I had woken up knowing it; the moment I opened my eyes and stared across the room to my reflection in the mirror, I was so scared my stomach hurt. No, not because I look like death personified in the morning, smartass, although that’s true too- but because I’d woken to silence, and a gut feeling too harsh to make any sense. If I lived in the country, silence would be OK, but I live in the city. Noise is elemental there, and the absence of traffic and creaking floorboards and diluted, arguing voices and too-loud was badly wrong- like the very floor disappearing from beneath my feet.

With a burning dread and a quivering, pukey feeling in my throat, I scrambled out of bed on shaking legs, dressed, and threw on my coat. God knows I was doing a stupid thing, but at the moment, panicked, brain operating on that highly dangerous “newly-wakened person logic” all I could think was that I had to see what was going on for myself.

I spent a few minutes in the kitchen, hovering pensively over a drawer- should I or shouldn’t I- before picking up a steak knife, the closest thing to a weapon I owned. I walked out into the hallway, my footsteps jerking, my head trembling.

“Is…is…is anybody here?” I ventured. My voice fell flat, pathetic and little-girlish. And of course, there was no answer. I shook my head, making my vision blur in the dizzy sunlight, and I pinched my right arm hard- no, not dreaming, so much for that. The dread got heavier with that realization, and the curiosity more piercing, so I pounded downs the stairs, through the lobby and out the glass doors, faster than any intelligent person.

As soon as my feet touched sidewalk and I saw the streets, the bluntest impact I ever felt smashed my mind into a million pieces. My screams echoed like thunder in the empty street.

There were cars everywhere, and no one in them. They were just- parked there, looking like a museum exhibit of traffic on a city street. The only sign of life was a pigeon moving about a ways down the sidewalk.

In an instant, it flew out of sight, and it was then that it really hit me:

I was the only person alive in the city.

I started bawling, fear rolling through me in waves. I tore into the nearest building, an office, picked up the phone and heard static buzz like a wasp in my ear. I threw the thing across the room, and stumbled blindly back into the street, screaming and sobbing. It was like waking up from a nightmare, to an empty house, with long black hours to go before morning. Except now, it seemed like there would never be a morning.

I wandered, my vision and my thoughts watery, screams eating at my throat like acid. And maybe as I wandered, some strange mocking shadow- figure looked down on me, alone in the empty dollhouse of a city, and waited.

You can only stay hysterical for so long. I don’t know whether it was minutes or hours- time had gone funny- but after awhile I calmed down. My thoughts straightened themselves out as well as they ever would.

I came to a decision; I could try to leave the city. Bleary-eyed and headachy from crying, I stumbled off to the silent parking lot, and my car, I was happy to discover, started up with no trouble. There was a prick of warmth in my chest. I wasn’t trapped, at least.

But I had to take into consideration the fact that I still had no idea what was going on; I didn’t try to make these thoughts coherent, but I knew several things; firstly, that the countryside, too, could have depopulated and secondly, that there might be something unnamed and bad out there, and I wasn’t prepared to meet it.

I had to be careful. I had to be alert. I had to cling to my steak knife like it was a lifeline. But while I was at it, steak knives were sure as hell not the only weapons this city had to offer. I drove through the empty streets, (or occasionally, where the unmoving cars were too tightly packed, on the sidewalks) until I came to a store that sold firearms.

Well...they had sold them. Today they were free. Ignoring the fact that I had never shot anything in my life (and thus would probably wind up accidentally killing myself), and cringing at the blaring sound of the shop's burglar alarm, I took as many guns as I could carry.

I don't even want to know what I looked like walking down the street.

I got back into the car, and my hand was hovering over the keys when I noticed something…odd. Something about the light that I hadn’t taken in before. Not wanting to believe it, I dragged my dreading eyes up toward the sky.

“No,” I whispered, flinching away from the sight. I saw one of the oldest pictures of dread- the setting sun. Night was coming.

My god, I thought, how long had I slept?

But no, no, I couldn’t think things like that. This was a whole new world now, and I wasn’t allowed to waste precious sanity on worry.

“OK,” I muttered briskly. “It’s OK. It's fine. There’s nothing in the dark that isn’t in the light. Sheesh.”

Empty words.

I’d gotten to the point where there was nothing to do except keep going, so I drove, staring straight ahead and trying to ignore the silence. I started singing, never mind I have a voice like a cat in a blender, and at first, it worked miracles on my nerves.

"I'll be waving my hand, watching you drown..."

But as the sun went down and the dark began to settle, things got bad again. It was ridiculous trying to keep down my rising panic. I kept imagining things.

"Watching you scream, no- one's around..."

I thought of eyes, mostly, by the side of the road, glowing in the headlights and popping up everywhere like green fireflies.

"As clumsy as you've been, there's no one laughing..."

And I thought of bloody raw corpses falling onto the windshield, eyes gouged out and blackish, and presences, presences everywere, huge, hulking figures waiting in my own backseat…

"You will be safe in here..."

My voice was sounding worse and worse, off key, spooky, until it was like the voice of one of those demonic little kids you see in horror movies.

"You will be safe in...safe in..."

I cracked, and panicked. I turned around, brakes screeching, and sped back to my apartment. I spent that night with all the lights on and didn’t fall asleep until the sun came up again.

I think it was late afternoon when I woke up. My room was full of bright sunlight, almost an encouraging sign- but it was silent again. Feeling hungover and drained, I got up slowly, and mechanically walked over to my window, absolutely certain what I’d see. I looked down at the street- same empty cars, everything still, just as it had been yesterday.

I was going to turn away, go do something, not that I knew what, but the moment I decided this, my eyes picked up something on the other side of the street.

A jolt went up into my mouth and, shaking hard, I stumbled back from the window, eyes so wide they blurred. Oh, god…

I wasn’t alone.