Fear: The Quiet Apocalypse Read online

  FEAR

  T. M. EDWARDS

  This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to real situations or people is entirely accidental.

  This work may not be reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the author.

  Copyright 2018: Tessa Escalera

  [email protected]

  Facebook: @tmedwardsauthor

  Day 3, September 20th

  Like it did every day, the alarm on my phone went off at exactly 7:30 am. It was a cacophony of clanging, like someone had taken an entire string of little bells and stuck them in the dryer.

  I had chosen the most irritating alarm tone on purpose. I had also put my phone across the room from my bed, and that was no accident, either.

  Because when you’re me, or like me, you know that getting out of that bed is the hardest task of the day. I’m not talking about the people who love their comfy pillows and warm blanket. I’m talking about me, the one who just doesn’t have the inner motivation to force myself from rest to motion. I think there’s a law of physics about that somewhere.

  Somehow, the strident noise of my phone, which I had to cross the room to stop, forced me into motion like nothing internal ever will. After all, it’s impossible to sit and brood in the silence if there is no silence.

  So, like I did every morning, I sighed, threw back the warm blankets and let the cold air settle over me for a moment before I wrenched myself upright and stumbled across the room to stab at the “cancel alarm” button on that little screen.

  Then the shuffle to the bathroom. I knew I really should shave my legs, or use conditioner or something, but all I really had energy for was to sit and let the hot water beat on my shoulders until it started to run cold.

  In the kitchen, I knew I should cook some of the eggs that were about to expire. Even though that thought nagged at me like an itchy bug bite, I pulled out the milk instead and took a bowl out of the dishwasher and filled it with sugary cereal. The eggs would be fine for one more day if they’d already lasted this long...I think. I mean, what makes something go from “fine” to “bad” over the course of a day, anyway? Like, what’s the moment in time when it changes from okay to eat to “I will give you deadly food poisoning?” How would I know? Should I go ahead and throw them away, just in case? But...what a waste of money. I should just leave them, in case I decide I’m brave enough to eat them tomorrow.

  My phone buzzed, snapping me out of my train of thought. Obsessing over eggs? I scrubbed at my face with my hands, sighing at the ridiculousness of my own brain.

  I swiped the screen to pull up the message. Just another person sending me a news article about that UFO-like meteor that had crashed somewhere in the desert. Apparently, shiny black meteors that look like alien eggs aren’t normal. I sighed, and touched the “home” button on my phone. I still wasn’t entirely convinced this wasn’t some big hoax. Anyway, it was hundreds of miles away, and the egg wasn’t actually doing anything, unlike the eggs that were slowly decomposing in my refrigerator.

  I almost poured myself a second bowl of cereal, but decided to look at the nutrition facts first. Feeling a little nauseated at the amount of sugar I’d already consumed, and feeling the urge to check and see if my belly looked any flabbier than it had yesterday, I shoved the cereal box back into the cabinet.

  Now there was no more avoiding it. Time to go to work. I threw a mug of water in the microwave to make myself some tea, then headed to my office. I jiggled my computer mouse, and pulled the cozy blanket off of the back of the chair, wrapped it around me, and set my hot tea down on the desk before settling into the chair.

  Then I pulled up my spreadsheets and databases, and began to type.

  From the outside, it probably looked like I had the perfect life. Get up each morning whenever I wanted to. Take a long shower. Eat breakfast while scrolling on my phone. Make a mug of tea, and walk a few steps to my office where I settled into my comfortable computer chair with my blanket, and enter numbers into spreadsheets. Hours a day of nothing more strenuous than typing. Perhaps the occasional article to be written or subject to research. I could take a two hour break if I wanted. I could go roam the mall. I could go to the grocery store. Heck, I could go watch a movie in the middle of the afternoon. I could do anything I wanted.

  But what if all I wanted was to lay in bed with the comforter over my head and watch movies on my phone? What if my doctors were shaking their heads at me because my weight was going up and my health was going down and I just couldn’t bring myself to care enough to change it? Though it wasn’t really that I didn’t care. I cared. I cared about everything. But actually making the decision to do something about it? Just too much to ask. It was easier to lay in bed and obsess over everything that was wrong than to step out the door and do something to change it.

  I was a prisoner inside my own head, trapped by invisible walls that no one else could see, and hardly anyone tried to understand.

  ***

  Later, in the afternoon, I had to face the inevitable. Other than the questionable eggs, the half-empty quart of milk, and the cereal that was mostly dust in the bottom of the box, I had no food. Well, except for condiments and about 200 bags of assorted teas.

  I reluctantly stood in front of the bathroom mirror, trying to decide what the bare minimum of grooming was that made me acceptable to be seen in public. Definitely change out of the shapeless gray hoodie with the coffee stain on the chest. I probably shouldn’t wear the faded yoga pants, either.

  Well, there was one good thing about being the stereotypical pale, freckled, curly-haired redhead. Since my hair always looked like I belonged on the Scottish Highlands no matter how long I spent on it, there was no point in wasting any effort there.

  Finally, I settled for splashing cold water on my face and rummaged through the “clean” laundry basket until I found a shirt and jeans that weren’t too horribly wrinkled.

  Ugh. The jeans were too small. I wadded them up and launched them into the corner in disgust. I found a stretchier pair, and this time managed to button them with little effort.

  I grabbed my wallet and my keys and stared at the front door for a solid 10 seconds. As I stepped outside and turned to lock the door, I glanced around to see if any of my neighbors were outside.

  Crap. Mrs. Hudson was in her front yard, just beyond the waist-high hedge. She had a pair of pruning shears in her hand and a floppy, floral-patterned hat covering her silver hair.

  “Hello, lovely!” She called to me as I strode toward my car. “I was beginning to think you’d moved away!”

  I did my best to smile back at her. She truly was a kind person. She often “accidentally” baked too many brownies or cookies, which I was convinced was just a ruse to make sure I was still alive. She was always cheerful, and willing to cover my awkward silences with her chatter.

  She was also...a hugger.

  I suppressed a shudder and waved in what I hoped was a friendly fashion, as I hurried to my car.

  When I reached the grocery store, I shoved my earbuds into my ears just before I passed through the roaring curtain of downward-blowing air in the doorway.

  I’d learned long ago that the earbuds helped. Instead of being pelted on all sides with snippets of conversation, crying children, and the squeak of shoes on the floor, I could blast calming classical music. It had the added benefit of making people less likely to try to talk to me. Or, if they did, I didn’t notice as much.

  Pushing the cart through the produce section, I examined a bag of grapes before setting them in the cart. As I grabbed the bar and pushed the cart forward, I couldn’t help noticing that the atmosphere in the store was...odd. Tense, maybe? Uneasy? It was strange enou
gh that I pulled an earbud out of my ear and listened to the conversations around me.

  Hmm. Maybe I was just being paranoid. All I managed to catch was something about the president dealing with some international threat (what else was new?), odd pop-up storms in the Midwest, and a couple of ladies discussing a UFO.

  Rolling my eyes, I shoved the bud back in my ear and pushed the cart forward. Like always, there was too many people here, but I never could remember to come early in the morning before all the young moms and old people did their shopping.

  I pushed the cart through the aisles, scouting each one before entering to see how crowded it was, and opting for the ones that were empty or nearly so. Those afforded fewer people to smile at, and less small talk to avoid.

  Once my cart was full and I could practically hear my debit card quivering in fear, I pushed the cart to the checkout.

  I avoided the gaze of the cashier, who was entirely too bubbly. She kept loudly popping the pink bubblegum in her mouth, and chattering at me as if she had no clue how little desire I had to engage in superficial conversation. She was one hundred percent a walking, talking stereotype. I knew my thoughts about her were unkind, but she was relentless in her attempts to engage me, and she kind of deserved it.

  I made my way back to the car. Then I continuedhrough the bustling city streets, out from between the tall office buildings and past the street lights, into the suburban neighborhood with the cookie-cutter houses.

  When I pulled into the driveway and reached forward to turn off the engine, I just stared at the blank garage door for a moment. I was pretty much the only person under 30 in this neighborhood. But, when your parents die and leave you a house that’s completely paid off, it kind of seems stupid not to take the house. Now I was stuck in the city, surrounded by average American houses, filled with average American families.

  Finally, I sighed and loaded myself down with groceries until the handles of the bags cut into my arms. No reason to have to make a second trip, even if I couldn’t see my feet and would probably give myself a strained muscle from the weight of the bags.

  Day 4. September 21st

  I was lonely. But doing what it takes to not be lonely was just too hard. I was alone, by choice, but only because I didn’t know what other choice to make. I had friends, but they engaged me mostly out of pity, I think. My friends were the people who texted me to make sure I was still alive. They were the people who tried to drag me out of my home and dress me up and make me act normal for a night. They were sometimes the people who loved me, but who eventually gave up and began the litany of “if you want help, you know where to find me.” Or the worse ones, like: “Your life is great. Why are you so depressed?” “The world really isn’t that scary. I don’t understand what you’re so afraid of.” There was even: “Come on, why can’t you just push through it? I’m sure you’ll get over it faster if you just force yourself to go out and do stuff.”

  Because the way my brain works is just something I can “get over,” you know. Sure, I could take drugs to shut up the panicked jabbering of the anxiety. I could sit in the office of some stranger every week and pour out my heart. But why? Why face the eyes of another person who didn’t really care about me, but would be happy to tell me everything I needed to do to fix my life? My choice was between zombie, whiner, or socially acceptable. I guess it’s obvious which one I chose.

  I wish I could say that there was some incredibly traumatic thing in my childhood that made me the way I am. But there really isn’t. I lost my parents to a car wreck two years ago, but I’m not any more scared of cars than I am of anything else. I love people, in theory, but actually being around them is just so overwhelming and depressing when I see how happy they are, often with much less cause than I. Plus they just make so much noise, and that noise all mixes up in my head until the anxiety thinks it has to scream louder to be heard over the commotion.

  I am cursed by a vivid imagination. Every time I touch a surface, I imagine all the tiny germs attaching themselves to my fingers. When I take a step, I see myself tripping or stubbing my toe. When I reach up to get something off of a shelf, I see the shelf come crashing down on my head.

  I’m not crazy, you know. I have fully recognized how irrational my fears and anxiety are. I am painfully aware that my life was good, and the only thing preventing it from being better was me. I had every reason to get out of bed in the morning, but it was still So. Damn. Hard.

  But I still did it. Does this make me strong? Or does the weakness of fear and depression cancel it all out? I’ve never been able to figure that out. People talk about courage not being the absence of fear, but rather that a person persists despite the fear. If this is true, I’m the most courageous person I’ve ever met. Which is laughable, considering how difficult it is for me to even step outside my front door.

  My alarm shrilled, singing its daily ode to 7:30. I threw back the covers and shuffled across the floor to turn it off. Today was like every day, except there was more food in the cabinets than yesterday.

  I set my phone on the table while I made my breakfast. Today, I decided to heck with those eggs, and tossed them into the trash. Then I threw some sausage patties into a pan on the stove, and sat at the table with one heel propped on the edge of the chair and my knee against my chest.

  My phone vibrated, and I reached over to pick it up. I swiped the screen to reveal yet another message about that egg-meteor.

  Deed, stop ignoring me. You gotta read this.

  I’ll read it only if you stop calling me Deed, Kayla.

  Fine. DEIDRE.

  True to my promise, that meant I had to read the article. I tapped on the link, which was different from the one Kayla had sent me yesterday, which I hadn’t responded to.

  MYSTERY METEOR EMITTING UNKNOWN RADIATION, PROMPTING MANDATORY EVACUATION OF LOCAL AREA

  I watched the news video that was attached, still wondering how this could possibly not be a hoax. It showed pictures of the object, shiny and black and as long as a school bus, laying in the middle of the desert. It shimmered in the heat, whether from a trick of the light, or from this strange radiation it was supposedly producing.

  I checked the site that had posted the article. Nope, definitely a legit site.

  Okay, I read it.

  THIS IS SO WEIRD Kayla’s response came almost instantly, making me think she’d been staring at her phone just waiting for me to come back. Do you think it’s like some alien spaceship or something??

  Aliens don’t really exist. Even as I typed, though, my traitor brain sent cold fingers into my spine. “What if?” it asked. “What if there are?”

  Day 5. September 22nd

  This was the fifth day since the strange meteor crashed. Nobody knew what the radiation was, only that it was spreading. Fear and panic were settling in. The roads out of the state were clogged with people fleeing the alien object. Two stores had been violently looted by those who had stayed behind. There was talk of sending the President and the Cabinet out of the country, in case the radiation ended up being dangerous.

  I watched it all through my phone screen in a sort of bemusement. It didn’t seem real. If it had been April first, I would have thought it was all some elaborate April Fools joke. I expected some state or country leader to pop up saying it had all been a drill, a test of preparedness, seeing how we would withstand if one of our enemies dropped a bomb in our midst. I wasn’t alone in that wondering, either. There were lots of blogs and gossip sites that speculated along the same lines.

  But there was nothing. No surprise announcements that it was all a huge hoax, not even from the major news outlets. Just the growing number of articles, the growing panic, and my growing unease that maybe it was real.

  Day 6. September 23rd

  I woke long before my alarm began to blare. Long before the clock hit 7, I was sitting up in my bed, comforter drawn around my shoulders, legs crossed, with my phone sitting on my knee. I cradled a steaming mug of tea in my left hand an
d balanced it on that knee while I scrolled through my phone with my right.

  I was so used to expending mass amounts of energy convincing myself that my fears and phobias weren’t really as bad as I thought they were. That this wasn’t going to happen. That it wasn’t going to be as scary as I imagined. That all the bad things happening in the world didn’t mean that I, ensconced in my heavy comforter, wasn’t safe at this exact moment in this exact place.

  The panic was still spreading. The radius of the radiation had now reached nearly a thousand miles outward from the object within six days. The rate of the spread was increasing. Only another day or two remained until it would reach my town. The mayor had issued a statement advising people to voluntarily evacuate, even though even he acknowledged that there wasn’t much further east we could drive before we hit the coast. Airlines were booked solid for the next two weeks, and the prices of tickets was now astronomical. Some countries had suspended passport and visa requirements for those fleeing the object.