THE MORNING AFTER THE RAPTURE, Stacy realized two things. First, she would never see her husband or son again. And second, there was nothing she could do about it. The event had happened, past tense, and she’d been left to . . . to what? She had no idea. Fend for herself? Find any people still remaining and try to re-establish society? Spend the rest of her life alone?

She had Randy for company, the teenage stock boy who followed her home yesterday. And there was Eddie, her husband Trevor’s best friend, who had also been left on earth, and that didn’t surprise her. But even with these two in tow, Stacy had no idea what her next move should be.

Her head had been pounding all morning, so she swallowed a small handful of Ibuprofen, put on coffee, then stood at the open front door while it brewed, staring through the storm door at the deserted neighborhood outside.

How many had been taken? How many were left? Of all the people in town, she couldn’t imagine it was just herself, Randy and Eddie. The news had broadcast the story yesterday, so there were still others left, but that station was an out-of-town affiliate and that didn’t mean there was anyone left around here. But still the question remained: did she want to find anyone else?

She couldn’t answer that. No crowd of survivors would make up for her lost family.

Scratch that, she thought. Trevor and Andy aren’t lost, they’re right where they belong. And I’m most definitely not a survivor. I didn’t live through the Rapture, I was rejected.

She needed to get her head clear on those details right now. There was nothing rewarding in Stacy’s situation. This was Hell.

The brewing coffee brought Randy and Eddie out from the back rooms. They’d stayed at Stacy’s last night, no one wanting to spend the night alone. She had slept on the couch. She had a feeling this would be the way of things for a while. The thought of being alone in the house at night was too much to take.

Eddie poured himself a cup of coffee while Randy disappeared into the bathroom. He asked his best friend’s wife, “You okay?”

She looked over her shoulder at him, but didn’t reply. Then she went outside and sat on the front steps. She wondered if she had any more tears left inside her or if she’d exhausted those reserves yesterday.

The silence outside closed in on her and she got up, walked to the end of her yard and looked up and down both sides of the neighborhood, then went to stand in the middle of the street. She turned around, looking, listening, trying to will someone else into existence. Trevor would be nice. After all, she’d been passed out drunk when he was taken, so maybe he wasn’t really gone. Maybe he saw what was happening and panicked and took Andy somewhere he thought would be safe.

She knew this was unlikely, but her mind had been working overtime since yesterday, running through countless scenarios that resulted in her getting her family back. Stacy looked up at the sky, wishing the clouds would form Andy’s face, wishing a shooting star would flash by giving her a sign Trevor was ok, or, hell, as long as she was wishing, let’s just get a few angels to descend from the clouds and tell her she was late, that she was supposed to have been taken with her husband and son.

And then, of course, her sins filled her up again and made her stomach turn to lead and her heart to sink a good six inches in her chest. There would be no late arrivals, no scheduling corrections. She was here, and she had no one to blame for that, but herself.

She went back inside and found Randy and Eddie sitting at the kitchen table discussing their next move.

“We need to stock up,” Randy was insisting. “Get to the store and get as much as we can before it’s all gone.”

“Have you looked outside?” Eddie said. “There’s not a lot of competition out there! So what, we bring all the frozen meats and cans of soup over here?”

“Who said anything about over here?” Stacy interjected. “How is my house all of the sudden base camp?”

“Well,” Randy said, Eddie nodding along, “we just figured, cuz, you know, it’s nicer and all and bigger that, you know, we’d just--”

“Just move in?”

Eddie nodded again and Randy looked at something interesting on the table in front of him.

“You’re talking like the zombie apocalypse has hit and it’s dog eat dog out there. And anyway last night you were saying the demons were coming and all hope was lost!”

“And they are coming,” Randy said. “But they’re not gonna just waltz into town, they’re gonna wait until they can catch us off guard. So I’m figuring we just keep expecting it, stay ready, and they won’t be able to do that. And anyway, until they do come, we still have to eat.”

“So we just go steal whatever we want and that makes us good people?”

Eddie drained the coffee in his cup and went for a refill.

“Steal what? From whom? There’s no one there.”

“Then why do we need to stock up?” Eddie asked.

“Because,” Randy said. “There might be people out there.”

“And they don’t need to eat as much as we do?” Stacy asked.

“What the hell, man, I’m just watching out for us is all!”

“You’re not thinking,” Stacy said. “The news was on yesterday. The power is still on. Just because the people we love--and everyone in my neighborhood but me--are gone, that doesn’t mean the world is empty. There are obviously still people out there. Society hasn’t broken down just yet, so we’re not going Lord of the Flies on day two!”

“Then what,” Eddie asked, “we just sit here and wait for someone to come find us and take us to wherever the Army is putting all the survivors?”

Stacy looked at Eddie.

“That’s what they do in movies, isn’t it?”

She shook her head and poured herself a cup of coffee.

“This isn’t a movie, and I’ve got plenty of food here. And anyway you two are not moving in. Randy, you’re a good kid, but no. And Eddie? You’re Trevor’s best friend but do you really think he’d want you just moving in?”

Eddie shrugged.

“I’m trying to do right by my friend and taking care of you.”

“I don’t need taking care of. I need my husband and my son back.”

No one said anything for a couple of minutes, the situation hanging heavy over them. It wasn’t just that the Rapture had happened. The real issue was that they hadn’t been worthy enough.

In the end, she refused to go scavenging like some Mad Max refugee, but she would go out with Randy and Eddie and search for more people. And even that was only because she still held out that slimmest hope that maybe Trevor and Andy might be out there somewhere.

Anyway, her head still hurt, so maybe she’d pick up something stronger while she was out.

Phone service was still up, so they exchanged numbers and said they’d keep each other informed, then would meet back at Stacy’s later tonight. This last part didn’t irk her as much as she’d thought it would. While these two were not moving in, she didn’t want to think about how she might spend a night alone here knowing why she was alone.

Stacy headed for the business district (there was a pharmacy there), while Randy took the grocery story where he worked and Eddie went downtown. She knew Randy would come back with stolen food and Eddie would come back smelling of booze. But if either of them also came back with more “survivors”, that might be good, too. Meanwhile her headache had settled right behind her eyes, giving them the sensation of swelling, as if about to burst from her sockets like some overgrown pug.

She drove toward the highway, but had to pull over twice as bright flashes of light appeared before her. The sun was behind her, but it wasn’t reflecting in her mirror, so the flashes had to be from the headache. She had to be careful she didn’t run the car into a pole or a wall before she could get where she was going. She had told Randy they weren’t scavengers, but right now she’d be whatever she had to in order to get this headache to calm down.

She got another few miles down the road, the pharmacy in sight, when another flash behind her eyes, coupled with a throb that sent vibrations down her body, caused her to pull over again, turn off the car, and bury her face in her hands, pressing against her eyes until the pain went away. Finally she looked up for a second to gauge her reaction to the light and was rocked back as her vision registered the dots of light before her as figures, red and white and dancing about the air, angels and demons battling in the sky, but that was just her mind using the last two days’ events against her and coming up with some hallucination because after she blinked the vision was gone.

But her headache remained.

She made the pharmacy and had a moment where she knew the doors would be locked. If that happened, Eddie and Randy would find her days later, lying in the backseat of her car and crying through the pain in her head. It was that bad. She’d never had a headache like this, even on her worst drunken morning. It was blinding and the pressure inside her skull caused a panic in her that sent her heart racing.

The automatic doors opened when she approached and Stacy sighed a little, then headed straight for the headache pills.

She rummaged through half a dozen different over the counter pills, then decided to aim higher, and headed for the prescription counter. She was trying to remember the name of the pills she’d taken for migraines several years earlier, but couldn’t bring that memory to the fore, so she scanned the various pills racked neatly into their slots, hoping something would ring a bell.

She had found three bottles that might be what she’d taken, and had set them aside, when a noise in the store made her stop, duck out of sight, and listen.

She backed herself into the corner and tried to be invisible.

The pill bottle in her hand slipped out from the sweat on her palms, hit the floor, and she tensed up, expecting whoever was out there to come charging back after her.

No one came. She listened. She eased away from the corner, toward the wall separating the store from the pharmacy counter. She stood up so slowly her knees almost gave out. With her head pressed against the wall, Stacy moved so the window in the door gave her a view of the store.

She only saw the tops of the aisles with the exception of the two directly in front of her.

She heard a noise, a voice this time. A groan.

She ducked out of sight and hurried to the door to block it in case someone tried to come back here.

She tried to figure out from where the noise was coming, which aisle, and, hopefully, could she see anyone there without having to go out to the floor?

She couldn’t. She had to go out there. It was the last thing she wanted to do, but it occurred to her someone could be hurt, and wasn’t the goal of today to find more people, if they were out there to be found?

She pushed through the door and slid her feet along the floor, easing down the end of the aisles. Her head pounded and the light flashed in her eyes again, almost sending her to floor, but her fear overpowered it and kept her upright and quiet as she breathed through the pain. The muscles in her arms tightened to the point of shaking and her fists clenched until the attack was over, then she continued across the store until she saw him.

Trevor lay on the floor, facedown and unconscious.

Stacy gasped and nearly leapt down the aisle to help him. She shook him and tried to wake him, but Trevor didn’t budge. She looked at him, trying to see if he was hurt or bleeding. She didn’t recognize the clothes he wore, white slacks and a matching button-down shirt. She noticed he was barefoot.

Then she wondered about the baby, and yelled, “Trevor! Trevor, wake up. Where’s the baby, Trevor? Where’s Andy?”

She turned him over onto his back and tried to rouse him by slapping his cheeks, but Trevor was out cold. The longer he was out, the longer she wondered about the baby, the more frantic she grew until she was screaming into his face and shaking him violently. Trevor never opened his eyes.

She wondered if he’d brought Andy here with him, or if he was outside, and she got up and ran down every aisle in the store, then rushed outside to see if Trevor’d set him down for some reason while he came inside. It made no sense, but neither did Trevor showing up here alone.

She felt another bout of vertigo coming on and the pressure in her head flared suddenly, sending blinding spikes of light into her eyes, but Stacy couldn’t let that stop her from finding her baby and she tried to fight through it, but something in her head, possibly caused by swelling in her brain, was sending the most insane hallucinations to her. As she stepped outside, hoping to see her son in his stroller, sitting under the shade of the store’s canopy, instead she saw a terrifying battle taking place overhead.

Figures in white slew a horde of black and red creatures that attacked them in the sky. She watched a gigantic black beast rip one of the white figures in half. It tossed the halves away and as they fell, the pieces of the white figure merged again and resumed its fight with a different beast, this one larger than the first and dripping red all over.

She didn’t see Andy out here. She ducked back inside the store, then ran back to Trevor and tried to wake him up, but he just wasn’t budging.

Stacy grabbed his wrists and hauled him back behind the pharmacy counter until she could wake him up or figure out something else to do.

She looked over the counter and saw through the window a half dozen of the things pummeling each other right outside.

She ducked out of sight again, then remembered the phone. She pulled it out of her pocket and called Eddie, but he didn’t answer. Then she dialed Randy’s phone, and he answered on the second ring.

“Randy!” she yelled into the phone. “What’s going on? What is all this?”

“Wait wait, slow down,” Randy said. “What?”

“Where are you?”

“I’m at the store,” he said. “Hey, do you like pepperoni or sausage?”

“What?”

“I’m getting some pizzas.”

“Pizzas,” Stacy asked. “Are you kidding me? Have you looked outside?”

“What’s going on outside?” There was silence for a moment from Randy’s end, then he came back and asked, “Really, what’s going on outside? I don’t see it.”

“Seriously? Look up in the sky, what the hell?”

“I’m looking,” Randy said. “I don’t see it. What am I looking for?”

Stacy looked over the counter again, out the front window, just in time to see one of the black creatures lose its head to one of the white figures.

She hid again and said, “Stop playing around and LOOK OUT SIDE!”

“I’m looking,” Randy insisted. “I’m standing outside right now, and I’m looking everywhere, but I’m telling you whatever you’re seeing, it’s not here. Where are you?”

“How do you not see it? It’s everywhere. They’re everywhere.”

“Who?”

Pissed now, she hung up on him and called Eddie again, but, again, he didn’t answer. She wondered if he hadn’t stumbled into what was going on out there. God please, she thought, don’t let me be stuck here with just Randy. I know I can’t stand Eddie, but I can’t be alone with Randy.

Then she remembered her husband was right here.

“Trevor!” she yelled again, still trying with everything she had to get him to open his eyes, anything to let her know he was okay.

Where in the hell was Andy? He couldn’t be alone out there, he was only a few months old. How could Trevor have just left him?

Then again, Trevor had come here. Why? Was Andy sick? Stacy had just seen him the day before yesterday, he couldn’t be sick. With every second that passed, the possibilities grew worse, and would continue to do so until Trevor woke up and told her what was going on.

She slapped him with all the force she could, hoping that would wake him, but nothing worked.

She looked around for a bottle of water to throw in his face, but there was nothing back here. She looked over the counter and found the aisle where the bottled water was kept. She could get there and back in five seconds.

The war outside was still going on. A red and black monster the size of an elephant grabbed one of the white figures and bit it in half.

Stacy tried once more to wake up her husband.

Finally she decided to make a dash for the water. She slid through the door, into the store, crawling on her hands and knees, and ended up having to stop halfway to hold her head in her hands and squeeze her eyes shut against the ice picks being shoved repeatedly into the backs of her eyeballs. She wanted to scream and wondered why in the hell nothing was working to make this headache go away.

She pounded her fist against the floor until the wave passed again and she could breathe. She grabbed a bottle of water from a case at one of the endcaps by aisle two. She started making her way back to the pharmacy counter and paused to peak around the next aisle and look outside.

There was nothing. The sun shone down, but otherwise all she saw outside was nothing at all. She stood up. She went to the front of the store and looked out the windows but, again, whatever had been going on out there was apparently over.

She thought for only a second about stepping outside to make sure, but after what she’d seen already, she knew there was no way she could do that.

She went back to the pharmacy counter, unscrewing one of the bottled water lids to hopefully try to wake up her husband, but when she got back there, Trevor was gone.

She looked in every cubby in the pharmacy area, looked under the drive-up window, under the pharmacy counter, but Trevor wasn’t back here. He must have woken up and left while she was getting the water, but that hadn’t taken more than ten seconds. She ran through all the store aisles, calling his name, but got no answer.

Stacy went outside and looked up both sides of the streets, yelling, “Trevor! Babe, where’d you go? I’m right here, Trevor. Come back to the pharmacy!”

There was no answer. At least, not from Trevor. A few seconds after the sound of her voice stopped ringing in the air, Stacy heard very faintly, barely audible at all, an answering voice, sounding like a young girl, calling, “Who are you?”

She looked around, trying to pinpoint the direction it came from, but out here there were nothing but businesses, pawn shops and restaurants and gas stations and used car lots and appliance rentals and a bookstore and a movie theater, ad nauseum as far as the eye could see up one end of the highway and down the other.

“Hello?” she called, cocking her head and listening for the reply.

“Who are you?” the voice returned. “Who sent you?”

“Hello?” Stacy yelled to the air. “I was looking for anyone who might be left. Are you okay?”

“Who sent you?” the voice repeated.

“Who sent me? No one, I’m here alone. There’s me and two others, back at my house, but we haven’t found anyone else. Where are you?”

“Who are you with?”

Stacy stopped. She looked around, suddenly nervous, insecure that she was out in the open like this, exposed, with no idea who else was out there, or what they were doing.

“I can’t hear you,” she called. “Come out so we can talk. Do you need help?”

“Where is everyone?” the voice called, and Stacy detected a hint of panic in it.

“They’re gone,” she said. “It was on the news yesterday. Almost everyone, they’re gone.”

She still couldn’t bring herself to say the words out loud: God took them to Heaven and left us here to rot.

“Please come out and talk,” Stacy asked. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

There was no reply this time. She waited a minute, her eyes wandering the landscape, trying to figure out where this girl could be hiding. Anywhere, that’s where. Literally anywhere out there.

“We’re looking for survivors,” Stacy called, then regretted the choice of words. Not survivors, she reminded herself: rejects.

“Are there any more out there?” she asked. “We’re just trying to help.”

“You can help,” the girl’s voice said from behind her. Stacy realized she had heard the girl approaching, but was so intent on trying to see ahead of her that she hadn’t been paying attention. Until she heard the click of the hammer cocking. “You can tell me where is everyone and what did you do with them?”

Stacy raised her hands to show she was unarmed. The bottles of water in each hand got very heavy with her arms raised like that.

“I didn’t do anything with them,” she said. “I woke up yesterday and everyone was gone. My husband, my son, everyone.”

“You said there were more at your house, and you keep saying ‘we.’”

“Yes,” Stacy said. “I was out looking for my family when someone found me. A kid, he works at the grocery store in my neighborhood.”

“Who else?”

“A friend of my husband. He’s still here, too. Did you see the news yesterday?”

“No,” the girl said. “Who is Trevor? Make him come out or I shoot you!”

Stacy wanted to turn around, just to get a look at her face. If this girl was going to kill her, Stacy wanted to see what she looked like. But she didn’t dare move.

And that’s when the headache flared up again, and everything went bright, and the ice picks returned to the backs of Stacy’s eyes, which flew open wide before she collapsed, clutching her face, pressing against her lids and grinding her teeth against the pressure on her skull.

She went to her knees and very faintly heard the girl with the gun issuing a warning to stop it and get up, stop it right now, but Stacy was lost to the real world, trapped for the moment inside this other, more painful world of razorblades in her brain and sirens blaring in her face as she tried to will the pain away.

She felt something press against the back of her head and she looked up, opened one eye to look around, but she didn’t see the girl with the gun. Or rather, she didn’t just see the girl with the gun. Surrounding them on all sides, the battle raged on as pitch black creatures with long tails and sharp teeth tore their way through dozens, hundreds of glowing white creatures that seemed immune to pain.

Stacy fell back, flat on the sidewalk, staring up at the sky, watching this panorama above her play out like the biggest movie screen she’d ever seen.

Swords and claws were swung, wounds opened, combatants felled. For every creature that was taken down, it seemed another three took its place, never mind which side of the skirmish the loss came on.

Her eyes widened further as a thing that looked like a gorilla, only twice the size, rushed toward them from behind the girl with the gun, snarling and beating at the ground as it ran. Stacy tried to move, to back out of its path, but the girl with the gun looked around, saw nothing, and pointed the gun back at Stacy. Stacy pointed and yelled something and just before it trampled the girl with the gun, the gorilla thing leaped over her, colliding mid-air with one of the white figures. They hit with a force Stacy would have swore she could feel herself, then tore into each other.

She looked around and saw the black creatures were climbing up the sides of the buildings, leaping into the air to attack the white ones. She scanned the entire sky above and saw thousands of the things, the fighting filling her entire field of vision, above, around, everywhere she looked.

She just barely noticed the girl, somewhere in the back of her mind, ask if Stacy was having a seizure. Stacy squeezed her eyes shut and pressed her hands to the sides of her head, trying to make the pressure go away, and just as she felt she was about to scream, it vanished as quickly as it had come.

She felt it this time, the sensation of a vice being slipped off her head and everything cleared, except for the very faint sensation of a hand on the back of her neck, spreading warmth through her. She took a breath and didn’t feel like she might vomit, which was a good thing.

She looked up. The creatures were gone. And like clouds parting to reveal a true summer’s day, Stacy had a vision, a clarity of mind, maybe an intuition. Whatever she called it, she felt it with a certainty stronger than any in her life.

Trevor and Andy really were gone, but something was happening to her, something was being accessed in her, that allowed her to see things others couldn’t. Randy hadn’t seen it when she called him earlier, and this girl hadn’t seen anything either. Stacy may have thought it had been her own hallucination, her slip into madness, were it not for the hand touching the back of her neck, that familiar positioning, that warmth, that gesture of “Everything’s okay.”

She looked up at the girl with the gun and said, “You can put that away. I’m not going to hurt you. I’m Stacy.”

She got to her feet. The girl kept the gun on her, but was no longer aiming. Now that Stacy got a look at her, she realized this was no girl, this was a woman, older than Stacy by ten years. She was short, though, petite, with a high voice, giving her a warped childish look.

“Where is Trevor?”

“He’s not here,” Stacy said. “No one’s here but me, and you. I have two friends, Randy and Eddie. Randy is checking for more people and probably filling up on groceries. Eddie went downtown, which means he’s most likely drinking. Trevor is my husband. He was taken along with everyone else, but I thought I saw him for a minute earlier, so I was yelling for him. He’s not here, though.”

“Where is everyone?”

“You really don’t know,” Stacy said, amazed.

The woman shook her head.

“I’m scared.”

“I know,” Stacy said. “I can’t blame you for that. Put the gun down, come home with me.”

Something in Stacy’s voice convinced the woman to lower the weapon, but she did it very slowly.

“Not everyone’s gone,” Stacy said. “There are plenty left. We just have to find them. But until we do, I’m here. You’re not alone.”

At this it seemed everything in the woman that had been holding on for the past two days, whatever had kept her going, suddenly fell out of place and she sat on the sidewalk outside the pharmacy next to an empty highway and cried.

Stacy sat next to her, a couple of feet distance between them, and waited. She realized she was still holding the bottles of water and set them between her feet.

Stacy’s phone rang. The woman jumped, then looked at her like she’d witnessed a miracle. Stacy pulled the phone from her pocket, looked at the screen, and answered.

“Hello?”

“Hey,” it was Randy. “I found a couple of people here. Five, not all at once, but here and there. We’re all going back to your house. Do you mind? I got a ton of food in the back of my car.”

“Yeah, that’s fine,” Stacy said. “Have you heard from Eddie?”

“No, I’ll call him,” Randy said. “Have you found anyone?”

“Yes,” Stacy said. “We’ll be there in a bit.”

They hung up and Stacy stuck out her hand. “Randy says he’s found a bunch of other people. We’re going to meet at my house. You can come, if you want.”

“I just want to go home,” the woman said.

“You can do that, too.”

“There’s no one there,” the woman said. “There’s no one, anywhere.”

“Come with me, then. Everything’s going to be ok,” Stacy said, knowing she meant it.

The woman took her hand and Stacy helped her up. They walked to Stacy’s car, and Stacy handed her one of the bottles of water, which the woman drank quickly.

“What’s your name?” Stacy asked.

The woman wiped her mouth with her hand. The gun was in the waistband of her jeans.

“Ellen.”

“Ellen, would you really have shot me?”

“It’s not loaded,” Ellen said. “My husband, Matt, he doesn’t . . . didn’t keep the bullets in the same place as the gun, and I could only find the key for the gun. Please, where is everyone?”

“Let’s wait until we get to my house, okay?” Stacy said. “I don’t know who else is coming, don’t know if we’ll be repeating ourselves, so we’ll all just talk when we get there.”

Ellen nodded.

Stacy drove home.