THE DAYS IMMEDIATELY FOLLOWING the Rapture were days of intense confusion and doubt on the part of all those who hadn’t been taken. Between the loss of her family and the visions that had begun plaguing her more and more frequently, visions of angels fighting an epic battle against demons and devils, Stacy had days when she wondered seriously if she shouldn’t just take up drinking with a vengeance. After all, it had been her penchant for overindulgence that had caused her to be left, hadn’t it? Gluttony had been her sin, so why not embrace that and make it hers?

The people drifted in from all over town, drawn to her neighborhood, refugees taking up residence in the houses surrounding hers, houses that had, until that one night, been occupied by her actual neighbors. During the first week, Randy and Eddie had found another dozen, then another dozen after that. Ellen, the woman Stacy had met at the drugstore on that second day of the new world, was staying with Stacy in her house. The two women, having lost their husbands, made an instant connection and became fast friends, although Stacy often saw Ellen drifting off in her head and Stacy wondered how much of Ellen’s spark had been taken when her husband, Matt, had gone off to glory.

Randy and Eddie stayed over at Stacy’s more nights than not, but she made them share the bedroom while Ellen had been sleeping on the floor in her son Andy’s room. Stacy had been on the couch and would remain there. After a few days it was no longer a matter of not being able to sleep in the bed she shared with her husband, now she refused. A part of this refusal was angry indignation at whatever god had decided they should be separated for the rest of eternity. The other part was simple stubbornness.

There were days when reality came in like a wrecking ball and she locked herself in the bathroom until she stopped crying. There was a day when she sat on the couch and just stared at the pictures on the walls, ignoring everyone who tried to talk to her, locked inside her own head and unable to get out. That day had terrified her because Stacy tried to respond, tried to acknowledge people, but she felt frozen inside herself.

And then there were those visions.

“Eddie, I don’t know what it means,” she told her husband’s best friend the night she’d first had them, the second day after the Rapture, as she searched the drugstore for something for her headache and she’d suddenly seen her husband, lying there unconscious on the floor, while outside the building glowing white figures fought against massive black creatures.

The visions came and went and Stacy couldn’t control it, but on the other hand they did afford her some measure of peace.

“I know it was Trevor I saw,” she told Eddie as they sat at her kitchen table that second night. “But when the visions outside went away, so did he. I don’t know how to get him back.”

“He’s not coming back,” Eddie said. “Whatever you saw, it wasn’t Trevor.”

“It was,” she insisted. “I think when these headaches come, I’m seeing a part of something we weren’t meant to see. I mean if you look at everything, why not, right? All the good people went to Heaven--”

“I’m not a bad person,” Eddie said.

“No,” Stacy agreed. “You know what I mean, though. For whatever reason not all of us were taken. Anyway, all of these people were taken to Heaven. So what’s supposed to happen after that? What, they just go off to Heaven and that’s that?”

“No,” Randy interrupted. They both looked up as he came into the kitchen. Ellen was sleeping on the couch, so they kept their voices low.

“No what?” Stacy asked.

“That’s not what happens,” Randy said. “When God takes the righteous, it’s to fight in the battle at the end of time, the final battle of good versus evil. The angels and demons fight the war they’ve been fighting since Satan fell.”

Stacy nodded. “And that’s what I’m seeing,” she said.

Eddie shook his head, but Stacy wasn’t having it.

“I’m not some holy rolling bible thumper,” she said, “but I know what I saw. The question is why did I see it?”

“You’re the chosen one,” Randy intoned, a hint of awe in his voice, although Stacy couldn’t tell if it was genuine or not. When she looked at him, she saw he was only putting her on.

“You said yourself,” Eddie said, “your head was killing you, how do you know it wasn’t a hallucination caused by brain swelling.”

“Eddie, I’m not seeing things!” she said louder than she meant to.

“Technically you are,” Randy added.

“Ok, yes, technically I am seeing things. But what I’m seeing is real, I know it is. I touched Trevor. I grabbed his arms and pulled him to the back of the store.”

“Okay then answer me this,” Eddie said. “If you could touch Trevor, and these things are all around us fighting it out, how come we don’t feel them? You touched Trev, but they just, what, fight around us, pass through us? It doesn’t fit.”

“That’s a good point,” Randy said, getting the bread and a pack of turkey from the refrigerator.

“I can’t answer that,” Stacy said. “I don’t know.”

Stacy’s depression grew over those next few days, with the crying spells and staring blankly at nothing all day. People drifted into the neighborhood, lured there by Randy and Eddie--mostly Randy who went searching for “survivors” every day and never came back alone. She went outside less and less because when the visions came, it was outside that she saw them.

The sounds of people milling about was balm on the wound after that first awful day of silence when Stacy woke up hung over on the couch to find the only two people who mattered to her were gone.

There were discussions among those left about what to do next. At the most recent count, Stacy learned there were almost 200 people gathered in and around her neighborhood. She couldn’t fathom why those left had felt the need to congregate in this part of town, it wasn’t like her house was anything special. And what did Randy expect, that all these people would be so grateful to him for finding them and showing them there were still people left that they’d fall down in worship of him and make him their leader?

“Jesus,” she said one evening when she looked out the front window and saw another group of three following Randy down the street, looking around wide-eyed and awestruck.

The world went on. The news still broadcast minus only some of the anchors as far as Stacy could tell. The stories had changed, it seemed every night the news consisted of one story only: the Rapture and what it means for Us.

“Means I’m a sinner,” Stacy said to the TV one night. “I wasn’t good enough.”

While outside things like “good enough” no longer seemed an issue. In fact, among those gathering in her neighborhood, it seemed very much like, with all the “righteous” now gone, there was very little sense anymore in feigning things like restraint, consideration or charity. Why pretend to be good in hopes of getting into Heaven when Heaven had already shown they weren’t invited?

The parties began before the first week was over. What started as friendly neighborhood gatherings as a way for those still around to get to know one another and form a new community bond, something to offer comfort in their time of need, with cookouts and Frisbee, soon turned into an ongoing event with many people departing just long enough to sleep, then returning a few hours later to continue the party.

What could they be celebrating, Stacy wondered. What is there to be happy about? Then a headache would hit and outside she would see them again, the glowing white angels pitched in battle against the monstrous demons, further proof for her that they truly were damned and forgotten, castoff like empty Coke cans out the window.

During her visions, she always looked once more for Trevor, but so far she’d yet to see him again. She wondered if he’d been taken off the battlefield due to whatever injury had put him on the floor of the drugstore. Then she wondered how an angel could possibly be put out of commission when she’d seen them heal instantly from battle wounds. Whatever had happened to Trevor that day, she made herself believe he had simply woken up and resumed his place among the ranks

So she kept looking, but she never saw him. And she never again mentioned them to Randy or Eddie. Instead, she suffered through the pain that came with them, watched in awe and terror at the war that carried on unseen by the revelers outside her window, and generally lost all sense of hope for the future.

Ellen had yet to step out and join the party. In fact, she rarely left Andy’s room. Stacy decided one day that it would probably do them both some good to get out.

They walked out to the street and Stacy turned left. Ellen walked beside her.

They tried to ignore the street fair. It was mid-afternoon and simply too hot to party. Most of the people were sleeping or possibly gathered inside Stacy’s neighbor’s houses watching TV and enjoying some free air conditioning.

“That guy owns the gas station I used to go to,” she remarked as she and Ellen passed a man in shorts and Crocs sitting in the shade of a tree down the block from her house. He sat around a group of three others, passing a joint back and forth. “Last time I saw it, it had been picked clean of all the beer and snacks.”

“He seems really broken up over it,” Ellen commented.

“What is going on?” Stacy wondered. “I mean have you seen how many people are camped out here? And that’s just here, this little nothing corner of the world.”

“Yeah,” Ellen agreed.

“It doesn’t have to be this way,” Stacy said. “All this . . . lazing around, partying. How long until the food runs out? Or something happens at the electric company and the power’s gone? These people just aren’t thinking.”

Ellen shook her head. “Matt could have fixed that,” she said.

Ellen hadn’t talked much about her husband, but Stacy knew if she felt at all about hers the way Stacy felt about Trevor, talking about him probably just made it hurt more.

“With his unloaded gun?” Stacy joked. Matt’s gun had been unloaded when Ellen pointed it at Stacy at the drugstore, but when the people started coming in droves, they’d gone back to Ellen’s house and found the bullets, hiding the loaded gun in the bathroom, just in case.

Ellen chuckled, then said, “No, he wouldn’t need that. He had a way with words, that’s for sure. I always said he could have made more money as a salesman, the way he talked. He would have gotten everyone together and just explained to them in the way he did that the party was fun while it lasted, but it’s getting time to dig in and figure out how we’re going to survive now.”

They walked on and crossed the street to the next block where it was more of the same. The more people drifted in, the more of the neighborhood was taken over by the post-Armageddon revelers and the less peace there was. She and Trevor had moved to this neighborhood because of its location and atmosphere, it was a peaceful street where people didn’t bother you if you didn’t want to be bothered. That peace was gone and everywhere she looked all she saw were signs of the sins that had kept these people from being taken in the first place.

She and Ellen walked in silence and before she knew they’d gone so far Stacy looked up and realized they were four blocks from the house. The people were thin this far out and most of the houses still empty. She listened to the birds chirp in the trees and was glad to hear that over the sounds of music blaring or TVs blasting Scarface for the tenth time in two days.

She was about to comment on how much it sucked having to go so far from home for a little peace, but as the words formed in her mind, the pressure swelled and she put a hand on Ellen’s shoulder to balance herself and closed her eyes. She knew it was coming, she just didn’t want to see it. She turned her face toward Ellen’s shoulder and said, “God, my head hurts.”

Ellen asked, “Do you want me to go see if one of these houses has something?”

“No, that’s okay,” Stacy said. “Just hold on for a second.”

She waited. The pressure increased.

She decided she had to sit down and ride this out, and without thinking she opened her eyes to find a place to sit and was assaulted by the visions.

The war raged on, as usual. An angel stood in the street before them, and plunged a huge golden sword into a demon’s chest before pulling the blade free and swiping at another demon hovering overhead. Both demons fell and the angel turned its attention elsewhere.

The angels outnumbered the beasts this time, which wasn’t always the case when she was made witness to the battle. She looked for Trevor but he wasn’t here.

Then a face she recognized appeared and almost made her cry out. Stacy saw the face of an ex-boyfriend, a high school jock who had been killed in a drunk driving accident only two years after graduation. He’d been a braggart, and a loudmouth, and a mean drunk back then, and when Stacy had heard news of the accident, she found herself thinking, “That’s a shock,” without meaning it at all.

She hadn’t thought of him in years, probably not since she heard of his death. And here he was, bold as anything in front of her, his skin now pitch black and full of scars and sores, his brow ridged and his skull split open where horns had broken through. The specifics were horrible and the reality heartbreaking, but it was him nonetheless. The high school show off who’d spent his life putting others down and living it up, dead, sent to hell, made into a demon, and standing here at the end of the world fighting amongst the angels.

Stacy didn’t so much sit as she stumbled and folded to the ground, landing with a thud. Ellen let out a bark of surprise and asked if she was ok, but Stacy wasn’t listening. All of her focus was on the demon with her ex-boyfriend’s face.

He looked up and watched the battle. Stacy couldn’t tell what may be on his mind, if these creatures even had thoughts anymore. He’d been dead almost ten years. He didn’t join the fight, though, just stood back and watched. The hole in his chest from the angel’s sword was gone, healed completely. The other demon had already taken off and was attacking another angel in the air.

The ex-boyfriend, however, slowly moved into the crowd, in no hurry, seeming exhausted or possibly just hesitant.

She wanted to yell at an angel to watch out behind him, but the demon didn’t attack. Instead it put a hand on the angel’s shoulder. The angel whirled, ready to strike, but before it could, the demon went to its knees and looked up at it.

Stacy couldn’t hear them from where she sat so she had no idea what words passed between them, but she saw the look in the monster’s eyes as it peered up at the beautiful creature. The demon’s eyes showed regret, sorrow, pain, and hope.

The angel nodded its head and, almost without preamble, the demon planted a foot on the ground and stood up once more, but in the time it had taken to perform that one swift motion, the demon was gone and in its place stood another angel, this one with the face of Stacy’s ex-boyfriend from high school.

She got up and grabbed Ellen’s hand, hauling the woman back the way they’d come. Her head still pounded, but she fought her way through the pain and the battle, which still carried on all around her. She ducked flying demons and avoided running into an angel who had just been thrown to the ground.

Ellen saw none of this, and Stacy still didn’t know if it would be possible to touch any of them other than Trevor, nor did she want to find out. But the whole way back to the house, every time it looked like Ellen might run into one, stumble or hit one, it moved at that very moment and Stacy wondered how much of that was coincidence.

By the time they got back to the house, the headache had passed and the vision was gone, but the inspiration remained. If anything, the time it took to get back only gave the thought more time to grow and fill her with certainty.

She went inside for a short time, then a bit later came back out and addressed the crowd that had gathered outside her house.

“There’s a reason we’re still here,” she said. “Look around. Why are you still here,” she asked a young girl who had arrived last night. “Who did you lose? And why weren’t you taken along with them? Or you?” she said, addressing an old man who looked like he’d spent too many hard years in a factory. “Why are any of us here? I’ll tell you why I’m still here. I didn’t drink all the time, but when I did, I did it hard, and my husband Trevor and I used to fight about it a lot. He hated it when I came home drunk. And I knew he did, but it didn’t stop me. Then I woke up one morning and my husband and baby were gone and I was still here.

“You all know Randy,” she went on, motioning to the kid, the first person she’d met in this new world, previous stock boy at the local grocery store, now resident party boy. “When I first met Randy, he was convinced it was his lust that kept him here, and I believe now that it was.”

Randy gave her a look of shock.

“He thinks that, because he’s so young, he should be forgiven for just following his natural tendencies. But we forgot somewhere along the way, we all did--and that’s why we didn’t get picked. We forgot that the rules were set down a long time ago. And we all grew up knowing those rules. And ignoring them.”

She pulled a piece of paper from her pocket and unfolded it.

“I saw something today,” Stacy said, “that gave me hope. We were left here because we weren’t good enough. But we can change that. We can change ourselves. We can do better and I believe, if we prove that we’re worthy, that we mean it, that we really are good people and not let our sins define us, I think that, when we die, we’ll get to join our loved ones again.

“I know we’re all having fun here, and I don’t want you to stop, I think considering what we’ve all been through, we deserve some time to wrap our heads around it and to just be. But pretty soon the party has to stop and we have to get back to the business of living. There are other people out there, lots of them. The news still airs, we still have television shows. We still have the radio. The world is still there, waiting for us. And when the party ends, and it will end, we just have to follow the rules,” she said and began reading from the paper.

“Thou shalt have no other gods. Thou shalt worship no graven images or likenesses. Thou shalt not take the Lord’s name in vain.”

Cries of “What the hell is this” and “Give me a break!” began echoing through the crowd, but Stacy read on.

“Alright, we get it!” someone yelled. “Is this for real?”

“These were the rules we grew up with, and they’re the rules we all broke. We know there are seven deadly sins, and I believe as long as we keep these rules as our guides for the rest of our lives on Earth, those sins will never again be an issue, and once we’ve made those changes in our hearts, when it’s our time, we’ll be taken to be with our families. There’s always hope.”

“Are you retarded or something?” the girl asked. “Hope? My whole family is gone. Bye bye.”

“So is mine,” Stacy said.

“So you wanna have hope? You go right ahead. Me, I’m just here. I’m gonna try to forget. Like all these other people wanna do. We don’t want to think about them, or what happened or why it didn’t happen to us. Because you know what? I know I’m a good person. So you can get out of here talking about I’m a sinner and I’m going to Hell. You don’t know me. You don’t know none of us. Who are you?”

“I live here,” Stacy said. “You’re in my yard. In fact, I’m the only one here who does live on this block. You came here, I didn’t come to you.”

“So what you want, a prize? Yeah, I’m here. So is everyone else.”

“We’re already damned!” the old man from the factory said. He worked his way to the front of the crowd to address Stacy directly. “Why do you think we’re here and they’re not? He didn’t want us. We weren’t good enough. If He’s so great, don’t you think he would have known if we could change? Get it through your head. I don’t know about anyone else here,” he said, turning around to address the crowd now, “but I feel like getting drunk and fucking something!”

The crowd cheered and the old man stalked off and Stacy lost track of him.

She turned back to the crowd before she lost them completely and said, “I promise you, He hasn’t forgotten us. We’re not dead, and that means there’s hope. I don’t know what’s going to happen next. But what I do know is that we can change, we can make ourselves better, and we can be forgiven for what we’ve done.”

“I ain’t done nothing!” the girl insisted. “So you go on and do you, I’mma do me, and I’m done listening.”

With that the girl turned away and went off, and in seconds the rest of the crowd joined her, leaving Stacy on her porch, wondering what was wrong with everyone, why were they so stubborn? Couldn’t they see the sense of what she said? Were they so set in their ways, so lost in their sins, that even the promise of forgiveness if only they could refrain from the thing that damned them in the first place meant nothing to them?

The crowd was gone. Only Randy remained, and he was looking at her like she may be infected.

“What’s wrong with you?” he asked. “These people are still upset, and you lay this guilt trip on them?”

“It’s not a guilt trip. I saw it today. I had one of those visions and I saw this demon who was this guy I knew in high school, and in the middle of the fighting he just stopped and he said something and this angel touched him, and before he even got to his feet, he was an angel, too. There’s hope, I’m telling you.”

“Or maybe some of what these people have been smoking is getting in through the screen at night and messing up your head,” he said. “You can’t make decisions for these people based on something only you can see, Stace. Have a little compassion.”

“Compassion?” she almost screamed. “I lost everything, too, remember, and I don’t get to go off and vacation in some new place and play with brand new toys that don’t belong to me. I’m still here every day in the house I shared with my husband and son, and I live with it all day, every day, while all these complete strangers just party it up all night in my neighbors’ houses. So don’t fucking talk to me about compassion!”

He backed away a few steps.

“You’re right,” he said. “I’m sorry. Look, just give them some time, okay? Let them have their fun and when they get it out of their systems, they might come around.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Maybe.”

She didn’t believe it, though. They had stated their case as she’d stated hers. The problem was, they weren’t going to hear her. And she couldn’t say she blamed them. They had a point, and they hadn’t seen what she’d seen, so for all they knew what she said were the words of a desperate woman.

She went inside and closed and locked the door. She doubted Randy would be in tonight, he was surely off doing damage control, telling the crowd not to pay any attention to the crazy woman, she was suffering post partum or something. Ellen was in her room, and probably wouldn’t be out the rest of the night. Who knew where Eddie was.

It was amazing the people she had come to rely on in such a short time, she mused.

She went to the bathroom, then came back and turned out the living room light and stretched out on the couch, staring up at the ceiling in the dark. This was the time of day she missed Trevor the most and when she heard Ellen move in Andy’s room, her heart leapt for a moment because she expected the baby to cry out, and when he didn’t, it hit home once more, and that was the worst feeling.

The partiers outside got louder and she buried her face in the couch, trying to shut it out. She felt anger at their ignorance, then felt bad for thinking it.

“They’re just blind,” she said to herself. They didn’t see like she saw, they didn’t see what she saw. But still, knowing what happened, seeing the news reports, knowing it wasn’t some mysterious event, that it really had been God taking the righteous to Heaven . . . you would think a reality check like that would serve as a huge wake up call to get your shit together.

The party went on, as it had been doing, well into the night. Music played and voices were raised, laughing and yelling. Someone had gotten especially drunk and was in the middle of the street, screaming to the sky, yelling his wife’s name. Stacy didn’t want to be that person, but she thought if not for the visions, if not for what she had seen with her own eyes to be true, it very well could have been her. She could have wound up being the sloppy drunk in the middle of the street, screaming at God to bring back her family. God knew she had enough experience getting to that point.

Her head started pounding again and Stacy was afraid to open her eyes and see what was happening outside. And that’s when another piece clicked into place in her mind and she got up went back into the bathroom.

Ellen was closed up for the night and no one else could get into the house. She couldn’t bear the thought of living here with all this going on right outside, but something inside her refused to let her leave, either. For better or worse, this was her home. It was they who were the intruders, and they wouldn’t run her off.

So what she had to do, she would do here, where she belonged. And if the aftermath left them all with a bad taste, that couldn’t be helped, could it?

The pain in her head felt like her skull was about to split in two.

She was back in the living room again and laid back on the couch. She looked up at the ceiling and saw an angel standing there. He may have resembled Trevor; her head was so rattled now it was hard to say for sure, but she imagined it was and that made it so, and she was able to look into his eyes and mutter, “I’m sorry. Forgive me,” to which the angel nodded once and smiled.

Stacy bit down on the barrel of Matt’s gun and squeezed the trigger.