SHE WOKE UP IN A PLACE she didn’t recognize, and it reminded her of another awakening in a time when the world had changed overnight. But beyond that brief flash of the past, she couldn’t say anything more, mostly because she simply didn’t know. She sat up and rubbed her eyes, looked around and wondered Where am I? and How did I get here? and a dozen other questions she didn’t have immediate answers for.

Strangely, she felt calm. Whatever had happened, or was going to happen, it didn’t worry her.

She stood up and dusted herself off. Dressed in clothes she wasn’t sure were hers except they fit okay, a pair of Coke pajama pants and a Jimi Hendrix T-shirt, she wore old torn tennis shoes that may have once been Converse but were now lucky just to be called shoes at all. She tested the shoes and they stayed on her feet as she took a step. She was facing a direction when she stood, so that was the direction she headed, not knowing what lie ahead.

She had woken in a field of tall grass, overgrown, untended for who knew how long. But closer inspection as she made her way across the field indicated this had, at one time, been a park. Benches lie hidden amongst the grass, in the distance to her left a paved basketball court and to the right a jumble of forgotten play equipment. Everything here looked just as abandoned as she felt and she suspected this place hadn’t experienced a child’s laughter in years.

The park was vast and she walked for what felt a long time, passing another play area, a parking area and a lagoon teeming with goldfish the size of bass. Down a long driveway and across the street at the bottom were the empty remains of a city swimming pool, also untended for however long the world had been empty.

And empty it was because she could walk down the middle of the street and there were no cars coming either way, no people walking dogs or carrying babies despite how beautiful the morning sky was. She wondered for the first time what day it was, what time, and that brought back the question of how had she gotten here?

The street was long and wide, four lanes across, an avenue, although the glare of the sun shone off the street signs preventing her from reading the name of the avenue without moving closer. She passed a Dollar General with empty glass doors, the interior of the building black and, she guessed, empty. Same with the grocery store, the gas station, the Dairy Queen she passed. All looted, all abandoned.

An intersection sparked a memory she couldn’t make solid, but it was enough, so she turned left and followed the street a few more blocks until her feet said to turn again, this time to the right. She did, and continued on.

Everything around her should be familiar, she felt, but how or why, she couldn’t say. It was the same thing when she tried to recall her name. She felt a memory there, fighting to get out, struggling against a powerful tide, but drowning in the tumultuous ocean of her mind.

She only walked another three blocks before turning onto a particular street and finding a particular house that she stopped and thought This is where I was going. She stood in the street, staring at the screen door. The houses around it, on either side and across the street, had been empty for a long time, but this one stood out because it had been maintained. She didn’t know by whom, but she guessed it was by the man peeking out the front window.

She took a hesitant step onto the sidewalk, watching him through the window. He didn’t move until she took another two steps and had entered the yard.

The curtain fell back and the front door opened and the barrel of a gun appeared. A voice behind the gun asked, “What do you want?”

She waited, wondering if the man holding the gun would come out. After a second, she guessed not, so she took another step closer and the hand holding the gun pulled back the hammer. She stopped.

“Hello?” she asked.

“What do you want?” the man repeated, but still refused to emerge from the house. “This is private property. You looking for a house, pick somewhere else, you can’t come in here.”

She looked around at the other houses, trying to make the memories return.

“Not those,” the man said. “Not on this block. Not in this neighborhood. Go back where you came from or just go somewhere else. You’re not wanted around here.”

She felt a moment of rejection and thought, But I didn’t do anything. Before she could say it, the gun withdrew, the door closed--and locked--and the curtains in the front window moved again. He was back to staring at her through the window.

Instead of approaching the house, she moved sideways, to be better centered in his view, and mouthed the words, “Where am I?”

The man behind the curtain just stared, scowling. A grown man with his hair kept long and pulled back. He needed a shave and when he opened the door again and stepped out onto the small concrete porch, she noticed his clothes were in rough shape as well. Torn and faded jeans with the knees worn out, a thin T-shirt with frayed collar and holes along the bottom edge. Whatever had been pictured on the shirt was long gone, a big blurry smudge that may at one time have been orange or red.

He still had his gun, a revolver, in his hand, but it wasn’t pointed at her. His eyes scanned the neighborhood, though, as if he suspected she might be a decoy.

“You’re lost?” he asked. His eyes never settled on her.

“I don’t know. I woke up in a park, and I came here. Do you know me?”

He finally looked at her, from the porch, and she remained at the end of the yard, on the sidewalk. He gave her only a cursory look, but shook his head and said, “No. I don’t know you, and, I’m sorry, you have to go.”

“You’re lonely,” she said before he could duck back inside. “You’ve been here a long time with no one to talk to. No one to trust. I’m not here to hurt you. I just want to know where I am. Maybe how I got here. And if you had any food, that would be nice.”

He watched her for a few seconds, searching for a lie in her face. She guessed he didn’t see one because he finally stepped back and said, “Come in.”

She walked up to the door and he stood there while she came in, holding the door open while she entered. She looked around the living room and saw pictures of faces she didn’t recognize. None of the pictures showed this man, unless the baby she saw in a few of them were him, but for some reason she didn’t think it was. She looked at him as he closed and locked the door--she noticed he had a bar he laid across it, held in place my metal clamps on either side--and asked, “You live here?”

“Obviously,” he replied. “Come in the kitchen. You can sit down. I’ll find you something to eat.”

“So it’s your house?”

“Whose else would it be?”

He pulled out a kitchen chair for her and she sat.

“Is that your family in the pictures?”

He shook his head. “It’s a friend of mine, that’s her family. They used to live here before, but then she died. I just didn’t want to leave it empty, didn’t want it to fall apart like everywhere else.”

“What was her name?”

“Why? It doesn’t matter, she’s gone. I’ll get you something to eat, but then you have to go.”

He entered a door and she heard him walking down a flight of steps. She didn’t hear what he did down there, but after a minute he came up again with a couple of cans of soup. He opened them with a hand-operated can opener and dumped them into a bowl. He set it on the table in front of her and handed her a spoon.

She looked at them, unsure.

“You watched me open them,” he said. “I didn’t do anything to them.”

She picked up the spoon, scooped noodles toward her mouth and tested them. They tasted fine, but were cold. Still, it tasted better than nothing. She took another bite.

He sat across from her and watched her eat. She could tell he wanted her out as soon as possible. She asked, “Where is everybody?”

“Around,” he said. Misinformation meant to make her think he wasn’t helpless. But she imagined as long as he had his revolver, he wasn’t helpless after all.

“All the yards, the houses. Looks like no one’s lived in them for years.”

“It’s been a while,” he said.

“But they don’t live here with you?”

“Are you almost done? I told you, you can’t stay here.”

“Almost,” she said, and scooped another cold spoonful of chicken and noodles into her mouth.

“Thank you, by the way,” she said. “It’s cold, but very good.”

“Yeah well, power’s out, isn’t it? You get used to it cold.”

“What’s your name?”

He got up and went to the basement again, came up with a bottle of water, set it in front of her.

“You can take this with you when you go.”

“You don’t trust me.”

“I left you up here by yourself, didn’t I? But I don’t need company and you shouldn’t be out there when it’s dark, so you’ll have to get going pretty soon.”

“What time is it?”

“Daytime,” he said, as if that was all that mattered. In this world, it probably was.

“Can you tell me your name, at least?”

“I don’t know what you’re after, but you’re stalling for something and I don’t like it. My name doesn’t matter to you anymore than yours matters to me. In a week I’ll be a memory. In two weeks I won’t even be that.”

“I’m not stalling for anything,” she said. “I woke up in a park, I don’t know how I got there, I’m not even sure if these are my clothes, except they fit okay. Of all the houses in this city, I found this one.”

“Well, I don’t know you,” he said. “So I can’t help you.”

“You’re very angry,” she said. “Why?”

He rolled his eyes and turned around, stared out the back window. She couldn’t see the backyard from here, so she didn’t know what he was looking at, if anything.

He turned back toward her and said, “I’m sorry. I’m not angry, I just haven’t had anyone here for a long time and it doesn’t feel right. The night she killed herself, I just . . . she tried to talk to me that night about something important and I shut her down, told her to stop being a party poop, basically. She had something important to say, but no one wanted to hear, and I told her to just let them be and not ruin it for them.”

“Ruin what?”

“I don’t even know. After the Rapture, everyone came here. We rounded up as many as we could find and they all moved into the neighborhood and everything was a party and Stacy had this idea that if we all started living according to the Commandments that we could win our place in Heaven when we died.”

The woman at the table laughed at this, then caught herself and stopped and said, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to laugh.”

The man looked at her as if she’d just insulted his entire lineage.

“It’s not something to laugh at,” he said. “She believed in it. She’d lost her husband and baby and she just needed something to make her believe she could see them again and I was so damn wrapped up in making sure everyone was happy, myself included, that I didn’t listen to her, and she--.” He pulled the revolver from the back of his waistband and set it on the counter.

“That’s terrible. I’m so sorry. What happened after that?”

“We buried her,” he said. He looked out the back window again, and she guessed that was maybe where they’d done the deed.

“I meant, what happened after that that made you so bitter?”

“I told them I didn‘t want anything to do with them. It was their selfishness, their thoughtlessness that made things the way they were here.”

“But you just said if you’d listened to her that night…”

“I know what I said. But I blamed them. They didn’t want to hear what she had to say, they just wanted to party, as if that could change anything. Our family and friends were still gone and we were still left here with no hope of seeing them ever again and instead of being productive, they just wanted to party. Get drunk, get laid, keep living the lives of sin that put them in that position in the first place.”

“But you said if you’d listened to her. So it’s not everyone else’s fault, is it? It was your fault she killed herself. The person she came to when she needed someone, and you turned her away, so what else was she supposed to do in a time when she’d already lost the ones who mattered most? But you shouldn’t feel too bad; you were right, and she was so very wrong. There is no hope anymore. Heaven’s gates are closed and no matter how noble her intentions, your precious Stacy rots in Hell.”

“Who are you?” he asked, laying his hand across the revolver.

“I’m no one,” she said. “I woke up in an overgrown field in a park in the middle of a dead city on a dead world. How long ago did she die?”

He picked up the gun and said, “Get out. She wouldn’t want you here.”

“You have no idea what she wants,” the woman said. She stood up and went to the living room. He followed her, the gun still clutched in his hand. “You kept the pictures up because why? To remind you, to make you feel guilty, to punish yourself? You were in love with her, weren’t you?”

“I just met her,” he said.

“Yes, but you were young and impressionable and you fell for her. How long has it been?”

He swallowed and she heard the click in his throat.

“How long since you dumped her in a hole in the backyard, Randy?”

He looked up at the sound of his name, something she guessed he hadn’t heard spoken in a long time.

“Three years,” he said.

“That’s all? They were a rough three judging by your face. Where did they go?”

“They left,” he said.

“Yes. Where to? The last time I was here, there were hundreds of people out there. I thought things would establish here and branch out.”

“I did too,” he said. “But a couple of months after, they came on television and invited everyone who could make it to come and rejoin society. They’d have everything we missed, water, power, heat, food. Every place was running empty from looters and people just trying to figure out how to live, and the people on TV were offering a chance to get back to normal. Eddie and everyone else here just took off, picked a direction and went. They said there were still enough people in the world to build good lives. They populated the big cities, New York, LA, Chicago. I think Miami is still there. And Dallas. Or maybe Houston or San Antonio, I don’t remember. And it’s like that all over the world. With all the smaller towns empty, the power and water eventually stopped, but if you go to one of those places they’ve got everything still. Television, internet, radio. We figured out that, all the people taken, over half were still left here, just spread out all over the place. They’ve done a good job of making the world like it was.”

“And that’s the problem, isn’t it?” Stacy said. “‘Like it was’ didn’t work so well.”

“They don’t know what else to do, what other way to live.”

“I showed them how to live. They didn’t want to listen.”

“They were scared. They were still adjusting.”

“Such stupid people,” she said. “I showed them the way, but in their blindness, they chose not to see.”

“They were still mourning, they had to get it out first.”

She just looked at him with a knowing smirk, then moved to the hall where she walked to the bedrooms.

“You sleep in her bed, don’t you?” She opened the bedroom door, found the bed clean, neat, smooth. “Very impressive.”

“I take good care of the house. It’s the least I can do. I owed you so much. I was so scared that first day. I thought I really was the only one left behind, that everybody’d gone off to Heaven except me, but then there you were, out of the blue, and I’d never been so happy in my entire life. You made me feel a part of something important.”

She turned to him so quickly he didn’t even see her move, just knew that one second she was looking at her old bedroom and the next she was pressing him against the wall, her forearm digging into his throat.

“Then why did you let them get away with it? I had the plan, I saw the way, I spoke through her, I gave her the words, and you shut her down without even a thought to what it might do not only to her, but to everyone here.”

He tried to reply, but he had no words. She hadn’t expected him to. His jaw stopped working and he slid to the side, away from her grasp, back to the living room where he wasn’t trapped.

He rubbed his throat. He caught his breath. He turned to look at her and said, “You’re not her. Who are you?”

“I’m the one who was there in the beginning. I harvested the wheat and left the chaff. I’m the one who showed her the light, who let her see the war and allowed her the insight into how you and the rest of them could save your souls. I’m the one who offered one more chance to get things right. If only they would have listened.”

Randy stammered, backed up, looked around the living room in confusion. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t know. I was--”

“Blind, but now you see?” she finished.

“Yeah,” he said, stumbling, trying to get his balance. He hit the coffee table, but caught himself before tumbling over it, then moved around it, backing up along the couch, then back out around the other side as Stacy crept closer.

“I followed them, though,” he said. “I’ve kept every rule since that night. It’s why I didn’t go along when everyone left, but stayed here.”

“Yes, it’s much easier to lead the monastic life when you’re all by yourself with no worry of temptation, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” he said, then realized it hadn’t been a compliment. “I kept the Commandments and I stayed true to her.”

“There’s just one problem,” she said. “She wasn’t yours. I know it’s the last one, and often overlooked, but you did it for three straight years. You do it now. It’s in the reason you keep her bed made, even though you sleep in it every night, dreaming of her touch while you . . .” She looked at him in disgust. “It’s in the way you keep strangers from her house, in the way you keep the lawn in order, the house spotless. In the way you keep her pictures up so you can see her every moment of the day. Even though she’s not. Your. Wife. You’re a coveter, Randy, and I won’t suffer a sinner in my kingdom.”

“What’re you--” he began to ask as she raised her palm to his chest.

She touched him and said, “Do not think that I came to bring peace on Earth; I did not come to bring peace, but a sword,” and he fell dead at her feet.

She looked down on him with sadness in her eyes for a long time.