*All chapters of The Disappearances that I post here on Substack are unedited works in progress.
*Updated 8-14-26
Chapter 2
The following day, I woke up with a headache. When I saw the bright light beaming through our bedroom curtains, I jerked into a sitting position, thinking I’d overslept and left my father-in-law to fend for himself.
“James. James, the alarm didn’t go off,” I yelled, springing out of bed without looking at the clock or seeing if James was beside me. I took it for granted that he was and headed to the door. “And you’re late for work.”
I rushed out of the room without making sure James had heard me. I pushed George’s door open, praying he’d also overslept. George usually did. He slept a lot, but on some days, he would wake up early and stay awake all day. Due to the blackout curtains we hung when George started sleeping in, the room was too dark for me to make out much.
“George,” I called in a soft voice, flipping on his bedroom light. I prayed that doing so wouldn’t startle the old man too severely. On the rare occasions when I had to wake him, I usually turned on the bedside lamp, located close to the door and opposite him. The bulb in that lamp emitted a soft, yellow glow, allowing him time to wake up. I didn’t turn on the overhead light until he sat up and was ready to take his meds.
I stood in the doorway, staring at the bed in confusion. George’s bed was empty, but his bedsheets were pulled up as if they were still covering his body. Without realizing it, I copied my actions from the day before and rushed to his side of the bed, fearing he’d fallen on the floor, but the floor was empty.
“George?” I called, rushing out of the room.
“James, where’s your dad?” I asked, hurrying back to our bedroom and flipping on our overhead light.
For the second time, I froze at the door, looking at the empty room, the rumpled bedsheets, and the clock on my side of the bed. My forehead wrinkled in confusion. The alarm wasn’t due to go off for another fifteen minutes. I could have sworn it was much later than it was. I sighed in relief at that knowledge.
I refused to acknowledge that my husband wasn’t in bed or up and rushing to get ready for work. Instead, I let myself believe James had gotten up early and was already prepared for work. I told myself he must have woken his dad up, too, because George had an appointment today.
Satisfied with my justifications, I walked to the attached bathroom. I peed, returned to the bedroom to turn off the alarm before it started blaring, and then went to the living room.
“James? George? What are you two up to so early this morning?” I asked as I approached the archway that divided our living room from our dining room. I glanced into the living room and saw no one. The dining room and kitchen were the same. I also didn’t see a note on the kitchen wall calendar indicating that the two had gone somewhere.
“All right, guys, this isn’t funny. Where are you?” I called again and went to the garage to see if James’s car was there. It wasn’t.
Feeling pissed and worried, I went back to the kitchen, where the only landline in the house was located and where my cell phone was plugged in to charge.
The date on my phone’s screen didn’t feel accurate.
“Did I miss a day somehow?” I shook my head in confusion.
My home screen didn’t show any missed calls or text messages either, which was also strange. Pushing back thoughts I didn’t want surfacing, I reminded myself that “It’s still early morning.”
I checked the landline. Nothing. The landline wasn’t unusual. We hadn’t had a landline in a long time, but George and Darlene still had one, and everyone they knew called them on that number, so we’d had it transferred to our house. They had cell phones but rarely used them, and with George’s memory going, we thought it best to cancel their plan. Anyone who needed my father-in-law would call us or their landline.
I ignored the fear growing inside me as I stared at the cordless phone’s screen and tapped the digits to call my husband’s office. Chances were slim that James would take George to the office, but that was the only other number I had for him.
The phone just rang. As it did, memories of what had happened the day before started creeping into my mind. I tried pushing them away. I tried to convince myself that yesterday had been just a bad dream and that everything was fine, but it was clear that wasn’t the case.
When James’ phone went to voicemail, I switched to my cell and dialed his cell. I let it ring for what felt like forever, then hung up and tapped Tanner’s icon. I didn’t know that number by heart. I also didn’t care if I called while he was in the middle of class. Something was wrong, and I needed answers. When his number did the same, I started pacing the living room, trying to come to terms with my situation.
Eventually, I turned on the television to see if anyone had survived and was broadcasting. What I found was stations off the air or playing preprogrammed shows.
It was then that, despite my best efforts at staying in denial, I allowed the voice in my head to remind me of what had happened the day before.
“Everyone disappeared,” I said aloud and laughed at the ridiculousness of the notion.
The laughter turned to sobs as everything I had done and seen the day before washed over me, and I collapsed on the sofa. I cried for a long time.
When the tears eased, I saw my laptop on the coffee table—where I never left it. That added to the reality I was telling myself was true. I didn’t reach for the device, though. I didn’t have the strength to search it. Instead, I sagged against the arm of the sofa. I didn’t cry again, though my entire body trembled with fear.
Once I thought I could walk, I stood and went to the kitchen to pour myself a shot of whiskey, something I hadn’t done in years. I almost poured myself a second shot, but told myself that one was enough to calm my nerves enough to face the morning.
Eventually, my hands stopped shaking, and I made coffee, grabbed my cell, and called James again, my mother, and then my sister. I cycled through every number on my phone before making myself eat two pieces of buttered toast, shower, and dress for a day out of the house, even though no one would see me.
After dressing and calling my husband a dozen times, as a way of postponing doing what I knew I had to do next—what I should have done the day before but had been too much of a coward to do—I stepped out the side door of my house, holding my purse, cell phone, and car keys.
I took a deep breath.
“I can do this,” I told myself, though my shaking legs suggested otherwise.
“You have to do this. You won’t find out what happened to your family hiding in your house,” I also told myself.
The day was silent. I hadn’t noticed the quiet the day before. How could I have? My constant screaming of my father-in-law’s name had echoed through the neighborhood and helped mask the stillness. The absence of noise caused me to pause on my stoop to strain to hear something—a dog bark, a distant car, a bird, anything—but there was nothing.
I lived two blocks from a busy highway. I should’ve heard cars, trucks, motorcycles, construction vehicles, and other typical city noises from where I stood. I heard nothing. Absolutely nothing.
A chill ran up my spine, and I hugged myself tight before stepping off the porch and going to my car.
“Surely, not everyone is gone,” I said in a low whisper as I slid behind the wheel. “I survived whatever happened, so others had to as well.”
I knew that not being able to reach anyone by phone, not seeing posts on social media, or receiving news on television should’ve been a clue that I was alone, and it was, but I couldn’t wrap my mind around the idea. Such a thing wasn’t possible.
I told myself that as I pulled out of my driveway and headed toward my husband’s office. The streets in my neighborhood were mostly clear. Still, I drove slowly, watching for movement. As far as I could tell, nothing had changed since the day before. Not that I’d paid too much attention to my surroundings in my frantic search for my father-in-law.
“No one is coming, you idiot,” I told myself as I sat at a four-way stop sign, looking to my left and right to see if anyone was coming in either direction.
“That might be so,” I scolded myself as I drove through the intersection, “but that isn’t a habit you want to break, just in case.”
I came across several cars that looked as if they’d veered off the road for some reason, but none looked wrecked or as if they had stalled. The first one I encountered was about two blocks from my house. The car’s driver had come to a stop, half on the road. The car’s other half was in the driveway of a home that I suspected wasn’t the car’s owner. I pulled my car over to the side of the road and slowly got out.
“Anyone hurt?” I asked, knowing no one would reply.
I rounded the front of the car and inspected the area to see if anyone was lying on the ground, hidden from view, or pinned under the vehicle. Next, I opened the unlocked driver’s side door to see if anyone was still inside, but it was empty. A cup of coffee that had long since grown cold sat in the cup holder, and there was trash on the passenger’s side floorboard, but that was all. Oh, well, I should mention that the keys to the car lay on the floorboard just as my neighbor’s keys had been.
After quietly closing the car door, I left the scene and returned to my vehicle, noting that no one from the nearby houses had come to ask me what I was doing.
The second car was two more blocks up the road. Its driver had merely pulled over to the side of the road. Its right wheels were in the grass, and the left were barely on the pavement. If it had been in front of a house, I would have assumed they’d parked there, but the person had stopped in front of an empty lot. I didn’t get out to investigate.
Surprisingly, my anxiety stayed level until I turned onto a side road that led to a red light at an intersection with the main road through town. At nearly lunchtime on a weekday, the highway should’ve been swarming with vehicles, but the streets were empty when I got to the red light.
If everyone disappeared at once, wrecked cars would be everywhere. As close as I lived to that road, I should’ve heard hundreds of vehicles crashing into one another, street poles, or the front of buildings at whatever time the event occurred. I’d heard none of that, and that was because there hadn’t been any wrecks.
I turned right at the light when it turned green—another habit I told myself I couldn’t get out of—driving as slowly as I could, not that I risked running into another car. The road was all but clear. Only the occasional car sat stranded in the middle of the road or at red lights. On the other hand, the parking lots were littered with vehicles.
“What the hell,” I said, looking around me and realizing the impossible. Whoever had taken the people had forced everyone to pull off the road and park. The idea was ludicrous, but I had no other explanation.
The view was both scary and organized, making me feel as if someone had carefully planned and executed the disappearances. It wasn’t an accident.
I nearly pissed myself at that thought. I didn’t want to think about who could do something on such a large scale.
“Don’t think about it. Just get to James,” I told myself.
My husband worked for a small tech company five minutes from our house. The drive took me ten minutes because I drove slowly to take in the view. I strained to find signs of life anywhere along the road.
Nothing moved but me.
I pulled alongside my husband’s car in front of his office and scanned my surroundings in awe. My heart sped up as I approached his car, but I’d seen inside the empty vehicle when I’d passed behind it. He wasn’t inside.
“Where the hell are you?” I asked aloud, peeking into the windows of his car.
James’ coffee cup sat in the cup holder. His cell phone lay in the passenger seat beside his laptop case. He’d never made it out of the car. He tended to forget his phone, but he would’ve never left his laptop behind.
He’d left the driver’s side door unlocked, so I opened it and leaned inside to get the phone. The device had died because it had rung constantly all day the day before. A further examination of the car revealed that the keys dangled from the ignition, barely in the hole. Not in the floorboard, but close enough.
“Someone didn’t want the cars idling,” I said, giving more credence to the idea that what happened was planned. But by whom?
“That doesn’t matter right now. Find James,” I said, refusing to spiral down any rabbit holes at the moment.
I went to his office in case he’d left the car without his belongings to see what was happening. Someone had locked the main door to his building.
“Or it’s still locked from the day before,” I reminded myself.
I nodded.
“James?” I said, knocking on the glass door. “Melanie? Sean? Anyone? It’s Laurie. James’ wife. Is he there?”
My voice echoed down the street and sent a chill up my spine, but it didn’t stop me from knocking three more times and calling for my husband or other employees in the building.
Unsurprisingly, no one came to the door.
In frustration, I pounded on the door with the side of my fist but stopped myself from doing more. I didn’t let myself inside with James’ key because I didn’t see the point—no one would be there. The locked door meant that James had arrived first and had not entered the building. I didn’t know that for certain. All I knew was that no one was there and that entering the building was pointless.
Screaming in frustration, I returned to our vehicles. At first, I had planned to get into my car and head back home, but I decided to take a walk instead. I wanted to look into some other vehicles and check a few nearby shops.
After locking James’ car, I returned to mine, put James’ stuff in the passenger seat, and closed the doors. Scanning the parking lot, I decided to walk south among the rows of vehicles along the side of the road, looking for…what… I didn’t know.
Every car I checked was like my husband’s, unlocked but shut off. None showed signs that the occupant had survived the disappearance, such as an open car door or a car facing the wrong way on the street. Purses, briefcases, diaper bags, rotting takeout bags, and other detritus littered the cars, indicating that their owners had vanished, leaving them behind.
“This isn’t possible,” I said aloud as I passed an empty school bus that had been taking kids to summer day camp at the local YMCA. The sound of my voice startled me. The silence had quickly become normal, and speaking was rare.
This isn’t possible. I thought the words again as I stepped away from a minivan with three different-sized car seats.
“What could’ve forced every car off the road in a precise fashion? Who made their owners shut off their engines before kidnapping them? And how could it have happened to every person in town? The city. The state. Possibly the world?” I asked as I tried to go into my third place of business, but the door was locked.
Nothing.
Nothing human, that was.
God?
I didn’t think so. I was sure it wasn’t the rapture. I wasn’t a saint. Yet, I believed in God and was a damn good person. God had strict rules. I wasn’t sure if I would be one of the chosen to go to heaven, but I knew for a fact that not every person who’d disappeared was. If God had come for his people, he would’ve taken me over the man working at the gas station near the house. He’d gone to jail three times in the last two years for beating his wife. I had no reason to think the man was gone, but the world around me said that was a distinct possibility. And if he was gone and I was still here, it wasn’t the rapture. Besides, I’d read some of Revelation, and nothing in it had occurred.
Feeling the tears returning, I walked back to my car. I stood before my husband’s office, looking at both cars and wondering what to do. I couldn’t drive both of them back home.
Wiping away tears, I told myself to search his car again for anything personal or valuable, so I did. He didn’t have much in the car: an umbrella, a charging cord, and trash. He mostly drove it to and from work. We took mine everywhere else because it had more room, and my father-in-law could get in and out of it better.
I hated leaving James’ car behind since it felt like I was leaving him behind, but I had no choice.
As I slid into my car, clutching the random, unimportant items that belonged to my husband, I broke into hysterics. I don’t know how long I sat there crying, screaming, and beating my fists against the steering wheel, not caring about the blood and snot pouring from my nose in my grief. None of it mattered. I let my grief flood me, wave after wave, until I couldn’t cry anymore.
Eventually, I was able to gain control of myself. I jerked my shirt off and used it to wipe my face and neck as best I could. Once satisfied that I was clean and had stopped shaking, I told myself it was time to leave. I couldn’t figure out what was happening by sitting there blubbering. However, I was tired and wasn’t sure I could muster the energy to do anything besides head back home.
The car engine was loud in the silence, and I screamed when it came to life. I waited five minutes after starting the car, hoping someone from a nearby business would come out to investigate the noise. No one did, so I pulled out of the parking lot.
At a nearby intersection, I saw my bank and the green open signs over each drive-thru lane. I was pretty sure no one would be there, but that open sign begged me to investigate. Someone had been there before the disappearances. The front doors were unlocked, giving me a fleeting hope that someone was inside. I looked scary, with my face, neck, and chest blotchy and stained. Luckily, I had a tank top under my shirt, so I wasn’t wandering around in my bra, but the top was pink in areas where the blood from my nose had seeped through.
“Hello,” I said into the quiet building and entered the circular lobby.
To my disappointment, no one answered. The place was empty, and the sight of the counter and desks on either side of the lobby was eerie.
“Is anyone here?” I called again, knowing I wouldn’t get an answer.
But someone had been there to open it.
I walked to the “Employees Only” door to see if someone had left it unlocked. They had.
“I’m coming back. Please don’t shoot. I’m just checking to see if anyone is here,” I said into the short hall.
I searched the entire place and found no one, which I expected. I discovered purses left under desks, indicating that people had been there the previous morning.
If I’d been more curious and not so terrified, I might have tried to open tills or see if I could access the vault, but none of that crossed my mind. I merely searched the place for a living person and then left.
As I went out the front door, I turned around for a last look. That’s when I noticed the bank’s hours of operation were from seven thirty in the morning to four in the afternoon. Seven thirty. That opened at seven thirty.
“That’s why they were open, and no one else was. Most places didn’t open until nine. And the disappearances had to have occurred around eight thirty for James to still be in his car. Damnit.”
Just as I was opening my car door, a thought came to my mind that I should’ve gotten someone’s keys and locked the door, though I didn’t know why I felt that necessary. I was the only person alive in the city, though I hoped not the world, and even if I wasn’t, paper money and coins no longer held any value.
Surely, I wasn’t the only person left, I thought, getting back into my car. If I were left alive, others must have been as well. Right?
Logically, I knew that had to be so, but I was lying to myself then.
All the spaces in front of the bank were occupied, so I’d parked in front of a sandwich shop. As I stared at the shop’s front window, wondering what I should do next, I remembered that a block and a half up the road sat a pet store. The store reminded me of my missing cats and made me curious about whether all the animals had also disappeared. So I drove there next.
The sign on the door said the shop opened at eight, and sure enough, the door to the pet store was unlocked. The bell over it dinged and scared the shit out of me. I jumped two feet in the air and laughed at myself as I closed the door behind me. Instantly, I felt the store’s emptiness after the bell stopped echoing throughout the quiet room. No birds chirped at me. No critters scratched at their aquariums’ glass or their cages’ bars.
I slowly walked through the room, looking into each habitat to see what remained. Surprisingly, snakes, hermit crabs, spiders, other reptiles, and fish were still alive. I nearly burst into tears when I saw those animals resting quietly in their homes. From what I could tell, all the missing animals were the ones someone might consider domesticated pets. The knowledge was both disturbing and reassuring because it provided another example of how the disappearances had been planned.
I knelt before the fish tanks and watched them enjoying their existence, mesmerized by their carefree swimming. The tiny creatures didn’t know what had happened to the world around them, nor did they care. Other critters seemed to sense that something was off, as they repeatedly tried to hide when I approached. I didn’t dare speak to them for fear of frightening them even more.
While exploring the store, I snatched a T-shirt off the rack with a picture of a black cat and the words, “Pay attention to me ignoring you,” and put it on. On my second round through the store, I fed the animals that seemed to need food. I told myself to come back the next day to feed them again. I also figured I should free them if people didn’t come back by the end of the week, since I couldn’t be responsible for them beyond that.
Sometime later, I leaned against the glass door outside the store, looking up and down the street, trying to remember if there was another place in the area, like the pet store. All I could think of was a few vet offices, but I was sure any animals they might have been housing overnight would be domesticated and would have disappeared with everyone else.
Before returning home, I made one last stop at the gas station. I didn’t need gas—my gauge was at three-quarters—but I wanted to see if the pumps still worked and gather newspapers to see if there was any information about the disappearances in them. I knew there wouldn’t, but I wanted to check.
The pumps worked, and I still had to pay before filling up, which I found amusing. Inside the store, a rack by the checkout counter held four newspapers. I picked up a USA Today and glanced through it. The date on the front page was from the day before the disappearances. I read each headline as I flipped through the pages, but nothing in the paper indicated what had occurred or hinted that something big was about to happen.
The other three papers were just as helpful. The disappearances appeared to have happened in the blink of an eye, despite how organized it was, so no one was around to report anything. If anyone had known that the entire world would disappear instantly, they most likely wouldn’t have told anyone, as it would’ve started a panic among the few who’d believe the claims.
Disgusted, I wadded the papers and threw them into a large trash bin near the food counter. It was then that I registered the burnt smell in the store. Hot dogs, hamburgers, chicken tenders, and pizza slices sat behind the glass, drying out from the heat lamps. I didn’t know what to do, so I left the store. I wanted to go home, where I could hide behind my curtains and locked doors, pretending I wasn’t alone.
