*All chapters of The Disappearances that I post here on Substack are unedited works in progress.
*Updated 8-20-26
Chapter 4
When I woke on the fourth day, I had no delusion that the disappearances hadn’t happened. Therefore, I didn’t cry or rush out of bed to check on my father-in-law the second I opened my eyes. Instead, I hugged James’ pillow tightly, let my tears fall, and told myself everything would be all right. I didn’t believe my words, but I had to say them. I had to keep saying them until they came true.
Once I’d had my fill of my husband’s fading scent and could no longer ignore my bladder, I looked over at James’ alarm clock. The bright red letters told me that it was eight in the morning.
“Well, the power is still on. I guess that’s a plus. At least I’ll have a good hot cup of coffee,” I said as I rose and went about my morning routine.
Half an hour later, with a steaming cup of coffee in hand, I sat at the kitchen table, opened my laptop, and went to the local news site. There, I flipped through the same headline articles I had the day before. I hadn’t expected to find any news on the disappearances, but that didn’t stop me from crying over the lack of new information. The crying didn’t last as long as the ones I’d had the previous days, and I felt calmer afterward, not tired and scared.
Okay, maybe I was a little frightened. That feeling would never go away, but each round of tears brought a bit of solace with them and helped ease me toward resignation.
The articles on the site were days old, similar to those on the national news sites. The news stations’ social media sites were the same. I checked the comment sections on all the posts I commented on, but no one had replied. That was disheartening but no longer surprising, and it didn’t stop me from commenting on the same articles and others to reassure future viewers that I was still there. I also added another post on all my sites and sent another round of emails and messages.
Later, I had breakfast in front of the television. Reruns were on their scheduled loop, but nothing filmed live was on the air. Even though it was fruitless, I painstakingly cycled through my available channels to ensure no new shows were airing.
After about an hour of channel surfing, I decided to clean my kitchen and dining room. As I did so, I realized my trash can was packed, and I wasn’t sure what to do with its contents. I couldn’t take the garbage outside to the large green bin that the trash collectors picked up because that can was already full. The trash collector wasn’t due for another day.
“But the collectors wouldn’t come if the people didn’t come back,” I reminded myself.
“Well, shit,” I said, wiping crumbs off the counter and into the palm of my hand. “If the trash piles up outside, I’ll get bugs.”
After dumping the bits down the sink and rinsing my hands, I returned to my laptop, opened a browser, and searched for ways to dispose of the trash. The easiest way I discovered was to haul it to the dump, but the county landfill was a bit of a drive from my house, and I didn’t think I’d feel up to making the trip every other day. The next way to eliminate it was to burn it. I found a site that suggested getting a burn barrel.
“That’s an accident waiting to happen,” I said as I scanned the instructions for setting up the barrel.
“I should do it, in any case. Gas and electricity won’t last long, and I might need the heat from the barrel this winter.”
I hoped neither was the case, but I had to start thinking about such things. I didn’t want the power going off to catch me off guard because I’d been in denial of what was happening and hadn’t planned for my future.
Another Internet search revealed that the local large home-repair chain store had several stainless-steel burn barrels to choose from, although I didn’t think they would fit in my car.
“It wouldn’t fit in James’ either,” I said, thinking of other options.
“I’ll have to steal a truck,” I said.
I’d never stolen anything. Even as a kid, I’d never shoplifted something as simple as a piece of gum.
“Okay. But from where?” I asked, trying to remember if anyone in my immediate family had a truck I could “borrow” until they returned. Nothing came to mind. My sister’s SUV might have worked, but she hadn’t been home. I could check her work, but if she hadn’t made it there, there was no telling where she was.
“Darrell has a truck,” I told myself.
Yeah, but it felt wrong taking from someone I barely knew.
“Just take one off a car lot,” I told myself. That idea made me feel more guilty than borrowing my neighbor’s vehicle.
“You’ve got to decide on something. Your car isn’t going to be large enough to bring home a lot of the things you’re going to need in the near future.”
After much deliberation, I decided that borrowing from my neighbor felt safer and less like stealing, and even if it were, he’d be more likely to understand why I took it.
If Darrell had been home the morning of the disappearance—I hadn’t paid attention when I’d been looking for my father-in-law—his vehicle would still be in his driveway.
“Well, don’t just sit here twiddling your fingers,” I said, pulling my notebook closer. “Get your shit together and get on the road.”
I made a list of the supplies I’d need if the home store didn’t have a pre-made barrel, along with other items to look for before showering.
An hour later, I walked down my empty street toward Darrell’s house, straining to hear any signs of life.
“Yes.” Darrell’s truck was in the driveway. Unfortunately, it looked like he’d been in it when the disappearance happened. His cell phone was in a holder on the dashboard, and his gym bag was in the passenger seat. His protein shake sat in the cup holder, making the cab reek of sour milk.
“Forgive me, Darrell. I promise to pay you back when you return,” I said to the driver’s seat before removing his phone, the protein shake, and gym bag and setting the items on his doorstep, then climbing into the truck.
Once behind the wheel, I worried that he’d somehow left the truck running when he disappeared, and the battery had died. A glance showed the keys were on the floor, where I knew they would be. I retrieved them and slid them into the ignition. The motor roared to life.
One last time, I apologized to Darrell, rolled down the windows to air out the vehicle, backed out of his drive, and headed to the hospital. That was the first place on my day’s list to look in the hopes of finding answers. It was first because it was closer than anywhere else on my list and because it might have been the first place notified that something huge was about to happen.
“Holly shit,” I half said, half gagged when the hospital doors opened. I hadn’t expected the hospital to be empty, but I hadn’t expected it to reek to high heaven when I entered.
At a glance, it appeared as if everyone were gone. And a glimpse was all I got because the smell was so intense that it pushed me back out of the sliding doors to the emergency room and caused me to vomit in the bushes next to the entrance.
“Oh, fuck me,” I said, wiping my mouth. “What happened in there?”
I hadn’t seen any bodies, but the smell told me more than a few someones were rotting inside.
Spitting a few times to clear my mouth, I rose and stared through the glass window into what I could see of the emergency waiting room. From my limited vantage point, I spotted a leg lying across one bench, an arm propped on an armrest, and the back of someone slumped over in a chair. None of the bodies moved. I was almost sure they were dead.
“Oh my God,” I said, straining for a closer look without going back into the building. “There had been other survivors. I knew there had to be. It didn’t make sense for me to be the lone survivor.”
My body stood frozen, watching the people inside for any sign of movement, but my mind raced with a mix of excitement and dread.
“Are you sure they are survivors?” I asked myself.
“Of course, they were. Just look.”
“I am, and all I see are dead people. People who could very well have died during the disappearance. They might already have been dying, and whatever took everyone just hastened it. Or whoever took the people might have killed them because they were hurt and not useful to them. Either way, we can’t call them survivors.”
“Seeing them still gives me hope that I’m not alone,” I said after a long moment of silence.
“I have to hold on to that hope,” I said, pulling my phone from my pocket. “Just because I hadn’t seen anybody anywhere else didn’t mean they weren’t out there.”
“The first thing I need to do is examine those bodies to see if I can find a cause of death, but that smell is too strong. I need to prop open the outer doors to let in some fresh air. Thank God the internet still worked.”
I knew nothing about sliding doors, but Google did. It told me that most doors had a toggle switch at the top to keep them open.
“Going back inside is going to suck,” I said, knowing I would have to because I wasn’t tall enough to reach the top of the doors.
“I need that chair,” I said, peering through the double doors to a free-standing chair next to the front desk.
Pulling my shirt up over my nose, though I knew that wouldn’t mask the smell, I entered the hospital once more. Gagging at the overwhelming stench, I grabbed the chair and rushed back out, all the while praying I wouldn’t vomit on myself.
Outside, I dropped the chair and rushed back to the bushes, dry-heaving a few times. I rested my head on the window for a few minutes, gathering myself. When I opened my eyes, I could see the bodies, and seeing them told me that I should put looking for my family on my to-do list.
From day one, I had known I’d have to, but I hadn’t been able to gather my strength to do so. I seemed to need more motivation than I had to do it. The bodies in the hospital were my motivation. I knew they weren’t alive because they would have contacted me by now if they were, but they could have left a body behind. And I couldn’t let them rot.
Once I was composed, I read over the instructions one more time, then dragged the chair into the first set of sliding doors. It took me a minute to find the panel with the toggle switch and another minute to set it to the right position, but within no time I had the door in a permanently open position.
The smell wasn’t that bad in that first area, but I still stepped outside for a few minutes to breathe in fresh air before going to the second set of automatic doors. Toggling it to “Hold Open” took me less time than it had at the first doors, but it had been too long for my sense of smell and stomach. I barely made it down from the chair and outside to the surrounding flower bed before I was vomiting again. By the time I was dry-heaving again, the smell of my vomit mixing with the aroma of death coming out of the hospital had me stumbling back to the truck for a water bottle and fresher air.
Relishing the chilly air from the vehicle’s vents, I stayed in the truck for twenty minutes before pulling myself together and returning to the hospital. I wasn’t far from the open entrance before the smell hit me.
“Nope. I won’t be going back in there for a while,” I said, leaving the emergency room area to air out and walking around to the main entrance. There were two sets of sliding doors there as well. Inside, the smell wasn’t as bad, and I easily grabbed a chair and programmed those doors to stay open as well.
Further inside, the smell was more noticeable but not overwhelming. The lobby was empty and dark, which I found odd. Even though the day was bright enough to see what I was doing inside the building, I flipped on all the lights. A cursory examination showed me that the power was still on, but everything that wasn’t needed was off, just like the cars outside.
“That’s not possible,” I said to myself, unable to wrap my head around the oddity of the situation.
A rotten food smell came from the cafeteria down the hall to my right. The food on the buffet tables had spoiled. I knew that without checking. The bank of elevators at the other end of the lobby was also a no-no. I was not getting stuck in one of those. With my luck, the power would go out between floors.
I turned left and passed through halls I thought led to offices, then came to a set of large glass doors. Those doors, which led from inside the hospital to the emergency room, weren’t automatic. I propped them open with chairs from the lobby.
Once the doors were secure, I stood back to let the smell dissipate as much as possible. The smell was just as bad from that direction, and it took everything I had to keep from vomiting. I hoped the building would air out soon with the two entrances and the dividing doors open. I wasn’t looking forward to seeing the bodies, but I needed to know what had happened to them. It was unfortunate that I had to wait before entering that area, as I wanted to complete my excursion and then visit the police department or the home store.
Wanting, no needing, fresh air, I left the hospital to circle the ground level, looking for more entrances to prop open. At the ambulance entrance near the emergency room, I found another body. The gurney sat between the outer and inner doors. I stepped toward the first set of doors, and they sensed my arrival and opened.
The smell from inside smacked me in the face.
I nearly passed out from it. I had to brace myself against the ambulance’s back doors as I gagged.
Once I could breathe again, I glanced inside the vehicle and saw they had masks I could use to cover my mouth and nose. I hadn’t worn one since the first year of the COVID pandemic and had hated using them then. At that moment, though, I welcomed one. However, I quickly discovered that they wouldn’t protect me from my vomit breath.
I removed the mask, swished some water in my mouth, spat, and put it back on. I stepped toward the hospital, then turned around and put on a second one before returning to the bay and wheeling the gurney out of the entrance and into the ER.
The masks didn’t help much, but they were better than nothing.
I told myself to grab some VapoRub before coming back—if I returned.
I set the gurney beside a long desk to get it out of the doorway. Next, I programmed both sets of doors to stay open. Even though I didn’t want to see the body, I went to the gurney and found an older man hooked to a few monitors. He looked as if he were merely sleeping, so I pulled back his blanket to see if he had any open wounds or something to tell me how he died. He looked fine. I found a chart hanging from his bed. From what I could make out, he was picked up because he was having chest pains, and the paramedics did suspect that he was having a heart attack.
Covering him back up, I pushed his bed toward an empty room. I didn’t have the heart to leave him outside for whatever creatures that remained to smell him and come to investigate.
The smell inside that section of the E.R. was worse than that of the waiting room, and I was having a hard time focusing on my task. I passed by two rooms: one empty, the other with a body. Before the smell overwhelmed me, I rushed outside to walk the parking lot and parking deck.
“How the hell am I going to find out what happened to those people if I can’t get close to them?” I grumbled as I walked.
I didn’t find much outside the building aside from one body. The older woman appeared to have stopped to rest on her walker after getting out of her car. I approached her with caution in case she was another survivor like me. When I was three feet away, I said hello, but the woman didn’t answer.
“Ma’am, are you all right?” I asked, knowing that she wasn’t.
I could smell her. The stench wasn’t as pungent as it was inside the hospital, but it was still too much to bear.
I said hello again once I was within arm’s length of her—still nothing.
I noticed something I should’ve realized much earlier. The woman had died outside in the elements. The smell indicated that she was rotting, but there were no other signs of deterioration. I expected birds, rats, or flies to be all over her, but she was free of that.
For the first time, I wondered if whatever killed these humans left behind a scent that repelled those creatures.
Not wanting to, but knowing I had to, I touched the woman on the shoulder to ensure she wasn’t napping. She wasn’t. Her head flopped back when I shook her. Her dead eyes looked up at me. The expression on her face was awe, not panic or fear. That made me wonder again whether what had happened was the rapture.
I’d sinned. I was far from perfect, but my sins were nothing compared to those of many I knew. Therefore, it couldn’t be the rapture. I wouldn’t be here if the rules were so lax—no one would be. And God wouldn’t have made a mistake or forgotten me. At least, I hoped that wasn’t the case.
The look on the woman’s face comforted me a bit. Her expression made me think that whatever had happened hadn’t been painful or scary, meaning my husband and son hadn’t suffered.
After putting on a pair of gloves that I found in the ambulance, I searched the woman for marks or injuries but found no apparent cause of death. Next, I laid her out in the vehicle’s back seat. I found a blanket in the trunk to cover her with, too. We were too far from the hospital entrance for me to carry her back there, and I didn’t have the heart to leave her out in the open in case the rodents returned.
The older woman was the only body I found in the car lot, so I returned to the building. The smell was still overwhelming, but it had diminished enough that the face mask was helpful.
When I entered the ER, I saw a body that I hadn’t seen from the window. The person was male and sitting slumped over in a chair. I straightened him to see if he had the same expression as the woman. He hadn’t. His expression said he was in agony. He was a man in his late fifties, so he might have been in the middle of having a stroke or heart attack, or God only knew what. So, I felt confident that his look was from whatever he was dying of when he got to the E.R., not from whatever had happened to the world.
Next, I went through the ER waiting room doors to a hallway that actually led to rooms. I wanted to examine the person in the room I’d passed and get to fresher air. That man’s expression was also one of fear and agony, but he had a clear reason to be. He had a gunshot wound in their stomach.
“No more exploring bodies. Find the head nurse’s station and see if they received a notice or anything about an impending catastrophic event. As I explored desk after desk and office after office, I found nothing. No printout from the CDC, WHO, or the president stating they need to be prepared for a possible influx of bodies. I was disheartened, but not surprised.
Eventually, I returned to the E.R. waiting room to examine the bodies I’d spotted earlier. They were like the older woman. Their expressions were peaceful. One lay across the seats as if trying to sleep. Had she been sick? I couldn’t tell. One had a leg propped in a chair in front of him. The appendage was swollen and bent at an odd angle. A bloody bandage covered the third’s hand. I didn’t open the dressing to see how nasty the wound was. None of their wounds looked fatal, but I wasn’t a doctor. I couldn’t tell how old they were, but I felt confident that they’d all been here the morning of the disappearances. I doubted they would smell so bad if they’d died only a day ago.
Tired and feeling sick from the rotting meat smell, I left the hospital after that and went home. The burn barrel, the police department, and everything else I had planned to do that day could wait until the next day. I was exhausted both physically and emotionally. And I desperately wanted to shower and burn my clothes.
