*All chapters of The Disappearances that I post here on Substack are unedited works in progress.
*Updated 8-25-26
Chapter 5
When I got home that afternoon, I didn’t turn on the television or boot up my laptop. Instead, I went straight to the shower. I hadn’t handled the bodies at the hospital too much. Despite that, my skin felt grimy from the thick stench in the air inside the building. The water heater still worked, and I took the longest, hottest shower I’d had in a long time. It didn’t help much with the gross feeling. Even after a good scrubbing, I still smelled the sweet, decaying odor of the bodies.
The water may not have removed the smell from my memory, but it soothed the tension in my muscles enough that I could easily crawl into bed and fall asleep after eating a protein bar. Sometime in the night, I woke and went to the bathroom. Feeling hungry, I grabbed a yogurt from the fridge before returning to bed.
The following day, I woke early and had a quick breakfast—I would need to stop and eat a meal soon, or I’d make myself sick—and was out the door at sunrise.
Before I could get to my car, a “Tweet. Tweet” broke the morning silence.
“Holy shit,” I said, nearly dropping my purse.
I spun around, looking for where the bird perched.
“Tweet. Tweet.” The sound came again, guiding me to a large Hackberry tree at the end of my front yard. Shielding my eyes from the morning sun, I looked up into the tree and saw a tiny bird singing on a branch.
“Oh my,” I whispered, afraid of scaring the bird.
The bird chirped again. Faintly, I could hear another bird off in the distance calling back. Four heartbeats later, a third bird called out.
That time, I laughed, and the bird in my tree flew off.
“Oh no. Come back,” I called after it.
Its screech of fear got the attention of the others, and the next thing I knew, the air around me filled with birdsong. The sound was music to my ears.
I laughed again.
“Not all the birds were gone, I said, with tears threatening to spill down my cheeks. “They must have sensed what happened and gone dormant or quiet until they felt it was over.”
Hoping other animals had returned if the birds had, I rushed back into the house to search for my kitties.
“Coco. Mia. Where are you, my kitty-kitties?” I called as I rushed to check their beds.
They weren’t there.
Next, I checked the laundry room, where their litter box was. It was clean.
“Coco. Mian,” I called again, but I wasn’t surprised that they hadn’t come running when I called their names. They were cats, not dogs. Cats don’t care for much of anything aside from themselves.
“Kitty-kitties? Want a treat?” I called, going to the cabinet where I kept their canned food. Their food bowl was still full, but that didn’t deter my hope that my cats had returned. They prefer canned food to dry food.
The sound of my voice wouldn’t get them running, but the smell of the canned food would. I made a big show of popping the can’s lid, tapping it on the counter, and emptying it into a bowl. It wasn’t until I set the bowl on the floor that I gave in to the idea that the cats weren’t coming. At the sight of the empty floor, my excitement died. The cats were still gone.
Sighing in resignation, I tapped the bowl on the floor just in case and called their names one last time.
Nothing came of it.
Sulkily, I went to the backyard to survey it in case they had escaped from the house. Coco did that on occasion but never left the yard when he did. I called their names a few times, but I knew they weren’t out there.
On the off chance that dogs might have come back even though the cats didn’t, I went out the side gate and over to Janie’s yard to see if Lulu and Macie were back there. We had a privacy fence that kept me from seeing into Janie’s yard. The dogs would have barked when they heard me calling for the cats, but a look over Janie’s chain-link fence confirmed my fears.
Feeling defeated, I slunk back to the house. I’d hoped the birds were a sign that the people were coming back. I knew that wasn’t the case. Still, I couldn’t give up hope.
“Fuck,” I said, though I wanted to scream the word.
I threw my purse into the car with a huff and headed to the police station.
“Hello,” I called as I pushed open the door of a building I’d never been inside. I’d been to the courthouse to renew my driver’s license and car tags, but I’d never been arrested or had to bail anyone out of jail, so the police station was unknown to me.
I noticed right away that the lobby didn’t smell like the hospital, telling me that no one had died inside during the disappearances. That made sense, considering the police would’ve taken an injured criminal to the hospital instead of bringing them to the station.
The only things inside the lobby were the registration desk and doors to my left and right. I approached the desk, leaned over it, and asked, “Is anyone here?”
No one answered me.
I tried the doors next. Both were locked.
“Shit,” I said, wondering what to do next.
I paced the lobby a few times, thinking before noticing the row of visitors’ chairs against the wall. I looked from the chairs to the registration desk and then back to the chairs.
“Please hold my weight,” I said, dragging one of the chairs to the desk and climbing onto it. From there, I pulled myself onto the counter. I couldn’t swing myself around just yet because there was a computer on the other side. Praying an alarm didn’t sense what I was doing and send something from the ceiling down to cut me in half, I leaned over the counter and pushed as much of the detritus as I could out of my way. The monitors moved easily to the side, and the keyboard and mouse fell to the floor, but the space created was enough for me to swing my legs over onto the desk part of the counter. From there I slid down until I was sitting where the monitors had been. The drop to the floor from there was simple.
There were doors to the right and left of the counter, but they were locked.
“Damn it.” I understood why the station was locked up so tightly, but it was aggravating all the same.
I turned back to the desk and began rummaging through the items and paperwork on and around it. None of the paperwork mentioned the disappearances, not that I thought it would. Next, I searched the drawers for a purse that might contain keys. No luck. The receptionist on duty had been a woman, but she must have had her eyes on her person when she vanished because there wasn’t even a set of car keys in her purse.
With a sigh, I plopped down into the swivel chair to think about what to do next. As I did so, one of the chair wheels hit the keyboard. I reached down and picked the keyboard, mouse, and mouse pad off the floor. I’d just set the items on the desk, out of my way, for when I crawled back across it, when I saw something white and rectangular on the floor.
“No way,” I said, bending down and picking up the keycard. The receptionist must have slid it under her mouse pad or keyboard. Thinking that if the woman had left her passkey where it could easily be found, the password to her computer might be around there, I spent a few minutes searching the area for something that might have a username and password on it. I found a few things that I thought might be what I needed, but they weren’t. That didn’t discourage me because I had a passkey. It might not give me access to the entire building, but it surely opened some doors.
“Let’s see what you open,” I said to the key as I walked to the door to my left and slid the card through the slot. To my relief, there was a click, and the door opened half an inch.
“Thank God.” I pushed the heavy metal door wider, and it opened up to what I think was called the bullpen. There were only four desks occupying the large space, but there were doors that led to offices, most of which were locked, and rooms that looked like conference or interrogation rooms.
The office I thought might hold the information I needed was the police chief’s, but the door required an actual key. If I tried, I might have been able to break into it, and I might come back later and do that, but for the time being, I left it alone.
I settled for searching the four desks in the bullpen. Like the receptionist and the rest of the world, the officers that worked at those desks had password-protected their computers, so I couldn’t access them to read their emails. I thought surely one of them would have a slip of paper or something with their password written on it, but if they did, they’d hidden it well. None of the files I found on the desks contained any information about what happened the morning of the disappearances. As far as I could tell, nothing abnormal happened anywhere in the city that morning.
“Could it really have all happened at once?” I asked myself, not for the first time, plopping down in a swivel chair.
“Seems so, considering we haven’t found any reports on it,” I answered. “However, we still have to check the 9-1-1 call center. They would have most likely gotten the first calls if anyone had been able to make a call.”
“Yeah, but if it’s all computerized like most things are, going there will be a bust.”
“True, but we have to check. Just like we have to check the courthouse, city hall, and the sheriff’s station.” I was right. I wouldn’t have felt like I’d covered all my bases until I’d checked every federal building and hospital I could. I also reminded myself that there was a military arsenal about a two-hour drive east of me that I could check. The facility was probably locked up tighter than the police station, but it’s another place that might hold answers.
“I will, but I have a feeling I won’t find any answers there either.”
“Probably not, but finding nothing will strengthen the possibility that it did happen all at once. What good does such information do me, I don’t know.”
“What I need to know is how could something so large-scale happen in a blink of an eye?”
“It might not have been a blink. I was alone for a long time that morning. It could have taken minutes. We don’t know.”
“However long it took, it was still quick, or we would have found a report, a jotted-down note on a Post-it somewhere, something.”
“You would think. I agree.”
“Who could do such a thing? Why would they do it?”
Frustrated, I looked at the desk I was sitting at and around at the nearby ones, trying to wrap my mind around my situation, knowing I couldn’t, or I would’ve by then. My wondering eye and mind paused when I saw that one officer had proudly displayed a photo of their daughter at the Space and Rocket Center. I stared at the picture for a long time.
Not for the first time, a thought popped into my head that I hadn’t let myself seriously consider. However, considering all that I’d been through, the absurd notion had to go on my list of possibilities. The idea that it might be possible made me laugh and sit bolt upright in my chair.
“It couldn’t be. I mean, really? Could it? There was no such thing. I mean. I never believed we were alone in the universe, but surely that’s not what happened here. Why would they bother?”
“I have to consider it. It’s just as likely as anything at this point.”
The possibility gave me something else to search for, instead of looking for notes on people disappearing in a blink or on people acting suspiciously. Would people call the police if they spotted what they thought were alien spaceships in our skies?
I flipped through the papers on the desk I was sitting at for a second time, looking for reports of people claiming to see strange things in the sky. They might provide me with locations to visit for clues if such reports were available. I didn’t find any such reports. Of course not, because who would take such a thing seriously?
“Why would they take us all?” I asked myself as I stepped to another desk to rummage through it again. “Did they want our resources? Surely not. We’ve nearly used up this planet.”
“They probably needed slaves or to repopulate their planet.”
“I can’t think like that.”
“Well, you need to start thinking like that and worse so you can be prepared for any possibility.”
I found nothing on that desk or the one next to it.
“Pray they wanted the people and not the planet.”
“Why? I want the people back.”
“Because if they want the planet, they’ll be back soon. With everyone gone, nature will take over quickly. The birds from this morning are proof of that. The high grass in the neighbor’s yard is more proof. Unless they want the planet overgrown, they’ll be back before too much longer.”
“But the birds could be a sign that whoever or whatever had taken everyone was gradually returning them?”
“Maybe, but…”
“It doesn’t feel likely,” I countered.
“No. It doesn’t.”
Sighing in resignation, I used the passkey to let myself out of the bullpen area and back to the lobby. I started to take the passkey with me, but decided to leave it on the receptionist’s desk instead. Someone else might come by looking for answers, and I wanted them to have easy access to the building.
“Am I seriously considering that aliens took everyone?” I asked as I left the station.
Aliens were as good a theory as any other I’d had about what happened to everyone. I’d rather it have been people from another planet that took everyone than to know our own government or scientists did something to them. God taking them would be the best scenario, but somehow it felt the least likely.
“If it were aliens, the government, or God, why leave me behind?”
I didn’t doubt that I wasn’t the only human left, even though I had no proof at the time, aside from the dead bodies at the hospital.
“Why didn’t they take us all? The deceased would’ve been easier to disappear.”
Yet, their bodies remained.
“Unless those people died while the aliens attempted to take them, and the beings just decided they weren’t worth the effort.”
“That kind of makes sense,” I eventually said. “As much sense as any of this made. I wasn’t dead or hurt when the disappearance happened. Or maybe I was. Maybe I’d died, and this was my afterlife. Shit, I didn’t think I’d added that possibility to the list.
I thought back to what I’d been doing that morning. Nothing special. I wasn’t hiding or sleeping, nor doing anything dangerous. Still, I could have had a massive heart attack, stroke, aneurysm, or something along those lines that happened so fast that I hadn’t had time to think I was dying.
“No. I wasn’t dead. That made the least amount of sense.”
“It goes on the list either way.”
“Fine, but I’m going with aliens, government, or God.”
“But if it were one of them, they wouldn’t have missed me. I was out in the open, just like everyone else.”
I didn’t know whether to feel left out or lucky that they left me behind.
“I don’t want to think about this anymore. I have trash piling up at home,” I said, needing a change of thought before my head exploded.
Trying not to think about anything, I got in my car and headed to the home store. My next stop should have been the courthouse or sheriff’s station, but I was too tired of feeling disappointed. At the home improvement store, I could pick up the burn barrel and other necessary supplies. That would at least help me feel productive.
With my list in hand, I walked the aisles of the home store, trying not to think about aliens and whether they were the ones who had taken everyone. I tried to think of a movie or book similar to what happened here, but couldn’t find one. In most of the movies, the aliens arrived, guns blazing. Or we started shooting them as soon as they appeared in the sky.
Most of my attention was on the subject of aliens, and by the time I left the store, I’d only grabbed about half the items on my list. I was annoyed with myself, but I didn’t go back inside. I could always come back later.
After leaving the home store, I stopped by the grocery store nearest my house to pick up some food. With the truck at my disposal and no one else in sight except the birds, I decided then was as good a time as any to begin stocking up on supplies in preparation for whatever lay ahead.
I didn’t know if I would stay in my home forever, but I didn’t plan to go elsewhere anytime soon. Eventually, I’d need to look for survivors, but I didn’t think I would until I felt certain my family wasn’t returning.
The smell inside the grocery store wasn’t as bad as I had anticipated. Little had rotted with the power still on, but what had gone bad had started to smell. I’d have to be careful picking out fresh foods and the like. Even with the store’s frigid air preserving them, they’d only last for so long, as would the stuff in the coolers. Canned and boxed foods, as well as items in the freezer, would last longer.
I had a deep freezer in the basement that stayed empty now that Tanner wasn’t living at home. I’d stock it full of things I could freeze to help them last longer—bread, sandwich meat, frozen fruit, chicken, and sausage. I even grabbed milk. I wasn’t sure if you could freeze milk, but I was willing to try.
I didn’t bother with dry goods too much for obvious reasons.
After gathering the groceries, I perused the non-perishable aisles for toilet paper, medicines, and cleaning supplies I would need soon. For the time being, I could run out and grab whatever I needed whenever I needed it, but I felt better knowing I had the items on hand.
Once I’d overloaded the truck with supplies, I returned home to put the items away and have a late lunch. I rested for a bit after my meal. I tried not to think about the disappearances and how it had happened. I tried not to think about the future either, but I couldn’t help it. I sat down at the kitchen table, opened the notebook where I kept my theories, and added aliens to my list of possible causes of the disappearances. I also added a few keywords to search the internet for later.
To keep myself from getting lost online, I set up the burn barrel. The instructions said I should place the barrel in a clearing to prevent sparks from igniting anything, so I placed it close to my curb, but not so close that sparks or debris could reach my grass.
The barrel had a lid that would help prevent sparks from flying, but I wasn’t taking any chances. The last thing I needed was to burn down my neighborhood.
Although the barrel I picked up had legs to keep it off the ground, I used twelve-by-twelve pavers to give it extra height and stability. Next, I put a small bag of trash, containing only burnable items—the rest I would have to carry to the dump every two weeks—in the barrel and set it ablaze. I hadn’t used too much kindling, so I couldn’t burn too much at once. The small load let me ensure I had a fire I could control. That was my first time doing anything like that.
I’d almost forgotten the fire extinguisher while I was out shopping. Luckily, I saw it on a shelf at the home store as I neared the exit.
We had one in the house, but I wanted one that would stay by the door so I could take it outside with me when I used the barrel.
While my trash burned, I sat in a lawn chair near the barrel, doing research on my phone and resisting the urge to get out my laptop. I’d check my social media sites and email before bed, but at that moment, I needed to calm the thoughts and questions running through my head, and the only way to do that was to research what my brain wanted to know.
The first thing I looked up was UFO sightings. That had been a mistake because everyone and their brother had apparently seen one in the days leading up to the disappearances. None of the images were clear enough to be conclusive proof of what the poster claimed to have seen, and none showed people being taken. In the reports of abductions, cars had been taken control of by the aliens, but they weren’t neatly moved to the side of the road out of the way of traffic, nor were the persons’ keys left in the floorboard. And the aliens returned everyone within a few hours of taking them.
I read articles and blog posts until the fire in the barrel died, and then I went into the house and had supper. Afterward, I showered to wash the smell of smoke off my skin and crawled into bed with the laptop to see if anyone had replied to my messages or posts.
No one had.
The news sites hadn’t changed.
Despite that, I decided to send another message to everyone on my friend’s list and post on my social media pages. In my post, I wrote about what happened those first few days, including finding my husband’s empty car and what I found at the hospital and police station. I didn’t add my theory that aliens might be behind the disappearances. Nor did I include my location. Yes, I wanted to know that I wasn’t alone, but I also didn’t want a pervert or crazy person showing up at my doorstep.
The smoke from the burn barrel would draw attention to my location, which I hadn’t thought about until then, but I had to take the risk.
I finished my post, begging someone to contact me soon before the internet went down, the power went out, or I went insane. After I hit “post,” I surfed a bit. That time, I researched the Christian rapture because, of all my theories, I hoped it was the one that would happen. I didn’t remember much from my time in church, but a few things had stuck with me. One of them was a verse that said, “the dead in Christ shall rise.” Another was something about God making Heaven on Earth after the rapture.
There was more than enough information on both of those ideas, and I read through a few theories and articles before my eyes went blurry. Most of the teachings agreed that only believers in Jesus/God would be taken, and I know not every person on the planet believed this, but I hoped the interpretation was wrong or that God had changed their mind and taken everyone. And I really hoped the “Heaven on Earth” bit meant everyone was coming back soon.
I closed my laptop, praying that the God theory was the right one.
