*All chapters of The Disappearances that I post here on Substack are unedited works in progress.
*Updated 9-10-26
Chapter 7
I rose early on the seventh day after the disappearances, intending to mow my lawn. I slammed my hand down hard on the alarm clock when it started blaring at six to shut it up. I groaned and sat up on the side of my bed.
“I can’t believe I’m up so early for this.”
“No one told you to get up at the buttcrack of dawn.”
“I know, but I don’t know how long it’s going to take me. I haven’t cut our yard in years, and it’s overgrown.”
“Screw the yard. Let’s look into the disappearances more. Or if not that, let’s go see Mom’s apartment.”
“I’m tired of finding nothing, and I’m not ready to go to Mom’s just yet. I need a break, and I need to prepare for my future.”
That last was just as important, and in many ways more important, than finding answers or my family. It was obvious I was going to have to leave my home if I wanted to find real answers, and I wasn’t ready for that.
Besides, the last thing I needed was snakes slithering onto my porch. With my luck, it would be something large and venomous. I also didn’t want to accidentally step into a fire ant mound I didn’t see. Ant bites wouldn’t hurt for more than a few hours, but they hurt like hell.
“It’s too late in the season to plant a lot of stuff,” my argumentative side chimed in as I sipped coffee and stared out the kitchen window at my overgrown lawn.
“Is a garden even necessary until next year?”
“I’m sure there’s something we can plant. And even if it is too late, I want it ready when the time comes. You know my luck. If I don’t start the garden soon, the power will go out, and the food will go bad a great deal quicker.”
“True, but everyone coming back as soon as I finish putting it in is also likely to happen.”
“So what? I’ve wasted a little time. Besides, if the people do come back, it’ll take a while for the world to restart, and in the meantime, I’ll have food when supplies start running low.”
“Okay. You’ve convinced me. I’ll mow the damned grass,” I said, putting my cup in the sink and going upstairs to find my garden shoes.
Twenty minutes later, I was filling the three-sixty’s tank with gas, thanking God we were midseason and that James had already done the yearly maintenance on our machines.
“Here goes nothing,” I said, mounting the machine. I’d only driven it a few times, so to say I was nervous was an understatement. I slowly backed it out of our shed, dropped the blades, set the height, and took off.
After finishing my backyard, I mowed my front yard, then drove around the block to cut the grass of the people behind me. They hadn’t put up a fence around their backyard, so I didn’t have to try to cut a hole large enough for the machine to fit through.
I had lunch after I cut the two yards with the riding lawnmower, then I went over the grounds with the push mower to reach areas the riding mower couldn’t reach, before finishing with the weed eater. Walking the yards with the smaller machines gave me a clearer idea of the area I had to work with and allowed me to examine the fence line to determine which sections I needed to remove to gain access to the neighbor’s yard, which was all of it if I wanted the three yards around me.
The yard work, especially the weed-eating, made me miss the two men who did it for me, not just because of the effort it took to operate the machine, but also because of how much they enjoyed it. Mowing had been the first chore we’d given Tanner that he’d liked doing. Tanner was also good at it. He took his time, made sure he didn’t cut down anything he wasn’t supposed to, and didn’t push the air conditioning unit off its foundation the way I had the first time I’d driven the riding mower.
Okay, I hadn’t pushed the entire unit completely off the pad, but I had moved it a few inches. Both men had laughed their asses off at me when I showed them what I’d done.
I’d flipped them off and stomped into the house. Their laughter trailed behind me, pissing me off even more.
By the time I’d finished cutting both yards, I was ready to crash. I barely had the energy to shower and nibble on food. I’d made myself drink multiple bottles of water and Gatorade as I worked in the heat and again before bed, and while I was hungry, a meal wasn’t appetizing.
“I don’t think I’ll be able to keep up with this entire neighborhood,” I said, crawling into bed and wondering where I would have to set my boundary line. I didn’t want to let nature take over too much, but I was one person, and Mother Nature is a determined bitch.
While I lay under my covers, nodding off, my mind drifted from my yard to work to my family, as it usually did. I let myself feel the grief I’d been holding back all day from the barrage of memories the activity had brought to mind. Fortunately, I was too tired to cry. That didn’t stop the video in my head from replaying a memory of James and Tanner standing around the push mower in the backyard. It was Tanner’s first time mowing, and he was grumbling because James wanted him to learn to cut the yard with it first. James told him he knew the riding mower was easier, but Tanner needed to learn to use the push mower first.
As I slept, my dreams of Tanner and James shifted. In the last one I clearly remember, I watched them break into a thousand bits of ash and blow away. I screamed in my dream, but I didn’t wake up. After the dream disappeared, I tossed and turned the rest of the night, only to wake up early. I hadn’t planned to do anything that day but rest, but the nightmare had me edgy, so I decided to cut more yards in my neighborhood. I wasn’t sure if I would need the space, but I figured it was better to cut as much of it as I could than to let it become so overgrown that it would be too hard for me to use.
After finishing two more yards on day eight, I sat in an outdoor chair by my burn barrel, reading a book as I burned my trash. The book was a good distraction. I can’t say I didn’t think about my family, but whenever images of them popped into my head, I could push them away.
I was so tired from the heat of the past two days that I dozed in my lounge chair. I might have slept there all night if the cool night air hadn’t started to give me a slight chill an hour or so after sunset.
“I guess that’s my cue to go to bed,” I said, rubbing the goosebumps on my arms.
Setting my book aside, I lifted the bucket of water I kept nearby and doused the fire. I spent a few minutes stirring the wet ashes to ensure the fire was completely out before packing my things and going inside to shower and have a late-night snack.
I wouldn’t have eaten that late in the old world, but back then I wouldn’t have done so much physical labor in so short a time.
“If ever I’ve done enough work to deserve a bowl of ice cream at ten o’clock at night, these last two days would be the days,” I said, grabbing the container from the freezer.
“So what if I get diabetes or fat? I don’t have a reason to stay healthy,” I told myself as I spooned another bite of the creamy mint chocolate into my mouth. “I mean, if everyone is gone and not coming back, the sooner I die, the better.”
“That’s morbid,” I chided myself.
“What? I don’t want to live another forty years alone on this planet.”
“Think of something else.”
“Like what? We’ve found nothing to tell us what happened, so as far as we know, this is what our life will be like from here on out.”
“We don’t know that for certain.”
“No, but we’ve thought about everything but dying.”
“And I’m not starting now. So pick a different topic.”
“I don’t know what else to think about.”
“I don’t know either. Go watch a movie or something.”
“Yeah, that’ll help.”
“Not with that attitude. It won’t. One of the Hallmark channels will have something mushy. Go crawl into bed and watch a sappy love story.”
I shrugged and did what I had ordered myself to do. I took my pint of ice cream with me.
The Hallmark Channel didn’t disappoint. I laughed and cried through two romances about women reconnecting with past boyfriends, which made me miss James. After eating myself into a sugar coma and giving myself a pounding headache with all the crying, I curled into my blankets and passed out.
The movies made me dream about how James and I met, our wedding, the day we found out I was pregnant, Tanner’s first word, his first step, his first car, the day he left for college, and so much more. Dreaming about James and Tanner brought on dreams about my parents and sister, my grandparents, my cousins, my childhood friends, and many others. I dreamed of places they might have gone. I dreamed that some of them had survived and were trying to get to me.
Thankfully, none of the dreams made me cry myself awake, which was a plus. I needed something resembling a good night’s sleep. Unfortunately, I slept too well and didn’t wake until nearly noon. I was so stiff and sore that I made what my husband and I called old people noises as I got out of bed on the ninth day.
“Yeah, I’m not doing anything today,” I said, inching my way to the bathroom. “Even my toes hurt.”
I barely made it to the kitchen to grab a quick bite to eat before I was talking myself into going back to bed. I hadn’t planned to go back to sleep, but to watch a little television and rest. Still, I was asleep within the hour. I didn’t wake again around five that afternoon.
Again, I got up, peed, grabbed something to eat, and went back to bed. It took me a little longer to fall asleep, but once I was out, I didn’t wake until the next morning.
At first, I chalked up my sleepiness to exhaustion because I had been sleeping around the clock for two days. However, in the days that followed, I barely got out of bed. When I wasn’t sleeping, I lay there thinking about everything. I thought about my husband, my son, my life, and the world as it had been, then about where they might be and the likelihood they were still alive.
I spent two weeks that way. I didn’t leave my house or, more accurately, my bed except to do the necessities. On the rare occasions when I ran out of something, like body wash or peanut butter, I would invade one of my neighbors’ homes to get what I needed. Usually, it was Janis’ house because I figured she was more likely to forgive me. I know that I had initially told myself to leave their things alone, but as each day passed and no one returned, I no longer cared what they thought about the missing items.
Depression that severe wasn’t something I’d ever suffered from, so I hadn’t registered what I was going through until I was well into my tenth day in bed. I just thought I was tired. I’d been through a lot since everyone disappeared. I’d felt a great deal of intense emotions in a short amount of time, and the shock of what happened alone had taken much out of me. I thought I was finally feeling the trauma, and I was, but I was also letting the trauma overwhelm me.
I stopped talking to myself.
I didn’t watch television.
I didn’t read.
I didn’t search for others on my laptop or phone.
I did nothing but eat, pee, and sleep. I justified it all by telling myself my brain and body needed rest. And it did. But I promised myself I would give it downtime only for a short time, hoping that when I was back on my feet, I’d be better able to focus on figuring out what was happening and deciding what I needed to do in the future.
For those two weeks, I was content to do nothing but that. Yet, when my time was up and I didn’t want to get up, a mental battle began to rage inside me. A big part of me didn’t see the point of getting up or doing anything. It said that I had nothing to do. I had no bills to pay for the first time in my adult life. I didn’t have a child or a father-in-law to care for, and I didn’t have a job. I didn’t have a husband to share a date night with. I didn’t have a mother to visit or a sister to talk to on the phone. I didn’t have a best friend to eat lunch with or cats to feed.
I had nothing.
I was utterly alone.
I’d stopped caring about most things.
The more rational part of my brain reminded me that I had plenty to do. I needed to stockpile items for when I no longer had electricity. I needed to research what life would be like living off the grid. I had federal buildings to explore. I had gardens to prepare, animals to find, and people to find. If I survived, others had to.
“I know you don’t want to die,” my rational side had said, speaking aloud to get my attention better. “If you did, you wouldn’t be feeding yourself.”
“No, I want to live because I’m hoping that whatever took my family will return for me.”
“Liar. You want your family back, but you don’t want to go where they are, not without knowing where they are. And you won’t get answers lying around in bed. All you’re accomplishing is giving yourself headaches and a weak and stiff body from the lack of movement. Now get out of this damn bed.”
“I don’t want to,” I said with a pout.
“I know you don’t because in your dreams, your husband was alive, your son was home from college, and your family was just a phone call away. In your dreams you can relive old memories, create new ones, and even disappear with them. But in the real world, they are gone, and you are here.”
“Why can’t I live the lie?” I said, covering my head with the blanket.
“Because deep down you’re curious. We have a burning itch to know what happened to everyone. We need to know if anyone else is alive. Most importantly, we need to know who is running this shit show. There is no way all those people just decided to pull off the road. Someone or something was controlling them, and whoever they are might be controlling the power stations.”
“If there is power, then there are people,” I said, uncovering my face.
“Yes. More than one if the power is still on everywhere, and I believe it is. That means someone is maintaining the grid, which means something bigger than the disappearances is happening, and damn it, as much as I wanted to be with our family, I want to know what that something is.”
“I guess I do too,” I said, tossing the blanket aside and getting out of the bed.
“That’s my girl.”
“Hey. Watch it. Or I’ll stop talking to you again.”
“No, you won’t. I’m all you have at the moment.”
“I’ve gone fucking insane.”
“Yep. Being the last person on the planet will do that to you.”
After showering, I looked at my house: the laundry and dishes had piled up, the lawns had overgrown again, and the trash needed to be burned.
“It’s too much,” I said, trying to give myself a reason to go back to bed.
“Yeah, there are a million and one things that need our attention. All of it should give you a sense of purpose.”
“Well, it doesn’t.”
“Oh yes, it does. I can feel the itch inside you to clean up as quickly as possible, so you dive into research. Now, get to work.”
Over the next few days, I regained my strength and stamina by slowly washing the clothes that had piled up in my hamper and running the dishwasher. I vacuumed and dusted. I burned my trash and made a list of what I was running low on, giving myself a reason to leave my neighborhood.
One day, while waiting for a load of clothes to dry, I went online to find out how long electricity could keep running without someone controlling and maintaining the power stations or substations. The internet didn’t give me a clear answer because I didn’t know what kind of fuel our plant ran on. I thought it was the nearby dam, but I couldn’t be sure. No matter what fueled it, be it fossil fuel, solar, or hydro, I felt the electricity would go out in my neighborhood soon if no one were maintaining it, and if it didn’t go out, then someone was definitely out there.
After folding the clothes I’d washed, I cleaned the dust off the washer and dryer, which had built up over the last few weeks because we hadn’t used them. That, in turn, led me to mop the laundry room floor. Before I knew it, I’d made to-do lists for the house and yard that would take me days, even weeks, to complete.
The to-do list and my desire to find out why I still had electricity kept me up and moving in the days after I got out of bed. Eventually, I discovered my electricity came from a hydroelectric plant. Unfortunately, the plant was three cities over. The thought of driving through that many empty cities made me nervous. I didn’t think I could do it without panicking.
“You don’t know they are empty,” the argumentative part of me chimed in. “And you won’t know until you grow a pair and go.”
“I’m well aware. Though, I think it’s safe to say it’s empty. But for now, I’m going to continue to stay close to home. The people have been gone long enough for me to stray that far from home.”
Further research revealed that my city’s electrical board and our substation were just four blocks from my house. That was a reasonable distance to travel, so I decided that would be my first place to investigate. My other half agreed that was a start.
