There were others but none of them held water.
One day, the talk show brought some real scientists on. They did a lot of speculating but only one theory caught my attention. It was one presented by a group of research and theoretical physicists. Because a number of people wound up in improbable or even impossible places, places they hadn’t been in beforehand, they conjectured there’d been some kind of temporal and spatial displacement. Unfortunately, there was no way to test the theory or even to determine what any of these people experienced since none of them lived through whatever caused the theoretical displacement. They’d all been in that same gut-wrenching condition.
The physicists talked about black holes, continuity fluxes, dimensional shifts, and time warps but none could say exactly what might’ve caused those phenomena. I was an English teacher and not a research scientist so though I’d heard some of the terms, I didn’t know what all of that meant. Then, I thought about the vague figures I’d glimpsed in the fog that morning, especially the one that passed me on the sidewalk, and I thought of Zoni, who’d impossibly gotten back to our apartment before I did. Maybe the theory had some merit.
One said that some of the laws of physics seemed to have changed because there was no reason otherwise why some technologies still worked but others didn’t, and that set off an argument between all of them. I turned the radio off. I didn’t care about that. I’d been listening to see if anyone would come up with a reasonable explanation for the Event. I felt they could argue about physics at some other time.
The day after that, the radio show brought in a couple of groups of religious people. A shock to no one, there were some who thought it was a punishment from God on a sinful world. They wanted everyone to join their particular “one true religion” or the world was forever damned.
I suppose they could’ve been right and God was pissed off at everyone, but He wasn’t saying. Halfway through their rant, I switched to a different station, one playing regular music and not the funeral kind.
Chapter Eight
WILL OPTED TO STAY WITH ME UNTIL WE heard from his parents. I got the feeling he didn’t want to be alone. He kept going back to his house to check the answering machine for messages but he always came back to my place with the same negative news – no word from them.
A couple of weeks later, we’d still not heard from them – or my sister.
“I want to try to make it to Jamaica, Tenn,” he said as he sprawled out on the tatty, seen-much-better-days brown sofa that came with the apartment. “This waiting is getting to me.”
From my seat at the equally as battered, laminate-topped table with two old tubular chairs, I looked up from the want-ad section of the paper I was perusing.
“How would you get there? Planes are still not flying.”
He nodded. “Yeah, I know. But they said on the radio some ships are back in service. They’re slower than… than before… but they’re running. You know my friend Tremaine? He said there’s one that goes to Jamaica. Most of his family’s there and he wants to go, too. We can drive to Miami to catch it. He’s got money and I’ve got some saved and that will be enough to get us there and pay for tickets.”
I thought it over. Tremaine was a couple of months younger than Will. His parents sent him to relatives in the states a couple of years ago to complete high school. He’d graduated with Will and was set to go to college with him in the fall.
The week before, Will went to check on him and found him staying with his one relative fortunate enough to have survived. I didn’t much like the thought of the two teens wandering down to Miami by themselves, especially considering how erratic things were. The federal government finally collected itself enough to get out the Guard. Their ranks were thinner so even with the drop in population it was slow going for them. They were making some headway but it was still dangerous out there.
It was not as bad locally but in some places, there was ongoing trouble, including from the religious group that wanted everyone to join their “one true religion”. Some of them went overboard and were making attempts to forcibly compel people into the fold. I didn’t think the movement would last long but they, along with other irrational folk, were causing a lot of instability. Most people were unwilling to join them, and expressed their displeasure by using equally as forcible means.
“I don’t know, Will. Things are still chaotic. There’s rioting in places. You should wait until the National Guard gets it under better control.”
He sat up and stared at the off-white, featureless wall for a few seconds before saying, “I’ve gotta go, Tenn. It’s killing me to sit here not knowing. I have to go see that Mom and Dad are okay. Every day, it’s something else. Cellphones don’t work, the internet is gone – except for DSL and you need a landline for that. There’s no TV… and the amusement park didn’t reopen so my job there is toast.”
He was right. The Event seemed to have screwed up a lot of crap and more than cellphones, internet, and TV were out of commission. Voice command and autodrive went out the first day. Trains didn’t work, though arbitrarily, cars, trucks, and buses did – as long as there was a backup ignition key and as long as you didn’t expect your flight capable car to fly. Owning a flight car was well above my means so that wasn’t a concern for me.
You also had to manually figure out where you were going since none of the directional programming or GPS worked. The satellites were still up there but they weren’t in operation, which, of course meant satellite phones didn’t work either. Neither did any of the ‘bots, though that also wasn’t a concern for me, either, since I’d been too broke to own any type of robot except the basic carpet sweeper, anyway.
Nobody knew why none of this worked. The physicists were scratching their heads and arguing about it.
At the moment my main worry was that when I went down to the school board to get my address changed, one of the people in the sparsely manned office informed me that the portion of my ten-month salary that I had opted to place in an account so I would have income during the summer, would not be forthcoming for a while. They didn’t know why only that there was some glitch in the system and all the teachers who’d taken the same option were in the same bind. They didn’t know when it would be corrected.
I checked with my credit union and the first scheduled amount wasn’t there. This was worrying. Since I had planned to be on my honeymoon instead of in the city, I hadn’t taken on any of the part-time work I usually did to supplement my summer pay, such as tutoring or working as a lifeguard at one of the public pools, and none of those jobs were available at the moment. That was one reason why I was looking at want-ads.
Most of the cash Zoni and I put away had already been paid out for the wedding and honeymoon that would never happen, and there was no way to get the money back. I had a little left in savings because in addition to setting aside funds for our wedding and honeymoon, we were also able to tuck away a little for a down payment on a condo. The royalties from my book went into that.
Of course, until the week before the world went slipping off into a deep pile, those royalties hadn’t been a lot and with things gone to hell, they would likely stop.
Then, the same day I got the news about my summer salary, local government announced they were delaying the opening of school. That was another reason I was looking at the want-ads. Maybe I would eventually get the money from my summer account, but I didn’t have it yet, and I was going to need a way to feed myself and keep my apartment until the schools reopened.