“No.”
“Then that means they’re all still stuck in Jamaica.”
I hoped so. Neither of us wanted to discuss the alternative.
He slumped down. “Well where’ve you been? I’ve been coming by here for days looking for you.”
I leaned forward and draped my arms over my knees. My head was beginning to throb and I kneaded my temples. Being there at the old place was getting harder by the minute. I stood.
“I’ve moved. I came back today to pick up some belongings. Look, let me get the rest of my things. It’s not much and won’t take long. You can follow me over to my new place, okay?”
He nodded and we went upstairs. The place was still intact. I suppose I was lucky nobody had broken in and taken everything of value considering the state of society at the moment. In fact, none of the buildings on the street seemed to have been bothered. It was sort of a run-down neighborhood so it was my guess that looters bypassed it for locations that were more profitable. Besides, there were a lot fewer people around.
Prior to vacating, I took all of Zoni’s belongings to the Goodwill so there wasn’t anything left of hers in the place and as I’d told Will, I didn’t have much to get. All the furniture except the bed came with the apartment, and I wasn’t taking the bed with me.
I gathered the things I wanted. I got my little table/desk and folded it up to take down to my car, and gathered the rest of my clothes and my books. Will helped me carry down everything. I also took the TV. Maybe television would start working again. Will hauled it out to put in his car. As I went past the little refrigerator, I stopped. Zoni’s note was still there under the Bigfoot magnet next to the little brown elf. I hesitated then took them down and stuck them in my pocket.
“What will you do with Zoni’s car?” asked Will when we got down to the parking lot.
I glanced at her five years old little electric Chevy Mia that had been sitting there since the 27th. I didn’t have the heart to deal with it just then.
I shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ll take care of it later.”
He nodded and trailed me back to my apartment.
Chapter Seven
THE FIRST WEEK IN THE NEW PLACE, WITH NOT much else to do, I continued to listen to a lot of radio.
For lack of anything better, people called what happened by that inadequate term the TV reporter used on the first day: the Event. That is, the folk on the radio did. The average person didn’t much care to talk about it, and only used the term in passing. We generally sort of skated around it.
Information on a cause was basically nonexistent. Our overwhelmed government hadn’t figured out what it was; only what it wasn’t. They released a statement that said they determined it wasn’t an attack by some rogue country or some terrorist group with a new weapon that got out of control but they assured us that the phenomenon was under study. What that meant was either they were lying, or they were as clueless as everyone else was. Thinking back on that morning, in my opinion they weren’t lying. I could’ve been wrong but I didn’t believe anybody on Earth had the technology to cause something like that.
One of the radio stations began broadcasting a talk show that invited groups of people to present their ideas on the subject. I listened to it because I guess I was hoping somebody would come up with something that made sense but I should’ve known better. Conspiracy theories flew around like a swarm of mosquitos.
One that might have offered a little plausibility was that of a scientific experiment going wrong. Unfortunately, the guy couldn’t say what kind of experiment it might’ve been or exactly where it might’ve taken place. He had no real answers so he came across – at least to me – as being full of shit.
Then there were the outrageously stupid ideas that folk pretending to know what they were talking about tried to shove on people.
At that time, there were no statistics on how much of a reduction in the world’s approximately ten billion strong population there was though it didn’t take much to see that it was drastic. Because of this, someone came up with the notion that there was collusion between the world’s super powers to lower the numbers of our overpopulated planet. Of course, that theory made no sense because the Event hadn’t discriminated.
Sure, certain areas of the world did have an overabundance of people but those weren’t the only folk gone. The Event took people in all walks of life everywhere: the rich, the poor, criminals, cops, teachers and preachers, soccer moms, working dads, kids, and babies. Even pet cats and dogs, zoo animals, and from reports, wild ones, too, were gone – and some of those same world leaders were among the dead. What had they used and why wouldn’t they have crawled into a hidey-hole somewhere in order to escape the fate they’d set loose on the rest of the world?
The man who put forth that theory hadn’t been able to answer those pertinent questions asked by the radio host except with some bullshit about how he was still doing research.
There was the group who declared that alien invaders brought it all about and the government covered it up. The host pointed out that no spaceships full of aliens showed up following the Event, and how or why would anybody cover it up? The answer from the group’s spokesperson amounted to “We don’t know but we’re sure that’s what happened and we’re going to prove it”.
Right.
On another day, some guy hopped in and said it was due to the magnetic fields of the Earth having undergone a sudden reversal.
Will, who was listening to that particular broadcast with me, shook his head at that one, and said, “We learned in science last year that the magnetic fields wouldn’t just haul off and flip all of a sudden. It’s a slow process. Heck, it’s happened before, several times, and the poles didn’t simply suddenly flip then, either. It’s a process that builds up over a number of years, probably thousands. While it was taking its time flipping, our magnetic shield would weaken so the earth would get more cosmic rays.
“The teacher said it might affect the ozone and that would cause a rise in cancers in people, and the rays would be hell on our satellites and electronics and stuff. It could get bad but it wouldn’t cause a problem like this. I’ll bet the dummy hasn’t even thought to check a simple compass to see which way it points. He’s gonna have to come up with something else.”
I had to agree with him and we both chuckled because apparently, the man hadn’t looked at a compass. When the talk show host called for someone to round up one and showed the guy that it indicated north still pointed towards the Arctic Ocean and south towards Antarctica, he shut up.
Another theory was that it was due to a sudden climate change. This one seemed centered on the so-called fog that appeared that morning. In fact, no one knew what the substance was that rolled down and spread around the entire world in a matter minutes. Having gone out in it, I knew it hadn’t looked or felt like a regular fog. I didn’t see it lift but others had and they reported that it didn’t really dissipate. It was there one moment and then it was gone. There was nothing gradual about it. Apparently, it appeared the same way.
Everyone agreed that the Event caused the encompassing haze and not the other way around. The weather-change theory was plainly absurd because the one thing everybody knew was that once the fog dissipated, the weather returned to normal. As established a while back, the climate was changing all right, but it wasn’t doing it any faster than before. The change had, in fact slowed in recent years due to international laws put into effect back in the twenties. Moreover, there was the fact that the particular theorist couldn’t say how a climate change would’ve caused what happened.