As she pondered her next move, the phone alerted her that she was down to twenty-four percent battery life.
Lara crawled back to the table, found the charger, and plugged it into the end of the iPhone. She waited to hear the quirky breep! sound as the phone began to charge, but there wasn’t one. She pulled the charger free and plugged it back in, but there was still no expected breep! sound.
Frustrated, she crawled over to the window and, making sure she was behind the wall, stood up and peered through an inch-long slit where the curtain opened slightly at the side. For a moment she thought it was just her vantage point, because the world looked nebulous through her miniscule one-inch view. But that wasn’t it.
The street lights had gone out, and every window she could see was pitch-black. She was momentarily baffled, then stunned when she couldn’t find a single working light anywhere in the neighborhood, no matter how far she looked.
This is impossible…
Desperate, she looked to the distance, toward Downtown, expecting to see lights along the skyscrapers. She could barely make out the dark outlines of what were supposed to be towering buildings. The only lights she could detect were the inert red and white lights along the highways, cars frozen in place. The city slumbered underneath some amorphous cloud, as if someone had thrown a blanket over it.
For a moment she childishly resolved not to go to sleep again, because it seemed that every time she closed her eyes, something bad happened outside.
Who needs sleep, anyway?
The quiet pulled at her and refused to let go. Where had everyone gone? There had to be others out there, maybe hiding in their apartments like her, waiting for daylight, for the police to show up, for anyone to show up. The military. The government. Unless it was happening in other cities, too. Around the whole country, maybe.
It had to be some kind of a terrorist attack. It was the only thing that made sense. Some religious fanatic with a grudge must have destroyed the power grid. Or some homegrown terrorist with an irrational fear of the current administration. There was an explanation here, somewhere. Cities didn’t just go dark. There were people to take care of these things — city employees dedicated to keeping the lights on. There were infrastructures in place to make sure something like this didn’t happen, and the only way it could was if someone attacked it.
Of course it had to be terrorism.
It doesn’t explain the man with the spiked hair…
Or the creature perched over him…
Movement flickered suddenly in the corner of her eye. Lara pressed herself against the wall and stopped breathing completely, her eyes glued to the small one-inch view that was her only safe connection to the outside world.
She glimpsed a white shirt and black slacks in the moonlight as the figure — a man, not one of those things—darted between cars parked on the curb across the street from her apartment. He hid behind the bumper of a truck and looked around, scanning the streets for something.
Idiot, get out of the streets. Don’t you have any idea what’s out there?
She watched him jog off the street and toward one of the apartments to his right. He tried the door, found it locked, then moved on to the next apartment and repeated the process.
At least he was smart enough not to knock or make too much noise. If only the man with spiked hair had been that smart…
The man was on his third apartment door, and finding it locked, he quickly darted back into the street to hide, this time behind a blue Ford. He crouched against the bumper, and Lara saw him gathering his breath, looking around, growing desperate.
You should be scared…
He was almost directly in front of her now, and she could see him more clearly in the moonlight. He looked young, maybe early twenties, about her age. A plain black tie hung loosely from his neck. He looked left, then right, then left again.
He doesn’t know where to go. He’s stuck…
She thought about the man with the spiked hair, and before she realized it, she had knocked on her glass window — just one quick rasp with her knuckles, loud enough that she hoped he could hear.
But he didn’t seem to, because he didn’t move.
She knocked again, and this time louder. He turned, looking around him. Wondering, probably, what he had heard.
She knocked a third time, even louder still.
That did it. The man glanced up in her direction. Afraid he couldn’t see her, Lara brushed the curtain aside just enough to reveal herself.
He looked straight at her.
Lara wasn’t sure what to do next. She looked down at him and met his eyes. He smiled and spread his hands, palms up, as if to say, “Now what?”
Good question.
Lara traced the number 214 in the air with her fingers a few times. He watched her carefully, then mouthed the words, “214” back at her. She nodded quickly.
He was suddenly on his feet and racing across the street, toward her apartment. She watched him for as long as she could until he disappeared underneath her window.
Stupid, Lara. This is so stupid.
She hurried to her bedroom door and wrestled free the chair underneath the doorknob. Adrenaline coursed through her, though she wasn’t sure if it was from anticipation or fear — probably both. She opened the door as quietly as possible, then peered out, one hand on the doorknob ready to slam it shut again if there was something—anything—out there.
There was only darkness.
She moved as quietly through the living room as she dared, reminding herself what she had heard below her only hours ago. She used what little moonlight there was from the window as a guide. It was barely enough.
She was halfway across the room when she heard the doorknob twisting, and for a split second she turned to run back to the bedroom.
Stop! her mind screamed. It’s him!
Her heart was still racing uncontrollably in her chest when she crossed to the window and quickly pulled aside the curtain to glance toward the door.
The young man in the white shirt and black slacks was waiting anxiously outside her door, glancing around him. Without the walkway lights, he looked foreboding and dangerous, and a part of her screamed that this was unwise, that opening the door was stupid, and what the hell was she thinking?
She fought through her fears and unlocked the door to let him in. As he moved past her, she could almost hear his heart racing in his chest.
At least it’s not just me.
She closed the door as softly as she could and locked it. First the doorknob, then the deadbolt above it. She stepped back and looked at him.
He was older than she had initially thought, though not by much. Dark brown eyes looked back at her while he crouched over at the waist, catching his breath. “Thanks. I don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t let me in.”
“Sure,” she said, and an image of the man with spiked hair flashed across her mind again. He was forever ingrained in her memory, a guilt she wasn’t going to be able to purge for a long time, if ever.
The man pushed himself from the wall, walked over to the couch, and sat down heavily. He leaned forward and ran his fingers through brown curly hair.
She walked over and sat in an armchair across from him. “What’s happening out there? The lights don’t work. When did they go out?”