Though the mayor was lucky that day, 450 or so others weren't.
It was just at this time that I returned to the city, after a long and deserved stay in the mountains, where I had been blissfully unaware of the events transpiring by now all over the country. I hadn't, in fact, seen a newspaper in three weeks, and I must admit I greeted the news of these disappearances as something of a joke.
I quickly revised that impression.
Just off the bus in front of my apartment, my folded newspaper under my arm, I witnessed the man who disembarked before me get sucked underground. The buses and city streets were nearly empty these days and only he and I had gotten off; the bus driver averted his eyes, closed the door behind me, and sped off.
I must admit I was alarmed. I tried to pry up the block of sidewalk by the curb where the man had vanished, but was unable to budge it. As I was bent over, I felt a firm tug beside me and looked over to see the next section of sidewalk raised up like a door and the hint of a hand on my trouser leg. With a cry of alarm I pulled away and the sidewalk slammed back down into place.
Needless to say, I no longer considered these events a joke.
But I was fascinated. When I returned home, by a circular route to the back of the building and employing a curious method of walking that resembled a game of hop-scotch coupled with a long-jumper's finest moves, I turned on the television to discover that a total of six thousand people had disappeared that day across the country. There were now cases being reported from all over the world—even from behind the Iron Curtain, which had just a few days before scoffed at the whole phenomenon as another Western figment of the imagination, akin to flying saucers and the Soviet threat of aggression.
The following day I spent mostly indoors in front of two windows—one the real window in the front of my apartment, overlooking the absolutely empty streets below, and the other the window of the television which told me that martial law had been declared in this and other large metropolises, and that, despite denials by military officials, there were unconfirmed reports that as many as four hundred and fifty military personnel and National Guardsmen had been swept from the face of the earth while on patrol. The mayor came on during all of this and tried to calm everyone down, but it was obvious that he didn't believe a word he was saying and so kept his speech short.
I ventured out only once that day, to buy groceries to stock my vacation-depleted larder. Even then I barely made it back, with my trouser cuffs a bit frayed from being pulled at from below. One never thinks about the essentialness of sidewalks—but after trying to avoid using them I realized just how dependent the city dweller is on them.
The next morning, one of the television stations went off the air, announcing that there were not enough personnel left to manage it; that evening, another station followed.
The streets were quietly deserted now. I made one more trip to the grocery, amazed that more looting had not gone on. Though the shelves were nearly stripped clean, it seemed to have been done in an orderly fashion. The front doors had been left open, and no windows were broken. The only shops along the way that seemed to have suffered any sort of damage were the jewelry stores, though I couldn't imagine why, since a goodly number of the thieves must have found their fate just outside the doors as piles of gems lay scattered about after being thrown into the air as the felons were pulled under.
Making it back to my apartment this time proved extremely difficult, and I only managed it by employing on my feet a pair of large and uncomfortable snow shoes from a sporting goods store which I was obliged to jump into just after leaving the grocery. It was here that I met a compatriot—an extremely frightened girl of nineteen who seemed so glad to see me that she threw her arms about me; after these preliminaries I learned that she had seen both of her parents disappear just outside the door of this store two days previously, and she had been in a sort of shock since, thinking herself the only person left alive in the city.
It was decided that she should accompany me back to my apartment, an arrangement which she was at first reluctant to go along with not because of any mistrust of me but because she was terrified of venturing outside. When I came up with my snow shoe plan, however, she warmed to the subject, not having eaten in forty-eight hours, and she even improved on the scheme by putting on herself a pair of cross-country skis. We double-lashed this gear to our feet and made our way homeward.
Even still we barely made it. Sections of concrete were popping up like jack-in-the-box covers all over the place. They had an almost comically obsessive quality about them which thoroughly frightened the two of us, as if they were impelled to carry us below ground at all costs. And try as I might, I could not peer into any of the momentary openings to discern what was doing all this.
We did manage to arrive at my apartment safely, though one of Julie's skis was wrenched loose as she made a dash from the road to the front door of the building: during one skip, an opening appeared and something firm and strong grabbed her leg. It was only by making a heroic (if funny-looking, considering that I was wearing snow shoes) leap onto this concrete door, forcing whatever it was (I thought I caught a glimpse of what resembled a human arm) to let go and pull back underground, that she was able to free herself, the ski coming off in the process. With one terrified leap, she fell into the doorway of the apartment building, and I followed none too gracefully behind.
One television station of importance was still left in operation, and it was here, huddled before the blue-gray lens with cans of cold soup and blankets wrapped around us (the heat and all other normal services of course had disappeared faster than anything else) that I learned that my worst fears had been realized. Up until this time I had nurtured some vague hope of making it back to the countryside I had so recently quitted, planning now to bring Julie along with me. But a jiggly camera bearing film that had been shot outside the city showed scenes even more horrible than those we had witnessed here, entire roads arching up at the center and dumping their contents— people, cars, whatever else had been moved there off the sparse sidewalks—off to either side and underground, spilling over and down below each curb, so now even the streets were not safe. The pun didn't occur to me at the time, but now, at last, this phrase was literally true.
That night Julie and I spent huddled together not so much for warmth as for the reassurance that there was still another human being within reaching distance; while outside and all around us the sounds of a city, and a world, slowly emptying itself underground went on, with huge groanings and slidings and horrid burpings, like the bowel movements of giant beasts. I remember the sound of the street in front of my building buckling as I fell off to sleep.
When I awoke Julie was gone. There was a note, taped to the television, stating that she could not live like a hunted animal and that the loss of her parents had been too much of a blow. I ran to the window to see, on the ravaged street below, her pair of cross country skis; I felt a moment of anger at her decision to abandon hope, but quickly recovered, resolving that I would survive at all costs.
Even the television had degenerated into madness now. The one operable station had apparently been abandoned by all of its normal staff, and had been commandeered by a bearded prophet of doom utilizing, of all things, a ventriloquist's dummy. I had seen this character in the park at one time or another; first he would spout his message of coming destruction and then the dummy, dressed in frayed evening dress, would echo the same words in a falsetto voice. So this is what was left of the world—but that wasn't entirely accurate, since as I was about to turn him off he abruptly announced that he would now go to his salvation, and ran shrieking off camera, apparently to meet his fate outside the studio. Fading away in the distance, the dummy's voice was crying, 'Be saved! Be saved!'
The television was now completely useless in all bands, exhibiting either station call letters or an empty stage set. My multi-band radio, little more than a toy actually, proved of little help either; the lone station I managed to pull in, from somewhere in Europe, died an hour after I located it with the eerie words reminiscent of the famed 'War of the Worlds' broadcast initiated by Orson Welles and his Mercury Theatre in 1938: 'Is anyone there? Is.. .anyone?' The voice sounded English, and frightened. I wished I could have answered it. A little after nine that night it faded and could not be recaptured.
For three days I stayed in my apartment, alternately trying the television and radio for some signs of life, spending the remainder of my time at my window with a pair of binoculars. Aside from a few airborne birds I saw no signs of life. Always having been something of a loner, I at first thought that my time had finally come and that I would now be afforded the solitude I had always craved; however, that hope quickly vanished with the prospect looming that I would run out of food, a prospect which was now imminent. I surveyed the pathways outside and was chagrined to find that there was little chance of my traversing them in the same fashion I had before: large
