This can’t be happening.
There is no way you, and everything else, could suddenly change like this.
No way in hell.
Wait, wait, wait, oh God, wait…
A high-pitched keening rose from my throat as I sought my lower belly with a sudden vengeance – no longer did it retain the feeling of a life beyond my own, the small but persistent swelling ache of pregnancy. I was hollow-hipped and empty.
Empty.
Oh, dear God, what is happening?
I sank to a crouch, bringing my folded hands to my lips. Shaking, profoundly terrified, I begged, Please let this be a nightmare. Let me wake up. Let me wake up right now. Oh God, let me wake up right now.
Nothing shifted, nothing altered. All but feral now, desperate for answers, I leaped to my feet and tore headlong back to The Spoke. Or, what had been The Spoke only minutes ago.
“Case!” I screamed his name repeatedly, running around to the back entrance where I’d found him once before, pounding my fists on the door, ready to break windows and force an entry. Case had been playing his fiddle on the stage when I’d seen him last and with the tunnel vision of the desperate, that’s where I figured I had to find him now. The murky silence released no clues, revealed nothing. Tears dripped from my chin and clogged my throat. In the course of a fairly eventful life, I had never been more frightened. Something chimed in my memory, stilling my frantic movement. This time, I yelled a different name. “Camille! Are you here? Where are you?”
I was certain I’d heard my sister screaming for me just before…
Before it happened, whatever it was. Whatever Fallon had done and Derrick had tried to warn me about. I continued my frenzied trek around the building and almost tripped over her huddled form, falling to my knees and wrapping her in both arms. She lay on her right side in exactly the same position in which I’d awakened, limbs drawn inward, chin tucked down. My breath exploded in bursting huffs, intense relief that she was here, that I was not alone in this nightmare.
“Are you all right? Can you hear me?” It took effort to keep my voice at least a few notches below outright panic. I smoothed hair away from her ear. “Milla, can you hear me?”
She groaned and shuddered; the back of her head struck my chin as she jolted to sudden consciousness, catching me off guard. I muffled a cry, releasing her to clutch my jaw.
“Tish,” she moaned, staggering to her knees. “Where are we? What’s going on?”
“I don’t know, Milla, I’m so scared. The last thing I knew I was out here in the parking lot talking to Derrick Yancy.” The words emerged from my mouth like small corks bobbing on ocean breakers. “And then I heard you screaming. I heard Case shouting for me…oh God…”
We were out of range of the streetlight and her eyes appeared as nothing but two dark sockets, but I knew her features better than my own. I felt her potent fear, her inability to grapple with what was happening. She grabbed my arms and the trembling in her body flowed into mine.
“What happened inside The Spoke? Do you remember?” I persisted, clutching her coat in a two-handed grip, as though she might just melt away if I released hold.
“I…we…”
“Tell me, Milla, please tell me. We have to figure out what’s happening.”
“It was so strange, so fast…the entire room started to fade away, just disappear.”
“Disappear where?” I stifled the urge to shake answers from her.
“I don’t know.” Small gasps punctuated her words. “I tried to…stand up…but I couldn’t…”
“And then what?!”
“It was like everything just…went gray and static.” She gulped but then steadied her voice, with effort. “They knew something was wrong at the last second, Tish, but it was too late. Case jumped from the stage, shouting for you…and Mathias…oh God, Mathias…” His name broke her and she covered her mouth, bending forward with the strength of her cries.
Case. Of course he had tried to reach me but I’d been outside. Camille sobbed, clinging to my ribcage, hiding her face against my coat; I held fast, rocking her side to side, my thoughts shrieking and flapping like a thousand panicked birds startled by approaching hunters. Agony would overtake and cripple us if we let it – and I knew we could not let it, not now. We had to figure this out, had to get to the bottom of it. I wanted my husband with an intense, all-consuming ache, but I gritted my teeth and mustered a measure of calm.
“Milla, listen to me.” I waited for a second, until I sensed her paying attention. “There have to be some clues as to what happened. Everything around us seems different, like we’re in some sort of alternate reality or something, but we can’t panic right now. It’s the worst fucking thing we could do. Come on, let’s get up. Let’s find out everything we can, okay?”
She nodded slowly, using her knuckles to scrape tears from her cheeks, looking exactly like her daughters. It had not dawned on me until just then that if everyone else we knew had disappeared, consumed in the roaring vortex of whatever the hell it was that changed the world as we knew it, her children had likely also been casualties.
Oh dear God, oh Jesus Christ, no…
“Come on, let’s go around front where it’s not so dark,” I ordered, helping her to her feet.
Together we rounded the corner of what had been The Spoke, confronted immediately by the only other sign of human habitation, the small green
