still day 2
Nov. 6th, 2007 12:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
smackenzieFirst she wanted to look around, though. See what the damage was, so to speak. See if she could find more people who maybe knew what was really going on.
There were still no other cars on the street, which was getting more and more creepy. Marya was starting to feel as if she'd fallen into an alternate world or something, one in which everyone went on vacation at the same time, or suddenly moved out of town, or just... vanished. She wasn't quite sure she wanted to admit to herself that that last one wasn't an alternate reality after all, but actual reality.
She drove by her old high school, which was dark and locked up as if it was the weekend. The school buses were still parked in long yellow rows in the back parking lot. She was tempted to park the van and look around, but a closed-up school was a faintly scary school, and given a choice she'd rather go somewhere she was more likely to see people. Somewhere like the neighborhood she grew up in, maybe.
The houses there looked like she remembered, although some of the landscaping was different. There were still cars parked on the street and in driveways. It was getting dark and the streetlights were starting to come on. Some people had light-sensitive front lights, or had them on timers, and as Marya passed a white house with rust-colored trim, the porch light went on and startled her. She stopped the van. No one came out of the house. The front curtains didn't even twitch. No lights went on inside, either.
"That's really creepy," she said to Oscar. He seemed more interested in what might be going on outside.
She drove on down the street, turned a corner, cruised past the house she'd lived in until her parents had gotten divorced. Whoever had bought it from them had painted it a weird melon color with yellow trim and had planted a couple of red Japanese maples in front. The trees looked perfectly happy. The house looked perfectly empty. Marya wondered if everyone in it had disappeared, or if they'd done what Jasmine's son was doing, and had collected their elderly relatives and gone somewhere else. There weren't any cars in the driveway, or parked on the street in front of it.
She went on through the neighborhood and into the next one, trying to figure out which houses had people in them and then trying to extrapolate from that how many people might be left. The first part was harder than the second - she'd always had a good head for math but wasn't so great at determining pretty much anything from a house's exterior, other than how little the owners cared about having the place painted. Although sometimes people didn't paint because they didn't have the money....
Driving around these quiet neighborhoods was a little like going through town on Christmas Day or Easter, when all the stores and offices were closed and all the people who weren't in church were in their homes or someone else's. Except there were no holiday decorations, and the stations Marya could get on the radio weren't playing Christmas carols. She found a station that seemed to be broadcasting mostly PSAs - stay in your house, only leave for emergencies or to stock up on food and water, don't waste water or power, don't panic - so she listened to that while she drove around. Eventually she had to turn it off because the DJ was just repeating himself, to the point she wondered if he was a recording and not a real person after all.
It got to be too creepy among all the empty or empty-seeming houses, so Marya headed home. She passed some stores, banks, office buildings, an empty bus parked at a bus stop. A pickup truck passed her going the other direction, and she had just enough time to get a look at what appeared to be a large-screen TV half covered by a blanket in the truck bed. Who the hell is bothering to steal TVs? she wondered. What's the point?
Oscar barked at the empty storefronts, some of which still had their interior lights on. Marya wished she could ask him what the hell he was barking at. Was he picking up her unease? Could he tell something was seriously wrong in the world? Or was he just barking to bark, to let the birds and squirrels know that he was in charge, he was the big dog in charge and he wanted to say hi?
It was getting darker and darker and Marya didn't want to be out on the streets at night. Not that it felt unsafe in the way dark streets normally felt unsafe to girls traveling alone, but it didn't exactly feel safe either. All this quiet wasn't right. It wasn't normal. And it didn't make sense.
She found a gas station with its lights on, pulled up to a pump, and jumped out of the van to fill the tank. She was a little surprised that the pump worked, although she realized she probably shouldn't be. After all, there was still electricity and the traffic lights still worked and the street lights went on like they were supposed to. Parts of the world went on as usual without people, which was oddly reassuring. At least some things still worked. She felt guilty about not paying for her gas, just as she'd felt guilty for not paying for her groceries, but there was no one to take her money here any more than there'd been a cashier at the store. But she also felt temporarily safe under the bright blazing lights of the canopy over the gas pumps and for a minute she really didn't want to leave. She had the brief and entirely irrational realization that she could easily stay here overnight under the lights - she had food and water and milk in a box in the van, she could sleep inside it, and she'd be able to see anyone else coming.
Of course they'd be able to see her too. She turned the ignition and drove home.
There was a light on in the little old lady's house next door, and she could hear Cujo and Cujo II barking when she pulled into her driveway. That was reassuring too. Marya never thought she'd be glad to hear the little old lady's big obnoxious dogs, but she was grateful that something and someone else was alive on her street.
Oscar bounded out of the van when Marya opened the passenger door. He sat his butt down in front of the front door and waited expectantly, his tail thumping against the doormat.
"Just hold your horses," Marya muttered, wrestling with her grandma's suitcase, which didn't seem to want to come out of the back seat. She wasn't sure how she managed to get it in the van in the first place, if it was so hard to get back out. Oscar waited impatiently, watching her, whapping the doormat with his skinny dalmatian tail. "Ok, ok, I'm coming, just chill." She got the suitcase out, grabbed one of the grocery bags, and hauled them both up the walk. She unlocked the front door, let Oscar in, and dragged the suitcase and groceries after him.
It took a few trips before she had everything inside, and then it took another ten minutes to realize that Oscar wanted to come in because he really had to go out. So she let him into the back yard while she unpacked all the groceries and reset the clock on the stove. Apparently the power had flickered off and then back on while they were out. She stuck her head in the fridge and then the freezer, but everything looked and smelled ok. Probably the power hadn't been off for that long. She took almost everything out of the freezer anyway and put it in the fridge - three chicken breasts, two pork chops, a package of sausage, a pack of english muffins, a turkey potpie. Tomorrow she'd cook it all in case her electricity went out and she had to empty the fridge, and she'd just hope the power wasn't planning to go out tonight too.
Well, she could have the potpie for dinner now. She turned on the oven to preheat it, let Oscar back in, fed and watered him, and brought her laptop into the kitchen. She still had wireless, so while the oven heated up, and then while her potpie baked, she surfed the web to see if she could find any reliable information on what was going on. She figured she could find more pieces of info faster online than by watching TV. She hadn't quite expected the volume and variety of crack-headed theories she'd have to wade through, though.
She checked her email and looked at weather patterns, because the weather center diagrams were interesting, while she ate her potpie and Oscar put his chin on the table and begged silently for some pieces of turkey or maybe some nice crust. "There's a lot of crap online," she told him, but he was only interested in her dinner. She let him lick out the little cardboard pie plate when she was finished.
There wasn't anything worthwhile or even different on TV, and Marya was getting tired of having to sort fact from insanity online. The few things that people seemed to agree on were that a terrifyingly large number of people had vanished, and that people only seemed to disappear when no one was looking. Like, an entire French class at a high school outside Detroit had gone poof between one bell and the next. The teacher had shut the door and no one had to leave in the middle of class to pee, in the middle of the period, when no one else was paying attention to who might be in that class, everyone disappeared. No one ever actually saw anyone vanish. Marya thought that was worse than watching it happen - if you watched someone go, at least you knew what had happened to them. This way, you could never be sure.
She was tired of dealing with it and tired of wondering about her dad and tired of feeling like the only person left on earth. Obviously she wasn't, but she couldn't shake the feeling that there was no one left in her part of town, just her and Oscar and the little old lady next door and the Cujos.
Marya ran a hot bath and poured about an inch and a half of brandy into a glass and found the book she'd been reading a couple days ago, an anthology of cowboy stories, both historical and contemporary. She sat in the tub and read and sipped her grandma's brandy until the water was lukewarm and her toes were all pruned, and then she got out and dried off and drained the tub and went to bed. She let Oscar sleep on the bed with her, which she usually only did in the winter, because the floor was cold, or during a thunderstorm, because the thunder scared him. Marya didn't mind the quiet at night, and maybe because she was more used to it after midnight, it only took a minute before she was asleep.
words: 1875
total words: 8673
There were still no other cars on the street, which was getting more and more creepy. Marya was starting to feel as if she'd fallen into an alternate world or something, one in which everyone went on vacation at the same time, or suddenly moved out of town, or just... vanished. She wasn't quite sure she wanted to admit to herself that that last one wasn't an alternate reality after all, but actual reality.
She drove by her old high school, which was dark and locked up as if it was the weekend. The school buses were still parked in long yellow rows in the back parking lot. She was tempted to park the van and look around, but a closed-up school was a faintly scary school, and given a choice she'd rather go somewhere she was more likely to see people. Somewhere like the neighborhood she grew up in, maybe.
The houses there looked like she remembered, although some of the landscaping was different. There were still cars parked on the street and in driveways. It was getting dark and the streetlights were starting to come on. Some people had light-sensitive front lights, or had them on timers, and as Marya passed a white house with rust-colored trim, the porch light went on and startled her. She stopped the van. No one came out of the house. The front curtains didn't even twitch. No lights went on inside, either.
"That's really creepy," she said to Oscar. He seemed more interested in what might be going on outside.
She drove on down the street, turned a corner, cruised past the house she'd lived in until her parents had gotten divorced. Whoever had bought it from them had painted it a weird melon color with yellow trim and had planted a couple of red Japanese maples in front. The trees looked perfectly happy. The house looked perfectly empty. Marya wondered if everyone in it had disappeared, or if they'd done what Jasmine's son was doing, and had collected their elderly relatives and gone somewhere else. There weren't any cars in the driveway, or parked on the street in front of it.
She went on through the neighborhood and into the next one, trying to figure out which houses had people in them and then trying to extrapolate from that how many people might be left. The first part was harder than the second - she'd always had a good head for math but wasn't so great at determining pretty much anything from a house's exterior, other than how little the owners cared about having the place painted. Although sometimes people didn't paint because they didn't have the money....
Driving around these quiet neighborhoods was a little like going through town on Christmas Day or Easter, when all the stores and offices were closed and all the people who weren't in church were in their homes or someone else's. Except there were no holiday decorations, and the stations Marya could get on the radio weren't playing Christmas carols. She found a station that seemed to be broadcasting mostly PSAs - stay in your house, only leave for emergencies or to stock up on food and water, don't waste water or power, don't panic - so she listened to that while she drove around. Eventually she had to turn it off because the DJ was just repeating himself, to the point she wondered if he was a recording and not a real person after all.
It got to be too creepy among all the empty or empty-seeming houses, so Marya headed home. She passed some stores, banks, office buildings, an empty bus parked at a bus stop. A pickup truck passed her going the other direction, and she had just enough time to get a look at what appeared to be a large-screen TV half covered by a blanket in the truck bed. Who the hell is bothering to steal TVs? she wondered. What's the point?
Oscar barked at the empty storefronts, some of which still had their interior lights on. Marya wished she could ask him what the hell he was barking at. Was he picking up her unease? Could he tell something was seriously wrong in the world? Or was he just barking to bark, to let the birds and squirrels know that he was in charge, he was the big dog in charge and he wanted to say hi?
It was getting darker and darker and Marya didn't want to be out on the streets at night. Not that it felt unsafe in the way dark streets normally felt unsafe to girls traveling alone, but it didn't exactly feel safe either. All this quiet wasn't right. It wasn't normal. And it didn't make sense.
She found a gas station with its lights on, pulled up to a pump, and jumped out of the van to fill the tank. She was a little surprised that the pump worked, although she realized she probably shouldn't be. After all, there was still electricity and the traffic lights still worked and the street lights went on like they were supposed to. Parts of the world went on as usual without people, which was oddly reassuring. At least some things still worked. She felt guilty about not paying for her gas, just as she'd felt guilty for not paying for her groceries, but there was no one to take her money here any more than there'd been a cashier at the store. But she also felt temporarily safe under the bright blazing lights of the canopy over the gas pumps and for a minute she really didn't want to leave. She had the brief and entirely irrational realization that she could easily stay here overnight under the lights - she had food and water and milk in a box in the van, she could sleep inside it, and she'd be able to see anyone else coming.
Of course they'd be able to see her too. She turned the ignition and drove home.
There was a light on in the little old lady's house next door, and she could hear Cujo and Cujo II barking when she pulled into her driveway. That was reassuring too. Marya never thought she'd be glad to hear the little old lady's big obnoxious dogs, but she was grateful that something and someone else was alive on her street.
Oscar bounded out of the van when Marya opened the passenger door. He sat his butt down in front of the front door and waited expectantly, his tail thumping against the doormat.
"Just hold your horses," Marya muttered, wrestling with her grandma's suitcase, which didn't seem to want to come out of the back seat. She wasn't sure how she managed to get it in the van in the first place, if it was so hard to get back out. Oscar waited impatiently, watching her, whapping the doormat with his skinny dalmatian tail. "Ok, ok, I'm coming, just chill." She got the suitcase out, grabbed one of the grocery bags, and hauled them both up the walk. She unlocked the front door, let Oscar in, and dragged the suitcase and groceries after him.
It took a few trips before she had everything inside, and then it took another ten minutes to realize that Oscar wanted to come in because he really had to go out. So she let him into the back yard while she unpacked all the groceries and reset the clock on the stove. Apparently the power had flickered off and then back on while they were out. She stuck her head in the fridge and then the freezer, but everything looked and smelled ok. Probably the power hadn't been off for that long. She took almost everything out of the freezer anyway and put it in the fridge - three chicken breasts, two pork chops, a package of sausage, a pack of english muffins, a turkey potpie. Tomorrow she'd cook it all in case her electricity went out and she had to empty the fridge, and she'd just hope the power wasn't planning to go out tonight too.
Well, she could have the potpie for dinner now. She turned on the oven to preheat it, let Oscar back in, fed and watered him, and brought her laptop into the kitchen. She still had wireless, so while the oven heated up, and then while her potpie baked, she surfed the web to see if she could find any reliable information on what was going on. She figured she could find more pieces of info faster online than by watching TV. She hadn't quite expected the volume and variety of crack-headed theories she'd have to wade through, though.
She checked her email and looked at weather patterns, because the weather center diagrams were interesting, while she ate her potpie and Oscar put his chin on the table and begged silently for some pieces of turkey or maybe some nice crust. "There's a lot of crap online," she told him, but he was only interested in her dinner. She let him lick out the little cardboard pie plate when she was finished.
There wasn't anything worthwhile or even different on TV, and Marya was getting tired of having to sort fact from insanity online. The few things that people seemed to agree on were that a terrifyingly large number of people had vanished, and that people only seemed to disappear when no one was looking. Like, an entire French class at a high school outside Detroit had gone poof between one bell and the next. The teacher had shut the door and no one had to leave in the middle of class to pee, in the middle of the period, when no one else was paying attention to who might be in that class, everyone disappeared. No one ever actually saw anyone vanish. Marya thought that was worse than watching it happen - if you watched someone go, at least you knew what had happened to them. This way, you could never be sure.
She was tired of dealing with it and tired of wondering about her dad and tired of feeling like the only person left on earth. Obviously she wasn't, but she couldn't shake the feeling that there was no one left in her part of town, just her and Oscar and the little old lady next door and the Cujos.
Marya ran a hot bath and poured about an inch and a half of brandy into a glass and found the book she'd been reading a couple days ago, an anthology of cowboy stories, both historical and contemporary. She sat in the tub and read and sipped her grandma's brandy until the water was lukewarm and her toes were all pruned, and then she got out and dried off and drained the tub and went to bed. She let Oscar sleep on the bed with her, which she usually only did in the winter, because the floor was cold, or during a thunderstorm, because the thunder scared him. Marya didn't mind the quiet at night, and maybe because she was more used to it after midnight, it only took a minute before she was asleep.
words: 1875
total words: 8673
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2007-11-06 07:20 am (UTC)an anthology of cowboy stories, both historical and contemporary
I have a book like that. It's one of the books I read for comfort.
no subject
Date: 2007-11-07 12:07 am (UTC)i'm just glad you're still reading! *smooch*
no subject
Date: 2007-11-07 01:56 am (UTC)It is still entertaining, so. :3 *MWAH!*
no subject
Date: 2007-11-07 03:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-11-10 02:44 am (UTC)So she let him into the back yard while she unpacked all the groceries and reset the clock on the stove. Apparently the power had flickered off and then back on while they were out. She stuck her head in the fridge and then the freezer, but everything looked and smelled ok.
This is what I mean about you being so good with the details. It's so true to life. This, too:
Marya ran a hot bath and poured about an inch and a half of brandy into a glass and found the book she'd been reading a couple days ago, an anthology of cowboy stories, both historical and contemporary.
no subject
Date: 2007-11-15 03:50 pm (UTC)Ahem.