The Blink is a science fiction webserial following various people trying to survive an apocalypse brought on by the disappearance of the Sun. New chapters (hopefully) arrive every two weeks!
Andy Waller is not a world-famous newscaster, not by a long shot. If you asked someone in New York or California who he was, they wouldn’t have a clue. But ask that same question in one specific corner of northeast Texas, you’ll find that everyone knows Andy Waller’s name.
And if they don’t, they certainly know his face. Perfectly symmetrical, clean-shaven, distinctly charming, Andy’s youthful face appeared every night on TV screens throughout the local area just before Wheel of Fortune, where, for the last five years, it had stolen the breath from middle-aged women sitting beside their snoring husbands on the living room couch. Andy Waller had become a household name for countless families throughout the state, a man who sat right across from the couch and read the events of the day out loud with that devilish grin flashing out at his audience.
Today, however, Andy is not smiling.
“We—We’ve just got another video,” he stammers from behind a BREAKING NEWS banner along the bottom of the screen. His voice no longer has that over-enunciated confidence inherent of newscasters. Instead, he has reverted back to his native Texan drawl. “This one was sent in by a viewer from Mount Vernon a few minutes ago. Can we switch over to that one?”
A moment passes, Andy’s face awkwardly motionless in the center of the shot as the news crew works to pull up the video, then the screen cuts to black.
It starts with a view of a Little League game filmed from the bleachers. The field is old, the borderlines between sand and grass blurred in several places from wind and time. A chainlink fence surrounds the field’s perimeter, and beyond it grassy Texas fields extend to a wall of forest far in the distance. Small shadows of cottonball clouds drift effortlessly across the world. It is a perfect summer day.
The metallic ting of a bat striking a ball, then the sound of parents cheering and clapping as a young boy runs tottering toward first with everything he’s got. Just before he reaches the base, the camera drops and gasps fill the stands, the same sound you expect to hear when one of those Little Leaguers gets hit by a foul ball, but when the camera pans back up it is like four hours have passed in the span of a few seconds. Twilight now blankets the scene in a hazy dimness that causes the camera to auto-adjust its focus. A blurry flock of small birds takes flight over the field, followed by a handful of bats zigzagging through the air at the mistaken belief they overslept their circadian alarm clocks. The cameraperson aims upward and zooms in on the Sun, and it is immediately clear that something is wrong.
Though at first washed out from the brightness, the camera shortly begins absorbing more and more detail as the Sun’s glare diminishes. What started as a perfect circle has morphed into a gibbous shape, like the moon a few days after it is at its fullest. As the shape continues to deform, the sky begins to darken, the clouds changing from white to gray and then to almost black. In less than half a minute, the Sun has become only a fraction of its former brilliance, the progression resembling a sped-up video of the moon’s phases. From full to gibbous to quarter in the span of a few seconds.
The crescent Sun wanes further, its last sliver glinting like firelight along the blade of a new scythe. Beads of light flash and pop along this strange hairline curve in the sky, sparking briefly against the ever-darkening backdrop, and then it is gone.
The video goes black, but concerned voices can be heard from the parents in the stands. Were it not for these whispers, people watching from home might think the video has ended, but it hasn’t. The camera zooms out to show the field now bathed in the harsh glow of tall stadium lights. On the field, the Little Leaguers stand with gloves hanging limply by their sides, all of them staring straight up at the stars.
All but one.
The kid who’d been headed for first moments earlier is now rounding third, too focused on scoring a home run to realize the world just ended. He slides across home plate and jumps to his feet, fists raised and a triumphant grin on his face as he looks to the stands, then his gaze shifts upward and he begins to cry.
This is where the video ends and Andy Waller’s perfect face returns to the living rooms of Texas. Rather than charming, though, his face is haggard and haunted. Shocked. Afraid.
“Uh,” is all he manages to say before glancing slightly up above the camera. He stands up and walks out of frame, leaving an empty desk in the shot. A minute passes like this. Indistinct voices mumble in the background, doors creak open and clang shut, footsteps shuffle around just out of view.
When Andy returns, his eyes are somehow even more haunted than they were, like he hadn’t believed the videos and reports coming in until he looked outside for himself.
“Uh,” he repeats, then clears his throat, remembering the hundreds, maybe even thousands, of unseen eyes currently fixed on him. “I just looked out the window and, uh, the sky is dark. This is real. The—The Sun seems to have . . .” Andy trails off, eyes again drifting back behind the camera as all thoughts of TV broadcast etiquette leave him.
He doesn’t know that his segment is already in the process of going viral, that, because it is one of the earliest and clearest videos shared of the Sun’s death, it is already being posted to Facebook and Twitter and Reddit and being sent to other news stations around the world, where it is shared again and again. He doesn’t know that his face will shortly be one of the most famous faces not just in Texas, not even in the United States, but in the entireworld. He has always wanted this kind of fame, has always secretly prayed for the day his face would be beside the likes of Anderson Cooper and Lester Holt, and his prayer to be a celebrity television star will be answered a dozen times over before the week is out.
Andy has no idea that in the next few days, his brief segment will become the most watched video on the Internet, breaking records as the fastest growing viral video in the history of the world.
He also has no idea that it will be one of the last viral videos mankind will ever produce.
Ryan tapped his pen against the empty lines of his notebook while the people of Honey Grove argued over whether or not the world had ended.
Town hall’s main meeting room was spacious and open, filled with the works of local artists hanging on the walls and on displays that made it look more like an art gallery than a government building. A raised platform against the back wall supported a simple wooden podium in front of a Texas state flag and various Fourth of July decorations that would most likely stay up until late August. In front of the platform, rows of metal chairs reached all the way back to the front doors of the building.
Or they had when the meeting started. Once the room began filling up, the chairs were pushed to the far sides of the room to provide more space for people. Now there were close to three hundred people crammed inside, with more lined up on the sidewalk hoping to see what was being said through the windows.
They were the lucky ones, in Ryan’s opinion. They at least had fresh air and space to breathe out there. Inside, standing fans did nothing but move the sour smell of sweat and fear around the room; the smell was almost more oppressive than the collective body heat radiating off of so many people in one enclosed area. And to top it all off was a droning roar that rivaled that of college football stadiums, a blended shouting match of voices all trying to argue louder than their neighbors, as if their point’s validity was based solely on volume.
So far, the gathered crowd had only been able to agree on one thing: the Sun was no longer shining over Texas.
“Folks, please,” Mayor Glenn Howell said yet again into his microphone. Standing behind the podium, the mayor had already tried several times to regain control of this renewed wave of shouting but was so far unsuccessful. Sweat ran down his face and stained the collar of his dress shirt, either from the faltering A/C units or the stress of being in charge of a situation for which there was no protocol. He stared out at the crowd with a distant, haunted expression on his face, like he expected to wake up from this nightmare any minute and find a sunbeam resting against his cheek. Ryan figured his own face had that same detached look of fear and denial, the same desperation that it would all go back to normal if he could just open his eyes. Everyone’s faces did.
The problem was one of information. People were afraid, understandably, but nobody up top had told them they didn’t need to be. Outside of the Emergency Alert Broadcasts that infiltrated TVs around the nation, no facts had been provided by a single government agency. Those broadcasts, with their screeching siren and robotic voice emotionlessly informing citizens to shelter in place until further notice, had done more to terrify the people of Honey Grove than reassure them. As if this were no different than a wind advisory, the broadcast stated that an “Extreme Solar Event” had taken place (whatever that meant) and that more information would follow shortly, but in the four hours since the broadcasts started there hadn’t been any information added, no press briefings from the President or NASA, just total radio silence.
Ryan thought the silence was the scariest part of all of it. The government wasn’t even lying about what had happened. No swamp gas or weather balloon excuses, nobody trying to explain away what had happened to the Sun, nothing. If some well-dressed man in a suit had stood before a hundred cameras and lied through his teeth to everyone in the world, Ryan would have felt better. That would have at least felt normal. Silence meant the people up top were just as shocked and confused as everyone else, which meant they really had no idea what was going on, and that was almost more terrifying than a sky without a Sun.
With no official updates, people were beginning to invent their own narratives to explain the unexplainable, latching onto the first social media post or blog article that offered to make the dark not seem so scary. Which was to be expected, Ryan knew that much from living through the last decade. But it was nothing new, not really. Humans had been doing it since the very beginning, inventing lightning bolt-wielding gods to offer an explanation for the sudden explosions in rainstorms or legends of giant beasts swallowing the Sun to explain solar eclipses. The unknown has always been humanity’s greatest fear, but it’s not all that different today than it was five thousand years ago. Just easier to spread the comforting falsehoods around the world. That was why journalism—good journalism—was so important to have in a healthy society. Being able to separate fact from fiction allowed people to move beyond their fear and focus on the truth, on their lives, and this was only possible if someone was willing to question what they had heard and start looking for answers.
Although he had only been working as a reporter for a few weeks, Ryan hoped he could one day say that his words had had this effect on someone, that one of his articles had banished fear and inspired hope in the mind of at least one other person. It was the reason he had wanted to become a journalist in the first place, why he had moved halfway across the country to accept the first position that accepted his application. And it was why he had answered the phone when the Herald‘s editor asked him to cover Howell’s emergency meeting.
Well, that wasn’t entirely true. Cheri had called Ryan, but she hadn’t assigned him to the meeting. In fact, she hadn’t assigned anyone to it.
“The Herald is canceled,” she had told him before he had finished saying hello. “Javi and Veronica won’t return my calls and Joanne texted that her family is heading up to their cabin until this blows over. In other words, we don’t have enough writers to keep the paper going. If I were you, I’d head back to Florida before the interstates get too bad.”
Ryan was stunned. Was she serious? At that point it had only been about an hour since the Sun went dark, far too early for people to declare that the apocalypse had arrived. “It’s not the end of the world,” he’d said, the anger in his tone surprising himself more than it did Cheri. He took a breath and tried again. “Whatever this is won’t last forever, it can’t, and in the meantime people need to know what’s going on locally.”
“I agree, but we don’t have the resources to give it to them right now.” Sherry sighed. “Look, I know you’re excited to get your literary feet wet, but now isn’t the time for it. You can have the front-page story on all this when we reopen, I promise. You may be new, but I really do think you have potential. Plus you’re the only one who actually answered the phone. That’s worth something in my book.”
“Then let me cover the meeting,” he begged. “I’ll have a full article ready for print before noon tomorrow. Or we could run an online article—”
“Ryan, no. Go to the meeting and take notes if you want, but the Herald‘s doors will be locked until further notice. I’m sorry. I have to go.”
Ryan had tried arguing with her but realized after a few words that she had ended the call. He had almost lost it then, standing there in the dark of his living room surrounded by some half-burned Christmas candles he’d found in a kitchen cabinet, no lights, no power, probably no job now that he’d picked a fight with his boss. His bedroom was destroyed—desktop computer now a scrap heap, bookshelf splintered and surrounded by the corpses of his favorite books, and in his crushed bed slept the front half of a two-ton Toyota. Through his windows he could hear the sounds of car doors slamming as neighbors loaded everything they could into the backseats, as if they could catch up to the Sun if they could just drive long enough.
But this wasn’t something you could run away from, Ryan thought. It was global. As much as he believed it would come back, right now the Sun was gone. He and everyone else on the planet had watched coverage of the event newscasters were referring to as “The Blink.” Without a working TV, Ryan had sat in the dark on his couch and watched videos on his phone of people who had filmed the Sun’s final moments. Each one was the same as the last, the only difference the backdrop. They started with the round disc of the Sun deforming from the top down, morphing from a perfect circle to a semi circle, then to a shrinking crescent that reminded Ryan of the Cheshire Cat’s toothy grin hanging there in the sky, then to a sliver no thicker than a clipped fingernail, and then to nothing at all.
Like an eyelid slowly blinking shut.
Ryan had gone down the various rabbit holes of the Internet in search of more news, but he had found only wild conspiracies and doomsday comment threads that made his heart pound in his throat. Thousands of videos of The Blink circled the globe within minutes as people shared what they’d seen to social media, but the wildest thing was the faked videos that began spreading. Clearly edited clips showing a man in white robes stepping out of the Sun before it vanished, CGI’d alien ships descending on the world and destroying cities, ghostly voices chanting in Arabic from the sky, the list went on. Ryan didn’t get it. There were real, actual videos of the Sun disappearing out of the sky and people were rejecting them in favor of obvious fakes. It was crazy.
And from the way Howell’s emergency meeting had gone so far, crazy was very quickly rising to the forefront of peoples’ minds.
Ryan clicked his pen let its tip hover over the blankness. The pages, thick and smudge-proof, were lined with dots rather than solid lines, but most useful was that additional pages could be “loaded” into the leather cover as needed. He’d gotten the journal as well as four notebooks worth of replacement pages from his grandparents as a going away gift last month, and he loved everything about it. It was the kind of book you felt nervous about writing in, the kind you leave in a drawer and plan to use but never do for fear of ruining its beauty.
Ryan’s pen began scratching across the page.
Town hall was filled to beyond capacity Friday night evening (?) as the people of Honey Grove looked to Mayor Howell for leadership following the mysterious bizarre disappearance of the Sun.
It was a decent opening, he thought, despite the crossed out words. Obviously still needed some fine-tuning, but it was a good enough place to start. Writing the words “disappearance of the Sun” had almost felt too ridiculous to put to paper, but what else could he call what happened?That was about as truthful as he could get on the matter. And Ryan wanted this article to be the clearest representation of the truth, because right now that was what the people of Honey Grove needed most. The pressure to write a story that people would not only read but also learn from had been steadily building over the last two hours, ever since he had grabbed his notebook and pen and headed out the door for the meeting.
What started like any other meeting quickly turned devolved into chaos as questions unanswered by top minds leading scientists remain unsolved, leaving the people of Honey Grove Texas, and the world at large, truly in the dark.
Ryan chewed at the end of his pen. Every article needed a bit of wordplay, right?
Mayor Howell slammed his hands down on the podium hard enough to crack its wooden surface, the sound echoing like a gunshot through the room. “That’s enough!” The crowd fell silent, every face turning toward their otherwise mild-mannered mayor. “Now, if we can’t do this like civilized people, we’re not gonna do it at all. I’ll end the meeting right now and you can all go home and figure it out on your own.” He waited, eyes moving across the people before him as if begging someone to say something. No one did. “Alright. Let’s get this thing back on track. Who has the mic?”
The microphone, found on the floor where it had been forgotten once people had realized shouting was a much quicker way to be heard, passed from hand to hand until it came to a man standing at the front of a group in the middle of the room. Several groups had broken away from the once unified crowd, but the man with the mic belonged to the largest of these by far. He looked to be in his forties, a short, stocky man dressed in camo pants and an olive green shirt that looked about two sizes too small. Despite not having a need for them, a pair of sunglasses dangled from a cord around the man’s neck.
“Darren,” Howell said, gesturing to him, “you have the floor. What’s your question?”
Darren took the mic and switched it on. “My question is what you’re planning on doing to keep the town safe while all this is going on.”
Howell nodded, slipping back into the role of politician without hesitation. “I can assure you, Honey Grove is in absolutely no danger at this moment. Our grocery stores are fully stocked and between the two gas stations in town, fuel will not be—”
“I’m not talking about supplies,” Darren cut in. “I’m talking about safe. Secure. From enemies foreign and domestic.”
The mayor glanced around the room, waiting for some indication that this was a joke, but nobody laughed. The people surrounding Darren only nodded in agreement with him. “Sorry, Mr. Turner, but I don’t know what you mean.”
“I mean Russia. Or China. Korea.” Darren said. “People are saying this is the first step in an attack on U.S. soil. A distraction to keep us all looking up at the sky while they send in troops.”
“Well,” Howell said carefully, “I haven’t heard any official reports about that, but I can assure—”
“Well you won’t,” Darren said. “The media’s keeping it all quiet so we won’t have the chance to prepare. That’s why the news isn’t covering it. We need to be ready.”
Ryan frowned and stopped writing. He knew he had a duty to be an unbiased and professional journalist, especially at a time like this, but he also wanted nothing more than to ask Darren—
“How the hell did you hear about it, then?” The voice belonged to a woman toward the back of the room. Ryan bit back his smile and looked for her, but there were too many people in his way.
Darren’s jaw muscles tightened but he ignored her question. “We need a plan in place in case someone starts parachuting in soldiers or dropping bombs.”
The woman fired back at him, her voice audible even without a microphone. “This isn’t Red Dawn. We need to worry about what’s actually happening, not YouTube conspiracy theories.”
“One at a time, Miss Rivera,” Howell warned. He turned his attention back to Darren. “I have every confidence that our military can defend us against any threat that might come our way. Besides,” he gave a rehearsed little laugh and flashed a too-white smile, “I’m willing to bet we have more guns in this room than all the military bases outside Texas. I think we’ll be just fine, Darren. Next question?”
The microphone reluctantly made its way out of Darren’s group and to a more scattered one to the side of the room, where it ended in the hands of a younger man no older than twenty. The rising chatter of the room died down as he cleared his throat. “I don’t think we need to get ready for war,” he said nervously, gaining a few nods from around the room that seemed to raise his confidence. “We need to attempt to respond.”
Ryan again stopped writing, knowing exactly where the kid was going with his thought.
Howell, clearly unfamiliar with the Internet theories Ryan had read through a few hours earlier, shook his head in confusion. “Respond?”
“It wasn’t natural,” the kid said, voice low. “I saw it. Didn’t you? The Sun didn’t just go out, something moved in front ofit, some kind of giant round thing. What if it was a ship? No, wait, just hear me out. Shouldn’t we try to say something to them so they know we see them?”
The people who had been nodding with the kid seconds earlier immediately stopped. Howell didn’t attempt to hide his laugh, but motioned for him to pass the microphone on. “I don’t think aliens did this, son, but if they did, I’m sure NASA has already sent them a greeting card.”
The microphone embarked on another journey around the room, stopping briefly at more islands of insanity before sailing off to the next in line. People discussed setting up an armed guard to patrol Honey Grove, contacting the National Guard to request soldiers, even blocking the highways leading into town just in case, and Mayor Howell shot down each of these ideas with a surprising amount of patience.
Ryan held his hand up several times as the microphone traveled, but it never came his way. Howell saw him, he had to have, but not once did the mayor make eye contact or tell the people to pass it to him. This would have bothered Ryan if he’d had any questions worth asking, but truth be told he didn’t. Howell had already “answered” some similar ones asked by other people in the room, though his response always came in the form of considering the question for a moment and then simply saying, “We’ll just have to wait on an official update to really know. Next?”
Near the end of the meeting, the microphone came to an older lady with thick glasses and a puff of white hair. She stood in another group of people, not quite as large as Darren’s but probably a close runner up. “Yes, I only wanted to take the time to invite everyone to come down to the church for our potluck dinner when this meeting ends.” She smiled. “We will be keeping our doors open and lights shining bright for as long as we can, all the way up until the Sun’s return.”
Ryan thought this was a very nice and optimistic outlook on the day until the people of her group let loose a chorus of enthusiastic amens, and then he realized she had said “Son’s return,” not “Sun’s.”
Surely there was at least one other person in Honey Grove who expected daylight to return without an apocalypse. Out of everyone who had a turn at the microphone, the sanest person in the room so far seemed to be the kid who wanted to send smoke signals to the alien ship blocking the Sun. At least he had formed a theory from what he had witnessed with his own eyes, crazy as that theory was.
The microphone bounced around the room for another half hour, landing at people with various concerns and ideas for what the town should do. Some were rational, such as questions about if martial law would be imposed (“Not in Honey Grove, but let’s be smart about things. Next question.”) and operating hours for the town’s grocery store (“Up to the store owner. Next.”). There were a few more irrational concerns as well, such as one older man who used his time to state that the President, who he knew without a doubt to be behind the Sun’s disappearance, should be hanged as soon as possible for his crime. Another began rapidly reciting verses from Revelation until the microphone was taken from him by a town hall security guard. One woman asked if laws still applied in the state of Texas, which roused a good bit of suspicion toward her from the others in the room. But overall, the meeting came to a close peacefully but, in Ryan’s view, unsatisfactorily. Not much had actually been answered, and Howell had spent half the time glancing down at his phone, patience clearly running thin.
“Alright,” he eventually said, clapping his hands together. “How about we wrap this up for the night? If it’s still dark by sunrise tomorrow morning, we’ll hold another meeting to start thinking about—”
“Excuse me?” The same woman who had confronted Darren was now waving her arm in the air. Ryan could see her now and he was shocked to find she was in her mid-forties, streaks of white in her black hair, far from the beret-wearing, fist raised in the air college student he had pictured when she first spoke out.
Howell sighed. “Yes, Miss Rivera?”
“Oh, good, you can see me.”
In the crowd, Darren snorted. “Can hear you, too, unfortunately.” Several people laughed.
“Do you have a question?” Howell asked.
“Yeah,” Rivera said. She still didn’t have a microphone but that didn’t stop her voice from carrying throughout the large room. “What are you planning to do about the cold?”
Howell smiled and looked around. “Miss Rivera, it is currently in the high 90s.”
“Currently,” she emphasized. “But if the Sun really is gone, it’s not going to stay that way for long.”
“As I’ve said before, we don’t know that the Sun is gone. This might just be another eclipse like the one we had a few months ago. You remember that, I’m sure. It got dark over the whole town, just like this, but the Sun came right back after a while.”
“Less than a minute later,” Rivera said, then shook her head. “This isn’t an eclipse. Those aren’t this dark and they don’t last for four hours. If the Sun’s really gone, we have a very small window of time to prepare before the world starts getting cold. And I mean very—”
“Hold on a minute,” Darren turned to face her. “If memory serves, last time you came to a meeting all you did was bitch and moan about the world being too hot.” He looked around and grinned. “Sounds like your problem’s solved, Doc.”
More people laughed, but Rivera’s eyes glowed with a heat that could have melted steel. When she spoke, her voice was calm and steady. “The last time I came to a meeting, the Sun was still in the sky. I’m sure even you can understand that the Sun warms the Earth.”
Darren only smiled back at her. “I can understand how those solar panels on your roof work, and I can understand what it means for your batteries when the Sun don’t shine. Bet you regret going green, now, huh?” The people in his group erupted in laughter.
“Okay, Darren, that’s enough,” Howell called out over the returning chaos of the room. He looked up from his phone. “This meeting is over. We’ll meet again tomorrow at two.”
People began wandering toward the doors at the back of the room, their voices rising again in volume, though not in anger. Ryan glanced down at his notebook, at the mostly useless lines of text that covered the page. He’d written down most of what people had said, but even so there wasn’t much to make an article out of. At least not anything substantial.
Howell gathered his things from the podium and started toward a hallway at the side of the room. Heart pounding, Ryan saw his final opportunity to get a few noteworthy quotes before the day was done. “Excuse me,” he called, following after him.
The mayor didn’t stop walking. “Yes?”
“Care if I ask you some questions for the paper?”
Howell frowned at him. “What paper?”
“The Herald. Here in town.”
“Cheri told me she was temporarily shutting down.”
“She is, but she said I could write a story on what’s happening,” Ryan said, which wasn’t really a lie.
“Good for you,” Howell said, “but I really don’t have time for . . .” His gaze shifted behind Ryan and he groaned. “Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me.”
Rivera walked past Ryan like he wasn’t even there and jabbed a finger at Howell. “People are going to die if you don’t get your shit together.”
“Language. And how many times do we have to go through this same conversation after a meeting?”
“As many as it takes for you to start listening.”
Howell glanced down at his phone, sighed, and began typing something. He spoke as his thumbs moved, voice distracted and uneven. “I will hear . . . whatever concerns you have . . . at tomorrow’s meeting, but right now I’m . . . very busy.”
“With what?” Rivera demanded.
Howell’s thumbs paused and his head snapped up, lip twitching. “Look around you! The whole town is coming apart at the seams! People are packing up and leaving, I’ve got over a dozen car accidents all over town, and half the rescue squad won’t even answer their phones.” He held his own phone up for her to see and Ryan caught a glimpse of what looked like an electronics store, its windows shattered and displays empty. “That’s Al’s Computer Corner,” Howell said. “Apparently someone broke in half an hour ago and robbed him blind. I can’t get in touch with any of our police officers to investigate it so I’m instead sending two of town hall’s security guards.” He lowered his voice and shook his head. “They’re glorified mall cops, for Christ’s sake, not detectives. I know you and Darren don’t see eye to eye on most things, but he may have been on to something about calling in the Guard. We don’t have the manpower to deal with what’s happening, and I fear it’s only going to get worse. If people start looting the necessities . . .”
Rivera’s shoulders dropped. “That was fast.”
“Yeah,” Howell agreed. “People are starting to panic, and panic leads to irrational behavior. So you telling the whole town that we’re all going to freeze to death isn’t exactly helping.”
“Even if it’s the truth?”
“Especially if it’s the truth,” he hissed. “The town needs to feel safe right now. Not terrified.” He shook his head, eyes drifting back toward the now empty town hall room. “It felt like we were preparing for war during that meeting, not nightfall. Now please, I’m wearing about ten different hats as it is and I don’t have time to play Q&A with the two of you. Go home.” Howell turned and disappeared down the hallway, ignoring Rivera as she called after him.
She sighed and crossed her arms after he was gone, then glanced back at Ryan as if noticing him for the first time. “Sorry, who are you?”
Ryan closed his notebook. “I’m a reporter. Or I was when I woke up this morning.” He pocketed his pen and rubbed his face. How was it only 9PM? It felt like it was going on two in the morning.
“You write for the Honey Grove Herald?” Rivera asked.
“Technically no,” he said, “at least not yet. I’ve only been in town a few weeks, and I spent most of that time being a glorified errand boy for the actual writers. Now they all think the world’s ending and ran for the hills, so lucky for me I’m the only one left at the Herald who can write anything. Unlucky for me, though, I have no idea how to even start writing about this.”
“Have you written any articles before?”
He nodded. “A few for my grad school newspaper. Mostly about whatever flashy event was going down on campus. Easy stuff. Not–” he glanced toward the doors “–this.”
She studied his face for a few seconds, gears turning behind her dark brown eyes. “What would you need to write the story?”
Ryan shrugged. “Half an hour with Howell? Just enough time to ask a few questions and get some straightforward answers, anything to give this town at least some idea of what’s going on so they’re not so afraid. But I don’t think that’s going to happen any time soon.”
“It’s not.” Rivera said, like she knew firsthand that the mayor wasn’t the type to waste time with news interviews. A small smile tugged at the corner of her mouth. “But what if you interviewed me?”
“I appreciate the offer,” Ryan said, genuinely touched by her willingness to help him, “but I can’t just interview random people off the street. I have to use people with relevant credentials, government officials, that kind of thing.”
“Oh.”
“Nothing personal,” Ryan quickly added. “I just don’t think my editor would be too happy if I brought her a story that didn’t come from a quote unquote reputable source.”
“Right, of course,” Rivera said, but there was something in the way she said it, like someone waiting for the punchline to sink in after telling a joke. And she was looking at Ryan like he was the one who still didn’t get it.
He smiled uncomfortably and tilted his head. “What am I missing?”
She reached for the small backpack around her shoulders and shrugged. “A more feminist upbringing, maybe?” A few seconds passed while she dug around for something, then pulled out a laminated card on a lanyard and held it up for Ryan to read.
Oh. Oh. He had never felt more stupid in his life.
Dr. Katherine Rivera, professor of astrophysics and climate science at the University of North Texas, returned the ID badge to her bag and smiled at Ryan’s dumbstruck expression. “So how about that interview?”
Illuminated only by the ruby red glow of astronomy lamps, a group of twenty-one tourists wandered between the observatory’s public telescopes with their eyes fixed on the stars above them. For those who came from the surrounding cities, this was their first time seeing more than a handful of stars in the night sky. One family had even made the trip from London for their chance to see the stars up close and personal, and simply being able to see the Milky Way spanning the sky had been a source of complete astonishment for them. As the student host of the night’s public astronomy event, Becca Simmons loved nothing more than to show people just how beautiful the firmament really was.
Most of this beauty was due to the Observatory Science Centre’s remote location all the way out in Herstmonceux, which meant light pollution from cities didn’t have the chance to wash out the night’s darkness. Phones also were forbidden on the grounds, which forced people to focus on what was in front of them. But more than that, Becca thought the sky had particularly lived up to its designation of “heaven” tonight, not just the result of the observatory’s remoteness, but of perfectly cloudless weather, a waxing half-moon still far beneath the horizon, and stable, non-turbulent atmospheric temperatures. Getting all three of these conditions at the same time was like hitting all 7s in an astronomical slot machine—in the year or so Becca had worked as an assistant for the observatory, she had only seen such conditions one other time. The fact she was able to host such a perfect viewing night for her final astronomy event before the semester started made her feel like she really had hit the jackpot.
Then again, just being able to work for an observatory was a jackpot all on its own. With a year left in her undergraduate, Becca was beyond fortunate to have landed the position at such an esteemed astronomical institution. It had started as a simple job shadowing opportunity but, thanks to a good word from her mentor at the university, the staff at the Science Centre had been open to accepting her as a member of the team. An assistant paid only in work experience, of course, but it meant she was part of the Centre’s family and could therefore use the facility whenever she wanted, free of charge. She’d spent countless nights beneath the stars in this very viewing area, her only company the telescope her parents had bought her and a playlist of classical music streaming through her earbuds. Nights like those made her feel like she stood in a cathedral the size of the universe, completely alone but somehow not lonely, as if God himself had silently wandered onto the yard just behind her to take a good look at his creation.
As incredible as those sacred midnight masses were, they didn’t compare to the public astronomy nights the observatory hosted. These were the nights Becca shined as brightly as Sirius, nights when she watched people who had never given the sky a second thought realize the true scale of their unconsidered universe. Children, teenagers, adults—everyone had a specific moment during these nights when it all clicked for them. The children were always amazed at simply arriving at the observatory and seeing the large telescopes, but their parents took a bit more to wow. So many parents expected a night of fun for their little ones and ended up so much more involved in the event than they had believed possible, and the sight of grown adults cutting ahead of their own children to see the rings of Saturn one more time was absolutely priceless.
“Mommy, I can’t see it anymore.” A little girl no older than six leaned away from the telescope’s eyepiece and frowned.
“Well, did you touch it?” Her mother asked. “The scientist lady said if you touch it, it might mess it up.”
The girl’s eyes widened. “But I didn’t touch it!”
Long familiar with the dangerous combination of children and fine-tuned telescopes, Becca approached the two and smiled. “Hi there! Having problems?”
The girl’s mother offered an apologetic smile. “Sorry, I think she must have bumped it while looking.”
“I did not!”
“It’s no problem,” Becca said, kneeling down in front of the girl. “This is a magic telescope. It can automatically find anything in the universe and point itself in the right place. All you have to do is press a button and it does the rest, just like that.”
The girl seemed amazed by this concept and watched eagerly as Becca punched buttons on the small control box. A display went through the recalibration process and Becca locked the telescope onto Polaris, the North Star, and the computer calculated precisely where every other celestial body was in the night sky just from its own specific time and location. Motors slowly turned the telescope to compensate for the Earth’s rotation, making anything it locked onto sit perfectly still within the center of the eyepiece, no constant adjustments necessary.
Once the computer was recalibrated, Becca looked to the girl’s mother. “Do you know what it was pointed at?”
She thought for a second. “I think it—”
“Mars!” the little girl half shouted. “I was looking at Mars.”
Her mother frowned. “I thought you said you didn’t see anything.”
“No, I said I can’t see it anymore. First it was a red circle, then it went black.”
Becca smiled again. “Mars it is.” She typed on the small keyboard and pressed the GO button, and the telescope swiveled around to a point just above the eastern horizon. Looking up, Becca could see Jupiter and the Pleiades cluster shining near where the telescope stopped, but she didn’t see the familiar red twinkle of the god of war. She peered into the eyepiece, but there was nothing there. “Huh.”
The girl’s mother sighed. “Please tell me she didn’t break it.”
[ . . . ]
Visit my Wordpress to read the rest!
(Most of my chapters are a bit on the long side so I’ll post them this way until someone says I should just post the whole thing here.)
And there, there overhead, there, there, hung over
Those thousands of white faces, those dazed eyes,
There in the starless dark, the poise, the hover,
There with vast wings across the cancelled skies,
There in the sudden blackness, the black pall
Of nothing, nothing, nothing — nothing at all.
-- Archibald MacLeish
Ryan knew the instant he opened his eyes that he was going to be fired.
The curtains covering the windows of his cramped living room no longer glowed with afternoon summer sunlight as they had when he stretched out on the couch for a quick power nap thirty minutes earlier. At least it was supposed to have been thirty minutes earlier, but naps had a funny way of turning into full blown sleep when you forgot to set your alarm.
Three months of unemployment had rewired Ryan’s brain into believing that naps were now a requirement, a necessary half-hour of downtime that kept him functioning through the blank pages of his days. More than that, he had come to see a nap as a vital step in what he considered his “creative process.” Before he would even start to rework another cover letter for another company that would send him another “Thank you for applying, but” email, Ryan would close the curtains to block out as much of the Texas sun as possible and set his alarm for thirty minutes. When the alarm sounded, he would arise a new man, refreshed and full of ideas for how to better present himself to potential employers. On good days he could see the perfect closing line printed out right there in his dream, Times New Roman font hanging in the air even when he opened his eyes.
But then he’d actually landed a job, and things had changed. Getting on at the Honey Grove Herald had been a godsend, make no mistake, but the disruption to his daily naps had been like kicking a bad drug habit. When noon rolled around each day Ryan found he couldn’t think straight, he became irritable, and when he finally dragged himself home at 4 in the evening all he wanted to do was curl up on the couch for a short nap–just a short one, ten minutes, fifteen max–but those evening naps almost always left him feeling worse instead of better. The golden hour of napping came and went each day after lunch while he was stuck staring bleary-eyed at a Word document, his third cup of burnt coffee no stronger than decaf in the face of his withdrawal. It was like his body knew exactly when it was time for his daily fix and, upon being denied its expected and necessary dose, promptly shut down all upstairs operations until it got its way. This lack of productivity in the office meant Ryan took most of his work home every day, where he could have a quick nap (ten minutes, I swear!) and then hammer out a whole article before the sun went down. Was it an efficient way to write an article? No. But it worked, and it had worked for the last three weeks he’d been employed.
Until today.
Ryan leapt up from the couch, his phone and TV remote flying across the room as he threw off his blanket. One of them, he wasn’t sure which, sounded like it exploded from the impact, but he didn’t have time to look. He turned on the corner lamp and straightened the pages fanned out on the coffee table, a lead ball of dread settling in his gut at how much work he had to do before tomorrow. Each sheet of printer paper had a keyword for his assigned article scrawled at the top, leaving him a whole lot of blank space to write out ideas and figure out where the story would lead him. Despite, or maybe because of, the extra hours of couch sleep Ryan had received, he still had no idea how to make this one work. The current assignment was an especially uninspiring writeup of a town council meeting from the day before, one involving tax cuts and spending budgets and a great deal of other lines less interesting than a play-by-play commentary of paint drying, but Ryan recognized it as a necessary rung on the ladder to becoming a real reporter. Everyone had to start somewhere, and even writing about the percentages of Honey Grove’s annual budget allocation was a step up from the handful of opinion pieces he’d written so far.
But oh, how he missed those opinion pieces now.
Ryan flipped open the manila folder containing the meeting’s minutes and began copying over important finance figures onto the appropriate blank page, wondering if it would be better to make a pot of coffee or just go lie down in the street and call it a night. Before he could decide, the passing sound of squealing tires came to him from outside, followed by a loud crash. Ryan looked up and froze, his ears dimly humming in the silence that followed. He waited to hear a car door open or another car pull up, anything to indicate that his assistance wasn’t needed and that he could get back to his article, but for several seconds he heard nothing at all. Then came the blare of a car horn that sounded like it was right outside the window, another long screech that grew louder instead of fading away, and then a metal KTHUNK that Ryan actually felt through the floor.
The lights went out half a second later, as did the A/C, refrigerator, and anything else plugged into a wall.
Ryan blinked, his eyes instinctively widening in an effort to distinguish light from the darkness that invaded his living room. All he managed to find was a thin strip of yellow that stood out like a highlighter mark on the floor beneath the window curtains, shadows drifting through it as people passed in front of headlights outside. Worry shifted to fear as Ryan rose to his feet and carefully approached the front door. What the hell was going on out there? Two accidents and a power outage? He debated whether or not to open his door, his mind filled with the openings of half a dozen zombie movies where scenes exactly like this happened, always just seconds before a horde of infected broke down the doors of everyone stupid enough to poke their heads outside, but he shook the thought away and reached for the door knob. Someone might actually need help out there. And anyway, a car crashing into a power pole was a bit more likely than an undead apocalypse unfolding at his doorstep.
A second thought, this one somewhat more realistic, crossed his mind and again stopped his hand from touching the doorknob. If a car had slammed into his street’s power pole hard enough to kill the power, didn’t that mean power lines were down? The crash had sounded like it was right in front of his house. He pictured sparking wires writhing madly at his doorstep like black snakes, waiting for him to touch the metal doorknob so they could inject their venom into his hand and fry his nervous system. Ryan gritted his teeth and grabbed the handle anyway, not wanting his nap-enhanced imagination to be the reason some poor soul bled to death in their car ten feet away.
There was no electrocution as the door swung inward, no electric serpents dancing at his welcome mat. There also were no zombies, he noted, which was good. The power outage was limited to his house alone, it seemed, as every other window along his street glowed with light from inside. He noted with a bit of inward humor that the zombie movies had gotten it right after all; all down the street people stood silhouetted in the door frames of every single home. If it had been zombies, well, there was no doubt about it. They’d all be dead.
Ryan turned his attention to the more important matter of the night: the three cars that weren’t where they should have been. The first (and arguably the most obvious) car had its front fender jammed a good foot into the wall of his bedroom. Smoke rose up from the crumpled hood where the car had taken out what Ryan guessed was his home’s connection to the powerline. A second and third car sat sideways on the road, fenders dented in what looked like a minor rear end collision. Ryan took in the scene and pieced together what had happened: Car A hits Car B, blocks the road, Car A tries to warn an approaching Car C with a horn blast but is a second too late, Car C swerves and skids into the corner of a house. Ryan’s house, because of all the other homes it could have hit, why would the universe allow any other to lose power? Wasn’t like he was busy or anything.
But that wasn’t even the worst part. The real problem would be getting his landlord to fix the new window his bedroom had suddenly gained.
Something about the crash bothered him, though. No one had been injured, at least not that Ryan could tell, but every face he looked at was turned in the same direction. That would have been expected if they had been turned toward the smoking cars, but not one person was looking at the crash. The people standing at their doors, a man straddling his bicycle on the sidewalk (the dumbass doesn’t even have a headlamp on, Ryan thought), even the people in the cars that had been in the crash, they were all looking in the same direction up over the rooftops. Ryan followed their gaze to a patch of empty night not unlike the rest of the sky above them, dark and rich and brimming with starlight, no full moon casting its haze into the night to spoil what must have been the most beautiful view of the Milky Way he had ever seen. His phone buzzed from inside but he ignored it, too caught up in the wonder of seeing the creamy brushstroke of the galaxy stretched out above him. It was a sight he hadn’t seen since he was a boy staring up from his childhood backyard outside of town, miles away from another porch light. There was also the awestruck, somewhat unsettling silence of the people around him, people who seemed fully hypnotized by the stars and unable to look away. Sure, the stars were bright and beautiful tonight, but that was nothing to wreck a car or two over, was it?
Ryan tore his gaze downward and started to ask a nearby woman what he had missed, if there had maybe been a meteor or fireball that had drawn everyone’s attention skyward, but before he opened his mouth the streetlight across from him hummed to life and cast a weak, orange-tinted glow down onto the sidewalk. As if following some unheard call to action, the next streetlight came on, then the next one, and the next, until the whole street began to glow under the dull red of warming bulbs.
That’s what was different, he thought, looking up as the stars appeared to lose some of their luster to the brightening street. The streetlights were off. Which didn’t make sense, as they were all automated by those little light sensors that detected when it got dark. Sometimes a good summer thunderstorm was enough to trigger them, but they were always on by 8 this time of year, 9 at the latest. Before he had time to consider this further, Ryan again heard the sound of his phone faintly buzzing from inside the house. He took another look at the fading stars before retreating back inside to see who was calling him.
Face down, his phone crawled across the linoleum with each burst of buzzing, but as Ryan reached down for it his hand froze. A floaty haze of unreality settled over him and for just a moment he was almost certain he was about to wake up from a dream. He must have still been on the couch napping safely in the land of logic where swerving cars didn’t target his house and people didn’t all stare silently up at the night sky, because the sound coming from his phone wasn’t his ringtone. It was the annoying, repetitive chirp he heard every single morning at 6AM before waking up for work. The same sound he also heard every afternoon right after his 4:30 nap.
It was his alarm.
Ryan picked up the phone and tapped STOP beneath a box informing him that it was in fact only 5PM, that his thirty minute nap was over now and he could start working on his article. Dazed, he drifted back to the doorway and joined the rest of the street—the rest of the entire Western Hemisphere—in staring up at the place the sun should have been but wasn’t.
