Prologue 2: The Hour Is Getting Late

by K. Patrick Glover

The silence is deafening.

It’s been nearly two weeks since “It” happened. Since everybody disappeared. I may not have noticed right away, If I hadn’t been in town.

See, I needed supplies. Ordinary things, water, cereal, toilet paper, toothpaste. A couple bags of Doritos. Seemed important at the time, those damned Doritos. The shelf was empty of the kind that I like, the spicy nacho ones. So I asked the stock boy to check in the back for me.

He never came back.

I waited. I waited at least twenty minutes. Then I stuck my head through the double doors, the big ones that say Employees Only on the outside. I know I was breaking the rules, but I only stuck my head through, I didn’t actually go back there.

I didn’t see anybody, so I called out. No answer.

I shook my head, figured the stock boy had snuck out on break and forgot about me. I decided to forgo the Doritos and headed for the front.

It was very quit. No other customers. I could hear something in the distance, very far away. It sounded like a woman screaming.

I hurried to the front, my nerves getting the better of me. The checkouts were as empty as the aisles had been. The front door was propped open and I could feel the breeze coming in.

I left my cart and walked around the registers. Two of them were open, money in the drawer. I looked around, and I almost took it, after all, it was just sitting there. But broke or not, I wasn’t brought up to be no thief.

I pulled my cart to one of the open registers, tallied up my merchandise and paid for it, making sure I took the proper change.

Then I bagged my things up and walked outside. The street was just as empty as the store. I felt, well, kind of like I was walking through a movie set and all the actors had gone home for the day. Like nothing was real, just facades.

I walked across the street and into the bar.

No one.

The radio was on, but only static came from it’s speakers. A cigarette, burned almost to the filter, sat smoking in the ashtray. There was a nearly full glass of whiskey beside it.

I drank it, but I didn’t leave any money. I figured the fella that had been here had probably already paid. I wondered where he went. Where everybody went.

My next stop was the sporting goods store. I rarely stopped there, no reason for it. Until today.

I could still hear that poor woman screaming, off in the distance. So that’s where I was headed. And I thought I just might need a gun.

Prologue – The Hour Is Getting Late

by K. Patrick Glover

And I heard a voice in the midst of the four beasts
And I looked and behold, a pale horse
And it’s name it said on him was Death
And Hell followed with him.
Johnny Cash
The Man Comes Around

I always knew I’d be around for the end of the world.

Don’t ask me how. Its not like I’m a religious man, or a superstitious one. I didn’t sit around thinking about The Rapture or the prophecies of Nostradamus. I didn’t spend much time thinking about it at all. I just knew that I would be there for it, that it would happen in my lifetime.

I just didn’t realize that I would be locked in a padded room when it happened.

Of course some people would tell you that’s the reason I was in the padded room to begin with, but they’d be wrong. The real reason, well, I don’t want to talk about the real reason I was there. It doesn’t matter anymore, does it? Does anything from before matter?

Do you remember that old poem about the world ending, not with a bang, but a whimper? Locked in that room, drugged out of my mind, I didn’t even hear the whimper. Just a sort of piercing silence.

No one came that day. Not the nurse that usually brought my pills or the orderly that brought my food. I noticed. I wasn’t so far gone that I didn’t notice, but I didn’t care. I had been kept drugged for over a year, docile, pliant. That doesn’t wear off in a day.

Or two. Or three.

On the fourth day, when the haze was getting thinner and the hunger was almost unbearable, I heard noise outside my room. Doors opening and closing, things being tossed about, somebody singing. Actually singing.

I sat on the edge of my bed and waited. I knew that she’d (the singing voice was definitely feminine) eventually open my door. I wondered what I’d say to her. Wondered, not planned, because I didn’t think my conscious mind, still working its way through the Thorazine fog, had any hope of controlling my lips. I wasn’t even sure I’d be able to talk. It had been so long.

I told her, much later, that I had spent the time wondering what she looked like. If she’d be pretty. The truth is, it never occurred to me. She didn’t have that much reality in my mind. She was just a melodic voice that could open doors. I wanted her to open mine. That’s all that mattered.

When she finally did open it, and I managed to stutter a simple hello, she screamed.