All Is Silence - Deserted Lands #1

Chapter 2 - Part I

Chapter Two

LIZZIE LEANED IN THE DOORWAY to Jayce's room. His clothes were all put away, and his books were in alphabetical order. He'd had the same shitty fatherless life she'd had, but he couldn't have been more different, escaping from it all with fantasy novels and precise conformity. Now the alarm clock in the middle of his floor marred that conformity. Lizzie stooped to pick it up, and set it on his bedside table next to his calculator watch. She'd teased him mercilessly about the geekiness of it, but he'd never given up thinking it was cool. She smiled sadly, slid the watch onto her wrist, and went in search of some coffee.

Coffee had always been there for her when Lizzie wanted it-cold, but brewed. Now she found the carafe empty. She had seen it made all her life. How hard could it be? She flipped open the lid and found a moldy filter and grounds. She made a face and dumped it in the garbage. Filter, coffee, and water-simple. Three of the big scoops of ground coffee looked about right.

After she turned on the pot, Lizzie sat down at the computer. If the cell phones were working again maybe the Internet was back too. The old dinosaur took forever to boot up. Mama had picked it up for Jayce at a yard sale.

As the hard drive churned away, she flipped the radio on and tuned it to her favorite oldies station. The radio had never quit working. For a few days all the stations had played non-stop recorded emergency bulletins, "This is the Emergency Alert System, this is NOT a test," interrupted occasionally with a song or two. But, after a while, the stations switched to digital playlists on repeat with alerts on the hour. She'd listened long enough to hear the same songs in the same order.

"...Can't you hear the thunder, you better run, you better take cover..." blasted out of the speaker. This part of the playlist was some DJ's twisted end of the world humor. "... on a heavy trail-head full of Zombies..." She had never figured out the lyrics. She turned it off and plugged in her player instead. She put it on the Dad's Music playlist.

The computer was still loading. She swiveled in the chair, trying to chill. Lizzie heard the final hiss and burble of the coffee maker and grabbed a cup. Not as dark as it should be. She dumped in sugar and settled back into the chair as the browser window popped up. Yes! She had Internet. A new message winked from Jess on the screen. Lizzie clicked to open it.

Jess, Lizzie's best friend from grade school, had moved to Texas in eighth grade. Away from the "bad influences" her father claimed. He had never liked Lizzie. West Texas might as well be on another planet.

Lizzie's father had family in Texas, somewhere. The Guerreros and the Salazars. She couldn't ever remember meeting any of them, though Mama said her grandparents had come up once when Lizzie was two.

Jess's message finally opened. You out there?

Lizzie typed: Im here. How u doing? Lame, but what could she say? She scanned through the posts in the Facebook newsfeed as she waited for a response, but they were all spam, nothing from real people.

Where is everybody? Lizzie typed a post on her wall:

Roll call. Check in if u r alive.

Then she headed out to the freezer and found some rocky road ice cream. She ate it out of the carton as she clicked into a Google News search. All the articles were variations on the same theme: "PANDEMIC. End of humanity!" None of them were recent. Last one was a couple days old, from the CBC, a Canadian news site. She scanned the article:

"...Can't find the source of the plague...

...long incubation period...

...swift death...

...predictions of 95-98% succumbing..."

She almost choked on her ice cream at the numbers. She swallowed more than she intended and then squeezed her eyes shut as the brain freeze hit.

I'm finally one of the One Percent. She flipped back to see if Jess had replied.

At the bottom of the article in big bold letters was the same warning she had heard so often in the last few days: "STAY INDOORS. NO CONTACT." Lot of good that plan was.

Her AC/DC ringtone was barely audible over the stereo. Her phone was charging in Mama's room. She scrambled out of the chair, knocking it to the floor. Lizzie ran, diving onto Mama's bed. She grabbed the phone, and jammed the answer tab with her thumb.

"Mama?"