Chapter 1 - Lights Out

  Do you remember where you were, the day everything on Earth just stopped and came to a cold halt? The day the old order came crashing down, and everything went crazy? The day magic returned, and all the fancy toys we’d built for ourselves stopped working?

  Of course you do. All of us who lived through that day remember it. Probably right down to the moment, am I right? I’ve heard a thousand of those stories since then. We survivors all have that ‘no shit, there I was’ story to tell. Those of us who made it through, anyway.

  A lot of folks didn’t live past those first few minutes, hours, and days.

  But enough of us did.

  My experience of the apocalypse started in a tunnel, on a train. I was riding the Red Line of the T up from downtown Boston toward Cambridge. It wasn’t where I wanted to be on a Saturday afternoon, but there were a whole slew of reasons why I was.

  Well, one main reason. That was my girlfriend, Amanda. She’d asked me to come along and help her wrangle the other twelve reasons. She was the coach of a kids’ soccer team. A few of the buildings around the area had come up with the idea of starting a local league, so kids from one building would go play against kids from another.

  It was a cool idea. Got kids outside running around, and they seemed to love it. That alone might not have been enough to get me involved, though. Amanda was more than reason enough, though. She was a keeper. In fact, when everything went to hell I was on my phone, scrolling through the offerings from a few local jewelers. I’d been saving money for months, and I finally had enough to afford a ring. I was going to pick one out, pick it up the next day, and then set up the most romantic proposal ever.

  I wasn’t sure yet what I was going to do for that last step. It would require meticulous planning, because I wanted to get everything exactly right for her.

  “Cam, you good over there?” Amanda asked.

  I looked up from my phone, quickly dropping the screen. I didn’t want her to see what I was browsing, after all. “Yeah, just goofing around. Everything okay?”

  “Sure. Emmy is having issues with her shoes, though. Can you take a look?”

  Emmy was an eight year old girl with a blond ponytail and the attitude of a dowager queen. I spotted the kid walking toward me and flashed her a smile. She didn’t return it.

  “Hey, Emmy. What’s up?” I asked.

  “They’re too tight!” She flounced her way over, then plopped herself in the seat beside me and pointed at the offending shoes. “See?”

  I could not, in fact, see. To me they looked like a perfectly reasonable pair of sneakers. But obviously the footwear had offended Emmy deeply in some way. You could see that just from looking at her pout.

  It only took a minute to get the shoelaces loosened up a little, after which Emmy went back over to sit with the rest of the team and I went back to my internet shopping. But as soon as I picked my phone back up and opened the Safari app, everything just…stopped.

  It started with a blinding flash of pain, so sharp I closed my eyes and pressed my hands to my temples. I couldn’t remember ever having that intense a headache, and certainly never one that came on so quickly.

  The train stalled out at the same moment my head felt like it was cracking open, stopping right where it was. I opened my eyes, but the lights inside the train had all gone out. My phone was dead, too. There was a long beat of absolute silence as all the noise around us just stopped cold. It felt like even my brain locked up, because I couldn’t think straight. I just stared into the dark like I was waiting for everything to reboot and come back.

  Then one of the kids started crying, and I blinked, shook my head to clear it, and tried to flick on my phone flashlight. There was no response; the phone was completely dead, like the battery was gone. I wasn’t even getting the ‘you need to plug this in’ icon on the screen, so something was really wrong with the device. I slipped it back into a pocket.

  “Amanda, you okay?” I called out.

  Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.

  “Yeah! What happened?”

  “I don’t know. My phone’s dead. Does yours work?”

  There were some noises from her side of the car as she fished her phone out; we’d been sitting across from each other. The kids were making more noises, too, and they weren’t happy ones. We needed to get some light in here or the kids would panic.

  I knew the lights would come on sooner or later. It wasn’t the first time I’d been in a stopped T car underground. Usually the emergency lights still worked fine even if the engine went dead, but whatever malfunction hit this one must have been worse than usual.

  “No, Cam. Mine’s dead, too,” Amanda called out. “What’s going on?”

  There was just the bare hint of panic trickling into her voice, too, so I knew I needed to keep it together for her. One phone failing at the same time as the train was weird. Both of us having our devices crap out like that implied something more serious was happening. My thoughts raced, coming up with ideas of what might have caused this. Each was more exotic than the one before, so I stopped myself. Spiraling wasn’t going to help anyone.

  Another stranger in the car spoke. “My phone is dead, too.”

  “Me, too.”

  “Me three!”

  “Mine’s completely dead. What’s going on?”

  Okay, panic was becoming the name of the game. That wasn’t going to work out well. I raised my voice so it would carry through the car. “It’s probably some sort of power surge or something. I’m sure things will be fine soon.”

  I was not, in fact, sure things would be fine soon. The possible answers which seemed most likely to cause our current predicament were either an EMP burst or a solar flare, neither of which were minor things that would come with easy fixes. But I wasn’t going to say that out loud. It wouldn’t help anyone.

  All at once, a green flash lit up the front of the car. The conductor stood there, holding a chem-light in his hands. I’d forgotten we were in the front car of the train, but was super glad to see him. The green light from the glowing stick illuminated his face as he held it high. He was a Black man with white hair in tight curls against his scalp and a well-trimmed beard.

  “Everyone okay back here?” he asked.

  “Better now. What’s going on?” one woman asked from a seat a few spaces away from me.

  “Dunno yet, miss, but we’ll figure it out. Anyone have a working phone right now?” the conductor asked. He looked around, his eyes scanning the compartment, but everyone was shaking their heads. “Huh. Me either. The radio is out, too. Dunno what’s going on, but we’ll get to the bottom of it. Now, I need to go check the other cars. You all stay right here and wait for me to get back, eh?”

  “Without light?” That was one of the kids, a boy named Manuel.

  “No, child. I’ll leave one of these with a grownup. Who’s in charge of these kids, eh? Whole lot of little ones in this car.”

  Amanda stood. “That would be me. We’re on our way to a soccer game.”

  “Good times,” the man replied, walking over to her and handing her another glow stick. “Hang onto that, and sit tight. I’ll be right back, after I drop more of these off to the other cars. Got enough to go around, and the light will keep people from panic until help arrives.”

  “Help is coming, right?” That was a man sitting in the rear of the car.

  “Sure is! Don’t worry about that. Lord, I’ve seen trains lose power more times than I can count, over the years. The folks outside already know, and they’re already working on getting to us,” the conductor replied. “Now, my name’s Gerald, and we’re gonna get through this together, eh? You all just sit tight here and I’ll be right back.”

  Amanda cracked the glow stick he’d handed her as Gerald unlocked the back door to the car and went through to the next. He closed the door behind him. The green glow from Amanda’s light replaced the one Gerald took with him. It still wasn’t a lot of illumination, but the old guy was right; as soon as he lit the thing, people stopped being as scared. Me, too, I supposed.

  There was something about being locked in utter darkness that was a whole lot scarier.

  I heard voices from the next car chatting for a bit and saw the light moving. Gerald must have been pushing through to the next car. How many were there? I couldn’t remember for certain, but this was the Red Line, which generally had a lot more cars per train than, say, the Green Line did. At least half a dozen, if I remembered right. Probably more.

  Amanda was working to keep the kids calm, so I joined in and did what I could, too.

  “Are we going to make it to the game in time?” Manuel asked.

  “I don’t know yet. We’ll try. I think they’ll set up a rain date if we can’t get there in time, though,” I replied.

  Then a blood-curdling scream ripped through the air.

  Everyone in our car fell instantly silent for a long moment, like we were all listening for a follow-up. But there was nothing. No more screams, no shouts, no loud sounds.

  “Where was that from?” Man In the Back asked. Because of course he was the one most scared of the random scream…

  I slipped out of my seat and moved toward the rear of the car, peering through the window into the next car. The people there were doing likewise, some of them, looking into the car beyond that.

  I turned to the man. “I don’t know, but let’s keep cool, okay? I don’t want to scare the kids for nothing.”

  He looked pale, and perspiration showed on his forehead. The guy was inches from losing it, but he calmed a little at my words. “Yeah. Yeah, you’re right. We should keep cool.”

  Of course, as soon as he said it, we heard more screams.

  This time it wasn’t just one. It was a bunch of people, all shouting, yelling, then…screaming. I’d heard people cry out when they were in pain before. I knew what it sounded like, and that’s what we were hearing.

  Worst part was, it kept going on. Like, I was hearing people shouting in alarm, then screaming in pain, then going silent. But then new people would begin screaming to replace the old. It was getting closer, too. Like someone was moving through the train, hurting people in one car after another.

  And those sounds were headed straight for us.