Hidebehind

By Mark Ferguson

Everyone else disappeared about six years ago.

It was hard to write after that, but I’m still here, and I’m still writing.

When I stop doing anything it gets quiet. There are no dogs, cats, squirrels, racoons, foxes, deer, songbirds, seagulls, and I think it goes on. No more animals. I was not swarmed by a city full of abandoned pets, and I don’t have to fear an attack from wolves, or bears or …

Why am I writing this? It’s just me and the buildings, the furniture, the trees creaking in the wind, everything slowly rotting. Or it was, for a long time, but --

So, it’s just me and the wind. And what the wind touches: closing doors and windows, fluttering curtains, rattling the chains of swings in parks, playing windchimes that I take down wherever I go. I hear everything, against my will. As I write there’s a flag waving on a pole three properties east and if I pause … yes, I register it. I’ll have to take it down. There’s a shed door that bangs open sometimes, five properties north. I’ve gone there three times and there’s never a reason why that door should have opened.

I could secure it, or take the door from its frame … but what if I still hear it slam open? Then I’ll really be in trouble.

So that’s my chief torment: sometimes doors and windows just slam on their own when they shouldn’t. The jolt can pull me out of the deepest sleep. I race over to the undoubted source and it’s just the wind, somehow nudging at every angle, reaching around corners, slinking down steps to find the door to a wood furnace in a basement with unoiled hinges that squeal, shredding my dreams. But I don’t learn -- I expect it to finally be something, every time.

There’s very little to see that changes, awake or asleep. I think I’ve seen the same cloud hundreds of times.

Wherever I curl up and sleep on this planet that is now my solitary kingdom I dream, even for a ten-minute nap. Often I dream that my ear is getting sharper and sharper, spreading an unwanted, helpless awareness across the unkept lawns and through moldering, empty houses of rustling dust, a fine spiderweb catching every piece of furniture that groans at midnight, each lifted windowpane that wants to suddenly drop like a guillotine’s blade to stop my heart, every step that yearns to creak, every keyhole that whistles so treacherously.

In my dream I am a spider in the center of my sonic net, waiting for another sound, telling myself that since there are no animals anything I hear must be the wind. But the wind truly can’t make some sounds, such as those persistent, semi-audible impressions on my eardrum like footsteps going down the black street at night, so regular … but always in the solid dark.

No one human is coming. I’ve travelled these last six years as far as Manhattan, and after that I believe that the whole Earth is empty. I’m the last one who didn’t make the Rapture. I’m not brave enough to try crossing the oceans.

Of course, I couldn’t stay in New York City very long. I couldn’t endure all the sounds to hear and ponder and dread in that empty grid, a million foundations breathing as the Sun warms and night cools, those hundreds of thousands of flags fluttering, glass tinkling as storm-rattled windows finally pop from their frames, shorn wires sparking -- there was still a little power flowing around back then. All possible threats for me to track, a frightened little spider.

But I must be the spider properly, the trapper and hunter, for this next thing. This last thing --

I have resolved to not kill myself. I will live just to see what happens and what else changes, to explore a little while longer, cast my net and see what vibrates up to the hammer, anvil and stirrup bones inside my skull. Or through my jawbone like the hearing of a snake, because sometimes I lie on the floor on my belly, every nerve on the front of my body straining to detect the first vibration that comes from those … things, when they approach. Always in the solid dark.

There are more of them now, and they must know I am still here.

‘Give them a name, stupid,’ I think, which might as well be my name now. I am Stupid.

Lurkers? But I am the lurker, slipping away as they draw nearer, devising my exits, my distractions, my traps, my watch points. I lurk, and they patrol the empty world, as if they knew from the start that one was left behind to sniff out.

When I actively listen, not fighting it anymore, I can talk to myself and sometimes get answers that aren’t mine.

Maybe the ghosts are still here. If so they have slowly found me, wandering from each haunted hill and moldy crypt across silent plains and lightless valleys and desolate cities to whisper to the last living ear. In my listening vigils I can collect fragmented voices through the static of my own worsening, voiced-starved mind. I don’t fear them like the other things, the lurkers who pace outside in the solid dark and know that I am still here.

They don’t speak. I hope they never do.

So I hear within as well as without, gathering from the deep place where the ghost voices sometimes come from. If they are real then I am not alone, so I hope they are real, and that hope has perhaps turned into proper madness over the lonely years. It took more than two years to accept the mad idea, at least.

The Earth is silent, and so am I, because I need to hear the first thing that isn’t me.

I am Stupid, the final toehold that humanity has upon the world, the eyes and ears of billions of ghosts. There is a weight, the pressure of will that is not my own … or I am mad. I can still consider that none of this magical hearing is real and that the simple, bleak, pointless, static situation around me really is all there is, so I’m not all mad just yet.

I have read a lot these last few years, trying to fill the silence with content from my eyes. I have read at least three thousand books since this all began, though I stopped counting some time ago. That number would only be for bragging. To who?

There were people like me before. They lived this way deliberately, closed the curtains on the simple, bleak, pointless, seemingly-static world deliberately, reading those thousands of books without anything to force them like a lack of new media and no company but crawling time. I think one of them was happy to be the last man on Earth in a story until he broke his glasses. Oh God, why couldn’t it have been one of them?!

It was in January, deep in a heavy winter of blowing snow and roaring furnaces, that I was left behind like a sinner in a clumsy evangelical cartoon. Those cartoons had at least promised more company.

I drove to work from my box in the middle of suburbia, part of a horizontal stack of identical boxes, two rooms wide and pressed together with no side yards, homes with identical driveways, trees and streets and even identical lights during Christmas. Unimaginative surroundings filled with unimaginative people, themselves mostly created by unimaginative sex. It couldn’t have been longer than ten minutes before I knew that something was quite wrong beyond a normal snowstorm, but I’ve stretched that time considerably in my memory.

Whenever it’s dark and snowing again I seem to go back there, adding time. So it sometimes seems to be just beginning, over and over.

Back when the time really mattered I left the driveway at 7 am, rolling in the only moving vehicle on planet Earth. I thought that my neighbors were running behind. Maybe I thought that the power had gone out across the street, looking upon dark buildings full of empty beds with light switches that hadn’t been turned, those houses with bedrooms where the depressions of heads on pillows and bodies on mattresses were slowly rising. Elsewhere there were plane crashes, and untended flames spreading wildly, and over-pressured dams, and maybe nuclear reactors flashing warning signs to no one as the months dragged on, but for me the change over the world was unnoted as a blink.

I didn’t find thousands of heaps of collapsed clothes from a cartoon vaporization. I’d been under the impression that Heaven would take you naked if it was claiming people so impatiently. The fact that people disappeared with their clothes and shoes on makes the mystery less mystic and more material to me, though not necessarily terrestrial. I am convinced that the disappearing act didn’t involve any angel reading a list of names off a scroll; it was more like a science fiction teleporter.

Whatever it was took all of people, I’m very sure: their false teeth, their pacemakers, their prosthetics too. But it just took living people: the morgues were still full, and there are still bones under the graves -- I’ve snooped, and I’ve dug. I went to the zoos and I found no one like me of another species, just empty habitats.

But for about ten minutes that seems much longer now I drove my Ranger over treacherous snow ploughed hours before, built up without pause because the weather didn’t stop when everyone disappeared. Through one intersection I swerved over a patch of black ice and felt thick drifts on the road’s shoulder sucking at my wheels. I swore and scowled pleasantly like many days before, passing almost a dozen humped shapes in the ditch before I noticed what they were.

My road to work was a loose S. Cars suddenly devoid of their drivers had neatly left the road as it curved to make way for me hours later, cushioned by snow as they crashed, their tracks quickly covered up by the shifting drifts, most of their shapes quickly buried as well. Elsewhere it was exactly the jam you’d expect a child to make with their toy cars, and the roads in any city or major town are virtually useless. I would become a most proficient bicyclist.

On that first day of the new silence I got to the parking lot in a half-awakened state, wondering if I should have been a good Samaritan, finding that the thought floundered and died when I saw the multitude of vehicles in the ditch spaced apart as I looked down the road. The streetlights still worked, and I could see several cars apparently marooned before me as well, and side roads were clogged, one vehicle rammed into a hydrant unburied with its front beams still visible. The water coming out of the broken hydrant was freezing into an arch of ice before my eyes.

I got to the parking lot. No one was there either.

I used to be so good with names, and faces, and cars. Your man Stupid never had trouble with those things like some people. I knew our receptionist Brenda’s Ford pickup that always smelled of her big dogs, Turby’s white Corolla with its mismatched blue door after his daughter gave it a spin, Alastair’s environmentally conscious lime-green Prius, Hugo and Ian always coming in together in their silver hatchback full of pine needles and fishing equipment --

Had to compose myself. God, I thought I had forgotten them, the staff of Solandt Electric, where I managed to not staple my fingers together for six years before the Rapture, making cabinets and test boards for the science folk.

In the lot I paced in a line through snow above my ankles that first morning, expecting to see moving lights on the road weaving through the stopped vehicles. At that point I was thinking of an EMP, focusing on the vehicles and not the absent drivers. I thought of neutron bombs. Then I thought that was stupid since the streetlights and car headlights were still on. The office lights were also still lit -- most office buildings stayed powered for several weeks afterward, but I could peer far enough in at my own place of work to see that no one was inside at the security desk.

My pacing through the snow increased in speed and I started to breathe heavily, looking in many directions for someone to come in or out of town, to my workplace or any one of the other businesses on that row of industrial lots that should have been opening their doors. I was covering my ears because there was a change in the atmosphere that I couldn’t pinpoint, a subtle alteration creeping into my awareness and smoldering.

Now I know it was the beginning of the new silence that was only going to get stronger and more intimate, but back then I could only focus on the building’s fans, which were still running. Those elevated and recessed units made a sound like rising tinnitus, a background noise I’d gotten used to over the years, but suddenly that noise was intolerable because it was the only sound. Cities hum, the sonic equivalent of that light pollution astronomers cursed, and that hum was exponentially decaying already.

The tinnitus-drone of the fans poured into my ears like wax, and I was reacting too slowly as I lost balance, the only thing moving in an apocalyptic painting beside the snow. The snowflakes looked lazy and underwater as they floated in the air, sparkling orange from halogens, points of light that blurred in my watering eyes. I swooned for a moment as my knees folded, going down in the lot, face first in fresh snow.

The shock of the cold broke the trance. I thought that I could just be sick, and very confused, that there was nothing wrong with the world at all.

Afterward I picked myself up, went inside, and sat in my office, waiting for the phone to ring, for a customer asking for the next quote on a particular cabinet design, or for anyone else to come in and tell me how bad the roads were, that idiots without snow tires were the worst.

But the phone never rang with new business, and no one came in to complain about anything. I made at least fifty fruitless calls, the last thirty or so random numbers, and no one picked up. The phones weren’t dead -- all of the infrastructure of civilization was still standing and running on its own for those first few days, and I heard voicemail greetings (which I would soon be scrambling to record, when the infrastructure started browning out and powering down).

Before noon I went to the security desk and hopped over to start digging for the camera recordings. Those cameras took pictures every five seconds from corners and over the desks at the entrance, low quality and grainy with stark lighting, like the footage in a documentary about a serial killer. In such a dramatized piece they would play eerie music while showing the last time the victim was seen alive. The change, down to a time of five seconds, happened between 03:19:12 and 03:19:17. That’s when the serial killer abducted the first victim I identified: Janice, one of the janitors, who let a mop fall in the hallway when she vanished. This was a particularly effective and slick serial killer because he somehow got everyone else in that stretch of time.

Everyone but me.

I’ve had too much time to ask ‘why me?’ Even in a religious sense where natural laws are optional, nothing comes of it. Faultless, selfless heroes and sweet old grannies and blameless kids went, but I stayed. Pedophiles and murderers in prisons went, but I stayed. Nothing in my biography singles me out. No exposure to radiation, no voodoo priest tapping me on the head, no pod from the planet Krypton in my parent’s barn.

Perhaps I was the one guy who was right in the middle. Half went up to Jesus while the other half went down to keep the Devil warm, leaving one meek and mediocre soul in between, inheriting the Earth.

I am Chingachgook, Last of the Mohicans. I am Lionel Verney, Mary Shelley’s last man on Earth. I am Henry Bemis the short-sighted reader, Lovecraft’s Ull, a maddened Max, a boy without his dog, and all the others. I have no great journey, no great fight, no stop condition, no life’s work to complete.

Until this last thing. It threatens me with purpose, with determination; I am a bit of a deep sea creature that has gotten used to the darkness, shuddering when the light of having a mission and a project returns.

I won’t believe in two separate strange things: the disappearance of everyone else and these lurkers are part of the same strangeness. They cleared the Earth and arrived about four years later, a delay based on how far they must travel to get here behind the wave of whatever disintegrating weapon the used to cleanly annihilate almost everything with a nervous system, a bio-EMP. There are more of them lately. That they only seem to travel by walking the Earth is an oddity that I must simply bear: there are no saucers, no moving lights in the sky that are not our satellites or meteors. That would have made them almost comfortably familiar, I think.

I’m not sure if outer space is even their point of origin. I’m not sure if it’s Hell either.

To never know what hit you seems unacceptable for a person, or a species. But that’s the truth. If you still have the ability to know or wonder, it hasn’t really hit you yet.

I stopped living in my suburban box.

Six months before the disappearing act I had moved out of my forever home with my forever dog and my forever wife. It had required two salaries to pay off.

I don’t want to write her name down.

Because I’d like to think that she was just away, so this only happened to me. Yes, that’s why. In some later time I’ll tell this story to someone and they’ll say, ‘huh, how strange for you’, and then she’ll tell me what she was up to all this time and it will be another story, there are other stories going on all at the same time so it’s not just one boring mediocre stupid stupid STUPID …

I’m not a good writer and by now my voice barely works. I tried speaking a few weeks ago and it was strange and scary.

I moved, finding a house for sale with nothing in it, something I could never have afforded on the end of my street. My new digs had black hardwood floors and huge windows, a staircase with an elaborate banister, some New Age galaxy that they called a chandelier overhead.

I smashed that galaxy after a month, hurling a baseball at it. I was going crazy, and then I remember Jack Nicholson throwing a ball in the Overlook Hotel and stopped, and laughed at myself for being unoriginally crazy, and for a moment I wasn’t crazy anymore. No pictures, no furniture. I couldn’t bear to try, for some reason.

I drove around in my Ranger and filled the mansion’s three-car garage with generators and other pieces of vital equipment. I collected way too much stuff, hurting my back and getting scared that the pain wouldn’t go away (it did), taking pills for the pain and then wondering if I’d overdose or just start gobbling them (I didn’t, not that first year). So many cans of food, so many flavors I’d never heard of. Other people’s food looks foreign in their pantry or fridge, even when they buy it from the exact same store. This is also true of their clothes, furniture … almost everything, actually. Going into someone’s home with all their stuff lying there really didn’t feel right. I told myself that I was just borrowing food, water purifiers and other emergency essentials at first, but I would rummage ever more adventurously once I was sure that it wasn’t just my state, and it wasn’t just North America, that I’d run into ghosts and cryptids and aliens before any other human outside a mirror.

Lobster potato chips. Black dogfish beer. Fusions of mayonnaise with Cheese Whiz, guacamole and licorice, and every other company’s vile attempt to come up with the next peanut butter and jam. Unhealthy, unkosher concoctions of an extinct species, blending meat and vegetable with mineral and plastic, making colors that should never pass through a digestive track. I have found leather gimp outfits and fur suits with holes in the groin, diaries written in code containing God knows what, and uglier secrets, some from people that I knew. I won’t say what I learned about one guy at work, just … no, not even more than that. No.

Let it go, they’re all gone, it’s over now.

So I gathered canned food and generators and flashlights and then I figured ‘why not guns? Just carrying one will make someone back off if it’s down to a few scavengers’, still thinking that it was going to be like The Stand and not I Am Legend without the vampires. There was a time when I’d stupidly hoped for something like vampires just to have something to do, something like that game my cousin’s kids played where they had to run around a world full of boxes and flee from monsters, building things. And now … in the solid dark …

Oh God, what are they? Did I just imagine them to have more than nothing? But if they’re imaginary then the ghosts can also be imaginary and I am alone, and which do I choose: utterly alone forever, or stalked by nameless things before a quick death?

I’ve read legends: ancient, urban, original. Sometimes one of my little ghost-voices says. ‘yes, maybe this’ or ‘no, not that, keep looking.’

But oh God, what are they? The footprints are just circles! They must be something simple like in a computer game, smooth and not at all convincing … did I think this because of the footprints, or because of that game my cousin’s kid played? I walk with a cane now after hurting my knee, and those circle prints are about the same size, and how could I have never seen one?

Gotta keep focused. I was going back in time, but I can’t even keep it chronological for a single page, my mind’s all over the place.

So I gathered canned foods and generators and flashlights and guns, then books on how to survive by preppers who never prepped for this. The guns were for show in case I needed to confront the minions of Lord Humungous. I didn’t dare to load them and start practicing right away. I strained my back and rested and took some pills then panicked and threw away the pills, hurting my shoulder when I did that. I was being a dramatic ass.

I started smashing things just because I was finally getting scared. How long can a man last with zero help? He’ll trip and hit something, break something. He’ll need a dentist, and if he tries to drug himself he’ll screw it up. His appendix could go. He’ll strain his back, he’ll crash his car or his bike. And if it’s none of those, a bad diet can clog his heart, and maybe without a fire alarm the carbon monoxide will crawl down his throat one night, or he’ll just burn his house down because why not smoke, why not drink, why not dive like Scrooge McDuck into a heap of porn … that last urge dried up quickly though.

I’d look at a woman’s face in those videos and wonder where she had been at the moment of the disappearance, what she had really been like. Then I felt stupid for getting any sense of attachment to a porn star. Then I felt ashamed for not feeling anything for those women up until now, and having all those thoughts in your brain draws a lot of blood away from your dick. And on another level, ‘here’s a thing you can never have again’ is a thought that’s always there.

I watched all the Hitchcock films because I thought I should see something like that before I suddenly died of appendicitis or a drunken fall down the stairs. Some of them were okay.

Then I crossed off Peckinpah. Then all the eighties action films of my youth. I branched out into Peter Sellers, white-knuckling it through all five of the old Panthers. John Belushi, Andy Kauffman, and other dead comedians who were still popularly-dead before the Rapture were safer than overdosing on pills, as were Kinison, Hicks, Hedberg, Stanhope. To get serious again I crossed off Streep, Dafoe, actors and actor’s actors. For some reason I got hooked on Miguel Ferrer, slain in Robocop and finding his way into Stephen King adaptations. I mulled over and brooded over trivial, meaningless connections and coincidences in biographies and film, becoming a downright scholar in the kind of lore men read while sitting on the toilet.

Speaking of toilets: I upgraded to outhouse technology before the local plumbing stopped working. Despite toying with the notion I did not fill a parking lot full of portables -- this was the time when I was still thinking of people being left over in Europe or Asia, coming over to a silent North America to find one loon planning his bowel movements years in advance and hoarding toilet paper. Back then I was still wearing pants every day.

I was hoarding duct tape for no particular reason. And alcohol for drinking breaks. Lumber, power tools, with enough twine to make a roadside attraction and enough gas to reach Tierra del Fuego. Vinyl records and CDs gave me a hundred years of music to meander through as I worked, or rather planned on working, gathering far too much stuff for any practical one-man project.

If I’m introducing myself properly to some new employer, I suppose the backstory should have this frame: Solandt Electric was my place of work for five years. Before that I was in construction with a hardhat. Before that, trade school. The good news is that I can assemble and hook up most of the things that you’ll find inside the walls of a house except for the plumbing, which I slowly figured out. You’ll find me keeping things physically in shape, keeping the lights on, not too bad at carpentry.

You’ll find that … Oh God, I’m not talking to anyone!

Once upon a time there was a guy named Andrew.

Scratch that: once upon a time there was only a guy named Andrew. He woke up one day and everyone else in the world had disappeared.

Andrew was a trucker from Seattle who now lived in Texas, rolling shipments from Vegas to Los Angeles to, oh, let’s say Washington (I don’t know how far truckers go). Andrew was a large sumbitch from a long line of cattle farmers, looking a bit like Dale from Tucker and Dale vs. Evil, still in good enough shape in his forties to lift things into his truck. He created an eclectic mobile home, and he roamed the countryside looking for anyone else who had missed out on the Rapture, which he called the Bad Trip.

Andrew’s lead explanation was that some bad trip from his teenage years had finally caught up to him for an immersive flashback. As months passed he refined this idea into the theory that he had jackknifed and rolled his truck on some lonely road between Houston and Dallas and right now he was in a coma, and all of this was some kind of elaborate dream. The doctors in the real world had provided a heroic dose of some narcotic, and getting back to reality would mean finding mushrooms, peyote, or a similar substance in this dream-world. With a little pondering he figured that he’d gotten this idea from an old science fiction story about a guy taking a trip with a Navajo medicine man and ending up in an alternative history where the Nazis and Japs had conquered and split up America. It had taken the protagonist of this story years to find the exact same mushrooms that could transport him back to his reality. Andrew supposed he’d gotten the notion from the Twilight Zone as a kid, but the story in question that he vaguely recalled was actually Two Dooms by C.M. Kornbluth. One of my three thousand.

In the early days of the solitude Andrew kind of liked driving nowhere in particular without a schedule, supposing he’d find someone else eventually, a hope that gradually died. He missed his radio buddies and when he turned his truck’s engine off the stillness started to eat at him. He would think of cowboys buried in anthills by the Indians with just their heads sticking out, getting nibbled away to the bone, and if he stopped playing his tapes and turned off his motor it seemed that invisible ants were starting to chew. He played music loud to fight it but when you hear the same songs repeatedly it’s easy to put them in the background, and after a while the silence would still creep in to sink its mandibles into his sanity. When he exhausted himself behind the wheel he’d stop and just stare, surveying the hot air wriggling over the mesas, the drifting tumbleweeds, the broken-down barns full of creaking doors and shot-up signs in the middle of the Texan nowhere. Everywhere felt like nowhere now.

Eventually, he decided that he’d have to suck it up and trip his way out of here.

So Andrew went around sampling, looking for the recipe of mind-altering chemicals that would make his Bad Trip end. After many unsuccessful, frustrating nights of vague hallucinations with squiggly colors Andrew took himself up toward a reservation in northern Nevada. He was getting desperate and starting to go deaf from the volume of the music he was cranking to fight the silence, and as the loneliness and stillness of the world ate at him he thought of Wes Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes.

He wondered if warty cannibal mutants played by Michael Berryman could lurk in those low tan hills within the old caves made by prospectors, creeping through dry riverbeds where the sand would still click a little if you had a Geiger counter, keeping watch for any intruder on the sharp ridges with binoculars in fused flipper-hands. If he was tripping then surely just the thought of those mutants would make them show up in this hyper-realistic dream, so he tried to think of something else. So instead he manifested an experience right out of Men in Black. His target Navajo reservation that he vaguely thought might have the right drugs was on the other side of Area 51, and in the cooling oven of dusk Andrew looked in his rear-view mirror and saw movement along the darkening south horizon. A lot of strangely-limbed, scuttling, bug-eyed traffic was heading his way, making long and horrid shadows on the cliffs as the setting Sun departed to kick off one hell of a night.

People had vanished from the Earth, and that meant that all the secrets that lunatics raved about could start scratching at the walls of their cells and gnawing at their chains, unchecked and soon unleashed. Without knowing the series Andrew imagined a whole SCP-universe of entities locked up by the government, now without wardens. They had broken out of captivity, and now the last member of the race that had imprisoned and experimented on them was theirs for sweet, torturous revenge. The mixture of real UFO aliens inside a Bad Trip where nothing was real did not have any trouble sitting in Andrew’s mind at this moment: both were true. He was being mobbed by alien inmates loose from Area 51 and the right drug could make him wake up from his coma. There was no one to express skepticism at this notion.

Andrew all but kicked the road with his boot, praying to Coyote, Eagle, Thunderbird and probably Elvis as his list kept growing. But the things were surely gaining and soon there were lights in the sky closing the distance, green and pulsing, and he prayed while fingering a twelve-gauge resting on the passenger seat, thinking that every bump could be them latching onto his truck, wondering if the tinnitus crackling in his ears was actually a laser beam powering up overhead. Sand hissed under his truck; it sounded reptilian. The road was half-covered by blowing sand and suddenly the truck’s wheels on one side were spinning and spraying without purchase. Dust was billowing up around him, so thick it ate his high beams. He couldn’t see the road; he was about to jackknife, and that’s when the ancient spirits threw the white man a bone.

A scorpion had snuck into the truck’s cabin and nestled itself under the driver’s seat. Now the arachnid cowered and posed in its stinging stance with open arms and pincers. Andrew’s socks weren’t pulled up and his pant legs were riding up, baring his ankles. As the crash became inevitable the scorpion winced, unable to escape from the giant loud being hammering the brake pedal in a panic. So it stung, hooking its barb in skin and dangling from Andrew’s leg.

The truck capsized and rolled. The scorpion held on and Andrew held on as they left the road and tore down a gravel slope and then through dead brush into the wild desert. A huddle of stones finally stopped the roll, breaking the truck’s back, and Andrew felt his seatbelt break one of his ribs. He could also feel the heat of the scorpion’s venom running up his thighs into his groin, where a major pipe shot it straight up into his heart.

He looked out the cracked windshield to see settling dust upon a flat plain. He could see for many miles despite the darkness; near the horizon yellow flashes of dry lightning thundered like his poisoned heart. He squinted, cranked his neck around to look straight up, which was through the passenger side window. To unfocused eyes it was either the full Moon or the melon-head of an ET crawling on his truck.

The scorpion’s venom ran up into his head and Andrew spasmed and laughed at the big-headed alien that could be the Moon, because he was out. They had no one to torture and he was out at last.

He was watching the whole universe squeeze into a tunnel and this time the squiggly colors were meaningful, this time …

In the death tunnel, Andrew got a show.

So that’s A done. The next story will be Bob, or Billy. No: Benjamin, a Harlem native struggling to get out of the depopulated Big Apple and make a living on Long Island, eccentrically dressed and looking like Isaac Hayes in Escape From New York. He must leave the island before the starving CHUDs in the sewers notice that humanity is gone and rise to devour whatever they can. And after that the adventures of Charlie, a cokehead in Florida who looks like Steven Bauer’s Manny from Scarface.

‘So what’s the plan?’ I ask myself. Start with Andrew, end with Zack, and then blow my brains out?

No, I won’t do that. Here’s what I’ll do, I’ll --

This is so nuts but why not …

Andrew got out, tripping back to reality on scorpion venom. In his trip he saw Benjamin’s story. Benji flees the Big Apple after driving an armored truck through hordes of Manhattanites too mutated to count as human, detonates the Queensboro Bridge in a towering inferno and makes himself a fine home in some rich asshole’s house in the Long Island suburbs. He grows elderly and cultured, well-read and spiritual in his decades of solitude, until one day he is compelled to sit at his desk, pick up a pen, and write about the strange life and times of Charlie, the bath-salt-crunching, scam-slinging Florida Man of legend who survived the Apocalypse like an impervious cockroach.

And when Charlie has wrestled his last coked-up gator, cut his way out of his last meth-head anaconda, and killed the Komodo dragon high on angel dust he decides to kick back and relax at a drive-in movie theater, turning on the projector and just going through a tall stack of films.

In his pile of movies is the story of Daryl, the Appalachian yokel who defends his territory from the emboldened cryptids that roam free and loud now that humanity is gone. Daryl looks like the non-rapist mountain man in Deliverance played by Bill McKinney. He turns Mothman into a sweater and has a Bigfoot rug laid in front of his fireplace, and once he’s collected his nightmarish trophies he laughs and strums a banjo and retires to his cabin for the dark winter ahead … where he reads a stack of pulp magazines, and one of the mags tells him about a poor guy named Eddy who’s the last man in his world.

Eddy is a cruise ship captain. He roams the ocean searching for another survivor on any coast. He looks like Gregory Peck’s Ahab in the 1956 Moby Dick, like an evil Abe Lincoln. The sea life goes nuts when humans are no more: sharks get bigger and jump onto the deck, a kraken gets turned into soup, things start coming out of the Bermuda Triangle because they’re hungry, and --

Keep going, Stupid. Just keep going. No matter how crazy it gets, make them and string them together. Captain Eddy’s got to conquer the monsters in his people-free world and find a way to hear the story of Franky, who was down in Mexico on holiday when all of this happened. Franky is up against Mayan stuff. He looks like every American slob tourist in khakis, completely out of his element, he could be played by John Candy, he --

Had to stop. Heard footsteps outside.

The pen on the paper right now … I think it’s reacting to that.

There’s a new presence down the dark street. Where the bus used to stop, trying to blend in with the garbage bin. It’s just sitting, listening with ears as big as trash cans. Pen on paper across a mile is still like a flame for a moth in this still world.

The curtains are drawn. I’m huddled up in a corner, in my closet. Beside me is a lamp with a dial that I can dim down to a weak orange glow of filament, and I’m wondering if I can get into the attic without making much noise if it starts scurrying this way. I hear sharply too, monster: from down the length of the street we might as well be two prisoners listening with bated breath through a cell wall for a secret knock. My attic escape route takes me over the roof to another home’s garage with a vehicle ready to go. I’ve planned and prepared and I’m kind of eager to use one of my plans …

But it’s just sitting there right now, listening. I write letter by letter slowly. No change, just still alertness in the air.

It is there. I know it’s there even I can’t quite see it. I’ll go to the bus stop in the morning and there will be circular footprints in the grass like the ones I saw before in the mud and the snow. They leave traces but they’re never unambiguous. My lurkers are subtle, tormentingly deniable, and the challenge is psychological, not delivering the cool action my Alphabet Men get into.

It’s walking now. I finish the ‘g’ in ‘walking’ and it stops for a whole minute.

Funny. I care less and less about what the final reveal will be, if they’re going to be Andrew’s Area 51 aliens, or Benji’s CHUDs, or Charlie’s drugged-up escaped pets, or Daryl’s Americana cryptids, or Captain Eddy’s twenty thousand leagues of tentacles, or Franky’s vampires from the Titty Twister. Just be silent, keep writing. Putting faces to that name: lurker. If I keep writing long enough I won’t be surprised when, one night, I hear a noise, look at the window, and see one staring in at me.

Now … George will trap and hunt his lurkers up in Alaska. He’s like Liam Neeson in The Grey, but he has a wolf raised from a pup, loyal as a dog, yeah. His lurkers are … let’s see … some Hodgson fungus monsters, yes, some of those zombie-ant fungus things growing on the dead bodies, replacing their nervous system and making them get back up. A one-eyed Kodiak bear corpse has it out for hi --

It's on my roof. Perhaps It knew I would go up and escape that way if it got too close.

They’re very quiet but they can’t fool me. They walk at the same pace as my heartbeat but they can’t fool me. They make their footprints look like my cane prints, only walk in the totally dark areas. But I’m on to them.

I’ll kill one. I’ll look at it. I will.

Why is it snowing? It’s the wrong time of year. Or did --

No, it’s January again. So that’s seven years now. Just lost track. Wait, it could be eight … seven, definitely seven.

So it’s snowing at night and it’s starting all over again. I’ll build lookouts and searchlights and traps and nothing will happen. No one else will show up. I’ll write my Alphabet Men and then some Alphabet Women, and they’ll have animal companions and explanations for what happened to everyone else and one monster in particular as a nemesis -- I’ll have to rewrite Andrew’s story to give him one alien in particular to take down. This ET is distinctive with a tire tread over its stomach after he crushes it one night as he roams the scenic badlands. It screeches like Donald Sutherland going full pod person and sets after him ahead of the others …

Look at all these things I do with just twenty-six letters and some dead trees, and if I write and write and write one day I’ll finish Stupid’s story. Stupid worked at Solandt Electric in Albany, New York and six months before the end of the world when everyone else vanished he lost his forever dog and his forever woman. Her name was Misha and when she died I stopped looking at other people and thinking about other people and what to do next and it’s still snowing and I’m going to go out there right now, I’m going to whack it with my cane --

Stopped myself at the door. Almost went nutty. If the lurker is real and not in my damn head I’ll still scream. I try telling myself I’m ready after years of tension to find out and die if that’s what happens next, but that’s a lie.

Andrew’s big-headed alien could have just been the full Moon. There’s a face in the Moon, some say -- some said.

Benji’s CHUDs liked to hide among mannequins. See, Benji put out dozens of mannequins to make himself a little parade after giving himself an eccentric outfit, an extravagance that he regrets terribly. He notices them shifting from day to day, some of them losing their clothes, some of them pausing awkwardly as he looks over his shoulder, teetering unconvincingly. In the end Benji must drive through his infiltrated parade, spraying gasoline and throwing Molotov cocktails. It’s hard to say which figure isn’t a mannequin, if it’s half or just one in ten -- in a rush they all seem to be moving.

Charlie the Florida Man is in a museum full of taxidermied beasts and birds when the wild drugged-up pets start attacking him. Wide eyes can look glassy, strange marbles can roll, and in the basement there is a frightening forgery: a record-breaker alligator made out of three real ones. Lots of weird things in Florida. Maybe strange forced matings of captive beasts, a wannabe Tony Montana putting leashes on tigers and letting them snort the marching powder.

Daryl drinks pure ethanol just before his close encounters of the B-movie kind. It’s a bathtub brew that burns with all the wrong colors, and his backwoods still goes up: he’s in the middle of a long dry summer for lightning or still explosions, and for weeks he can barely breathe, and the smell of the burning wood penetrates every possession. He hauls ass in his truck as the forest fire suddenly blossoms, and a falling tree branch that could be a flaming Mothman crashes through his windshield, beginning a montage of implausible adventures.

Captain Eddy sees large blobs on the radar like clouds, guessing what shapes they might be if they’re not schools of fish, finding them to be more and more suggestive. He tours the turquoise tropical waters that turn grey under powerful storms overhead, passing over blue holes that go black, their bottoms fuzzy and shifting to the radar pings. There are ships appearing and disappearing on the horizon, ignoring his flares or turning into rocks as he approaches. When he dreams he hears sirens and watches himself climbing over the railing, and one night he sleepwalks, starting awake with one foot off the deck. He anchors himself to his bed, but the sirens still sing and the things in the radar could be so many awful things, so Eddy goes ashore. The silence gnaws at him like Andrew’s invisible ants.

Franky, down in Mexico? Well, he finds some peyote in a desolate taco truck, strips naked, and meets his vampires in the desert twilight. He’s lost weight rapidly on a scavenger diet, and is changing from John Candy into a bandito from a spaghetti western, going full native with a mustache and hat. A Gila monster talks to him about foot fetishes and Superman, and narrates the story of Andrew through Eddy, which is the first sign that the Alphabet Men can look backwards up the letters.

So Franky knows about Benji, who writes in his Long Island mansion and sees words on the page which are Daryl talking to him in yokel gibberish, offering him a swig of moonshine, and Andrew is tripping on scorpion venom as the ET with the head like the Moon stands over his truck, and Charlie dumps a bag full of glass eyes that look like marbles in the taxidermist shop and they roll, each one catches him in its reflection and the Alphabet Men are talking, and talking. Captain Eddy sits on the beach and listens to the sea, which sends a sea turtle ashore to lay eggs that roll around like glass eyes. The Moon is overhead and there is kind of a face there, it’s getting clearer now.

Up in Alaska George gets desperately hungry and eats some questionable mushrooms before he meets his mushroom monsters. While shaking off the effects he sees the face of a rotting undead bear in the Moon, and despite the different faces it’s the same Moon. These Alphabet Men are far apart but they know about each other now. The Moon puts them in one place. Daryl has hauled ass away from the forest fire and it’s made a big smoke signal, and when an alien darts in front of his truck he drives over it and now that ET has a second tire tread across its body. It’s very pissed off and screaming like Donald Sutherland …

One day I felt something funny on the side of my neck. I thought about a micro-lurker, getting inside me like Nostromo’s demon. The bump on the side of my neck got harder and redder: I thought of mutated botflies, an adventurous tapeworm, a microchip from some forgotten abduction.

The ingrown hair was about three inches long once I dug it out. Left a little scar.

Martin fights Martians. Screw it.

I’ll set up things that will force them to leave clear evidence. The perfect trap would be something like wet cement that just stays wet forever, something that will capture each trace of that thing sticking and struggling, maybe even catching my elusive lurkers in the morning like a bug in amber.

Too conspicuous. I put fresh cement down across the neighborhood on the sidewalks, but they just hop over it. It’s hard work and I didn’t do enough, what with my cane and slow hobbling with the wheelbarrow. Only one print once it was all dry, and it’s a hand my size. I must have put it in and forgot. I can’t be totally delusional and think they’re copying my hand. If I go in that direction I might as well say they look exactly like a fire hydrant or a mailbox.

Take some pictures of the neighborhood, just in case anything moves. Nothing yet. All fire hydrants and mailboxes holding steady.

Making stacks of boxes to get knocked over, hard to make them windproof. So, stacks of cans … but I don’t want to waste too much food out in the cold though. Just the weird flavors, the canned escargot can go …

Nets. Nets with bells to wake me up at once if they start struggling. I’ll have a searchlight ready to go and … no, this is getting dangerous. I’ll tangle myself up if I keep this up. Get myself stuck in wet cement, or fall into a tiger pit and break my legs. Any boobytrap I think of has a chance of getting me, and that chance might be bigger. These things are so damn slick.

Years ago lumberjacks had many fearsome critters in their tall tales. One of these was called a Hidebehind. No matter how fast you turned your head it would get behind a tree or a rock. You’d never see it until it was eating you. Guns and traps were useless; there was only one way to ward off a Hidebehind, and that was committed alcoholism. It made you smell awful to those suckers.

A supernova bathes the world in radiation one day. All the humans except a chronic insomniac named Wally die in their sleep. Wally looks like Ed Wood, though he only wears men’s clothes. At first it seems like the animals have mutated in all kinds of crazy ways. A goat with legs of different lengths chases Wally across the landscape like something out of a cartoon, limbs stretching and compressing to hold its body steady. A hoopsnake rolls after him, hissing like a leaking tire up his stairs one night while he cowers in bed. A dropbear breathes down the back of his neck as he walks through the woods, crashing behind him and scampering away whenever he turns his head.

With a trail-cam Wally realizes that he’s just dreaming awake: he has survived the radiation that killed everyone in their sleep but he’s hallucinating, and that’s the price for his survival.

Oh hell, trail-cams! Why did Wally think of that before I did?

What if I see nothing with claws or teeth or eyes at all? What if it’s this: Misha walking out of the staticky, pixelated darkness on the screen, waving and then fading away?

The good news is that whatever I think of doesn’t happen.

That’s the rule with these lurkers of mine, my subtle psychological pain-in-the-neck lurkers who don’t have the decency to howl in the darkness or leave scratches on my door. They can read my mind, so any plan I make to catch them or get clear evidence can be easily thwarted, and whatever the end they are determined to surprise. The good side of that is that if I think of horrible stuff they change themselves to be something different.

They’re not aliens, not mutants, not altered animals, not cryptids, not something from the deep sea, not vampires, not zombies. Harry suffers in a world of living dolls so I don’t have to. Ian is in battle with the world’s plants -- they’re not all as energetic as Audrey II, but they’re quite hungry … and so I know that my lurkers are not some kind of malevolent Ent.

There was a knobless, black door with shredding paint in a wall between two stores that scared me when I was young. My older brother Gregg said it was an alley sealed off because some kids had disappeared down there. I totally believed Gregg at the time. I also believed that certain manhole covers that rattled were actually the tops of secret tunnels made by mole people (Nathan’s plight), and I believed it because Gregg told me. He also told me that when you saw a tree in the middle of a field with nothing around it that meant that a murderer was buried underneath. He told me about goatman, and dogman, and pigman.

He died of depression when I as twelve, which is more accurate than the s-word. That’s why I can’t do it.

Yuri, who looks like Tim Robbins in Jacob’s Ladder, hears terrible noises from open doors, and manhole covers, and wells all around him. They sound like the slaughterhouse symphony, a million goats and dogs and pigs screaming together. He has to find the openings that releases the noises and seal them before anything comes out, locking and welding and burying them under cement. He just has to do that over and over again, maintaining the peaceful, lonely silence for as long as he can. As a child he was diagnosed as schizophrenic, so he’s got auditory hallucinations trying to cover his ears at certain times.

Packing up. Packing up my life. So much stuff I bequeath to the dust-bunnies. I noticed that dust-bunnies still form in my house. Slower than normal, but still growing, generating undeniable proof of my existence. Can I make a monster out of this? Can I make this cloud of feeling go away? Locking up one garage, and another. I have a gun house, a food house, a power-tool house …

Zack hears a phone ringing.

He gets up but it stops ringing by the time he reaches it, and he stands in front of the phone frozen, one arm extended, thinking that he must be asleep. He hasn’t seen anyone else outside of a screen for seven years. Maybe eight.

He used to work at Solandt Electric and working was all he did after Misha died. Once everyone disappeared there wasn’t even work to do. And he thinks ‘I can’t be sleeping,’ and he’s right because he doesn’t even dream of other people anymore. Zack wonders if the phone was really ringing at all when it starts ringing again. He grunts like a man awakening from a coma, certain that his voice won’t work.

But his ears at least do work.

“Wake up, Z-man. We’ve got work to do.”

Imagine that. Just imagine wanting, needing to have something to do. Zack can’t believe it. He’s crying like a dummy.

“Hey,” the phone-man continues, “Get dressed, get some coffee in you. We’re rolling hard with heat on our backs and picking you up in ten.” And without introducing himself the rough and tumble character on the other end of the line slams the phone down, and Zack knows that it’s Andrew. Andrew is a hefty sumbitch, a trucker who has to evade big-headed aliens.

Zack burns his tongue and throat on the coffee, gulping, aspirating and nearly choking when he hears the motors outside his house, his last house, his only unpacked-up house in this suburb where he once had a purpose for every house. At least one motorcycle.

Karl has a motorcycle, Zack remembers. Karl’s a roughshod biker who looks like Ron Perlman in Blade II. He has to out-speed and blow up Christine and the truck from Duel and thousands of other possessed vehicles, but the motorcycles are still loyal. George got a souped-up plow for remote Alaskan highways with the skull of a Kodiak roaring on the hood. Charlie is rather ostentatious with an absurd monster truck that wheelies if he leans too far back in the seat. When Captain Eddy’s on land he rolls in a flatbed with a boat somehow lashed on the back, and I can’t swear to his sobriety. But when you’re up against Hidebehinds a stiff drink is essential medicine.

Zack steps outside, feeling the coffee punching his stomach, feeling another punch in his heart. It is a wonderful sensation, the shock of a man rescued after total resignation to a solitary, miserable death, and he almost folds up in the doorway looking out at them, assembled in the circular pavement of the cul-de-sac, rolling over lawns and through gardens to pack in.

The heat of twenty-five idling engines makes a steam of the falling snow, a thin dream of fog over the lot of them in like a halo. The snow cannot fall on these Alphabet Men, cannot trap them. George’s plow has a heating grid that will brand the next ET he runs down, and Benji’s SWAT car is made from three normal SWAT cars like the forged taxidermied croc which Charlie found (he beheaded it to make a Floridian figurehead, which has a reptilian skull, Cubano jewelry jangling around the neck, a crackpipe in one hand and an M16 in the other). The Alphabet Men have been trading ideas and tips and rolling hard to find each other, and here’s the Z-man at long last.

Zack is bracing himself in the doorway, feeling like a little boy, like a fraud. What does he bring to this pantheon of fearless, unstoppable men of action, these unrepentant drug addicts, hard-timers, moonshiners, pyromaniacs, knife-fighters, mountain-crossers, self-taught surgeons, accidental skydivers, wolf-tamers?

“Don’t say, ‘you made us up,’ you brazen bastards,” Zack says, finally feeling his spine returning to his body. “Don’t none of you dare.”

There’s an alien with three tire-treads over its body still screeching up a storm down the road. There’s a Mothman full of buckshot, a headless zombie Kodiak who wants its skull back. There are creepy dolls and mole-men, Mayan Draculas and Audrey IIIs dragging themselves this way. There are goatmen and pigmen and everything else Gregg promised with a smile on his face.

And they shout ‘you made us up!’ But they are monsters; they are supposed to be the worst thing imaginable.