Deadfall

Headlights shone across the sand towards the crashing surf. A dark mound on the beach sent long shadows down to the waters edge. North Bay Police Chief Sean Korde’s eyes focused on the thing on the wet sand. Pale flesh, dark, tangled hair. His breathing grew ragged. His gut twisted. It felt like he was stumbling into his worst reoccurring nightmare. One more step and he would see her face, the fogged staring eyes, the lips gone pale blue. He wanted to turn away screaming. He wanted to lift her into his arms. His heart. His Maria. He took the last step, and felt his breath restart in a loud surge.

She looked nothing like Maria. An unlined face, maybe pretty, ageless in that eternally static pose. Plump with wide hips and flattened curves where his wife had always been painfully thin, with sharp edges. Sean took another deep breath. Professional training kicked in. Work the scene. The smooth sand around the body showed only one set of footprints, in an out, but a good stride short of the body. All indications said she was more than likely left behind by the tide, naked, and pale.

“Hey Chief, sorry about waking you up.” Patrol Officer Daniel Furdy came up to Sean’s side. He had been the first responder. Only two months on the job, too young, too tall, too agreeable.

“It’s okay, I wasn’t asleep.” A stupid little untruth. Lying had become a habit. Strange how that happened. How are you, was always followed by, fine. He wasn’t fine. The apparent driver of the second car on the beach, a black SUV, stood a step behind Furdy. It only took a glance to see that the guy seemed to be a cascade of twitches and furtive movements. Obviously very nervous about something, he wasn’t much older than Furdy, wearing a dark jacket and backwards baseball cap. The way he wore the hat made Sean take an instant dislike to the guy. “Who’s this?”

Furdy half turned at the question and literally jumped when his eye focused on Baseball Cap standing so close right behind him. He recovered with a nervous smile but Sean had seen his hand move too obviously to his gun. Furdy managed to turn it into a seemingly casual thumb tucked in his belt thing. “Chief Korde, this is Jessy Jimson. The Williams hired him as off season security for their hotels. This is his second day on the job.”

The Williams family owned three of the hotels on the beach front. They were cheaper, and more cheaply run, than any of the other tourist traps. Sean doubted they were spending much money on someone to guard their crappy properties.

Ball Cap did a jerky shrug. “I get a free room to be on call during the day, and make a few rounds after dark. It leaves me lots of time to work on my novel.” The kid paused, no one took the bait. He frowned. “Never thought finding a dead person would be part of the job.”

Sean took Jessy Jimson’s statement. The young man knew nothing and had seen less. He’d spotted the body while driving down the beach. Approached close enough see what it was, and nearly shit himself, and called it in. Other than that, he professed ignorance. Sean believed him, and sent him on his way.

They took photos, did the first once over of the body, and walked off the beach for a hundred yards up and down the shoreline. The receding tide had left the sand smooth except for the scatter of shells and tangles of kelp. The search turned up nothing.

The local hospital’s ambulance came and carried away the body. The sky brightened with the coming day. In the afternoon the tide would come back in and wash away all traces that anything unsavory had been there. An apt metaphor for life that Sean forcefully ignored. Nothing would ever erode his darkness. He wouldn’t allow it.

Sean gave up on the idea of getting any more sleep. The sky was brightening into a new day as he drove through the quiet town. At the station, he perched over Patrolman Furdy as the young officer did the paperwork. The dead woman had no identification nor identifying marks such as tattoos, nor did the body match any descriptions in the county's missing-persons file. They ran the fingerprints through the FBI national database. Nothing.

Sean sent Furdy to canvas the houses along the nearby stretch of beachfront with a picture of the dead woman. It had been taken in the unforgiving light of the back of the ambulance. Harsh edges, pale and cold, but hopefully good enough for anyone that knew her to recognize. Hopefully.

The day crept towards noon. Irritation kept Sean from feeling the lack of sleep. A muddy cup of coffee that wasn’t any better now gone cold only added to his foul mood. Sitting at his desk looking over the report on the Jane Doe didn’t help any. Of course, drowning victims were not uncommon for a beach resort town, but this one seemed on route to be anything but routine.

Sean had thought they caught a break with the prints, the fact that the vic had fingerprints at all. A body usually gets pretty badly chewed on after being in the water for a day or two. Anything longer than that, and the skin had a tendency to come off like a loose glove. The pristine condition of the body meant it couldn’t have been in the water for more than a few hours. He got clean prints. All that now meant squat. She wasn’t in the fed’s database. Not everyone had prints on file. All they knew was she had no criminal record. Or ever worked for the government, been in the military, or bought a handgun.

Sean turned away from the computer screen displaying the lack of information. Well, if she hadn’t been in the water that long, maybe no one had missed her yet enough to call the police. The part about that theory he didn’t care for, waiting it out.

“Chief,” a grating voice yelled from down the hall. The sound transferred his irritation to the source of the shout.

He ground his teeth as he got up and walked the twenty-three steps down the hall from his office to the dispatch desk. “Gillian, why don’t you ever use that fancy phone intercom thing sitting right there in front of you?” He kept his voice to a low menacing growl.

Gillian King appeared to be pushing a hundred years old. She looked exactly the same as she had when Sean got elected Chief of Police for the community of North Bay going on twenty-six years past. He occasionally wondered if she was some sort of immortal demon sent to plague his existence. “Chief, why would I do that when you’re just a shout down the hall?”

He opened his mouth but closed it again without a sound. Her dull staring eyes just withered his will to live. They gazed at each other in a contest that Sean knew he was fated to lose. He decided on a strategic redirection. “What?”

A flash of confusion in those wrinkled eyes rewarded his efforts. “What, what?” Sean nearly smiled. “Gillian, what did you want? You called me. Don’t you remember?”

The scowl told him that some time in the future he would pay dearly for the slight about her memory. “Chief Korde, there’s a call about two bodies found on the beach.”

That took Sean mentally back a step. “Two? Who called? We only found one body.” Two people missing. A couple missing on the beach. That might help explain the lack of clothing. Well, damn. He leaned over the desk trying to read Gillian’s notes on the call. He should have known better. Looking at the scrawl, he couldn’t even tell the language. He gave up. “What are the names of the two missing people?”

Gillian’s glare hit like a physical force pushing him back off her desk. Sean took a half step back and crossed his arms to keep from looking like a reprimanded school boy. She seemed satisfied with her domain properly defended. “The call didn’t say anything about missing persons.” She tapped a gnarled finger on her notepad. “The caller, Jessy Jimson found two bodies on the beach.”

That didn’t make it any clearer. “Yes, the William’s security kid. He called in finding the Jane Doe on the beach early this morning.” His mind ground up the information and spat out the only logical conclusion. “He called in another body?”

Gillian held up her notes, he suspected just to mock his inability to read them. “At 10:47 AM, Jessy Jimson called and said he found two bodies on the beach. I dispatched patrol officer Furdy. At 11:03 Patrol Officer Furdy radioed to dispatch requesting that Chief Korde, that would be you, be notified. Officer Furdy asked that you come to the scene.” She gave him that dead eyed stare again. “Is there any part of that you need repeated?”

Sean drove through the little town from the police station to the beach, a trip of all of seven minutes with traffic. When he pulled out onto the sand he had one of those déjà vu moments that he heard about, but never experienced before. Furdy’s blue and white patrol vehicle and the Jimson kid’s SUV were there just as before. As he came to a stop Furdy came up to his door. They were a few hundred yards south from the scene earlier, but—. Damn, was it déjà vu if what you experienced really did happen before?

Sean got out of his truck and did his job. He listened in as Furdy took Jessy Jimson’s statement, nearly word for word like the previous one. Photos, fingerprints, and calling up the hospital for the ambulance to make the pick up. It all went almost exactly like the earlier Jane Doe, but this time Jane had a John. Both were naked, no identification, no identifying marks, no clue on who they were. He scanned the horizon, half expecting, hoping, to see a boat out there on the water chucking naked dead people over the side. Nope, no boat.

Back at the station, Sean put the fingerprints of the two new subjects into the FBI search. He sat at his desk waiting for the results with a premonition of failure. Time dribbled along. The results came back. Nothing. Sean liked his mysteries like he liked his beer. He didn’t, he preferred whisky. He read through the reports on the three bodies again. Nothing new presented itself. His desk phone buzzed.

“North Bay police department, Chief Korde.” Sean had a thing for the little details, like answering the phone in a professional manner.

A rumble of static came out of the phone. Sean opened his mouth to repeat his intro, but before he could start a loud pop sounded in his ear. He jerked the phone away. “What the hell?” A tiny voice called out from the receiver. He tentatively pulled it back towards his ear.

“Hello, hello, Chief Korde?”

He didn’t recognize the speaker. As the voice spoke an odd echo shadowed each word making it seem like the person was a great distance away. “Yes, this is Chief Korde speaking.”

“Sean, this is Doctor Connett.” And just like that, the echo fell away, and everything seemed back to the familiar. He and Doc Connett weren’t exactly drinking buddies, but they had gone fishing together a couple times. Being such a small town, and the office of Chief of Police an elected position, there weren’t many adult males in the town that Sean hadn’t gone fishing with. An oddness to their pseudo-friendship, Chief Korde quickly became Sean, but the doctor had always been Doctor Connett.

“Doctor Connett, weird morning. I guess we been keeping you busy.”

“Yes, I prefer my patients alive when they come in the door. Whether they stay that way afterwards is my choice.” Sean had no response for this. The doc had one of those dry senses of humor that Sean never really got. He wasn’t even sure if that was a joke or not.

“So, I’m guessing your call is to tell me something I don’t know.”

“Well, did you know that I have three dead bodies filling up my morgue?” The doc, head GP at the hospital doubled as the cities coroner, a position that thankfully didn’t often take much of his time.

“Yes, I did.” Talking with the Doc seemed always a strange battle that Sean never knew if he was winning or losing. He suspected mostly the later. “All three washed up on the beach near the William’s newest hotel.”

“Did you see them get washed up?”

The question threw Sean sideways. “What the hell? No I didn’t see them come rolling up out of the ocean, but I’ve seen my share of drowners.”

“Well. Not to throw a shadow on your deductive reasoning, but I finished the autopsy on the first girl, and did a preliminary look on the other two.” There followed a long pause that Sean refused to take a bite of. There seemed to be a bit of condescension in the Doc’s tone when his voice came back. “In none of the three bodies were there any indication of drowning. No water in the lungs. No indications of asphyxiation.”

Yup, Sean hated mysteries. “So what did they die from?”


The Doc’s voice came back somehow diminished. “I don’t know.”

Sean had to take a breath to give him a moment to respond without sounding as frustrated as he felt.” Doc, if you don’t know, who does?”

“Look Sean. I’m not really a trained ME. I just do this because there’s no one else that will, or can.” It was unsettling to hear the doc’s voice so distressed. “The autopsy on the girl showed a completely healthy woman of, at best guess thirty years old. There’s no wounds or trauma. I sent off the blood work to the county. Maybe they’ll find something, but I’ve done all I know.” Sean heard an audible deep breath. The doc’s voice came back sounding a little more like his normal arrogant self. “I can tell you that they didn’t drown. I’ll do the autopsies on the other two, and let you know if I find anything. When the county gets back to me with the lab work on the blood I should have more to tell you.”

Sean wanted to ask more questions, but the doc didn’t have any of the answers he needed. “Okay, Doctor Connett, keep me informed of anything new you find on these three. I don’t like having three unsolved deaths. That’s near to double North Bay’s worst yearly statistic.” The doc chuckled before he said goodbye and hung up. Sean didn’t understand what had been funny.

The rest of the day slipped by more as normal, uneventful, thankfully unremarkable. The Doc’s report came in, three dead of unknown causes. They were still waiting on the county to run whatever tests on the blood. That line of thought brought up another. With three bodies and no leads, the logical next step was to call in the feds. He pushed back from his desk, tabling that step until tomorrow.

As Sean left the station he patted his pockets. It felt like he had forgotten something. He ground his teeth as he got in the truck. No, nothing forgotten, just a gapping loose end. Unsolved cases bothered him like a half eaten donut.

He turned off his headlights as he turned into the driveway of a sprawling two story house. He pulled his truck around the big grey home trying to keep the engine noise as quiet as possible. A garage converted into his tomb of an apartment squeezed into the back corner of the property. He did his best to close the truck door soundlessly, and move across the gravel with crunching. The apartment door, never locked, pushed open with a nerve grating squeak. Without even turning on the interior lights he knew what waited. A plate wrapped neatly in shiny foil sat on the tiny table. He unwrapped it guiltily. Meatloaf. He felt slightly less bad.

Sleep came, unwanted, undeniable, and with it the dreams. His wife came to him cradling their four-year-old son. They were both wet, dead fish fogged eyes, and naked. Helen called to him desperately as Tommy cried and whimpered in her arms. Sean struggled and fought with all his might and soul, but he couldn’t reach them. He could never reach them. He jerked awake bound in sweaty sheets and wanting to scream. The sounds of their suffering cries echoed in his ears as he lay in the dark. It had been nearly two years since their plane had crashed, vanished without a trace. His wife and child’s bodies were out there somewhere in the cold grey ocean. His arms hurt from reaching out to the two so beyond his grasp.

A buzzing filled the small room jolting him awake. He struggled to the edge of his bed and reached for his phone. A horrible premonition curled his finger right before he hit the answer key. What was that movie where the guy kept reliving the same day over and over? Shaking off the moment of crazy, he answered the phone and stuck it to his ear.

“Chief Korde, you need to come down to the beach by the fishing pier right now.” Sean felt something cold crawling down his back. Furdy’s voice sounded wrong. The was nothing of the apologetic tone for waking him up.

“Okay, give me ten minutes.” He hung up, got dressed and climbed into his truck without allowing his mind to process what he had heard in the young officer’s voice. It echoed in his head as he drove through the dark streets. Furdy had sounded badly shaken, scared. The growing knot in Sean’s gut swelled as he turned onto the beach access road. Stark shadows form the pilings of the old fishing pier spread along the beach like boney fingers grasping at the grey surf.

Sean didn’t remember pulling his truck along side Furdy’s police cruiser, getting out, and walking the distance out onto the pier.

Several small utility vehicles with banks of blinding lights were inching along the beach. The harsh lights threw a stark contrast over the scene. it gave the impression like some old black and white movie. Larger trucks lumbered slowly between the smaller vehicles. A half dozen men in greyed uniforms scurried busily around the trucks. Clearly military. “What the hell?”

“Yeah, craziest thing I ever saw.” Sean jerked from the voice too close beside him. “There’s a Major down there that said she would only talk to you.” Furdy said without taking his eyes off the stretch of beach. “There she is. Wouldn’t tell me crap.” Sean saw Furdy’s arm come up out of the edge of his vision. He followed the gesture. The indicated person in the androgynous military uniform was moving up the beach towards the Pier.

Sean nodded, turned and walked back along the pier to meet the soldier halfway. The entire time he couldn’t bring himself to turn away from the horror of the activity on the beach. The soldiers, in pairs were picking up things scattered along the beach, debris left from the last tide still receding. Sean’s mind didn’t seem to want to acknowledge any more of the details.

“You must be Chief Korde.” Sean turned to focus on the woman approaching. The insignia on the tips of her collar confirmed her as the officer that Furdy spoke about. “I’m Major Bronte.” She stopped a few paces from Sean and gestured to the activity on the beach. “I’m sure you would like some kind of explanation for this.” She shook her head. They both turned toward the beach. “I wish we had one for you.”

A heavy silence fell between the two as they watched the work on the beach. When the officer spoke again her voice sounded low, almost a whisper. “About seven hours ago my guard command received orders to call up as many of my troops as we could under short notice, and deploy out here. The word is that this is going on all up and down the coast.” Her next words were louder, and came from further away. “I’m sure someone will be in contact with you.”

It took an effort for Sean to tear his eyes away from the beach. The officer, Major Bronte had already retreated a dozen strides away. “Wait,” Sean had to say something, ask some question. The Major paused and looked back. Sean opened his mouth, and closed it again. What could he say?

“And once you are awake, you shall remain awake eternally.” The major’s words bounced back along the beach as she strode away hurrying to follow her men. The whole operation progressed enough distance down the beach that the details of what they were doing was thankfully less discernable. Still, the image remained burned into Sean’s brain. The trucks. He took a long breath, letting go of a deep shudder.

“Chief, what the hell is going on?” Furdy had come up besides him as he watched the dwindling soldiers.

Sean shrugged and turn back towards his truck. He stuck his hand in his pocket and it came out empty. Damn. The exhaust drifting up from the tail pipe told him where his keys were. Well, hopefully he hadn’t locked the doors.

“Chief, those trucks.” Furdy’s voice rose. “There must have been more than a hundred bodies. They were naked and all like the three we found yesterday.”

Sean had his hand on the door of his truck. The latch clicked. The door opened thankfully.

“Chief, damn it. What is this?” Furdy shouted from only a few step behind.

Hot anger flared up in Sean’s gut. “Patrol Officer Furdy, get in your car, and make your rounds. Do your job.” The feeling dissipated as fast as it had risen up. “Look, this is obviously a military thing. I don’t know what it’s about. I don’t like that any more than you.” He opened the truck door and felt the warmth from the heater roll out on his face. “Until we find out better, we do our jobs.”

Furdy met his gaze across the short distance. The patrol officer obviously wanted to say something more, but whatever he saw in Sean’s eyes made him take a step back. “Okay Chief.” Sean watched him go to his patrol car and get in, the entire time mumbling low words. He waited until Furdy’s car had turned up the road and vanished from sight before he got in his truck.

Sean sat in the dark for a long time with his eyes screwed shut. He couldn’t get the image of all those bodies out of his mind. Each one naked, pale, wet, dead flesh. In his mind, they opened dull eyes and stared at him with terrible accusations. Just like his wife and son in his nightmares. He felt hot tears running down his face.

#

When his alarm buzzed in the morning Sean reached out from the warmth of his bed and shut it off. The sound was a reprieve from his sleepless night. He rolled out of bed, got dressed, out the door, and in his truck in all of three minutes. He didn’t have a TV in his apartment. He had his police radio in his truck, but the one that made music and droned on about the inanity of the world hadn’t worked in nearly a decade. His house had a television. The thought brought a painful mental flinch. He hadn’t stepped through that door since the day he got the news of his wife’s plane going missing.

As he pulled out on the street he looked up at the big grey house. He could go in. Paul and Millie, his wife’s parent had a TV and would more than welcome a visit. They shared his pain, and put up with his avoidance. He shook his head. He wasn’t ready to scratch at that scab this morning. He pulled out and headed to the station. The holding cells had a TV. Something about all this weirdness going on, the bodies on the beach, had to be on the news.

Yeah, it was on the news. Every channel had some sort of special broadcast covering it. Sean kept flipping through the channels hoping to gain some sort of insight. He found more questions than answers. Every channel had their perfectly manicured images talking to other flawlessly framed faces about the “new developments” or “breaking coverage.” Between the rhetoric and somber expressions all of them told the same story.

Starting two days ago, the little town of North Bay apparently started a day late, bodies began being found along ocean beaches. Not just the local little stretch of sand, but reportedly, all beaches, all coasts, of all countries, edging all oceans and seas. The first days the tides brought in only a few bodies found in ones, twos, or threes. In the last twenty-four hours, depending on the local tide schedules, the count accelerated. No one had precise counts, but certain experts or leaks from those in higher places put the numbers in the hundreds of thousands. And no one apparently knew where they came from.

Furdy hadn’t come in to work. He tried calling him, but got no answer. After what they had seen, Sean didn’t blame him. Police work that day trickled by even slower than usual for off season. A domestic disturbance call, Dale and Wanda Norris going at it loudly, with breakage. High school sweethearts, married twenty plus years. It was a continuous fight that escalated to public disturbance level about once a week. They never hurt each other, but took it out on any dish at hand. Sean advised they switch to paper plates.

The second call of the day, was the type that were hardest for Sean. Delilah Delgado met him on her front porch crying, distraught over the disappearance of her two-year-old daughter. She was still considered a newcomer to North Bay after six years. Delilah had been adamant that her recently divorced husband had kidnapped the little girl. Frank, a born and bread North Bayian he had some time back moved three states away for work. Apparently he had swooped into town a day ago demanding quality time with his daughter. This morning he had taken the girl for Ice cream. That was six hours ago. Sean took the report, and notified the State Police to keep and eye out for them. He wished he could do more. He always did.

During the long quiet times between calls, Sean sat in the holding cell watching the TV. It felt like seeing the aftermath of a train crash, in extreme slow motion. Everyone just sat around talking about what had happened. No one had any real idea on the cause, but everyone had something to say about it.

The next day Furdy still hadn’t come in. Sean tried calling again, and again. He went around and banged on the door of Furdy’s small trailer house. No answer. Furdy’s patrol car was parked on the side. Sean tried the trailer’s door. It opened. The patrolman’s uniform and gun were there, but no Furdy. Maybe he was shacked up with some girl in the trailer court. Damn it. When he showed up, Sean would have a stern word.

Back in the office Sean chew on his annoyance with his young officer. There were two part-time patrolmen on call during the off season, but he didn’t ring them. There wasn’t a need. Gillian sat at the dispatch desk reading one of her trashy pulp novels. No one had called into the station all day. Probably everyone sat transfixed by the horror displayed on every TV channel. There had been more naked, cold, wet, dead bodies. And this time the networks had camera crews on the scene.

A different beach, the scrolling caption said somewhere in Malaysia. It looked like one of those places from a travel brochure. Crystal clear water and white sands, but no vacationers were frolicking in the surf. The tone of the news commentator contrasted sharply with the beautiful landscape. The speaker told of numbers of military personnel deployed in each country to deal with the crisis. Soldiers looking like soldiers do, were roaming along the sandy stretch in the morning sunlight.

Sean had a cup of the horrible office coffee in his hand. It had gone cold unnoticed. His eyes ached from too long without blinking. His thoughts had frozen. He just watched as an announcer made, what was becoming an almost routine warning of “viewer discretion advised.” It was followed by a scene of pairs of soldiers on some beach, moving to the water’s edge, lowered stretchers, rolled bodies on to them, then lifted and carried them off to waiting trucks. There were dozens of trucks on the scene, some just arriving, and others full, slowly moving away. There were hundreds of bodies in each loaded truck. More empty trucks came. More full trucks left. And the thing that physically hurt the most to see, too many of the bodies were not adults.

Sean pulled his eyes away from the TV screen to the wall clock. One fifteen. A glace at the one high window and the darkness outside. He forced himself to turn off the TV and go back to his four walls and a bed. He ate the offering of food long cold, not tasting, not thinking. He climbed into bed without bothering to undress. The bed, cold and uninviting suited his mood. Sleep came, and with it, the nightmares. A thousand bodies surrounded, smothered, clawed at him. And every one, every pair of pale dead eyes that looked upon him were his wife, pleading, accusing, condemning.

The week slipped past. Each evening Sean would tell himself that he would not watch the horrific scenes on the TV anymore. They just made his nightmares worse. Each morning he would be irresistibly sucked back into the holding cells to see the horde of the dead being gathered. And the talking heads spewed their commentary.

The second week, Gillian didn’t come into work. Sean tried her phone. He went to her house and banged on the door. She never answered. During off season many of the town’s shops had shortened hours, or just completely closed up. Many of the residents followed the geese and went south for the winter. Gillian was one of those rare folks that stayed regardless of the season. She had never traveled out of the state, but claimed no regrets. She had grown up here, her roots were deep, and firm.

The third week came and passed like the last, only bleaker. The representatives from the governments that stepped in front of the cameras looked worn down, haunted by mountains of the dead. One thing became evident, even without the commentator’s tally, the numbers were increasing. The crisis of the appearance of so many dead stretched nerves thin. The issue of what to do with them, that broke many. For most countries, military by default became responsible for gathering and containment of the bodies. A brief scandal broke out. A story broke that many countries were running massive furnaces burning day and night to dispose of the collected corpses. The first sound bites made it to be so unfeeling, terribly calloused. But, a horror one day became acceptable by even the most conservative the next.

Sean drove through an empty town. All the stores and shops were closed. He didn’t see another living soul. The town’s population during the winter, always sparse, now it seemed truly deserted. He felt something, Not loneliness. Just a wistful absence of companionship.

He went to the holding cells and turned the TV on. This had been going on for more than a month. How easy he fell into a routine. He bound himself into strange symbiotic relationship. The TV commentators continued their mindless drivel, and he continued to watch them. He only took breaks for the most basic of necessities, and sleep. And each night his sleep grew more restless, more haunted, but it was the only time he saw his wife. So seductive, so horrific.

He started each day hoping to learn something, to understand. Still, no one had any clue where the bodies came from. With all the combined resources of the worlds investigating agencies, not a single one of the millions could be identified. Rosters of missing persons were poured over. No matches were found, but almost by accident, the search revealed something.

The entirely fruitless endeavor to identify the dead did reveal the one piece of tantalizing data. The statistical numbers matched. Not missing person’s names, or faces, or any sort of match of identities, but the raw numbers. The numbers of missing, and the bodies washed up on the many beaches were, as close as could be estimated, the same. People vanished, and the dead appeared.

That evening when he went back to his apartment no food waited. He didn’t go to the house. He knew. His wife’s parents were gone, Like Furdy, and Gillian. Part of him felt like running down the street screaming. That was a familiar feeling. But, instead he did what he always did, all that he really could do, nothing. Well enough. There was one thing he could do. Something he understood well, how to miss people.

It took Sean five weeks to give up on pretending to have a job to do. His last time going into the station, he brought the TV home with him. Once he decided on the act, it took three more days to execute. He moved the TV and knew it as an admission that hope for a return of some kind of normalcy was dead. He cleared off the little table in his apartment and set up the TV there.

When he turned the TV on a guy with a heavy French accent spoke to him. The banner across the bottom of the screen named the speaker as Dr. Gaston Foucault, a Jesuit priest fallen to science. He had degrees in theology, physics, and philosophy. Sean vaguely remembered hearing him interviewed before. Three weeks in, most considered him a fringe nut. Now, his voice had become a siren call from the darkness.

“No Bill, I don’t claim to have any secret knowledge about all this.” The camera cut back to the smirking interviewer, but Dr. Foucault talked right over the beady eyed commentator. Most didn’t get away with such behavior, but something about the Frenchman’s voice filled the space. The camera cut back. “Physics has long theorized the existence of parallel universes. Of course, it’s never been proven, but neither has it been disproven.”

“So, you’re saying that all these bodies, the last estimates being somewhere over a billion are all being spit out into our universe by someone in a parallel existence?” The commentator let out a single loud bark of laughter. “That doesn’t make them very good neighbors.”

“Bill, do you complain to the sky when the wind blows? No, no no. I do not say that this is an action with any intelligent intent. Stars are born, grow old, and die. Each universe has its structure and order.”

“So, you say that these bodies appearing are like some natural event.” The host leaned forward, his perpetual smirk growing a little thin. “Then, where are all of our people going?”

“Yes, you have heard of the law of conservation of energy? The total energy of an isolated system must remain constant.”

“I’m not following Doctor. You talk about universes, stars, and energy.” The host’s voice rose up. For any of his regular watchers, they knew it to be a sign of the immanence of an explosive blow up. The host wasn’t known for his calm patience. Most tuned in just to see one of his spectacular temper tantrums. “I think you are just making all this up. Another so called scientific theory—”

“No,” the doctor cut off the host. He spoke calmly, but with an underlying power in his voice. “Bodies are appearing in our universe. This is a fact.” He raised his hands in front of him, palms up. “A body, a bit of mass leaves one universe,” his left hand dropped a fraction as his right rose up. “This must be matched by an equal amount of mass in return.” His hands returned to matching heights. “Even you should understand the simplicity of this. A body appears here. A body must go back to the other universe.”

“At the current rate that the interaction is accelerating, it is only a matter of days until the transfer is complete. All humans native to this planet will be replaced. We all will be— someplace else.”

The camera flashed back to the host. The shocked look on his face said that he understood. “All—,” he blinked several times. “Will we—is everyone that has gone, are they dead?”

The doctor smiled. It wasn’t a particularly pleasant look. “We won’t know until we get there. Exciting yes?”

Sean didn’t listen to whatever came on the TV after. Eventually he fell asleep, the voices from the TV continued talking to the empty night. His nightmare came. His wife called to him, begging, and pleading for help. The whimpers of his son echoed in the dark. Impenetrable black enveloped him. Every direction he moved, the voices were no closer, further away. He tried calling out to them, but he had no voice. The first rays of dawn woke him. He clawed his way up from the bed feeling exhausted and sore.

Some young woman with too big a smile tried to talk him into buying crap he didn’t want. She faded, replaced by images of a car he would never drive. Then came scenes of a place he would never travel to. Sean moved across the room took up a hand full of cord and gave it a sharp yank. The room went still and peaceful. The whole world seemed quieter. He liked it better this way.

He dressed and left the apartment, the in-law’s converted garage, his hiding place for the last two years. He didn’t bother locking the door. The truck waited in the driveway. Sean walked past it without a glance. An unhurried ten-minute walk brought him to Main Street, heart of the small town. A cool breeze blew in from the ocean carrying odors best not considered. Charming two story brick buildings lined the street. The scene looked like something pulled out of some movie set in the early 1900’s. Now, devoid of all signs of life, it felt like a place frozen in time. A monument. A tomb.

Sean glanced through a few windows, but didn’t try any of the doors. The whole town seemed to have a giant do-not-disturb sign hanging over it. It begged an unconscious effort to step softly. He passed the old movie theater. He took Maria there on their first date. Everything had been so exciting then. The potential hanging off every word and shy glance. It had been terrifying. Maria had been so painfully beautiful. He remembered thinking that she was so far out of his league. A year later they were married. How the hell did that happen?

It took well into the afternoon to make the walk to the very fringe of the township’s borders. Sean walked at a leisurely pace. For some unexplainable reason, he knew he had time. It had been two years since he had been out to the house he once shared with his wife and child. Yes, time enough.

The house stood on a low ridge overlooking a stretch of beach bracketed by tall rocky bluffs. The first time he had brought Maria here to show her where he wanted to build their house, he had told her that it would be their private world. Technically the area was designated as a public beach, but few people ever came out here to challenge the illusion. He had thought it would be a great place to raise a family. It had been, until it hadn’t.

He opened the door with the long unused, but never forgotten key he always carried. Cobwebs and shadows filled the entry, clinging like gossamer caresses. He pushed through. A layer of dust and sand covered everything. That didn’t matter. He stumbled from room to room. He kept bumping into memories. A toy car poking out from under a chair. Strategically placed for a random need. A jacket hanging across the back of a chair. Something that used to bother him so much. He ached for the lost moments of harsh words.

Great windows submerged the kitchen with grey light. The last time he had been here was the morning he got the call. The voice on the phone had informed him that the airplane his wife and son had been traveling on was missing. Not crashed. Not downed. He hated that softened euphemism. No, they had nothing definite to say. Nothing final. Nothing he could anchor his grief to. Somewhere out over the ocean, they where just—gone. He made a noise, choke, sob, something deep and painful. It offended the stillness.

He pulled a chair out from the little kitchen table. It left gouges in the dusty floor. He sat, cross armed, cross legged staring out into the grey skied ocean. The dark water filled the horizon with shapes his mind refused to focus on.

So, now the rest of the world had gone the way of his family, just gone. In those first days and weeks he had prayed so hard that Maria and Tommy be returned to him. Prayers lost to the void, never answered. But maybe he had finally got an answer. If his wife and son couldn’t come back to him, he, the whole world would go to where they were. This all was the answer to his prayer?

Sean smiled into the abyss, and waited.