2020: Emergency Exit Read Free

dried-blood shade of red. Only Jenna was brave enough to approach and touch one of them, feeling for a pulse, but finding none. She reported their skin as leathery and cracked along the vein lines—like old clay—varyingly dark brown and gray, with spongy bruises everywhere. It was a haunting scene, and vomit-inducing for many of us. We couldn’t help it. So much death, so much shock…so much, so much. It was too much. Given the limited amount of people in the open—and that every business but the gas station and a few coffee shops had their doors closed—it definitely seemed to have happened at night. And it seemed to have happened quite suddenly. But when? What day?
    I had enough wits about me to step inside a coffee shop and grab a newspaper off the rack. It was from Monday. Could this really have happened five or six days ago without us knowing anything about it? There were no signs of electricity anywhere. We found no evidence of any other life around town, other than a single sickly crow. No other human survivors. This didn’t make any sense! There was no other destruction, no other sounds, no one passing through. Whatever had killed everyone was either invisible or gone.
    Stephen King couldn’t have made it more horrific. We didn’t know what to think. Our best guess was that it had to be a chemical reaction of some sort, but accidental or intentional, we didn’t know. If it were an attack, we hadn’t seen or heard any signs of it. Then again, our cabin was a remote twenty-five miles away on a heavily wooded lake. Danny claimed he’d heard a few distant airplanes the previous morning, but nothing else. Right now, it felt like we were the last ones living in the End Times, which was equally frightening since we all thought we were Christians. If that were the case, then either God didn’t exist, or He had left us behind. No, in all likelihood, this had nothing to do with the end of the world.
    The date on the newspaper suggested it had happened sometime Monday or perhaps Tuesday at the latest. We’d been at the cabin for nearly a full week, four days longer than expected, having been surprised by the boys showing up for Hayley’s tournament. They had a few extra days before they left for their first Special Ops assignment, and we figured we’d all spend it together. Hayley should have been in school and Jenna and Kate back at college, but we didn’t know when any of us might see the boys again. It was a legitimate enough excuse for everyone to play hooky from his or her responsibilities for a few days.
    But how could we not have known anything about this until now? That question kept nagging at me. Wouldn’t we have heard about it from someone, somehow? The only people who had left were my parents’ friends, and they had been heading home to Wisconsin. We hadn’t been expecting them to return, so we thought nothing of it when they didn’t. But they didn’t call us either. Were they dead now too? I shivered suddenly. As I’d been living at the cabin for years, and everyone had brought some supplies up with them, we had no reason to go into town. Call it dumb luck or whatever, but we had no idea what was going on. We had no idea what we’d missed.
    As soon as we returned to the cabin from Ely, we all tried calling various people with our phones. The only cell tower for 50 miles was less than half a mile from us, but even that convenience did nothing for us now. No one answered. We turned on the computer to check our satellite Internet for further information, but it was also down. We didn’t know what we should do next. Mom put out some snacks, but no one ate. Half of us just sat around stunned, and the rest of us were asking questions no one could answer. Eventually, we all settled into a zombie-like stupor around the fireplace. Was there even anyone else out there? There had to be!
    Dad turned on the high frequency shortwave radio Danny had given me a year ago and scanned all the channels for any