L.B. in Newport 7: Work

The world was still going crazy over the Event, but that didn't mean I could stay home from work. I'm the overnight desk clerk at a local hotel, and good boy that I am, I reported for work at 11:00 PM, same as usual, in spite of the fact that I had only gotten a couple hours of sleep during the day. According to Maryann, a fellow desk clerk that I was relieving, nine of the people staying with us had their children disappear on them. As you can imagine, they all decided to check out early. The General Manager, a good guy, said that any guests who've lost children won't be charged for their stays.

Maryann also said that the Rooms Division Manager didn't come to work, because his wife (they've been married for about six months) was one of the women who miscarried.

According to Maryann, she spent most of her day contacting all the guests, or leaving them messages asking them to check in with the front desk. She left me a list of seven rooms whose occupants hadn't been heard from, and who thus might (or might not) be among the disappeared. If they were in fact disappearees, we wouldn't know for certain until it was time for them to check out. If their baggage was still in their rooms, then we could be pretty certain they were among the vanished.

There was also a much larger list of people who were due to check in, but hadn't, or hadn't yet. They might be among the disappeared, or they might have died or been injured in traffic accidents, or they might have gone down in one of the pilotless planes, or they might have been left stranded when the government shut down all the airports, or they might have decided to cancel their trips to Newport but not bothered to call and let us know (and who could blame them?).

I spent the first couple of hours the way I usually do, assembling the day's paperwork, going over the receipts from the hotel's restaurant, and entering figures into the computer. None of the people on my long list of no-shows checked in; there were thirty-five altogether. By two in the morning, I had finished all the usual tasks I had to finish. There was a war being waged in my brain between thoughts about the day's horrors and the need to sleep. In theory, of course, I was supposed to stay awake all night, but nobody at the hotel seemed to mind if I caught the occasional cat nap behind the half-closed door to my office. As long as I didn't try to sneak off to one of the hotel rooms and sack out there (as one of my predecessor had once done), I should be all right. I grabbed one of the towels from the hotel laundry, rested my head on it, closed my eyes, and let my mind drift off.

I came out of my cat nap around four in the morning, when the man from the Providence Journal showed up to leave papers for the guests. He had a lot of extras, of course, because a lot of people with reservations hadn't checked in. I was up-to-date on most of the stuff taking place around the world, but I still pounced on the newspaper.

Although Rhode Island is one of the most liberal states in the country, the state's major newspaper is owned by the same people who own the Dallas Morning News, and it shows. (Back when Congress was debating Bush's torture-legalization bill, the Providence Journal ran a revolting editorial in favor of the bill.) Below the headline BILLIONS VANISH was a brief story headlined "Left Behind series coming true?" with somebody from the series' publisher raising the possibility that the Event was actually the Rapture. The story noted that neither of the series' authors had disappeared during the Event. Perhaps not surprisingly, neither one had been willing to comment on anything.

L.B. in Newport 6: Family

My phone rang while I was reading the paper. I answered it before it could ring again.

It was my mother. She was calling to tell me that she had spent the day visiting my siblings and that yes, one nephew and one niece, both in elementary school, had disappeared. Both families seemed to be coping as well as could be expected. My other brother, a childless Navy lifer stationed in San Diego, was all right, as was his wife. My other sister, the mother of the Coast Guard Academy cadet, hadn't been answering her phone. My mother had driven to her house, and neither she nor her husband were there. My sister's car was in the driveway. My mother had searched the house, and finally found a pile of her clothes draped over a chair facing a computer. She had waited for her son-in-law to come home from work, but he never had. I hadn't shared my Alien Rapture Con Game theory with my mother, but if the Squire of Gothos (or God) had hoovered up all the Left Behind fans, my sister and her husband would have been prime targets.

I got off the phone with my mother, and had returned to the paper, when it rang again. Once again, I answered it before it had a chance to ring again. This time, it was my nephew from the Coast Guard Academy. He had just spent the last half hour trying to call his parents. I passed on what my mother told me. His reaction was, "I think God took them."

"You think it was the Rapture, then?"

"Yeah, I think I do. And I know why I was left behind. It's because I've been so busy here at the Academy. I let myself get caught up, and lost touch with Jesus."

I couldn't really think of an appropriate response to that, so I asked him if any of his fellow cadets had "been Raptured".

"No. After the Rapture, they had a special roll call, and everybody was present and accounted for."

"Well, if you're right, then it sounds like all the other cadets there let themselves get caught up, too."

"Yeah, I guess so." He didn't sound like someone who was overjoyed that God had personally escorted his parents up to heaven. He sounded like a young man who had just lost both parents. He also sounded upset that God hadn't taken him. I couldn't think of anything to say to that, so the conversation stumbled to a close.

So: out of two parents, four siblings, four siblings-in-law, three nephews, and two nieces, one nephew and one niece were definitely gone, and one sibling and one sibling-in-law were probably gone, leaving an orphaned son who was convinced he had earned himself damnation. If I ever got to meet the Squire of Gothos, or God, I'd like to punch his lights out.

L.B. in Newport 5: News

The Newport Daily News was late. Normally, it showed up on our front door around three in the afternoon, but today it didn't appear until six. As soon as I saw the front page, I understood why.

Normally, they put the Daily News to bed around nine in the morning. The Event would have occurred while they were in the process of printing it out and getting ready to ship it to the various newsstands and convenience stores. The Managing Editor had evidently decided to shut down the original print run, gather up as much news of the Event as she could, and put out a delayed edition of the paper. I like to imagine that she ran into the press room and shouted, "Stop the presses!"

So here, in my hands, was the first solid news I had of what had happened here in Newport. I read about the four thousand estimated missing children and the thousand estimated missing adults. I read about the seven crashed vehicles, and the seven vehicles whose passengers had taken control of them when the drivers vanished. I found out that all seven members of the City Council were present and accounted for, along with our state representative, state senator, and all the statewide elected officials. There had also been two crashes by driverless cars in the neighboring town of Middletown, and another one in the town of Portsmouth. There were no official figures for the number of people who had disappeared in the state, but it was estimated that out of about a million people, 150,000 children under twelve had vanished, along with about 40,000 people twelve and above. The accidents on Interstate 95 had been worse than here in Newport, because so many cars had been traveling above 50 mph when their drivers vanished. Nevertheless, the interstates had remained open, though sometimes reduced to one or two lanes.

There was an editorial that basically said that nobody knows what's going on yet, but there was still hope that somebody would figure out a way to get all the missing people back, or that whatever made them vanish might cause them to reappear.

Probably the saddest part of the paper, ironically, was the comics. A lot of the strips had main characters under twelve: "For Better or For Worse", "Baby Blues", "Family Circus", "Sally Forth". Would they be discontinued? Would they pretend the Event hadn't happened and keep all the under-twelve characters? Would they write the Event into their storylines? I could imagine Lynn Johnston, at least, doing the latter.

And if it was true for the comics, it was also true for the rest of popular culture. The Event, I was starting to realize, was going to leave a permanent psychic scar on the human race, even if nothing else bad happened to us. A hundred thousand years from now, assuming humanity survived that long, the Event would still haunt us.

L.B. in Newport 4: The Gothos Game

The dogs and I returned to the house after an hour's walk. I'd been thinking, and I'd decided that the lizard tail hypothesis actually made more sense than the war hypothesis. If somebody wanted to exterminate humanity, they could have done it easily enough by making the other two-thirds of the human race disappear too. I checked my answering machine, but none of my family had returned my calls.

In the bedroom, the television was still on with the sound low. They were mixing footage of traffic accidents, downed aircraft, the schoolroom in Baltimore, and crying women in doctors' offices. My wife asked me what I thought was going on, and I told her about my lizard tail theory: someone was running an experiment on the human race, to see how we would react to having a segment of our population eliminated.

"Do you really believe that?" she asked.

I shrugged. "It fits the facts as well as anything else. I can't think of any better explanation."

"Someone on the TV just now said he thought it was the Rapture."

I had to think for a moment to realize what she was talking about. "You mean like those fundies believe? Like that movie with the disappearing people in the airplane?" My wife was a Wiccan, but I knew she had seen the movie, though I was pretty sure she hadn't read any of the books it was based on.

"He was saying that this was just what they were predicting. Do you think it could be true?"

The God hypothesis, huh? Of course, there was no way to prove or disprove it, which has always been the case with the God hypothesis. But that gave rise to another thought.

Arthur C. Clarke famously said that a sufficiently advanced technology would be indistinguishable from magic (or, in this case, divine intervention). This made me remember an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation called "Devil's Due", about an alien named Ardra who showed up on a planet claiming to be the Devil. Ardra had come to collect on a Faustian bargain the planet's inhabitants had allegedly made a thousand years earlier, using a bag of technological tricks to convince the planet's inhabitants that she was the real thing.

Was that happening to the earth? Was some powerful alien trying to convince us that it was God, and that the fundy End Times were here? If that was true, then depending on how powerful the alien's bag of tricks was, the result might be indistinguishable from the actual Rapture, except that instead of being sorted out into Saved and Damned, the human race would simply be screwed over. Of course, Ardra had only been a con artist seeking wealth and power on the planet she was gaming. We might just as easily be facing a real sadistic bastard like Trelane from "The Squire of Gothos" who was running an End Times game and tormenting us just for shits and giggles.

I mentioned all this to my wife, and ended by pointing out that, as far as the human race was concerned, there was no difference between God and a Sufficiently Advanced Alien. The human race wasn't going to be any better off in the hands of a God who would pull something like the Event than we would be in the hands of the Squire of Gothos.

L.B. in Newport 3: Dogs

You can only watch so much televised chaos before it starts to wear on you, and after a couple hours of watching shell-shocked people trying to cope with an unfathomable tragedy, I decided I'd had enough. I needed to do something besides watch television and listen to my wife talk on the phone, so I put the dogs in their harnesses and leashes, and took them out for a walk.

Spring was already well in advance. The last of the snow had melted a month before, and leaves were growing thick on the trees. The temperature had climbed up into the 50s, so I put on a jacket and took the dogs outside. As is usually the case with dogs, they had their own priorities, and the walk took the form of a compromise between where they wanted to go and where I wanted to go. As we walked down the sidewalk, they would stop to investigate various objects that seemed to hold more meaning for them than for me. We crossed side streets and the dogs sniffed their way down the sidewalk. There was music coming from St. Joseph's, a Catholic church sitting across the street from the 7-Eleven. Hardly any Catholics had been disappeared, with the peculiar exception of Pope John Paul III himself. One of the news reports had mentioned that the Church hierarchy had declared him dead, and the College of Cardinals was coming to Rome to elect his successor, once air travel had been restored.

The dogs led me past Thompson Middle School, and it was odd not to see half a dozen of them hanging around in front of the school the way they usually did. At first I thought it must be because they had all disappeared, but a moment's thought showed me that that wasn't it. Thompson's student body were teenagers, above the cutoff age, and whatever entity had culled the world's people would have left them alone. One of my wife's friends here in Newport had called to say that all the schools had let out early. After the Event, it would be a long time before any parent let any child out of their sight.

After watching scenes of chaos, destruction, and despair on the television, it felt odd to be out on the street, seeing cars driving past and people walking, as though the most mind-numbing event in human history hadn't just taken place. It looked perfectly normal, just like any other day, as long as you didn't pay close attention. Once you did, though, you could tell that it wasn't quite as normal as it looked. A man sat on a bench, staring blindly down at his feet. A woman sat at the bus stop, looking quite normal except for the tears running down her face. A young couple went by, hissing angrily at each other.

Watching the dogs stop and sniff at an empty paper bag lying on the sidewalk, I remembered the pictures I had seen of abandoned dogs standing forlornly on rooftops in New Orleans after Katrina. Millions of adults, at least, had vanished along with all the children. There were thousands of families across the country and the world who had disappeared, leaving behind dogs, cats, and other pets. There would be farm families, too, with abandoned livestock. It would be up to the Humane Society and the S.P.C.A. and similar organizations to try and locate and rescue as many of the abandoned animals as possible, and find new homes for them. I didn't envy them the task. I found myself wondering if we could make room in our house for another dog. I decided I'd ask my wife what she thought of the idea when I got back home.

My musing abruptly ended when I found the dogs staring across the street. There was another man there, walking his own dog, a big black one whose breed I wasn't sure about. His own dog had also stopped to stare across the street at mine. He looked over, and our eyes met, and I could tell he was wondering what my story was, just as I was wondering about his. Then the moment passed, and he called his dog to his side and continued his walk, and I did the same with mine.

L.B. in Newport 2: The Lizard's Tail

The car had been in motion less than twenty seconds when my wife's cell phone rang. The caller was a friend of hers from Ohio who worked as an elementary school teacher. Her children, too, had all vanished, leaving behind clothing, glasses, braces, and hair clips. She and my wife traded stories of frantic teachers, and my wife learned from her that other schools around the country were reporting that all their children had vanished, and that there had been a sudden spike in traffic accidents. A minute into their conversation, my wife got another call from a friend in upstate New York. She added her to the call from the teacher in Ohio and continued her conversation.

I had just finished parking the car in front of our house, at a point about ten or fifteen minutes after the Event, when aircraft whose pilots had vanished started crashing around the world. My wife now had four friends taking part in a conference call, and three of them were watching news reports of the missing children on television, when the first reported plane crashes started coming in. My wife ran up to the bedroom, followed by me and the dogs, and turned on the television, tuning it to one of the cable news channels.

At that point, our household joined the great worldwide community of shocked disbelief. Over the next hour, the vast, terrible scope of the Event became apparent: every child under twelve on earth was gone, and so was an apparently random group of adults, mostly in Europe, North America, and Australia. Over a third, at least, of the world's population had all disappeared at 10:32 AM Eastern Time.

I suddenly remembered my nieces and nephews. Three of them were over the cutoff age, and two of them were under it. I was on the phone to my brother, but got no answer. One of his sons was under twelve. I got no answer from my sister, either. One of her daughters was under twelve. I called the oldest of my nephews, a cadet at the Coast Guard Academy in New London, and left him a message. I finally decided to check in with my family's central information collector: my mother.

Again, nothing. All I got was an answering machine that told me (in my own voice) to leave a message. I left one, then went back to the bedroom.

When I got back to the TV set, I found that I had missed two developments. First, somebody had been videotaping a third grade classroom in Baltimore during the Event, and had captured footage of the children vanishing. The news channel was now running that footage over and over again while various baffled people commented on it. Second, reports were now coming in from hospitals and prenatal care clinics all over the world: every pregnant woman on earth had suffered a miscarriage during the Event.

It was hard to think over the babble of the television, and my wife was still on her cellphone with a floating population of her friends, but hearing about the miscarriages made me realize that whoever was responsible for all this was playing for keeps. The children and adults might eventually be returned by whatever mechanism had caused their disappearance, but there was no way to reverse all those miscarriages. The vanished fetuses wouldn't be coming back, and that implied that the children and adults wouldn't be, either. By this time, two explanations were forcing themselves to the front of my mind. One: this was the opening act of a war against the human race. Someone Out There had just struck a staggering blow against humanity, by some means that we could barely comprehend. Over two billion people, and countless fetuses, had been teleported off the earth, including every child under the age of twelve. If Whoever It Was kept inducing miscarriages in pregnant women, the human race would be extinct in a century or so.

The precision with which the Event had been executed led to a second possible explanation: this wasn't a war, it was an experiment. Just like cutting off a lizard's tail to watch it grow back, only they were cutting off a segment of our population. What do you do with a lizard's tail after you've cut it off? You don't try to sew it back onto the lizard, that's for sure. You just throw it away.

I had the sick feeling that whoever had taken all those people had done just that with them. They were gone. They weren't coming back. The only silver lining I could see on that particular cloud was the thought that, like the lizard in the experiment, Whoever It Was might leave us alone now and let us grow our missing tail back.

L.B. in Newport 1: School's Out

As it happens, Rhode Island is the only American state where Catholics make up a majority of the population, so the first thing we noticed was the missing children. One minute everything was as normal as things get here, and the next every elementary school classroom had no children, only piles of clothing. Later on, it was calculated that between three and five percent of the adults also disappeared, but that was later. When it happened, it was the children everybody noticed.

My wife and I are childless, so ordinarily it would have taken a while for us to notice, but my wife works for a children's literacy group, and she happened to be in an elementary school handing out books and prizes. She was looking at a little red-headed girl with glasses, and in the blink of an eye, the girl was gone, leaving behind her clothes, her glasses, and a couple of plastic hair clips. There was a momentary breath of wind that scattered some papers around the room, and a dozen sets of small clothing whirled around and down to the floor, then nothing. Later on, after I heard her story, I decided the wind was caused by the air in the room rushing in to fill a dozen child-shaped pockets of vacuum.

It being a Tuesday morning, I was asleep, with our two pet basenjis lying next to me in bed. I was awakened by a ringing telephone. I disentangled myself from the blanket and the two dogs and answered the phone. It was my wife, and she was frantic. The teachers and administrators at the school were in a state of panic. Every child in the school had vanished at the same time, leaving their clothes behind. My wife had seen one disappear, so she knew they hadn't suddenly all stripped down to the buff and run off. They had vanished into thin air. I told my wife I was driving to the school to pick her up, and she should meet me at the front door. I got dressed in record time, and since I didn't want to leave the dogs alone in the house, I put their leashes on and brought them with me.

I've heard that in some parts of the country, the roads were rendered practically impassable by cars and trucks that had become driverless during the Event and had crashed, but that's not the way it was in Newport. It's been established that at the time of the Event, Newport had a total population of about thirty thousand people, of whom maybe 5000 disappeared. Four-fifths of them were children, and of the remaining thousand, only fourteen were driving vehicles when the Event occurred at 10:32 AM. Seven of the suddenly driverless vehicles had passengers remaining who were able to take control of them without suffering any accident, three had passengers who were unable to do anything before the vehicles crashed, and the other four were empty when they crashed. None of the seven crashed vehicles were going over thirty miles an hour, five of them were going under twenty, and all of them hit either parked vehicles, guard rails, or decorative shrubs. One road was closed to traffic for an hour while a crashed car was towed away; in the other six cases, traffic was able to get by the crashed cars.

Driving from my house to the elementary school, I didn't come across any of the crashed cars, though I did have to pull over to let a paramedic truck go past. It took me five minutes to reach the school, and my wife was waiting on the sidewalk. The dogs were very pleased to see her (as they always are), and she was still busy greeting and petting them when I pulled away from the school. When the dogs had settled down, she reached over and took my hand in hers.