"What the fu..."
Before Ben Coleman could finish his f-bomb or the joint he was pulling back on, the sky had begun to fill with people. Popping up all over the place. As far as his eyes could see, human beings appeared everywhere. First, one by one, then two by two, now it seems they're multiplying by ten at a time. Suspended off the ground about a hundred feet or more, all spaced out sort of evenly. He slowed his car to a stop to get a grip on what was happening. This couldn't be real. He looked momentarily at the bag of weed sitting next to him in the passenger seat. Pausing a second, thinking maybe he was high. Baked on his uncle's homegrown stuff. It wouldn't be the first time. His uncle's gear was always sort of "use at your own risk." Thinking this, he figured it was another reason to pull over. See if he could come down a bit from his buzz and get his head straight. The people kept coming, and it wasn't long before he realized it wasn't weed. He was buzzed for sure, but this was as real as it gets, and now he was freaking out. His buzz was just making it worse.
"Is that real people up there? It is...they look like human raindrops." His words leak from his slurred and lazed lips.
The residue from his joint made what he had mumbled slightly funny, but that quickly wore off when more and more people started to show up.
OK, what the hell is happening?
Ben straddles the center lane as his car idles down the highway. Endless rows of people just blip onto the skyline right before his eyes. He looks both ways to the sides of the road and sees nothing but tree lines and deep, dense forest on either side of him. The whole way up and down the highway, he was driving on. Not a soul on the ground. Shocked, he applies his brakes, stops the car, and gets out. Walking a few steps and then pausing to find some sense of what was going on. Nothing was making any. The only thing happening was that more and more rows of people kept blipping in. Men and women. Old and young. Of all races. Like a whole town or city full of citizens raised up from their homes and their jobs. Like some sort of mass satanic ritual or alien abduction. It started to scare the shit out of Ben. It was eerie. Ben thought, what if he was next? Or what if whatever put those people up there like that was coming back to do the same thing to him? Was he ahead of it or was he behind it? As Ben thought about those things, he continued to look up at each of the people floating. It didn't matter whose face he looked at. All of them had the same blank stare, gazing off into the distance, fixated on nothing but fresh air. His buzz was completely gone after witnessing what he was quashing any hope he smoked a little tainted ganja. This was panic button stuff.
He broke his fixations long enough to rush back to the car to kill the engine and leave only his surroundings as background noise. Thinking, maybe one of the sky zombies would react. No one did. Not a single person budged. He made a point to keep switching his line of vision to try and catch movement, but nothing. With the engine off, the only sounds to be heard were the sporadic October gusts that pushed fallen leaves down the lonely highway, a trickling brook running alongside where he was stopped, and, because this was indeed really happening...his heartbeat. It was pounding.
Shaken, Ben runs back to his car and gets in. He turns the key forward enough to power on the radio. It blares as he jacks the volume knob. The first station was scratching static noises, the second a series of loud, long, annoying beeps. The third, the fourth, and the rest of the stations were variations of the same.
"Come on, ...work you piece of shit." Ben cursed into the car dashboard.
"Wait...where'd I put my phone?" He feels around his seat, thinking it slipped from his pocket, but touches nothing. He checks the glove box and the center console, then swipes his hands left and right under his coat draped over the passenger seat in a panic.
"Where the fuck is my phone?" He spits out in frustration.
Then he remembers. He twists his body far enough to reach his bookbag sitting behind his seat. Ben drags it to the front with him, pulls the front pouch zipper across, opens it and snatches his phone from the inside.
"Got it."
Ben awakens his phone with his thumbprint. He swipes it from top to bottom, getting him to the phone's settings bar.
"Shit...no service. I got nothing. This is getting a bit much."
He turns the ignition, and his car starts.
"Thank God."
"I don't understand what's going on. Why is everything down? Nothing's working."
With a million questions running rampant, he drove on down the highway. It didn't look as if the amount of people was tapering off at all. Every fifty feet or so, another row. Ben stepped harder on the gas pedal, trying to outrun it. Again, every fifty feet, more people. Each time he would break a plan, poof, a line of people. Driving even faster, another thing occurred to him that he hadn't passed another vehicle on either side of the road for some time. It was not exactly strange for the highway he was travelling on, but something would have passed him by now. An eighteen-wheeler for sure. The further the road stretched, the further loneliness in Ben grew. It was starting to sink in that he might be the only person not floating automatized in the sky. He also started to think about his mom and dad. His brother and his girlfriend. Were they up there somewhere with the rest of those people? He knew he had to get home to find out.
Ben had to quiet his inside voice for a second to get a moment of clarity and that's when he remembered a diner that was just up a ways. After a few more kilometres, the highway would straighten out, and the winding hills would open up. Once it did, Ben could make out the diner he remembered. From what he could tell, there seemed to be a normal bunch of cars in the parking lot and a few RVs across the road from it. His heartbeat dropped a bit, and even more when about two kilometres out from the diner, the people in the sky stopped appearing. No more showed up as he rode on, and they began to grow smaller and smaller in his rearview as he got closer and closer to the diner. Like the place was in some eye of a supernatural tornado.
"Finally, they stopped." His inner voice became his outer. Releasing some of his anxiety with it.
"Alright, alright, alright." Ben quoted his favourite stoner, David Wooderson, from his favourite movie, Dazed and Confused. Feeling confident, he gives his car a shot of gas, closing in on the diner."There must be someone there who can tell me what's going on. They'll have a landline, I could use at least. All those vehicles, there's gotta be someone other than me left standing." Ben prayed as his car pulled up to "Dot's Diner & Road Stop". He flipped the turn signal indicating a right and steered his car toward pump one of two, stopping alongside it. A loud dinging noise rang through the whole lot as a notification of his arrival, only no one appeared. The cars and trucks in the parking lot were all empty. The RVs across the road looked deployed and set up, but there was no one around there either. No BBQs cooking, no kids playing, and the hammocks were empty, swinging by themselves in the dusty wind.
Ben exits his car and walks towards the diner. As he drew closer, he wasn't seeing any movement. None. He couldn't see anyone in the booth seats by the window, and as far as he could tell, there was no one in the gas station. He swung his head to take a quick look down the highway where the people had stopped blipping in. They looked more like ants now. There was about a two or three-kilometre radius of floating people in every direction. The diner was definitely smack dab in the middle of the fog of human beings.
He reaches the door to the diner, pushes the handle down, and it opens. Another ding is heard signalling his entrance, and just like the gas pump, no one responds or reacts to the sound. He walked further in, and as anticipated, there was no one inside. No owners, no employees, no customers, no truckers, no road-trippers, nobody. The jukebox was playing country music, and the radio coming from the kitchen was buzzing with static like his car radio emitted. Pacing down the aisle between the diner counter stools and booth tables, he notices half-eaten plates of food, quarter cups of coffee, and newspaper pages flapping in the breeze.
"Did everyone here get pulled to the sky like those other rows of people I passed?" He questioned while he scanned the whole place for anything that could explain something. The more and more he looked around, the more he was convinced that he was the only one left with two feet still left planted on the ground.
"But, why me? How come I'm not up there floating?"
Starting to lose hope and getting extremely worried about not only himself but his family. Ben spots a phone on the wall by the entrance to the back, between the dining room and the kitchen. He rushes to grab it off the hook. He gets a dial tone right away.
"Shit...yes." He shouts and begins to call his mom, June. The phone rings through, but is interrupted by her voicemail. The same with his father, Gary, his brother, Sam, didn't have voicemail, so he hung up after ten rings and after trying him a few times. Then, he called his girlfriend, Stacey and got the same result. Although when he listened to her voicemail, it made what was going on more real. Loneliness swarmed over him again. He was feeling very much alone. There was no one left on earth but him. Weakened, he falls into the nearest booth and sits there. He strokes his hands over his head, removing his stocking hat in one pass. He clenches it in his hands. Squeezing it to release the stress coursing through his body.
"I don't know what to do. There's nobody left."
As he sits alone in the diner, he places his head on the table and closes his eyes. He drifts for a minute in silence. A result of too much weed, too much driving, and too much freaking out for one day. The twang of a jukebox tune lulled him the rest of the way as he fell asleep face down on the table.
[BANG]
Ben jumps up with a sugar packet stuck to the side of his face and tips a mug next to him off the table. Black coffee and porcelain shards shoot in every direction over the floor. He looks both ways in reaction and sees nothing. His eyes coming back to life after shaking his head clear of his nap, he gets out of the booth and runs toward the back, near the kitchen. Where he thought the sound came from. He takes the first left and sees a big soup pot spinning on the floor. Ben continued racing through the back, heading in the direction of a sound, any sound.
[BANG]
Ben stalls and jerks back in the other direction. Hearing something back in the diner part. He charges to the front of the building. Back toward where he came from.
"Hello, ...anybody here?" He cried out.
"I'm not armed, I'm not going to hurt you. Helloooo!" He shouted just as loud.
Making it back to the front, he sees what he had seen before: nothing. Nobody. But what made those sounds? Could that be the person or thing that's responsible for the rest currently floating in the sky? Ben's heart was racing, and his mind was racing even faster.
[A SUBTLE BOOM BOOM NOISE LIKE A SMALL DOOR OR CABINET]
Ben's head swivels toward the gas station cash area. He sprints, passing through the threshold separating the two parts of the truck stop. Quickly, he scans the room and spots beads swinging gently down the back room entrance.
"Hello, is somebody there? Is someone back there? I won't harm you. I just want some help. Why are there no people here? Where is everybody?" Ben edged his way back toward the beads, continuing to make whatever was back there, convinced he was friendly.
The closer he got, the more he could hear rustling. Like someone or something was really back there. Another living something. It was then he realized that maybe that something may not be friendly itself. What if he was walking into danger? What if he were about to be placed in the sky like the rest of the poor people he drove past? He had to put that out of his mind and kept going. No matter who or what that was going to be, it was most likely the only way he was going to figure out what was going on. This was his only chance.
[BING BING BING LIKE METAL FORK OR SPOON DROPPING TO THE FLOOR]
Ben turns quickly to his right and thinks he sees someone. There's a light coming from the same area, making it difficult to see any features. He held his arm before him in hopes of blocking out some of the light, but it was still not enough. Whomever it was, they too were moving forward, but they were not making a sound. Ben's heart was crashing back and forth inside his ribcage.
"Hey...you there? Can you kill that light? The light, can you turn it off? You're blinding me here."
As brave as that came across, Ben was the polar opposite of being brave. He was about to piss his pants. The light finally goes off after a last plea from Ben. Not knowing if it was understood or not. Ben rubs his eyes, and they slowly acclimate to the natural lighting in the room. He looked straight in the direction of where the light was coming from, and when he did, all he could spit out was?
"What the fu..."