He didn’t know how long he sat there just staring. He thought he might have giggled, or sobbed, or made some combination of both. He almost threw up, and he wanted to curl up into a ball and go back to sleep again; he did close his eyes for a few seconds, but when he opened them again the skeleton of his wife was still lying in the bed and the sound of thunder was nearer.
And he might have sat there until doomsday if the telephone beside the bed hadn’t started ringing.
Somehow, he was up and had the receiver in his hand. Tried not to look down at the brown-haired skull and remember how beautiful his wife—just twenty-eight years old, for God’s sake!—had been.
“Hello,” he said in a dead voice.
There was no reply. Brad could hear circuits clicking and humming deep in the wires.
“Hello?”
No answer. Except now there might have been—might have been—a soft, silken breathing.
“Hello?” Brad shrieked into the phone. “Say something, damn you!”
Another series of clicks; then a tinny, disembodied voice: “We’re sorry, but we cannot place your call at this time. All lines are busy. Please hang up and try again later. Thank you. This is a recording…”
He slammed the receiver back into its cradle, and the motion of the air made flakes of skin fly from the skull’s cheekbones.
Brad ran out of the bedroom, barefoot and in only his pajama bottoms; he ran to the stairs, went down them screaming, “Help! Help me! Somebody!” He missed a step, slammed against the wall, and caught the banister before he broke his neck. Still screaming for help, he burst through the front door and out into the yard, where his feet crunched on dead leaves.
He stopped. The sound of his voice went echoing down Baylor Street. The air was still and wet, thick and stifling. He stared down at all the dead leaves around him, covering brown grass that had been green the day before. And then the wind suddenly moved, and more dead leaves swirled around him; he looked up, and saw bare gray branches where living oak trees had stood before he’d closed his eyes to sleep last night.
“Help me!” he screamed. “Somebody please help me!”
But there was no answer; not from the house where the Pates lived, not from the Walkers’ house, not from the Crawfords’ or the Lehmans’. Nothing human moved on Baylor Street, and as he stood amid the falling leaves on the seventh day of June, he felt something fall into his hair. He reached up, plucked it out, and looked at what he held in his hand.
The skeleton of a bird, with a few colorless feathers sticking to the bones.
He shook it from his hand and frantically wiped his palm on his pajamas—and then he heard the telephone ringing again in his house.
He ran to the downstairs phone, back in the kitchen, picked up the receiver, and said, “Help me! Please… I’m on Baylor Street! Please help—”
He stopped babbling, because he heard the clicking circuits and a sound like searching wind, and down deep inside the wires there might have been a silken breathing.
He was silent too, and the silence stretched. Finally he could stand it no longer. “Who is this?” he asked in a strained whisper. “Who’s on this phone?”
Click. Buzzzzzz…
Brad punched the O. Almost at once that same terrible voice came on the line: “We’re sorry, but we cannot place your call at—” He smashed his fist down on the phone’s two prongs, dialed 911. “We’re sorry, but we cannot—” His fist went down again; he dialed the number of the Pates next door, screwed up, and started twice more. “We’re sorry, but—” His fingers went down on about five numbers at once. “We’re sorry—”
He screamed and wrenched the telephone from the wall, threw it across the kitchen, and it broke the window over the sink. Dead leaves began to drift in, and through the glass panes of the back door Brad saw something lying out in the fenced-in backyard. He went out there, his heart pounding and cold sweat beading on his face and chest.
Lying amid dead leaves, very close to its doghouse, was the skeleton of their collie, Socks. The dog looked as if it might have been stripped to the bone in mid-stride, and hunks of hair lay about the bones like snow.
In the roaring silence, Brad heard the upstairs phone begin to ring.
He ran.
Away from the house this time. Out through the backyard gate, up onto the Pates’ front porch. He hammered at the door, hollering for help until his voice was about to give out. Then he smashed a glass pane of the door with his fist and, heedless of the pain and blood, reached in and unsnapped the lock.
With his first step into the house, he smelled the graveyard reek. Like something had died a long time ago, and been mummified.
He found the skeletons in the master bedroom upstairs; they were clinging to each other. A third skeleton—Davy Pate, once a tow-headed twelve-year-old boy—lay on the bed in the room with posters of Prince and Quiet Riot tacked to the walls. In a fish tank on the far side of the room there were little bones lying in the red gravel on the bottom.
It was clear to him then. Yes, very clear. He knew what had happened, and he almost sank to his knees in Davy Pate’s mausoleum.
Death had come in the night. And stripped bare everyone and everything but him.
But if that were so…then who—or what—had dialed the telephone? What had been listening on the other end? What…oh, dear God, what?
He didn’t know, but he suddenly realized that he’d told whatever it was that he was still on Baylor Street. And maybe Death had missed him last night; maybe its scythe had cleaved everyone else and missed him, and now…and now it knew he was still on Baylor Street, and it would be coming after him.
Brad fled the house, ran through the dead leaves that clogged the gutters of Baylor Street, and headed east toward the center of town. The wind moved again, sluggishly and heavily; the wet fog shifted, and Brad could see that the sky had turned the color of blood. Thunder boomed behind him like approaching footsteps, and tears of terror streamed down Brad’s cheeks.
I’m cold, Sarah had whispered. I’m cold. And that was when the finger of Death had touched her, had missed Brad and gone roaming through the night. I’m cold, she’d said, and there would never be any warming her again.
He came to two cars smashed together in the street. Skeletons in clothes lay behind the steering wheels. Further on, the bones of a large dog were almost covered by leaves. Above him, the trees creaked and moaned as the wind picked up, ripping holes in the fog and showing the bloody sky through them.
It’s the end of the world, he thought. Judgment Day. All the sinners and saints alike turned to bones overnight. Just me left alive. Just me, and Death knows I’m on Baylor Street.
“Mommy!”
The sobbing voice of a child pierced him, and he stopped in his tracks, skidding on leaves.
“Mommy!” the voice repeated, echoing and warped by the low-lying fog. “Daddy! Somebody…help me!”
It was the voice of a little girl crying somewhere nearby. Brad listened, trying to peg its direction. First he thought it was to the left, then to the right. In front of him, behind him…he couldn’t be sure. “I’m here!” he shouted. “Where are you?”
The child didn’t answer, but Brad could still hear her crying. “I’m not going to hurt you!” he called. “I’m standing right in the middle of the street! Come to me if you can!”
He waited. A flurry of brown, already-decaying leaves fell from overhead—and then he saw the figure of the little girl, hesitantly approaching him through the fog on his right. She had blond hair done up in pigtails with pale blue ribbons, and her pallid face was streaked with tears and distorted by terror; she was maybe five or six years old, wearing pink pajamas and clasping a Smurf doll tightly in her arms. She stopped about fifteen feet away from him, her eyes red and swollen and maybe insane too.
“Daddy?” she whispered.
“Where’d you come from?” he asked, still shocked at hearing another voice and seeing someone else alive on this last day
of the world. “What house?”
“Our house,” she answered, her lower lip trembling. Her face looked like it was about to collapse. “Over there.” She pointed through the fog at a shape with a roof; then her eyes came back to Brad.
“Anyone else alive? Your mother or father?”
The little girl just stared.
“What’s your name?”
“Kelly Burch,” she answered dazedly. “My tel’phone number is…is…555-6949. Could…you help me find…a p’liceman, please?”
It would be so easy, Brad thought, to curl up in the leaves on Baylor Street and let himself lose his mind; but if there was one little girl still left alive, then there might be other people too. Maybe this awful thing had only happened on Baylor Street…or maybe only in this part of town; maybe it was a chemical spill, radiation, something unholy in the lightning, some kind of Army weapon that had backfired. Whatever it was, maybe its effects were only limited to a small part of town. Sure! he thought, and when he grinned, the child abruptly took two steps back. “We’re going to be all right,” he told her. “I won’t hurt you. I’m going to walk to Main Street. Do you want to go with me?”
She didn’t reply, and Brad thought she’d truly gone over the edge, but then her lips moved and she said, “I’m looking for…for my mommy and daddy. They’re gone.” She caught back a sob, but new tears ran down her cheeks. “They just…they just…left bones in their bed and they’re gone.”
“Come on.” He held out his hand to her. “Come with me, okay? Let’s see if we can find anybody else.”
Kelly didn’t come any closer. Her little knuckles were white where she gripped the smiling blue Smurf. Brad heard thunder roaming somewhere to the south, and electric-blue lightning scrawled across the crimson sky like a crack in time. Brad couldn’t wait any longer, he started walking again, stopped, and looked back. Kelly stopped too, dead leaves snagged in her hair. “We’re going to be all right,” he told her again, and he heard how utterly ridiculous he sounded. Sarah was gone; beautiful Sarah was gone, and his life might as well be over. But no, no—he had to keep going, had to at least try to make some sense out of all this. He started off once more, east toward Main Street, and he didn’t look back, but he knew Kelly was following about fifteen or twenty feet behind.
At the intersection of Baylor and Ashley streets, a police car had smashed into an oak tree. The windshield was layered with leaves, but Brad saw the hunched-over bony thing in the police uniform sitting behind the wheel. And the most terrible thing was that its skeletal hands were still gripping that wheel, trying to guide the car. Whatever had happened—radiation, chemicals, or the devil striding through the streets of his town—had taken place in an instant. These people had been stripped to bones in the blink of a cold eye, and again Brad felt himself balanced precariously on the edge of madness.
“Ask the p’liceman to find Mommy and Daddy!” Kelly called from behind him.
“There’s a police station on Main Street,” he told her. “That’s where we’re going to go. Okay?”
She didn’t answer, and Brad set off.
They passed silent houses. Near the intersection of Baylor and Hilliard, where the traffic light was still obediently blinking yellow, a skeleton in jogging gear lay sprawled on the ground. Its Nike sneakers were too small for Brad’s feet, too large for Kelly’s. They kept going, and Kelly cried for a few minutes but then she hugged her doll tighter and stared straight ahead with eyes swollen almost shut.
And then Brad heard it, and his heart pounded with fear again.
Off in the fog somewhere.
The sound of a phone ringing.
Brad stopped. The phone kept on ringing, its sound thin and insistent.
“Somebody’s calling,” Kelly said, and Brad realized she was standing right beside him. “My tel’phone number is 555-6949.”
He took a step forward. Another, and another. Through the fog ahead of him he could make out the shape of a pay phone there on the corner of Dayton Street.
The telephone kept on ringing, demanding an answer.
Slowly Brad approached the pay phone. He stared at the receiver as if it might be a cobra rearing back to strike. He did not want to answer it, but his arm lifted and his hand reached toward that receiver, and he knew that if he heard that silken breathing and the metallic recorded voice on the other end, he might start screaming and never be able to stop.
His hand closed around it. Started to lift it up.
“Hey, buddy!” someone said. “I wouldn’t answer that if I was you.”
Startled almost out of his skin, Brad whirled around.
A young man was sitting on the curb across the street, smoking a cigarette, his legs stretched out before him. “I wouldn’t,” he cautioned.
Brad was oddly shocked by the sight of a flesh-and-blood man, as if he’d already forgotten what one looked like. The young man was maybe in his early twenties, wearing scruffy jeans and a dark green shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He had sandy-brown hair that hung to his shoulders, and he looked to have a couple of days’ growth of beard. He pulled on the cigarette and said, “Don’t pick it up, man. Doom City.”
“What?”
“I said… Doom City.” The young man stood up; he was about six feet, thin and lanky. His workboots crunched leaves as he crossed the street, and Brad saw that he had a patch on the breast pocket of his shirt that identified him as a Sanitation Department workman. As the young man got closer, Kelly pressed her body against Brad’s legs and tried to hide behind the Smurf doll. “Let it ring,” the young man said. His eyes were pale green, deep-set, and dazed. “If you were to pick that damned thing up… Doom City.”
“Why do you keep saying that?”
“Because it is what it is. Somebody’s tryin’ to find all the strays. Tryin’ to run us all down and finish the job. Sweep us all into the gutter, man. Close the world over our heads. Doom City.” He blew a plume of smoke into the air that hung between them, unmoving.
“Who are you? Where’d you come from?”
“Name’s Neil Spencer. Folks call me Spence. I’m a…” He paused for a few seconds, staring along Baylor Street. “I used to be a garbage man. Till today, that is. Till I got to work and found skeletons sitting in the garbage trucks. That was about three hours ago, I guess. I’ve been doin’ a lot of walking. Lot of poking around.” His gaze rested on the little girl, then back to Brad. The pay phone was still ringing, and Brad felt the scream kicking behind his teeth. “You’re the first two I’ve seen with skin,” Spence said. “I’ve been sittin’ over there for the last twenty minutes or so. Just waitin’ for the world to end, I guess.”
“What…happened?” Brad asked. Tears burned his eyes. “My God…my God…what happened?”
“Something tore,” Spence said tonelessly. “Ripped open. Something won the fight, and I don’t think it was who the preachers said was gonna win. I don’t know…maybe Death got tired of waitin’. Same thing happened to the dinosaurs. Maybe it’s happenin’ to people now.”
“There’s got to be other people somewhere!” Brad shouted. “We can’t be the only ones!”
“I don’t know about that.” Spence drew on his cigarette one last time and flicked the butt into the street. “All I know is, somethin’ came in the night and had a feast, and when it was done it licked the plate clean. Only it’s still hungry.” He nodded toward the ringing phone. “Wants to suck on a few more bones. Like I said, man… Doom City. Doom City here, there, and everywhere.”
The phone gave a final shrilling shriek and went silent.
Brad heard the child crying again, and he put his hand on her head, stroked her hair to calm her. He realized he was doing it with his bloody hand. “We’ve…we’ve got to go somewhere…got to do something…”
“Do what?” Spence asked laconically. “Go where? I’m open to suggestions, man.”
From the next block came the distant sound of a telephone ringing. Brad stood with his bloody hand on Kelly
’s head, and he didn’t know what to say.
“I want to take you somewhere, my friend,” Spence told him. “Want to show you something real interestin’. Okay?”
Brad nodded, and he and the little girl followed Neil Spencer north along Dayton Street, past more silent houses and buildings.
Spence led them about four blocks to a 7-Eleven store, where a skeleton in a yellow dress splotched with blue and purple flowers lolled behind the cash register with a National Enquirer open on its jutting knees. “There you go,” Spence said softly. He plucked a pack of Luckies off the display of cigarettes and nodded toward the small TV set on the counter. “Take a look at that, and tell me what we ought to do.”
The TV set was on. It was a color set, and Brad realized after a long, silent moment that the channel was tuned to one of those twenty-four-hour news networks. The picture showed two skeletons—one in a gray suit and the other in a wine-red dress—leaning crookedly over a news desk at center camera; the woman had placed her hand on the man’s shoulder, and yellow sheets of the night’s news were scattered all over the desktop. Behind the two figures were three or four out-of-focus skeletons, frozen forever at their desks as well.
Spence lit another cigarette. An occasional spark of static shot across the unmoving TV picture. “Doom City,” Spence said. “Not only here, man. It’s everywhere. See?”
The telephone behind the counter suddenly started ringing, and Brad put his hands to his ears and screamed.
The phone’s ringing stopped.
Brad lowered his hands, his breathing as rough and hoarse as a trapped animal’s.
He looked down at Kelly Burch, and saw that she was smiling.
“It’s all right,” she said. “You don’t have to answer. I found you, didn’t I?”
Brad whispered, “Wha—”
The little girl giggled, and as she continued to giggle, the laugh changed, grew in intensity and darkness, grew in power and evil until it became a triumphant roar that shook the windows of the 7-Eleven store. “DOOM CITY!” the thing with pigtails shrieked, and as the mouth strained open, the eyes became silver, cold, and dead, and from that awful crater of a mouth shot a blinding bolt of blue-white lightning that hit Neil Spencer and seemed to spin him like a top, throwing him off his feet and headlong through the 7-Eleven’s plate-glass window. He struck the pavement on his belly, and as he tried to get up again Brad Forbes saw that the flesh was dissolving from the young man’s bones, falling away in chunks like dried-up tree bark.