Nov. 11, 2011

The disappearance began with what I can only describe as a sonic boom. As a teenager, during a visit to England, I saw an air show, part of Queen Elizabeth’s silver jubilee celebrations. The Concord did a fly over and it was throttled wide open at the end. It was like the sky cracked open and swallowed the sleek hook-nosed craft. Boom — gone.

Carrie and I were standing shoulder-to-shoulder in a crowd of about 2,000 Remembrance Day ceremony participating people in Cranbrook’s Rotary Park.

We sang O Canada, heard a recital of the hymn O God, Our Help In Ages Past and listened to a number of soulful addresses by a pastor and by Royal Canadian Legion members.

The Last Post was played before two minutes of silence, which was concluded with a 10 second blast of a Canadian Pacific Railway engine whistle, from a train in the rail yard about half a kilometre away.

From where I was standing, I could see the Canadian flag fluttering in the light breeze, framed in the fork of an elm tree trunk. As the train whistle began, I shut my eyes to take it all in. There’s something about a distant train whistle that makes me feel so… Canadian.

After about 10 seconds, my eyes were ripped wide open when a sonic boom obliterated the reverie that I assumed would be interrupted by Reveille.

I expected to see people bumping into one another in a large-scale pre-panic crowd shudder and heard Carrie yelp, “Holy!”

Flags attached to lances clattered to the ground. A trumpet hit concrete with a brassy ‘pang!’

My eyes latched onto piles of clothing accordioned on the ground in front of me.

Carrie shouted, “Rob!”

I looked at her and saw nothing but terror in her eyes. She searched my face for assurance and seeing none, shouted, “What the heck?”

I shouted back — “I don’t know!” as a car rolled into the front of the Cranbrook court building. The sound of vehicles coming to unguided stops slashed in staccato through the uneasily stillness.

We were alone. In the blink of an eye, everyone in the downtown park had disappeared — apparently naked.

A sense of panic returned following the brief twinge seeing humour, as a car rolled past the park, through the stop sign and as it began heading up the hill on the other side of the road, it veered slowly and came to a crunching halt against parked vehicles.

“What the heck?” Carrie shouted again. There was a tone in her voice I had not heard in our 11 years together – utter panic.

We stared at one another unable to speak. All we could do was shout questions neither could answer.

“Did I miss something,” Carrie said after we shut our mouths and scanned our surroundings for a few seconds. We could hear loud bangs and metallic scratching sounds from nearby streets.

“I don’t know. I had my eyes closed,” I blubbered, staring at the car nosed into the court building and waiting for someone to step out. It didn’t look like anyone was behind the wheel — at all.

It didn’t compute.

Nothing computed for either of us.

Carrie began crying and told me she was frightened. I felt like saying ‘no shit.’ But thought better of it. It was probably the only clear, direct thought I had for days to come.

My throat tightened and I battled back the urge to join her with the tears.  I grabbed her hand and squeezed. I began to walk, careful not to stomp on the piles of clothing crumpled about in piles all around us.

The park looked like a battlefield after-the-fact. The red poppies attached to coats and sweaters added to the visual hyper-freak.

Carrie called out “hello” every few seconds, and her voice disappeared in the billowing breeze that carried strange sounds of the end of the world.

We walked to the town square stage, where the high school band had been playing a few minutes earlier, and took in the sight of a collection of instruments laying hither thither. The conductor’s baton had bounced down the three steps leading to the stage and lay on a 45 degree angle against the final step. I blinked and my brain flickered and fluttered.

I sat on the steps and shook my head, taking it all in it once again.

Carrie said she wanted to go to her friend’s office just down the street. Mechanically, I huffed to my feet and followed her.

As we headed up the downtown street, we began to notice all the vehicles angled into one another, into parked cars, up against buildings and through storefront windows. Here and there were piles of clothes, with hats, purses, grocery bags, books, laptops, knapsacks and the rest of the detritus of society.

As we arrived at Carrie’s friend’s office I was wondering why I hadn’t heard all these crashes – there had been so many. Were we deafened by that explosion?

Then as if on cue, a percussive rumble exploded from the rail yard that runs east-west through the centre of Cranbrook.

“That was a derailment!” I yelled. “Had to be! What the hell is going on, man?”

Carrie had already stepped inside.

I yanked the door open and bellowed, “Did you hear that?”

Carrie’s voice, small and hesitant, said from an office down the hallway, “yeah, I heard that. What was it?”

She emerged back in the hallway and walked cautiously toward me. “Just a pile of… just a skirt and a blouse,” she stuttered.

“Come on!” I demanded. “We have to go see.”

We ran down the street and came to a heel-skidding halt at Baker Street — Cranbrook’s main street. It was another scene of complete chaos. From Baker we could see Van Horne Street, part of the main highway route running through the town. The carnage appeared grander and nastier, thanks to the speeds vehicles were going along that road.

A black shadow of smoke rose to the northeast, from where the derailment sound came. It was too far away.

“Let’s go back and get Ointment,” I said, referring to my X-Trail.

We trotted back down the street and over a couple more to where we had parked my SUV. Along the way our eyeballs sucked in a plethora of surrealistic, Twilight Zone-like images and with numbed senses and twitching minds, we carefully drove through Cranbrook, witnesses to the Rapture. But no such awareness dwelled in our minds. Our minds were, simply put, mush.

Our eyes searched for signs of movement; for other people. We stopped at a scene that would normally feature damaged human beings but the vehicle occupant equation did not add up.

Five vehicles were crunched together in one of the busier junctions in town. It was a T-bone fiesta and a couple of the vehicles must have been traveling 60 or 70 km/h upon impact but no one was apparently on board at the time of impact.

We clambered back in Ointment and headed northeast again, toward the black smoke.

A train had derailed — after slamming into the back of another train. The engines and first 20 or 30 cars, potash cars from Saskatchewan, were crinkled together on both sides of the tracks.

I didn’t want to get near the smoke, not being sure what could be burning and we backed off. There was no sign of movement anywhere.

No sirens.

No screams.

No cries.

No shouts.

There was nothing. We were in the space of nothing.

Carrie’s cell phone was stuck to her ear. She was calling everyone in her directory and didn’t get an answer.

All I could think to do was to go home, so we gingerly crept past the aftermath of the “disappearance” — which was all we could think to call what we had just experienced but first I had to stop at Save-On Foods for some groceries. Old habits.

The parking lot was emptier than usual, likely a by-product of the 10:30 a.m. Remembrance Day ceremony.  It was now 12:12 p.m. The disappearance happened, as best as I can recall, sometime after 11 a.m.

The electric doors whirred open for us and we stepped into the grocery store. Aside from crumpled piles of clothing here and there, it appeared normal.

I grabbed some garlic and strolled through the meat section, stopping to grab some chicken wings that were marked down in price and then we made our way down the aisle where the olive oil was located. I remember feeling pissed off because I was going to have to pay a fortune for a small bottle of olive oil. We usually bought large volumes of the stuff when we hit a Costco but we’d been homebound the past few months thanks to being up to our armpits in our communications consulting business.

I grabbed the cheapest bottle of EVO I could find and headed toward the check out area, stepping around piles of clothing in front of shopping carts containing various quantities of groceries and again wondered what the hell was going on. My eyes locked on a purse laying atop some clothes that had just recently been worn by an elderly lady. I tapped my front right pocket to make sure my bank card was in place, as I had finished my shopping. Carrie tapped and thumbed away at her iPhone.

The sonic boom entered my brain again and a small chill entered my spine, creeping small and devious at first, then raged upward into my brain with a liquid spike of terror.

As I walked up to the check out area the chill doubled in intensity. More shopping carts were lined up at one checkout counter. A shopping basket was on its side and the jug of milk that had been in it was split open on its side.

“What the… ? Hello! Hello? Is there anybody here?”

Carrie put a hand on my shoulder and my exploding panic came to a halt.

“Do we have orange juice?”

I shook my head. “Nope.”

With the heebie jeebies rattling along my frozen spine, I walked to where the juice was located and came upon a large spill of dark berry juice, which exploded from a container lying on its side.

A shopping cart sat next to the spill. I noticed a purse in the cart and a bag with Elmo on the side. A diaper bag, I deduced. No mother belonging to the purse; no infant belonging to the diaper bag.

Before we fled the store, I went to the ATM and withdrew $20, enough to cover my goods. I left the bill on a till and walked away double time.

As we drove past more carnage on the way home, the air smelled of gasoline and diesel and different kinds of burning and smoke. As I turned the corner toward home, I saw a taxi slammed up against a bus stop bench, its engine revving wildly. I stopped, walked up to it, reached inside and turned it off.

Just up the road was a car blocking our road. Its front tires were against the curb and I noticed that it must have crashed against the cars parked on the side of the road, from the dents against their doors. Only the high curb had stopped it from rolling over the sidewalk, through a chain-link fence and down a steep hill into the Church of Latter Day Saints. I walked up to that vehicle and shut it off, too, before joining Carrie inside.

Once inside, the first thing we did was have a drink. It was the only thing that made sense. I cracked a beer open and poured Carrie a glass of white wine.

“Happy hour,” I said without humour. “Cheers,” she said weakly, staring out our kitchen window at the steely grey November day.

“So,” I said, “Let’s recap. No one is around. It is science-frigging-fiction, babe. Purses left in shopping carts, trains derailed, crowds disappearing, cars left running — crashed into each other, and into things. It is total chaos without any screaming. No one is around to scream. No cops, firemen or anything like that. It’s a dream. It has to be some kind of wicked dream,” I babbled.

“There we were and then we weren’t but we are and no one else is. Why’s that?”

Carrie said I was babbling.

“Come with me.”

I laced my boots back on and led Carrie down the street to the regional hospital, which was a block from our condo.

An ambulance sat idling in front of the emergency room entranceway.

It appeared to be such a normal sight that I felt a burst of relief. I expected to see a paramedic come out the doors and thought about what I would say to him or her.

At this point, I should note, neither of us believed that we were the only people left alive in Cranbrook. We were just confounded about shit, is all.

The doors parted quietly for us and we stepped into the hospital.

“Fuck!” I screamed.

“Shhhh,” Carrie hissed.

“What for… what… fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” I screamed each word incrementally loud until I was shrieking at the top of my rather prodigious lungs.

Carrie screamed at me to be quiet. “Child!” She spat. “I need you to calm down.

“How can this be?” She asked once again, barely loud enough to be heard. She’d been saying that every two or three minutes for the last hour.

She marched away deeper into the hospital and I followed, once again feeling like puking. My head reeled and rolled.

Carrie called out “hello?” Over and over and over again.

She pushed the button on the elevator and a few seconds later ‘bing’ the doors opened. We stepped inside and went up a floor. Stepping out, Carrie called out “hello?” Her voice grew louder with each few shouts of “hello.”

“This doesn’t make sense,” she said finally, as we came to the end of a hallway. We looked into each room. In one we could see the vague outline of a body that had been lying on the crisp, fresh sheets stretched across a hospital bed. The cover sheets were thrown back. On the floor was a silver tray. A needle lay a few feet away in the middle of the floor.

We headed to the elevator and went to the third floor, wandering from ward to ward, room to room, occasionally calling out “hello.”

Carrie’s enthusiasm to find someone, established around her premise: “there has to be someone around,” had reignited my grip on sanity, so I joined her in the call for life.

Twenty minutes later we were in the basement, standing outside the morgue.

“You first,” she said.

I pushed into the morgue and shouted “hello!”

The door closed behind me and Carrie remained out in the hallway.

The room was fully lit and at the far end, on a gurney, was a body.

I stepped back and the door slammed into my shoulder, knocking me forward.

Carrie burst through and let out a sharp yip as she caught sight of the body.

It was my turn. “Shhh,” I demanded, perhaps fearful that with the absence of life, death may be awoken.

Carrie stepped toward the body and I followed.

It was an old man in a hospital gown. His grey/blue features almost matched the colour of the gown.

“I am not an expert by any stretch but I’d say this guy is dead,” I said.

Carrie nodded, turned sharply and grabbed me. Her arms closed tightly around me and she sobbed. “What is happening?”

I led her from the morgue and we returned to the hospital foyer. I couldn’t say anything. I feared that if I began to speak or to try and make sense of things that I’d unravel into a complete shrieking maniac. Carrie’s plea for me to calm down was now my anchor.

“Okay, I am now officially freaked right the frig out,” I said to myself as we stepped outside.

“What?” Carrie asked weakly, grabbing for my hand. I shook my head. It was enough of an answer for her. After all, she was mumbling away to herself a fair bit, too.

We returned home and climbed into my SUV and slowly crawled our way south through residential Cranbrook to Gold Creek Road and drove to her parents’ place.

We were greeted with emptiness and silence. Her son Stephen lived in a trailer on their property and his truck was parked beside it. But he was nowhere to be seen.

“Dad would still be at work and mom could be at the gym… or…” Carrie reasoned. I didn’t say anything. Her red eyes and shaking hands were all I needed to see to keep my mouth shut. Besides, I was thinking about my parents and daughter Hayley and a controlled, relentless panic was taking root in me and it would be several weeks before I was able to step from its embrace.

We drove back into town and then headed south toward Kimberley, where Carrie’s daughter Amanda and her baby were living.

A couple of miles out of Cranbrook, down highway 95A, we covered a few miles of roadway without any signs of human disappearance and we again began to feel some strange relief, as if we had come out of the bad world and were back in our normal world. Like waking up suddenly during a nightmare.

And then we came to the St. Mary Bridge. A curl of black smoke rose up from below the bridge, past the guardrail that was torn open. We stopped and peered over the edge and saw the remains of a semi-trailer that had landed on the bank of the river and burst into flames. I thought about taking photographs. Old habits.

The whole time I stared down at the carnage, I kept flinching and looking back up and down the road, freaked out about having stopped on the bridge.

No one came.

No one would come.

Kimberley was as nuts as Cranbrook and we were growing accustomed to seeing vehicles crashed into houses, into one another and in Mark Creek. We stopped at the house where Amanda and her beau rented a basement suite. No one was there.

After the third or fourth knock, Carrie slumped to the floor, her face pressed against the door. She sobbed as I held her and repeated, “I don’t know why” after she said through heaves of her chest “why?”

Anger began to build in me and it washed aside the fears and questioning as we drove back to Cranbrook. I expected to see emergency crews at the bridge, their flashers painting the mid-autumn murk with psychedelic sparkles and rays. We could smell the thinning black smoke as we crept across the dark bridge and it lingered with us as we drove home, as silent as our world.

After arriving to our dark home, we sat in the kitchen and had a drink; probably four or five or eight. Neither of us could remember moving upstairs to bed and when we awoke at 8 a.m. the next morning, we rose from the bed without saying anything, aside from saying ‘good morning.’

I looked outside and the thin hope that I had had a twisted dream was popped like a cherry tomato beneath a chubby thumb when I saw the crashed pickup truck down the street.

Carrie was looking at me, anticipating with great hope that she too had had a mind-blowing nightmare.

I let the curtain fall back and reached for her. Wrapped tightly in each other’s arms, we lay back on our bed and lay still, feeling each other breathing – feeling each other’s hearts beat. It was about the only thing to do that made any sense.

---

Article Share

---