Episode 1 The Strangers

To inhabit the planet, they had to eliminate the Earth’s indigenous human population. Trouble was, they missed a few.

The story begins with a storm . . .

Transcript

0:30

This is Ed Falco on the air, reading The Strangers, a novel in 19 episodes. This is episode 1, The Lurchings. Severn lay in bed, listening to the wind scream and the rain splashing great waves that washed over the house. Sarah was sitting up alongside him, but he didn't know whether she had been awakened by the same sharp sensation of movement that had awakened him, or whether she was just sitting up in the darkness, which would not have been surprising. Sarah was a lifelong insomniac. From the time she was a toddler, getting to sleep had been an issue. She had long ago resorted to drugs, and she always had a stock of something or other on hand. sleeping pills of various strengths and side effects. But she tried not to use them every night, and often Severn would wake to find her reading in bed or in the kitchen or downstairs watching some nature show on the Discovery Channel. She loved the outdoors. She worked for a battery of environmental groups. So when he felt for Sarah alongside him and found that she was sitting up in bed, it didn't tell him a lot. He figured that the electricity was off. He figured the storm had downed a power line. Did you feel that, he asked, meaning the lurching that had awakened him. When she didn't answer, he touched her shoulder. He had put together the wording of what he wanted to say. He was going to say, It felt like the bed lurched. He only meant to shake her a little, to get her attention or wake her up if she had fallen asleep. For Severn, this is where it all began. Before, there was an eerie darkness that he had awakened into and a sense of foreboding, the kind he associated with waking from a bad dream. But still, he was living in the old world, a world where things happened regularly, as you expected them to happen, a recognizably human twenty first century world of politics and culture, full of all the ordinary chaos of our familiar noisy humanity. He awakened into this old world. And when he pushed Sarah, and she toppled over and fell horribly out of the bed, overturning the night table, when she crashed to the floor, like a big, heavy object, with all the weight and physics of an object, somewhere inside him, he knew that she was dead. And that was the beginning of the new world. Severn didn't panic, but he was frantic. He shouted Sarah's name and scrambled after her onto the floor. He said, God, he said, Christ. He knelt beside her in that awful dark, and he felt all over her body, looking for some indication of what might be wrong, but it only felt like Sarah, still warm and supple as in life. He listened for her heartbeat and found nothing. He gave her mouth to mouth. He did that for a long time. That memory persisted, and he dreamt it sometimes. Trempt of pressing his lips to hers, trying to breathe life back into her. He did that, it seemed, forever. He punched her chest, her heart. He turned her over and pulled her arms back, trying to force her lungs to pull in air. He did everything he could think to do. And all this in a blackness so thick he was blind. To say it all felt unreal is not quite right. More, it felt like a waking dream. He believed it was all happening, and that it was happening in the real world. But it was so eerie, working with only two senses, touch and hearing. He couldn't see anything, and taste and smell were of no particular use. Everything was what he felt and what he heard. He felt his wife's body, lifeless under his hands, and he heard rain and wind and the sounds he himself was making as he worked on her frantically. Blowing air into her lungs, pounding on her chest, turning her over and pulling her arms back. Oh, and there was the sense of taste. It was the salty taste of tears on his lips and in his mouth. He thought to scream for help, but he didn't. Then a moment came when he was kneeling beside the bed, listening. As a gust of wind built up strength until he thought it might blow out the windows or rip off the roof. Sarah was sprawled in front of him, and if he reached for her he believed she would be there, but he didn't want to touch her again. The wind subsided and the house remained standing. A syrupy thick weight spread over and through him. His thinking was syrupy. As if he were half sleeping and his thoughts wouldn't cohere. He slid away from Sarah until his back touched the wall, and he sat there quietly for what felt like a very long time. Sentences came together slowly in his thoughts. Sarah is dead. Something has happened to Sarah. He thought it could have been a heart attack, and he wondered vaguely if she might have tried to wake him. And that was the sensation he felt, Sarah grabbing his arm and yanking at him. That might have, in his sleep, felt like the bed lurching. He had obscenely practical thoughts, what his life would be like once he inherited Sarah's money. They'd had a long standing argument about her money. She wanted to save for retirement. He wanted a bigger house, a better car. It wasn't a fortune, it was about half a million. Sitting with his back against the bedroom wall, with his dead wife's body on the floor at his feet, he was thinking about her money and the disgust he felt that that was cosmic. Less, what a creep I am, and more, how base we all are, human beings. He cried. He pulled his knees to his chin. and sat in the dark crying. His thoughts eventually turned to light. He felt for the window and looked out. Or he just pressed his face against the glass because there was nothing to see but more darkness. He pulled himself to his feet and felt his way around the bed and out into the hallway and from there to the kitchen where he felt around in the cabinet over the fridge for the big mag light. He found the long, cool, roughened handle of the flashlight, found the soft rubber off on button, and nothing happened when he pressed it again and again. Carefully, making a space on the kitchen counter, he emptied it of batteries, and then felt his way back to the hall closet where they kept the replacements. Amazing how good the sense of touch is, how accurate. He found the big D batteries, four of them still unopened in their plastic wrap. He found a scissors, carefully cut open the package, carried the batteries back to the counter, put them in the flashlight, pressed the button. Nothing. He took the batteries out again, made sure they were in the right order, positive to negative. Screwed the cap back on, tried again. Nothing. He told himself to be patient. He worried that the bulb was blown. He took the batteries out again, put them back in again. Still nothing. He considered candles and matches, but he knew he had neither in the house. He had been meaning to buy some for months to keep with the water and the canned foods and other emergency supplies. He thought about giving up and calling the police. But he wanted to see Sarah first. He wanted to look at her one more time before the ambulance came and the attendants arrived and did whatever they would do to her. He'd been with his father when he died and he still remembered the cold as he watched the attendants lift his father's body from the couch and drop it into a black plastic bag which they zipped shut around him. He felt the cold all through his own body as he thought of bodies as meat and sinew dropped into a black plastic bag and the bag zipped closed. He wanted to see Sarah again, alone, before the police and the ambulances and then the friends consoling him and all that would be happening in the next few hours that would stretch into terrible days and weeks and so he found the car keys on their hook over the sink and he made his way to the front door. past the cordless phone and Sarah's cell phone attached to its charger. In his mind there was the idea of the flashlight in the glove compartment of his car, and in his heart there was, again, a sense of foreboding. He found his raincoat hanging on a hook on the back of the front door, and then he hesitated, afraid to unlock the door, let alone open it and step outside. His breathing went ragged and his arms shook, and he had to stop and rest his head against the doorframe. He wanted to open the door and go out for the flashlight, but his arm wouldn't move until he resorted to reason. His fear was irrational. He said it a few times, this is irrational. And then he pulled the door open and stepped out into the rain. It was mid April then. The day had been warm and the night was cool with wind whipping through trees and hedges and blowing thick sheets of rain in winding and billowing waves that he couldn't see but he could feel and hear as he made his way down the three steps to the brick walk that led to the driveway. He went slowly and carefully. He was barefoot and the bottom of his pajamas were soaked instantly. His feet immersed in rainwater puddling on the walk. He stopped to listen and heard nothing but the storm. The highway was almost two miles away, though usually he could hear the soft grumble of an eighteen wheeler rumbling through the country on the way to somewhere else. He couldn't shake the fear, and he was rapidly growing disgusted with himself. He was a thirty nine year old man in the prime of his life. In good physical condition, six foot one and strong. And here he was, afraid of nothing but the dark, while his wife lay dead and growing cold. Out loud, he said, and loud, what the hell is wrong with you? And he continued along the brick walk to the driveway, where he found his Honda CRV parked where he always parked it. He opened the door, and the lights didn't go on. He got into the driver's seat, put the key in the ignition, and nothing happened. Except that sense of fear and foreboding came back strong. It occurred to him that he might be dreaming. But if that was the case, he was in big trouble. He would have to be psychotic because he knew what reality felt like and what dream felt like, and this was the feeling of reality. But the total darkness and the flashlight that wouldn't work even with new batteries, and the car that wouldn't start with the lights that wouldn't go on, that he had to admit, that was a lot like a nightmare. And Sarah had fallen over, dead at his touch. He was awake in a nightmare. He said that in his head, and it seemed true. It He found the flashlight in the glove compartment, and it didn't work. He carried it back into the house, took the batteries out and replaced them with the fresh batteries from the mag light, and it still didn't work. He put the flashlight down on the counter and took a seat in a kitchen chair. He told himself to slow down and think. Why wouldn't either of the flashlights work? He decided that all the batteries were dead, as unlikely as that seemed. Or both the bulbs were burned out, as equally unlikely as that seemed. He tried to think. He needed a source of light. On the counter he found his wife's cell phone and hit the side button. Nothing. He tried to dial 9 1 1. Nothing. He picked up the cordless phone. Nothing. This was not easily comprehensible that this was happening, and his thoughts returned for a moment to the possibility that he was dreaming. As absolutely as he knew that he was awake, he still couldn't discount entirely the possibility that this was all a dream, because none of it made any sense. He was tempted to get back into bed and curl up under his sheet and hope to fall asleep so that he could wake up to discover he had indeed been dreaming. Instead, he thought of his iPod and his laptop computer. He felt his way through the dark to his study, where, as he feared, both pieces of equipment were as dead as lumps of rock. He tossed the iPod onto the desk, half in anger and half in disgust. The electricity was out, and all the batteries were dead. How was that possible? The iPod was working fine before he went to bed. It was fully charged. He and Sarah had listened to Pablo Casals, his choice, and Nora Jones, her choice. They had stretched out on the big living room couch, wrapped up in each other, her head on his chest, his arms around her, and listened to music sleepily. Sarah had at one point kissed him on the chin. And he could still feel it, as he sat in the dark of his study and tried to reason things out. Her lips on his chin, warm and a little wet. He recalled that the weather was nice that evening, no hint of a storm, and no mention of bad weather on the news. Did that mean something? Was that a piece of the puzzle? What would kill all the batteries from the car, to the laptop, to the iPod, to an unopened package of D cell batteries? He thought maybe an electrical surge of some sort, but neither the iPod nor the laptop were connected to anything in any way. It wouldn't explain the flashlight batteries. He considered the possibility of a series of coincidences, that all the batteries in the house just happened to be dead at the same time the car battery was dead. Or something else was wrong with the car's electrical system at the same time that the iPod and the laptop battery died. He considered it and ruled it out as nearly impossible. Something must have happened that fried everything electrical, even devices and batteries not connected to the electrical grid. And that chain of thinking brought him around to thoughts of a nuclear explosion or a sun flare. Or some kind of natural electrical phenomenon. What that last thing might be was a mystery. But he had read about sun flares creating electrical disturbances, and he had read that a nuclear bomb would fry everything electrical within a certain radius of the explosion. Severn tried to work his thoughts around the three improbable scenarios that might explain what was going on. And the possibility of a nuclear explosion began to loom over the other choices. Even while, at the very same time, he found the idea absurd. His thoughts went like this. Sarah was awake. The explosion was someplace distant, say, Roanoke, fifty miles away, but close enough to rock the house. That would be the lurch he felt in his sleep. Sarah, seeing the flash and feeling the explosion, knew what happened. and it frightened her so badly she had a heart attack. Could the rain be some kind of fallout? Or the rain and the storm was a coincidence? It was impossible. A nuclear explosion in Roanoke, Virginia? Terrorism in Roanoke? A nuclear war, again, bomb Roanoke? It was so improbable as to be impossible. But it was a theory that fit the evidence. Severn could not, however, actually believe it. He stood up in his study and walked in a small circle, straining for some other explanation, and then the idea of a meteor strike came to him. And crazy as the idea seemed, it suddenly felt like the best theory he'd come up with. Might a meteor strike have the same effect on electrical devices as a nuclear explosion? He seemed to remember reading something like that somewhere. Out loud and in his study, he said, My God. And he seriously entertained the possibility that a meteor had crashed into southwest Virginia. If that were the case, if a meteor had struck the earth somewhere nearby, or relatively nearby, would the rain be full of debris? Full of pulverized earth? Would the sky be black with ash and dirt? With the thought of that, the sky black with ash, a kind of numbness descended on Severn as he accepted the meteor strike as a possibility. The storm could be some kind of freak weather event associated with the strike. The utter blackness of the night might be more than thick clouds, it might be ash and debris. The fear Severn felt at that moment, at the moment he truly entertained the possibility of a meteor strike, made his knees suddenly go watery. He told himself that the meteor strike was a crazy theory, that there could be other explanations. He tried to come up with a course of action, and the simplest one was to drive to town. If there was something huge going on, he'd find out soon enough. If there was some other explanation, he'd find that out too. After thinking things through as best he could, Severn settled on trying to jumpstart the CRV. He guessed he'd know very quickly whether his theory was hysteria, perhaps as soon as the car started and he could turn on the radio and the lights. On his way to the bedroom, he had to stop a moment in the study doorway. The possibility occurred to him suddenly that he was blind. His heart jumped at the thought of it. Somehow, he knew he wasn't blind. It was a stormy night, and without any of the usual electronic devices emitting light, with no stars or moon, with a thick layer of clouds, there was no light and he couldn't see. He knew he wasn't blind in the same way that he knew he was awake and not dreaming. He didn't think. There was a texture to things, a deep sense. There was a texture to reality and waking, and he felt it. There was a texture to sight, even when all you were seeing was darkness. He knew he wasn't blind, in precisely the same way he knew he wasn't dreaming. But the thing was, that he couldn't be sure. How could he know for certain that this wasn't a dream? How could he know that he wasn't blind, given that he couldn't see a thing? He told himself to follow through on his plan, to get the car started and drive to town. In the bedroom he found Sarah and he lifted her onto the sheets. As best he could, he straightened the blankets around her. He put a pillow under her head. He found her lips with his finger and kissed her. He righted her night table, for he went to his own, and found the key to the gun box. On the top shelf in the closet, he found his gun. There were two ammunition clips in the box. He slipped one into the gun, and put the other down on the foot of the bed. He went to his dresser, pulled on pants and a shirt, socks and shoes, and then put the second clip in his pocket. He checked the gun's safety with his thumb before tucking it down in the back of his pants. What else should he take? His wallet. He found it on the night table and put it in his back pocket. He crawled on the bed to kiss Sarah one more time, and then he lay down beside her. He was afraid to go out to the car. He was afraid to go outside, and he lay there beside Sarah. until he finally gathered himself together and pulled himself up and out of the bed. In the kitchen, he found his raincoat, shook the wetness from it, and then laughed at himself for the stupidity of that. Outside, the rain was, if anything, coming down harder. At the door, he hesitated. He had no idea of the time. He had gone to bed with Isara around ten o'clock, and he'd have guessed. that he had been sleeping for a good while, but he couldn't be sure about that. He didn't feel tired, but that didn't mean anything either. He was confused by the resistance he felt to opening the front door and stepping out into the rain. It was almost as if something was holding him back. There was one force, and that was the force of all the questions building and the way they were frightening him. And that force urged him to go out to the driveway and try to roll start the CRV, because he knew that if he could accomplish that, many of his questions would be quickly answered. And there was another force, like an unseen hand around his heart, squeezing and trying to pull him back into the bed, under the covers, to sleep. There was no question though, not really, he knew what he had to do. He pulled himself free from that unseen hand and went out into the night. His house was at the bottom of Pearl Mountain. In a hard rain like this, the roads turned into waterways. And that was what he heard as soon as he was out the door. Water running like a river down the roadway. That would make things a little trickier. From his driveway, the road sloped down in an almost straight line before it turned gently to the right and intersected a half mile further on with a wider, better paved road, which in turn ambled a long, winding distance, little more than two miles, to the highway. The brick path to the driveway was flooded, and water followed the path down the driveway and out to the road. Severn's pants, where the raincoat ended at his knees, were soaked almost the moment he stepped out the door, and by the time he reached the driveway, he could feel water soaking through the leather of his shoes. The driveway itself was a small tributary feeding the road. And he could tell all this from the sound of the rain splashing around him, and the accumulation of it spilling down the hill. He still couldn't see a blessed thing. When the bricks stopped and blacktop started, he knew he was at the driveway. He walked with his hands stretched out in front of him. When he was expecting to touch the car soon, he removed the keys from the pocket of his raincoat. Behind him, he heard something running across the sodden lawn. And he had time only to spin in the direction of the sound before it was on him, slamming into him, knocking him onto his back, the keys flying out of his hand. He made some kind of animal noises, Severn did, grunting noises of alarm and fear. He tried to protect himself, his hands flailing at the darkness. Then the creature that had knocked him down backed off and barked. Severn understood that this was a dog, and he understood, again, he couldn't say how he understood. It was likely something in the sound of the bark. He understood that the dog meant him no harm. A moment later, the dog jumped up on him again, this time licking his face and trying to nuzzle into his chest. He patted the dog's back and said, Alright, hold on. And it backed away, given Severn room, as if it understood what was being asked of it. Now we're in trouble, he said, meaning the keys were lost. And he realized he was instantly talking to this dog as if it were a human and an old friend. Something about the dog running at him and then slamming into him had pushed Severn around the corner. The fear was gone. Maybe that's too extreme to say that he wasn't afraid. It was more like this, the terrible sense of foreboding, the sense of something ominous and frightening that had Severn in its grip from the moment he opened his eyes that night. That was what disappeared once the big dog came at him and knocked him down and licked his face. Where are the keys, he said, and curled on all fours in the direction where the keys had been knocked out of his hand. The big dog came close alongside him and sniffed the ground, as if he were helping look for the keys. Where are the keys? Severn kept saying, as if the dog might find them for him. And the dog sniffed the ground as if it understood and was doing its best. When Severn found them, his fingers coming down first on the metal ring of keys before clutching them in his hand, the dog barked and Severn jumped to his feet. When he opened the car door, the dog leapt into the passenger seat. It was a relief to be out of the rain. Severn said, You alright, boy? And he reached across the darkness to pet the dog's head. The dog responded by licking his face. And when Severn said, Okay, enough, it backed off immediately. He put the key in the ignition and turned it, hoping something might have changed since the last attempt, but nothing had. He left the key in the on position, released the handbrake, and used the foot brake to slowly roll the car down the driveway. He was quiet, trying to sense a straight line. Without the power steering, he had to muscle the wheel for the smallest correction. He let the car build up a little speed, and at the bottom of the driveway, when he felt the smooth surface of the blacktop give way to the rough asphalt of the roadway, he yanked hard to the right on the steering wheel. And the CRV went a few feet backwards up the hill before coming to a stop and beginning to roll down the hill. Besides Severn, the dog was quiet, though its breathing was audible. Severn pulled the steering wheel slightly to the left to bring the car out to the center of the road, and then did his best to straighten it out. It was frightening being in a car rolling down a hill in utter darkness. He put it in second gear and waited as long as he could bear before popping the clutch. When he did, the engine turned over, but it didn't start. The hill was steep enough, and the car had enough momentum to keep it going, and thus to keep the engine turning over, but it didn't start. You could jump start a car, he thought, without any battery at all. So what was the story? The car was rolling, the engine was turning over, but it wasn't starting. He pumped the gas pedal once, and then the car went off the road. Before Severn could manage a correction in the steering, he hit something solid, most likely a tree. His head went into the windshield hard, and he might have lost consciousness. He remembered the impact, and then the next thing he remembered was the big dog licking his face, and then the taste of blood in his mouth and the feel of it warm and trickling down from his forehead. Bust, he said, not knowing what he meant. He unzipped and took off his raincoat, tore a sleeve off his shirt, and wrapped it around his forehead like a bandana. The cut didn't feel like much. He had run his fingers over it, and it felt more like a scratch than anything worrisome. He put the raincoat back on and tried to get out of the car, but his door was jammed against something. He reached across the dog and the passenger seat, threw the door open, and the dog jumped out as Severn climbed over the console and followed. He walked along the edge of the road in the dark, feeling with his feet where the line of pavement met the weedy shoulder. The dog walked beside him, occasionally bumping into his leg as if to reassure Severn of his presence. Houses weren't close together on this road. But he shouldn't have had to walk too far before coming to a driveway, wherever he was, whichever house. He was going to bang on the door till someone answered. He knew most of the people on his road anyway, and he guessed from the distance he had rolled and from the tree he hit, he was assuming it was a tree. He guessed he'd come up soon on Hank Epperson's place. Hank was a wine importer, and his house was a big old Victorian. He lived there with his wife and four daughters, the oldest of whom was about to start school at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Hank and his wife were taking her there for a visit this weekend, but the other three daughters should be home. He didn't see how he could have rolled past Hank's place. He hadn't gone that far. Severn reached down to pat the dog alongside him. In the back of his mind, he was thinking about Sarah. He wasn't letting himself think about the meteor strike theory, it was too crazy, and it wasn't worth thinking about because he'd know what was going on as soon as he could get out of the suffocating darkness and make contact with someone other than a dog. He couldn't trust his thoughts. Sarah was dead, and everything was crazy. He needed to stay calm and keep pushing. Till he got out of the darkness. He was glad this dog had found him. And as soon as that thought crossed his mind, the dog growled, low and ominous, and then took a quick step in front of Severn, as if to block his way. What, Severn said, what is it? The words weren't out of his mouth before he heard someone laughing softly in the near distance, maybe twenty feet away. Not much more than that. Severn yelled, Who is that? He tried to sound aggressive and unafraid, and thought he was managing it pretty well. But whoever was laughing just kept at it, softly. The laughter was crazy, a little maniacal, like a madman laughing in his cell. What is this? Severn shouted. Who are you? The laughter stopped. And there was a sound of rustling, and then something whizzed past his head and crashed into the road behind him. Instead of laughter now, he heard a kind of muted growling, a strangled, furious moan. What the hell are you doing? Severn yelled. And before he could get another sentence out, the big dog barked and ran toward whomever it was who had just thrown something at them. Boy, Severn yelled, boy, but the dog was out in front of him, snarling and barking. And then, whoever he was barking at ran off, across a soaked field. Severn could hear the retreating footsteps clearly, and the dog at his heels. And he listened to them recede into the darkness and distance, until he was alone again, and the barking stopped. He crouched down in the road. A shallow river of water rushed past his feet. The only sounds were the driving rain and water as it sluiced down the mountain. He put his fingers in the water and then touched them to his lips. No taste, only water. No grit, no dirt. If there were ashes or dirt in the water, he couldn't feel or taste them. He looked up to the sky, where he saw nothing, no different than looking behind him, or down, or to the side. It was all black, and nothing, and rain so intense, he might have been standing under a showerhead, every drop fat and cold, and like a little bucket of water, all on its own. He pulled the makeshift bandana off his forehead, and let rain wash over his wound. Like running a stream of water over a cut. He touched the sore spot with his fingertips. It didn't hurt much. He couldn't feel anything more than a welt and some raised skin. He took off his raincoat and tossed it behind him. It was useless. He was soaked through under it. Severn had never experienced a rain like this one. He knew that the stream at the end of the road would be flooded. It had to be. The road itself was a stream, and the stream would be a little river by now. He waited and listened, and then, as he hoped, he heard the sound of the big dog barreling toward him, and he braced himself. Okay, boy, he said, thinking he might help pinpoint his location, because he couldn't believe even a dog could see in this darkness. And he must have been operating on smell and sound. When the lab jumped up on him, he was ready, but still knocked backwards a few steps. He patted his head and said, Good dog, good boy. And then he pushed down and started out again, following the pavement toward the Ebersons. Who was that, he said, as if the dog might answer. The lab followed along beside him. Bumping into his leg every now and then. Severn thought he heard something out in the fields, and he stopped to listen. When the dog stopped with him, but made no sound, he decided it was nothing and moved on. He felt the beginnings of panic in his belly, and he fought it. You need a name, he said to the dog. What's your name? He stopped and bent to the dog, feeling his collar. Thinking he might have a tag with a name attached to it. How about Sage, he said, when he found no collar. He patted the dog's head. I used to have a Weimaraner named Sage. How about Sage the Second? Then he added, as if the dog had rejected, the added Roman numeral. Just Sage? OK, fine, he said. Sage. Under his feet, he felt the end of the weeds and the beginning of what he had to assume was Hank Epperson's driveway. Here we are, he said, and started up the drive. He walked with slow, careful strides, half walking and half feeling his way. After a few feet, his calf touched the bumper of a car. He reached for the car and used it as a guide. sliding his hands along the trunk and the back doors and windows and then the hood. When he passed that car, there was another one in front of it, and then another in front of that one. He slid around one of the cars, and as he had guessed, there was another alongside it. If he could see a blessed thing, he was sure he'd be seeing the driveway packed with cars, which meant the Epperson girls were having a party while their parents were away. And as soon as that thought entered Severn's consciousness, it was followed by an awareness of the silence coming from the house, and the sense of panic roiled and threatened to explode. He knelt to the dog and patted its head, and he stayed there like that, quiet, the two of them soaked in a drenching rain, until he felt sure he had stilled the panic. He made his way to the front of the house and followed along the walls to a bay window that showed no light coming from within the house, to a door which was unlocked. He opened the door and stepped into a still living room. When he closed the door behind him and Sage, the silence was striking. He hadn't realized how loud the rain had been until the sound of it was muted. Sage shook the rain off his coat. and then sat alongside Severn, pressed up against him so close he was partly sitting on his foot. The room smelled of beer and cigarettes, as if a party had just ended, and no one had cleaned up yet. Severn considered calling out for the girls, but that intensely gripping sense of foreboding was on him again, and he seemed unable to manage anything more than standing silently in the dark As if he was waiting for something. He knew the girls names. They were all named for flowers. The oldest, Daisy, was the one starting college who would be off in Charlottesville now with her parents. The two older teens, 16 and 15, were Iris and Rose. The youngest, a 13 year old, was Violet, though she hated her name and insisted on being called Vi. He knelt to sage and patted his shoulders and chest. The dog's body was muscular and sleek. He found the light switch on the wall and flicked it up and down, knowing that the electric was out and that nothing would happen, but doing it anyway. Then he gathered up his courage and began feeling his way through the room. When his foot hit what he imagined was a coffee table, he knelt to it and felt around on the surface. The first thing he touched was a beer bottle, and then next to it, what felt like a pack of cigarettes, which he lifted and squeezed because something solid was jammed into the pack. His heart beat hard with excitement when he understood that it was a butane cigarette lighter. He pulled it from the pack, held it out in front of him, spun the little wheel, held down the lever, and it burst into flame. Illuminating a living room filled with scores of dead bodies, all young, all kids. They lay scattered throughout the room, tumbled over each other, on chairs and couches, all over the floor, looking as if they had been hit by a bolt of lightning and fallen where they stood, their arms bent awkwardly, their eyes open, all their eyes open. Severn let the flame go out, clutched the lighter to his chest, and concentrated on his breathing, which had gone instantly shallow and rapid. When he tried to control his breathing, it turned ragged and loud, like someone recovering from a hysterical crying jag. And then he thought he might be unable to breathe right, because he couldn't seem to get enough air, couldn't seem to manage a deep enough breath. In his mind, he shouted, Panic, panic, you're panicking. As he grew progressively more light headed. He feared that he might pass out. But then Sage was up on him, nuzzling into him, licking his face. And he grabbed the dog by the neck and pushed it down. His breathing got better, and he was able to take deep breaths. When he was sure he wouldn't faint, he flicked the lighter again, and knelt to the nearest body, which was at his feet. He had been a footstep away from tripping over her, a girl in a short black skirt that was thrown up now to her waist, revealing skimpy red panties. He pulled down the skirt as if to protect her modesty. He touched her neck and found that her body was still warm. When the wheel of the lighter grew uncomfortably hot, he extinguished the flame and sat back on his heels. What, what, what, he said aloud and then something, something, something must have happened, something to kill some people and not others because he was still there, he was still alive, what? He tossed the meteor strike theory. Every young person in a room doesn't suddenly fall dead with a heart attack because they've heard or seen an explosion. He flicked the lighter again and looked around the room, and this time noticed an arrangement of three fat square candles on a shelf in a bay window. He stepped over the bodies and lit the candles, and then turned around with the tallest candle in his hand and found himself facing a scene out of a horror movie, a room full of dead bodies in flickering candlelight. My God, he said in a whisper, talking to himself. He counted 22 bodies. They looked like they ranged in age from 14 or 15 to 16 or 17. Kids. A room full of dead kids. Sage sat quietly between a pair of girls and watched Severn as if waiting to be told what to do. Severn negotiated his way around the bodies. moving toward a dark corridor that led to the bedrooms. He didn't know what he was doing. He was looking around, looking through the house. He didn't know why. It seemed to Severn at this point that probably the only reasonable thing to do would be go back to his house and wait for daylight. Something huge and mystifying had happened. Something cataclysmic. The Angel of Death had appeared to everyone awake at a certain hour and all who saw him perished. Or maybe waking and sleeping had nothing to do with it. Maybe that was the wrong track. Maybe Severn and Sage and Laughing Man had some kind of natural immunity to whatever it was that happened. In the first bedroom, Severn found a couple of teenagers, a boy and a girl, their clothes unbuttoned down to underwear. lying on a neatly made bed. They looked like they had been embracing and had simply fallen away from each other, like a shell split open, the two halves lying side by side. Their eyes, like all the others, were open. He thought about covering them and hesitated until he saw a lightweight blue throw folded over a rocking chair. He tossed it over them and then went back out into the hallway where Sage was waiting. In the next bedroom, a little girl, the youngest, Vi, was in bed with the covers pulled up to her neck. He noticed immediately that her eyes were closed and that she appeared to be sleeping. He stared at her in the candlelight. Before he could think things through, Sage jumped to his feet, springing suddenly to attention, as if he too realized that something was different. He leapt up onto the bed and tried to lick Vi's face, but the girl jumped up instantly, screaming and flailing her arms and legs. Sage retreated to stand beside Severn. Severn himself, out of something like terror at the sudden screaming, had taken a half dozen steps back before he regained his senses and shouted the girl's name with as much authority as he could muster. Vi, he yelled, Vi. He approached the bed. Though she had already jumped out of it and was pressed up into a corner, screaming hysterically, with her eyes squeezed closed. Vy, he said, with the bed between them, open your eyes, please. Vy's screaming turned to a whimpering sob, and then, as if she had to screw up every last inch of her courage to do it, she opened her eyes. It's me, Severn said. You know who I am. Vy nodded. but didn't move out of the corner until Sage went to her and pressed his head against her belly as if begging for a pat on the head. As best she could through her sobs, Vyse said, What happened? She touched Sage and then knelt beside him. Everybody's dead, she sobbed. I saw them all. They're all dead. Severn took a seat on the edge of the mattress. You were out there. You saw them. Something woke me up, she said, crying as much as talking. And then I called and called and nobody answered. And then the electricity was out, so I lit a candle and went out into the hall, and then they were all dead. Everybody. She put her arm around Sage. Iris and Rose are out there, she said, a terrible sadness suddenly in her voice. I know, Severn said, I'm sorry. I'm sorry, Vi. My wife, Sarah, she's gone too. What happened, Vi asked, and she looked at Severn as if he would be able to explain things. I don't know, he said. I can't figure it out. I mean, he added, I'm trying, Vi, but so far nothing makes sense. I thought somebody might have killed them all, she said. That's why I pretended to be dead too when I heard you coming. You heard me? You were downstairs? Vi nodded. I came up here and pretended. Tell me what happened. Severn put the candle down on a night table and touched the center of the bed, meaning she could come closer to him. She didn't move, though, until Sage pulled away from her and jumped up on the bed. Then she followed and sat alongside the big dog, whom Severn noticed was not a he at all, but a she. The end. Vi put her arm around the dog's neck. My mom and dad are in Charlottesville with Daisy, she said. The phones aren't working. I know. Your dad told me he'd be going this weekend. Do you think they're okay, she asked. Is there some way we can reach them? Tell me what happened, Vi. Help me try to understand this. I told you, she said. I woke up and found everybody dead. You woke up. Do you remember? She nodded. It was like my whole body jerked. Like I'd been yanked or something. Like sometimes when you're falling asleep, she said, only it woke me up. I was wide awake. Then what? Severn asked. Then what I just told you. Severn reached across the bed to pat Siege's head, and he let his hand fall over Vyse and rest there. He looked around the room, taking in the scene as if searching for clues. Her walls were a flickering blue in the candlelight, decorated with sports posters, including a group picture of a woman's basketball team, signed by a dozen or so players and coaches. There were none of the posters or frills Severn might have expected in a 13 year old girl's room. Instead, there was a baseball bat and a glove with a hardball in the pocket. A soccer ball, a basketball, and a lacrosse stick were arranged neatly in a corner. The only thing the least bit girly in the entire space was a line of Nancy Drew mystery books on a small roll top desk beneath the room's only window. Severn was trying to think of something to say. When the rain stopped so suddenly and completely, it was as if someone had turned off a spade. Sage stood up on the bed and said, And Vi's eyes went to the window. Severn looked at the ceiling as if he might be able to see through it and out to the sky above. Vi said, it's kind of even scarier now. Severn squeezed her hand and when he got up from the bed, both Vi and Sage left off the bed to follow him. At the window, he said, it's still too dark to see anything. And when he turned around, he found Sage and Vi looking up at him in the candlelight. Sage, a black lab with soulful eyes, was almost half Vi's height. The dog's shoulders came up to her thighs. Vi, a thin girl with a shock of bright blonde hair, cut boyishly short, had her arm around Sage's neck. She was wearing white cotton pajamas, and they were soaked through in places where she had hugged Sage. Together, they looked like a Norman Rockwell print. Only they were surrounded by a horror unlike anything Rockwell ever painted. Vi said, Was that a gun? She pointed to Severn's waist. Under your shirt? Severn carefully pulled the handgun out of the back of his pants and held it dangling in front of him. It's wet, he said. I don't even know if it'll still fire. Vi went to her bed, pulled off a pillowcase and tossed it to Severn. You should dry it off, she said. When Severn asked why, she said, in case you need to use it. Severn went about drying off the gun with the pillowcase. Vi, he said, whatever happened, it wasn't a person or people that did it. He sat on the bed again, ejected the clip, and dried it, even though it wasn't wet. I don't think we're in any danger that way, he said. And then he added, though he wasn't sure about this at all. In fact, he said, I think the danger is probably over. Whatever it was that happened, it already happened. Anyway, Vi said, you should dry it off good. Okay. Severn continued rubbing the surface of the gun. He even twisted the pillowcase and shoved it as far as he could into the barrel. What's her name? Vi asked. And she knelt beside the big lab and combed her fingers through the matted and wet hair at its neck. I'm calling her Sage. Severn held the gun up to inspect it. There, he said, all dry. He started to put it behind his back again. Don't, Vi said. She found a red t shirt in a dresser drawer and handed it to Severn. Wrap it in this, she said, to keep it dry. Severn wrapped the gun and second clip neatly in the t shirt. He said, I'm sure it will work now if we need it. He added, But I'm also pretty confident, Vi, that we're not going to need it. Still, Vi said, and she looked up at Severn as if waiting to be told what to do next. Severn wedged the gun in the back of his pants and went to the window hoping to see something different, hoping now the rain had stopped that the clouds might be breaking and a little starlight or moonlight might shine through. But all he saw was his own flickering reflection in the candlelight. He was a big man, but he looked even bigger next to Vi. His reflection loomed over her and Sage as they stood side by side behind him, watching and waiting. We should probably go back to my house and wait for daylight, he said, as he turned to face Vi. But we could also walk into town. It's only a few miles. We might learn more about what's going on. Town, Vi said, without hesitating. Maybe the phones are working there. Severn very much wanted to go into town. And were he still alone, there would be no question. But he thought better of it. Of going to town with Vi in tow. Actually, he said, let's see what it's like out there. If it seems dangerous, we should wait for morning. I have a lot of friends in town, Vi said. My best friend, Nate, lives right near the campus on Waverly. Do you know where that is? Sure, Severn said. But the stream is probably flooded. We don't want to cross a flooded stream in the dark. You think the bridge is underwater? Yes, I think it probably is. Let's at least walk down and see, please? All right, Severn said. Sure. Wait outside the door, okay? Severn was confused until Vi went about quickly grabbing up a pair of jeans and sneakers, and he realized, of course, that she meant to change out of her pajamas. I'll be right outside the door. When Sage started to follow Severn, Vi called to her, and then took hold of her by the neck. She struggled to budge the dog, who looked torn between following Severn and staying behind with Vi. Severn pointed to Sage and then said, Stay. Sage sat down, obediently. If I said, leave the door open a little, please. Severn placed the candle on the floor next to vie. He went out into the hall and closed the door halfway. Don't go away from the door, she called. Okay. Okay, severance said, and he leaned against the doorframe in the dark alone for a moment. With the sounds of Vi hurriedly dressing on the other side of the door, Severn struggled again to make sense of what was happening. The evidence suggests that an event of some kind that fried everything electrical and killed everyone who was awake. The mystery was, how did those two things connect? He didn't know a lot about biology. His undergraduate degree was in English, and he had been working for the last 15 years in university administration. But he was pretty sure that the human body's central nervous system functioned via a combination of electrical and chemical processes. So if some cosmic event had happened that somehow interfered with electrical functioning, could that be fatal to humans? It seemed like a possible theory. But how could being asleep protect someone? Vy flung open the door and came out into the hall carrying the candle in one hand and a baseball bat in the other. The bat was flung over her shoulder, and she had on good hiking boots and jeans under a long yellow rain slicker. Severn considered explaining again the unlikeliness of any person or persons being responsible for her sister's deaths, but then decided that if the baseball bat made her feel safer, fine. He thought about the bodies in the living room and having to walk through them again on their way out. He said, let's use the back door. And he took the candle from her. Wait, he said, once they started down the hall. I should go get the other candles from the living room. I'll get it, Vi almost shouted, as if she thought Severn meant for her to wait alone. She darted into her room and was back in a second with a tall white candle, fat and round. Should I light it? No need to, Severn said, and he touched her shoulder. She leaned toward him a little, as if she might hug him. But then she quickly backed away again. It's this way, she said, and she took Severn by the arm and led him to a door that went down a flight of stairs to the basement. At the head of the stairs, she waited for Severn to go first. He took a single step around her before Sage bolted between the two of them and scurried ahead into the darkness. In the candlelight, Severn watched as Sage sniffed at the foot of the stairs. The basement was finished with wood paneling on the walls and dark carpeting. Severn took a few steps down the stairs. The candlelight pushing ahead of him dimly illumined a pool table to the left with a girl's body slumped over it. He touched Fai, meaning she should wait. He thrust the candle in front of him and saw more bodies, boys and girls, scattered on the floor around the pool table. He turned to Vi and said, There are more dead down here. If you want to close your eyes, why, Vi said, I already saw everything upstairs. She added, as if angry at the dead, they weren't supposed to come down here. She had tucked her candle into her jeans and was holding the bat over her shoulder as if ready to take a swing. Severn thought again to explain that she wasn't likely to need the bat, and again thought better of it. Sage came around to the front of the stairs, looked up at Severn and Vi, and barked as if confused by what was keeping them. Severn reached behind him and put his arm around Vi's waist to guide her down the stairs. The smell of alcohol was particularly thick in the basement. As he stepped onto the carpeting and looked around him one more time in the candlelight, he saw why. The carpet was puddled with dark stains where beer bottles and tumblers of whiskey had spilled from the hands of the partiers. In the back of the room, a dozen bodies, mostly girls, lay at the foot of a small bar. A pair of bar stools tumbled on top of them. A fifth of vodka lay on its side, a little beyond the bodies. Its contents spilled out in a stain on the carpet, like a thought bubble emanating from the mouth of the bottle. Alongside Severn, Vi made a deep, grief stricken sound, and then put an arm over her eyes and sobbed. She was looking at the body of a boy stretched out on the floor. His face turned to the wall. In the middle of the room. His jeans were pulled down to mid thigh, exposing a pair of boxer shorts. His hands were clenched at his side, as if he might be ready for a fight. Who is he? Severn asked. Tommy Riggs, she said. My cousin. He was visiting from New York. She paused and added, almost in a whisper, He's really nice. After another second, she said, Was. Severn directed her toward the door, where Sage was sitting and looking back at them, waiting. Outside, the rain had slowed to a drizzle, and though it wasn't raining crazy hard as it was before, it was still too much for the candle's little flame, which was extinguished immediately. Fai said, I can see a little bit, it's not that bad. Fade out. While Severn couldn't make out the details, he could discern shapes and variations in the darkness. The black of the clouds slightly different from the black of the sky beneath the clouds. The black of the sky slightly different from the black of the trees. It was still windy. Leaves rustled in trees as the wind blew through hedges. The various sounds of the wind through and against things helped define the surrounding darkness. Severn bent to pat Siege's head. All right, he said to Vi. Stay close to me. I'll be right behind you, Vi said. Severn moved cautiously along the walkway in front of the house, toward the garage and the line of cars, and by the time he reached the end of the driveway, he could make out the road and the woods on both sides of it. They were a couple of miles from an old four lane highway still used by lots of truckers. Severn hadn't heard the low rumbling roar of a truck from the highway since he'd awakened a couple of hours earlier. And that was another bad sign. Even miles away, he'd expect to hear the growl of a big rig's monster engine screaming through its gears every once in a while. Bye. Who had been walking practically on Severn's heels, apparently decided that she wanted to be closer, and she came up alongside him. You think Daisy and my parents are okay? She asked. Without waiting for an answer, she said, They're going to be so heartbroken. Severn said, A lot of people are going to be heartbroken, Vi. Even if whatever happened, whatever happened to your sisters and her friends and my wife, even if it only happened here. Only in our two houses, there are still going to be a lot of people heartbroken. What are the chances of that, Vi asked, that it only happened here, only our two houses? Severn thought of the quiet on the highway and the laughing man. He said, we'll know soon enough. Right now, it's a mystery. What if we're the only two people left in the world? I rubbed the side of her head with a baseball bat and looked up at Severn. Where they were walking, long, thick branches from a line of big chestnut trees hung over the road, turning it into a tunnel. Wind whistled low and soft through the leaves. We're not, Severn said, and he pointed to Sage, who was several feet in front of them. Sage lived through it, wherever she was. You lived through it in your house. I lived through it in my house. He touched her shoulder. There are lots of people alive, Vi. No matter what it was that happened. They're going to be so heartbroken, Vi said again, obviously meaning Daisy and her parents. Severn reached for Vi's free hand and she let him hold it. They're also going to be thankful that you're alive. That'll be a blessing. Fi was quiet as they walked in silence through the light rain and darkness. Then, as if finally articulating what she had been thinking, she said, I'm sorry about Sarah. She was nice. She let me come over and make cookies with her once, when I was little. I remember that, Severn said. She told me about it. When he thought he heard something in the woods, a branch crackling, something, He slowed a bit and let go of Vi's hand. When he didn't hear it again, he said, picking up the conversation, She liked you. She thought you were smart. I'm the youngest, Vi said. My dad says you've got to be smart when you're the youngest. Severn laughed at that and was amazed that he had laughed. Sarah was dead and he was in the middle of some kind of insanity and he had laughed. Wait, Vi said, and she pointed to Sage, who had stopped suddenly and turned around. The lab was looking off into the trees, and then a low growl came up from her belly as she started back toward Vi and Severn. Sage was maybe five or six feet in front of them. She stopped and barked, and a figure rushed out at her from between the trees. Vi screamed. And ran away into the darkness, and Severn took a step back. The figure fell on Sage, wielding what looked like a length of pipe, and he struck the lab repeatedly with it, in the head and shoulders, until the dog spilled onto its side, motionless in the middle of the road. By the time Severn had gathered his senses enough to reach behind his back for the gun, the figure was almost on him, and he saw that it was a burly, gray haired man with a beard. Severn hadn't even gotten the gun out of his pants when the first blow hit him, glancing off the side of his head. It must have been a lead pipe the man was wielding, because the blow was only glancing. And still it was enough to bring Severn to his knees, and then over backward onto the road. He saw a bright fireworks of light sparkle in front of his eyes, and then the figure leaning over him, cocking his arm, aiming the pipe for another blow to the head. Severn understood that he was about to die. The first blow had addled his senses. His stomach churned with nausea, and he was on the edge of losing consciousness. Now there was going to be a second blow, and it wasn't going to be glancing. He seemed to be drifting off into someplace dreamy, and he imagined his head splitting open like a rotten pumpkin, and all his history spilling out onto the road. All his years with Sarah, and all the years before that as a child, a boy, and a young man. He started to say something, and the word that formed on his lips was Vi. And then Vi was there behind the figure, and she swung her bat at the man's head as if it were a fat softball gliding in over the center of the plate. The man, screaming curses, was knocked sideways to the ground. Severn found that he couldn't move. He wanted to move when he saw the man regain his balance, but nothing happened. The figure leapt at Vi and punched her viciously in the face. Her head jerked backward and her body followed, and she slid along the wet pavement, her arms and legs spread eagle. Severn thought to himself, She's dead. He killed her. And then a couple of things happened simultaneously in what couldn't have been more than a second or two. First, the world went black. It was exactly like being in a room at night with no windows when someone turns off the lights. One second you can see, and the next second blackness. Sage lay unmoving in the road. The man punched Vi in the face, knocking her dead or unconscious. And then the lights went out, followed in the next instant by a driving rain and a huge gust of wind. Severn felt the man's hands on his legs, as if he were locating him in the utter dark, and then the man's fists raining blows on him, and then nothing. That was episode one of The Strangers. New episodes will be available twice a week on Mondays and Fridays until the novel is completed. If you want to read ahead, an inexpensive digital edition of The Strangers is available from Amazon, Barnes Noble, and other online bookstores. This podcast is an experiment in alternatives to traditional publishing. If you'd like to support it, and more like it in the future, please consider becoming a subscriber or supporter. If enough listeners choose to do so, that will go a long way to help ensuring the podcast's success and continuation. In any event, I'm Ed Falco, I wrote The Strangers, And I hope you'll come back for the next episode.