Episode 2 The Strangers

In Episode 1, Severn and Vi had just been attacked after starting for town. When we left them, they’re were both unconscious in the road as a storm hit. That’s were we pick up with Episode 2.

Transcript

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This is Ed Falco on the Air Reading The Strangers a novel in 19 sevens in episode one, Severn and VI had just been attacked after starting for down. When we left them, they were both unconscious in the road as a storm hit. That's where we pick up episode two. When he opened his eyes to the first hint of daylight, Severn knew where he was, though he couldn't make sense of it, and so he lay still and watched the familiar lightening of the sky that was dawn. He was lying behind the busted out window of an empty storefront off Main Street. He knew the store. It was once a used record shop, and then it was a half dozen other things over the years. And for the past several months, it was empty and unrented. A few doors down was Beringer's, a popular college bar. His field of vision took in Main Street and University Avenue and the Price Theater with its 1940s marquee. The rain had stopped. Though there were puddles everywhere and dead people in the streets and on the sidewalks, a dozen or so that he could see. A red pickup truck had smashed into and partly through the plate glass window of a restaurant. Up the block, a small blue car's front end was crumpled against the red brick wall of a main street shop. Dogs were barking. It sounded like several dogs, none nearby. And there was birdsong, what you would expect on a spring morning. Lots of birds squawking. When he noticed movement in the crown of a sidewalk tree, he looked up and saw a pair of squirrels darting along the branches. Except for the dead bodies in the street. It was a pleasant spring morning. Somehow Severn must have known that moving his head was not a good idea, because the first time he tried it, lifting his head slightly to look behind him, into the store, a small explosion of pain detonated and sent shockwaves down his neck and through his arms. He groaned and touched his forehead, which was wrapped in a bandage of some kind. When he looked at his fingers, they were smudged with blood. And, carefully, he moved his head again. And again the pain was intense, a terrible throbbing throughout the back of his head. He was on a makeshift litter, constructed of tree branches and denim jackets and twine. Someone had carried him into town. At that thought, Severn pushed through a flood of pain into a sitting position because it occurred to him that if he had been carried into town, perhaps Avai was here too. Behind him, though, the store was empty except for a dozen backpacks and a couple of duffel bags. It looked like a scout troop on a camping trip had dumped their stuff in the store before taking off somewhere. Severn held his head in his hands and waited for the throbbing to subside. Once again, he was utterly confused. How had he gotten where he was? That was a small confusion within the massive confusion of the event, which was how he had come to think of whatever it was that had happened, leaving dead people around him every time he opened his eyes. He looked again at the backpacks and the duffel bags and replayed the memory of the madman flying at Vi and punching her in the face, and it seemed possible that she was dead. She was a tiny thing, but it didn't seem like a punch, even a vicious punch, would kill her. Severn's mind went to other possibilities. If Vi wasn't dead, where was she? Had the lunatic who had attacked them taken her? At that thought, Severn closed his eyes. He didn't want to go there. He didn't want to think about that. Severn pulled himself to his feet just as a pack of dogs raced past the busted out storefront window. He counted five of them as they flew by in a heartbeat, and all but one of them disappeared in an instant later around the corner. The one that had hung back looked to be a collie mix, and it skidded when it stopped, as if it had only just registered passing a live man in a storefront. It trotted back cautiously towards Severn and then growled at the sight of him. When Severn moved toward it, the dog snarled and lunged, barked a few times, and then turned and ran off to rejoin the pack. There was an odd disconnect between the dog's appearance and its behavior. It looked like a well groomed, cared for pet, and it behaved like a junkyard guard dog. Severn thought the dogs were the only living things he had seen since first opening his eyes, and then he remembered the birds and the squirrels. And that led him to wondering why the streets weren't full of dead animals. Why weren't there dead birds all over the place? Why hadn't he come across a dead cat, a dead squirrel? He tried to think about that, and then simply let it go. Sara was dead, Vi was gone, they were dead everywhere around him, and not a human being or human movement of any kind on a Sunday morning in town. Whatever it was that had happened, I don't know. It was beyond his understanding. He wanted to go home and bury Sarah. Suddenly, that seemed urgent. The backpacks were jammed with the kind of stuff you'd expect to find at a gathering of survivalists. Powdered food, matches, clothes, tools. In one duffel bag, he found tent poles. In another he found rifles. He moved quickly from bag to bag, only glancing at the contents, not knowing what he was looking for. In a little girl's bright pink backpack, with a cartoon girly figure emblazoned on the front of it, he found a family photograph in an outer pocket. It pictured a half dozen smiling adults in the background forming a semicircle around a dozen teenagers, who in turn formed a semicircle around a half dozen little kids, one of whom was a girl of six or seven, dressed all in pink, and wearing the same backpack from which Severn had pulled the picture. He sat motionless on the floor, distilled a throbbing in the back of his head, which was getting to the point of being incapacitating. He had bad headaches before. But nothing near this intense. It occurred to him that in one of these backpacks there had to be medical supplies, including painkillers. And he made himself get up and begin searching through them again. In an outer pocket of a framed pack, Severn found a stash of pamphlets about the rapture and a pair of Bibles. He thought, of course, though living and working in a college town sometimes made him forget it, this was still Bible country. There were a half dozen Bible colleges within a 50 mile radius of his home and a church of this or a church of that around every corner. So, of course, a cataclysmic event happens that leaves masses of people dead and it must be the rapture. Some Christians believed that when Christ returned, the good would be gathered up into heaven and sinners would be left behind to suffer tribulations. At least that was one theory. Or at least his understanding of one theory. He didn't know much about the rapture. But he did know that there were lots of theories. He put the Bibles and the pamphlets on the floor at the foot of the backpack and continued searching. He thought about these people, the family in the picture. Did they think they were sinners who had been left behind? In another pack, Severn found what he was looking for. It was full of nothing but medical supplies, from band aids and gauze to various drugs. He located a container of Percocets, popped two into his mouth, and then closed the backpack and slung it over his shoulder. He went back to the duffel bag with the rifles. When he pulled one free, Yanking on it by the barrel, a smaller bag spilled out with it, and inside that bag he found two handguns, one of them his own, still wrapped in Vi's red t shirt. The rifle was an M1 carbine. He recognized it from his youth, from growing up in Syracuse, New York with a father who was into hunting and guns. He found a dozen clips for the carbine in the bottom of the duffel bag. He popped one into the rifle and slung it over his shoulder. The others he crammed into the backpack with the medical supplies. His handgun still had the clip in it, and he shoved it, again, into the back of his pants. When he raised himself to his feet, the throbbing in his head got so bad, he thought he might black out. He waited for it to pass, Along with the nausea that had come with it, and then he went outside. The weather was beautiful. Puddles here and there along the street were the only remaining signs of the previous night's heavy rain. In the dirt, near the roots of a sidewalk tree, a trio of earthworms slithered through the damp black dirt. Severn ignored the bodies on the street and along the sidewalk. It wasn't that he was consciously not looking at them, it was more like he didn't care. When he recognized that feeling, that he seemed so uninterested in the dead that he couldn't even bother to look at them, he decided it was better not to let himself think about that boy in jeans and a sweatshirt ten feet away from him with his face in a puddle of blood. The kid had probably gashed his head when he hit the sidewalk. Severn looked at him and looked away. The more he looked, the more bodies he saw. There was a clump of bodies in the doorway of Behringer's. They seemed to have fallen out of the bar and tumbled over each other. Beyond those bodies were dozens of bicycles, some chained to a bike rack, most leaning on kickstands or on their sides. Severn started toward Berengers without much sense of where he was going or what he was doing. He had decided to go back home and bury Sarah. And yet he was walking toward the bar, aware of the sound of his own feet scraping along the sidewalk and the so far ceaseless barking of a few dogs somewhere, along with birds chattering in the crowns of sidewalk trees. The air smelled like spring, budding trees and green plants and growing things and recent rain. On the street, there were dead kids and blood and wrecked cars. The front of Beringer's was all plate glass, and Severn saw with a glance that the bar was crammed with bodies. He looked in, and looked away, and then looked again. They weren't all kids. Burringer's was a college bar. It should have been packed with students on a Saturday night, but the bodies in the bar represented a range of ages, from little kids to old folks. Burringer's had two bars, the ground floor bar with the plate glass front windows, the one Severn was observing at that moment, the one packed with bodies. And the cellar bar, with a second entrance around a corner. At the second entrance, the first thing Severn saw was two neat stacks of bodies, maybe a hundred bodies piled up like cordwood, and they were all young, student age. The second thing he saw was the entrance to the cellar bar. The steep stairs leading underground was clotted with bodies, and again, they were the bodies of townspeople, all ages, children to grandparents. Something within Severn's mind stopped working. He stopped trying to make sense of things. What could any of this mean? He seemed, for the moment anyway, not to care. It was all just what it was. The bodies of a hundred students were stacked like cordwood. The bar, upstairs and downstairs, was crammed with the bodies of townspeople. Dozens of bicycles waited outside the bar. When he noticed a flash of bright pink fabric among the jeans and dresses and khakis, he went closer to the bodies in the cellar entrance. They looked like they had all fallen into a hole. Their eyes were open. Pink fabric covered the leg of a little girl. All he could see was one sneakered foot. and a little bit of a branched thin leg. The rest of the child's body was smothered under other bodies. They looked like they were all diving into the ground, flying into the earth. Eyes all open, feet sticking up, legs bent all ways. Severn took the child's sneakered foot by the ankle and yanked her free of the other bodies. And it was her, the girl from the photograph. The girl with the backpack. The same cute, cartoon, girly figure on her pink t shirt as was on the pink backpack. Severn turned away from the bodies. He adjusted the rifle strap on his shoulder and straightened out his backpack. He thought he was about to start for his house, but instead he took a seat on a green park bench bolted to the sidewalk in front of the bar. He had to step over bodies to get to the bench. He sat and looked around again, taking in the streets and the wrecked cars and the bodies scattered everywhere. Part of him was at work trying to make sense of it, while another part of him was settling into a deep. Quiet place, some place within himself, a place that didn't care about the two young men at his feet, or the little girl in pink behind him, or Vi, or even Sarah. Something inside him was settling into a place without feeling, and he could almost sense it physically, a shifting and readjusting, like a house settling. He rested his feet on one of the dead boy's legs. The kid was fat, and when he nudged him his belly shook. Severn was pretty sure at this point that there had been a second event that had killed most of the people whose bodies were all around him. He imagined that there had been the first event that killed Sarah, and the kids at the Epperson's, and many more in town where the bars would have been full of students. The first event happened, and And then eventually others who survived, like him, like Severn, started reacting. One group of survivors cleared the dead kids out of Beringers and stacked them outside, and then used the bar as a gathering place. Another family of survivors packed up their gear and started into town, and picked up Severn along the way. And then there was a second event. And again, everyone who was awake died. And anyone who was unconscious, like Severn, or asleep, survived. If these events happened worldwide. Severn Shikov, trying to think about that, and stepped over the bodies at his feet. He hesitated before he went out to the middle of the street with the carbine and the backpack slung over his shoulder. Far as he could see, up and down Main Street, there were wrecked cars and bodies. On the roof of one car, he noticed a fat white cat lying in sunlight. While he watched, it picked up its head and stirred and then settled down again, lazing on a spring morning. Severn gathered his strength and started yelling. He screamed, Hey, hey, hey, is anyone alive? Is anyone here? He kept up the shouting for several minutes, and when no one answered, he went about riding and mounting one of the bicycles from in front of Beringer's. He took off the backpack with the metal supplies, threaded its carry straps over the handlebars, and biked back along Main Street, past bodies and around wrecked cars, the town silent except for the barking of dogs and the chatter of birds. When he reached the highway, he found what he expected. A couple of big rigs crashed into the trees and three cars, almost evenly spaced along the road, wrecked. One of the cars was nosedown in a ditch, its back wheels up in the air, a woman visible through the driver's door window, her hair dark against the white background of an airbag. He rolled his bike up onto the grass, leaned it against a tree, and walked out onto the roadway. On the ride out of town, he had passed a cluster of houses, fifteen or twenty of them built within the last five years, turning what had been a hilly field into a little community of similar looking homes. Throughout the ride, the only sounds had been the barking of dogs and the occasional chatter of birds, and then, as he was passing that new development, he heard a scream. It came from one of the houses and it sounded like a boy's scream, high pitched, but with something masculine about it. He hadn't stopped. He bicycled past the scream, imagining a kid, a teenager, waking up to find someone he loved dead, slumped over a kitchen table, or sprawled out in a bed with a book in his or her hand, or stretched out in some lazy boy recliner in front of a blank TV. It was still early, he guessed, 5. 30, 6 a. m. Lots of people would be waking soon to find a world utterly changed, utterly different, a world they couldn't have imagined a heartbeat earlier, a heartbeat before they opened their eyes on the unbelievable, and were forced slowly to believe it. There would be lots of screaming, and still he found it hard to believe he hadn't stopped. He thought, I should stop, I should help, but he kept biking past the houses on his way to his own house, where his only thought was that he wanted to bury Sarah. Once the screaming stopped, he heard another sound, like a door slamming, and then nothing, only silence. He stood out in the middle of the road, thinking he might see someone, another survivor, but nothing was moving except the crowns of trees, which swayed a little in a light breeze and made a rustling sound. If the first event had happened at, say, 11pm, the event he had slept through that killed Sarah and the kids at the party, and then there was a space of several hours before the next event, the event he was unconscious for, how many people could he expect to have survived both events? Even if only a handful of people like himself, like Vi, had awakened to discover someone dead, they would have awakened many others, and then the second event would have killed all of them. In towns and near highways, the sounds of car crashes would have awakened many, and they would have awakened many more, and then the second event would have killed them. So how many could Severn expect, like himself, like the screaming boy? How many survivors could he expect? Lots, he thought. Whole families who had gone to bed early on a Saturday night and were sleeping late on a Sunday morning. For the next several hours, he imagined, survivors would be awakening and taking stock. People would gather. They'd organize. Severn imagined all of this while he looked out at the silent road and listened to the breeze and the birds and the dogs barking, only a couple of dogs now, in the distance somewhere. He went back to his bike and then continued out onto the highway, rolling past the wrecked cars and trucks without stopping or even slowing down to check on the dead. near the turnoff to his road. The body of a big woman in blue jeans and a flowery blouse was splayed out on the pavement. A tractor trailer had jackknifed into the trees nearby and its door was ripped open, half off its hinges. Severn imagined the woman had been flung out of that truck and onto the road. Atop the cab of the truck, a trio of turkey vultures perched warily, eyeing the body as Severn approached them on his bike. When he looked more closely at the woman, he saw that her eyes were gone, and he thought feast, a feast for the vultures. and biked past her onto his road. He heard the stream racing, running fast and smooth, and saw the bridge wet but not flooded over. A little beyond the bridge, he came to the body of the lunatic who had attacked him, lying on the blacktop, and Sage's body on her side in the grass off the road. But not Vi. Vi was nowhere to be seen. He got off the bike and looked over the scene carefully, trying to make sense of it. He walked up to his attacker, who lay on his back, a lead pipe on the pavement near his outstretched fingers. His eyes were open. He touched the dead man's body with his foot before he went to sage. The first thing he noticed was that her eyes were closed. And then he saw that she was breathing, her breath slow and shallow. He picked up her head, but she didn't respond. She appeared to be alive, but not conscious. Her head was cut in several places and caked with blood. She wasn't dead. But she wasn't far from it either. Severn left her and went to the spot on the road where he had seen Vi knocked onto her back. The blacktop was still wet. Whatever blood there might have been would have been washed away by the rain. He looked one more time at the madman lying in the road with his eyes open, dead and cold and unmoving. He tugged thoughtlessly at the strap of the carbine slung over his shoulder. He left his bike where it lay and started for the Epperson house. The driveway was crowded with cars. Morning light, soft over an array of bright colors, including a fire engine red Mustang convertible at its top down. The interior soaked and puddled with rainwater. Severn touched the beaded water on the Mustang's trunk as he studied the interior. The way the drink holders were full of rainwater and the carpeting was saturated. The car was new. The owner might have been drunk enough to forget that the top was down, but that didn't seem likely. Severn thought back to the attack by the lunatic and he remembered that a driving rain had followed the blackness by seconds. He imagined the party going on. Kids jammed into the living room, dancing and talking, more kids downstairs, drinking at the bar, a couple in one of the bedrooms, taking off each other's clothes. Suddenly it goes dark. They must have thought the electricity had gone out. Maybe a fuse had blown. They would have laughed. They would have been drunk and shouting. Then the rain, and then something else. And they all fall over dead. Before the kid who owns the Mustang has a chance to worry about putting the top up, he's dead. And down the road, Sarah's dead too. Severn would have been sleeping. And then he awoke to the world the way it was now. Full of the dead, and barking dogs, and vultures about to feast. He went around the house to the backyard and his heart jumped at the sight of a blood smudge on the basement door. In the house, he found more smudges of blood on the basement stairs and banister, and before he reached the top of the stairs, he was shouting Vi's name, and when he reached her bedroom, she was there. Backed up against the wall, clutching her bat and looking terrified. Her right eye was swollen shut and shining blue black. Her face was swollen and a thick cloud of blood distorted her bottom lip. Severn watched her shivering with fear, pressed up against the wall. Part of him was heartbroken at the sight of her battered face and part of him wanted to break down and cry at finding her alive. And another part of him felt like a black boulder, something unfeeling and ancient. He wanted to embrace Vi. But he listened instead to a cold voice whispering that nothing mattered anymore. In a short while they'd both be dead. He leaned the carbine against her dresser. A whimper issued from Vi's cracked lips. I don't know if you're even real, she said. Her voice was shaking, as was her whole body. I don't know what to think. I don't know what's happening. I left you dead out there. Severn took a cautious step toward her bed and said, I'm real, Vi. What happened, she pleaded. I'm dead. I woke up in the rain and you were dead and that man was dead and sage. She lowered her head as if she couldn't go on and dropped the bat. She leaned forward, broke into a child's sobbing cry, and looked as though she were about to collapse to the floor before Severn caught her in his arms. I don't know what's happening, he said. He picked her up and laid her down on the bed. He touched her forehead gently and dried her eyes with the corner of a sheet. Vi lifted her head slightly and looked around the room. It's light out, she said, as if it were just registering with her that it was morning. It's been light out for a while, Severn said. I must have been sleeping. I must have fallen asleep. Since when, Severn asked. Do you remember? Vi said, I thought you were dead. I could hardly see. It was still dark. Out on the road, Severn said, but not blinding dark. Not the kind of dark where you can't see your hand in front of your face. Not like the advice said, but dark. Was it still raining? Vi nodded. Driving rain or not that hard? Not that hard, Vi said. Just dark and raining. I could see you lying there and that guy lying right next to you. What did you do after that? After you thought I was dead. I came back here. I sat on my bed. I didn't know what else to do. That was smart, coming back here, Severn said. He touched her shoulder. He said, I see you brought your bat with you. Vi thought about that and said, Lucky for you, I brought it with me the first time. Severn nodded, though he wasn't at all sure at this point how lucky it was. You should see your face, he said. You look like you got hit by a truck. Me? Vi wiped tears away from her eyes. Have you looked at yourself? Severn glanced around the room and found a hand mirror on Vi's dresser. He looked at himself standing in the daylight in front of the bedroom window. My God, he said, no wonder I scared you. From his chin to his forehead, his skin was a dozen shades of bruised blue. His hair was matted with blood, and dried blood stained his face and neck and clothes. We're a pair, he said. I pushed her hair back off her face. Do you think my parents and my sister are still alive? Do you think they'll be coming back? Severn considered lying to her, making up a fantasy she might believe, something that would make her life more bearable for whatever time they had left. Had he been able to come up with something, he might have done it, but the idea only flittered through his head and disappeared. I don't think there's any way to know who's left alive and who's not. If your parents are still alive, I'm sure they're trying to find some way to get back here to you and your sisters. Vi watched his eyes carefully. She seemed to be reading him. But you don't think they're alive, do you? She said. Tell me what you're thinking, please. Severn put his hand on Vi's knee. He felt somehow even more drained and tired. I'm thinking there have been three events. Three lurchings so far. Lurchings? Vi folded her hands in her lap. She seemed newly alert and attentive. We both noticed that feeling, as if our bodies lurched the first time. You think that has something to do with all this? Severn made a gesture with his hands that said he had no idea, really. The way I'm understanding this, he continued, whatever it is that's happening, it's happened three times. The first time, my wife and your sisters. Then maybe an hour or two passed and you and I were on the road trying to get to town and we were attacked. What about that, Vi said. Who was that? Why did I don't know. Severn interrupted her. I don't know who he was. A lunatic, he said. Some guy who lost it. But how did he wind up dead while you and I are still alive? Vi shook her head as if to say she had no idea and was waiting for Severn to explain. I think there was another event, the second one, and it killed him because he was still conscious and awake while you and I were unconscious. For a while Vi was quiet, then she said, and I woke up and came back in here and fell asleep. And while you were asleep, Severn said, a group of survivors found me in the road and carried me into town. They left me in an abandoned store. I was still unconscious. Meanwhile, other survivors were gathering at Berringer's, a bar in town. Fai said, I know Berringer's, as if indignant at the suggestion that she wouldn't know the place. When I finally came to, there were only dead bodies in Berringer's, scores of them. I figure that was the third event. They were dead bodies of college students piled up outside the bar. The survivors went to Berringer's, emptied out the bar of all the dead, and then used it as a gathering place. And then, it happened again. Severn paused a moment, waiting to see if I got the picture. When she was silent, he added, that's three events in seven or eight hours. Oh, Vi said, figuring it out. So you think like, pretty soon, there'll be another one. Severn said that seems like a reasonable assumption. Vi looked around her room, as if the answer to their problems might be hidden there somewhere. She said, we could go back to sleep. Severn said we can't sleep forever. She said maybe it only happens at night. That's possible. Vi said, we could do whatever we need to do now during the day. And then be sure to be asleep before dark. Severn looked out the bedroom window, at sunlight through the branches of a tree near the road. He noticed a bright red cardinal as it streaked up from a branch and out of sight, and he was struck again at how pleasant the day seemed, as long as there were no bodies or wreckage in the field of view. Vyse said, what should we do? We should see if we can do anything for Sage, and then He killed Sage. The guy, he No, Severn realized that he hadn't told her yet that the dog was alive. I'm sorry, he said. I forgot. Sage is still alive, but But what? I don't know if she'll make it. She was barely hanging on. Vi threw her legs over the side of the bed as if she was ready immediately to attend to Sage. And then what, she asked, reminding Severn that she'd interrupted him. And then I want to bury my wife, he said. After that, we can bury your sisters. Can we wait maybe a day, Vi said, her eyes suddenly tearing up. My parents and Daisy, they'd want to see them before Sure, Severn said, we can wait a day. He thought he should put on the air conditioning, if they weren't going to put the bodies in the ground as soon as possible. Then he remembered again that there was no electricity. The morning was already warming up, and he'd have heard the central air humming if the electric were working. Still, he went to the wall and flipped the light switch a few times just to be sure. My parents and Daisy, Vi said, if they're still alive. She hesitated. It's possible they're alive, Vi. Vi said, but not likely. And her voice in that moment sounded like a grown woman's and not a 13 year old's. There are still lots of survivors, Severn said. He thought, but didn't say, for the moment anyway. There are a lot of people who will have slept through all of this. They're waking up now, and Severn looked out the window again, as if he could see all the dead and people waking to find them. We should tell them what we know, Vi said. Severn doubted there was anyone else who had awakened right after the first event who was still alive. The only way anyone would go back to sleep after something like that was via drugs or violence. And who would take drugs to go back to sleep in the middle of a catastrophe? So on the one hand, they should share what they knew. On the other hand, why? If there were going to be lurchings every few hours, what did it matter what anyone knew? How could that be survived? He said, I want to bury Sarah, and he sounded almost petulant, like a child who only knows what he wants and doesn't care about anything else. Well, I said, but we can take care of Sage first, okay? Severn retrieved the carbine and slung it once again over his shoulder. Behind him, Vi found her baseball bat and followed him out of the room. This time, they went out through the front door, and when they reached the living room, Vi stopped, asked Severn to wait, and ran back to her room. A minute later, she reappeared with two sheets with which she covered her sister's bodies. She said, If we have time, we can bury. And then looked around at the dozens of bodies scattered everywhere else and didn't continue. Severn said, we'll figure out what to do with the bodies. And then he stopped because he realized that he and Vi had fallen into talking as if they were going to survive, when really, it didn't look like anyone was going to survive. He resolved not to let himself do that, not to let himself block out the truth, to make the present a bit more bearable. We'll figure it out, he said. Vi, once they were outside, had taken off at a jog over the lawn and out to the road. When Severn caught up with her, she was already kneeling over Sage and gently petting the big lab's head. In response, Sage opened her eyes and moved her head slightly, but otherwise lay motionless beyond the slight rise and fall of her chest with each breath. Severn, without a clue why he was doing it, grabbed the outstretched arms of their attacker and pulled his body a few feet off the road, which spilled face down into a muddy ditch. Then he looked off into the distance at the sunlight on the blacktop where the road curved and disappeared. His car was half on the pavement and half in the trees, and beyond that there was nothing but a quiet country road. What should we do, Vi asked. She hadn't stopped petting Sage's head for a moment. Severn considered carrying the big dog back to his house and decided that wasn't a good idea, especially if there were broken ribs involved. He looked back at the Epperson house and noticed that the garage door was partly open. Jake had been a part time carpenter and auto mechanic, and his garage was always full of tools and supplies. Severn said, let's make a litter for her and carry her back to my house. I'll probably find what I need in your garage. Vi said, a note of worry obvious in her voice. You want me to wait here with Sage? If you see something moving, he said, call for me. Then he added, I mean anything, Vi, even a dog. Okay, she said, and brought her face down to Sage's and touched her cheek to the dog's head. Severn started for the garage and then stopped when he remembered the handgun he had wedged in the back of his pants. He brought it to Vi and laid it in the grass by Sage's paws. You won't need this, he said, but just in case. He pointed to the safety. You have to flip that if you need to shoot it. Okay, Vi said, her head still resting on Sage's head. In Epperson's garage, Severn found what he needed quickly, a pair of dowels that looked to be five or six feet in length lay on the ground under a workbench, and a canvas hammock hung neatly from the back wall. He had spotted both these items within moments of raising the garage door slightly and slipping under it and into a quiet space that was more of a workroom and storage space than a place for parking cars. He closed his eyes as if taking the briefest of naps in this cool, dimly lit space where there were no dead bodies or signs of an apocalypse. Only the smell of wood mixed with another, sharper odor that was probably a cleaning agent of some sort mixed with the cool damp of night rising off the concrete floor. Severn crouched and rested in the quiet. Vi was near enough, and the day was quiet enough, that he'd hear her if she so much as spoke loudly, and so he felt able to be still for a minute. I'll It seemed likely that at any moment the sky would cloud over and a light rain would start up to be followed by blackness and driving rain and then it would happen, whatever it was, and this time he'd be awake to see it. Then at least he'd know. He'd see what all the others, all the dead had seen in the moment or moments before they died. He sighed and bent over to open the garage door to let in more light, and as he did so, he heard a glass break somewhere in the house, followed by what he was pretty certain was a human voice, though he couldn't make out what was said. It sounded like a muttered curse. After the breaking glass and muttered oath, there was only silence. and the rocketing of Severn's heart banging in his chest. That was episode two 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.