The digital clock next to the luxurious king-size bed glowed a neon-blue 6:37 – eight minutes before she’d set it to go off, but she was already wide awake.
She could hear the crash of sleepy waves on the beach outside and below, the sliding glass balcony door of her hotel room having been open all night, letting both the sound and salt air into the room through the screen door all night. She hadn’t gotten enough sleep – she'd stayed up reading and drifted off after midnight – but she was excited to see the sunrise over the ocean for the very first time.
The room was pricey, a real reach on her budget, but this was her first-ever solo vacation, and her first vacation of any kind since she’d found herself single again. It was, for once, a vacation entirely of her own choosing. An easy choice, as she’d never seen the ocean – any ocean – and had always longed to.
She slid out of the huge bed and exchanged her nightshirt for a t-shirt, then flipped on the tiny coffeemaker she’d set up the evening before. She pulled on gym shorts, slid the screen door aside, and stepped out onto the balcony.
The deep blue of night had given way to a gentler blue faintly tinged in pink and orange, a smattering of gray clouds catching a sprinkling of emerging beams of light from below the water-flat horizon. She’d timed it well; dawn was still about 25 minutes away, leaving her space to have her coffee here on the balcony before venturing down to the water for the full sunrise.
She clicked off several cell phone pics of the unfolding sky as the coffee behind her bubbled to a halt, retrieved it and leaned out over the rail into the morning air. Far below her, an early jogger ran the path just above the beach; a local was approaching from the other direction, walking a black terrier.
Sitting in a plastic chair on the balcony, enjoying the quiet and the sea air, she watched the waking life below her and sipped her coffee. She resisted the urge to check her phone for texts or calls; if he’d called again, she didn’t want to know it. She didn’t want any distractions from this marvelous morning, a morning all hers.
The blue of the sky glowed lighter and the glorious orange of the approaching dawn intensified as she set her coffee aside and stood, leaning again on the railing and surveying the beach. Gentle waves lapped at its edges, reaching, receding, reaching, receding, and in the distance, she saw a young woman – more or less her own age, though hard to tell from such a distance – walking down toward the water.
The woman was wearing night clothing, rather than swimwear, which struck her as odd. Curious, she kept watching as the woman slowly walked to the water’s edge and proceeded into the quiet surf.
That’s gotta be freezing, she thought as the woman was soon knee-deep, then hip-deep. Going in up to the ankles this early was one thing; chilly but doable – but-
The water came to the woman’s neck, small waves crashing into her face, and she vanished.
Alarmed, she scanned the ground for someone, anyone, to alert to what she’d just seen. Neither the jogger nor the dog-walker were still in sight, and the beach was otherwise uninhabited.
There was no one in the parking lot below her, no one on the street next to the hotel.
She bolted from the room, grabbing her key card, and flew down three flights of stairs and out a side door, sprinting for the beach. She was there in forty seconds, barefoot, kicking up sand as she ran to the edge of the water.
She frantically scanned for some sign of the woman, crying out unintelligibly to see if she responded.
The waves rolled in amiably, indifferent to her distress. She ran up and down the beach, in case she was in the wrong spot, but saw no one.
Horrified, she realized she’d just witnessed a suicide, and wondered how it was even possible to walk beneath the waves and not float upward at all. She realized that she was, in her panic, hyperventilating, and leaned forward with her hands on her knees, taking slow breaths.
She rose and turned.
Behind her, another seven people – all in various stages of dress – were walking toward the water, as calmly and slowly as the woman she’d just seen. None of them seemed to see her.
A middle-aged man wore nothing but boxers. Another somewhat younger man was dressed for a workout. A woman in a t-shirt and jeans stepped onto the beach, following another who was in shorts but topless. A teenage boy in baggy shorts and a torn shirt walked on the fringe of the group. Behind them was an elderly woman in a nightgown, flanked by a tall, balding, shirtless man in sweatpants.
One by one, they all walked past her as she stared in horror.
The middle-aged man in boxers stepped into the water and kept going, just as the first woman had. Shaken to movement, she ran up to the next man, the one dressed for working out, and put her hands on his arms.
“Stop this! You have to stop!” she said too loudly. He paused.
Calmly, he put his hands on her waist, lifted her, turned and set her to the side as if she were a mannequin, then proceeded into the water.
She started toward the elderly woman, suddenly realizing that another dozen people had stepped onto the beach – none dressed for it, and all with the same serene expression, oblivious to her presence. All bound for the water.
She had to call someone. The police. The Coast Guard. Anyone.
Without turning back – she didn’t want to look back – she bolted back toward her hotel room, ran up the stairs and into her room, and grabbed her phone. She called 911 and got no answer, just a machine. She grabbed the room phone and dialed 911 again – no answer. She dialed the front desk. No answer.
She rushed out onto the balcony and looked down at the parking lot, the road, the beach, and the streets beyond.
Dozens walked those streets, and across the parking lot, and the path, all moving toward the beach, all at the same quiet pace. She was momentarily mesmerized. They almost moved as one, with an order unmatched by anything less than a military parade – all moving together, all headed the same way. And suddenly the thought came -
It’s as though the ocean is calling them...
She snapped back into the moment, pulling on her jeans and shoes, and fled the room and ran back down the stairs, jumping into her car.
The road by the sea was all but empty of cars, but lined with people serenely walking toward the beach. She shuddered, but ignored them, intent on getting back into town, off the coastal road. She turned west at the first opportunity.
Almost immediately, she had to swerve to avoid running into a car that had stopped in the street, its driver and front passenger doors still open. People coming from the town walked the sidewalks, headed oceanward, oblivious to her. She encountered another stopped car, and another – and realized there would be more and more of them, the further she went.
Her phone was still working, and her map app guided her to the town’s police station. Parking haphazardly and rushing into the station, she found it deserted.
A weather information loop played silently on a television in a corner. A large clock behind a counter ticked indifferently. She called out, several times. No reply.
The sun was fully risen and burned bright into her brain as she ran back out of the station. Lifting her hands to shield her eyes, she sensed movement to her left, and saw what looked like a small boy a hundred yards or so away. He wasn’t marching anywhere; he was standing still, staring straight at her, and when she made eye contact with him he turned and fled into the neighborhood beyond. Opposite the beach.
“Wait!” she cried out. She ran across the police station parking lot, across the street, and through the front yard of the house on the other side, the direction in which he’d run. He’d gone around behind the house; she followed, and found herself in someone’s back yard, where an anxious dog was pacing on a leash. The dog barked at her. The boy was nowhere in sight.
“I’m not going to hurt you!” she called out. “I want to help you!” There was no answer.
Help him, she idly thought. What the hell can I do?
Fear continued surging over her like floodwaters spilling across a dam. She got in her car and started it, jumping when a middle-aged woman facing east walked right past the front of her car without turning to look at her. Instinctively backing up before driving out of the lot, she anxiously tried to figure out where she would even go.
They were like a wave themselves, the dozens-now-hundreds strolling toward the waters. As casual and relentless as the surf. And seemingly, now, as inevitable. There was nothing to suggest why, no reason, no sense to it. It was as if the ocean was simply calling them.
But not her.
Not the boy.
Not the person driving the car that shot past from behind her, barreling down the street next to the police station, doing three times the speed limit and seemingly oblivious to the people randomly crossing.
Maybe they know something...
She swiftly turned onto the street and pursued the other car, which appeared to be headed for the state highway that ran parallel to the coast, north to the next town. About 10 miles or so.
As she set out in the direction she’d seen the other car heading, she suddenly thought of him. How she had felt free of him. How she had been relieved he hadn’t called. How right now, in this moment, she’d give anything to hear from him. Because I really want to? Or because I just want to hear from anyone? And she realized, with a sudden flash of unbidden insight, that it couldn’t possibly matter anymore.
She had to slow down for several oblivious walkers crossing the road in front of her, a courtesy the car ahead had not extended, making the lack of fatalities in its wake a matter of pure change. It was bat-out-of-hell out of town before she could catch up. She continued north all the same, passing several vehicles abandoned on the wrong side of the road, in a spot where the highway neared the ocean. She kept her focus on the road ahead.
The road ahead...
She had no way of knowing whether there were any answers on the road ahead. She just knew she’d put distance between herself and horror.
She remembered a movie she’d seen years ago when the people of a town had all walked into the water – Stephen King? - and even then, only the people of the town.
What if the same thing was happening up ahead?
She turned on her car radio. A satellite pop/rock station came to life. She flipped through a couple of channels. More music from space.
She went to a talk radio channel.
Dead air.
A fresh wave of dread descended like nausea, and she instinctively slowed down as she reached the edge of a new town.
Slowing as she began encountering abandoned cars, she took in the same scene she’d just left behind, dozens of people walking quietly toward the sun. She stopped the car and got out, feeling both restless and helpless. It was the same random mixture she’d observed before: young and old, children, elderly, dressed and undressed, well-off and not. All disengaged. All oblivious.
She had no interest in going toward the beach.
Turning by chance to her right, she saw a bird rising into the air and suddenly thought about the animals around her. None of them were joining in this macabre march, and wondered what would become of them, with all the humans gone.
Her eyes followed the bird as it soared into the morning blue, past a tall office building. And she made out a figure standing there.
Her heart leapt as she realized what she was seeing.
It was a woman, age she could not tell, holding a small child. Poised on the edge of the building’s room, a good seventy feet or more above the ground. About to jump.
“Hey!” she cried out weakly, her breathing shallow from panic. “Hey! Stop!” She began to wave her arms.
The woman showed no sign of seeing or hearing her. Calmly, as if in slow motion, she stepped forward, and they fell to the earth.
She screamed and turned away. She couldn’t look.
She fell to the ground, sobbing.
No sailor – fisherman, merchant, or soldier – fails to learn the voice of the sea.
It is the amiable sigh of wind over water on a warm day crossing the deep. It is the dark and violent scream of the storm and the crash of waves on the deck. It is the softest of whispers in the silence of the expansive light of the moon as the waters lap at the edges of the hull.
And every sailor knows – the sea means what she says.
Beyond the fate of the puny sailor, the sea commands the skies. Her nourishing vapors give it form and substance; her moods are reflected in its radiant façade. The skies in turn command the lands, raining down her purified offerings into the cauldrons of life, clustering in white billows to shield them from the harsh, unblinking sun. The land is life’s stage, illuminated by the heavens; but the sea directs them all.
And so she moved across the plain of life, raising her voice in a mantra that reverberated through all existence, calling – crying out, anguished, infected. Suffering.
She cried out, raging, no more... and called.
The scene up the coast was magnified one hundred thousand times in Boston, where the state and interstate highways on both sides were packed with cars rolling eastward in disturbingly perfect unison, thousands and thousands of them, their drivers calm and unhurried. They rolled slowly down offramps and into the city, seamlessly joining the gentle traffic on the streets.
They rolled forward until they could roll no more, to be abandoned by drivers and passengers who then proceeded on foot eastward, ever eastward, into the downtown canyons, past Bunker Hill, past Harvard Medical, past Fenway Park, to the bridges and docks and waterfront that were their endpoints. By the thousands, they stepped off into the cold, salty foam, wordlessly and without complaint.
On the cape to the south, the roads had filled up, the streets of Hyannis and Centerville and Falmouth all choked with cars parked in lots and fields and yards as their occupants flowed outward into the waters along the entire cape coast. The beatific atmosphere, not nearly as harsh as the scene just to the north, was no less horrific.
...scenes happening further south in New York. Washington. Savannah. Miami.
New Orleans. Houston. Los Angeles. San Francisco. Vancouver. Dublin. Liverpool. Amsterdam. Copenhagen. Beirut. Lima. Rio. Capetown. Dubai. Singapore. Hong Kong. Manila. Tokyo. Sydney...
By the hundreds of millions, they flowed to the sea in the greatest diaspora in all of time and history – and the fastest species extinction since the demise of the dinosaurs. They drove, until they could drive no longer, and then they walked, until they found the water or died in their tracks. They biked. They rode animals. They made their way by any means possible, not excepting the air; hundreds of early morning airline flights had gone down into the blue depths.
Behind them all as they marched to their doom, their cars and their trucks and buses spewed their collective fumes in one last toxic gasp, ending decades of steady poisoning of the skies above her, doomed to rust where they sat. Likewise died the power plants and factories that dotted the continent, soon to fail and cease their exhalations. Tomorrow, the earth would once again finally breathe free.
She awoke with a start. A cool breeze drifted through the open car window and she realized she’d fallen asleep. Looking around, she found herself underneath a shade tree next to the parking lot of a convenience store. The remains of a makeshift meal cluttered the seat next to her: an empty milk carton, a sandwich, a bag of chips, an untouched bottle of mineral water, all liberated from the deserted store.
She could feel the salt of dried tears on the skin of her face, and remembered the emptiness that had fallen over her after what she’d seen, that she’d stumbled back to her car and raced out of the town as fast as she could. Avoiding the state highway, she’d barreled down backroads, sobbing, aimless, terrified.
She had no idea how far she’d driven when she passed through another small town further inland, and had stopped at the store when she’d seen it was open. It had been, of course, unoccupied.
She got out of the car and looked around. The moment was desolate, and the sky and the air had changed, and she realized she’d been out for hours. Not surprising, as she’d gotten little sleep the night before and had been living a nightmare since.
Above, opposite the west-leaning sun, she saw the ghostly apparition of the moon, quietly awaiting her turn in the sky.
A full moon, she thought. Of course.
And as she stared up at the moon, a calm descended over her, and she felt peace for the first time since she’d awakened.
She got back into her car and began to drive, following the reassuring orb above.
The skies command the lands; the sea command the skies.
But the moon commands the sea...
Dust thou art, one of the old myths goes, but the road back leads much further, into the ancient waters beyond the land. And life courses through the currents of the deep only because they ebb and flow.
And they ebb and flow because the world has a mighty partner, gargantuan by ratio compared to her peers spinning around the other planets. Its force is fierce, demanding, its calm presence refusing to be denied. It brought day to night, and shaped the forms and rhythms of life across a million species.
The moon commands the sea. It sits in cool, unpitying authority over the raging waters; it pulls the tides, in again, out again, relentlessly stirring the constituents of life. It is the power in the engine of creation.
And it reserves judgment on the affairs of the world beneath it.
The moon commands the sea. The waters could call their issue home, bring a relief in the world’s gasping, but they would not have final say. The moon calls as well, as all the poets and minstrels have always known, and with far greater eloquence. In the maelstrom of earth’s competing forces, there were no absolutes, only the volley of energies surging and retreating, surging and retreating. So it would be now.
The moon commands the sea. And the moon commands the night...
As the sun fell behind the trees, she continued in its golden wake, the moon above her. She had no idea where she was going; but she knew, without knowing, that she was going the right way.
She thought of him again, and felt the weight of her cell phone in her shirt pocket.
She’d hadn’t seen any other vehicles for hours that weren’t parked in driveways off the road, nor had she passed anyone walking seaward. Her car’s headlights came on as the shadows lengthened and the golden rays on the horizon dwindled; she didn’t know what road she was on, but she was compelled to continued, and knew she was on the right road.
Rounding a curve, she saw two red dots far ahead. Taillights. Another car, headed west as she was.
Heart pounding, she sped up gradually, breaching the distance between them without appearing to be in chase. Soon she had closed the gap to a couple hundred yards, and she settled there, realizing the other car could see her by now, but content to simply follow.
Approaching an overpass, the other car left the road on an offramp, then turning left. She followed, catching a sign at the top: WACHUSETT MOUNTAIN STATE RESERVATION.
She followed down a narrow road through wooded land, and the road curved around the mountain both cars were now beginning to circle. Minutes passed, and the car ahead finally pulled off the road into a parking lot.
By the time she reached the lot, whoever had been in the car was gone. But there were several dozen cars in the lot; it was nearly full.
A public path, clearly marked, began up a short hillside beyond the parking lot, a covered message board with a bright map standing next to it. They’d gone up the path, she decided, and again she followed.
There were trees on every side, and the air smelled of woods and summer. The moon glowed brilliant-blue above, lighting the path ahead as she felt the cool of evening air on her tired face. The path continued upward, a bit steeply in places, but was no burden.
It seemed a long time before it finally leveled off, and she found herself leaving the trees behind for a large open field, where dozens of people stood, surveying the surroundings quietly and staring up into the night sky. They were a random mix, as varied as the thousands she’d encountered ocean-bound throughout the day. Young. Old. Children, elderly, dressed and undressed, well-off and not. White skin. Dark skin.
But none disengaged. None oblivious. No one really spoke, but everyone met her eyes, with expressions of wonder, confusion, relief.
Of course, she thought.
Not Stephen King. Steven Spielberg. And she remembered Richard Dreyfus and Devil’s Tower, from a movie made long before she’d been born.
But no aliens. No starships.
Only the moon.
As the sea had called billions to their doom to reboot the earth, so the moon had called them – here, and doubtless hundreds of other hillsides across the world – to preserve enough of us to begin again.
More people trickled into the field from the path, and a collective calm fell upon them all as they arrived at their common conclusion. That whatever had stricken the earth today was ended, and they had endured, and there would be a tomorrow.
And a dozen yards away, she saw him. There he was. He turned and saw her, too.
She didn’t run into his arms. They simply approached each other and embraced. And for a second time, she felt tears on her face.
Of course the silence would be broken, and someone would take charge, and they would discuss the situation and figure out what to do next. The message board showed a lodge nearby, and they would all have a place to stay, and they would rise the next morning and come up with a plan.
A plan for the human race...
And now, more than ever in all of history, there needed to be a plan. In a single day, billions of lives, erased. Billions of histories. Infinities of memories. In a single day, all of human industry... all of human accomplishment...
And, in a single day, all politics had been vanquished; all ideologies, all religions, all tribal rivalries... all oppressive institutions... all wealth, all poverty, all inequalities - completely reset.
Everything is new again...
The hope swelling within her – within everyone here in the moon’s glow – was healing, but it was small compared to the overwhelming terror they had all just survived. The unspeakable trauma of what they had all been witness to eclipsed the bloodiest atrocities of war... the Nazi camps... the flash of Hiroshima...
This was a trauma that would never leave any of them. They would bear it all their days. They would heal, and rebuild, and find new purpose in the days and years ahead. Yet they could never again know the unspoiled joy of living, existence unfettered by dread and trauma of such unimaginable magnitude.
But their children would.
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