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                   Hope you enjoy this short story

                                                                                 ALONE

     Whatever happened, happened at exactly 2:22 a.m. on Wednesday, May 19. I know that for certain because the mosquito buzzing around my ear finally woke me up. I saw the digits 2:18 on the clock radio through my bleary eyes as I arose to head for a trip to the bathroom. At the age of seventy, nighttime visits were becoming a regular occurrence, and it was rare to get in a solid eight hours of sleep more than twice a week. Usually, the urge hit me between four and five a.m., so I figured I might as well empty out now, and hopefully sleep the rest of the night through.

I finished my business and scratched the back of my neck. That's when I felt the three small lumps. It seemed the mosquito had quite a feast back there. I hoped she'd had enough for the night, but I was not about to put on the bedroom light to hunt for her now. No sense in disturbing Marge in the middle of the night. She needed her sleep too, although there were no prostate problems in her present or future. I was just reaching to close the light switch on the bathroom wall when the lights went out. I flicked the switch a few times with no results and felt my way back to the bedroom where, thanks to its battery backup, the red numerals – 2:22 – on the clock radio guided me back to my side of the bed.

There were no thunderstorms in the area, and a power outage was unusual at this time of the year. I hoped the battery would last until the alarm went off, but I often awoke before seven anyway. I looked over at Marge and she was sound asleep in the same position. She hadn't moved a muscle despite my trip to the bathroom, and I envied her ability to sleep soundly every night. I curled up next to her hoping to join her in solid repose for the next few hours. And sleep I did, right through the alarm which hadn't buzzed as the battery had given up sometime during the night. I reached for my wristwatch on the nightstand. It read 7:38. Damn! I was usually done showering and shaving by 7:25.  I would then awaken Marge at 7:30 for her turn in the bathroom. We were going to have to scramble if both of us expected to make it to work at the hospital on time. "Marge!" I shouted as I shook her shoulder. "We had a power outage. I'm heading into the shower now. Get up!"

I shook her shoulder again, but she did not move. She was still in the same position as she was when I came back from the bathroom hours before. Still out like a light. She sure could sleep. “C’mon, Marge,” I said “You have to wake up now.”

When I pushed her harder, her arm slipped out from under the blanket and fell straight down next to the bed. I took her hand in mine and it was cold. I pulled the blankets off her body and rolled her onto her back. Her eyes were half open and glazed over. Her whole body was cold, and she was not breathing.  Marge, my wife of forty-nine years, was dead.

I grabbed the phone and punched in 9-1-1, but nothing happened. I then realized that with the power out, all our cordless phones would not operate. My cell phone was fully charged, but there were no bars for cell service and, of course, no wi-fi service due to lack of power in the house. I went over to the kitchen sink and turned on the tap. A weak stream of cold water poured out and then, after about fifteen seconds, stopped completely. No electricity, no telephones, and now no water pressure. What the hell was going on here?

I swallowed my morning’s quota of pills and vitamins with some still-cold orange juice. It was eight a.m. and the sun was shining brightly, thank God for that. I went outside and walked next door to our neighbor's home. Roy and Barbara, like Marge and I, were retirees in our early seventies, and we all did volunteer work at the local hospital. They were early risers and should be finishing their breakfast about now. I rang the bell at the side door that led into their kitchen, but of course, it didn't sound. I knocked hard on the door again and again, shouting, "Roy! Roy!”

After several attempts at this with no response, I tried their door. It was locked. I went around to their bedroom window in the backyard and pounded on it. “Roy! Barbara!” I shouted. “It’s Paul! Paul Harrison!”

  I then noticed that the window was partly open to the spring air. I pulled the screen off, opened the window fully, and climbed in. Roy and Barbara were still in bed, but they were not sleeping. Just like Marge they, too, were dead.

I took a couple of deep breaths and went out the front door. I walked up and down the block, opening doors or breaking into the homes of my neighbors. They were all in bed – and they were all dead. I walked back to my house trying to figure out what had happened, and then I paused. Something was not quite right – I mean, despite my dead wife and neighbors – something felt eerie. It was the silence.  No birds were chirping, no car engines were coughing, no bees were buzzing – there was total, complete silence.

Several dead birds, a dead cat lying on its side on a freshly cut lawn, a dead yellow Lab attached to its chain on the side of Bill Riley’s house – what was his name? Buster? Yeah, it was Buster – confronted me on my slow walk back home. As I reached my driveway, I had to sit down on the curb. My brain could not comprehend this. I could not process what I was experiencing.

I sat on that curb for a long while contemplating what to do next. I went into my house and covered Marge up with a blanket. I couldn’t bear to look at her now. Then I manually opened my garage door and got into my four-year-old Pathfinder. I inserted the key and turned it, half expecting no response, but the engine turned over as usual and I backed out of the driveway and headed toward the main commercial street in the neighborhood – Northern Blvd.

There were a few cars pulled off askew on the side of the boulevard. Several had their motors running, but all the occupants were dead. The road was clear of obstructions, and I guessed that there hadn’t been too many vehicles on the highways at 2:22 in the morning when this happened. I continued west to the Queensboro Bridge and managed to cross it easily on the upper level having to dodge around only four vehicles.

Manhattan was silent. No boats moved on the East River. No taxis blasted their horns. No subway trains rumbled beneath the streets. I drove all the way downtown on Broadway, carefully threading my way through the cars and buses and taxis stopped haphazardly on the street and sidewalks.  Their drivers and passengers all were dead and slumped over in awkward positions. I had to figure out what I was going to do next and the obvious item on the top of the list was to find another live human being. After all, in a world with eight billion souls, someone besides me had to be alive. I couldn’t be alone. I couldn’t be the sole survivor of whatever disaster had occurred. Or could I?

I took a pad and pen from the glove box and wrote down a list of what I needed to get, and what I had to do. Batteries, a generator, and propane tanks were necessities right away. Food and medicine could always be gotten, but I needed a freezer if I was going to eat anything that didn’t come in a can or a box. List in hand, I drove back up Broadway and parked in front of an electronics store. All five clerks behind the counters were dead. I selected a small battery-operated TV and turned it on. As I feared, all I saw and heard was static as I switched through the local channels. I carried the set over to the main TV display area and hooked the store’s cable connection into the back. I took a deep breath as I pressed the remote’s channel key through all the couple of hundred channels. There was nothing.

I took a box of various-sized alkaline batteries and put them on the front seat. As I was about to get back in the driver's door, I noticed a branch of the Chase Bank across the street. All the money I could ever need was in this one building. All the money was there for the taking, and now it meant absolutely nothing to me, or anyone else – if there was anyone else.

The day had grown much warmer. The outside temperature registered 79° on the digital readout in the Pathfinder. I shuddered as I thought of the coming smell of death from the millions of corpses that would soon permeate the air. That brought me back to Marge still lying lifeless in our bed, and to our daughter, Linda, and her husband Bob, dead in bed in Akron, Ohio. And our son, Tony, and his wife, Laura, dead in California, and our three grandchildren…I pulled over to the curb and cried for them, and I also cried for everyone else now dead on planet Earth. And I guess I cried for myself, too.

When I got back to Queens, I drove to the Home Depot store nearest to my home, located a dolly in the warehouse area, and wheeled out a Honda generator. I figured a five-kilowatt model would be sufficient. According to the manual, it could run about twelve hours on a full tank of gasoline, which was about six gallons. I got it out to my car all right, but it must have weighed over two hundred pounds, so  I rigged up a sturdy rope from the dolly to my trailer hitch, and very slowly drove back home. I positioned the generator next to my electric meter on the side of the house and hooked up the wires.

 I drove back to Home Depot and got a couple of twenty-pound propane tanks and a battery-operated siphon. I removed enough gasoline from Roy's Ford to fill the generator's tank. The electric start switch on the generator turned it over on the first push, and I was ready to go. I went into the side door of the house, which leads into the kitchen, and was greeted by the comforting hum of the refrigerator. I poured a large vodka on ice, which had just begun to melt and sat on the sofa with my TV remote in hand. I took a large swallow of the cold vodka and turned on the TV, hoping against hope that something had changed over the past few hours, and that someone would be on the air telling me and the world what was going on, what had happened, and what to do about it. But, as before, there was absolutely nothing.

The static was somehow reassuring – at least it was a sound. Like the refrigerator's motor, it seemed to raise my spirits, if only by a small measure. I got up to replenish my drink and finally did turn off the TV. I put on a CD, a collection of classical music pieces, and pondered my situation. I figured I should bury Marge soon, but that could wait until tomorrow morning. I carried her to the bed in the spare bedroom, kissing her before pulling the blanket over her head. God, she still looked alive. No distorted features. No rigor mortis. No beginning of decay. Then the crazy thought struck me that maybe she wasn't really dead and that no one else was dead, either. Maybe whatever caused this only put everyone in a deep sleep or a coma – everyone, but me. This raised that question again – why not me, too?  Why had I escaped their fate? And I shuddered, thinking what had I escaped from – or to?

I hadn’t eaten much for dinner – a ham and cheese sandwich plus my evening’s handful of pills – and I went to bed around ten o’clock with the false hope that I would wake up in the morning and this bizarre nightmare would be over. Marge would wake up with me; we’d have breakfast, and head off to the hospital as usual. With those pleasant thoughts in mind I drifted off to sleep, and thanks to the generator, the alarm woke me up at precisely seven a.m. Marge, an alive and breathing Marge, was not next to me in bed. I hurried to the bathroom with a bladder ready to burst, since I had, surprisingly, slept through the entire night.

My neck and upper left arm itched, and it seemed that the mosquito had struck again last night as the fresh welts attested to. And then, as I stared into the mirror above the sink, a realization came over me. If these were fresh bites on my arm, the mosquito had to be alive. But maybe they weren’t fresh bites at all. Maybe they were just starting to itch and swell.  Maybe, maybe…

I put the coffee pot on and began with a search of the bedroom. I spent the better part of an hour combing the entire house, carefully moving the drapes and blinds, searching for a sign of life, but all to no avail. In the hopes that at least one other living creature existed besides me, I decided to name the mosquito. She would be Mary from now on, but Mary was now nowhere to be found. Frustrated, I went into the garage and got the garden spade, selected a spot in the backyard, and began to dig a grave for my wife. By noon I had the hole about half completed and I stopped for lunch and a couple of beers. As I had done in the morning, I ran through all the TV channels for a sign of life on the airwaves. I shouldn't have bothered, but I knew I would continue to search every day, several times a day, until…until when?

Always the same two questions raced through my mind – what happened, and why not me? I figured that some sort of radiation hit the earth, but where had it come from? If the sun were responsible, why did those of us on the dark, shielded side of the planet succumb? Or did the radiation penetrate the earth like neutrinos were supposed to? And why didn’t I die, too? What was special about me? Why was I –Paul Steven Harrison – spared?

The grave was at a sufficient depth of four feet by late afternoon, but I couldn't bring myself to carry Marge downstairs and bury her. There was too much of an air of finality to that deed. I decided to wait until she started to decompose. I guess I still harbored some hope that she wasn't dead after all. "Please, Marge," I cried aloud. "Wake up! Don't be dead! Wake up!"

                                                                                                                              #

A week passed and Marge had not shown any signs of decay, but I noticed a slight change on her face. Her lips looked a little drawn and her skin looked and felt very dry. I checked several of the neighbor’s bodies and they were similar in appearance. No signs of decomposition, no odors, no bodily fluids leaking out.  I knew the body decomposes because of the microbes and bacteria that continue to live in it after death. They cause the decay and the bloating. No germs, no decay. The death ray, or whatever radiation occurred, was very effective. Without the germs, the bodies would probably just dry up like mummies.

As I scratched another lump – a fresh lump – on the side of my neck, I wondered about the relationship between me and Mary the Mosquito, to my knowledge the only two living organisms left on earth. Had her bites on the night of the event somehow given me immunity? Or was it the other way around? Had my blood given her immunity? And, if so, would that immunity pass on to her offspring? I decided to leave my bedroom window open at night to facilitate her coming and going. Go forth and reproduce sweetheart. Even the company of mosquitoes was preferable to being alone.

After that first week of hectic activity, I relaxed with a beer and contemplated the future and my fate. I had ensured my basic survival for the time being. The generator hummed along and I had siphoned enough gasoline from neighborhood vehicles to fill ten five-gallon containers which would keep it going for a long while. I had gone back to the Home Depot for a medium-size freezer, which I stocked with meat and other perishables from the local supermarket. I converted my kitchen stove from natural gas to propane gas, so I no longer had to cook on the barbecue outside in the rain. I had stocked up on bottled water so I could put off digging a well for a while. Now, what do I do with the rest of my life – alone?

The list I prepared while enjoying my second beer was short – read, write, and watch movies. Certainly, I would never run out of books to read, and watching all the movies available on tape and DVD would take a long, long time. As far as writing, a daily journal starting with the day I woke up alone might be therapeutic, but who would ever read it?

After a few days of movie-watching and reading, boredom and a bit of depression set in. I had to get out of the house and get some fresh air. The beach! Brisk salty air! And maybe some fish to catch, too. I loaded up the Pathfinder with my fishing gear and headed south on Woodhaven Blvd. In a few miles, it changed names to Cross Bay Blvd. and was a straight shot over Jamaica Bay, through the communities of Howard Beach and Broad Channel, and right to the ocean beaches of the Rockaways.

 The first thing I noticed was an A train sitting motionless on the tracks parallel to the road, no doubt filled with the dead bodies of early beach-goers who would now never arrive at their destination. As I began to cross the Addabbo Bridge, I glanced down at the still waters of the bay. The surface was covered with fish – dead fish – but no odors came through my open window. The same scenario greeted me as I crossed over the long Veteran’s Memorial Bridge, which took me directly to the Rockaway peninsula.

I parked my vehicle in an almost empty lot and walked up and onto the boardwalk. I smiled as the fresh ocean breeze hit my nose but my smile faded as I glanced toward the ocean. The wide expanse of beach sand was littered with dead creatures from the water line up to the high tide line. And some of these were huge, including a few easily recognizable as sharks. Sharks, have been around for millions of years and were supposed to be around for millions more after mankind disappeared from the face of the Earth. There was no sense in commandeering a fishing boat now to dip a line in the water, was there?

Totally dejected, I slowly drove home and as I turned into my driveway, there they were – three of them in helmets and hazmat suits – standing in my driveway. I stopped the car well short of them and got out on shaky legs. Thank God! Fellow human beings! Alive! I regained my composure and started to walk towards them when the one in the middle raised his hand and said, “Stop!”

His voice sounded a bit mechanical, and I obeyed his command – it was definitely a command. I said, “Sure. I’m Paul Harrison, and boy am I glad to see you guys. What the hell happened anyway? Were we attacked? Did something blow up? Did –”

The same guy raised his hand again and said, “Stop speaking. You will come with us now.”

His voice was not human, and I took a moment to look at the trio a little more closely. The one in the middle was my size – about five feet nine – and a bit taller than the two flanking him, but the big difference was that he wasn't armed like the shorter ones. At least they appeared to be armed, since each carried a long pistol-shaped device at port arms. Their hazmat suits were white with an unfamiliar patch on the left shoulder. The helmets had dark-tinted front plates, so I couldn't discern their faces.

 “Go with you where?” I asked.

“To our planet,” the man in the middle said. “You would be foolish to resist. You should have been dead anyway.”

“You’ve come to finish the job? To kill me?”

“Our scientists wish to study you. They must find out why only you were able to survive their process.”

“Are you saying that of eight billion people, and billions of other living creatures, only I survived whatever you guys did?”

“Yes.”

“What the hell did you do?”

“We must go now before our window to leave closes. If you do not struggle, I will explain what I can during our journey.”

I didn’t seem to have much choice as I glanced at the weapons once more, so I said, “Okay, what do I need to bring?”

“I don’t understand your question,” he said

“You know – clothes, toothbrush, a razor?”

“Everything you require will be provided. Come, now.”

“Wait! I need my meds and my vites.”

“What are they?”

“My pills. I need them to live. I have heart disease and diabetes. You guys have hearts, don’t you?”

“We have circulation systems similar to yours, but you must leave them here.”

“But that’s why I probably survived,” I protested. “Something in my system prevented me from dying from whatever rays you bathed the earth in. Surely your scientists would want to study these items to see which ones kept me alive?”

“Why are you volunteering this information? I determine that it would not be in your best interests.”

“I’m in a pickle – damned if I do, and damned if I don’t.”

“I don’t understand you,” he said.

“If I don’t take my meds, I’ll probably die anyway – probably sooner than it’s going to take your scientists to figure out what combination of pills is the key to my immunity.”

“Perhaps. How many do you take?”

“ A lot – two for cholesterol, three for blood pressure, two blood thinners, an insulin regulator, and seven or eight different vitamins.”

 “Very well, go get them and be quick about it,” he said, motioning to one of the armed guys who followed me into the house. I scooped up all the bottles of pills and put them in a plastic shopping bag. Thank God I had visited the pharmacy and restocked my supply with the thousand-tablet bottles of all my prescription drugs. I was good for almost three years – if they didn’t figure out the protective combination before then, of course.

As I closed the cabinet door where my meds had been stored, a flicker of movement crossed my eye, and there, sitting on the door I had just closed, was Mary the Mosquito. Or, perhaps, it was one of her offspring who had come for a fresh drink of blood from the only source in the vicinity. Whether it was Mary herself, or one of her daughters, she went for the back of my neck. I felt the slight bite as I struggled to keep my hands at my sides as she feasted, and I was successful in inhibiting all those years of instinctive swatting when you know an insect is digging its stinger into your body. I grabbed my bag of pills and turned for the door.

We walked back outside and they led me down the block and around the corner. At the next intersection, a vehicle rested on the roadway. It wasn't large, about twenty feet long and fifteen wide, and of a dull green color. We climbed inside an open hatch and I was shown to a seat in the rear compartment. They slid a door shut effectively sealing me in, and I saw them walk toward the front of the vessel. A few moments later we were silently airborne. I looked out of my small window as the earth rapidly receded from view. I blinked back a tear as I wondered if I would ever return home again, knowing deep-down the possibility of that occurring was remote indeed.

Thirty minutes later we docked with a much larger ship and I was transferred to what appeared to be a cell, although it was quite comfortable. I had noticed that only the one who had spoken with me had come onto the bigger ship. The two others were headed back to earth. About ten minutes later, I felt the ship move and although we accelerated quickly to a great speed, I had no discomfort or sense of gravitational pull. In another ten minutes I heard the sound of a door opening and closing, and then thirty seconds after that, a small panel near the floor opened in my cell door and a tray of what I guessed to be food, slid in. The panel closed and as I reached for the tray, a screen came to life on the opposite side of the room and a head came into view – an alien's head. He – if it was a he – appeared similar to the standard description of what I expected from reading newspaper accounts of extraterrestrial visitors and alien abductions, none of which I had ever believed – until now. The creature spoke, "You are being transported to my planet which is on the opposite side of our galaxy. The journey will take approximately three of your Earth days. The food just given to you is nutritious."

“What is your name?” I asked.

“Names are of no importance,” he said.

“I’m Paul Harrison. Will you speak with me and allow me to ask you questions?”

I thought I detected a slight sigh of exasperation and he replied, “Very well. I am occupied now. Eat your food. I will contact you later.”

“And what was your name again, sir?” I asked, which brought a slight roll to his almond-shaped purple eyeballs.

“Zheytu,” he said as his image faded away.

I ate the “nutritious” food. It was surprisingly tasty, but of uniform consistency, like densely packed bread. I washed it down, along with my evening’s handful of pills, with a glass of water, and waited. About an hour later, Zheytu’s image again appeared on the screen and by then I had accumulated a whole lot of questions in my mind.

“I am a busy individual,” he began. “I will tell you what has happened and what will happen. Then I will answer a few of your questions. I haven’t much time to spend with you.”

“Thank you, Zheytu. Please call me Paul.”

“Names are unnecessary. Please do not interrupt again.”

“Just one thing, Zheytu, are you the fellow who was in the spacesuit that spoke to me on Earth?"

“Yes.”

“Thank you. I will not speak again until you are finished.”

"Good. Our civilization is constantly expanding across the galaxy. Our home planet, Raxor, is now sparsely populated as we have depleted most of its natural resources. There are only about ten million of us Raxorians left.  We must seek new worlds that we can inhabit comfortably to ensure our continued survival. Your planet – Earth as you call it – fits our needs. However, before we inhabit a new world we must sterilize it of all living things. If not, the foreign bacteria, viruses, and microbes would kill us. Somehow you escaped the sterilization process. The two beings who were with me have now returned to earth to sterilize your traces – feces and all items you may have contaminated. Then the cleanup and colonization will shortly begin.

"You could have, of course, been killed by other means, but our scientists insist, for future expeditions, on researching the reason you escaped the sterilization process. You are in quarantine and will continue to be in quarantine until we reach our destination. I will take your questions now."

“How did you learn English?”

“I am a professor of galactic languages. I learned English from your people, the ones we have captured and brought to our planet over the past seventy years.”

“How many did you take back with you?”

“About five hundred humans and many hundreds of other creatures. Only two hundred humans remain – it was necessary to test various versions of the sterilization radiation on them and the other creatures.”

“Just out of curiosity, Zheytu, what was the most difficult of earth's creatures to kill?"

“Your insects, particularly the ones you call cockroaches and mosquitoes.”

“I guess I should have known that,” I said, thinking of Mary. “Will I be allowed to join my fellow humans?”

“If the scientists finish their tests on you without killing you, I suppose so.”

“Are there beings there from other worlds?”

“Yes.”

“Are we all in some sort of zoo?”

“Yes.”

“Zheytu, what did you mean by the clean-up process on earth?”

“All bodies and carcasses in a designated area will be gathered and burned. Then that area will be settled.”

“So you bastards just go about the galaxy killing everything in your path, and then take over the planet and move right into our homes?”

“Yes. We must survive.”

 "When you colonize Earth why do you need those spacesuits? Can't you breathe our atmosphere?"

“The protective gear was to avoid your germs. It will not be necessary for colonizers to wear them.”

“And when will these colonizers arrive?”

“In about two earth weeks.”

“Thank you, Zheytu," I said and smiled as I thought of Mary and her hungry offspring and the many and varied diseases they were capable of transmitting. How would the colonizers stand up to malaria, West Nile virus, and encephalitis?

“Anything else?” he asked with an annoyed tone to his voice.

“Suppose things don’t work out for you guys? Suppose, despite all of your precautions, you can’t survive on my planet? Will you send all of those humans you now have captive back?”

He smiled an evil, smug smile and said, “I assure you that will not occur.”

“We’ll see,” I said, smiling a huge smile right back at him.

His face flickered off the screen and I lay on my bunk finally knowing the answer to the question that always comes up on warm summer evenings in the backyard as we sit slapping away at ourselves – Hey Paul! Why didn’t Noah just swat those two damn mosquitoes anyway? I drifted off to sleep hoping that I would someday be able to tell the answer to that question to my fellow human beings on our journey from Raxor back home to Earth.