Chapter 3

All right, don’t panic. Everything is fine, this is perfectly normal behavior.

Meagan looked out the window of her little Ford and noticed that the traffic that was usually gridlocked heading back into the suburbs was completely gone. In fact, she was the only car on the road. She breathed slowly, her eyes darting around the car for a paper bag or something else she could hyperventilate into as to avoid careening off the side of the road, but alas she was incredibly tidy and found no such garbage. Her cell phone trilled in her purse and made her nearly jump out of her skin.

She reached over, not afraid of losing focus on the totally empty road, and checked it. Apparently Elise had also been able to scoot out of work early that day too.

“That’s odd...” Meagan mumbled to herself. Something about the wiring? What a strange thing to happen in a downtown high rise this day in age. “Totally nothing to worry about,” she told herself, but it was too late. She could feel the panic swelling up inside her and it was beginning to make her vision blurry.

Meagan suffered from acute panophobia, the fear of practically everything. She was constantly counting the steps to every exit; she slept with a baseball bat and a wine bottle opener (for close combat) next to her bed, and she kept two wooden planks and nearly a hundred “extra screws” near her front door all the time. She also had her back door welded shut from the inside, which wasn’t very fun in the summer but allowed her to sleep at night.

So the text from Elise did nothing to help her breathing, and she decided to pull off to the side of the road. Although she could very well have just stopped right on the highway, because she was still the only person heading into Petesborough. Where the hell was everybody?

She shut off the car and got out, shielding her eyes from the sun despite her UV sunglasses. Years of protecting her eyes from sunlight had left her utterly blind in anything brighter than a 60 watt bulb. Nothing looked out of the ordinary except for the traffic. There was no smoke coming from the buildings that lined the stretch of road. She turned back towards downtown, and it was completely clear there, too.

Then she noticed a little construction no man’s land not too far ahead that gave her access to the westbound lane. If the apocalypse was coming, she sure as hell wasn’t going to be alone with a bunch of soccer moms. She slid back into the car and hammered out a frantic text to Elise: “Don’t leave your house, I’m coming over. Something is VERY WRONG!!!!”

Her car kicked up a flurry of dust as she pulled a near 180 to make the construction zone u-turn, and she was barreling back downtown in a matter of seconds.