First, a note of thanks and recognition to my ghost writer. Oh, she does not like that but I do not like deceptions. Or not much. Besides which she is as well known as I am and she was there but I will tell it all as it happened to me and maybe if we put in some steamy parts she will consent to author those from her side.

 

It was sticky nasty hot. It often is. We were all dripping salt water in our gear like we had just swum to the game. Nothing new there. May I mention a few names long buried in a death toll of millions? My parents were there, of course. Marion-Anne and Phillip Gordon. On the team and in the stands were quite nearly everyone I knew. On the scrimmage line; Weston, Marley, Michaels, Farley, Gibbs, Sari, Major, “Deet” Denton, Holska, Marks and of course Gordon. Only Gordon survives.

 

There is the snap and I am running, sideways then down. If you have never played ball at that level, with all the gear and everything you can hardly imagine the noise. You hear it on the sidelines but in the middle of it you can hear nothing but the thud of bodies colliding and your own heart so it was a long second or two before I realized that utter quiet had just burst into my head. Gibbs had laid a perfect spiral where he had thought I could run but a couple defenders got between me and the ball. This is classic Flash territory, man, I am loving it. Charging down, I see a man going for the interception. No, not hardly. So I leap. I guess I could lie since there is no one left to call me a liar but I missed it. I tipped it off so there was no interception but it was incomplete. Let the ref have his final call. But that jump put me in the air for one brief second and that was the second when a good fraction of Tampa died in mid breath.

 

Landing was weird. The wind got knocked out of me pretty good but it didn’t keep me from noticing how strange the grass was. It looked waxy and whitish like someone had gone crazy lining the field but also it was as brittle as if it had been dead for two months. Only then I felt the silence and saw a man with a camera holding stock-still. I looked at him and heard no click. Then I realized that there was no way I would hear that click because of the cheering. Then I noticed there was no cheering and felt immediately puking ill. I popped up and turned to the stands and you know what I saw.

 

It took a good few moments of hard looking but I was certain that no one was moving in the stands. A couple things fell over; drinks and papers and such. Then one fellow who was standing on the middle stairs slowly teetered and tumbled down setting off an avalanche of a dozen or so corpses, for that is what they now were. I ran up to the men nearest me mostly lying on their sides but frozen in mid step or mid grab. I pulled on their chin guards to look them in the eyes and they were all cloudy like the eyes of unfresh fish. Tearing off my own equipment I went up to the stands. My folks were there alright. My dad had participated in the tumbling act previously mentioned. He loved joining in. My mother looked like she was happy when it happened so that is something. My girlfriend, Margeret, had an intent look on her face. I think she saw me miss that pass and didn’t much like it. Now let us move on from the field.

 

A car crashed into the little house across the street from the field gate so I just ran to the sound. I pulled open the door but the old man driving was in the same state as everyone else; freeze-dried in the position of his last act. I shut the car off and could hear a TV broadcast coming from inside the house. I pounded on the door and screamed hello. It was unlocked. Again, the two people in front of that TV were as still as stones and just as much alive. But the TV. It was on some cable news crapola but it was live and talking about whatever  but going on quite normally. It doesn’t make much sense I guess but I grabbed up the phone and called 911. I can’t blame them now but at the time I cursed the dead police across town for letting it roll over to the voice.

 

Only then really did I get something of a handle on my situation. Before I could form the nasty thought that I was the last man left alive the TV, god bless it, had shown me that the world was continuing about its business though everyone I could lay eyes on was bizarrely dead. I ran out and to the next house, the next car, the next body. For hours I guess I did that until I noticed a jet in the air, then a smaller plane and shortly a helicopter that settled down in a churchyard right in front of me.

.. ..

A couple cops came out and checked me over quickly like a cow headed to the butcher’s and asked me, reasonably, just what had happened. I don’t think I said much but the next few days events are known to all. I was the sole survivor, not just in Tampa Oh, no. Tampa was the first but then hours later came Tacoma. Then Mindanao. Of course you know there were ten such incidents as we called them then, in a perfect 24 hour cycle. At first no one in authority was saying it but it was plain to anyone. This was no natural event. It was an attack and a leisurely one that simply let the earth rotate under the barrel of some distant and invisible gun picking targets at whim.

 

That terrible weapon we all know now as the pulse bomb; an invisible blob of energy that, striking the surface, releases a rhythmic wave of radiation that momentarily stops all motion of all water in anything in contact with the surface. I was out of contact with the surface and was saved. I was the only one to survive who did not have at least one foot outside the ravenously precise radius in all of the ten attacks. Total dead was near six million. In a flash.

 

But now I was in the hands of the authorities. And it is a forest of hands when something like this happens, many of them hold microphones. Others weapons. Many hold medical instruments of one sort or another. Every time I showed my face in public it was a worse scrum than ever I was in on the field. People whose loved ones had been turned to statues, perhaps before their eyes reached out to me over the cordons and past the bodyguards. Sometimes I touched them. Not often, but a few times.

 

I was told little of what was being discussed and decided. The Silent Day had passed, killed millions and then, nothing. Not a thing else happened except there were ten perfectly round and precise dead holes on the earth though they didn’t stay dead. Observation quickly showed that the plants recovered quickly. Even thrived. The animals’ condition, including the talking animals, proved permanent. The news shows were full every day of “experts” weaving elaborate suppositions into some plausible explanation. I was tested, interrogated, imaged, bled, dyed… did I mention quarantined for a few days? Of course quarantined. But nothing gave anything close to an answer. The situation was becoming dire. Rumors of a super-weapon test gone wrong swept across the globe. Nothing else anyone wanted to think made any sense unless it was the very hand of God. And if that were the case, why pick on Tampa? Or Krakow? But no one was in a mood for quietly pondering the possibles. Riots demanding “The Truth” broke out in India and Russia. In America things were more orderly but still there was growing suspicion that this was some evil or stupidity of man’s. And of course it proved to be. Just not men of Earth.

 

If the government monkeys in charge of me were not so certain that they represented the top of the Authority Food Chain they might have never put me on that plane and, obviously, things would have been different. Security was not really considered a big issue for a plane in flight at that time. Live and learn.

 

So some genius in Colorado wants to talk to me in person. I realized after the fact that this was the first flight I had taken since my name was in the news. Be careful what you tell the public, friends. You never know who is listening.

 

Also, you never know who will be the last person you ever meet so try to make a good impression. I must admit I failed on this occasion. This was the first time I ever laid eyes on one Miss Dale Arden.

 

And the first time she had laid eyes on me. In person. Being in the center of a media storm one gets to believing all the great things everyone says about you which is the surest and shortest path to the destruction of whatever meager virtues you may actually possess. You get used to people doing things for you and giving things to you. You get used to women climbing over each other to get to you and when you run up against one who does not… Who refuses to see the mighty gift you are to reality, it grates. And it affects your behavior. No, sorry Dale. This is not the moment where you get to say it your way. Maybe later. It should be enough that I am willing to admit, even given the weight of the previous weeks, that I was a real ass. Enough said.

 

Except on the subject of Miss Dale Arden. I’ll skip the aesthetic descriptions. Let’s just say if we make a movie of this she will have to be portrayed by a leading beauty. But not only that. Miss Arden, now Doctor Arden, was then a masters candidate in physics at MIT, research assistant, calculator, aid and niece to Doctor Emil Zarkhov, another name you may have heard. She also lettered in swimming and lacrosse. One moral of our story will prove to be, don’t discount sports in an education, even that of young ladies.

 

But for now our lives were not so much different than they had been before The Silent Day; we were just ten or so people, including cops and security of various types, getting on a smallish plane to attend a meeting. I don’t think that meeting actually met.

 

I never was much for flying, imagine that. And the smaller the plane the worse the experience except, wonder of wonders, our super-special delegation was spared the indignities of  the metal detector and the pat-down. I remember the take-off seemed very fast. Faster than a drag racer. I guess government planes have a little more punch than the ordinary jet. But it was just us once we got up in the air. They could have had fighters with us but they could not have done anything. Not five minutes after we had come to a level flight we all felt a strange humming in the floor, in our seats and even more loudly resonating from the glass in the windows. Everyone was darting their eyes around as if a snake had been sighted in the cabin. The captain said something over the PA… everything is fine or some such. It is a shame this man’s final act was a transparent lie. Nothing was fine, not inside that plane. One of the security men stood and drew his gun out wincing in pain and holding his head. I am glad he didn’t just start shooting. Others seemed to be having reactions of pain or delirium or both. Then, just like that, it was dark.

 

Stars shined through the window. We were far, far further above the earth than was wise in a small passenger plane. We were in orbit or nearly, somehow, and being drawn, not slowly, up to a great open bay that closed beneath us.

 

The darkness was utter. All sound stopped. The thousand tiny lights that indicate the plane or anything else is electronically alive were out. I heard the clicking of switches, a couple fellows trying flashlights and the overheads. Finally a female voice called out, “Everyone just stay calm, stay right where you are.” I could hear her paw along the seats to the cockpit door and call through it. No one answered but we seemed to be past our need for a pilot. Another female voice said, “Doctor, are you alright?” It was Dale of course. She always called him Doctor in public. A plane in the belly of a spaceship is still public. Manners first.

 

I wish I could tell you a tale of my first experience of spaceflight that included bobble-headed aliens and solarscapes but the simple fact is that once we were buttoned up in the hold of The Righteous Will, which proved to be the name of the ship, we were put out like so many candles. Mathematics told us later we were in a voyage of some weeks.

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