Chapter 3

I gingerly removed the telephone receiver from Aunt Rachel's hand and tried to call for help, but the phone was dead. Unnecessarily, I hung it back up and went back outside. There were several houses nearby, and although I didn't know anyone in Cripple Creek besides my aunt and uncle, I went next door for help.

Nobody answered the door, so I tried the next one. Nobody answered that one, either.

Where the hell was everybody? It was like a ghost town -- which was pretty funny, because Cripple Creek had come pretty close to actually being a ghost town, after the gold rush had slowed down many decades ago, and before the legalized gamblers had moved in.

The lack of any signs of life on the street was unnerving. Something had happened. Something really bad. But -- what happened, exactly?

I ran down into the main area of town -- it was only two blocks from Willard's house -- and into the nearest of the several casinos. The door was open.

Inside I found several people -- all of them quite dead, lying on the floor or slumped over blackjack tables and roulette wheels.

Something, apparently, had come through and killed everybody in the whole town.

Everybody except me. Maybe Willard hadn't even had a stroke, down in the mine. Maybe whatever killed all these people had killed him, too.

Or maybe the only reason I wasn't dead was that I'd been down there, trapped underground in Uncle Willard's mine.

None of the dead people I saw was marked in any way. It was like poison gas had gone through, or some kind of death ray. Yeah, right. A death ray. I'd been reading too many comic books.

I figured whatever it was must have happened late in the night. Last night. That would account for the small number of people I found in the casino, and the fact that the street outside was completely empty. Most people had been caught, in bed, by whatever it was that had killed them.

I tried another telephone, and it was as dead as the first one. I picked up somebody's cell phone, and that had a signal. Not knowing who to call, I called my folks, back in Atlanta. The phone worked. I heard it ringing.

But nobody answered.

I called my girlfriend, back home. No answer there, either. I called 911 and 411 and nobody answered those numbers, either.

Just how far, I wondered, had this death-ray thing gone? The nearest town to Cripple Creek was another old mining community, Victor, Colorado, just a few miles away. I found a phone book, dialed the Victor Police Department on the cell phone, and got no answer.

So I walked back to Uncle Willard's house, got back in his truck, and drove to Victor.

Everybody there was dead, too. There was one guy sitting in his car, at a non-functioning traffic light, but he was stone-dead. I checked a couple of houses, and although the doors were locked, I could see people inside, dead in their beds.

What the fuck would account for this?

I drove back to Cripple Creek, stopping a couple of times along the way to check on mineshafts I passed. Maybe if being underground had kept me alive, there would be other people, too, who'd been underground when it -- whatever it was -- had happened.

I didn't see anybody or find anybody, and although I hollered down a couple of mineshafts, I wasn't about to pursue any more underground adventures with strange mining equipment.

Nothing to do for it but leave town, go down the mountain to Colorado Springs, and look for some help. Uncle Willard's truck was too low on gas to make the trip. I saw a parking lot down the street and matched up keys from the little kiosk with a big Cadillac SUV in the lot. I figured the owner wouldn't be needing it, and the gas gauge said it was nearly full.

Goodbye, Cripple Creek.

The SUV was the biggest and sweetest ride I'd ever had, and just getting an opportunity to drive it would have been, in normal times, a real kick. Only, finding two whole towns full of dead people had kind of dampened my interest in luxury transportation. I just wanted to find somebody, upright and moving around, to talk to.

Coming down the mountain approaching Colorado Springs, it was becoming increasingly clear that I wasn't going to be talking to anyone there, either.

The streets were largely deserted, although I saw an occasional stopped car, the driver still inside, waiting at random street corners. I saw one car that had hit a telephone pole.

Everybody, it appeared, was dead. Each undamaged corpse was positioned as if whatever had killed it had come quickly and without warning. No signs of anyone trying to run away, or to struggle. No expressions of agony on these death-masked faces.

Everybody had just fallen asleep, apparently, where they sat or stood, and hadn't awakened thereafter.

Well, if the Arabs had pulled this off, their technology was way better than we had thought.

I didn't know what in blazes to do. I had already tried the obvious stuff -- the car radio. Telephones. Cell phones. There were no clear signs of life anywhere. The electricity was off in Colorado Springs.

But here I was, alive and well and moving around in this dead world, now, for several hours. There was no way in hell I could be the only one alive. Clearly, whatever had happened had killed off an enormous number of people for an enormous radius. But I wasn't Superman. If I was alive, others must have escaped death as well.