Here We Were

I do not fear the dark. 

I do not fear the dark because the dark is only the absence of light. Night is only the absence of the sun. It is nothing. It is empty. I do not fear nothing. I do not fear emptiness.

I repeat this statement—this mantra—to myself as the warm blue sky of northern Wisconsin fades into a cold night. I repeat this to myself as the birds—loons, ducks, woodpeckers, cardinals, owls, and hawks—and insects cease their calls and retreat into the night. They didn’t use to do that. 

Before The Night, summer nights at the Spider Lake Lodge—the cabin that’s been passed down through three generations of my family—were filled with swift sounds of birds and grasshoppers filling the night as my family sat around the campfire and warded off pesky mosquitoes. 

Now, it’s only me, and I wouldn’t dare start a fire at night, even in the fireplace with all the shutters and windows of the lodge bolted shut and painted black. I do not fear the night, but I respect it. I respect its desire to stay black and empty and do not infringe upon it with fire or light.

I have been here for two years, three months, and fourteen days. The Night happened a few weeks before I arrived at the cabin. I was lucky on The Night. I don’t know why, but They never came for me. In my shitty studio apartment on the east-side of Chicago, I curled myself underneath my bed and hid. 

I could hear my neighbor’s scream and my city burn from underneath my bed. No matter how hard I clasped my hands against my ears, I heard the cries for help and explosions in the distance. I accepted my fate that night. I didn’t know what was happening, but I resigned myself to death. I welcomed it, as long as it would make the screams stop and end the waiting for the inevitable.

I hid and cowered and cried beneath my bed and waited—waited for whatever was out there to come to me and end it. But it never came. I don’t know why and never will. Perhaps my life was so insignificant that I wasn’t worth the bother. That thought crossed my mind more than a few times.

In the morning, when daylight broke through the emptiness of The Night, the death and destruction stopped. At least, it seemed to. When I exited my home, I didn’t know what I expected to see but it wasn’t what I saw.

Nothing.

Barely anything had changed. The streets were still lined with cars seemingly undisturbed. The streets were clean and untainted. Even though I had felt the destruction from what seemed like feet away from my building. I had felt my floor shake and my walls rattle. I heard the explosions and could feel the burning flames heat my building.

But, when I stepped outside, there was no indication that anything had happened. I thought I had gone insane and hallucinated it all. Then, I realized something was missing: The people.

I knocked on my neighbor's doors—no answer. The sidewalks were bare and not a single car drove by on the street despite it being the morning rush hour. I only saw two other people that day.

Luckily, I wasn’t insane and they heard and felt the same as I did. They couldn’t explain it either. There were no emergency broadcasts on TV or radio. Anything that used electricity was broken beyond repair but looked fine. Cars, phones, computers—nothing worked.

We walked around the city that day—the two strangers and me. They were a man and a woman. Alex and Jesse were their names, respectively. We saw a handful of other people, all as frightened and confused as us. Was it aliens? Some kind of biological weapon? An EMP?

None of those answers were right. Ninety-nine percent of people were gone—vanished or murdered through destructive means of weapons and chaos, but everything looked untouched. There were no giant craters where bombs would have exploded—no signs of struggle anywhere. Everything was the same, except the people were gone.

We found some others. There were about thirty of us on that first night. By the second night, there were twenty. The third night twelve. The fourth night six. Some left on their own accord, most disappeared. All of those who disappeared did so at night. 

I left on the fifth day. I found a bike and began the over three-hundred mile journey to northern Wisconsin, where the Spider Lake Lodge waited. I figured, if any of my family had made it, maybe they’d go there too. All I knew for certain was the city was dead.

It’s at this time I’ll say I did not go alone. Jesse came with me, the woman I met on the first day after The Night. We became friends in those first days together. When I explained where I was going, she wanted to come too. I told her the trip was almost definitely suicide. She didn’t care. Every action now seemed like suicide.

We biked hard every day. As soon as the sun rose and just before it set, we rode. We sheltered where we could, ate what was available, and hid as best as we could at night. We realized if we kept quiet, barricaded the windows, and didn’t give off any light, we were probably safe. Luckily, we were so tired from biking all day that we didn’t have much time to worry about the night and Them, whatever they were.

We barely saw another soul as we made our way north. A few times we passed some other bikers, but they were not inclined to stop and talk with us. In fact, they seemed to accelerate in the other direction at the sight of us, likely due to past experience with other road travelers. We didn’t blame them.

The Spider Lake Lodge was empty when we arrived. My family wasn’t there—not that I really expected them to be. We settled in and began our lives together in this new world. We fished—the lake still being plenty filled with fish—and gardened and occasionally hunted thanks to my father’s old shotgun he kept at the lodge.

Mostly, we made love. When two people fall in love and are together all the time with no other distractions, there’s not much else to do. Jesse loved the cabin life. She’d been a city girl all her life, barely leaving Chicago in her entire twenty-seven years on the Earth. She loved being outside during the day and not hearing the bustle of cars or people. Many times I caught her sitting on the dock, by herself, listening to the lake and its creatures alone. 

Those first few months together were the happiest of my life. It seems strange to say when most of the world and everyone you’ve ever known has disappeared for no apparent reason but the truth is you get used to it. When you fall in love, other things, even the end of the world, seem to fall by the wayside.

We were careful. We set alarms for the sunset and outfitted the lodge with protective measures. What we were protecting ourselves from, we still didn’t know. We biked into town for supplies when needed. We saw or heard no one else. 

Jesse loved to canoe the most. Our family had an aluminum canoe that was older than my twenty-five years but it still floated, miraculously. Once a month we would pack a picnic and canoe out to the small forested island in the middle of Spider Lake—Hat Island. 

After our picnic, we’d canoe back and Jesse would ask to stop in the middle of the lake. We would stop and she would sit there, quietly listening—the water like glass beneath us and the loons calling in the distance. 

That’s what I’ll remember most about her—how she looked sitting there. Her back to me and her long black hair curled past her shoulders her neck strained up at the trees, her hands dangled over the side of the canoe, her fingertips grazing the water with the rose tattooed along her wrist gingerly touching the water, her nose in the air, and how she inhaled the aroma of the lake.

That is what I see when I think of her. At least, I try to. I push away the last sight I have of her from my mind and substitute it with that one. As hard as it is, I’ll recount what happened to Jesse because she deserves to be remembered, by whoever may read this—if it is ever read. 

Last night was like any other we spent together. We ate dinner, we made love, we went to bed. It was near morning according to my watch when we heard it—the knock. A decisive, methodical knock on the barricaded front door. Three steady, deliberate, forceful knocks.

I grabbed the hunting rifle and approached the door. We stood there, silently in the dark and waited for another sound. A young boy’s voice spoke up. He sounded like he was barely ten-years-old. He explained that something happened to his new mom. He said they lived across the lake. He was lost now and scared. He began to cry.

I didn’t believe it and, at first, neither did Jesse. How had this boy and his family been living on the other side of the lake without us noticing? How did he make it to this side of the lake at night alone? How did he know we were here?

I asked these questions but the boy only cried more—heartbreaking, terrified sobs. They were too much for Jesse to bear. She pleaded with me to open the door. I refused. It didn’t make sense.

We argued and screamed at each other for what felt like hours but was only maybe two minutes. Finally, she said that she was going to open the door unless I shot her, right there and then. I knew she meant it. Jesse’s will was stronger than anyone I had ever met. I begged her not to touch the door, but all she could hear was the boy’s cries.

I stayed back with the gun while she unlocked the door. I aimed and readied it for whatever was behind that door. When she opened, there was nothing. There were no more cries from the boy.

She opened the door wide and stepped outside. I heard her call for the boy. By the time I stepped toward the door to look outside, she was gone. I called for her. I screamed for her. For the first time in two years, I stepped out into the night. It was nearly dawn. I called again and again. No answer.

I went back inside and locked the door. I collapsed on the floor and cried like I did on The Night two years ago.

When dawn came, I searched for her. I trampled through the woods and called her name again and again and again. Nothing returned my cries. 

Which brings me to now. Jesse has been gone for almost eighteen hours. Dusk is fading and night is coming. I will go into the night and look for her, even though I know it is futile and I will most likely die or disappear—whatever has happened to the world. I will go out into the night and search for Jesse.

Because I will not live if I don’t. I will wither away until I end my life with my own hand, alone. Because she would do the same for me. So I repeat this mantra until I eventually find enough courage to step out into that night and search for Jesse. 

I do not fear the dark. 

I do not fear the dark because the dark is only the absence of light. Night is only the absence of the sun. It is nothing. It is empty. I do not fear nothing. I do not fear emptiness.

Whoever is reading this, know that the two people who lived in this cottage did so with love for two years, three months, and thirteen days. 

They lived in love until They finally came for us.