King of the Hill

Chapter one

Danny rubbed weakly at his eyes, which were nearly crusted shut. He blinked about a dozen times before he could focus. He watched vertical lines of light shift nearly imperceptibly across his lap as he tried to make sense of his surroundings. The window was open, letting in a gentle breeze, and the blinds swayed ever so slightly.

He extended his right arm and felt the slight tug of a forgotten IV. It was sitting under his skin uselessly, the drip long emptied. He reached again—more carefully this time—to the bedside table, clumsily knocking down an empty vase of dead, crunchy flowers. His phone was just out of reach. It took him four attempts to sit up and swing his right leg out of bed onto the frigid hospital floor. Then the left leg. He tried to stand. Headrush. Danny gripped the bed railing to steady himself. His back felt tight, so he twisted from side to side to a symphony of loud pops and cracks. Instant relief.

He shuffled past two deflated “Get Well” balloons to retrieve his phone. The battery was dead, and there was a thin layer of dust on the screen. He was weak, and the dehydration made it difficult to process anything but his desire for water. The room was lit only by the setting sun outside. The power must’ve gone out, he thought as he shuffled toward the dark hallway outside his room. A generator powered a few flickering fluorescent lights on his floor. He grabbed a mug from the nurse’s desk and gulped down some cold, black coffee greedily. The liquid caffeine hit him fast. He took a deep breath and scanned the floor as he leaned on the counter. Looking around the deserted building, he began to notice that things didn’t seem quite right.

Where is the staff? He wondered. Staff meeting? Maybe they’re doing off-site work somewhere. Maybe a bomb went off or something. And what happened to the electricity? Storm? Power surge?

Everything was so quiet. He held his breath. He could hear his heartbeat and...nothing else. It was totally silent. The digital clocks blinked, begging to be reset. He remembered preparing to do something pretty stupid on his bike. I guess I crashed, he thought. I wonder how long I’ve been out.

He needed more water and took the coffee mug back to his bathroom. A shaft of light filtered in from the window as he attempted to turn on the faucet. It sputtered and spit out some dark sludge before finally settling on a coppery drip. He glanced up at the mirror and froze. His chest tightened, and he could feel his heart in his throat. He shifted in the mirror and leaned forward until his face was about two inches from the glass. Long gray hairs had sprouted from his chin and above his lip. The bags under his eyes were big enough to be considered checked luggage, and deep wrinkles were etched into his skin. Danny’s breath grew rapid. How long have I been here? He pulled his gown off. His rib bones strained against his skin; his hip bones look as if they’d rip through.

He ran from the room in no particular direction. Down the hallway and through the double doors...down another hallway until he hit the staircase. He threw open the door and raced down floor after floor, with only a flashing red emergency light to guide him. His mind was racing. He looked nearly a decade older. How was he alive? Where was everyone? What year was it? Where had everyone gone? He paused at the fourth floor, gasping for air, legs shaking, eyes streaming. Get it together, Danny, he chastised. Forehead pressed against the glossy, painted brick, he collected himself. Panicking would do him no good. Just get outside, he told himself, perhaps hoping the hospital were trapped in some sort of twilight zone and that everything would be back to normal as soon as he made it out of those double doors. He climbed down the remaining four floors to the lobby. He paused before pushing the door open, wondering if whatever was waiting out there would be worse than whatever was in here.

He pushed the door open just enough to get a glimpse without being seen. The setting sun illuminated the room through the floor-to-ceiling windows. Everything seemed relatively normal, save for a few odd exceptions: the little shops with cards and chocolates and coffee were empty, but the iron gates that were normally pulled down and locked were still tucked away in the ceiling, and several pieces of large furniture were blocking the automatic sliding doors at the main entrance—as if someone was in the middle of moving them out of the hospital.

Danny opted for the emergency exit, which he could see across the room. He forces the door all the way open and steps out into the open. A slow walk turned into a quick sprint as his nervousness built. Danny flew through the door and felt the warm sun hit his face. The breeze tousled his hair, but it didn’t have the deep-dish-pizza-and-Blommer-chocolate scent he expected. It was fresher than any air he’d ever inhaled on the streets of Chicago. Perhaps it was the sharp contrast between the dank, dark hospital and the sunny street, but everything seemed so saturated with color. The trees were exceptionally green and overgrown, as was the grass, and the sky was a bright, cloudless robin’s egg blue without a hint of the smog that sometimes hung over the city.

Danny noted with relief the lack of the post-apocalyptic mise-en-scène feature films had trained him to expect. There were no overturned cars, no scorched buildings, no busted windows—everything was just...empty. Danny walked toward the main street and saw that Mother Nature had started to reclaim part of the city. There are no signs of distress. Just an abandoned city.

He walked toward the coffee shop on the corner and noticed that the sign was faded and swinging in the breeze. Maybe they still have some of those crunchy, inedible, rock-hard granola bars, he thought. He grinned as he noticed a fat rabbit crouched in the thick grass that had taken over an empty parking lot. He took it as a good omen. He pulled open the glass door after peering in to make sure the place was empty. He smiled, seeing the “hippy bars,” as he called them, still there by the register. He grabbed the lot, stuffed them into his pockets, and opened decided to test one out. It tasted like cardboard—just as he remembered. Despite the flavor, the bar whetted his appetite, and he choked down four more.

He suddenly noted a stack of newspapers by the door. The New York Times and the Chicago Sun Times. He ran over and grabbed both, squatting down to read them in the dusk light. “WHITE HOUSE EVACUATION,” read theNew York Times. It was a full-page story, but Danny’s attention was drawn to the local paper: “Mob Attacks Presidential Bunker” stretched across the page, which was dated December 17, 2012. Danny scanned the paper again and again. The stories all centered around one incident. The president had been moved to a bunker, and a mob of restless citizens had managed to discover the location and attempted to take the bunker by force.

“The visitors landed on the roof of the Library of Congress at approximately 6 pm. There has been no word on whether their requested exchange between their representative and the representative from NASA has taken place. The SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute and the United Nations are both involved, but we do not yet know the extent of their participation.”

Danny read the words over, unable to process what he was seeing. He read it again. Extraterrestrial intelligence. Again. Extraterrestrial intelligence. He needed more. He couldn’t understand. As someone who worked as a reporter just out of college, Danny knew a hastily cobbled together story when he saw one. No quotes, poor word choices, and lousy sentence structure riddled the piece. Definitely something you didn’t usually see in the New York Times.

He threw the newspapers down in frustration. He needed older prints—ones with a bit of backstory. That would have to wait until morning, though. He didn’t feel confident enough to travel about in the dark. The sky went from orange to white to indigo to black. Danny crawled behind the register and curled up under the counter behind a curtain. He lay awake for what felt like hours, just listening for any sound that would indicate someone else was out there. And then wondering if he really wanted to hear someone else—and what it would mean if he did. He didn’t remember finally succumbing to sleep, but the next thing he knew, soft, orange sunlight crept into his eyelids and he awakened with a start.