Civilization collapsed on November 29th, 2008, but Leigh was a little distracted that morning, so she missed a lot of it.
She noticed a few things. When she was waiting for the bus, she noticed a man across the street who had an odd metal glove on his left hand. She thought that maybe he was a Michael Jackson fan, and she thought it was kind of strange that he kept rubbing the glove up against the streetlight, but just then the bus arrived, and she climbed on board.
She barely caught sight of the woman who just missed the bus, sprinting to the stop just as it was pulling away, but that just set her mind thinking about how the driver on this particular route was so obnoxious about not waiting for people even when he must be able to clearly see them in his rear-view mirror, and although she noticed the spiderweb of metal on the woman's face, this was Los Angeles, and people wore strange fashions and did strange things.
Leigh got into the lab, and started running tests on the baryon chamber, and from then on, her mind was occupied with work for the next eight hours. She never listened to the radio at work--the building was shielded from so many different particle types in order to avoid contaminating lab results that radio reception was non-existent; ditto with television, which Leigh didn't bother much with anyway. Lab work was her Zen, she'd once said.
She sometimes signed onto the Internet at lunch, but today she was busy trying to figure out why she was getting power surges in the capacitors, which meant that "lunch" was "suddenly notice around four o'clock that your stomach has passed beyond growling and is now well into howling, and go grab a granola bar." All of which meant that when she finally left the lab, sealed shut the security doors, and walked out onto the streets of LA, the lack of noise that greeted her was as loud as a shout.
The lack of traffic felt sinister and oppressive to Leigh as she walked down the street towards the bus station. To walk two blocks in Los Angeles and not see a single car go by didn't just seem unusual, it seemed like a derangement in the order of the world, as unnatural and unwelcome as a pinpoint black hole suddenly appearing in her bedroom. She didn't see any people, either. She almost shouted, but a lifetime of pop culture had left her feeling like she was suddenly walking through a horror movie, and a lifetime of watching horror movies had taught her that if you were walking down a totally deserted street in a totally silent city, the last thing you did was draw attention to yourself. It was a silly, surreal thought, but it kept Leigh's lips sealed as she headed towards the bus station.
She never reached it. Instead, she spotted movement out of the corner of her eye, a silhouette moving in one of the office buildings that dotted this part of the city. When she turned to focus on it, the person receded into the depths of the building. Ordinarily, Leigh would have kept going; when people were commonplace, you didn't feel a great need to follow any particular one. But when people were rare, indeed just about unique, Leigh felt like she should take the time to find out why. She headed for the door to the building, found it unlocked, and went inside.
The power was off. Thinking back, she realized that the power had been off the whole way down the street; her lab was on a generator, and it was still daylight, so the lack of electricity hadn't been conspicuous. But inside, the shadows and darkness forcibly reminded Leigh that office buildings were made to take advantage of ready electricity. Without that flow of power, the familiar and welcoming (if a bit sterile) environment of the corporate office became a hostile, threatening place. One that Leigh had just walked into. One other person was already inside, perhaps the only other person in the building, perhaps the only other person in the city for all Leigh knew. She looked around for something heavy.
She didn't find anything heavy, but she did find something sharp. She picked up a pair of scissors, and continued on her way into the office. "Hello?" she said softly, not sure whether she wanted to find this other person or not. "I saw you on the street. Please don't be afraid." Or violent, she thought. Please don't be violent.
She ventured deeper into the maze of shadows, occasionally drawn on by a half-imagined rustle of sound, an eye-straining almost-glimpse of something in what was now nearly pitch darkness. She wished for a flashlight, a radio, a small contingent of the National Guard walking behind her, anything beyond her walking around in the near-dark with a pair of scissors. When she heard the noise behind her, she whirled around as the adrenaline rushed to her brain, almost screaming.
The other woman held the blade to a paper cutter, removed from its board and wielded like a machete. She had short brown hair, a business suit that looked disheveled and stained, although it was hard to tell with her standing against the only source of light. Leigh couldn't see her face, but the way she stood suggested that she was in the same adrenaline-crazed state as Leigh. Perhaps worse. Her voice was taut. "Tell me they haven't touched you," she said.
Leigh wanted to ask who 'they' were, but calming this woman down took precedence. "Nobody's touched me," she said in calm, soothing tones. "I've been alone for the last eight hours. What's happened? Where is everyone? Was the city evacuated?" Leigh noticed the calm, soothing tones seeping out of her voice, but panic was starting to set in, now. Had already set in, she realized, noticing the way her fingers gripped the scissors so tightly they almost hurt.
"No. Not like you're thinking, anyway." The woman relaxed a little. But only a little. "I think most of them have fanned out now, started heading for other cities. They're very well organized. I think they're communicating with each other, somehow. Not just with speech, they don't talk much." She shifted her weight anxiously from side to side, obviously uncomfortable with staying in one place and talking. "I don't know how many are left in the city now, but they're not wasting much time searching for people. They're guarding food supplies. Hunger will draw us out eventually."
