When the end of the world happens, I’m sitting in the front seat of my mom’s car.

  We’ve been fighting again, like we have been nearly every day since I moved back into her house after my engagement ended. I resolutely stare out the window so I don’t have to look at her or talk to her or even acknowledge that she’s alive. We’ve been sitting in silence for at least five minutes, the crooning sounds of 80s soft rock filling the void.

  It occurs to me slowly that we’ve decelerated. But we’re getting pretty close to the car ahead of us. I sit up straight with a “Mom!” and look over at her…

  And she’s not there. There’s no one in the driver’s seat at all, just an imprint where a butt might have been. “Mom?” I squeal, looking around like I’m in the middle of the worst game of hide-and-seek ever. But I’m totally alone in the car. Tires screech off in the distance and the unmistakable crash of a car accident sounds over the velvety voice of Tracy Chapman. We’re quickly approaching the car in front of us.

  I reach over and jerk the steering wheel to the side just in time to avoid the other car and pull into a parking lot of a strip mall. I clamber over the centre console and gain control in time to stop it, nice and squarely in a parking spot.

  The driver’s seat is still warm under me. But my mom was driving this car a minute ago and now she’s nowhere to be seen. I wrench open the car door and half-fall onto the concrete in nothing but my socks. As I scramble back up to my feet I turn to the street, watching the way the cars knock slowly into each other. The traffic was slow moving, but it’s like everyone just put their cars in neutral and walked away.

  Like my mother.

  “What the actual fu—” I start to say, wondering why I suddenly can’t see another human being. No one comes in or out of the storefronts in this strip mall. I can’t see anyone in the cars out on the main road. Before I can get the curse out, another car pulls into the strip mall and doesn’t even make it into a spot before the car door is flung open and a middle-aged man tumbles out of the driver’s seat.

  “Oh thank goodness, another person,” he says between gasps, hands sliding down his legs while he catches his breath. “My daughters were in the backseat and now…”

  “My mom was driving,” I said, my confusion slowly turning to panic as I watch the mid-tone blue of his shirt darken with sweat under his arms and down his chest. “She just… poofed.”

  The man looks up at me with wild eyes. “Poofed?! Is that all? My girls just poofed!?”

  I raise my hands in front of me. “Dude, I have no clue what’s happening.”

  He seems to deflate. But he doesn’t compose himself. Instead, he starts crying, slipping down onto the concrete. “They said there was the Rapture coming, but I never thought that I’d get left behind.”

  Rapture!?

  The man’s staring at me again while he sobs. “I’m a good man, I swear! Why didn’t I get Raptured along with my daughters? What if I never see them again?” He continues on, but I take a shaky step backwards. I haven’t believed in religion, or God, in a very long time. I don’t believe in any sort of Rapture. The man rubs his arm across his face, and a long goober from his nose stretches as he pulls his arm away like the most disgusting cheese pull I’ve ever seen.

  I take another step backwards. I glance at the street. All those cars in a row, literally bumper to bumper now, have barely moved.

  Some part of me wonders if I should go put them all in park, turn them all off.

  Instead, I flee back into my mom’s car, lock the door behind me, and tear out of the parking lot.

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  In the distance, one of those unmanned cars backfire, and I see a wall of flame shoot into the sky. I turn the opposite way, needing to weave a little around the unmanned cars, and then my socked foot hits the gas.

  * * *

  As I drive in the direction of home—my parents’ home, my childhood home, the home I swore I’d never move back into when I left for university and somehow found myself in again six months ago—I think on this whole Rapture thing. It’s the same scene on every stretch of road: cars with kissing bumpers or in more compromising positions, a small handful of people on the sidewalks or among the cars. Everyone looks bereft and lost, tears on their cheeks and barely holding themselves together.

  I flip between radio stations—most of them are dead air, but there’s one that I find that has someone who survived this Rapture. He says what I’ve already seen, that the majority of the population has just disappeared without a trace. It’s not the apocalypse I always saw in fiction. The power still seems to be on, though I ignore the traffic lights as I weave around stalled cars. The man on the radio implores everyone to stay calm (yeah, right) and if they have the ability, go home until we know more. Based on how the people standing on the roads don’t move, I don’t think they’re going anywhere.

  I pass a Wal-Mart.

  I make a u-turn.

  I leave the car directly in front of the doors and I go inside, retrieving my shoes from the ground in front of the passenger seat. I don’t know how I’m so calm, but all I can think of is that the apocalypse usually comes with looting, and I should grab some supplies. The store is, as expected, empty. There are abandoned carts everywhere, but I see no personal belongings. It’s like every jacket or purse or shopping list vanished with the person who owned them.

  I’m helping myself to canned vegetables when I hear a crash, echoing through the otherwise silent store. I leave my cart full of non-perishables and head toward the sound, though all I can hear now is my heart pounding in my ears. From what I’ve seen, not everyone was Raptured—but just how many were left behind? What were the parameters for who was left behind?

  And if a monotheistic deity does exist, and it did launch a Rapture event, what does that say about everyone that’s left? What does that say about me?

  I find the culprit in the video games aisle. A boy. He can’t be older than nine or ten, and he’s siting amongst an assortment of game boxes. That must have been the crash I heard.

  “What are you doing?” I ask, my voice a little harsher than I intended. The sound catapults off the warehouse ceilings, adding to the intensity of my question.

  The boy whirls around, eyes wide as he takes me in, slack-jawed. And then he breaks into a beatific, relieved, shiny-eyed smile. “A person!” he cries out, and I understand exactly what happened. Out of this whole Wal-Mart, this kid is the only one who didn’t get Raptured.

  That must have been terrifying.

  “I’m Jane,” I say, taking a few steps into the aisle and crouching down. My knees protest—a new part of my body reminds me every day that I’ve past my twenty-fifth birthday—but I ignore them and focus on the kid in front of me. “Are you here alone?”

  The boy nods. “I am now. My mom was with me but she… well, everybody… it was really scary!”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Oh, I’m Ryder.”

  And since I’ve always hated my name, I find myself saying, “That’s a pretty cool name.”

  Ryder gives me another bright smile.

  “Ryder, do you have any other family? Dad, siblings, aunts or uncles, grandparents? Someone we can call and see if they, well—”

  “If they’re still alive,” Ryder finishes for me, seemingly less hesitant to state the obvious.

  I didn’t even try to call any of my own extended family. I wonder if that makes me a bad person. I wonder if I should call my ex.

  “I don’t have a phone,” Ryder goes on, unaware of my own distraction. “And even if I did, I don’t have anyone’s phone numbers. They were all saved on my mom’s phone.”

  “Do you know your address? Maybe I can drive you to your house, see if anyone’s there?”

  Ryder’s eyes went wide and shiny again, and guilt crawls up my throat at the hope that I saw there. I can practically count the number of humans I’ve seen since the Rapture event on one hand. What are the chances any of this kid’s family survived?

  “I know we’re house number 23! Does that help?”

  I pick up the video game box closest to me, looking for something to do with my hands before I have to tell him the truth that no, it doesn’t help at all. It’s some RPG. I preferred cozy games, but my Switch got left behind when I moved out of my ex’s. It was Alex’s Switch, after all.

  But I don’t get a chance to answer. The lights overhead flicker, and the ground rumbles a little under my feet. My gaze shoots to the floor. Earthquakes don’t happen here, so what the heck was that?

  When I look back at Ryder, his eyes are wide again, but this time they’re scared. And when the ground rumbles again, he lunges to his feet and throws himself at me just as a small zap of something flows up through my feet and surges through me.

  The world goes black.