Chapter Text
Elizabeth Conway had spent the first twenty years of her life wanting for nothing. Born not only rich, but fabulously wealthy, she enjoyed a life that few people could, and most could not even dream of. The best schools, the best holidays, the best toys, the best games. The best colleges too, though she hadn’t gotten very far into them.
Two weeks after she got accepted into her dream school, her father died, and took with him his wealth. Apparently unimpressed by her greed now that she’d become an adult, he torched scholarships for her, and locked her inheritance away into a trust fund that wouldn’t unlock for another decade. A decade she’d have to endure as one of the ‘normal people’.
It had been a very hard adjustment. To go from a manor in Bright Hills to a Manhattan apartment. Then to a Brooklyn apartment when she, like so many others, misjudged how expensive living in NYC actually was. She got a job at a diner, quit after two days, and that began a string of failed jobs until she finally landed the subtly-bullshit job of “personal trainer” – Wherein middle-aged men would pay the short blonde girl thousands of dollars to bend over in front of them in yoga pants.
It was degrading, but it was easy, and it kept the roof over her head. Through all that time, she lied to her new roommates that she was working at a Fortune 500 company as an up-and-coming investor. She bought meals she couldn’t afford then dashed out the door when the check came, lied to her clients about needing funds for her dead dad’s cancer treatments, and so many more horrible things that landed her time and time again in hot water that she never truly saw consequences for.
When her roommate suddenly came into money, Liz stole a lot of it, and gaslit them into thinking it had been a smaller amount than it was. She spent it on designer shoes while they struggled to buy food.
Liz snagged herself a nice boyfriend, who cared too much about a woman who didn’t care at all about anything he had but his wallet. He’d lavish her with gifts, and she’d give him a kiss and feign the appreciative girlfriend, then sell what he’d given her on the internet. She gave him her virginity, and the price that came with that? He spent his college savings on getting her a car, after she convinced him college wasn’t necessary. After all, she hadn’t gone.
Liz was the worst.
And then Liz was alone.
Everything and everyone had gone missing. Not destroyed, not broken, not even abandoned in the usual sense, simply gone. No bodies. No wrecks. No fires left burning. Humanity had simply slipped away. Left Liz all alone.
She thought it had been a joke at first. Her roommates had slipped out without waking her, and her whole building was silent. Then when she stepped outside, she thought something had happened – a terrorist attack? No fires though, no screaming, nothing on the news. Just re-runs of shows on TV. Nothing new.
At first, Liz had searched.
She had screamed herself hoarse atop a parking garage, called everyone on her phone, walked into Times Square and found it empty of all life. Great big advertisement signs still lit and displaying fashion trends, brands and upcoming films. Cars parked in the middle of the street, empty and turned off, as if whoever was driving had simply stopped in gridlock, gotten out and went home.
She had taken her roommate’s car, driven until the gas needle dipped low, refueled at unmanned stations, and driven again. Cities bled into suburbs, suburbs into countryside, and everywhere the same impossible stillness waited for her. Not a single human voice answered back. Not a single sign of struggle suggested she had missed the end of something terrible. The road led her back to the city, where she remained.
Grocery stores were her first real proof that something was wrong beyond mere disappearance. The shelves were never empty for long. If she took a box of cereal, it would be gone so long as she lingered. But if she left the aisle, checked the freezer section, and returned, there would be a new box sitting neatly in its place. Different brand, sometimes. Different expiration date. Always sealed. Always fresh.
She tested it obsessively in those early months, setting cans on the floor, memorizing labels, scratching tiny marks on cardboard with her keys. The cans returned to their shelves when she wasn’t looking. The scratches vanished. The store itself seemed offended by the idea of scarcity, correcting it the moment her attention drifted elsewhere.
Plumbing behaved the same way. She could run the shower for hours, water endlessly hot and clean, and it never sputtered or weakened. Toilets flushed. Trash disappeared from dumpsters overnight. Fallen leaves vanished from sidewalks. Even the corpses she half-expected – dead pets, livestock, roadkill – never materialized. Animals still existed, she discovered later, watching deer graze in highway medians and birds roost on power lines, but none ever seemed frightened of her. None ever acted as though humans had been predators once.
That, more than the silence, unsettled her.
Liz adapted because there was no other option. She cooked elaborate meals for herself to occupy her time. She claimed an entire block of apartments as her own, moving between units whenever the loneliness of one space grew too thick. She wore different clothes every day, partly for variety, partly to prove to herself that time was still passing, even if the world refused to age.
She had a lot of time for reading. Her phone worked, but she had no signal, and all the Wi-Fi networks were down. That was one thing that wasn’t maintained, apparently. The libraries had their lights on though, and they were warmer than her apartment during the colder months. So she camped inside them, read books, and slept between the shelves.
It was also brighter in the libraries. At night, she slept with the lights on.
Not because she feared the dark (though she did) but because darkness felt like permission. Like the world might finally do whatever it had been patiently waiting to do the moment the darkness came. She dreamed of crowds she couldn’t see the faces of, of voices calling her name from behind walls.
Six months in, Liz no longer believed she was lucky.
Luck implied randomness, a roll of the dice that had spared her by chance. This felt deliberate. The infrastructure of civilization persisted too perfectly, as though an unseen caretaker were maintaining the set between scenes of a play that would never resume.
Power grids should’ve failed by now. Supply chains shouldn’t restock themselves. Reality did not behave this neatly unless something was forcing it to. Liz became convinced that someone or something, somewhere, was trapping her in a cycle.
She had tried to break it.
Once, in a fit of anger, she smashed a store window with a fire extinguisher and looted recklessly, flinging food across the floor, leaving doors open, lights flicked on and off in frantic patterns.
When she returned the next day, the glass was repaired, the shelves pristine, the food arranged with almost mocking care. The only thing that remained was the extinguisher, placed upright near the entrance, its pin neatly reinserted. Someone had to have placed it there.
She sobbed on the pavement and stared at the extinguisher, curled into a ball, and screamed herself hoarse for hours. She tried to end things after that. Drugs and alcohol, a tall building, a car in a garage. She never remembered the details, but did remember always waking up on some street corner, shivering, alive and still painfully alone. Always angry, but oddly grateful. Even Death would not accompany her.
That was about when she began talking to herself. Sarcastically, at first, then conversationally, as though addressing an unseen listener. She asked why her. She asked what “it” wanted. She threatened. She pleaded. The world answered her with silence, but it continued to provide, continued to function, continued to watch her just closely enough to respond when she wasn’t looking.
She read about limbo. About liminal spaces trapped between time. Had she died so many months ago, and her body was trapped in an inbetween? Some celestial waiting room?
The sun rose on an empty city.
Outside the library, now packed with looted items, bedding and other knick-nacks to give Liz some semblance of ‘home’, light bled between the tall buildings. A city built for millions but occupied by just one. The air was clean. The buildings intact.
Somewhere, a pedestrian signal chirped patiently, waiting for no one at all to cross the street.
Liz’s phone alarm went off. The date claimed it had been over one year since everybody vanished. November 19th, 2025. The air would be getting colder soon, and already she was sleeping with a heavier blanket.
Its absence was the first thing she noted, as a chill ran along her spine. She must’ve thrown it off in her sleep, she reasoned at first. Then the pain came. Tickling at her abdomen. She shifted, and it sharpened. Had she eaten something bad? She’d not been sick since before the quiet year started.
“What…” She started to say aloud, her fingers brushing over her own stomach. She slept in comfortable pajamas… But her shirt was pulled up over her chest, and her pajama pants were… missing. The cold air striking her bare legs made her realize that before her fingers found her bare waist.
Her fingers found something wet. Wet and sticky, cooled and partially dried, but when she lifted her fingers above her to look at them with blurry, sleep-addled eyes, she found a clear white substance clinging to them. Beyond that, she could see her wrist was bruised. Both were. Her neck too, she quickly surmised, when she craned her neck to look down at herself.
The realization hit her like a freight train. Liz’s heart stopped for just a moment. Her pupils dilated as sickened realization gripped her body and drove pointless adrenaline into her veins.
Someone had touched her during the night. Someone had raped her.
Liz was not alone.