The Stranger Visitations
Short Fiction: What comes after the fall?
He looked up at the dusty blue sky, mindful to stay in the shade.
There used to be clouds, he thought. Big, fluffy clouds you could imagine as a turtle, a dragonfly, or even Jesus.
It was hard to remember the last time he'd seen a cloud. Last winter, maybe? Every day was blazing hot, and the rain never came anymore. One endless, dusty blue sky stretched horizon to horizon, hazy with smoke from distant forest fires.
He leaned over and spat in the gutter. A dead bird lay on the sidewalk beside a public garbage can overflowing with years-old trash. The old man walked past without a glance—he’d long ago given up searching trash cans.
‘Gizmo!’ the man yelled, and a high-pitched bark rang out. The stray Chihuahua he’d adopted after... it happened... came running from the alley. In truth, there was some question about who’d adopted whom, as the ankle-biter had simply started following him around. But now, the dog was his trusted companion.
The old man looked up at the gaping hole in what was once an office building. Dark and quiet now, soon enough it would light up and another atrocity would begin.
“We shoulda done somethin’, Giz,” the man said, but the dog just bounded along.
“If we had known what was gonna come through, we woulda done somethin’,” he said, nodding.
The man cast a wary, last glance at the portal, then stepped into the deserted street.
He was a teenager when it began. They called it “The Stranger Visitations.”
All over the globe, strangers appeared under mysterious circumstances, with reports that some materialized out of nowhere. In a single night in the west, strangely dressed visitors were seen everywhere — in Great Britain, Canada, the Sovereign States, the Columbian Republic, and American Mexico
The visitors possessed technology like he had never seen in Columbia. Everywhere they went, the strangers carried devices that worked as communicators and displayed moving pictures. Sometimes they wore them like a wristwatch.
They were friendly, even helpful, in those first encounters, telling fantastic stories.
Then they opened the portals.
The old man led the Chihuahua into an alley at the base of a vacant office building, its walls the color of spoiled cream. At a long-abandoned construction site near the alley's entrance, he pilfered a scrap of steel rebar, about three feet long. The dog bounced ahead, the vanguard of their search party, while the man followed, carrying the rebar like a walking stick and poking at trash in the weeds along his route.
“Don’t wanna get bit by a snake out here, Giz,” the man said, shaking his head. “Can’t just run to the ER anymore.”
All around him, it was quiet. For the first six months or so, it had seemed strange to see a familiar city street, once busy and dangerous, now suddenly deserted and barren. The traffic lights continued to click and change in silence for cars that never came.
He had been in his early twenties when people began to disappear. Men and women of all walks of life vanished in the midst of house-to-house searches by the Strangers, and the disappearances accelerated over time.
Parents reported their children missing, and worse, police fielded calls about parents who had simply vanished, leaving toddlers home alone to be discovered by worried relatives. Everyone suspected the Strangers, but there was nothing but suspicion to go on.
The old man approached a rusty door in the alley, its latch decayed and loose. Raising the steel rebar, he jammed it behind the bracket and pried with a grunt, surprised when the latch gave way easily. He lost his balance momentarily, collected himself, and stepped into what was once a drugstore.
A long-unused blood pressure machine sat dark in a corner, and a sign on the wall read: 'RX: Take two, call us never.' A single word was written on a note he carried — Metronidazole. He scanned the barren shelves until he found what he needed.
“Yes!” he said, pumping a fist. “Jackpot, Giz!”
The dog stood in the doorway, trembling. It looked around when it heard its name as the old man stuffed the pill bottles into his pockets.
As he left the store with the pills he'd sought, he thought of the days when he could still go to a doctor. He could spend a whole day in the sun, as long as he stayed hydrated. He could even order takeout pizza.
“Oh, the pizza,” he admitted with a sigh. “I miss the pizza the most, Giz.”
The last time he’d ordered a pizza, he was still a teenager, and his family had their own Stranger. His name was Franklin, and he visited the old man’s home several times over nearly two years. They had ordered a pizza and sat around listening to Franklin’s tall tales.
He’d shared stories about his home, claiming it was an alternate version of this place. Franklin unfurled tales of tsunamis, pandemics, and World Wars—none of which were familiar to the old man.
As the years passed and Franklin stopped coming around, the old man often wondered whether Frank really was who he said he was or if he was just crazy. One time, he told a story about men going to the moon, and the old man thought Franklin sounded absurd. But he couldn’t shake the mystery of the vanishings.
If Frank was just crazy, if his alternate reality didn't exist, then where did everybody go?
In an urban courtyard between vacant apartment buildings, a hard-looking blonde woman and a muscular Latino man sat at a picnic table, engaged in a deep discussion when the old man arrived.
“It doesn't make sense to me,” the Latino man said.
“Listen,” the woman replied, “If it was easy to understand, I’d explain it, but it's kinda above my pay grade.”
She laid down a hand of playing cards, and the Latino man folded.
“Like I said, infinite timelines, and AI helped them find the right one,” the blonde finished.
“And what is AI again?” the Latino asked, eliciting a loud groan from the blonde.
The old man had heard this story countless times, but nobody had any way of verifying its truth. As far as anyone knew, nobody from this side had ever been to that side and returned to tell about it.
A tall, lanky man appeared from a section of fenced-off makeshift shelters, and the old man called to him.
“Royce!” he shouted. “I got it!”
He removed a pill bottle from his pocket and shook it.
“I got the medicine,” he said.
Royce shook his head and continued walking.
“It's too late,” Royce said. “He’s dead.”
“…What?” the old man asked.
Royce clapped his hand against his leg. “Happened a couple of hours ago,” he said. “Just put the pills in the MASH unit with the other stuff.”
“Where is he?” the old man questioned.
Royce pressed his lips together in a sympathetic expression, pointed, and walked away.
The old man stood there for a moment, stunned. Everything he’d been working toward was now gone. He headed for the med bay.
They'd waited too long to start fighting back, and he accepted part of the blame for that. Everyone had waited too long. It wasn’t until a video smuggled out of the Portal Transfer Station showed men, women, and children being forcibly abducted to the other side that outrage sparked action. Strangers who had been dear friends to many became mortal enemies.
As the sun set, the old man pulled out a portable light. Rounding the corner to the makeshift hospital they had set up, he saw the Stranger lying on a table.
He approached, his pockets heavy with the antibiotics that had arrived too late for the Stranger. An infection had taken him before the old man could help.
The intelligence they could have gained from him — knowledge that could benefit the Republic, or what was left of it — would have been immeasurable.
The old man walked up to the table and looked at the dead Stranger, who had a deep wound in his thigh — the injury that ultimately killed him. He wore a white kevlar suit, and a name tag on his left breast read “Franklin.” A patch on his left shoulder read “USA,” but the old man didn’t know what it meant.
The old man took the blanket covering the Stranger’s lower body and pulled it up to cover his face.
Troy Larson is a writer, digital content creator, and broadcast veteran with hundreds of podcast and broadcast credits to his name. Reach out on Facebook and on Instagram.
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