Ten

The light seemed unnecessarily bright.  Rooms like these never seemed to be designed for comfort, which was like adding insult to injury.  Or should it be injury to insult, in this case?

"They could at least put some comfortable chairs in here..."

The thought came randomly and with immediate regret.  With everything that is going on and the discussion about to take place, how could Allison be thinking about her own comfort?

Nine

The next time David heard the voices, they awoke him from his sleep.  His eyes snapped open and he sat up with a jerk.  He turned to get out of bed when he remembered his plan to ignore the voices.  He laid back down, rolled on his side away from the door and pulled the covers over his head like a child hiding from a parent's discipline.

He felt foolish and cowardly, but he did not budge.  He lay in that position for more than an hour after the voices had faded away.

The voices came more infrequently thereafter and David always went to his room and hid under the covers.  Every time the voices would just fade away and David felt reassured that ignoring them was his best option.

Eight

David didn't lose consciousness, but the flash of light blinded him momentarily.  There was a residue of the pain radiating down his arms and legs as he struggled to get to his knees.  He shook his head to clear the cobwebs as his vision began to return to him.  He looked around quickly and saw no one.  His shotgun lay a couple of feet away from him and he clumsily crawled over to it, picking it up and scrambling back around the corner.

"What the fuck was that?"  David said aloud, under his breath. 

Seven

David had heard the voices on a couple of occasions in the first few days.  He had tried chasing them down again and tried yelling for them to hear him, but it had never worked.  Then one day he heard them while he was searching a drug store for some first aid supplies.  He had stopped in an aisle in front of the condoms, thinking about how he would never have a need for them again and wondering if it made him less of a man that he didn't really miss sex.  He had distractedly pulled a condom out of its package and was looking at it, thinking how primitive the concept of condoms really were, when he heard the voices again.

He immediately jerked his head around, looking for the people talking.  But he didn't call out or run looking for anyone.  Instead, he thought "I've got too much other shit to do, I don't have time for wild goose chases," and he dropped the condom and went about looking for the supplies he wanted.  The voices faded and he hadn't heard them since then.

Six

In the month since David had found himself alone in the world, he had made his house into a fortress.  He had gas powered generators in his basement that provided all the electricity that he needed and his pantry was fully stocked with food.  Fresh food was quickly running out - David knew that he soon would never drink milk again - but he had wisely brought several large freezers into his garage and filled them with a multitude of steaks, hamburgers and other meat. 

So David was eating well and he was keeping himself entertained.  David had gotten himself the nicest sixty inch television he could find and had an impressive library of DVD's to choose from.  Between the movies and video games, David was rarely bored.  There were times when he thought that this might be the happiest he had ever been.

Five

David woke in his own bed the next morning.  He couldn't remember how he had gotten there, but his car was in the garage and everything seemed to be in the same place as when he had left to go to his office the previous day. 

He tried the telephone, in the vain hopes that the previous day was a bad dream, but there was still no dial tone.  He could still feel the desperation and the panic that he had felt in the sporting goods store lurking just below the surface of his mind, but he pushed them down and made himself replay the previous day's events in his head. 

After hopelessly trying to come up with a reasonable explanation for everything that had happened to himself for a while, he set those thoughts aside and retraced his steps in his mind.  Recounting what had happened in the sporting goods store gave him an idea for what his next steps should be.

Four

David flinched at the sight of something moving, but when he turned to see what it was there was nothing there.  He was sure that he had seen something, so he started walking to his right, in the direction that he thought he had seen something move. 

He was about half a block away from his office building when he thought maybe it was just a shadow of a bird on the ground.  Then he realized that he hadn't seen any birds, either.  He stopped in his tracks and looked up at the sky in wonder.  Just as he was starting to feel stupid, staring at the sky, movement caught his eye again.  This time he was sure he hadn't imagined it - something dark had moved quickly and disappeared around the corner.

Frantic now, David began to run towards the corner.  He stopped at the corner and looked around, but again saw nothing. 

Three

The panic subsided as David got behind the wheel of his car.  He started the engine, but he couldn't think of anywhere to go.  Eventually he pulled out of the parking lot and drove aimlessly through town.  He didn't see anyone anywhere.  He stopped at a grocery store and a fast food restaurant, but found the same results as at the Target. 

After an hour David was bored and decided to go home.  On his way he stopped at the Target again and decided to pick up some food and drinks.  It felt wrong, but once again getting caught would come as a relief.  No one stopped him. 

Two

After David had walked through every room and confirmed that Allison was not in the house, he decided to try and call her cell phone.  First, he picked up his own cell phone and found that he had no signal, which had never happened in his house before.  Then he tried the land line and found that it was dead, as well.  Again, David couldn't think of anything else to do, so he sat down and ate his cereal. 

He once again considered going back to bed, but instead decided to check with the neighbors to see if their power was out.  Going outside, David saw that the sun was beginning to break up the haze and the sky seemed normal to him now.  He wondered if his half-asleep mind had merely tricked him into seeing the odd lighting earlier.  He trudged next door to his neighbor's house (the single mom that looked excellent in her little jogging outfits, not the creepy old man on the other side that sometimes looked at Allison for just a little too long) and knocked on the door.  He waited for twenty seconds and then pushed the doorbell.  Nothing.

One

David woke up exhausted and disoriented.  The room was dark and it took him a moment to realize that the utter darkness was a result of there being no power.  The LED's on his alarm clock normally would allow him to get his bearings, at least, but the total absence of light furthered his confusion, not to mention the simple fact that he had no idea what time it was. 

He briefly considered the merits of just rolling over and going back to sleep, but the feeling in his bladder told him that the attempt would be useless.  He threw back the covers and swung his legs to the floor.  Reaching to the nightstand, he found the alarm clock and felt for the cord to make sure it was still plugged in.  It was.

Still trying to shake the sleep from his legs, David used the nightstand as a crutch to stand and make his way to the door to the master bathroom.  Through the bathroom was a walk in closet and when he opened the door, he finally could see some light coming from a window in the closet.  The light seemed muted and hazy and David was drawn to the window to see why.  His eyes were still adjusting to the light when he looked out.  The sky seemed to have a peculiar texture to it, like how the world looks right before a big thunderstorm at dusk, but there wasn't a cloud in the sky.  He flipped the light switch in the closet to check the power, but the light didn't come on.