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.
After a few weeks, David went back to his routine and stopped thinking about the voices. He enjoyed his leisurely lifestyle and the voices fell into the category of out-of-sight (or in this case, hearing), out-of-mind. After a couple of months he had all but forgotton the flash of light and the pain.
Other strange things were happening that he noticed, though. One day, about six months after he had found himself alone in the world, David went to the sporting goods store to pick up some batteries. When he arrived, something seemed different. David stood in the parking lot for a minute trying to figure out what it was before it hit him: there used to be another store next to the sporting goods store and now the sporting goods store stood alone.
He stood staring at the emptiness next to the sporting goods store. It was just a grassy lot, but he was certain that there had been something there before. "It was a hair salon, right? Or a bookstore?" he thought, but he just couldn't remember. He was sure something had been there, but for the life of him, he couldn't picture it. He had been to the sporting goods store a hundred times in the last six months and he was sure that he could drive to it blindfolded, but he could not visualize the store that had been next to it.
He started to doubt himself. There was really no explanation for how it could have disappeared if there had been something there, so it must just be his mind playing tricks on him, he decided. "Too much time alone," he thought. It bugged him, though, and he couldn't shake the feeling that something was out of place.
A couple of weeks later he misplaced his watch. He really had no need for a watch, but he had broken into a jewelry store and grabbed a $20,000 Rolex to amuse himself. He wore it when he went on driving trips as a joke, "trying to impress the locals," he thought to himself. But he hadn't been on any driving trips for a while and he couldn't find the watch when he went to look for it. He got the same feeling as when he couldn't remember the store next to the sporting goods store; something just wasn't right.
As time went on, he made fewer and fewer trips, until, after eight months, he was only leaving the house for necessities. It hadn't been a conscious decision, he just never felt like going anywhere. Some days he only got out of bed to get food or use the restroom.
One day, at some point in the ninth month, David woke up feeling groggy. The blinds were open in his bedroom, although he couldn't remember having opened them, and a strange hazy light was filtering into his bedroom. The eerie haze was very similar to the haze of the first morning that he had found himself alone, but David didn't make that connection. Instead, a strange thought occurred to him: he couldn't remember the last time that he had refilled the gas tanks on the generators.
The thought was fleeting, just beyond his grasp. There was some important meaning to the thought that he just couldn't piece together. The generators. Gasoline. When had he last filled them? How could they still be running? Food. The gas station. When had he last left the house? Who was he?
The last question came like a flash in his brain, but it was immediately gone. The flood of questions and random pieces of information came too fast, like rapid-fire deja vu. The pressure in his head became too much and he closed his eyes, allowing it all to fade away.
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