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.