Prologue

Jack was in the middle of a deep reverie when he heard a disturbing knock on his door. The knock was quite hard. It was more like breaking and entering knock. It was five o’clock in the morning. Had it not it been for his daily alarm snoozing to the roof, he would not even have bothered waking up. Jumping out of bed and going downstairs, still in a somewhat sleeping state. 



While he was rushing down, another hard knock shook his house. “I’m coming,” he yelled, switching on the flickering night lights.
 The night was still.

When he peeked through the door’s security eye, he saw a mailman standing outside. A mailman at five o’clock in the morning? That’s strange!


Yawning and rubbing his heavy eyes, he loosened the locks, without asking the identity of the large mail carrier standing outside. When he opened the door, his jaw dropped to the floor before he could even speak. His stomach tightened, and he began to sweat. The large man at about six-eleven, and weighing three-hundred pounds, disguised as a USPS worker, aimed a gun between Jack’s two dozy eyes. Jack’s body shook like a 6.0 magnitude Earthquake. He was then kidnapped at gunpoint from his luxurious Coney Island apartment, where he was forcefully blindfolded, and thrown into a pitch-black unlicensed van. The van sped towards Belt Parkway East, with rubber kissing the cold wet winter asphalt, while its muffler was choking up with hazardous smoke which could create global warming.

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At five o’clock in the morning, the Price Savers Supermarket was deadly quiet, and Drake was the only employee that clocked in at that dark hour. He loved the dullness and the total privacy. He shuffled the grocery items neatly and methodically, at a fast-paced speed, aisle by aisle. He always made sure that everything got aligned perfectly as if he was trained in the army. He paid extra attention to each class matching as details as their color lines by categories. When he was at work at these ghostly hours, he put on his Wireless headset and blasted his favorite music through his eardrums. He nodded his head and his body moved with a rhythm like he was in the clubs, which made the rest of the nights go by quickly without any boredom or strains on him.
That night, when he was almost done and getting ready to go home, he felt a heavy shadow walking behind him. He shrugged it off, thinking that it was nothing to expect because he was alone in the store. But, the last thing he could recall from his foggy memory was a hit in the back of his head, which has been giving him a massive headache, and the echo of sardine cans that he had dropped on the white, clean tiled floor.


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Emily was strolling through the busy mall alone, at 5:00 PM. She’d seen a red dress commercial on TV a day before, and she was dying to get her hands on it like a heroin addict that craves for a needle shot. When she walked into the store, she was greeted by a well-dressed, sparkling sales associate, who was smiling to her ears. Her tag read Betty. Emily had never seen this woman before, and she didn’t like the magnetic force she pulled from her either. Something’s awfully strange about this woman. Then her mom’s voice danced inside her head, a woman’s first instincts are always right. Remember that, baby.

The sales associate, who rather looked in the wrong line of business followed Emily throughout the store, insisting if she could be of any help. Emily tried ignoring her politely as much as possible, by either saying nothing or fewer words; after she picked the extra small red dress and a shoe with high heels, she went to the vacant fitting room to try the dream dress. After she took off her weekend wardrobes, she slipped into the dress, but she couldn’t fit into the extra small.



“Excuse me,” Emily called out to Betty. “May I please get this in a small?”

She handed her the one that didn’t fit. 



“Certainly,” said Betty, and disappeared between the nearby aisles.

A few minutes later, a knock on the door.



“Here is the dress you requested,” says another woman with a deep and scary voice. The voice sounded very mature and serious. When Emily opened the door, she felt a cold gun with a long silencer on her small forehead. Her voice defused, unable to scream, for a sudden fear killed her survival adrenaline by shooting a cramping pain to her belly. A military trained type woman stepped in and with a white nasty smelling towel, quickly covered Emily’s mouth and nose.

The last thing she remembered was waking up in a cold dark storage room, without any lights, and the bad smell she was introduced to, by the lady who medicated her in the fitting room.

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Some unknown object or a plane just fell from the sky, exploding into pieces near La Guardia Airport, just off Grand Central Parkway and Brooklyn Queens Expressway. The sky covered with burning flames and dark dusty smoke, like after the mushroom cloud that rose over Hiroshima.



It seemed one day the world would detonate and be torn apart, while we’re still sleeping.