The strangest part was that the houses still looked lived-in. Everything was still in its place, lights on, cup of tea cooling on the side table, toothbrush laden with toothpaste resting on the edge of the sink. That’s why it took so long for anyone to notice. 

                Elise and Carol were having another argument. They prowled around the living room couches like predators hungry for a fight. They were both nice people, but they brought out the worst in each other—as well-meaning mothers and their resistant teenage daughters often do. 

                “I don’t understand how you expect me to be a perfect student and also help with my brothers.” 

                “I don’t see what you don’t understand. You’re 15, Elise, it’s time to grow up and take on some responsibilities.” 

                “I’m tired of being a parent!” 

                “I’m not asking you to parent, I just expect that you would help out in making sure your brothers don’t kill themselves. You know what I mean,” Carol responded to the face Elise gave her. 

                “Oh, you mean how Charles keeps having nightmares that he can’t wake up from?”

                “Those are just his night terrors. They happen to some kids. So what if he’s a little paranoid—Maybe if you didn’t encourage him, his worry wouldn’t last all day and night.”

                 “Oh, and what do you do? Because I’m pretty sure the cure to being scared of everything except for the dark isn’t yelling. And then Jack always cries and you yell at me to make them stop yelling and we all end up yelling until dad yells at us to shut up.” 

                “Jack is young, okay? I wish that as the oldest sibling you could have some room in your developing brain to watch over your brothers.”

                “So you want me to babysit? Fine! My rate for a four-year-old and a seven-year-old is twenty dollars an hour and stop getting on my back about homework all the time! And stop telling me to smile, I’ll smile when I feel like it!” 

                Carol’s face revealed a change in her train of thought. 

                “Damn it, I left the potatoes in the oven.” She ran to the kitchen, and Elise followed, finally noticing the distant ringing of the timer. 

                Carol grabbed the oven mitts from the counter, turned the oven off, and grabbed their black-charred dinner. 

                “Hey, what happened to Dad’s soup?” said Elise. 

                Carol turned to look at the liquid just in time to see it bubbling out of the pot, splattering red over the floor. 

                “Hurry! Go get paper towels or something!” she shouted, turning the stove off. Elise came back with the roll and started wiping the floor while her mom grabbed the sponge and cleaned the counters. 

                “Daniel, you left your soup! Ugh, where is he? Go get your father.” 

                The girl walked back across the living room shouting “Daaad” like when she fetched him for dinner. “Dad?” She looked in his office. Elise checked the bathroom, the bedroom, and even the yard before going back to her mom. 

                “I can’t find him.” 

                “What do you mean you can’t find him? He’s not the size of a mouse. Go get him.”

                “I checked all the rooms, mom. I’m getting kind of worried.” 

                “Fine, I’ll get him myself. Set the table.” 

                While Elise grabbed the dishes with a nervous shake in her fingers, Carol strode across the house searching for her husband. As the seconds passed, she became less confident and more confused. “Where could he have gone?” Carol asked, somewhat breathless, poking her head around the doorframe to talk to Elise. 

                “I don’t know! It’s not my job to track everyone down in this house! Where is he, though?”

                “I know, honey. I don’t know where he is.” 

                Carol exited the kitchen for the second time. Elise felt the silverware starting to slip from her moistening hands. She heard scratching from the laundry room door. Elise slowly approached, gripping a butter knife in one hand, reaching for the silver door handle with the other. “I told you they would come,” a small voice emitted from the dark. 

                “Charles!? You scared the shit out of me! What are you doing in the closet? Dinner’s almost ready.” 

                “I told you they would come. We need to go.” 

                At this point, Carol returned with a new expression on her face, one of apprehension, almost fear. She said, “We have to leave.” 

                “Why, what happened?” asked Elise. 

                “I saw someone at the door, a sort of shadow. I think someone might be trying to break in. I don’t know, I just have a really bad feeling. Come on.” 

                She picked up Charles and rushed to the shoe closet. 

                “Elise, get some sweaters and the toothbrushes and usual stuff!” 

                Obedient, the daughter grabbed Charles’s jacket from his bedroom chair, found her own in her room, and hesitated for a moment over her jewelry box before going to her bathroom instead and swiping her toiletries off the counter into a bag. She shoved socks on her feet in hops between running steps, slammed her sneakers on without fitting her heels in, and ran to the garage, catching up with her mom and brother. 

                “Did you get Jack’s sweater?” 

                “No, I forgot. Let me go get it.” Elise took her seatbelt off and opened the car door. “No, get back here!” 

                There was a beat as mother and daughter had a rare moment of shared understanding. “What about Jack?” Elise asked. 

                “He’s not coming,” said Charles. “They got him already.” 

                Despite his little boy voice, he seemed certain in a way that made it seem dangerous to disagree.

                “Nevermind. Put your seatbelts on,” said Carol. 

                She turned the car on and opened the garage, checking the rearview mirror to make sure they were wearing their seatbelts. 

                As the grey SUV pulled out of the garage with a screech, only Charles felt the presence of new entities taking over their house. The women didn’t have it, couldn’t feel it, didn’t know. All they had was a vague but sharp sense of unsettlement. Elise turned back at the last second and thought she saw her dad and Jack through the kitchen window, weirdly static. She had no way of knowing that they were looking for her. 

* * * 

                They drove for two hours without stopping, rushing to disappear like the sun. “Where are we going?” asked Elise. 

                “I don’t know,” responded her mother. 

                “We need to go faaar away,” said Charles in a sing-songy voice. 

                “Ok Choo-choo, you’re freaking me out here. Are you being silly again, or do you have something to tell momma?” Carol asked her son. 

                “I tried to tell you they were coming to get us but you didn’t listen. Now they got Dad and Jack.” 

                “Wait, what do you mean they “got” them?” said Elise, disturbed. 

                “Jack and Daddy are gone, they replaced them.” 

                “Who replaced them, buddy, can be more specific?” asked his mom. 

                “The Others. And they’re coming for us, too.” The little boy swung his legs in his seat and looked out the window.

                “Ok, that’s not creepy at all,” said Elise. 

                “Jesus! The drivers are really insane today.” 

                While Carol focused on driving, Elise tried to look into the other cars. Many of them had passengers in the backseat. She made eye contact with one of the drivers, who had a chilling gaze.

                “Mom, I don’t think these other drivers are normal. One of them just gave me a death-stare. Charles, can the Others drive?” 

                “Why not? They’re just like us, except not us.” 

                “I think we need to get off the road, right now,” Elise told her mom, getting more panicked. “Sure, I need to use the restroom. I’ll pull over at the next rest stop.” 

                “I don’t know if we should get out of the car. We need to drive somewhere less populated, don’t you think?” 

                “I don’t know. I’ll worry about the driving, okay?” 

                “Alright.” Elise relented. After a few minutes, she asked a question. 

                “Why did you make us leave—I mean, how did you know the house wasn’t safe anymore?” Keeping her eyes focused on the road, Carol answered. 

                “I thought I saw your Dad at the door. It looked just like him, like his body, at least, but his movements were strange, robotic, in a way. Then I heard him fumbling with the keys. Your Dad knows which key is for the front door, so why would it take him so long? I think whatever it was was trying each one.” 

                “Oh.” Elise thought about it for a moment. Her mom pulled into a gas station. “Mom, what are you doing?” 

                “I’m gonna grab a soda. Relax, we’re gonna be okay.” 

                “Okay, whatever. Go ahead and die,” she retorted. 

                Carol’s seatbelt clicked, and Elise was frozen. When her mom closed the door, she locked all the doors and waited apprehensively. 

                “Mom’s right. We’re gonna be okay. Right Charlie?” 

                Her little brother didn’t respond. He was distracted again, propped up on his knees, looking outside with both palms on the window. 

                Elise put the radio on to try and calm herself down. Five minutes passed, and she heard the jingle of the little bell on the gas station door. 

                “Finally, she’s back.”

                “That’s not Mom,” said Charles. 

                Elise squinted and saw that he was right. It looked like their mother, but she was different somehow. Her eyes were cold, and they stared straight at Elise. Carol, or whatever had replaced her, walked towards the car with a quick, steady pace. Elise thought fast and hopped over the console into the driver’s seat. 

                “But you can’t drive, sis,” Charles protested. 

                “Now I can.” 

                Elise started the car and reversed with a jolt. She talked to herself to try and stay focused, but it was difficult to navigate.                 Everywhere she looked, people popped up, and there were at least a dozen walking briskly straight towards the car. She slammed the gas and weaved between them, barely missing an old couple. 

                “Charles, where do we go?” 

                “Nowhere. They’re gonna get us eventually. They’re everywhere by now. We’re probably only one of the few left.” 

                Elise felt a cold tingling all over her body. Panic had set in. Where were these people coming from? What made them go all creepy? According to Charles, it sounded like some sort of takeover or invasion. People were getting snatched, and just like that, half her family had disappeared just a few hours before. She shuddered. Ok, if they’re taking people, then the best place would be the place with the least people, right? 

                “Charlie, do you remember the farm we go to for apple picking, that has the pumpkin patch we go to for Halloween?” 

                “Yep.” 

                “Can you lead us there?” 

                “Sure.” 

                Elise relied on her 7-year-old brother’s spatial memory to take them to the loneliest place she knew. She drove as best she could, this being only her second time behind the wheel unsupervised—the other being when she stole her mom’s car to run away after she confiscated her phone for a day. She ended up coming back after half an hour because she ran out of gas and didn’t know how to refill it. 

                Elise checked on her brother in the rearview mirror, trying to keep her sanity together. All she could think of was one repeating sentence: Okay, whatever, go ahead and die. Those were the last words she had spoken to her mother. She tried to hide it, but she could barely see the road through watery eyes. Her face was hot and her throat tightened. She could’ve been a better daughter. Should she have? Of course, she answered herself automatically. No matter the pain her mom put her through, she owed her more love than she had ever shown. After she hit 6th grade, Elise and her mom spent more and more time fighting. But she knew that through all those mean words, those nasty refrains, that they cared about each other more than anyone else—it was just puberty and menopause colliding. Did her mom know? 

                After 40 minutes, they reached the farm. She drove slowly into the field and stopped, unsure what to do next. 

                “Hey!” Heeey!” A man was running across the field towards them, waving. 

                “Is he safe?” 

                “Yeah, he’s not one of the Others,” answered Charles. 

                Now that the man was knocking on her window, she recognized him as a classmate. He stepped back from the window and took off his straw hat. Elise rolled the window down a crack. “Elise! Oh my god, are you real? I’ve been looking for someone real. My uncle got taken earlier, even though I thought I was keeping such a good eye on him. I had to shoot him.”                 

                “Sawyer—Wait, you shot your Uncle? What are you doing here?” Elise asked. 

                “Well, it wasn’t really my Uncle, it was his Other. I help out on this farm after school for extra money. Come to the barn and help me get some supplies, we can load them into your car and then keep driving. I think I know a good place to hide.” 

                Elise hesitantly opened the car door, stepping onto shaky legs. She and Charles followed the boy into a wooden building with some horses and a pigpen. There was a small shed inside with a box of cans and some jugs of milk and water. 

                “Take this.” Sawyer threw her a gun. 

                “What do you expect me to do with this?” 

                “Well, we’re gonna need to defend ourselves somehow.” He handed a slingshot to Charles. “Wait wait wait. You want me to shoot a gun? I don’t, I never even—” 

                “It doesn’t matter. I’ll teach you. Listen, we just need to get out of here quick.” “How do you know about these people—things—anyway?” 

                “I knew they were coming because… it’s hard to explain.” He looked at Charles. “I think your brother and I have something in common. You knew they were coming too, didn’t you?” Sawyer asked Charles. The boy nodded. 

                “Okay, I guess that’s fine. Desperate times.” Elise mumbled. She was only trying to seem defensive, though, like her mom taught her, to keep weirdos away. Really, something in her intuitively trusted Sawyer, and she felt safe around him. At least right now, it was safer than being alone. 

                They saw some others crowded around her mom’s SUV, like predators prowling around a carcass. 

                “We need to take my truck. Follow me, quick!” 

                The three of them ran towards a rusty pickup, shoving the supplies into the back and hopping in. And just in time, too, because a cold finger grazed Elise’s shoulder after she slammed the door. “It almost got me. It touched me.” 

                “It’s okay, you’re okay. We’re safer together,” Sawyer reassured. 

                Charlie was shaking violently in the backseat, eyes rolled back. 

                “Shit! It’s happening again.” 

                “What’s happening?” Sawyer asked. 

                “He gets these—I don't know, they’re not seizures, they’re more like nightmares, but they hit him really hard. He usually starts screaming and we can’t wake him up.” 

                “We need to get him to a safe place. Don’t worry, I’m driving us there now.” 

                “Where are we going?” Elise asked. 

                The boy didn’t answer for a moment.

                “We just need to get past this bridge. There’s a clearing in the forest with rocks around it that’ll slow them down.” 

                Before Elise could criticize this plan, Sawyer braked hard, front wheels stopping on the stone, back wheels still in the dirt road. 

                “This is the bridge we’re supposed to cross?” she asked. 

                “Umm, yes. Theoretically.” 

                Others were swarming at them from the other side of the bridge. Sawyer tried to go in reverse, but they were coming from behind, too. They were trapped. That’s when Charles started screaming, which seemed to only attract more of them. Elise felt guilty at herself for not taking his nightmares more seriously, and angry at her mom for not listening to either of them. She remembered her mom had been taken less than an hour ago, and tears started to sting her eyes. 

                “What are we going to do?” she begged through sobs. 

                None of them had an answer. Sawyer pulled out his shotgun, but it was futile. “There’s too many of them!” 

                All Elise could do was watch her brother writhe and sweat in the backseat. Sawyer grabbed her hands, and they clung to each other, shutting their eyes as tight as possible, melding into a mess of fear and heat as cold limbs invaded the car and grabbed them. The last humans fell into emptiness together.