-Final Hour Before The Vanishing

"We don't have enough room in the house for everyone."

"We would if you didn't invite everyone and their dogs to this place!"

I took a swig of vodka, the only thing that seemed to help with the stress. I had invited my family to this homestead in the middle of nowhere, repeatedly ensuring they only brought their spouses and kids. And they seemed to have listened. Both my sisters and brothers arrived with their families, and I had already moved my parents and younger brother here. We had enough land, food, water, and shelter for all of us. We had plenty of board games and video games to entertain ourselves. Everything was going well, and a month passed smoothly.

Then someone approached our property, claiming to be my sister's friend. My sister admitted she knew them but denied inviting them. Since they were already here, I couldn't just scare them off, so I let them stay. But then another one came, and another.

"I didn't know it would snowball! I swear I didn't mean for this to happen!"

"It doesn't matter what you meant; what matters is it's happening! Thanks to you, twenty people have intruded on our home! I specifically asked you not to share our location. What's the first thing you do? You share it!"

I screamed in frustration and bashed the table next to me. The commotion gained some notice, and a man walked into the room.

"You don't get to talk to my wife like that!"

I turned to look at Vlad, my sister Jessica's husband.

"What do you mean I don't get to? Stay out of thi—"

A punch flew at my face, and not expecting that, I saw stars and the ceiling. A shocked silence filled the room before Vlad spoke up again.

"Nobody talks to her like that, not even you. I appreciate you giving us a place to live during these times, but it doesn't give you power over us."

I collected myself and left the room, not bothering to listen to him or anyone else. All I could see was red, and it took every inch of my willpower not to do or say anything. I exited the house while people looked at me through the doors and windows. I hopped into my truck and drove off.

Where? I didn't know, but I needed to get away from that place to cool down. My sister exposed our location to her friends and ensured we didn't have much food left and that people would have to sleep on the floor. This was all her fault, and he dared to hit me. I gripped the steering wheel tightly until I decided I was far enough away and found a field to pull into.

I exited the pickup and emptied everything from the back except some blankets and pillows. I lay down and stared at the sky, thinking over everything that had happened. About all my life and my decisions. I saw a few stars wink out slowly but surely and just stared at the ever-darkening sky.

I guess today is the day the darkness gets us. It got darker as more stars disappeared until it became pitch black. It was so dark, and I was so alone.

I ceased to exist.

* * *

-POV James

The sky was bright! There were stars! So many stars it was astounding. What the hell? How did I not notice this last night! Why were there stars? Was I hallucinating? I rubbed my eyes, seeing if I was just hallucinating things, but nope, they were still there. I looked at the guard and pointed up at the sky. Confused, he looked up and then back down. Seeing that he didn't see anything strange, I started thinking about everything. Waking up butt naked in the middle of nowhere, with people who have no access to technology. Did I get transmigrated? The idea baffled me. How was that possible?

Eventually, the guard dragged me back to the hut. I pulled the bedding to the door and stuck my head out of the doorway's flap. The guard looked at me like I was crazy, but I ignored it and continued to stare at the sky.

The night sky stretched infinitely above me. A canvas of shimmering stars twinkled against the vast darkness. Laying on the blanket, I felt the cool earth beneath. The day's events had left me mentally exhausted, but as I gazed upward, I found a sense of peace I hadn't felt since the stars started disappearing. Every day since, I've been filled with anxiety, rushing to get everything done and ensuring I didn't lose my job.

I couldn't 100% confirm it until I learned the local language and got to a city. Still, I was reasonably confident I wasn't on Earth any longer. Even if I did feel a little guilty for feeling like this, it felt freeing knowing that I didn't have to deal with the mess on Earth. I simply admired the stars for a bit, and they were beautiful.

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* * *

"I live in house," I say as the teaching women giggle at my broken pronunciation.

"I eat good food," I continued, trying to "hold" a conversation.

"And I love sun. What you do?" I asked.

At first, the women were annoyed at repeating words all the time, but some of them started to find it amusing to teach me. They would sometimes sneak in clearly wrong words, based on how they responded when I said them in a sentence. I caught most of them but I was sure some words were wrong in my vocabulary and I would have to live with it until I knew the language better or someone corrected me.

“My **** ** ** watch *** take care ** child(ren). I live in *** Qingfeng Village."

There were a lot of words I didn't recognize in the sentence, but it felt good to recognize the gist of what they were. It was not like we were practicing these couple of sentences over and over again. Not only was it hard to remember the words, but the language was similar to Chinese and based on a tonal system. It took multiple tries to get the pronunciation right, let alone remember the word.

A kid walked up to me with a bug that looked like a caterpillar.

“Bug! Bug!” He says.

I said it back, and he ran away hurriedly in excitement, looking for the next thing to show and "teach" me. It became a game for the kids, and they kept bringing me more items, and it started to become more absurdly weird. There was even a kid who brought a spider that was quickly slapped off by one of the women, Huá, and promptly stomped down into the ground. She then proceeded to say a few words that I assumed were spider, poison, and bad, in no particular order, which I started grilling her on.

The atmosphere shattered as we heard panicked screams off the field where some kids were playing. I looked around, and when I noticed all the adults were running towards a certain direction, I decided to join and ran ahead with a few of the men. Arriving just past the trees was a kid on the ground, grasping at his neck and choking.

A man had already reached the poor kid and hit him in the back to try to unlodge whatever was choking him. Some kids were standing around in a crowd, scared but curious about what was happening. I realized that slapping the kid on the back wouldn't help, and it simply bruised the poor child. I reached out to pull the man off the kid.

“Stop! Won’t work!”

He looks at me with some anger in his eyes. Still, recognizing my words and noticing I was the mysterious visitor, he decided not to punch me in the face. I pull the kid up to his knees and start performing the Heimlich on him. There was a tense silence as I performed the Heimlich, and the kid slowly stopped gasping. My adrenaline was rushing through my veins, and panic started to set in as I tried my best to dislodge something from his throat. Seconds pass until, finally, something rolls out of his mouth.

The crowd around me got excited with my success, and I tried to shake the kid to consciousness. The kid simply flops around, and I put my ear to his chest to hear if there is any breathing. There wasn't. The excitement of the crowd slowly turned to confusion when, instead of getting up, I rolled the child onto his back to perform CPR. As I started, the confusion turned into worry, and they realized something was wrong since the kid wasn't responding. A sob picked up in the background, which I chose to ignore. All that mattered to me at the moment was waking this kid up.

One compression. Come on, kid, you got this.

Another one. Just breathe.

Another. I believe in you.

Another. Another. Another.

I started to lose hope until I finally heard something. At first, I thought it was the sounds due to my CPR, but the kid twitched, and hope rose. I continued doing it until the kid finally woke up completely. Once the kid started groaning, I decided to stop and simply put my ear on his chest to listen to his breathing. His breathing seemed fine, and I relaxed and stepped away from the kid.

Realizing I was done and the kid was alive and well, a woman rushed to the kids' side for a hug while I quietly slunk away. The guard assigned to me followed me out of the crowd, and we walked silently. Eventually, the man stopped, did a slight bow, and asked me to follow him. Seeing no reason to refuse, I agreed and followed the man. Going through the village, it was slightly more empty. The choking kid seemed to have caused a commotion, and people went to check it out. Since it is such a close-knit community, there was more of a reason to care, and living in such a remote location, any drama was probably welcome.

I realized we were heading towards the center again and resigned that we would meet the elders at the hut again. The guard didn't check on me throughout our little walk. When you save a kid, I guess you are no longer suspicious. We walked into the hut, and all eyes turned to me. It seemed like the commotion caused all the elders to meet together here. I didn't know why they deemed the incident big enough that they all needed to gather and felt uncomfortable. Some eyes were filled with suspicion, while others were filled with curiosity. There were even some that were filled with awe. That last emotion was the one that confused me the most.

This time, I wasn't offered a seat. I was left standing awkwardly near the entrance as the guard seemed to recite the events that were happening. I picked up some words like "run," "push," and "dirt." He seemed to be reciting the story in excruciating detail. There was some grumbling when he mentioned how distracted they were by playing the translation game. I then got glares when it was mentioned how I pushed the man who was trying to help the kid off of him. But mostly, there was some resigned silence as some elders assumed the kid was finished. In contrast, others who already had awe in their eyes nodded in seemingly understanding, even approvingly.

Eventually, it got to the part where I had trouble understanding. I had never heard of most of these words, but I did recognize one. Dead. I recognized the word because it was a commonly used word when paired with hunted or eaten animals. Everyone stilled at the mention. Did he just say that the kid died? He didn't die but simply stopped breathing. I quickly realized I didn't like the direction this story was going. Still, I didn't know enough of the language to explain Heimlich and CPR.

As the guard finished his story, everyone looked at me. Some looked at me with awe and respect, while others looked at me with disbelief and uncertainty. All I knew at this moment was that I did not like this development.