Reverse armeggedon

Reversed Armageddon

A crowd of jacket-suited men passed Jeff on the sidewalk. His beard was overgrown and had an earthy musk. A curious teenager quickly touched the hems of his clothing, to test if it was costume. Jeff had been roughing it in the city all week. The modified bag of chips he wore for socks gave it away. He had stockpiled a weeks' worth of food grabbed from convenience stores. Yesterday, downtown had been devoid of all walking life.

As the crowd thinned, Jeff restarted his questioning of God. He locked his eyes to the stupid people who acted as if nothing had happened, pushing his tongue up in intrigue. God. Who was that to him?

The suited men were all at work soon. Jeff couldn't believe everyone returned. He thought he might have been drugged at the bar and hallucinated everything. But he knew he wasn't a victim of drug overdose. He knew it was God himself who hated him. Only God could make everyone on Earth disappear and reappear without them noticing.  A traffic officer finally gave Jeff a citation for goods he'd illegally gathered on the sidewalk. After determining Jeff was a sane, married man with a house, he let him go. A penetrating void gathered in Jeff's stomach.

"What have you been doing for the past few days?" the officer asked.

"Just looking after what remained of humanity," Jeff said. "In other words, me."