I Am Not the One Who Gets Left Behind

This month’s stories are by authors Eric Smith, Julie C. Day, Juan Martinez, and E.C. Myers. The first story of the month is free to read, but it’s our paying subscribers who allow us to keep publishing great stories week after week.

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For April’s first, free, story, Eric Smith brings us an alien apocalypse direct from Philadelphia. It smells delicious. ~ Julian and Fran, April 7, 2024

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I Am Not the One Who Gets Left Behind

by Eric Smith

When I can smell my wife’s apple cinnamon French toast, I know the monsters are outside.

I peer out of our third-floor window to the darkened street below, and for a second, just a second, I can almost taste it again, but I know it’s all a lie. A trick. I lost my sense of smell after hitting my head in a car accident years ago. I’ve made it too long, and they’re not gonna get me.

“Daddy, astronauts.”

They’re not gonna get us.

I glance back at my kid’s daybed, a twin-sized piece of furniture that barely fits the two of us, but I make it work. There’s almost no sunlight streaming in through the bedroom windows, the once-white curtains turning a drab gray, and I can’t help the little sigh that escapes me when I peer down at my watch. He’s awake so early. So early. It’ll be a long day.

“Daddy.” He tugs at the large quilt blanketing him. “Astronauts, okay?”

“Okay, kiddo.” I smile, and I take the quilt and flutter it up, then down, before tucking myself in next to him. The world blacks out, and a little light blinks on. The trusty tablet, encased in a protective kid-proof shell. I get it, it does feel like we’re in a spaceship, only instead of gadgets and panels illuminating the inside, it’s an iPad. Once he was old enough to understand his mother worked for NASA, and just what that place is, that was kinda it.

Astronauts. That’s the game.

He swipes around on the tablet, the soft glow illuminating his face, though the internet hasn’t worked in nearly six weeks. Most services slowly blacked out when the city was quarantined, and the last time I was even able to talk to my wife was a month ago. But I always kept a bundle of his favorite shows and movies downloaded on the thing (and locked so he couldn’t erase them by accident) for long road trips and walks to nearby restaurants.

Both things of the past, I suppose.

I squint at the little battery notification in the upper right-hand corner of the screen: 4%. I’ll have to plug it into one of the solar batteries soon, which should be finished charging down in the kitchen. For now, I reach under the bed and plug in one of the smaller power banks I always keep charged up, and used to travel with once upon a time, for my phone.

I peek my head outside the quilt and inhale, wondering if the French toast smell-that’s-not-a-smell is still in the air. But there’s nothing. There’s never really anything. When all of this started, and before services shut off, my wife told me that her people figured out it was all pheromones.

That, and to keep our boy safe until we could get pulled out.

“It’s not affecting you—you need to shelter in place,” she’d said.

Maybe they’ve moved on.

It’s funny. My friends and I used to love watching all those end-of-the-world movies and television shows, reading novels by writers like Emily St. John Mandel and Justin Cronin. There’s always zombies or a plague or aliens or something. We did some light “enthusiast” prepping—backpacks with nonperishable food, water filters, first aid kits, portable solar power, and other emergency gear—comparing our hauls and finds in a group chat.

I’d joke that out of all of them, I was one of the early characters in all the stories we read. That guy you don’t remember from season one of a show. I’d try my best, but I wouldn’t survive. I’m the one who gets left behind. Just make sure you take my gear and remember me in some flashbacks or something.

And now I’m the only one of us still here.

“You’ve been ready for this your whole life,” my wife insisted, the last time we spoke. “You just never realized it.”

God, I hope they made it out.

I groan and start to get up, and kiddo tugs on my arm.

“Daddy?”

“It’s okay,” I whisper. “Gonna get ready for the day.”

I tuck the quilt back over him, muffled music from some Disney movie playing, and make my way downstairs. I pass the second-floor bedroom I no longer use, the master bathroom mostly now for storing buckets and containers of water, and when I reach the first floor, the early glimmers of dawn start to peek in through the boards nailed up against the massive window on the front of our home. I remember when we bought this place, that specific highlight felt so beautiful, and now it’s just a threat.

I peek through the splintered wood, out into the street. It’s quiet, and I try to get a look up at the home across from ours, equally as boarded up except for a third-floor window, but no one is there right now. Not that I can see, anyway. I press my cheek against the haphazard, splintered wood, broken up from the garbage shed that once sat in front of our home with pieces from the gardening cabinet in the yard, and close my eyes. I wait there for a few seconds. To see if there’s anything. Any French toast, or the other things they’ve tried to lure me out with.

The smell of shea butter. Of apple blossom body wash. Even this apple cider vinegar concoction my wife used to make to wash out her hair.

But there’s nothing. Thank God.

I hurry to the backyard and do the same ritual with the rear window. I reach for the doorknob, my heart pounding in my chest, and swallow. I can see some ripe tomatoes weighing down the vines in my planters, and a few small cucumbers peeking in and out of soft, heavy leaves. They’re so small, which twinges at some worry in my chest. Not seeing much in the way of anything ready to pick on the fruit trees, a few small apples and pears.

I press my hand against the door, and exhale.

“You’re not the one who gets left behind,” my wife pressed, the sound of harried people and vehicles in the background of her call.

“But I am!” I’d shouted. “I’m alone!”

“No,” she said, sharp. “You are not.”

I quietly open the door and hustle through the garden. It’s not big by any means. We live in a city. It’s a patch of dirt, originally packed full of lead from the neighborhood, about twenty by twenty feet. But over the years, I replaced the soil. I planted small fruit trees. Three apple trees, three pear trees. A few blueberry bushes. Some planters full of veggies. The once tiny trees now blanket the tiny space in a canopy, the leaves rustling, like they’re defying the neighbors’ concrete patios. I thought urban farmsteading could be fun, complete with a rain barrel, and now it’s just another one of my ridiculous prepper enthusiast activities keeping us alive. Once I’ve filled an oversized Tupperware with enough veggies to keep us fed for another two or three days, which I can mix with stale granola or maybe-too-old-to-eat dried pasta, I hurry toward the door.

And that’s when it hits.

The smell.

I know it. The smell of peonies when they’re at full bloom, the blossoms heaving to the point the entire plant falls under its own beauty, in whites and pinks and purples. And blended in, a faint splash of foundation, of the little dust cloud the makeup leaves as you’re putting it on your cheeks, like clay and chalk and earth.

It’s how my wife smelled on our wedding day. Peonies in her hand, a little smatter of extra makeup on her cheek, which I kissed off like it was powdered sugar.

So I run.

I slam the door to our backyard behind me, bolting all the locks and lowering the large piece of wood I’ve made into a drop bar.

That’s the thing about them. The monsters, the creatures, the aliens, whatever they are. There’s no sound. You can’t see them. There’s just the smell. Pulled together from whatever you yearn for the most. Luring you toward them like a spell.

It doesn’t work on me, but in some ways, like how the memory wrenches at something in my chest, it does.

The unseeable terror clatters against the door for a moment, and pounds against the window I’ve long since boarded up back there, and then, at least I assume, goes somewhere else. Whatever they are, the little I got through newscasts and social media, they’re not strong enough to break through doors or crack open a car. But once they get their unseen appendages around you, that’s it. People just turn to husks, drying out like a piece of fruit in the sun.

I saw it happen once, in the early days, as I madly hammered boards over our windows, right in front of our home.

Being a parent is a bit like fighting invisible monsters. Bullies at school no one tells you about. Judgmental comments. Systems that are meant to be for you and your child, seemingly actively fighting against you.

This is different, though. Those I knew how to fight. My wife and I, a team.

I’m barely making it right now.

I put the fruits and veggies on the counter, the marble cool against my skin, my heart still pounding, the monster’s frustrated slamming still rattling in my head. It’s September. Winters in Philadelphia are not kind. I’ve tried to preserve as much as I can: there’s a wild amount of soup in the basement, lots of pasta and sauce. Oatmeal. Granola bars. Maybe we can push it through. But the doubt nips at the back of my mind, as the little hauls from the tiny yard get smaller and smaller, the veggies and fruits tinier and tinier. How long can we hold out?

I cut up some fruit and mix it in with some way-too-tough granola, carrying a bowl upstairs. When I get to kiddo’s room, he’s still hiding under that blanket. I move to the window, and peer between the boards, and spot the lone neighbor I know is still here. Jason. He’d lost his sense of smell to COVID and it just never quite recovered. During the early days of being trapped in here, he would cackle loudly out the window as they apparently tried scent after scent on him, mocking the monsters, never quite getting it right enough to lure him from his fortress of a rowhouse.

I wave around behind the slats in the wood, and he catches the movement, smiling at what he likely only sees are a pair of eyes and part of a face. We didn’t talk much before all this, but now, these last few weeks, he’s the only adult conversation I get besides the downloaded podcasts I relisten to and the emergency radio I crank up every few hours.

He holds up a walkie-talkie and points at it, and I grab my matching one off the sill. They’re from the bug-out bag that I ran to grab from my old car parked in front of the house when all hell started breaking loose. And with the way the streets were packed with cars, both occupied and abandoned, there was no driving away. Still isn’t.

“Doing all right?” he asks, the walkie squeaking.

“As well as I can.” I exhale.

“You on the radio?” he asks. “Today, that is?”

“No?” I tilt my head, peering at him from the wooden slats. “What’s going on?”

“There’s a boat,” he says, matter-of-fact. “They’re playing an emergency signal over and over. It’s docked down at Penn Treaty, and then it’s making its way up and along the Delaware, before ferrying people over to Jersey.”

I almost drop the walkie.

“Go turn it on,” he presses. “I ain’t going anywhere.”

I glance over at kiddo, the quilt rustling a little, and head into the adjoining room, what used to be my office just a few months ago. Now? I’ve got a bundle of emergency gear from the basement up here, and several buckets that I use to collect water out the window.

When I give the radio a crank and turn it on, it’s broadcasting on all stations.

There’s a boat. Docking in Penn Treaty. Today. Right now. Leaving within the hour.

The limited food flashes through my mind. The dwindling supplies. The stagnant water sitting in the second-floor tub, the buckets filled with rainwater that takes ages to boil on a hot plate, but how many times can I keep going outside before whatever they are start to gather? Start to wait me out. Before they figure out what I’m doing back there and destroy my limited city crops. I’m one wild storm away from us starving together in this house.

I grab a small shoulder bag, which I’ve kept filled with necessities in case we had to run. Power banks. A small portable solar panel. Enough snacks for a day or two. Water-purifying tablets. A LifeStraw. An emergency blanket. A tiny first aid kit. Changes of clothes for kiddo, nothing for me.

All the photos I’ve ever taken on a USB drive, and then again on a second USB drive. All the wedding photos, first birthdays, vacations . . . they’re in the cloud someplace, sure, but I never trusted that. Still don’t. Where does it go?

I hurry back to the window.

Jason is still there, walkie in his hand. I can see the hint of a smile on his face from here.

“Are you sure?” I ask, and he nods.

“I can see it from the back of my house with my binoculars. It’s one of the old tourist yachts. You all set?”

“Are you coming?” I ask.

He smirks.

“Come on,” I press. “Come on, you have to.”

“My family bought this house in the 1800s. Before all the condos and restaurants. Before you and your hipster families made it ‘cool’ to live here. They couldn’t get me to leave these last fifty years, some fuckin’ aliens or whatever the hell they are ain’t going to do it either.”

I shield the walkie, like somehow that would stop those words from traveling across the room and under my kid’s blanket, but the tablet is still playing something.

“Hey,” he says. “Hipster isn’t a bad word.”

I laugh and shake my head. “I’ll make sure they come back to check for you, when it’s all over,” I say.

“I know you will,” he says. “But if I’m not here, don’t blame yourself. I’m stubborn. That wife of yours always said I was a Taurus.”

This cracks another laugh out of me that’s more like a sob, and he waves at me from the window slats, leaving his walkie on the sill, vanishing into his home.

Within the hour. Okay.

I barrel through my house, going over what’s inside the mini bug-out bag. I grab a few toiletries, my kiddo’s toothbrush and mine, another USB cable, some of my wife’s jewelry, a few more granola bars I’d been saving in the kitchen. I double-check that our identification and papers are still in there. I cram some money inside, and before I get back to my kid’s room, I let myself throw in a paperback novel. One I’d been meaning to read. Who knows how long we’ll be on that boat, where we’ll go. Might as well give myself one thing.

“Hey, buddy?” I nudge the quilt off of him, and he grumbles at me. “Hey, we’re gonna go take a trip.”

He looks up at me quizzically. He has his mom’s lack of a poker face. I’ve spent so much time stressing that he can’t go outside or touch the windows or doors.

“It’ll be real quick, but we need to go right now, okay?”

I almost want him to say no. Have a fit. Melt down and cry. We’ll just stay. I’ll figure it out.

His mouth is a thin line, and he hands me his tablet. I put it in the little bag.

“Okay,” he says, his arms out. I scoop him up.

I’m gonna have to carry him. With the ruined streets and leftover cars, the stroller won’t make it. Penn Treaty Park is maybe half a mile away. Jason could see it with his binoculars. We spent so much time there in the before, on the swings, the slides, running along the shore near the water. We can do this.

I carry him down the stairs, the shoulder bag bouncing against my back, his face nuzzling into my neck.

“You are not alone,” my wife insisted. “You keep him safe.”

This boy. We can make it.

I press my hand against the front door and try to inhale. To smell anything. To have some of the pheromones those things unleash rattle something loose in my brain. A memory of sense long since gone. But there’s nothing. They aren’t here.

“Do you smell anything?” I ask.

“No, Daddy.”

My heart is pounding in my throat. I swing the front door open, take a deep breath, and I bolt down the street. Away from our home. Our refuge. Stocked with everything I thought would keep us safe but has only been keeping us preserved, like the pickles I’ve spent my time making. Preparing, waiting, harboring. Away from the toys and the games and the books and the blankets and the comforts. Into the early morning, into the terrifying quiet.

I run.

The pocked sidewalk and cracked streets, a thing we frequently complained about, has me hopping over splits and bumps. It’s worse now. Kiddo laughs as we hurry, oblivious to the reality of what’s happening. My legs burn, my heart heaves. I am not an active person. I am not an athlete. I am not someone who does this.

“You are not the one who gets left behind,” she’d said.

So I run. Between the crashed cars and collapsing rowhomes from said crashed cars, over dried-out corpses littering the street, hands gnarled and grasping, mouths wide, skin like paper. I hope he doesn’t see. Please don’t let him see.

And then it hits me.

It’s . . . pasta.

A mushroom ravioli. An alfredo cream sauce packed with pesto. The smell of wine as it’s poured into a stemmed glass, tickling at the back of your throat, teasing you before you taste it. It’s the smell of a restaurant, of a chef’s kitchen window, of flour and olive oil and browning butter. One of me and my wife’s first dates, a decade ago.

It’s not real, though. I push. I keep going.

Because they’re coming.

They’re nearby, maybe behind me.

I’d heard some theories on the radio, about why kids weren’t affected, or at least, as affected, as adults. Something about the sense of smell being the most nostalgic of senses for adults. How it can rocket you back to a moment in your life. Bring up feelings. Rip something up inside of you, in a way that other senses don’t quite do. Little kids, they don’t have that yet. That nostalgic urge for how things were. For what they miss. What they long for.

They don’t realize that the older you get, the further away it all is. And eventually, you realize you can’t get back there.

Smell makes you feel like you can, though. It teleports you.

As my throat goes dry, as we continue to run, good Lord, I wish it could teleport me now. Right to the water. To the boat.

The street starts to bend, moving down a small hill, and as a footbridge vanishes from my sight, the smell of first dates and memories of holding hands and awkward first kisses along twinkling lit streets assaulting me, I see the water. I see the green of the park. The trees and the playground and . . .

And the boat.

Jason was right. It looks like they refitted one of those tour boats that takes people around the river, with absolutely horrible buffet meals on board and terrible DJs. It almost chokes a laugh out of me as I push, my whole body wanting to shut down and crumble to the sidewalk.

“Daddy, park?”

Kiddo’s moved his head off my neck and is looking over his own shoulder.

“Yeah, yes,” I cough out. “Almost there. Almost—”

The smell is so intense that it sends a chill through me, my body shaking. Cherry blossoms, Funfetti cake, vanilla icing, grass and rain. A first birthday celebrated outside, the smell of hamburgers and hot dogs on a nearby grill, charcoal and smoke and flames licking everything just right. I see my kid taking awkward steps on wobbly legs, an uproarious cheer from our friends and family and the rare handful of people who feel like both.

Something tickles at my back.

The water is there. Right there.

The boat. I see people hustling to get on board; some people on the deck are waving at me madly. Shouting.

The boat is close, closer. There’s no one else running with us, my child bound in my arms. We’re the last people. I can feel the monsters at my back, my lungs on fire from running, or maybe they’ve touched me, their invisible arms grasping for my waist, I don’t know. I can’t know. There’s no time to know. I can’t stop.

“Hurry!” a man shouts from the boat, steam hissing from the bottom. He looks back and forth from the inside of it to me, his eyes wide from behind a thick mask.

It’s the smell of a hospital room, of bleach and alcohol and blood.

Of sweat and horrible food and clammy skin. Of thin hair, freshly dried, of soap and baby powder and soft clothes and wipes. The best day of my life. The day this kid in my arms was born—

“You assholes!” I shout, the urge to turn around and yell at the monsters almost too much as the memory dances and flashes through my mind, and I grit my teeth at this last stretch, my feet pounding against the dirt and rocks and sand.

The boat starts to move.

“Jump!” the man shouts.

For a moment, a horrible moment, I think of throwing my kid. Making sure he gets there. What if I don’t make that jump. What if I try and I can’t do it. What if we plummet into the water. What if—

No.

No. I want to make him his mother’s French toast, even if I can’t taste it. I want to find that ravioli recipe and figure it out in a kitchen, take him to one of those restaurants and tell him how I met his mother, when things are better. Because they will get better. I want to show him the videos of those first steps, stored on my paranoid USB flash sticks and the stupid second one, how his mom cried when he toddled. I want to read this goddamn book I threw in my backpack.

I want him to know how brave his mother was the day he was born, how she’s out there, fighting whatever these are, and then I want to find her. Wherever she is.

She wouldn’t give up.

Neither will I.

I jump, and I feel those things, those monsters, nipping at my back. I feel the burn of their touch on my skin, pulling what remaining air I have from my lungs, and just as fast as the creature tried, it’s over, and I hit the floor of the boat with a bang, turning just in time to land on my back with my child in my arms on my chest.

I can’t stop coughing.

People around us are shouting, someone helps me up, helps up my kiddo, who is crying. We’re led over to some seats, and I shield my son’s ears as some soldiers start shooting at whatever invisible horrors splash madly in the water behind the boat. Everyone’s got on thick gas masks.

“Here, please,” someone says, handing me an emergency blanket, the material shimmering and silver, like a huge piece of aluminum foil on one side. I’m handed some water in a bottle, and I chug it down, coughing, and I can feel the dried tissue in my throat pulling apart as it’s cooled and watered down again.

“Daddy,” kiddo says, tugging at the aluminum sheet.

“Yeah . . . yeah, buddy . . .” I huff.

“Daddy, astronauts.”

I take the aluminum emergency blanket and flutter it over us. The smells start to fade, the tricks the monsters played with my mind. The boat lets out a rumble, and I lurch back in my seat a little as it picks up speed, taking us to whatever is next.

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Thank you for joining our journey this week.

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Eric Smith is a literary agent and Young Adult author from Elizabeth, New Jersey. As an agent with P.S. Literary, he’s worked on New York Times bestselling and award-winning books. His most recent novel, With or Without You, a rom-com about two teens working in rival cheesesteak trucks, published in 2023, and was a Junior Library Guild selection. He lives in Philadelphia with his wife and son.

“I Am Not The One Who Gets Left Behind,” © Eric Smith, 2024.

The Sunday Morning Transport: Selected Stories 2022 is now available at Weightless Books!