The People

“Honey, come look at this,” Fred called to his wife in the next room.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Come here, you have to see it.”

She came into the room and Fred was looking out the front window.

“Look over there. Someone is standing on the roof.” He pointed to the house across the street, where a man was standing motionless on top of the house. “He’s been there a few minutes and not moving at all.”

“What’s he doing?” Ginger asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Weird.”

Ginger shook her head, then went back to the next room where she was working on a project. A few minutes later, Fred called to Ginger again. “Now there are two of them!”

“What?” she called back. “Two what?”

“Two people on the roof.”

Ginger came back in. “Weird, they’re just standing there!” she said.

“Yea, they’re not talking to each other or anything.”

Just then Ginger saw something else and pointed. “Look, there’s someone in that tree!” Fred looked and there was a guy sitting on a branch about twenty feet up.

“He’s not moving either!” he said.

Ginger took Fred’s hand. “This is kind of creepy.” The two looked at each other, and then out the window.

“Oh my god!” Ginger screeched. There were two more people, now standing in the yard across the street, and five more in the middle of the street, all perfectly still, silent, stationary, and yet eerily alive.

“I’m not comfortable with this, honey,” Fred said. “Let’s grab our phones and get out of here!”

Ginger nodded and they grabbed their phones, jackets, keys, and went to the door. As they approached the door, they could see out the front window that dozens more people had gathered in the street. They opened the door and there was a woman standing right in front of them.

“Aah!” Ginger gasped.

Fred shouted at the woman. “What are you doing?!” But the woman’s face was vacant – had no more feeling  than a crab’s eye at the end of a stalk. Fred and Ginger pushed past the woman, who gave no resistance, pulled the door closed behind them, locked it, and pushed their way down the front steps, which were now filled with people. The two worked their way through the crowd in the street, squeezing between the bodies as if exiting a large arena. As they got further away from their house, the crowd thinned, and they turned to look back. People were everywhere – on top of their house, in the trees, in the yard, and all over their neighbor’s houses too. There were hundreds of people in the street.

At the edge of the crowd there was a single policeman who stood facing the crowd like a cardboard cutout in a window display. A block later and they were far away from the spectacle and there was no one around.

Fred turned to Ginger, “Are you hungry? Want to grab a burger?”