A woman is sitting in her old, shuttered house. She knows she’s alone in the world because every other living thing is dead. The doorbell rings. She answers the door to find nothing but the wind. She looks to the left, then to the right and back to the left.
She has a puzzled look on her face. “What in the world is going on”, she thinks to herself. Janet runs to the living room, picks up the phone and calls her sister. No answer.
“A fluke”, she thinks to herself. She dials her best friend, again, no answer. She is starting to panic at this point. Janet calls everyone in her address book, including her brother in China. She gets no answer from anyone. Janet walks outside and finds nothing but dirt, empty cars and houses.
She sees bicycles left lying in the street, as if the children were snatched off them while riding away from something. Janet walks down what used to be a beautiful street, lined with oak and willow trees. What she finds now is a desolate world in which she seems to be alone. Janet continues to walk, not realizing that hours have passed. Hours without any trace of life, not even a blade of grass. She is trying to sort things out in her mind as to how this could be.
Alas, she comes up with the answer, or so she thinks. She is talking aloud as she walks because she knows she will go crazy if she doesn’t hear something. “While I was sleeping, I did hear a loud screeching noise. I thought it was just a dream.
I did hear a lot of screaming, and what sounded like pandemonium in the front of the house. I think we were under attack. Yes, that must be it. They have dropped nuclear bombs on us and wiped out all of God’s creations. But, can it be? Who would do this? Why am I still here? Why didn’t I die too?” Janet remembers when she was a young girl and her father told her of a story about their old, run down, house with magic shutters.
He said that his father had met an Indian Medicine Man during his travels. Her grandfather helped the Medicine Man’s son. He performed an emergency surgery on him that enabled him to live a long, prosperous life. The Medicine Man didn’t have anything to offer in return. She remembers how he told her that her grandfather asked if he would bless him and his family with safety.
They lived in rural Kansas and had already lost six homes to tornadoes. Her father told her how the Medicine Man blessed the shutters that are still on the house today. The Medicine Man told her grandfather that as long as the shutters remained on the home, no harm would come to those inside it. She never believed the story, yet she never had the courage to remove the shutters.
“Well, that makes sense, doesn’t it” she thought aloud. “What do I do now? Where do I go from here? What happens when I die? Can I really be the only one left? I don’t understand. Why can’t I find anyone” she thinks to herself as she sits down in the middle of what used to be the highway and breaks down into a hard sob.