DREW THOMPSON - THE DAY NO ONE DIED

Drew Thompson received his Bachelor of Arts in English from Kent State University in August of 2014. He won the Anna Ulen Engleman Creative Writing Award from Kent's English Department in 2012. His work has appeared in The Long Story. Currently, he resides in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, where he works as a route driver and writes fiction.

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​THE DAY NO ONE DIED
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            The editor for the city newspaper was at her desk, going over the copy for the morning’s issue, and she was exhausted. Long days blended into longer nights—the way of the world as electronic media continued its slow but certain infringement. The results were taxing, as evidenced by the surrounding mountain of cigarette butts and Styrofoam cups.
            Everything looked okay. Not spectacular, but okay. Nothing much in the way of real news had happened for weeks. A state senator’s visit, a city official’s divorce, the occasional mugging and shooting (it was a city, after all), but that was it.
            The editor went over everything one last time, and was preparing to okay it, when she noticed something amiss. She double checked again, just to be sure, then picked up the phone and dialed out.
            A cracking male voice answered. “Yes?”
            “Stevens, get in here at once.”
            “Coming.”
            A moment later Stevens came in, timid as always. “Is there a problem?”
            “Where’s the obit column?”
            Stevens stared dully. “It’s there.”
            “What—where?” The editor flipped through the sheaf once more.
            Stevens picked at his mustache. “It’s there.”
            There it was: between the op-ed and comics. In the wrong order. But that wasn’t what concerned the editor. For the single page, entitled OBITUARIES with today’s date, was blank.
            “What the hell is this?” she demanded.
            Stevens just looked at her.
            “Get Monroe in here.”
            A minute later the two men shuffled back in, Monroe looking especially hangdog.
            “Monroe, what is the meaning of this?” she cried, waving the nearly-blank sheet.
            Monroe mumbled something unintelligible.
            “Speak up!”
            “There were none.”
            “Excuse me?”
            Monroe repeated his assertion.
            The editor picked up the phone and punched the button which speed-dialed her friend and colleague, another editor to another newspaper in a nearby city.
            The editor told her colleague of her odd predicament. The other editor, sounding somewhat reassured, informed her of a similar situation. After exchanging basic information, they promptly reached the same conclusion: no obituaries had been printed because none had been reported; the lack of reports came down to the lack of bodies. More research would be required to make certain, but as of a quarter to one in the morning on Thursday, the preceding Wednesday had passed without blood or mayhem, indeed without soul-passage of any kind, in two respective cities.
            The editor hung up and leaned back, massaging her temples and giving herself excuses to light another cigarette. She had once given thought to quitting, but the stress of her profession was too great.
            She was about to leave, having temporarily resisted her urge, when the phone rang again.
            It was the Chairman.
            The editor immediately thumbed her lighter and breathed deeply. She reminded herself to pick up another carton. She would need it.
                                                                      ***
All was quiet in the stadium when the Chairman stepped up to the podium. All was dark, too. Not the darkness of night but of extinguished electricity; the stadium was of the enclosed kind.
            “Thank you,” the Chairman addressed the crowd, “ladies and gentlemen of the Litigious International Association of Reportage Supreme, for your expediency and solemnity in address of the matter at hand. Also due thanks are the Elite Gonzo Organization, without which meetings such as these would not be possible in such magnitude; and last but not least our colleagues in the Global Reconnaissance Ensemble of Erudite Disseminators, a funder par excellence of all of our work abroad which, as you know, can be quite the strain on the ledger.”
            The crowd laughed politely.
            “Thank you all,” the Chairman continued. “As I’m sure all of you are by now aware, we are at a great precipice, the defining event of our careers, daresay our lives; our collective presence this early morning is due to something magnificent, unprecedented in recorded history, very unlikely to be reprised. I don’t need to highlight just how crucial the next twenty-four hours are to our organization, let alone our profession, our passion. If each and every one of you didn’t already have a headliner on standby, simply jittering to jump into print this very morning, you wouldn’t be the outstanding newspapermen and women I know you to be.
            “Let us make no mistake: these headlines must sell, and sell they will. You are all people of incomparable wit and brains as infallible as your sense of integrity. I do not need to tell you that our industry has fallen on hard times. The media has been infiltrated with the kind of festering gangrenous sickness that has poisoned and will eventually kill every principal and scruple we stand for, which, as we all know, number numerous. The rampant commercialism of today’s daily media output, while sharing the enthusiasm and omniscience for which we in this industry strive, has ultimately—and seemingly irreversibly—prevented real news stories from enjoying the spotlight, the unassailable reverence and endurance, they so deserve.
            “Ladies and gentlemen, a few years ago I had a dream. As many of you may know, my career choice was inspired by the legacy of my father, lauded as the finest, shrewdest newspaperman of his generation. One evening, savoring an iced coffee of particular gusto, I dug through my father’s files and pored over his stories, articles dating from the stock market crash through the first Reagan inauguration. A long, distinguished, accomplished career, preserved in my own personal archives, yet, having coincided with the last century’s most extraordinary events, become, like history itself, immortal.”
            The crowd hummed respectfully.
            “That night, my dream manifested itself. It was of a simple corner kiosk, like a million others on a million city street corners. The air was permeated with the mist of early mornings in the city, the kind that rises out of the ground itself and fills the air like an old-fashioned tramp steamer—a pungent fog. An elderly gentleman was setting out the day’s magazines, circulars, and newspapers, preparing for a day’s grind in the kiosk. He was the only living soul present.
            “Then, as soon as the city’s four newspapers were loaded in their appropriate racks, people began to appear, out of the fog like ghosts from the night. They hurried up to the kiosk, brandishing money, eager as children at an amusement park attraction. Quickly the morning sun dissipated the fog, and the attendant saw an incredible thing: the line of customers stretched as far as he could see, at least ten blocks away, and as fast as he could sell the newspapers the line seemed not to shorten but to grow.
            “Ladies and gentleman, I was in this kiosk with the attendant. I wondered what sort of cataclysmic event had occurred to bring customers in such multitudes, and I had no sooner passed the thought when the elderly attendant put a paper in front of me. The headline read ‘NO ONE DIES.’”
            The crowd waited breathlessly.
            “Then, a great wind lifted me up, and I saw the city, and then the next city, and the next, and finally the state, and I floated higher and farther, until finally I traversed the world over, and saw the situation was the same. My heart soared with the possibilities such an extraordinary phenomenon would achieve for mankind. Visions as clear as day came to me.
            “I saw bars and lounges and clubs open twenty-four hours a day, and newspapermen had the VIP room. I saw dignitaries honored with royal and political festivities, and those dignitaries were newspapermen. I saw the most affluent, important citizens of our nation and others bestowing in all fields of social activism the highest honors upon newspapermen. I even saw the awarding of the Nobel Prize—to a newspaperman. And, I’m a bit sad to say, it was not me.”
            The crowd laughed jovially.
            The Chairman smiled good-naturedly.
            He continued, “I jest, but let there be no doubt at my astonishment, my wonder—and my conviction. I have always believed that what I witnessed was no mere dream but a vision of the great times of old days, and a prediction that it would be again. This day, that vision has been realized. Ladies and gentlemen, we stand on the verge of greatness once more.”
            The stadium thundered with applause and cheers.
            “And now, I urge you to do what newspapermen and women do best, and hit the pavement. Go to work. Tell the story that the crowds will knock each other out to hear. And do it in print. Do it with dedication and passion. Together, we can chronicle one of humanity’s finest moments, and we can do it in style.
            “But this is only the beginning of a fabulous new era for our industry. When the people hear, in loving print, the story of this monumental occasion, they will embrace a new lease on life. All over the world, everyone will feel blessed with another chance, a fresh start. Your duty, as always, is to show the people what they need before they know they need it.
            “Now go out and show them.”
                                                                         ***
They did, and the world entered into an unprecedented era of peace and unity.
            Before the end of that first day, the stock market soared, the value of currency increased, and the American presidential approval rating was the highest in history. Politicians everywhere set aside petty differences to make decisions that would soon benefit everyone. Multibillion dollar corporations dumped vast amounts of money into the world’s neediest charities, and before the week was out, both cancer and the common cold had been cured.
            And the media were lauded as heroes (compliments to themselves who reported the lauding). People took to the kiosks on street corners once more; they cared about and invested in the news. The Chairman’s vision had come true.
            Pride and goodwill were not merely confined to reporters and editors, but to each and every individual on the planet, from the oldest human vestige down to the freshest cognizant toddler. People took pride in their work, their homes, their activities—every aspect of their lives. People cared about their neighbors. People believed in something once more, and the world was a glorious place.
            For two whole days.
            Now, neither of those days included the day no one died. The following day, the day people first received and celebrated the news, held plenty of deaths, as did the day after; but these deaths were expected, natural, peaceful, smiling. After all, the seven-hundred sixty-eight people who perished the first day had lived to see a day without death. It was the happiest moment of almost all their lives.
            The same went for the second day, whose death toll numbered more than double the day previous. Another milestone: never before a day with more pleasant endings.
            The third day was different. It was, in fact, the most disastrous in all recorded history.
            It began, appropriately enough, with fire raining down on Pompeii. Not from the volcano—the first eruption in almost two thousand years came that evening to wipe out the rest. No, the first hell came from the smoldering wreckage of a midair collision at twelve-oh-seven in the morning, Pompeii time. (Whatever deity the world owed this relentless reckoning certainly possessed an earthly sense of punctuality.) Two commercial airliners lit up the midnight sky in a great explosion; almost everyone on the ground—Mediterranean Europeans being by and large night owls—saw it happen, from cafes and fiestas, and most tried to escape. Not many did. Three-thousand five-hundred-and-six people died that warm summer night, the bulk of which were citizens of Pompeii, having the terrible luck of enjoying life beneath a populous commercial flightpath.
            Pompeii kicked off a day of unthinkable catastrophe. The strangest thing about that terrible day was how at once staggered and restricted the long list of disasters seemed to be, according to the vagaries of world time. The survivors who were in charge of the tallying uncovered an odd pattern: every horrible thing that occurred did so on the shared calendar day of which the Pompeii collision started. For example, at the time central Europe was breaking the new day, Australia and New Zealand were well into the morning. So, their day up until then had passed as normal.
            A meteor shower, undetected by the most precise radars, rained down on Sydney and Auckland (at eight-ten and ten-ten a.m., respectively), leveling the cities in a matter of minutes to a desolation surpassing the bleakest parts of the Outback. (New Zealand did not have time to resent this, as a Pacific tidal wave a mile high created by an asteroid sank the whole island by three o’clock, their time.) Eighty-five thousand people were struck down while eating their breakfast. Most of them never knew what hit them.
            As the earth spun slowly on its axis, the gods of destruction shed the gleam of red carnage across its surface; a satellite—had they not been obliterated by one of the seventeen meteor showers to riddle the world that day—might have captured pictures of the wonderful blue tinged a pale crimson:
            Tsunamis plagued Southeast Asia and the Oceanic Islands, flooding whole cities and drowning untold millions.
            A Palestinian ship mechanic, on a routine check, accidentally triggered a torpedo to blast into the side of an Israeli cruise liner, killing six-hundred seventeen civilians and inciting another war in the Middle East.
            Russia was besieged by wolf attacks. Thousands of wolfpacks descended upon villages across Siberia and decimated legions of citizens. One mauled survivor said it was as though the beasts were under some kind of trance.
            A league of underground terrorists orchestrated the deadliest mass attack in history. In a single move, Paris, Berlin, Madrid, and Rome were blown to bits. It had been long in the planning; the concurrent annihilation of the day was just luck on the part of the terrorists. The following day, remaining newspapers across the world were printed with a picture of the Eiffel Tower collapsing.
            Africa and South America, aside from a few minor natural disasters, were relatively unscathed. Cynical scribes later postulated that they had already suffered enough.
            America, being at the westernmost end of the axis, and having seen obliteration washing the world bloody, edging nearer their way as the day wore on, received its fair share of mass shootings, gang wars, train and car and plane wrecks, but the fact was the most devastating day in human history was, for America, not too worse than a normal, pre-deathless day. Of course, much of the citizenry, being Americans, would claim otherwise; tales of America’s heroism in participating in and surviving the world’s worst day would be reviled at barbecues and in taverns and clubs by millions of sloshed patriots until the end of their days.
            The ongoing celebration of America’s peerless virtues had already begun in honor of the day no one died. Millions of people, in a newfound vitality, had taken the week off to enjoy the blossoming summer, and were enjoying pool parties and bocce and cookouts. One such group of newspapermen and women gathered on the lakeshore deck of the editor’s house.
            “A fleet of ours just sunk in the Atlantic,” Monroe said, nose to his tablet, fingers busily scrolling.
            “Yes sir, the world as we know it is ending,” Stevens said for perhaps the fortieth time that afternoon. “It’s only a matter of time now.” He sipped his beer and sucked on his mustache.
            “Shut up, Stevens,” the editor said. “Don’t be so goddamn negative.”
            “Steaks are almost ready,” the editor’s husband said from the grill where juices hissed and spat.
            “Right on, bro,” said the copyist, who kept shuffling a deck of cards to entice (fruitlessly) potential opponents, and peered (not quite as fruitlessly) up the editor’s skirt.
            “Oh God,” said the receptionist. “Do you really think it is?”
            “Without a doubt,” Stevens said at once.
            “Shut up, Stevens,” the anchorman said, rising. “Need a hand there, Jeff?”
            “Just another minute and we’ll serve ’em up,” the editor’s husband said.
            “D.C.’s been bombed!” Monroe cried. “Wait—no, just bomb threatened. False alarm.”
            “God help us all,” Stevens moaned.
            “Shut up, Stevens,” the anchorwoman said. “You know what I could use right about now? A good steak and a good lay.”
            “I could help you with one of those,” the copyist said. No one responded. He had always been a letch.
            They were silent for a while. The editor’s husband, with the unnecessary aid of the anchorman, distributed the steaks, and the editor fetched the potatoes and salad from inside. Everyone sat around and ate their food and drank their beer. The anchorwoman drank iced tea.
            The anchorman, dipping a bite of steak into a puddle of A-One, declared, “You know something, if it were all to come crashing down at this very moment, I couldn’t complain. Not a bad way to go, in my estimation—in the company of coworkers and friends.”
            Stevens burst into tears.
            “Shut up, Stevens,” everyone said.
            Stevens did not, and had to be escorted indoors by the anchorwoman. The copyist quietly seethed with jealousy.
            “A toast, if I may,” the anchorman went on, unfazed. “To good friends, now and forever, be that an afternoon or a century.” He raised and tilted his beer.
            “Cheers!”
            Three hours later, after a nuclear bomb was detonated as it dropped into Lake Michigan, creating a tidal wave that destroyed everything and everyone up to half a mile inland (by far the most shattering event in America that long, horrible day), two men sat together in a dark office in another city, drinking from a fifty-year-old bottle of Chivas Regal.
            “Well, sir,” the assistant said to his boss, “where do we go from here?”
            The Chairman, ragged, unshaven, and bleary-eyed, swigged the last of his scotch. “Why, the pavement, of course,” he said. “We hit the pavement like always.”
            He paused and gazed across the desk at his assistant. “Where else?”