The next day began the same as the day before. With the power still out and his cellphone still dead, he rose with the sun. For a long while, Jens sat on the edge of his bed, staring out the window at the too-quiet city outside. For breakfast, he opened a can of pork and beans and ate it cold. He didn’t trust his milk anymore after a full day sitting around room temperature.

He double checked his fish tank but it was the same as the day before. His next door neighbors owned a dog and a couple of cats, Jens recalled, and he wondered if they were still there. With nothing else to do, he got up after finishing his breakfast and walked over to their door. He knocked, although he didn’t expect anyone to answer. It just felt wrong to go in without knocking first. After waiting what he felt was an appropriate amount of time, Jens tried to open the door. It was, unsurprisingly, locked.

Their dog was usually barking up a storm any time someone knocked on their door, though with the lack of dogs he’d seen yesterday he wasn’t very surprised by its absence.

“Hello?” he called out, wishing he could remember what their names were.

When no one answered, Jens reared back and kicked the door. Unlike in the movies, the door didn’t crash inward but instead he wound up launching himself backwards into the wall. He got the wind knocked out of him and it took Jens a moment to recover. When he did, he tried ramming his shoulder into the door instead. This time he heard the door frame crack and felt it give a little. He tried again and the door shifted a bit more. The third time did the trick and he burst into the front entry.

Right away he knew the cats, like the dogs, were gone. Their food dishes were in the hallway, still half full. Jens had never known a cat to leave its food that long without finishing it. He still did a cursory search of the apartment but found no signs of life. He even found some sort of lizard enclosure that was obviously devoid of whatever animal used to live inside.

What was going on? Everyone and their pets were gone, even his pets, but he was still here.

Jens had never been one for conspiracy theories about living in a simulation or stories about alien abductions, but right now he was seriously wondering if he was living in one of those possibilities. How else could everyone just up and disappear like this.

He stood in his neighbor’s dining room and looked out at the road below. The strangest thing, in all of this, was the fact that there were no cars in the middle of the road, anywhere. If everyone had been suddenly transported away, there would have been at least a few cars out driving, no matter what time it was, and yet there were no cars, no busses, nothing. In all his walking the day before he’d only seen cars parked neatly in their driveways or along the street in front of their homes and apartments, but none outside the residential areas.

“Why take the pets?”

Jens of course wondered at the potential religious reasons for why he might be alone out here, but he wasn’t a bad person. Certainly not worse than everyone else in his apartment building. He knew for a fact that the guy three doors down from him was into some pretty shady stuff. Just to confirm it, Jens broke into that apartment too and found it similarly abandoned.

Maybe Jens was dead and this was some sort of twisted afterlife. That might explain the lack of pets, but also be why there was wildlife outside. Though, why would there be wildlife in the afterlife if there weren’t any other people?

“I’m not dead,” Jens assured himself. “If I was, I wouldn’t need to eat.”

He also still needed to use the bathroom and he was pretty sure ghosts wouldn’t have that mortal requirement. Fortunately, and oddly enough, the water was still working. Maybe the local water tower was still full so he would have water pressure until it emptied? He wasn’t going to complain since it solved at least one of the problems he could potentially have in a world with no one else in it.

“I don’t know that I’m alone,” he told himself. “There might be others out there but we’re few and far between.”

It had only been a day and already he was getting antsy about being so isolated so he went back to his apartment, grabbed some matches and a few sheets of paper and walked back outside. He rummaged around in the dumpster by the street for anything that he could burn, then decided that, instead of pulling burnable material out, he’d gather it up and fill the dumpster. Then he could have the mother of all bonfires and raise a smoke signal high enough that if there was anyone else in the city they’d see it and maybe come to him. He spent a good few hours going from dumpster to dumpster along his street, gathering all the best fodder he could find.

All that effort had built up a pretty good appetite so he went back to his apartment while the fire started to burn and grabbed a package of mostly thawed hotdogs from his freezer. They ought to still be good. He had some buns, condiments, and a poker and brought them out as well to the now roaring dumpster fire.

He cooked up the entire package. He didn’t eat them all, but they’d go bad once thawed. He tossed the extras to the crows and they eagerly got to work tearing them to pieces. It was only after he’d finished eating that Jens wondered if using the dumpster fire to cook his lunch was a good idea. There could be any number of chemicals pouring off the fire in the smoke that shouldn’t be ingested.

“Too late now,” he grunted but resolved to avoid using such fires for cooking in the future.

He kept the fire burning until the evening, continuing to go out and gather more trash for the fire and as the sun set on the second day, Jens found himself still alone, watching the dumpster, glowing red from the heat, fade into blackness as the fire died and the heat dissipated.