Where is Everyone?!

I woke up at first light as usual, but found the neighbourhood devoid of the familiar sounds I had been accustomed to hearing.

Every day, as soon as he was awake, Uncle Lee had his radio on at full blast. The operatic music in his favourite channel penetrated the walls and dispelled the last vestiges of my drowsiness away. He ran a noodle stall at the market and so he woke up earlier than anyone.

Dragging myself out of bed, I opened the window and looked out into the same familiar direction, where Uncle Lee's van was parked outside the gate. I smiled at the sight of the van, whose door flung open on both sides. But something strange caught my eye - one of the blue slippers he had been used to wearing was found at the front of my gate, and the other in the middle of the road. With Uncle Lee's meticulousness to detail, this act of careless negligence was beyond my wildest imagination.

Could something have happened to him? Seized by a sense of alarm, I rushed outside and peeked into the van, only to find no one in it. But fresh, oily yellow noodles could be found in plastic bags, arranged neatly in a huge basket along with some utensils for cooking noodles. A few containers were unlidded, exposing the strips of red barbecued pork inside, glinting in the half-light, releasing some warm moisture.

"Uncle Lee!" I shouted through the gap of the door, which was half-open. The effort yielded no response from the inside. I stole a look through the gap but there was no sign of the old man.

With lots of doubts occupying my mind, I walked over to Madam Fatimah's house from across the road. Her gate was open, and the lights of her car were flickering red and yellow, a tell-tale sign that the teacher was ready to back the car out through the gate. The car was trembling  to the whir of its engine. I approached the window of the driver seat, expecting to see the broad, fleshy face of the woman but there was no one in the seat! The key was still stuck in the ignition.

Then, 20 to 30 thirty minutes later, having come in and out of several houses, I found out that there was no one but me in the neighbourhood.

On the way to my art studio, a lot of empty cars were stationary along the road, and I had to weave through them, sometimes almost banging into some I had mistakenly thought moving. A few motorcycles keeled over, and a few metres away, lay the helmets of the disappeared motorcyclists.

Suddenly, the air was shaken by some faint drones of aeroplanes, the first sound I heard today! I gazed up into the sky and saw several fighters hovering amid the clouds.