I gave up on this one after about fifteen minutes.
Good premise, cities disappearing into thin air. And then we spend the next ten minutes hearing her mope about the guy that was cheating on his wife with her, and blah blah blah. When billions of people disappear, I do not want to hear someone bitch about their relationship troubles. Maybe it was in character, but it was also very dull.
And when it did talk about the aliens, it was mostly listing dozens of cities, even more dull. At least Escape Pod pays a flat rate, but at a market that payed per word I can just see a nickel being added to the stack for each city read straight off an atlas.
And, as others have pointed out, the fact that cell phones worked was just ridiculous. Even if the cities just became unpopulated and not actually destroyed, you'd have no chance to get a call through. When the I 35W bridge collapsed here in the Twin Cities you couldn't complete a call for at least 12 hours after that because of all the locals calling their friends, and all the people across the world who were calling TO locals to make sure they were okay. Text messages went through most of the time since they take so little bandwidth. And that didn't cause any significant damage to the communications architecture like erasing cities would do.
Not that this story is the only one to make that major error, but it still bugs me. Cloverfield did the same thing, hinging the entire plot on cell phone calls. Yeah, a monster is destroying New York City and your call goes through on the first try? Yeah right.