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I’m here because I have to be, because I have to record the last chapter of this story, because if I don’t, then no one will. And if no one records it, then there’ll be no record left of it anywhere on the planet, and I couldn’t bear for all of this to have been in vain. It would be too much, too pointless—too painful.
Let’s face it. It was probably in vain anyway.
Who’s left to care whether I made it across town for one final journey or not?
...I care.
And if anyone comes looking—no, when they come looking, when it’s finally been long enough that the contagion has cleared and the solar quarantines lifted... I want them to have a clear understanding of how this ended.
I want them to remember my name.
Is that selfish?
It’s probably selfish. But when you’re the only person left alive, maybe everything you do is, by default, a selfish act.
So I’m sitting here at the computer terminal at the port, the scent of the pine-based antiseptic still thick in the air—and it smells like futility, like lost hope.
This is what the end smells like: pine-based antiseptic and steel, stale air and musty carpet from the rain that leaked in through a broken window.
This is what is looks like: an empty terminal, commercial-grade navy-blue upholstery on the waiting area chairs, silver steel tech terminals sprouting in little clusters like so many mushrooms glinting in the light, sky-high ceilings containing nothing but echoing emptiness.
This is what the end sounds like: silence. Complete, utter silence.
Until the rain begins.
––––––––
Fein stops writing for a moment, rests their head against the cool, sleek, silver of the terminal in front of them, eyes closed as pain squeezes their head in a vice. It’s been happening more and more frequently, the vice-like headaches, with pain enough to spark little blue lights in the corners of their vision, sometimes enough to make them see ghosts and hear long-forgotten conversations. Enough to make them taste that bitter, dead-mouse taste on the back of their tongue.
They know this means the end is near, and that scares them, but it also comforts them as well, because at least then all this will be over, and they won’t be alone anymore, because they’ll either be nothing, or else they’ll be something with all the rest of the people who have died.
It’s the frustration that drove them here, weeks after everyone else gave up, days after the last of the power went out in the city, when the streets went black and silent.
It’s hard to understand just how much noise electricity makes until it’s gone.
Chills ran down Fein’s neck the first time they stepped outside after that. They didn’t live right in the centre of town, but they could see the scrapers from the crest of the hill by their house, the path they took to get powdered milk or freeze-dried cream from the store back in the early days of the disaster.
But that time, the last time, Fein paused under the spreading branches of a giant oak, its leaves gilded with fall and the late-evening sunshine both, and the scrapers on the horizon seemed more like monuments to greed, to stupidity, to hubris than they ever had to anything else.
Don’t get them wrong, Fein’s not anti-capitalist or anti-urban or any of that. Anti-greed, for sure, but that can be found anywhere that humans plague the universe. It’s just that, that last time, with the sun glowing between the spires, the windows of the scrapers reflecting like so many diamond eyes, the city completely, utterly silent but for a single, paper-brown leaf scatterling down the asphalt of the road beside them, Fein knew that it was over, that everything had come to naught.
And so they’d begun the long, trudging road to the spaceport, way on the other side of the city, three days’ travel in a world where cars no longer ran not because they or the roads were broken, but because of the contagion, the fact that people had been so totally and utterly cut off, and there was no one left to transport fuel.
The last petrol station had run dry two months ago. There’d been a riot. Two people had died.
It had barely made the news.
What were two more deaths against the millions—billions—that had already occurred?
And so now, all that was left was this: a three-day trek across a corpse of a city, smashed windows for empty eyes and skeletal, multi-story buildings like broken ribs jabbing the sky.
Fein lived alone, with a prolific and prosperous veggie garden out the back, a half-dozen chickens, and at the time of that epic journey across town, they hadn’t left their house in eighty days.
Eighty-three, if you didn’t count that one quick jog around the block for exercise, which sometimes they did count and sometimes they didn’t.
They’d been out jogging, face flushed, body slick with sweat, ungainly bits that had grown more ungainly with the imposed confinement jiggling. Their heart had been pounding in their neck, they could taste sweat and thick saliva, and the sun had been slanting down through the red-turned leaves of the maple at the end of the street when they’d seen it: a woman, early-thirties, blonde, trim in her athletic wear in the way that broadcast long hours of bodily commitment—and pushing a black pram.
The woman had seemed fine. She was walking slowly, sure, but there was nothing about her that seemed to indicate what was about to happen—that she was about to drop dead, right there on the sideway, and the way her head bounced as it hit the ground still made Fein sick to the stomach.
Fein had rushed over, of course, despite the social distancing laws, risking tens of thousands of dollars in fines and maybe even imprisonment if they were caught by the wrong person. But they couldn’t do nothing.
It was clear, though, that the woman was dead on impact: her neck lolled at an angle no live person would tolerate, her limbs splayed like an awkwardly crushed spider.
Fein couldn’t quite bring themself to touch the woman—they’d been distancing for two years now, no one got close to a stranger without feeling awkward and uncomfortable—but they slipped their phone from the pocket, breathed on the screen once to see if it would fog, then held it in front of the woman’s slightly parted mouth.
No fog.
No movement from her chest.
Struck by a brainwave, Fein opened the heart rate monitor app on the phone and held it so the woman’s finger was against the sensor.
Nothing.
Carefully, holding it only by one corner, Fein tucked the phone back into their running vest’s pocket, zipped it shut. With proper precautions, the phone could probably be decontaminated. The vest could go into the bin, wrapped in several layers of plastic to make them feel safe.
The pram bounced.
The baby, its occupant, cried out, a squirmy, uncomfortable sort of cry—and, horrified, Fein straightened and stared.
Dark-haired thing, chubby-cheeked. It was sitting and looking bright-eyed, so obviously not a newborn, but babies were as far outside the purvey of Fein’s experience as flying, so who knew how old it might actually be.
“Hello? Baby?” Fein ventured.
The child lit up in a bright-eyed smile, gurgling and waving in that jerky, not-quite-controlled manner that babies did.
Well fuck.
Fein couldn’t leave the baby here alone. Definitely couldn’t take it home, either, not after its mother had just dropped dead.
Fuck fuck fuck.
Okay. Okay. They could do this. The woman would have a driver’s licence, a wallet, something, and there’d be an address, and Fein could wheel the pram back and return the baby...
Hazmat. This called for hazmat protection first.
Ten minutes later—fastest suit-up they’d ever done—Fein was back on the scene, layered under three pairs of gloves and three pairs of leggings, everything tucked tightly first under their zip-up knee-length down jacket, then layered with a thin, ankle-length raincoat, topped with a blue plastic poncho for good luck. The top layer of gloves tucked over the sleeves of the raincoat; Fein wore not only a tightly-fitted surgical mask they’d been saving for an emergency but a balaclava and an impromptu helmet made from a white plastic shopping bag with a hole cut in it for their face, the ends tucked firmly into the neck of the raincoat under the poncho.
The baby was wailing. Either everyone else had chosen today to be sensible and stay indoors—like they were supposed to, like they’d been warned from the start—or else they’d heard the baby wailing and decided they wanted none of it.
Fein scowled, the mask rasping against their skin.
If they’d been sweating before, it was nothing to now: fall it might be, but the afternoons were still warm and long, and they were wearing approximately five billion too many layers for this. Already the sweat was dripping down their back, sticking uncomfortably under their arms, dampening their groin and wrists and neck.
Dizzy.
Damn.
Have to work fast.
Fein dug in the pockets of the woman’s clothing fruitlessly, the cottony scent of the mask blocking everything else out, the baby’s determined wails providing a soundtrack.
Ah, the pram.
There, in the bottom, a nappy bag. And there, in the nappy bag, a wallet. And there, in the wallet, a driver’s license, and the baby only lived a street away, and thank heaven for that, because standing up too quickly sent a wave of dizzy nausea through Fein, and if they didn’t get this over and done with, they’d pass out from heat stroke.
Quickly, confidently, as though they’d been doing it for years, Fein grabbed hold of the pram and pushed. They were surprised—having never actually pushed a pram before—by how easily the little vehicle moved; were all prams this smooth and effortless, or was this just a really expensive model?
One street up—the baby was now quiet again, staring sulkily at the surroundings, cheeks still red and blotchy from wailing—take a left, down the street with the strange yellow house and all the old rose bushes perfuming the air.
Number seven, there.
Fein wheeled the pram awkwardly up the single step into the red-brick house’s front yard, closed in on the front door. Knocked. Was that their heart, hammering so loudly it sounded like someone else was knocking too?
Please be home. Please, someone, be home.
Because it was entirely plausible that no one was. Maybe this was a single-parent family. Maybe the other parent had been trapped elsewhere during the quarantine. Who knew? All Fein knew was that they couldn’t leave the baby here on the doorstep, alone and unprotected, no matter what the prudent thing to do in terms of their own survival was.
Fuck. Was the baby still drinking milk? Was it eating food yet? The whole thing seemed more utterly overwhelming than the contagion itself, and that was saying much.
The door creaked open.
Thank God thank God thank you God.
“Is this your child?” Fein said, voice muffled by the mask.
“Alice!” the brunette-woman cried, flinging the screen door open compulsively before jerking to a stop, arms still outstretched toward the baby. “Where’s Odette?”
The mother—other mother?—presumably.
Fein sucked in a deep breath, made a little harder by the mask that pressed against their face with the negative air pressure. “Dead.”
They could have softened the blow, couched it in gentler terms... But the rigidity that came over the brunette woman in the doorway, the fear, the horror in her eyes... Best to rip the bandaid off quickly.
The brunette woman’s jaw twitched. Her fingers clenched. “Oh,” she said simply, then reached out to take the pram, bundling it inside, scooping out the child and hugging it close.
She knew. Fein could tell she knew.
But there was nothing else to say, no help or hope to offer, and so Fein walked away, wondering how long the two other members of Odette’s household would be able to fight off the contagion that had breached their home.
That was the last human contact Fein had.
Eighty-three days ago.
And now they were dead, all dead, and as Fein walked along the deserted street, scrapers lining the forward horizon with the setting sun behind them, red-brick houses with white trim cloned in long rows down the sides of the road, abandoned vehicles in driveways and on road sides, tears clogged at Fein’s nose, throat, thoughts.
They were the only one left.
It was possible that somewhere in the city, others still sheltered singling like they did. Possible. But the streets had been dead silent—pun fully intended, because a little black humour was the only way to stay sane when you were possibly the only person left on the planet—for at least a month now, and the radio broadcasts and tv stations had fallen silent three weeks ago, and Fein could feel it in the air that suddenly tasted clean, like a giant rainstorm had been through—or like they were out in the middle of a forest, like they’d used to do as a kid, hiking far away from human civilisation.
And everything was silent, and the power had finally gone out, and the nights were getting cold...
And this morning, the second day of the hike across town, Fein had woken up with a headache.
That was the problem with the contagion. Normally, deadly plagues burned themselves out; they killed their host far too quickly, incapacitating them before they could spread the disease to many other people.
Colds and flus and things like that were much worse, because you were contagious for days before you felt symptoms, and even when you were symptomatic, there was pressure to just keep going about your daily life anyway, maybe with a day or two off if you got really sick.
But this contagion had managed to marry the best with the best—or the worst with the worst, if you were human and not the virus.
It had taken fully eight months of research to realise that people could carry the virus for the better part of a month before they showed any symptoms—if they ever showed symptoms—and in that time, could have infected almost everyone they met.
The exact mechanism of transmission was still unconfirmed, but the assumption was that it passed in bodily fluids like most other viruses—sneezes, coughs, those sorts of things—and, unlike most other viruses, could live for several weeks outside a host body.
That was the death knell right there: a month-long, asymptomatic incubation period, the ability for the virus to last for weeks outside a host...
Fein shook their head. They could have told everyone that the shutdown came too late, that the world should have been more cautious the minute random flare-ups started appearing without any visible cause, or link to prior cases.
But the hospitals were already overloaded by that point, people dying in the hallways from lack of beds, lack of staff, and it was all just disaster processing, constant triage, and despite the apparently-united, superficially-logical approach of the world leaders, underneath it all, they were panicked too.
Fein’s jaw twitched. Mistakes were made. Fatal mistakes. And the lives of the many were dictated by the decisions of the few.
And now they had a headache, even though they’d been sleeping outside in the cold, not wanting to risk entering anyone’s house for anything, in case the contagion lingered, even though they hadn’t seen another living soul for nearly three months.
But Fein had blinked to wakefulness under the oleander bush they’d spend the night in, blinking rapidly in the dim morning light, lungs full of the scent of dirt and grass and sappy leaves, the taste of bitter greenness in the back of their throat, and Fein had stared through the leaves at the overcast sky and realised that the shivers they were feeling weren’t all from being cold, and the pain behind their eyes probably wasn’t thirst.
It was the end, or the beginning of it, at any rate.
They still wanted to get to the spaceport, though. Make one final broadcast and see if anyone responded. Call out to the city and see if anyone was still alive, call out to space and see if the others had changed their mind and would come to the rescue after all.
If nothing else, to record their final days somewhere others might find it, decades hence when the far-flung reaches of humanity came toddling back to see what had happened to good old Earth after all.
And so, despite the headache, and the bitter green taste, and the inclement weather, Fein got up, and continued walking through the graveyard that had once been called a city.
Now, with Fein slumping at the terminal in the spaceport, the rain gushes down from the sky, a fall torrent here to cleanse the world. Fein hopes the animals will enjoy their new world; in fact, they know the animals will, because already in the last twelve months the reports from various science groups and environmentalists were indicating a far more rapid recovery on nature’s part than anyone could have expected. Turns out, it wasn’t humanity the planet was allergic to, just the frenetic pace. Given the chance to stop, to slow down, to breathe a bit, the planet was suddenly doing quite fine.
That tears at Fein’s chest a bit, because it would have been nice to stick around, to watch as the Earth recovered and maybe make a go at real balance, find a way for humans to live in harmony with their environment for a change—and with themselves, their own bodies and psychological needs.
That would have been fun.
But the headache is stabbing like a knife now, the worst yet, and Fein knows that’s one of the final signs. Likely it was a headache like this that scythed through the woman’s head as she dropped dead on the pavement, inadvertently abandoning her child.
Lucky Fein, at least, has no one left to abandon.
They rest their head against the cool of the terminal—because what does skin contact matter now?—and watch as the rain thunders down beyond the distant plate-glass windows. The sun is dying on the horizon, a mere sliver of golden light that makes the grass oddly luminous, a vibrant, emerald green under the grey-blue clouds.
The roar of the rain on the roof is like the sound of one of the ships taking off, though without that deep, chest-gripping bass.
It’s soothing.
They are, they think, quite happy to die here, like this.
Well, happy may be an overstatement, Fein isn’t happy to die, no one has been, not in this context, not in these days, but if death has to come, then let it be like this, in the vast, cavernous waiting hall where people come to transit from one world to another, with the life-giving rain pelting down.
The terminal beeps, a green incoming-message light flashing on its periphery.
Fein bolts upright.
That isn’t supposed to happen.
These terminals are public, they aren’t made to call in on. Sure, someone talented with IP addresses and suchlike could probably hack one, ring in... But who in the world is left to do that?
Fingers trembling, breath catching like the agony of hope in their throat, Fein reaches out and answers the in-coming call.
Because of course, the answer is obvious.
Obvious, and plausible... But utterly, completely improbable.
“He... Hello?” Fein spoke too soon, the connection’s still going, forging a bridge between Fein at their terminal here, and someone, somewhere, out there, alive.
It doesn’t usually take this long to connect.
Fein’s heart contracts again, a little squeeze of adrenalin, and they frown it away, impatient, because hope has let them down oh-so-many times before.
But with one last flash of black, the image on the screen resolves, and it’s grainy, and it’s black-and-white, and it’s staticky and stuttery and Fein begins to cry, because it’s beyond anything they could have hoped for, because it’s Admiral Marchalle herself, commander of the legendary, semi-mythical space fleet, born from the one generational ship that set off for Alpha Centauri a century ago, and she’s here, and she’s talking to Fein, and Fein had better stop gawking and listen, because this, this very moment right here, will change the course of the human race forever.
“I’m sorry,” Fein says loudly, leaning in to the terminal instinctively. “I’m having trouble hearing you.”
“Situation. Report,” Admiral Marchalle says crisply, also leaning forward a little, her beret pinned at its neat angle and her eyes flinty and tense even through the poor picture quality.
“All dead,” Fein says, because this was the last city in the country left standing, and for all Fein knows, they are probably the last person left alive on Earth.
“Right.” Admiral Marchalle nods, everything she does crisp and precise. “Standby for pickup in twelve hours.”
“I... might not last that long,” Fein replies as pain stabs through their head again.
Marchalle frowns. “Hang on.” She speaks rapidly to someone off screen, nods, then turns back to the camera. “We’re teleporting you down a shot of the vaccine. You’ll have to administer it yourself, we can’t get someone down to you fast enough, but it’s a simple enough procedure and an intramuscular injection will do just fine.”
Fein is dreaming. That’s the only rational explanation.
The headaches are so intense they’re causing hallucinations, and Fein is imagining the one thing humanity has hoped for more than anything else: that the space-humans, with their radically evolved technology, born from the discovery on Alpha Centauri of an ancient civilisation, would come through for dear old Earth, would have a magical solution that Earth, with all its billions and billions of clever, creative, wonderful humans, could never manage.
“Hello? Hello, can you hear me?”
“Y... Yes, I can hear you. Where will I find... the vaccine?”
It’s so wildly implausible. Teleportation? Fein had known that the spacer-humans had advanced—but apparently even the Earth’s wildest conspiracy theories had been underprepared for just how far that advancement had gone.
“We’ll send it right to you,” Admiral Marchalle responds. “Hold tight.”
Sure enough, a perspex case appears on the dirty laminated floor next to Fein.
Hardly daring to breathe, they pick it up, unclick the latch, flip the lid open...
The needle is long, and thick, and this is going to hurt. But it’s not going to hurt as much as dying, so Fein picks up the syringe, holds it upright like they’ve seen in the movies, and taps to remove the air bubbles. “Like this?” they say.
Marchalle nods. “It’s hard to get wrong. Just stab it into your thigh, squeeze slowly until all the liquid’s in, and remove the needle. Hurts like a bitch, but what choice do you have?”
Fein nods, swallows, tenses. Marchalle’s right, and it’s going to hurt like a bitch, and the rain is thundering down on the roof like it’s determined to purge the world, and this is the end...
“Is there anyone else?” Fein asks, gaze flickering back to the screen.
Marchalle’s mouth goes tight. “A few,” she says. “One on your west coast, a couple in central Australia, three from Africa. There’s a Pacific island that made it.”
It’s so many more than Fein could dared have hoped for... and it’s few, so, so precious few.
The rain thunders down, the scent of pine-cleaner fills the air, and it’s the end of the Earth at least for now, because how can so few people rebuild?
But Fein stabs the needle into their leg right as another wave of headache grips their head, grits their teeth, pushes the plunger slowly, slowly—Marchalle was right, it hurts like a bitch—and removes the needle, panting, and it’s also a beginning, and that’s far, far more than Fein could have dared to hope for.
“Well done,” Marchalle says with a strained smile. “We’ll see you in twelve hours.”
The terminal goes blank.
Stiffly, dazed, head pounding and thigh aching, Fein lies down on the hard, cold floor. And, lullabied by the rain, Fein sleeps deeply for the very first time in months.