Amelia

16

The Last Man on Earth

The sun rose and everything fell. The director of the European Center for Ballistics had risen at four, gone for coffee, pulled into the employee parking lot, settled at his desk, and proceeded to promptly knock his coffee onto the controls, resulting in the mass destruction of the Earth. And, yes, it simply was that easy to annihilate nearly the entire planet’s life, especially when the convoluted series of security systems (highly prone to malfunction), all had the passcode 1, 2, 3, 4, and the world’s most powerful nuclear weaponry (producing the same amount of energy as the sun), had got off simultaneously. The only remaining life was a percentage with a nearly incalculable number of zeros before a one. This percentage was the Last Man on Earth.
The Last Man on Earth (known to his deceased loved-ones as Alex) sat alone in a room, oblivious to his singularity. The house was an old air-raid bunker which was especially cheap and especially quiet, and Alex had converted it into a six-room living space. The blinds were drawn because it was too boring outside, it was damp without a working heater, dull without electricity, and it was not the kind of room in which the Last Man on Earth would want to spend his last Earth days. But, still not used to the way things were, Alex tolerated it. Tolerated it in the same way Michelangelo had tolerated the Pope.
It was a Tuesday; a week had passed since the coffee had accidentally exterminated all but one member of Earth’s species. But this didn’t surprise Alex; it seemed like everything bad happened on a Tuesday.
Miraculously having survived incomprehensibly inept to the present circumstances on nothing but canned ravioli and green beans, Alex had collapsed dolefully on the couch, lethargic, the high curve of his stomach straining against his shirt. While he lay there glumly, it occurred to him that people could die from this boredom stuff. It happened, surely. The power station goes wacko, there’s no television for a week, and suddenly, blam! You’re dead from nothing to do. The fortuitous death of everyone you’ve ever known, leaving you as the last individual on Earth, definitely increases this factor, Alex deduced in a much more simplified way; so simplified, in fact, that it was reduced to one equation that gleamed in his abnormally small mind: if people = dead, then Alex + dead people = boredom.
Then, sharply, there was a knock on the door.
Alex was an average person. In fact, the biggest difference there was between Alex and an absolutely normal person was the fact that he laced his belt through his pant-loops counter-clockwise. He was easily distracted by shiny objects, Look, over there!s, birds, and the national anthem. His favorite popsicle flavor was blue, his favorite show was whatever was on, and his favorite part of the weekend was getting up at noon, saying hello to the mailman, and eating steak while watching an actress spend most of her life looking upset on television. He was the sort of man who’d show up uninvited to cocktail parties and talk about that one thing that no one else wanted to talk about. So this knock was something that he handled as any normal person would. It was a reprieve from the perennial boredom, and his stomach, a magnificent sphere, stayed amazingly intact despite the emanation of ripples of every thudding footfall.
He opened the door.
Alex stared Death for a moment, then closed the door. There was silence as Alex tried to decide what he had just seen. Perhaps it was a blessing in disguise. A very good disguise.
Then came another knock, then a ring; hollow, cold, fingerless.
Alex sat back down, disappointed at the lack of a stripper or the mailman or any other random person he might want to see. “Oh, fuck off.”
The door was thrown open and there came a voice; mouthless, frothy, haggard. “So, you know me . . .” Death talked slowly, like he was using up the last of his reserves as he glided into the living room.
Alex returned to the couch. “Chris, you’re not fooling anyone,” he muttered. “Just take off that stupid mask and get out. I’m not dealing with the police again.” He paused and thought for a moment. “Come to think of it, no one’s been there to take my calls all week.”
Death continued to peer at him through some Stygian cloak of darkness. It was both there and not at the same time.
“Listen, Chris.” Alex rolled over and groped for a baseball bat by the television. “I’m really not in the mood for this now. You’d better get out of my living room before I do some damage to your skull.” Alex heard what sounded like a sigh.
“The rest of you were so easy to take,” Death continued. “Already dead. Conflict seems to be the only inevitable thing about your species. Bombs, I’ve seen, are quite popular with humanity. You just can’t get enough of them, can you?”
“Yeah, sure, Chris. Just get out, that’s bullshit,” he replied, fighting to sit up.
“Perhaps it would be wise for you to look outside, Mr. Roberts.”
“And what will I see, a zombie invasion?” Alex readjusted himself and stifled a laugh. “Is it a crime if I just want have time without some looney asshole?” Death tore him from the couch and slammed him into the window, drawing the blinds with an invisible force.
Alex’s face went white as he inspected the barren landscape riddled with debris of humanity’s existence. It had a dandruff-like resemblance to that of a giant scalp. “ . . . Holy . . .” He looked from the window to his guest and back again. “You’re not Chris from the office, are you?”
“You’re a very lucky man, Mr. Roberts. Not too many have had the fortune of speaking with me before they depart,” Death observed, his stark voice echoing like a knell.
“ . . . How,” Alex started, reaching for the bat, “how the hell am I alive?”
“Your house, Mr. Roberts, is solid concrete,” Death explained impatiently. “And so far away from anything else hardly anyone knew you even existed in the first place. Anyone who did obviously didn’t enjoy your company enough to warn you. I’m sorry, Mr. Roberts, but you’re just not important enough to live, and you’re very much wasting my time being here. Anything else before you leave the land of the living?”
“Wait!” Alex held up the bat, trembling. “Can't I just savor the . . . gravity or sun or air or something? They don't have gravity where . . . wherever I'm going, do they?”
Death sighed again. “Ah, yes, gravity, the cruel and unpredictable mistress.”
“Well-well, then, don't you have a name or something? I’d like to die knowing who killed me.”
There was silence before Death responded. “Jeff,” he said wearily.
“What?”
“Jeff, okay?”
“Oh.” Alex did not anticipate a response. “That’s a nice . . . name. Want a cup of coffee or something? I can heat some water. I-I mean you’re . . . Death and all, don’t you get hungry? I can take out some cheese.” He tripped over his words as they fell out of his throat in nervous gasps. “Can I try on your robe? No, maybe I can tell you my life’s story. Don’t you want to hear it? I mean-I mean I have no one else-”
“Mr. Roberts you are too dull of a person to even have a life’s story. Now let’s get this over with,” Jeff muttered. “I have a timeshare in Orlando I’d like to get back to . . .” He was gliding towards him with an arm outstretched, his cloak billowing in some chilling, unseen wind.
Alex’s mind raced. There was so much he hadn’t done. He had always wanted to know where mayo came from, what raisins were. He’d never been on a jetski (only a bumper boat, which, if you thought about it, were basically the same thing), he’d never gone to England and been shouted at for being a stupid, fat American, and he was just beginning to teach himself chess. He was just getting over the sudden death of his Parisian dachshund named Jacob, who was visiting a neighbor’s house the Tuesday the world ended, and he was just starting to form an opinion about Republicans. But here he was, about die. He’d miss traffic and taxes and pollution and all the other things that made Earth great. Alex still couldn’t understand the magnitude of it all. Or what Jeff had said; his cloak was muffling his mouth a bit.
Everyone he had ever known was dead. Strangely, he had chosen to skip work the week it all ended, and had he gone he would have been obliterated. But after not having received a furious call from the office, Alex assumed his boss had accidentally stabbed himself in the chest while shaving or fallen into a bottomless pit of flesh-eating butterflies. He cursed himself for not seeing it sooner, seeing the danger, the emptiness around him, but he had deleted the evidence without looking it over, like email updates from LinkedIn.
Trying to do anything now seemed about as useless as getting your haircut on the steps of a guillotine. But suddenly something jumped up inside of him, screamed off its little red head, beat its tiny fists on his guts until it crawled into his mouth and puked out rainbows in the form of the last, glorious will to fight. At least, that’s how Alex saw it. Not as the primal instinct known as sympathetic stress reaction, but as minute man he later named Tony.
“No!” Alex screamed, pointing the bat at headless hood. “No, I know what you want! You want to play a game. We can play a game because I . . . know how much you love games.” Alex did not where he was going with this. He scrambled to a cabinet, fumbling for a package while his other arm still weakly held the bat. “Um, cards. Here, we can have a card-game, okay? You can decide the rules if you want. But-but if I win, I get to go free?”
Jeff sighed. “Oh, I suppose.”
“Okay, and if I lose-”
“If you lose, you will come back with me to the World of the Dead where you shall dwell in utter anguish and misery for all of eternity with the other wretched souls who consist of what you call humanity which has met a ghastly and grim demise by your own stupidity and folly.”
Alex thought. “Fair enough.”

The cards were dealt between the two by Alex, whose hands shook like on a rough night of nothing but Mountain Dew and Call of Duty. Once they were cut, he couldn’t help but feel Jeff’s gaze, an eyeless gaze, an emotionless gaze. He tried to shake it off of him, but it was a combination of something else; he vaguely felt his sister’s gaze, too. And his aunt’s, and Joe’s from the office. Alex felt the dead peering into him. He immediately regretted suggesting a game. He was terrible at games.
“What are the rules?” Alex changed the subject.
He felt Jeff grin. “You’ll figure them out.”
They played in silence. At first Alex counted the cards he lost and cards he won, but soon he lost track. As they were shuffled, Alex felt a presence, a deep, frigid presence. It was one that grew heavier with every card he lost. Almost an hour had passed when he noticed that the uneasy, grim feeling was beginning to choke him, enough so that he had sweat through his sweater, his hands trembling to an extent to which he had to put down his cards. His vision swirled; he couldn’t read the numbers on the cards anymore.
By the time Alex had one card left, the presence was so excruciating and heartbreaking that he tossed the card to his guest. He couldn’t take the pain anymore, he couldn’t take the screams of the dead that seemed to come from nowhere. His stomach was now a stupendous wobbling globe of sweat.
“Here . . .” Alex clung to the table as the room was twirling. “I’ve lost. Take me . . . please . . . I welcome you . . .”
“Mr. Roberts.” The resounding, slow voice surfaced out of the dark. “I will not take you.”
“No-no, but you must, you have to-I lost. Please . . .” Alex panted.
“What would I want with you?” The presence suddenly ceased, the pain and shrieks gone. Alex breathed again, could finally see. “You, a mere wisp of an existence? Humanity deserved better, I will say that.” Jeff rose, gathering his robes. “I’ve claimed many an innocent life, Mr. Roberts, but none so foolish as you. What would I want with an idiot for eternity?” Then Jeff disappeared in front of him, the air wavering with cold for a moment.
He shot up and looked around, finding nothing of Jeff’s departure. Then, his hands still shaking, he eyed the window, then the door. Alex stared at the door handle and slowly turned the knob.