3
Outside was exactly the right kind of wrong to paralyze him temporarily.
He lived one side quest from the middle of Central Square, a place where the traffic was so bad that the only rational response to it was to move to the country and raise animals. But he was used to it, in part because he had no car, and had no real interest in driving one in the future, especially given the aforementioned traffic.
What was interesting was that everyone else apparently decided moving to the country was a good plan, overnight. They left behind the animals, though.
It was dead quiet, except for birds, and he never heard birds before in the middle of the city, regardless of the time of day. What movement existed was non-automotive in nature: squirrels, mostly, plus a few rats, and something that looked a lot like a bobcat.
No people.
He ran to the corner and found more of the same. A family of raccoons was walking down the median strip of Mass Ave., evidently going shopping. Ahead, a hawk swooped down to nab a chipmunk. Up a side street, there was a four-point buck just staring at Touré like the two of them were in the middle of an insurance company commercial. He was chewing grass from a patch in the middle of the road where there shouldn’t have been any grass.
Likewise, there were climbing plants all over the sides of the buildings, and the sidewalks were riddled with cracks from an eruption of tree roots.
Nature had exploded.
And still, there were no people. Even the panhandle corridor—where all the homeless congregated to see who had any smokes left—was empty. Those dudes didn’t have the money to get out of town, never mind head to a farm or whatever. It made no sense.
Touré kept running, from block to block, looking up and down every street for some explanation. A sign, maybe, like HIDE-AND-SEEK DAY STARTS NOW. TOURé IS IT.
He didn’t stop until he reached the front of the twenty-four-hour store he should have been hitting the night before. It was a point of pride for the owner, Stefan, that this place never closed, for any reason, ever. Nor’easters, hurricanes, police actions, it didn’t matter. Unless it was the end of the world, Stefan said, he’d have the place open.
It was closed. The conclusion was inescapable.
“Touré, my man, the world ended and you survived it,” he said, to nobody. Because there was nobody. He was the last man left on Earth.
He sat down on a bench, and started laughing.
4
When he was a kid, Touré’s parents made him see a psychiatrist to figure out why he hated them. (That wasn’t, probably, how they’d pitched it to the doctor.) He didn’t remember much about the guy, other than that he liked to play chess with Touré and ask leading questions. It was maybe three sessions before the guy decided Touré was just bored with everything, and then they got on okay.
The psychiatrist came to mind once Touré stopped laughing, which took approximately half an hour. He figured the doctor would call this a minor psychotic break, if there was such a thing as a minor one.
The doctor wasn’t there, because he was dead now. Touré’s parents had to be dead too, a fact he found a little sobering. It didn’t have the sort of impact it was supposed to, though, for a well-adjusted adult human. Touré wanted this to be because he was a survivor who had no time for grief, but that wasn’t right. The problem was that the idea was so new, and so enormous, that he was probably experiencing something like shock.
Maybe that was what the doctor would say instead, if he were able. The other option was that there was something deeply wrong with Touré, and he didn’t want to go down that particular rabbit hole.
The next person he thought of was Ducks, because he and Ducks used to get in arguments about which of them would survive an apocalypse. It got really involved, and included flow charts and props. The great news was that Touré was right all along. It was a little anticlimactic, though, because he couldn’t very well gloat about this to Ducks.
Touré decided then that he was jumping to conclusions. He didn’t know for sure that Ducks hadn’t survived, and he didn’t know for sure that he was really the last man on Earth. He was the last man on his block: anything more than that was prematurely hyperbolic.
So, he knew what was quest number one: Get off the bench and get to Ducks’s apartment to see if Touré really had won the apocalypse challenge.
He did this—it wasn’t far—and discovered a new problem, immediately.
The building was gone.
Admittedly, it had been a while since he and Ducks had hung out, but not that long. Not so long that receiving a quick Hey, I had to move because they’re demolishing my building was an unreasonable expectation.
There was a sign out front saying the place had been torn down to make room for new condos, and that didn’t make any sense either. Not because the old building wasn’t a rat trap in need of demolition—it was—but because the sign said the new building wouldn’t be ready for thirty years.
Touré decided this was a successful completion of the first quest anyway, because he had arrived at Ducks’s apartment; it was only that the apartment failed to continue existing.
Quest number two: Widen his search parameters for signs of life.
There was a high-end bike shop across the street from Ducks’s hole in the ground. Touré was not an athletically inclined person, but he liked riding bikes okay, and he knew how, and this place had a bike in its window that cost more than a small car. He used to go by it all the time wondering what made that bike so amazingly awesome that it cost that much.
This seemed like an excellent time to find out.
5
The super-expensive bike in the window he had to break to get inside was a different one than he remembered, but he tried it anyway, more for the price tag than the utility of it.
This ended up being an instructive error. He learned that most of the price corresponded to the lightness of the bike—it felt like it weighed less than his shoes—rather than the kinds of features he might personally value much more highly. Comfort, for example.
In addition to the lightweight frame, it came with razor-thin, puncture-proof tires. The puncture-proof part was an excellent idea, but the razor-thin component turned out to be a great feature only as long as the pavement was relatively level.
That was not the case anywhere around the shop. The roadway had developed potholes all over the place, apparently overnight. Likewise, the ground under the sidewalk erupted at random intervals, revealing soil and newly grown grass. Touré couldn’t remember Mass Ave. ever looking quite this bad, in so many places at once.
After a block of travel in which he nearly fell over three times, he turned around and walked back to the store, in search of a more sensible option. He found a bike with fat tires—still puncture-proof—and a lot of springs. It felt as heavy as a small car, and that was fine.
Then he had to figure out where to go, to accomplish his current quest.
The largest nearby concentration of people would either be Newbury Street in Boston, or Harvard Square. From the bike shop, he figured it was about the same distance to either place; it was just a matter of going left or going right.
He went right, toward the Square, both because he was intimately familiar with the layout already and because there was a bridge between him and Boston. He didn’t want to discover that the instantly crumbling infrastructure problem he was seeing on the Central Square streets extended to the Mass Ave. bridge. Certainly not while he was on that bridge.
The thing about being on a bike was that, at first, that was all he could think about: watching where he was going and making sure he didn’t fall over and so on. This was especially true since the last time he rode one was when he was fifteen—a solid decade ago.
Having something so specific to concentrate on actually helped him deal with the fact that clearly he really was all alone, and this really was the end of the world.
That was always the fun part o
f planning for the apocalypse: It was hypothetical, which made it easy to ignore all the dead people and focus on the ones who hadn’t died instead. But if he and Ducks ever took any of it seriously, they would have moved to a cabin somewhere and prepped.
Touré came to a stop just past the halfway point to the Square, in the no-man’s-land part of Mass Ave. between Central and Harvard, to reassess.
Where he stopped fell between a closed bike shop (another one, because Cambridge) and an office building with a spin class gym on the ground floor. He used to find the fact that these two places of business were across from one another really funny. Today, it was mostly just sad, because the shop was locked and there was nobody on the spin bikes across the street.
The traffic light directly over his head wasn’t working, which wasn’t notable, because none of them was.
“You haven’t seen any lights,” he told himself. “The power grid is down. What causes the power grid to go down and all the people to vanish at the same time?”
There were no apocalypse scenarios in his mental playlist that included everyone dying without leaving behind a body. The power failure could be an EMP, but unless everyone else in town other than Touré had been a computer-generated hologram, that didn’t help resolve the central mystery of the missing people.
He should have been considering a zombie version of the apocalypse, probably. That would mean everyone died, and then got up and went somewhere, which was why there were no bodies. It nearly fit the available info.
In that hypothetical, an entire city of zombies was only a couple of blocks away—he just hadn’t stumbled upon them yet.
He didn’t think that was going to happen, primarily because of the birds. There was no birdsong during a zombie apocalypse. That seemed obvious, although he couldn’t come up with a reason why. Didn’t make it untrue.
Probably not a neutron bomb, he thought. He knew almost nothing about them, except they were supposed to kill the people and leave the buildings. So that didn’t explain the bodies vanishing, or how he neither died nor vanished—unless he was immune to radiation—and it didn’t explain the birds . . . or the squirrels, or the deer, or any of the other animals running around all over the city.
Radiation killed wildlife, too, and there was a lot of wildlife about, so unless he fundamentally misunderstood what a neutron bomb was, that wasn’t the answer.
As he climbed back onto the bike, he wondered how many more blocks it would take before he considered it proven that he was truly alone.
6
A few minutes later, Touré nearly ran someone over.
The dude was standing practically in the middle of the street, so it wasn’t like the near-collision was Touré’s fault. If there were still cops and traffic laws, he would definitely be in the right. Fortunately, there was no collision, because there was no ambulance to call, and the phone to call it on probably wouldn’t work anyway. They also didn’t have to deal with the irony of the last man on Earth accidentally killing the second-to-last man on Earth.
The guy looked like he was new in town. Every year, the colleges brought in a bunch of newbies who didn’t know how to get around, dress, or just generally comport themselves in public. Touré dealt with them on the regular, because Central Square fell right between the Harvard and MIT campuses.
He was a Black kid wearing khakis and loafers, a collared shirt and a denim jacket. All he was missing was the too-heavy knapsack on a hunched back and he would’ve been Every Freshman on His Way to Class. A guy like this was not on Touré’s mental shortlist of likely apocalypse survivors. More like second zombie from the left.
The Asian woman on the sidewalk, wearing some kind of pantsuit, was a bit harder to peg. They both looked younger than Touré, but for her, this didn’t mean she actually was. Part of that was because she was a girl, and he was historically bad at figuring out the ages of women between puberty and thirty.
Basically, she could have been the same age as the kid she was with, or she could have been his teacher. He would have believed either one.
The woman didn’t look right at Touré, which was weird up until he figured out she was blind. That definitely put her off the apocalypse survivor shortlist.
“Hey, guys!” Touré said. “Did you sleep through the apocalypse too?”
“The apocalypse?” the kid repeated. “Is that what you’re calling this?”
“Sure,” Touré said.
“What’s happened to everyone?” the woman asked. “Do you know?”
“Are there other people?” the kid asked.
“Have you seen a dog?” she asked.
“One at a time, guys,” Touré said. “But for real, I have the same questions. Oh.”
He turned to the blind woman.
“A dog, huh?” he said. “You’re missing your dog?”
“Yes, did you see one?”
“No, I’m sorry. That must super suck.”
“Thank you, yes, it does . . . super suck.”
“But, look, I’ve been riding all over the place, and whatever happened, the animals all look okay. Better than okay, actually . . . like there was . . . an overnight population explosion or something. I mean . . . what I mean is, I bet your dog’s just fine. If he’s around here, like, maybe we can call for him.”
She responded silently, with a resigned nod, before slipping her dark glasses back on and trying to get back up to her feet.
Touré got the sense that he’d interrupted an argument.
“So what happened?” the kid asked. “We were thinking everyone just left town and forgot to tell us, or . . .”
“Or a quarantine,” the woman said. “That’s what he was thinking. You’re the first person we’ve come across, so perhaps there are others and we’re not alone after all.”
“I don’t know,” Touré said. “You’re the first people I’ve seen too. But yeah, solid reasoning. I’m not the last one alive now, and neither are you two, so we can scratch that off the list and work from there. Definitely we have to find some more people. But hey, maybe we should find someplace to sit down and eat first, huh? I’m starved. Who wants breakfast?”
7
Once it was established that both of his new friends—the guy’s name was Robbie and the blind woman was Carol—were indeed new in town, Touré felt an obligation to take charge and pick a place to eat. This was stupid, of course, because it didn’t matter how good the brunch was at one place versus another if both places were locked and abandoned.
Yet that was what he tried. He brought them the rest of the way into the Square, past the closed bookstore, the closed banks, the closed pizza place, and the closed convenience store, to the closest thing the area had to a proper greasy spoon.
It was closed too, but more than that: It didn’t exist anymore.
“Damn, when did this happen?” he asked.
“It looks like a clothing store,” Robbie said.
“Yeah, I know, but it was a restaurant, like, last week. Maybe. I can’t remember the last time I came here, but it wasn’t that long ago. Crazy.”
“This seems very far down the list of our current concerns,” Carol said.
“Yeah, but I loved this place.”
There were a dozen other restaurants to consider breaking in to, but after the surprise of seeing his favorite one shut down, Touré began to appreciate that the hunt for proper food was going to end up being more involved than he’d thought. Even if they broke into a restaurant, they had no means by which to, for instance, cook an egg, because there was no electrical power. Maybe a gas stove would still work, but he didn’t know enough about gas stoves to be positive that this was so.
“C’mon,” Touré said. “I need some food in my stomach or I can’t think straight.”
They crossed over to the pharmacy across the street. Like everything else, it was locked, but thanks to the sudden deterioration of the sidewalk, a loose brick was easy enough to find.
“Are you sure th
at’s a good idea?” Robbie asked. “I mean . . . Actually, never mind. It’s a great idea. Let’s get the police down here.”
“No private property after an apocalypse,” Touré said. “It’s a rule.”
Touré shattered the glass door and stepped through. Robbie and Carol followed, with Robbie guiding her carefully, over the glass.
We’re going to have to find a safe place for her to camp out, Touré thought, seeing how much trouble Robbie was having just to get Carol past the glass. We can’t move very fast otherwise.
It was the first time he considered their situation from a Darwinian perspective, and he hated that it had even occurred to him. He shoved it into the back of his mind, to be dealt with at a future point.
“Whoa,” Robbie said, on his first look around.
“What is it?” Carol asked.
“The shelves are kinda empty,” Touré said.
This was an understatement. The place had been cleaned out, from top to bottom, by someone in a hurry. Had it not been for the locked doors, Touré would have assumed this was the consequence of looting.
“I’m not certain I understand your concern,” Carol said.
“I’m just adjusting the parameters of our apocalypse,” Touré said. “This looks like what happens in an evacuation.”
“Right, an evacuation,” Robbie said. “That’s what I’ve been saying.”
“I think you need to stop saying that word,” Carol said.
“Evacuation?” Robbie asked.
“Not you.”
“She means apocalypse,” Touré said.
“Yes,” she said. “Something clearly transpired to which we weren’t privy, for some reason, but I am far from ready to declare everyone dead simply because this one area has been abandoned.”
“Quarantined,” Robbie said.
“Maybe you’re right,” Touré said. “But until I . . . Ah-ha!”
Past the aisles, there was a second set of checkout registers, in front of which were a half-dozen candy bars.
The Apocalypse Seven Page 3