The Last Man on Earth Club

by Paul R. Hardy

  “Uh… yes.” She might have understood me, but she didn’t believe me. Her eyes darted around the room.

  “That’s where you are now. A universe with no war. We have no armies, and I’m not an officer. I’m a therapist. I’m only here to help you. We can’t send you back to your unit because it’s in your universe, and it’s too dangerous for us to go there. We already lost a lot of our people the last time we went.

  “I’m sorry to break it to you like this but you deserve to know the truth. I’ll answer any questions you have…”

  She looked down and clasped her hands together. They were trembling. Not a good sign.

  “It’s a lot to take in, I know. You do understand me, don’t you, Sergeant?”

  She looked up at me. “Oh, yeah.”

  Then she ran for it.

  She rushed forward, trying to barge me onto the floor — but I wasn’t there. I was only an image, projected remotely from a place of safety, and she found herself running through nothing.

  “Sergeant—” I tried to say, but it was no good. She tracked back, eyes wide as she realised I was just an illusion, then turned and dashed for the door.

  It swished open for her. She found the infirmary outside deserted, the windows shuttered, every door closed. She tried the first one she came to — it stayed locked. She hammered on it, tried to find a door control, but there was nothing. She tried another door — the same. And another.

  It opened. She ran through, into the centre, past more doors that wouldn’t open, meeting no one, running down the path we’d laid out for her, until she turned a corner and saw an open door ahead of her — a door into blinding light. But it wasn’t a light. It was an exit from the building, and it was so much brighter outside that she was momentarily dazzled. She dashed towards it, shielding her eyes as they adjusted — until she saw what lay beyond the corridors she thought were buried inside a cold rock halfway out to Jupiter.

  The forest, stretching forever, more shades of green than the eye could see, a blue sky above fog-strewn mountains in the pale distance. Before the forest, a green glade with a small vegetable garden, neatly laid out with shoots budding into life.

  And sunlight, warmer than any she’d ever known, making the colours burst out as a cloud passed away and the sun shone full upon the garden. And as she approached the doors, her run slowing to cautious, astonished steps, a smell no one from an asteroid could ever know: the morning’s rain, still wet upon the grass.

  Spellbound, she stared through the doors at the green world outside, unable to go further. When I caught up with her, judging she wasn’t a threat any more, I found her weeping at what she saw. I put a hand on her shoulder to show I was real. She could barely tear her eyes from the sight to look at me.

  “It’s… Earth…”

  “Yes.”

  “But this is… this is in the Testament! Just like this… Those are… trees? And… sky?”

  “That’s right.”

  “They destroyed it. The Testament shows it! All the smoke and poison and, and… machines…”

  “In your universe, perhaps. This is another Earth. A parallel Earth. There was no war here.”

  “It can’t be real. I’m dreaming!”

  “Then go outside. See for yourself.”

  “I can’t…”

  “You can. It’s just a few steps.”

  She looked at me, needing support. “I’ll go first, if you like,” I said. I walked ahead of her to the exit, and stepped outside. I turned back and held out a hand. Nervously, she joined me, and I led her across the paving into the garden.

  She had no shoes on, and noticed how wet the grass was. “It was raining earlier. Mind yourself, the grass is a bit slippery,” I said. But she didn’t mind. She revelled in the feel of the grass between her toes.

  “It’s… squishy.”

  “That’s soil, underneath the grass. That’s what most of the surface of a planet is like. That’s what plants grow out of.”

  “Plants don’t grow in soil. Plants grow in water.”

  “In hydroponics, yes. But this is how they do it on a planet. Come on, let’s go further…”

  The sun was high and the centre’s shadow was cast only a short way into the garden. We crossed the border into sunlight. I noticed she was nervous, and when the sun hit her, she flinched and cried out.

  “What is it, Elsbet?”

  “It’s… hot…”

  “Yes, direct sunlight. That’s what you get on a planet.”

  “Aren’t we going to get burnt?”

  “The atmosphere protects us. You’ll be fine.”

  But she wasn’t fine. She was breathing hard, and hunched over, as though she expected something from the sky to hit her.

  “Elsbet? Are you all right?”

  “It’s so… big…”

  Her eyes were wide, she was hyperventilating, her hands were shaking. She was having a panic attack.

  “Okay, Elsbet, that’s enough for today, we need to get you back inside…”

  She looked up at the sky, and gasped. Sun, a few scudding clouds, and endless blue. I knew the problem at once: she’d grown up on an asteroid, enclosed by walls, and had never stood exposed to an endless space without protection. Veofol had anticipated it. His people, living in orbital habitats, had the same problem. I summoned him and a medical team as Elsbet slumped to the ground, hiding her head.

  “You were right. Agoraphobia,” I said as Veofol and the medics came running up.

  “Let’s get her inside,” he said. The medics tranquillised her and we carried her back.

  7. Olivia

  Later that day, it was Olivia’s turn for a therapy session. She didn’t show up, so I pulled on some boots and went to her. She’d returned to the garden after the commotion with Elsbet, under a lower sun and the pleasant warmth of the afternoon. She wasn’t out there to rest, though. She was working hard, bent over and muttering at weeds as she yanked them out of the earth.

  “Aliens and weeds trampling all over, this planet’s nothing but aliens and weeds…” Elsbet had trodden on some of the plants in her panic, so I thought it best to go over, apologise and see what we could do to help.

  “Olivia?”

  She started at the sound of my voice, grabbed a shovel, came up and spun round to bring it down on my skull. I staggered backwards and caught the shovel high on my left arm. I shrieked at the pain, fell to my knees and Olivia suddenly realised where she was and who she’d struck.

  “Oh gods. You idiot. You bloody idiot!”

  She knelt by me and ripped the arm of my shirt open. “Don’t move! You’ll make it worse.” A massive bruise was coming up. She pressed the skin around it and made me gasp.

  “It’s not broken. You’re bruised, that’s all. What were you thinking, sneaking up on me like that?”

  I replied through gritted teeth, feeling queasy as the aftereffects kicked in. “Usually… the assailant… is the one who apologises…”

  “I’m sorry. All right, I’m sorry. Happy now?”

  “That’s… fine, Olivia. I thought… you weren’t… a doctor?”

  “I can set a bone if I have to. Oh, look, here come the crows…”

  A nurse came running out, along with a couple of security guards. “It’s all right!” I shouted at the guards. “It’s my fault. Olivia’s not to blame. I just need someone to take a look at my arm…”

  “Sure?” he asked.

  “Very sure,” I said. “You should never sneak up on someone with PTSD.”

  “I do not have PTSD!” snarled Olivia as the nurse kneeled in the mud to take care of my arm.

  “You can leave us,” I said to the guards. They holstered their stunsticks and left.

  “Hold still,” said the nurse, administering an anaesthetic spray.

  “Oooh, that’s better,” I said as the pain slid away.

  “I don’t have PTSD, I bloody told you I don’t, it’s just reflexes,” muttered Olivia.

  “I nee
d to get you inside to take a better look,” said the nurse.

  “Okay,” I said. “Olivia? Do you mind giving me a hand up?”

  “Fine,” she said, and helped me to my feet. “I suppose you want help getting indoors now.”

  “I’ll take care of it,” said the nurse.

  “I hit her, I’ll bloody help her inside!”

  “It’s okay,” I said to the nurse, and Olivia helped me indoors.

  They scanned the arm and found no fractures, then gave me a dose of healing accelerant and put my arm in a sling. I’d be back to normal in a day or two. Olivia stuck with me — as much as she blamed me for provoking her, she still felt an obligation to ensure I was treated properly. And she didn’t mind the chance to spy on Elsbet, either.

  “What’s up with her?” she sniffed. Elsbet was visible in her room, curled up on her bed, looking shell-shocked and occasionally nodding as Veofol explained things, which was as well as could be expected.

  “She’s had a bit of a shock,” I said.

  “I don’t understand her. How many of them are in there?”

  “Just the two. As far as we know.”

  “Is she dangerous?”

  “Not if you treat her kindly and with respect.”

  She narrowed her eyes at me. “What, and you think I won’t?”

  “I just think you should be careful.”

  “Yeh, yeh. Not much chance of me being able to hurt her, is there? Wouldn’t have got far with a shovel on her…”

  “There are other kinds of hurt. Aren’t there?”

  “Huh.”

  I caught the attention of a nurse, and indicated the curtains around the examination cubicle I was in. He drew them and left me alone with Olivia. “I’m sorry about what I said.”

  “What?”

  “I mean for saying you had PTSD in front of other people.”

  She shrugged. “Well, you weren’t yourself, were you…”

  “I was rather lightheaded, I have to admit.”

  “Stupid thing to do, creeping up on me like that.”

  “Yes. You’d think I’d have learned by now.”

  “Hah. Leave the crazy old bitch alone. Good lesson.”

  “No, I mean I’ve had a lot of PTSD patients. I really should know better.”

  That got her annoyed. “I’m telling you for the last time, I do not have PTSD!”

  “Why?”

  “What do you mean, why?”

  “Everything I know leads me to think you do. So if you were in my position, why would you make the opposite diagnosis?”

  “Because I’m not in your position and I know the difference. What I’ve got is a natural reaction to having revenants trying to kill me for thirty odd years. It’s why I’m still alive, for gods’ sake.”

  “Hm. Actually…”

  “What?”

  “Well, you seem very opposed to the diagnosis. Was PTSD known in your world?”

  “Because we’re primitive, of course…”

  “A lot of species have trouble accepting it exists. You wouldn’t be alone in that.”

  She sighed. “We knew about it.”

  “What did you call it?”

  “A gross moral failure.”

  “That’s rather harsh.”

  “I’m joking.” There wasn’t a trace of humour on her face. “The people who called it that were the ones who never saw revenants. Never had to put up a barricade and stay up all night in case they got in. Never had to kill their friends because they’d come back from the dead…”

  “What was it really called?”

  “Necrotic hysteria.”

  “Wow. That’s quite something…”

  “Or death-shock, if you read the newspapers.”

  “So they associated it with the outbreak?”

  “That’s right. Somehow they decided the dead coming back to life made people go round the bend. Wonder where they got that idea from.”

  “Was it widespread?”

  “Lot of people came down with it during the first outbreak. You could tell. They stopped fighting, just stared all the time. Lot of them got mistaken for revenants.”

  “That sounds more like ordinary shock…”

  “Well, probably was. But it kept happening after the outbreak. People who got through without a scratch did the same thing.”

  “Yes. Sometimes the extreme cases are like that. In some species, anyway.”

  “Well, I didn’t get it.”

  “The extreme cases are just the tip of the iceberg. Did you have any particularly harrowing experiences during the first outbreak?”

  “The dead got up and ate the living, what did you think I was having, happy little daydreams?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know what you did. I don’t know what a normal day would have been like.”

  “I was in the Coroner Corps. We went house to house. If someone answered, we searched it for revenants. If no one was there, we broke down the door and searched for revenants. Either way we found ’em.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Twenty. Twenty year old girl with a revolver and a couple of marines behind me and they were the ones shitting themselves. The marines were supposed to protect me from the living. I was supposed to figure out who was dead and put down the ones that were. Never worked out like that.”

  “So you had to kill. And not just revenants?”

  “I didn’t have a choice.”

  “And there was nothing… nothing especially bad?”

  She sat there for a while. “You don’t want to know.”

  “Is it difficult to talk about?”

  “Of course it’s bloody difficult.”

  “I’d understand if you couldn’t. It’s a common symptom.”

  “I don’t have any bloody symptoms. It’s—” She pursed her lips. “Have you ever killed anyone?”

  “No.”

  “Then you don’t know. What’s the point of telling you?”

  “I’d like to know.”

  “Yeh? You sure about that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Balls.”

  “If you don’t have any symptoms, then what’s the harm?”

  She narrowed her eyes. “I was at Tanymouth. You’ve never even heard of it…”

  “No. I’m afraid not.”

  “Well it didn’t give me any damned death-shock!”

  “What happened at Tanymouth? Is that where you got your reflexes?”

  “I already had reflexes,” she said, glancing down at my bruised arm.

  “So what happened?”

  She pursed her lips again. She didn’t want to say. But she couldn’t help looking down at my arm once more as I looked back with utter sympathy. Perhaps it was a feeling of obligation that motivated her, or just the sense she was backed into a corner. After a moment, she began.

  “We were going up the coast, the Kernow coast, right? Village after village, little ports all the way along, places they’d been smuggling for centuries so they didn’t like the look of us, didn’t like anyone in a uniform. The navy put us and the marines ashore and they were all the same: no cholera here, ma’am, we closed the gates and didn’t let it in. Balls. They let it in all right — let it in from the sea. Them and their mates in Gaul were back and forth across the Channel the whole time. They were spreading the damn cholera, not hiding from it. So we weren’t any too gentle when we found what they were hiding in the cellar. Cholera killed ’em, and then the revenation bug brought them back, and their families thought they could hide the stink with rosewater and garlic.

  “So that was it, one after the other for weeks. I put down hundreds of the bastards before we even got to Tanymouth, and I didn’t get any death-shock from that.”

  “But then there was Tanymouth.”

  “Yeh. The big town, the real port. Proper customs house and navy cutters in and out all the time. It was supposed to be safe, do you understand? Revenants were still crawling across the moors but Tanymouth was suppo
sed to be keeping them out and staying clean.

  “It wasn’t clean. Not one bit. They’d had the cholera, same as everyone else, probably the navy bringing it in. They’d kept it quiet and hidden all the sick ones far as they could from the harbour. Any sailors that revenned on shore got put down properly, but they weren’t letting it happen to their own. They thought we had a cure, only we were keeping it for the rich folks in the capital — typical Kernish.

  “We went ashore on leave, until we saw all the things we’d seen coming down the coast. People not looking us in the eye. The odd one running off all of a sudden to warn someone. And that smell in the air, you don’t know that smell — not the revenants but the cholera. Do you know what cholera does? It makes you shit yourself trying to get rid of it, only you shit water and you end up dying of dehydration. The stink was everywhere.

  “And then a couple of marines heard the moans. It’s never screaming with the revenants, they bloody moan. Like damned children can’t get what they want, only what they wanted was human flesh.

  “We pulled all the marines out of the taverns and whorehouses and had the townsfolk off the streets in an hour. Men posted at every crossroads to make sure of it so we could start on the house to house. But we thought we’d give ’em a chance, so we went down to the town hall to see the mayor and corporation and ask them what was what and give ’em a chance to come clean.

  “The mayor and the councillors came out into the courtyard and gave us all the nonsense: no, no cholera in the town ma’am, no revenants neither, we kept it all in the hospital. We listened to all of that and told ’em how it was going to be: we were searching every house and there was curfew until it was done. We told them to get inside and we’d search them last.

  “They went in like good little mice and locked the gates behind them. And that was when it began. Just moans at first, and you couldn’t hear where they came from because they were coming from all round. It was a trap. They knew we’d find them out eventually. They weren’t giving up a single one of their dead, not while they thought we had a secret cure we weren’t giving them because they were Kernish. They used them instead. They had them in sanatoriums all round the town, just warehouses and the like, and they opened them up all at once. There were four hundred of us, Coroner Corps and marines on the streets, and two thousand revenants coming down every road from every direction — they must have been taking them in from the villages nearby as well, like as not they all had relatives in town and that’s where they ran when it started. And we had our men stationed on every street corner so they got surrounded by the bastards, and the townsfolk came out as well with whatever weapons they’d had hidden away. We must have lost a hundred men before we realised what was happening. We tried running for the harbour, but the revenants were swarming there because they’d seen all the marines and sailors on the docks. The dreadnought, Indefatigable it was called — hah! — they’d cast off and were halfway out the harbour by then. Revenants were falling off the docks trying to get to the ship, sailors on board were shooting them as they went, probably the only decent thing the navy did that day.