The Last Man in the World Explains All

by D Krauss

  *

  Midnight. The same routine, but this time Louise came with him. Not the park, the old railroad cut behind the houses. It was one of six staging areas they rotated for these occasions. They broke into five teams, wives with husbands.

  “Here,” Levy handed them a jammer and everyone held out watches. “Go, “Carl said, and everyone melted away.

  Louise and Carl ran through the back hedges, stopped at the end and surveyed the van parked there. She tapped him twice on the shoulder and they slipped along the houses, Carl engaging the jammer. At the back of the van, they studied their watches and, at the right moment, both stood, walked around the opposite sides, and shot the driver and passenger with silencers. Carl entered the van and shot the tech before he could hit the transmitter. “Go,” he said into the radio.

  Gunfire, one and two blocks over, quick, intense, then quiet. Carl waited, heard two clicks on the radio, pulled the dead driver into the back, and started the van. Louise got in, and they slid down back alleys the Bureau knew nothing about, all the vans gathered on a trail off the railroad cut.

  “Sam got hit,” Levy came up to the window.

  Carl swore. “Bad?”

  “He’ll live,” Levy shrugged. Carl nodded. “All right.” Levy disappeared back to his van and they started up and drove for about an hour into the Blue Ridge, Carl occasionally flashing his lights to see obstacles. They pulled into a clearing up past the vineyards. Cloudy night, no moon. Good.

  Carl walked over to where Rachel, Sam’s wife, was dressing his side. “You okay?”

  Sam grimaced, “Looks worse than it is, but there’s a lot of blood.” Left unsaid was how much blood had been left at the scene.

  “You know what this means, right?”

  They both looked at him, Rachel’s tears glistening on her cheek. “We know,” Sam said.

  Carl nodded, and he and Louise joined Levy and Zachary and they walked over the ridge to where the Appalachian Trail touched it. Junior and Chucky where standing there with full packs. “Your Dad got shot,” Carl said to Chucky.

  “What?” Chucky yelped and moved to throw off the pack and charge down the ridge but Carl backhanded him down. “Stop it!” he yelled, grabbing Chucky’s lapels and shaking him. “This is what happens! Why you have to stay invisible! Stupid kids!” And he raised a fist to smash Chucky’s nose but Louise was there. “No,” she said, quietly, “no.”

  Carl sobbed and threw Chucky down and stomped off the ridge, furiously waving away Junior’s plaintive “Dad!” and fell to his knees and cried, finally, a long held grief over dead friends, dead dreams and a dead country, breaking him. “My son, my son…”

  Ten years, ten minutes later, Louise’s hand was on his shoulder. He looked up. “They’re gone,” she whispered. He nodded, wiped his face and stood. They stared at each other and fell into each other’s arms, her time to cry now, but, as always, quiet, just for him. “Will he be all right?” she asked.

  Carl thought of distances, things that could go wrong, Junior’s inadequate traveling companion, and whether the contacts in Georgia were actually still there. “Yes,” he lied.

  Rachel and Sam were already gone. They dumped the vans in the Shenandoah, made their way back, stopping by Sam’s house first, then taking their leave of each other in the park. Carl and Louise were back in bed, everything clean, before sunrise.

  The knock on the door came shortly after that, Agent Smiley-Smith, not smiling now, and jackbooted thugs dragging Louise and he out to the interrogation yards. They got past the polygraphs, of course, since they both knew how to beat those, but the pentathol drips were next and Carl steeled himself. Never happened, though. He and Louise were released.

  “Did they hurt you?” he asked as they walked back home. She waggled a hand but would not look at him and he made another mark in his mental ledger, beside Agent Smith’s name.

  It took them a few days to fix the damage to the house. Sam’s place was bulldozed, a proscription banner placed across the property because of the rebel literature found there (in the bathroom vent where Carl had placed it), and three of Sam’s cousins in the next county were executed. Collateral damage.

  “We okay?” Carl whispered to Zachary a month later in the night-shrouded park.

  “Yes,” Zach told them, “They got their pound of flesh.”

  There was a pause, and then Levy asked the question they all had: “When?”

  “Soon." Zach said. "The weapon stashes are almost complete. So, soon, guys. Soon.”

  They stood a moment, quiet, considering, then all left. Carl didn’t ask about Junior and Chucky. They were ghosts now.

  Invisible.

  back to top

  Not with a Bang

  (Original in Ezine OG's Speculative Fiction Magazine #16. https://theopinionguy.com/OG16.pdf)

  There was a body in the alley beside the apartment complex. Rosa stood at the top of the porch and regarded it as she puffed her last Viceroy. All she could see were the feet, about mid ankle down, protruding from the alley entrance. Green work pants were bloused over work boots—probably the building super, or one of his assistants. A rat scurried across the boot and up the body. At it, as were probably the neighborhood dogs and cats. She shuddered and wondered if anyone had called. She wasn't going to.

  Rosa unlocked the door and made sure to lock it behind her, although she was practically the only one in the building who did so anymore. There were still a few thugs running around and she preferred they went elsewhere while she was home. The buzzer system had failed about three months ago and the only response she had gotten from the super was “Whadjawanmetodoaboudit?” so, if that was him serving as a rat banquet, good. She pulled at the door to make sure, and looked enviously at the elevator, the “Out of Order” sign now so dust covered only memory deciphered it. She groaned and slumped to the stairs and began the trudge up. It was getting a little harder every day. She wondered how many more weeks until she gave up and just stayed in the lobby.

  Well, according to the latest figures, about three.

  She opened her door, which she had stopped locking some weeks ago. The neighbors wouldn't come in and any thug making it up this far couldn't do much more than wave a menacing hand. At least, the majority of them. It was the Immunes who truly worried her, but, given their small number and the target-rich environment, she was probably safe.

  Probably.

  She sat on the couch. Plastic faux leather, a gift from Mom ("You’ll need a good couch. Every body should have a good couch.") with 'good' debatable, even though it was cool and long and very comfortable, the plastic notwithstanding. It tended to squeak and form a very slick surface under her back as Mark tried to thrust her through the cushions. Several eons ago, when Mark was her thruster. She patted the seat affectionately. Good ole Couch.

  She stared at the refrigerator across from her, an ancient Amana that wheezed and gasped and piddled the floor like the octogenarian it was. She had inherited it from an upperclassman who had sternly admonished her never to throw it away because It was History— Salk had kept some of his later samples on the shelves. She didn’t believe that story for an instant but the fridge was definitely old enough and a small plate inside could be interpreted to read 'U of Pittsb…', that is, with the proper alcoholic motivation. She had taken it with her from MIT as a symbol of things surviving, things remaining.

  She desperately hoped things remain.

  Rosa took a deep breath and reminded herself how important food was and got a sluggish response from somewhere in her brain. She stood up and forced herself into the kitchen. Good Lord, how long before she stopped eating? Four weeks? No, should be at least three or four months, so her present dragginess was just plain exhaustion. Twelve hour days for weeks on end tended to run you down, without everything else.

  She opened a can of soup and a bag of Hershey’s chocolate chips, gulping handfuls while stirring Campbell’s Chunky Chicken Tortilla in a pot. Glucose rush, kept her moving.
She gulped another handful and grimaced as she hit chocolate overload.

  Rosa felt much better after the soup, actually roused some interest in the apartment. Wouldn’t last long, so get to it. She grabbed her vacuum cleaner and made several vicious passes at her rag rug and the baseboards, probably startling the neighbors enough for them to turn and frown. What on earth? Someone vacuuming? Then they’d just shrug and melt back into chairs and glaze at the droning repetition of news or soaps or some anemic comedy. Kids would stare at undone homework, dogs would die of thirst, babies would remain unchanged.

  She sobbed.

  Alright, alright, keep going. She practically tossed the vacuum against the wall and looked around ferociously. Something, do something.

  Call the Japanese, Mark had said.

  She looked at her watch. 9:00 pm. 9:00 am there. Do it.

  Rosa turned on the webcam and dialed through, holding her breath because, more and more, servers were crashing or sputtering or non-existent and the rerouting one expected was just not happening. Two minutes stretched to five and she felt it, that little spot of lethargy in the base of her spine—oh, let’s just watch TV.

  No!

  She leaped up, turning the chair over and threatening a similar fate to the laptop and rushed to the counter and poured a handful more of Hershey's chips, spilling half on the floor and crammed them, chewing and swallowing and almost choking herself to death. The spot grew, gray and soft and cottony and the warmth of it started to creep up her back…and stopped. She breathed, downing a glass of water to get the glucose moving a little faster. Snuffling, she stepped back in the living room and saw Dr. Mateo's puzzled face blinking in the screen. "Dr. Arguello?" he said.

  "Yes, RB," she said, plopping in the chair so he could see her and hoping he didn't see her distress. Or the chocolate smears. RB, Rhyme Bud, a joke between them because of the consonance of their names.

  "Are you all right?"

  "Yes, yes, fine…no, I'm not."

  He blinked slowly, the perpetual sadness of his face refueled, reiterated. "I know. I am sorry."

  "We're the ones who are sorry. We should never have asked for the team."

  "It is not your fault."

  Rosa shook her head. "But it is. We knew how fast things were progressing. We knew how dangerous a flight would be."

  "No one got on that plane who did not understand the risks."

  "But we shouldn't have asked, just shouldn't. We played you, knew your honor would make you send them. It is our fault."

  There was silence and Mateo's sadness was a living thing, something she could actually autopsy, strip down to viscera, expose. Look, here it is, what moves sorrow; this is its heart.

  "We would have had to try, anyway," he said softly.

  "I know," she said, just as softly.

  Shared moment. He thought of colleagues, now somewhere deep in the Pacific. She thought of last, lost hope.

  "Do they know what caused it?" she asked.

  "No," he said. "No one has gone to look."

  And there it was, stark, simple, in six words, the best measure of where they all were.

  "I have sent you something," he said.

  "By the plane?" knowing immediately it was a stupid question.

  "No, by Express. Last week," which meant there was a better than even chance it got here. "You have not received it?"

  "I…don’t think so," she racked her brains, "I would have seen something. Mark has said nothing. What is it?"

  "Two things. Both of which you will hate."

  "RB, there’s nothing you could send me I’d hate."

  "The last recorded interview of Dr. Hishiyama?"

  He might as well have reached through the screen and slapped her. She looked over at her desk. There, right on top: Not With A Bang—The Late Implications of General Evolutionary Development in the Human Genome. By Dr. Tohe Hishiyama, Human Genome Project, Japan Branch, University of Tokyo. Published in Science. Fifteen years ago. Laughed at.

  Not anymore.

  "That's…fine." She paused. "Where did you get it?"

  "From his effects."

  She nodded. Hishiyama, following the finest of samurai traditions, had committed seppuku in his office. No assistant to lop off his head so he died in agony, guts spilled across the carpet. Many people thought that fitting.

  "What's the other thing?"

  RB hesitated and she frowned. "What is it, RB?"

  "A…serum."

  "What? What kind of serum?"

  He looked down, an act of apology. "A serum of genetic material, phased."

  "Huh?" for a moment she was speechless. Just a moment. "What did you do?"

  He looked up and she saw the pain, deep, frantic. "We are desperate, Rosa."

  "What did you do, RB?"

  "It is…bonobo."

  Her jaw dropped. "Oh no, no you didn't. You did not do that." She grabbed the sides of the monitor, shaking it a bit, the gray spot on her spine gone for now. "How many died, RB? How many?"

  "All of them." The eternal guilt for others, there, etched deep behind the sadness.

  "Numbers, RB."

  "Six. All of them volunteers," he added, hastily.

  "You asshole!" she screamed that, actually screamed and knew it was the first scream heard in her building, her block, probably the whole city, in the last month. And whoever heard it sat up in fright for a moment, their heart pounding, a mordant adrenalin rush, and then settled back into the couch.

  "What choice do we have, Rosa?" He took her abuse, her curses, without reacting. At all. Not the warrior he once was, screaming back at her, almost hitting her on a few occasions, calling her stupid, throwing her dissertation to the floor. None of that.

  "You asshole." She whispered it. She began to cry. She turned off the monitor, RB's stricken face afterimage.