“No way…” Cole’s eyes lit up in amazement. He ran over to the long leather sofa and began to jump up and down in excitement. “Merry Christmas to me, merry Christmas to me!” he sang in the tune of the birthday song.
He spent the entire afternoon playing with all of the preloaded apps and games until the battery finally died. Looking around, he realized that the sun was beginning to set and he hadn’t spent any time looking for tools that would help his family escape. The garage was the first place that he began to look, but got so easily distracted by the fancy car with the leather seats, as well as the skateboards, roller skates, and bicycles that by the time he had made it to the second floor it was almost completely dark. Fearing the things that he would find outside, Cole decided to spend the night in the big empty house.
The master bedroom had a king size bed that was perfectly made and had over a dozen decorative pillows. He eagerly pulled back the taut covers with his dirty hands and kicked off his shoes before slipping under the lavender covers. At the prison where he had spent the last year, there were only flimsy beds that had moldy and caseless pillows and a thin olive blanket that never seemed to keep him warm. The bed with the lavender sheets felt even better than his old bunk bed that he used to sleep in back at home. It was at that moment that the idea of never returning to the prison had planted itself in his brain.
‘What if I search and search and never find anyone or anything that could help them? Would they still expect me to come back?’ He thought as he buried his head in the pillow that smelled of dryer sheets.
The next day Cole finished searching the house in the woods, and did not find anything that could help the people in the prison. He decided to walk to the end of the driveway and explore the houses closer to town. Along the roadway many of the houses were still decorated for Christmas- there were twine deer and symmetrical string-lights on the nicer houses further away from town, and there were faded plastic Santas and deflated blowup snowmen at the smaller houses that were closer to the city. Every few blocks Cole would stop his noisy walking over dried yellow and brown leaves that blew around on the sidewalk to listen for sounds of people. He would close his eyes and listen intensely for the sounds of cars, but it had been over a year since he had heard a car and he was beginning to forget what they sounded like.
There was a bulk candy store in a shopping plaza with its windows smashed out. Cole walked up to the window and his eyes lit up at the sight of bin after bin of brightly colored, unattended candy. He climbed over the broken window and began sampling every flavor of candy- jelly beans, red vines, malted milk balls, jawbreakers, lemon drops, and cherry bombs. Before he left, he filled a plastic bag full of the candy that he decided he liked the best: cherry bombs.
He took his bag of candy to the largest house he had found that hadn’t been boarded and also didn’t appear to have been looted and went inside. Much like the house in the woods, this house also had a smaller Christmas tree that was packed with unopened presents. Cole sat his bag of cherry bombs on the floor next to him as he began to methodically open each of the presents and tossed the ones that didn’t interest him aside. When all of the presents were opened, he was left with a special edition version of Monopoly, a pile of toy cars and robots, and a Gameboy. He decided that since the battery was only half charged that he would play with the cars and the board game while the sun was still out, and save the Game Boy for when he went to bed that night. He casually scanned the house for the things his mom had asked him to search for, and he secretly hoped that he wouldn’t find anything.
The last bedroom on the left was a room that clearly belonged to a teenage girl. There were posters of boy bands and movie stars that were sloppily taped to the neon pink walls. Pictures of her friends and her boyfriend were taped along the perimeter of her dresser mirror. The words ‘I Love Josh’ were written in bubble letters on the front of a yellow and blue folder that was filled with school assignments and graded papers. Next to the folder was a thick book labeled ‘Diary: Keep Out’ with a skull and crossbones and a lock along the side. Cole picked up the book and tried to pry the lock off with his small fingers and ended up flinging the diary against a wall. He began to search for the key around the room and ultimately found it in a likely position under her mattress.
He jumped up on the lacy pink and black bedspread and began to flip through the pages as if he had just discovered the forgotten texts of a mysterious and elusive creature: the female. At that moment in Cole’s life, he was too young to have developed any feelings for girls, but he was under the impression- based upon how adults made small talk with him- that one day soon girls would be the only thing that would occupy his thoughts. He had friends who were girls at his old school and girls that he played with in his neighborhood, and he always wanted to know the things that they would whisper to each other.
The beginning of the diary was filled with boring and uneventful things. One entry talked about how excited she was to have a sleepover. Another entry talked about how she was mad at her mom for canceling plans to go to the movies because her car wouldn’t start. Toward the middle, she began to talk about the boys that she liked, and the names had a tendency to change day by day. She would say mean things about other girls that she knew and occasionally would mention a class that she liked or a test in which she scored well. The last few entries did not mention boys or school, but rather how the virus had affected their family.
Dear Diary, Roger got real sick yesterday and my parents had a complete meltdown. I have never seen my mom and dad act the way that they acted yesterday. Mom couldn’t stop shaking and crying. I asked her if I could go to Josh’s house to have dinner and she actually forbid me. Usually I would be upset… but something seems different. It makes me sick to my stomach. Later in the day they said how we were going to leave and go to Washington. They claim that there are people in Washington who can cure Roger. I don’t see what the big deal is, I don’t know why they can’t take him to the hospital like they did when he had to have his appendix out. I told them I would only come along if they could promise that we will be home by Christmas. Dad didn’t say anything he just stood there real quiet. Mom nodded and said that we wouldn’t miss Christmas… but I just have a feeling that she’s lying.
Cole continued the same routine throughout the rest of the fall. He would find a house with a Christmas tree full of presents, open the presents, play with them that night and then leave them there the next morning before he would set out to find a new house.
Autumn quickly faded into winter and Cole began to lose track of the what day of the month is was, as well as how to get back to the prison. His search for weapons and people who could help him came to a complete stop. By the end of the winter, he had convinced himself that everyone in the prison must have found a way to escape by that point in time. He imagined the look of excitement when his mother was able to finally crawl out from under the fence to freedom, and imagined the look of determination as she vowed to find her son. He tried to imagine the things that he would tell his mother when she finally found him and the excuse that he would tell her as to why he never came back to rescue her.
However, the seasons quickly came and went and months turned into years and Cole hadn’t seen a single person. He stayed mostly within the city limits of a town called Akron, mostly because all of the houses were tightly spaced, which resulted in more Christmas presents. As he grew older, he decided to quit sleeping in random houses and set up a house for himself at the public library. He was at least 16 at the time and had no more than a third-grade education. If he stayed in the library and surrounded himself will all of the printed knowledge of the people who lived before him, perhaps it wouldn’t feel as if he was so incredibly alone anymore.
Within 1 year of living at the Akron Public Library he was able to put words to the things he had been feeling all those years. He discovered that he felt regret and he felt shame. There were so many people who were depending on him and he had just left the
m there to die because he was afraid. What if he was really the last person left on Earth? Should the heir to the throne of humanity really be a coward? Cole thought not.
One afternoon he had climbed to the top of the library and stood on the ledge. Looking down, he traced the lines in the street where dusty cars were parked in front of old meters. Just one step and all of the guilt, shame, and regret that suffocated him on a daily basis would be released. He followed the event even further by imagining what his corpse would look like after it hit the pavement. Would it explode into a million pieces? Or would all of his bones shatter inside his intact skin? And there would be no one there to clean him up off the street. Wherever he landed would be the spot that he would spend all of eternity, or until his bones turned to dust and blew away in a strong breeze. But how long would that even take? How long would his body be lying uncomfortably next to a Chevy F-150? There would be no one to mourn him, and there would be no reaction to the news of his death. If he took that short step off of the building, that would be the end of his book. No, it would be more than that. If he jumped off that ledge it would be as if he were to set his book on fire. It would be like he never even existed.
“If I’m going to die…” he said to himself, “It’s going to be after at least one person knows my story.”
Cole was able to deduce a rough estimate of the exact date and year and kept vigilant records of the things that he did and learned on each day. If he was- as he believed at the time- truly the last man on Earth, he felt that it was important to tell the tale of the end of times.
It was on October 11th, 2026 the he stopped keeping track.
As Cole was finishing up documenting his thoughts from the night prior, he heard something coming from the lobby of the library. It was normal to hear the sounds of rodents or the occasional feral cat, but the sound on that day sounded like slippery shoes on ceramic tile. Instinctually, Cole hid under the table on which he was writing, but slowly lifted himself up off of the floor and convinced himself to investigate the source of the strange noise.
He walked out into the lobby and saw the slender frame of a man carrying a heavy blue bookbag across one shoulder reading the bulletin board.
Cole tried to find something to say to get the man’s attention, but he stared at the back of his head instead.
Eventually, the man turned around and froze in place when he noticed Cole staring back at him. The two men held their unspoken exchange until the slender man spoke.
“You….” His lips curled over his yellowed teeth in disgust. “It’s you.”
Cole searched the man’s face for familiarity. “Jackson?”
“We thought that you were dead.”
“Dead? No… I’m not dead.”
“Then where were you? Why didn’t you come back for us?”
Cole’s heart began to race as he felt so unprepared. He had always imagined being found by someone from the prison, but the look of disgust on Jackson’s face was something that he hadn’t anticipated. “I couldn’t find any weapons. And everyone out here is gone...”
“You didn’t come back for us because you couldn’t find any weapons?” Jackson spit.
“Yes.”
Jackson’s eyes bulged and his neck turned red and blotchy. He walked over to the fire alarm, broke the glass next to the switch and pointed to the fire axe. “There. We could use this.”
“I...I didn’t…”
“We could have used anything!” His booming voice echoed off of the ceramic tile. “We just needed something to cut through the fence. Or something to kill a few guards.”
“But… you’re out now. You escaped. That means---”
“Not we, I. I escaped. The place burned to the ground and I was able to get out in the confusion.”
“Did… D-Did my mom---”
“No, your mom didn’t make it, asshole. I don’t know why you even care. You obviously didn’t love her.”
Cole’s eyes narrowed. “What’re you talking about--- I loved my mom more than anything.”
“Then why did you leave her to die?” Jackson snapped.
“I---”
“Why did you leave her there to try and explain to the group why her heroic son never returned? She tried to convince everyone that you were dead. In her mind, that was the only explanation for a son who would fail his mother so badly.”
“You don’t know what it was like on the outside back then.”
“Bullshit. I had your number pegged years ago when you started riding my bus. All the other boys wore their football jerseys and talked about video games, but you… you were the little weird shit who sat behind the bus driver and carried a little stuffed teddy bear. You never talked to anyone except the bus driver.”
“So? What does that matter?”
“You were a wimp then, and you’re one now. You are a coward. You’re nothing like your dad. He was a hero. You’re nothing but a sniveling coward who left us all to die.” Jackson plucked the fire axe off of the wall. “I should kill you right now.”
Cole’s stomach dropped and his heart began to pound. He was afraid that Jackson could see how hard his heat was pounding through his shirt. “D-d-don’t be stupid, Jackson. We need each other.”
“We need each other?” Jackson ran his fingertips along the blunt blade. “I’m doing just fine. And as far as I’m concerned, the world would be better off without someone like you.”
“I get that you’re angry---”
“In fact, I think I would be a bit better off if I got to see you suffer.”
“Please, Jackson…” Tears began to well in Cole’s eyes.
“You missed out on so much, CJ. You missed out on the giant human bonfire that they held at the end of the winter. Do you know what human flesh smells like when it burns, CJ? It’s got almost a sweet scent to it. And the smell clings to everything. No matter what you do… it’s like the stench haunts you in your sleep. Towards the end… right before the fire… most of the people there were basically zombies. I had no one to talk to… including your mother. She just sat in the corner and stared at the fire exit poster most days. Some of us thought that it was a result of what they had done to her… but there were rumors that she just had a broken heart that her son had abandoned her. Sure… she claimed that you must have been murdered… but deep down I think she knew what kind of a person you were. And she hung herself with her bedsheet in the bathroom. The women who found her were shaken up. It must have been quite the sight.”
“Stop it.”
“You left us all there to die. I can’t find one good reason why I shouldn’t bash your brains in.”
“B-b-because I’m the only one left. You need me.”
“I need you? Sorry, buddy… but I don’t need a scared little pants pisser to talk to. I think I would be better off without you.”
“That’s not true.”
“If fact, it would be rather… what’s the word… it means to make me feel better emotionally… what is that word…”
“Cathartic?”
Jackson made eye contact for the first time with Cole. “Cathartic. That’s it. It would be cathartic to watch your brains spill across the floor.” He lunged at Cole as he drew the ax back behind him and pushed Cole onto the floor. His skin made a high-pitched squeal as it slid across the damp tile.
Feeling the ax cut through the tile as he scrambled upright, the tip of it hit the back of Cole’s head before smashing into the floor. Cole pushed himself upright, and ran into the main hall of the library. Counting the rows of books as he ran, Cole turned down the Science Fiction aisle and froze as he listened to Jackson grunt and huff as he tried to pull the ax out of the wooden subflooring.
“You are actually making this more fun for me, idiot.” Jackson’s voice echoed through the shelves of books. “I haven’t been hunting since my dad took me when I was seven.”
Cole quickly ran through his possible options at that moment: he could choose to fight him- a fight in which he would
most likely lose; he could try to reason with him- but Cole had a feeling that Jackson didn’t want to talk; or he could choose to run. Running seemed the most pragmatic option at the moment, but what would it mean in the long run? Would he constantly have to look over his shoulder for the rest of his life? If he ran to another town would Jackson find him? Or what if there were other dangers in neighboring towns?
Cole watched and studied Jackson’s movements- the way he zigzagged his way down each and every aisle. If Cole could predict where he was going to be, he could plan to push over one of the bookcases and trap him. As Jackson neared the Science Fiction section, Cole crept two aisles back. When he had walked a third of the way down the aisle, Cole pushed the nonfiction bookshelf with every ounce of strength that he had within his body.
The bookshelves creaked as they topped over and made a muffled crash as they continued to knock each neighboring shelf over until the very last bookcase was on the ground. Jackson hadn’t made any sounds- or at least Cole wasn’t able to hear over the sounds of the crashes. With the intention of playing it safe, Cole ran to the very back bookcase that was still standing behind him and peeked around the corner to the center aisle.
There was no one there.
He waited, holding his breath in his chest, and listened for sounds of movement.
There was only silence.
Cole let his breath inch out of his chest and pass through his nose as he tried to calm himself. Carefully, he walked down each aisle until he reached where the Science Fiction shelf used to stand.
“J-J-Jackson?” Cole’s voice cracked.
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