by Roger Elwood
I sense the next thought coming and scuttle faster to avoid it, but it squeezes relentlessly up from my subconscious anyway and oozes like cloying oil across the surface of my mind. Can a man exist when there are no other men who know of his existence? In time, will he not fade away like a deity whose worshipers no longer believe, disappearing Cheshirelike and leaving not even a smile behind to mark his going? I am invisible, I whisper to the night, because there are no men left to see me. Eyes flashing ahead again, these larger, bounding away quickly. But I can be seen. There are eyes that can see me, but they are not human eyes. I am invisible, but I can be seen. A paradox. I giggle to myself, crouching and swaying, clutching at the fraying edges of my sanity. Imagine, I’m a paradox, and at my age. I’ve made a mark in the world. I laugh. I stagger up over the crest of the hill. I pause, suddenly and shockingly sober, and I listen, straining.
There was a sudden rustle of tall grass, small shadowy forms exploding by. He threw his arms up before his face and cowered back with a moan. His thoughts surged disjointedly in a dozen random directions. There are no demons, he whispered, clinging to that. A darting scarlet shadow appeared in the wake of the small things: flash of tiny bright eyes, grass shaking and reforming down the length of hill behind as a running body tunneled through it like a fleshy torpedo.
There are no demons, damnit. He cautiously lowered his arms. Those were rabbits and a hunting fox. A wailing in the sky, passing overhead. He began to tremble uncontrollably. That was a bird, a bird. There are no flying demons either. There are only animals now. He began to cry silently, without volition, as if it were a thing that someone else was doing while he watched.
Alone in the night, he cried and rocked on his heels and wondered why he wept. There was no reason to cry. He would survive, and there were no such things as demons. There were no demons or gods or ghosts or angels anymore; they had died with the race, deserted an empty earth. In fact, there were not even any people or machines anymore. There were only animals now.
This thought annoyed him for some perverse reason. The end of the world had come and gone; ipso facto, nothing should be left alive. He listened to a crackle of breaking twigs down the slope, the sound fanning a spark of anger. Fireflies drifted along with the liquid night, blinking in and out of existence. Suddenly and intensely, he hated them. The animals were still alive, and the birds, and the trees and grass. It wasn’t fair that they should be alive after Armaggedon. Somehow it made humanity seem transient and unimportant, and he didn’t want to have to think about that.
Memory whispered something about the meek inheriting, and he grimaced. If man had to destroy himself, he could at least have taken everything else with him and saved face. It was unpleasant to think that the world could go on existing without man. He found that he had always naturally assumed that the world would fold up like a studio bed when man was through using it, that the sun and the stars would shut themselves off, that the universe would be dismantled like a stage set when the play is finished and the actors gone.
Maybe it’s because of me, he thought. Maybe the world is being maintained for me because I’m the last man left alive, and when I die, the universe will run down then. Maybe I’m what’s keeping everything going. Maybe I’m responsible. He giggled, feeling an uneasy, unexplainable guilt. There were no people left anymore. Suddenly he felt like a traitor; but the reasoning behind that slipped away every time he groped for it, and it made his head hurt.
He remembered (though he couldn’t remember from where he remembered) that he had to find the one who was responsible, the one who would have to pay. He clung to this, using it as a motivation to go on. He risked another cautious look around.
Huge red eyes blinked at him from the crook of a tree: an owl, visible as a white ghost against bark. He felt a sudden flare of unbelievable hatred for it. What was the morality of a universe that let an owl survive while the woman who had slept beside him was dust? How could you reconcile that with any sort of logic, how could you live with that? Who was to blame for that huge an injustice?
Breathing in great rasps, he snatched his pistol from his holster. The owl blinked at him unperturbedly, its head seeming to swivel on its neck. He holstered the pistol slowly, vaguely ashamed. That was the reflex we could never get rid of, he told the owl. But we came close. We almost made it out of your cycle of tooth and claw, eat or be eaten. We almost did. We took a calculated risk. We gambled that empathy could balance intelligence, and we lost. We just couldn’t get rid of that part of you in us, that’s all. We couldn’t love enough. We couldn’t stop being predators. But we came so damn close to breaking the circle. And you never even tried. The owl stared at him disinterestedly. You never got to the moon, he told it, you never could have conquered the stars. The owl wasn’t listening.
He turned away, shivering. Faces crowded into his mind, the men in his unit, but already the features were blurring and memory wouldn’t bring them into focus. He thought for a while of a certain woman, but even that face was blurred, and he fought to suppress panic. He closed his eyes and remembered the owl; it was in sharp focus. The owl is alive, he told himself puzzledly, aware of things that he didn’t want to think about shifting under the surface of his mind. That’s why it’s in focus. It belongs here; it survived. It shares the guilt, a voice said. He shook his head, wobbling it back and forth like a pendulum. He stood up, stretching cramped muscles. He remembered the blurred trail he’d found. Maybe they were human footprints, somebody else left alive. Maybe it would be a woman. That thought panicked him more, and he buried it. Even thinking of someone else being left alive made him uneasy, made him angry and afraid. Why? He rubbed nervously at a leg cramp.
He began to limp slowly forward again, feeling the tidal ebb and flow of panic, shoulders hunched, head tipped at an odd angle, fingers scrabbling aimlessly, eyes strained wide, still listening intently to nothing.
There is a new kind of silence coming into the world.
Listen to it, the silence; can you hear it? There are no man-made sounds, no buzz of engines, no clatter of wheels, no chiming of church bells, no honking of horns. Listen, there are no shots, no screams, no weeping. Listen, there is no music, no laughter, no soft sighing. Mankind is gone, and its greatest legacy is silence. For ages, man has filled the world with the echoes of his building and destroying, his wars and loves and living; but now he is gone, the echoes are dying, and there is a new kind of silence coming into the world. Listen. The silence spreads and multiplies molecule by molecule, smothering even memory under a soft fall of feathers. Listen. If I should scream now, jetting my soul into the absorbing, muffling air with a single wailing cry, there would be no human ear around all the ravaged world to listen. Listen. The dying crackle of the fires that eat smoulderingly at the Cities of Men is the last sound that the human race will ever make. Listen; the silence is very loud.
The place where the human race had died was marked only by a green chemical glow. Clouds of phosphorescent fog had gathered softly in jagged shellholes, sending wispy trailers rolling out across the blasted land, flowing over and around the dead like water tumbling polished bones on a river bottom. The crystal stream that had wound through the valley was a shrunken trickle, scummed with black. He paused on the outskirts of the place, anger ebbing, hushed and awed by the cathedral silence. Here the last men had died, he thought, somehow never questioning the fact that they were the last. He knew, after all, that he was the last man alive, and he had been the only survivor of this battle. He took a slow step. Here two full battalions had clawed at each other with every insanity in the modern arsenal; each side conquering with weapons that destroyed everything alive with impartial fury, turning the technical designation of victory into a moot point. He cringed back instinctively. He didn’t want to go out onto the ravaged place, but he had to; he needed clothes, he needed weapons, he needed ammunition. Whimpering, he crawled forward, avoiding the green fog.
The blackened ground was feathery and crusty under his
feet, making a slight scrunching noise and spitting up swirling puffs of ashes under the pressure of his boots. He realized that he was walking ankle-deep through human debris, and he felt the vomit sloshing hot against his clenched teeth, a little seeping through to touch the insides of his pale lips; he swallowed it with difficulty, forcing himself to move. Don’t breathe; oh God don’t breathe the ashes. He half ran to the side, circling the perimeter of destruction, leaving an irregular trail of staggering footprints in the ashes. Somewhere there must be something left. His thoughts wore a bloody groove deeper into his brain. Graverobber, graverobber, deserter, sin. Unclean, hissed a muffled demon voice from his subconscious, as strangled and incessant as a jack-in-the-box screaming for release from its padded container. He thought of the night as a bloodshot eye, following him with relentless, evil hunger. His shoulders hunched, waiting for the punishment, waiting for the blow that would crush him flat like an offending insect. Why did you escape? Unworthy? Coward, rumbling somewhere in his stomach. Alone, bubbling and leaking from his nose in a sob. They are coming to get you. He stumbled on, staggering crazily away from a marching finger of fog. They are coming to get you.
Glint of metal ahead, dark forms, vaguely human, lying scattered across the ground, twisted, broken, and contorted, looking like flies caught in amber or ants frozen into a cooling stream of. black asphalt. He paused, feeling his stomach twist far away in another universe. The edge of the fire-storm: these bodies were intact, though scorched. He looked at them, monuments in human flesh to concrete stupidity, and strangely, he felt the trembling, feverish madness drain from him, leaving only uneasy fear. They made it all right somehow, they made it real. He could worry now about how much ammunition he needed to steal, what kind of clothing he needed, and not think about them coming to get him, about them hiding just beyond the gabled hills and waiting to pounce. He could play at survival now and be the calculating pragmatist. Robinson Crusoe must survive regardless, never think of touching a jagged seashell to your throat. The universe wasn’t unraveling; the corpses made it real. He had seen plenty of corpses. And there were always plenty more people to chum into corpses. Don’t think of that, he told himself uneasily.
He bent over one of the still figures, forcing his mind onto the problem at hand, the problem that was cold under his hand, the problem that stared accusingly at him with empty eye-sockets, the problem that was tacky to the touch. There are always plenty of logical ways to solve problems.
Strip the corpse of valuable gear, put it into the bloodstained field pack, lash the field pack to your own back. He did so, watching his hands move detachedly, as if they belonged to someone else. Safety matches, waterproof; good. Into the pack. More ammunition. Jam it into the pack, jingling against an extra knife and some canned food-concentrates. He struggled to strip the clothes from the body; the clothes resisted him, slightly tacky, sticking to cold flesh. Rigor mortis had set in, and the limbs were awkward to move. Slit the clothes carefully at the seams, resew them later. Clothes and, yes, sewing kit, into the pack.
He was tugging at the boots when something changed in the atmosphere of the night. He became aware of the silence again, like the sound of great dark wings beating over the hushed battlefield, like the sound of the patient breathing of those who. waited behind the gabled hills. He straightened, chills snarling along his nervous system. He felt his breath come faster, felt his fingers curl into taut fists, felt his body stirring, his blood pounding hotly. Why? The half-naked corpse gleamed white as an ice sculpture in the shadows. He laughed shrilly, on the ragged edge of hysteria. Homosexual necrophilia? No, this is a ghost memory—this is the dreadful, half-pleasurable anticipation of a child hiding huddled under the porch and waiting for his father to find him, knowing that he had done something wrong, and knowing that he will be punished and that he has no place to run to, and that he wouldn’t dare to run away even if he did have a place to go. Blood roared in his ears. Why? Look up—He screamed, choking it into a gurgle after the first shrill note. The stars were looking at him. The tumbling night wind had finally swept away the clouds, and the stars were very sharp and bright, and they were looking at him. They will see what you are doing and they will know and they will come to get you.
Feeling naked and unclean, he crouched close to the ground until the panic drained from him. He became as limp as a crumpled piece of cellophane. The stars have been there for a long time, and they always watch and say nothing, and they never come to get you, no matter what they see. They are content to let men solve their own problems. He blinked at the stars, wondering. For how many ages had the hungry eyes of men turned up at night to watch the stars and dream? And now there were no men left to watch the stars, and no dreams. So the stars were invisible too, and soon they would realize it and blink out, turning the night into the dusty inside of his own skull.
He looked back down at the corpse under his hands. He felt nothing, no sorrow, no pity, no empathy. He could be afraid, the fear churning his stomach, afraid of death, afraid that they would come to get him. But he couldn’t cry; he couldn’t work up the overwhelming sorrow, the sense of loss, which he knew he should feel. It all seemed too far away, too unreal. It seemed too small a thing to cry about.
Why was that? Surely that wasn’t right?
He diverted his thoughts, uneasily aware that there was something unnatural about his inability to mourn. As penance, as a substitute for grief, he began to lash himself into a cold fury. He climbed slowly to his feet, the anger building, looking for a scapegoat, something to divert his attention from himself, something to lash out at. His eyes rose back to the icy stars. He snarled, a reaction as old as the jungle womb of the race. Hey God, sir—he shouted aloud, dramatizing himself, puffing out his chest—are you there? Can you hear me, huh? There’s been a death in the family. Called Gotterdamnung. Didn’t you know? He giggled, a touch of real hysteria seeping in. He began chanting the funeral mass in a wailing, sing-song voice, breaking up, dissolving into snickering laughter. Shit, if I’d known sooner, I’d sent you an engraved invitation so’s you wouldn’t miss anything. RSVP, baby. He swayed back and forth, the field pack dangling from his hand by the strap and swinging in time with his body like a cloth pendulum. He was play-acting, pretending emotions that he could not feel, but it was fun. Did you enjoy yourselves, all you bastards? he shouted, no longer sure whom he was talking to. Did you all have a real good time? He shouted louder, grimacing fantastically, putting a little soul into it. Did you get a kick out of it? D’yhear? D’you hear me? He was enjoying himself now, feeling grand and glorious and tragic. He reared back and screamed at the sky, daring it to answer.
The sky didn’t say anything.
After a while, he decided he’d done a good enough job and went back to stealing the boots.
II
Winter-Spring
I sit in darkness, leaning against the rock, and it is cold. The night is wet; the soggy air pressing against my face, running its velvet lingers along my spine, making me tremble. The cold rock sucks warmth from my flesh, turning it into smooth marbled stone, and that is a good thing, because then I will not move and they will not see me and come to get me. I sit very still, trying to become a rock. I am a rock, heavy and hard, pressed deep into the wet, sheltering earth. I am invisible. If I move, they will come to get me. I must not move because then I will be seen, and I am invisible, so I must not be seen, no. I am a rock, crouching. There is an earthworm tunneling under me, rubbing slimily against my inviolate, hard smoothness, pressing up, straining to break through the surface, but I sit immovable on it and block its passage and single it out and make it alone. I will not fade away because I am solid now and no one will come to get me because no one ever bothers to get rocks. I am a rock.
The field pack dangles loosely from my marble hand, swaying slightly with the motion of my breathing, banging against my knee with the steady, sonorous tap-tap rhythm of a dead hand knocking against the lid of a coffin. But I do not breathe because I am a
rock; I do not hear. Rocks do not have to have crusted blood under their fingernails. It is good that rocks do not have hands or smell the air filled with the corruption of death.
It is early morning, and it is misty, and the mists are pearly wet. They look like white shrouds and they wrap around me and creep rustlingly up over my eyes. But rocks don’t have eyes and they can’t come to get me. False dawn thrusts a pale blue wing over the horizon. I watch it as a rock watches, patient and safe, watching with every surface, every inch, of my polished marble body, not caring.
The light fades into deeper, textured darkness, the night holding its breath, pausing for a beat in the steady rhythm of time. There is a single star on the horizon, very bright, very low. It is watching me, waiting for me to move so that it can tell them and they can stride forward over the gabled hills to get me. I do not move. Slowly, a veil of velvet air slips aside on the horizon, and the sky becomes a degree lighter. The bright star fades, struggling. It is becoming invisible; soon it won’t be able to see me. I sit patiently, wrapped in earth, feeling moss growing on my smooth side.
A bright red wound opens on the horizon, blood seeping horizontally out along the sky. Above the creeping finger of dawn, a tawny golden-orange glow spreads up the curving sky, setting the heavy clouds afire, staining and diluting the jet black of night. It is lighter, spreading branches of trees around me visible now, etched black against the pale golden sky, abstract silhouettes. The light grows, and I can make out the texture of the bark, see the whorls and ripples in the wood. The branches turn purple, then blue, shading toward brown. The bright star has disappeared, lost and drowned in the bloody wash of morning. Shadows make twining, shifting patterns on the ground, elongating rapidly as the sun climbs. The mists are fleeing, lashed by light. Color bleeds back into the world, chasing grey. Warmth and light beat gently against my face, heat melting my stone into flesh, translating me. I am safe.