This post is Copyright 2007 Jeremy Osborne, All Rights Reserved.
Green sunlight sparkles through the droplets of water Jill scatters into the air. She lifts her bare foot and swings it forward. This completes step 3,796 and splash 1,772 of water along the deserted coast. She glances back to see the how many foot prints remain, and guesses that the ocean hasn’t washed 949 of them away.
At the beginning of her walk she waded knee deep in the foamy, cool water. During her stroll the tide receded back into the vastness. The sun fell beyond the horizon and her shadow climbed up the beach. Nothing interrupted her this trip, or any of her previous trips. This time belonged to her. Of everything she could be thinking, she thought of only the walk.
“3,797,” she thinks, lips still, eyes staring at the sun. “3,798… 3,799….”
A wave splashes foam over her feet. Each step splashes more droplets ahead of her path. The sun, a green Christmas ornament lost by some careless god, warms her body. Staring at it doesn’t hurt her eyes. She never blinks.
At step number 3,820 her right foot sinks deep into the wet sand. She pulls herself upwards, straining her left leg against the wet sand. The sand collapses below her left foot, trapping it, too. The sun melts, dripping down behind the horizon. In the dark, the waves rise higher and higher, the cold water threatening to drown her. The swelling waves break at her chest. She gasps for air, yanking her stuck legs against the trap of the sand. Salty water slaps her face. Her freezing chest constricts her thudding heart.
Jill wakes on her back. She rolls over onto her side, awake and dry, in her bed far away from any ocean. She throws her legs over the edge of the bed. She thinks that dying in her sleep might not be so bad.
Her days of peaceful snoozing ended, in Earth Standard Time, 6 months and 4 days ago. On that Sunday, at 15:46 EST Frank stopped breathing. The 17 puncture wounds, 3 lacerations and his mutilated thigh would never appear on an autopsy report or police record. After he stopped breathing, Jill guessed at least 7 pints of blood covered her, Frank and the floor of the bunker. She stood up and collected the few useful items in the room and then left, locking the door behind her. She didn’t cry because crying had become useless; with Frank gone Jill became the last person alive in Border Town Alpha 314.
She stares at her pre-arranged wardrobe on the adjacent unoccupied bed. 2 double ply socks. 2 boots. 1 pair of underwear (the Earth Outreach Corps never celebrated femininity). 1 pair of khaki Durapants. 1 double-lock black utility belt. 1 spider-weave top (perfect fit, support built in, E.O.C. got one thing right). 1 shock gun, fully charged. 1 ankle-strapped utility knife. 2 shin guards. 1 environmental body armor unit including body waste recycling and elimination; also including nutrition system pack with 20 days supply of nourishment and 20 days supply of water. 2 gloves with retractable climbing claws, 10″ retractable spikes (useful for spearing rapists… not that there were any left) and reinforced wrist braces. 1 light weight, high durability helmet attachment for the enviro-gear, fitted for air purification and recirculation. 2 double ply socks. 1 pair boots.
Jill wanders over to the real water shower. She installed it 124 days ago. She washes every body part her hands and brush can reach. Now clean, she closes her eyes and stands under the flow of warm water. Enough with conservation. The planet has plenty of water for me and whatever else lives here. Why waste it all on the river? Jill thinks back to the day she made the shower. 34 meters of duralex plastic tube. 1 utility clamp. 1 repurposed worker bot reprogrammed to keep the tube of water full at all times. 3 failed attempts to snake the tube through the building’s aeration system. The forth attempt worked. She noticed the men’s restroom was much closer and easier to access. No men, no need for a male restroom.
She dries off with a comforter (what the hell was wrong with the Earth Outreach Corps anyway, making the comforters more absorbent and softer than the body towels). Jill heads back to the room and looks over the gear. “This isn’t enough,” she says, “Not enough pieces. It’s only 22.43 kg, and I can easily carry 31.2 kg. I’ll add some rations.” She walks over to the bunker pantry and opens it up. A choice of the favorite meat flavored, vegetable flavored, or fruit flavored rations. Same nutritional value, different flavors. E.O.C., according to history, never seems to be very good at making meals for the field. Each ration designed for survival, not living. Each ration designed for humans. Designed for humans equates to being designed for the average nutritional needs of a Eurasian (aka. cocoapuff). Some brilliant scientist realized that a healthy cocoapuff deposits 1.3 stool drops a day. Jill never matched that classification. She might be size twelve, but those skinny chicks never could do what she could do. That’s why she’s here, providing more than 2.2 stool drops a day for her environment. And they’re not.
“But,” she says, “I forget why I’m leaving in the first place.” Jill latches shut the pantry door and heads back to the bed. “22.43 kg of equipment is just fine. No need to bust my ass anymore, except when I want to. No one left to impress, no orders left to follow.” But that wasn’t quite true, she had 2 last orders to fulfill, both of them self-ascribed.
She straps, ties, clips, pulls, pushes and hooks every bit of gear into place. Everything balances on the 39th gear up. Jill looks back and forth across the dorm out of habit. Nothing left behind and nothing out of place. 3 steps bring her to the hallway. Her back turned to the 12 empty bunks she closes the door. 10 steps take her outside, 13 steps into her journey and that much closer to freedom.
She remembers back to the time when she won a game of hide and seek. They should have declared her the hide and seek champion of all time. She slipped down the ravine behind her house, sliding through the vegetation to land on her back. The impact knocked the breath out of her, but otherwise caused no breaks, pains, aches, bruises or scrapes. Without any breath in her body she heard silence, a match for the picture painted by an old song remade by The Manly Boys. Embarrassing she ever liked that band at all, but she loved that song.
Ten thousand bugs around her, maybe more, all of them silent, waiting for her, waiting for her to breathe again. Waiting to hear her. Then they would jump on her. Her mother told her never to move if she fell down and had an accident. Her mom told her to stay still and scream for help. Her mom never told her what to do if thousands of bugs, all hiding in the bushes, were waiting to pounce on her if she screamed for help.
Jill, afraid of the bugs, didn’t scream. She found her breath in the next moment, her diaphragm yanking the gasp of air deep into her core. It hurt to much to hold in the air and prolong her silence. Jill let out every bit of it and inhaled again. A bird chirped, something moved in the bushes next to her. She rasped a plea into the leaves of the bush hanging over her head. Were the leaves to have ears not even they would have heard her diminished voice.
4 breaths later and she had calmed down. Nothing had bitten her or attacked her. The stories of the scary monsters that lived in the ravine disappeared like Santa the instant she found the presents her father hid from her in the closet. Jill remembered she was still playing hide and seek, a game she was positive she’d finally win. If it took falling down a ravine to win, fine.
She heard Dan and José run by her, only twenty feet away and up a hill. Will called out from whatever direction her feet pointed toward. No one bothered to check the ravine. What seemed like an hour passed. She wasn’t so far away that she wouldn’t have heard them call the game off and declare her the winner. The boredom, the growing shadows, the loneliness got to her, but she was going to wait however long she needed to hear them say she won.. Pictures of the forgotten crawling and slimy bugs crept back into her imagination. She needed something to take her mind off of her own thoughts and figured she’d do something she hated. She counted.
126 leaves on the bush branches. 250 breaths. 10 fingers. 10 toes. 48 rocks under her right hand. 37 rocks under her left hand. 345 pieces of dirt. 23 birds flew over her. 2 birds dropped something, probably poop. 0 bird poops hit her. Each item she counted she imagined placing in a box. Each of these boxes she stored in the empty spaces of her mind where the bad ideas might show up. The bigger the stacks of items, the less room the scary thoughts had to live. She liked that.
The sky dimmed to deep orange, but she wouldn’t sit up. No way, not until she heard them give up. The 13 chirps of insects and 9 flying bugs didn’t deter her one bit. Not now, not ever. If she had to lie here 3 days, and go to the bathroom in her underwear, she would. If she had to survive on her own spit she would, whatever it took, no matter how thirsty it made her.
At the time of pink clouds and dark red skies she heard the call. Will also shouted words that mommy and daddy said they weren’t allowed to say. He obviously wasn’t happy that Jill won. That made Jill even happier she had made Will say bad words. That’s all that mattered.
Now, all that mattered was that there were still things to count. She’d have gone crazy long ago because there was no Will, no Dan or José, Betsy, Kim, Janet, Bill, Robert, not even a Frank left. For all she knew she was the last human alive. Someone might have left a message on the CommNet, but the chances of that involved those imaginary numbers that Jill hated use. She wasn’t that desperate for solace. She always imagined her life would end up like this.
57 steps took her to the Communications bunker; 2 more steps than normal probably because of the extra equipment she carried. At this point, the counting ceased to matter, the whole moment brought unexpected excitement and a rush of trepidation. Maybe someone left a message and she wouldn’t have to be alone.
But no message waited for her. They had sent 3,778 public report messages over the last 10 years, slightly more than one per Earth Day. The interstellar messages they used to receive ceased 5 years, 2 months, 29 days ago. The interplanetary messages ceased 2 years, 4 months, 13 days ago. The last message received from their own planet and sister city, Border Town Beta 314, arrived 1 year, 3 months, 26 days ago. She gave the rest of the humans a chance to prove they still lived. That fulfilled her first set of orders. With those orders fulfilled, she declared herself the final living human.
Her second order had a contingency for action, provided she was the last one alive. Jill grabbed the microphone and began recording her final transmission, taping it for archive. She spent the better part of an hour speaking, too absorbed to comprehend the clock in front of her. She opened her mouth and ignored protocol, thinking for a split second that perhaps breaking rules would have gotten an answer. Silence only.
Jill described the events clearly, in non-technical terms. The mysterious break in communication. The growing silence throughout the universe. The mental breakdowns. What little she knew about life outside her town. The beginning of the gang warfare in her town. Her final confrontation with Frank, suspected murderer and attempted rapist. Jill recorded the location of the bunker with his body, as well as Jill’s apology to Frank’s family. She agreed that what Frank wanted made sense. It made sense that they had to start a new life if they were really the last humans alive. She just couldn’t let her turn everyone into cattle.
“…and now I’m alone. I really don’t know what happened, but I’m leaving the compound entirely and knowingly disobeying my direct orders. I’m heading outside of the limits of the town’s outer wall. If you need to get through the locked doors of the bunkers, I’ve left my keycard inside the north gate of the outer wall. And that’s where I’m heading, north. I really do hope I’m not the last one, but I will assume I am at this point. I’ve been alone 6 months and 4 days now without a single message from anyone.
“But let’s just say someone does hear this, and you wish to find me. I want you to find me. I won’t be hiding, but I’m also not going to burn down the planet with a signal fire in hopes of you noticing me. I reviewed the updated local scans of this planet this morning. Just as we found during our initial survey, there is a high concentration of vegetation, primitive lifeforms and water, both fresh and salt to the north. I’m heading there. If you wish to find me, scan for my beacon there.”
Jill ran out of speech. She clicked stop on the recording. The computer flashed two windows up on the monitor. The first acknowledged the integrity of the recording and the sending of the message across all bands. The second informed Jill that the message was archived. Jill flipped open a panel and put in the vacancy override code, all 64 digits of it. Hell it was just a number with a couple letters, took about 2 tries to memorize during training. If the adventure north turned boring, she’d see just how many digits of pi she could memorize.
“There,” Jill said. The motion detectors were set to active and would trip anytime someone entered the Communications bunker. Her final journal entry would play for anyone, or anything, and they might even understand it provided they muttered to themselves and triggered one of the known languages of the translation programs.
She exited the keep, walked across the farm land and waved goodbye to the robot farmers. They hurried away at work, not the emotional lot to get choked up over any kind of goodbye. At the outer gate she punched in the 128 digit exit override code. This code had numbers only. Simple. One attempt needed to memorize. The triple barrier, 20 foot tall gate pulled aside. Perhaps they should have opened it’s protective seal long ago, but that’s useless to worry about.
Jill took the 10 steps needed to cross the newly exposed interior of the wall and paused just a moment. “There are other worlds than these,” Jill said looking back before turning around. 1 step north onto the ferrous rock became 100 and then 1000. Somewhere north beyond the not yet visible forest was a beach, and every step brought it closer.