The Last Man on Earth Club

by Paul R. Hardy

  “Yeh. So?”

  “And you were in your… what did you call it… Coroner Corps?”

  “So were lots of people. You know what happened to them? They’re all bloody dead.”

  Iokan joined in. “But that gave you certain skills, surely? Like all of us, your chances would have been improved by your experiences.”

  Even Katie spoke up. “I can calculate the probability of survival of a person with your skills against one without if you wish to be convinced.”

  “Did you not hear me? All the others are dead. Knowing how to put down a revenant didn’t save ’em. Researching it didn’t save ’em.”

  Her protestations sounded ragged. I decided to risk pushing a little further. “But here you are, and you were a researcher and you do know how to put down a revenant. Doesn’t that have any relevance to your survival?”

  She exploded back at me. “Course it’s got relevance! Can’t you see? Course you can’t, you weren’t there, you don’t bloody know, do you?” Iokan tried to speak, but Olivia wasn’t to be stopped. “And why are you asking us, anyway? You don’t know anything about it. When was the last time your world blew up? Eh? Bet you’ve never even seen a dead body.”

  “That’s not the point, Olivia.”

  “When were you ever the last woman on Earth? Course you bloody weren’t, there’s only us here and half of ’em I don’t even know they’re properly human. How come you get to ask us questions?”

  “You’re right, I’ve never been the last person on Earth. But that doesn’t mean I can’t help you.”

  “You don’t know a damn thing about what it’s like to be us! How are you supposed to help us?”

  “I was chosen for my experience as a therapist, not—”

  “How is anyone supposed to help us? Eh?”

  “That’s why we have the group, Olivia. So you have peers—”

  “Don’t you change the subject! You make me sick, telling us how we ought to get better as though you know what it’s like to be us! There’s not one of you knows what it was like, you with your comfortable world with your food printers and your flying cars and everything you want on a plate with a cherry on top, what do you know about it? Eh? Tell me that! What do you know?”

  She glared at me, challenging me to admit to incompetence. She was doing her best to avoid her own problems, of course, but she’d drawn the group’s attention to me instead of her, and it’s true that patients sometimes have difficulty working with a therapist who has no personal experience of their trauma.

  I sighed and put my pad aside. I never like having this talk with patients, but sometimes it becomes inevitable.

  “Well, since it seems to be important to you, Olivia, I’ll tell you. I’ve never been the last person on Earth. But I have been through an apocalypse.” She was on the point of making a retort, but I kept going. “It’s not why I was picked to be your therapist, but if the group thinks it might be relevant, I’ll tell you what happened to me.”

  Kwame put a hand on his chin. Liss uncurled in her chair and wiped tears from her eyes. Katie stared at me, waiting. Pew had a new expression on his face, close to sympathy. Iokan glanced round the rest of the group. “I think I’d like to know,” he said.

  I looked back at Olivia. “Well go on, then!” she said.

  “Those of you who’ve been here for a while have probably noticed that a lot of people on Hub are just passing through — diplomats, students, delegations of one kind or another. Some people come from worlds the IU is helping to rebuild…” I looked at Veofol. He got the hint.

  “Er, yes. We messed up the environment on my world. There was a mass extinction, lots of UV — long story short, there were only a few thousand of us in orbit when the IU found us. That’s why I look the way I do. We’ve lived for ten generations in orbit on the stations. We’re not used to being in a gravity well.” Olivia gave him a sidelong look for a moment.

  I went on. “But some people do call this world home. A few of them are descended from the people who colonised the planet in the first place. Most of us, though, came here for a different reason. Most of us are apocalypse survivors.”

  Olivia scowled but didn’t interrupt.

  “There was a volcano, on my world, in America. Not an ordinary one. It was like a thousand volcanoes all going off at once. The sky was blocked out with dust and ash. There was no harvest for years on end. If we’d been on our own, we’d have probably gone extinct.

  “But we met the IU. They managed to get hundreds of millions of people out — which sounds like a lot but there were eight billion of us before things went bad. That’s how fast people were dying. I nearly died. Most of the children in my town did die, and I was never in good health.” In fact, I had a cleft palate because of the pollution from a chemical plant abandoned when the economy went bad a decade earlier.

  “There was an evacuation centre near where my family lived, and the ships lifted off from there to get out to the portals in orbit. They built it round an old airport and kept us in tents until they could take us.” IU doctors gave out medicine and food and water, keeping us alive until we could be evacuated. They said they’d be able to fix my cleft palate, and I never saw my parents so happy.

  “We had these little pagers they put in our hands, I mean they implanted them so we wouldn’t lose them. The idea was that, when it was our turn, they’d go off and we’d get on the ships.” They itched like hell for the first few days. I couldn’t help stroking the spot now; it was still there, and still itched sometimes.

  “Somebody figured out how they worked, and tried to jump the queue. But instead of setting off their own pager, they set off everyone else’s. You can imagine what happened.” Hell. Chaos. Thousands of desperate people running out of their tents to get to the ships. All of them crowding around the fences. My parents dragging me along, desperate to get me to Hub.

  “There was a crush at the gate. Nobody at the back of the crowd knew it was a false alarm. Everyone at the front was trapped. If they’d opened the gates, people would have been trampled to death as the ones at the back rushed forward. They tried to disperse the crowd and eventually they managed it, but eighty-six people died, including my parents.” They only kept me alive by putting me on their shoulders. They did that with all the children. They passed us forward over the crowd and the IU staff pulled us over the fence. I was screaming when they lifted me over the barrier, trying to get free so I could crawl back over the heads of the crowd, but they were already gone, already pressed to death.

  I didn’t cry. I’ve told the story too often, and I always keep some of the details back.

  “Why didn’t they turn off the implants…?” asked Liss, appalled.

  “They did. It didn’t stop people trying to get in. We were desperate.”

  “Was that the worst?” asked Kwame. He wasn’t testing how much I’d suffered; he was genuinely sympathetic.

  “No. We had it easy in my country. There’d been a nuclear war between India and China a couple of years before. That’s what persuaded the governments to finally accept the offer of evacuation. We had everything you can imagine before the end.” I shook my head and sighed, and hoped they would not ask for more details. There were mass graves, pandemics, a volcanic winter compounded by the dust thrown up by the nuclear exchange, whole countries abandoned to die.

  “So no, I would never have been like you. If it wasn’t for the Interversal Union, I would have been one of the bodies in a mass grave. But I came here instead.”

  Here: the evacuation shuttle to the L1 point, weeks in quarantine at Grainger Station with its uneven artificial gravity that children loved to play in, those that weren’t in the terrible silence I withdrew into; then down the Lift, descending on a carbon strand to the equator, and out to a reception centre, and always the therapists worrying about me, trying to get me to play with the other children, putting me in a group with other disturbed ones, wanting us to talk about it. Until finally I did, and the healing be
gan.

  The biggest danger when telling this story is becoming lost in reverie. I shook off the memories and looked around the group. By and large, they were sympathetic. I’d shown enough of my own pain to convince them I was no stranger to suffering.

  Except for Olivia, of course. She had her arms folded and an obstinate look on her face. “And that proves your point, does it?”

  “I may not be a lone survivor, Olivia, but I’ve seen my world die. I saw hundreds of people starve to death before the IU came.”

  “Late as ever.”

  “I’m still alive because of the IU. And so are you. I’m sorry we didn’t get to you earlier.”

  “But nothing—”

  “Shut up!” shouted Liss. “You never say anything nice to anyone! It’s like nobody even matters to you if they didn’t suffer like you, we all lost our whole species, isn’t that enough for you?”

  Olivia was speechless, for once. She looked around, hoping for support from Pew.

  “She’s kind of right,” said Pew, unable to meet her eyes. “You’re not very nice to people.”

  “I find your outbursts irritating,” said Katie.

  “I find everything about you irritating,” said Kwame.

  “Okay, everyone,” I said, “honesty is good but there’s no need to make this about someone’s character.”

  “There’s every bloody need!” shouted Olivia, and turned it out to everyone. “You want to know why I’m sick of you? You didn’t fight! You didn’t try! You didn’t have to try! You were the last people on Earth because you were all pathetic! You deserved to go extinct!”

  She stormed out of the room, and very shortly out of the building. Pew shuddered as she went. Her words hit him harder than anyone else.

  “Veofol?” I asked. He sighed and went after her.

  “She has a point,” said Iokan.

  “Must you always be contrary?” asked Kwame.

  Iokan shrugged. “She’s the way she is because she suffered for longer than any of us. It was twelve years for her… I always knew there was a chance my world would end, but it was quick when it came.” He suddenly remembered himself. “Not that it was a bad thing, of course.”

  “There is something admirable in her struggle to survive, if not her personality,” said Katie.

  “There’s nothing admirable about her,” said Liss. “She’s just horrible because she wants to be horrible.”

  “Did she have any children?” asked Pew. “Maybe she’s angry because she lost her children?”

  “She’s never spoken about it,” I said.

  “She would hardly be alone in losing children,” said Kwame.

  As much as the group had grown closer and gotten to know each other, Olivia was proving to be a problem; she tried to dominate every session while she was present, and was still provoking discussion about her even though she was gone. We were getting nowhere.

  “I think that’s enough for today,” I said.

  12. Katie & Iokan

  Katie had been unusually garrulous during the group session; you could almost call her restless. And when she retired to her room after the evening meal, the restlessness redoubled.

  Normally, she would simply sit on her bench, or lie on it, or sometimes just stand in the middle of the room. But now, if she lay down, she found her head tossing about, unable to find a comfortable place. She sat up, and found her fingers drumming a simple rhythm. She picked her hand off the bench and stared at it, flexing the fingers. She put it aside, and then found her foot doing the same thing.

  She stood and walked to the centre of the room. But her body would not stand still. She had to flex her hands to stop them twitching. She tried pacing back and forth, but this did not help either.

  She marched to a wall, activated a control surface, selected the room controls and turned one wall into a facsimile of solid steel. Then punched it.

  It must have hurt, though there was no expression on her face, and no mark on her fist. The wall was not so lucky: she left an impression of knuckles. She punched it again. And again. And again, until she showed some pain on her face, and her knuckles were scraped. She punched again—

  And her fist plunged into foam rubber. She drew it back out of the ruptured surface, and it closed up around the hole she’d made. She tested the wall, still apparently steel as far as the eye was concerned. But it gave way to a firm push. Safety measures had been activated. She would not be allowed to harm herself in her own room.

  Her fist trembled. A look of frustration passed over her like a wave, and was gone.

  Iokan, meanwhile, was getting a door slammed in his face. “And you can bloody piss off!” yelled Olivia as the door crashed shut. She preferred her door to swing rather than slide, mainly so she could create a satisfying slam.

  Iokan sighed, turned away, and had to stop before he walked into Katie. She’d made no noise as she left her room a few doors down and walked up to him. Someone else might have jumped. Iokan was just surprised.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t see you there…”

  “I require your assistance.”

  “Okay. How can I help?”

  “I am experiencing emotional disturbance.”

  “Ah. I see…”

  “I require the same assistance you provided previously.”

  “I’ve been thinking about that.”

  “Please explain.”

  “I’m not sure it’s such a good idea.”

  “You have stated your wish to help members of the group.”

  “I have, yes, but… I’ve been thinking about Szilmar.”

  “Your wife is dead.”

  “No. She isn’t. She found a new life! She’s still out there, somewhere. I might see her again one day…”

  “That is unlikely.”

  “Do you have marriage, in your species?”

  “No.”

  “I swore to her that I would set aside all others and honour only her. Do you understand what I mean by that?”

  She spoke forcefully. “I require your assistance!”

  “Ask me anything else. Please.”

  She grabbed for his arm, but he was too fast. “Don’t,” he said, retreating into a fighting stance, despite the robes that would have been all too easy to trip in.

  “I need you!” She grabbed again and he stepped aside.

  “I’m not yours to have.”

  She ran at him, and this time she didn’t miss. His robe made it too easy for her to grab him. It ripped but held together enough for her to throw him across the corridor and pin him against a wall. She flipped him round and pulled an arm behind his back. He gasped at the pain as she yanked him away from the wall and pointed him in the direction of her room.

  And then she let him go. He stumbled forwards into the carpet, scrambling away while he had the chance. But she wasn’t following. She wasn’t doing anything. She stood in the corridor, not seeing him at all. He stood back up, cautiously.

  “Katie?”

  She heard that. And saw him. She looked confused. “Ket’or Katie?” she said.

  “I don’t understand.”

  She twitched.

  “Who’s Katie?”

  She collapsed to the floor.

  PART SIX — MYSTERIES

  1. Liss

  Katie stayed unconscious for several days, causing grave concern among the neurologists who came in to examine her. She was unresponsive to stimuli, and whole areas of her brain seemed to have shut down. All we could do was keep her under observation and hope she improved.

  Therapy for the others had to continue. I saw to it that the first individual therapy session of the week would be for Liss. She hadn’t been willing, yet, to talk about what she’d experienced, or reveal any other secrets she might be keeping. She huddled in her chair with sweet tea for the first half hour of the session, and we spoke about the screenshows from her world. She showed some interest in those, and I kept her talking until we came to a very specific episode of Dates and
Hates.

  “I think it was called The Underdater. Do you remember that one, Liss?”

  “No…”

  “It’s the one where she goes on a lunch date and it turns out he’s taking her to a funeral? Remember? And she thinks it’s his mother’s funeral, but he just likes funerals.”

  She looked up at me. “That one was about Ellera’s mom.”

  “That’s it. The guy’s trying to impress her but she’s in the same graveyard her mother’s buried in so she has a big breakdown…”

  “And she sees her mom’s ghost and all she does is ask her if she’s met a nice guy…”

  “That’s right.”

  “And her mom hates the guy she’s with because he keeps going to all the funerals with a different girl each time, and, and Ellera ends up telling her mom to shut up and goes back to the wake with him…”

  “And that’s how she comes to terms with losing her mother.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Liss… what happened to your family?

  She hid her face again and took a while to answer. “I buried them.”

  “Your whole family?”

  “My parents. They were at home when it happened. They were retired.”

  “Can you tell me about them?”

  She looked up from her tea, but not at me.

  “They were great. They were… they were…” And back came the tears; I offered her the tenth tissue of the session.

  “I’m sorry…” she said.

  “They must have been good to you.”

  “Oh, sure. The best.”

  “So you buried them straight away?”

  “Oh. Uh. Yeah. Well. Not right away. I, uh…” The tears welled up again. Tissue number eleven came out. “I don’t know what I did at first. You’ve got all these people that did so much, I must seem kinda pathetic.”

  “Not at all. I expect you were in shock. Did you stay in the call centre for long?”

  “No. I… I remember I saw a screen. There was a news channel on it but all the newspeople were gone. I guess I thought that if that was still going, everything else would come back, maybe if I closed my eyes…”