Pete grabbed me, “Nick, I found some sidewalk tiles on the other side of the building. We are going to place them over her grave as a marker. They will keep anything out.”
I knelt in the sand thinking. “Okay, but I want to place them. You guys take a break. This is something I want to do alone.”
Pete helped me carry them all over to the sand pile, and then joined the others.
My main concern was to keep animals away from her body. As I placed the tiles on sand, I interlocked each one as tightly as possible, lifting each one several times. My fingers bled from jamming them between pieces. My back hurt and pain radiated down my legs, but I continued. This act of covering her body to prevent scavengers wasn’t enough. How could I mark her grave so others would know who she was? Maybe letting Maria put the cross on her neck was a bad idea. But it wouldn’t matter to Beth now. I didn’t have the energy to get fancy. I just wanted to finish. I had to stop and catch my breath.
“You okay over there? Take your time,” Sarah said.
“Almost done.” I forced myself back to work. My chest pains had come back about the time Phoenix was crowning. I’d learned to ignore them, but these were the worst. A half dozen blocks remained and I wouldn’t quit until it was finished. I dropped with five left.
“Hey, you ok?” Sarah said running to my aid.
“Yeah, I just need a longer break.” I couldn’t catch my breath, but tried to get back up.
She held my wrist as she guided me to the ground. “Sit down and we will finish that. Now slow down your breathing and relax.”
“No, I want to make sure it’s right.” My left arm went numb, and both hands tingled. “I have to finish this now.” My breathing escalated. I tried to stand.
“You’ve got to slow your breathing down. You’re hyperventilating.”
“She deserves…better…than this.” I tried to yell, but didn’t have the wind.
Sarah held my chin with one hand. “Nick, you have to calm down!
I needed more air, and pushed her hand away. I needed to breathe, but her hand was obstructing me. I thrashed trying to push her away.
She firmly held my head in both hands. “Nick, calm down and listen to me. I’m going to help you breathe. I’m going to place my mouth on yours and we are going to breath into each other’s lungs. Do you understand? Trust me.” She then lowered her mouth to meet mine.
I tried to fight her, but couldn’t.
Her breath was hot, but I couldn’t get enough of it. I sucked for more. She held the seal so tight, controlling my intake, no fresh air got through. After three rounds of controlled breathing, my fight evaporated. I accepted what she was doing. Her lungs took the place of a brown bag. After about a minute she pulled away.
“There now keep taking slow deep breaths. Slow…That’s good.”
“I want to be buried alongside her.” I took another measured inhalation.
“You’re not going to die today. You’re just having a panic attack. You’ve been through a lot lately. Do you have any pains in your neck or arm?”
“No, but my chest feels like someone is standing on it. I feel like I am dying. I feel so bad that I haven’t done enough to keep everyone from starving to death. If Beth had been fed better, she would probably still be alive.” My breathing increased.
“Slow down. Slow down your breathing and be quiet a minute, I want to listen to your heart.” Sarah lowered her head, placing her ear on my chest. “Everyone quiet!” Everyone obeyed, except for the insects. She kept moving her head to different areas of my chest. Then she moved to my back.
Sarah backed away and knelt on the sand. “First of all let me say this: Beth might have survived if she had more food, maybe she was just too old. She did have enough energy to give you a son. Phoenix is going to need you. Marcos still needs you. You still have a job to do.” She held my hand. “You will get the time to do it.” She put her other hand on my leg. “But you have to take it easy. That means you get to ride Jorge from now on.” The woman, who just open mouth kissed me for two minutes, looked at me with a wink of reassurance.
As doomed as I thought I was, I looked at Jorge, his big stupid grin looking me right in the face. I burst out laughing, tears running down my face. Everyone joined in, hugging and kissing me when I needed it most. Again I felt drained emotionally, but I needed it. We were family, and I felt loved.
Pete grabbed a stone, so did Sarah and Maria. The children tried to lift them. I watched while I rested. I knew one of them would pinch a finger, but I let it go on. The last of the blocks were placed, securing Beth’s resting place.
The sun poked out from behind thick clouds. Her grave looked very nice and secure, nothing more than she would have wanted. Maria wanted to place a cross to mark it. I said no.
I saw a shadow move along the road in the distance. It was Marcos running, dangling an opossum by the tail in each hand. He found us.
To my left, one of the babies dropped a stone on her fingers while piling stones up like the big people did. The rest came to her rescue.
I left them alone, except to say, “Sometimes we need to learn things the hard way.” Then I lay down to take a much-needed nap.
Epilogue
The Cyclical Earth
The rogue moon that slammed into the Earth at 60,000 miles per hour was formed 6.5 billion years ago in another solar system in the Milky Way galaxy. As two giant gas planets collided, the little moon was ejected out into space, never to orbit its star again. Though small as moons go, the thirty-seven-mile rock travelled in a straight line while our solar system and home planet were still being formed. Approaching from behind our sun, after traveling for billions of years, it remained undetected until a day and a half from impact.
Impact: When the tiny moon slammed the planet’s crust, ejecta circled the world, lighting fires and baking everything above ground for two days. Nineteen percent of all species went extinct immediately. Others followed as the process of photosynthesis stopped, and the food chain fell apart.
1 month AI (After Impact): Four thousand, three hundred twelve people survived the first month of the disaster.
3.5 years AI: When supplies ran out at underground bunkers, those who counted on them soon starved to death. Mankind had forgotten to teach the basic skills of survival that had sustained them a couple thousand years earlier. They relied on their technologies, infrastructures, and governments. Few had the ability to provide for themselves under the conditions that existed.
51 years AI: The eruption of the super volcano located beneath Yellowstone national park would signal the end of the Anthropocene epoch: a period of geological time that began with the industrial revolution, when man began to affect the planet with his pollutants on a grand scale. This was the final blow for any homo sapiens that had survived the impact. Arrogantly, they thought that they would be the most advanced living beings that ever inhabited the planet Earth. They imagined themselves eventually spreading out into the universe to encounter other worlds and other species. Colonizing Mars never happened, leaving man a one planet species: a disadvantage in a violent universe.
52 years AI: Humans go extinct like 99.99 percent of all species that ever lived on the planet. Mass extinctions are not uncommon, there have been at least five major events before this one in the past.
The only land containing life larger than an insect was the North and South American continents. Europe and Africa were no longer recognizable; layers of molten rock covered one half of the globe. Other than the coastline, the western hemisphere geographically, had not been changed.
After the dust settled, the balance returned. Life continued, just as it had sixty-five million years before. Several small ice ages left only the equatorial areas able to prosper for an extended period of time. Only the tropics escaped the snow.
The sun was permitted to reach the ground again and its energy was welcomed by the living that remained. The Earth was new again. The slate had been wiped clean again.
Ferns were plentiful. Insects devoured them as fast as they would grow; they thrived, feeding on the dead, the new growth, and each other. Animals that fed on insects adapted and soon became the most successful species of the new period.
Mice, moles, rats, bats and shrews made up most of the mammal life that remained on the two continents. Common house cats survived and hunted once again.
Opossums were the last of the marsupials.
Reptiles seemed unharmed, and were plentiful.
The amphibians that didn’t go extinct during the time of man came out of the mud and continued on, though there were few.
Birds didn’t make it this time; the dinosaurs finally went extinct.
During the day, insects would feed on the ground, clearing any vegetation that would grow. Plant growth never had the chance to come back to where it had been.
At night opossums and bats gorged on the insects.
The reptiles would eat anything that passed by.
Time went on for the earth as it always did. Man was not missed.
Fifty-five million years slowly passed: a mere hiccup in Earth’s life.
The oceans were alive again and the climate leveled off to a more temperate one.
Plant life adapted to change in their new world. Their leaves became tough and toxic to prevent total loss from predation. Even those plants whose entirety remained under ground could not escape the hordes of insects.
Mammals advanced, but competed with the swarms of insects that darkened the skies during the day, and never amounted to anything larger than an average sized rodent.
Reptiles survived just the way that they had all the other times that the earth had gone through this cleansing process. They didn’t evolve into much more than they already were. They had already developed a successful design, though they did get smaller.
The opossums gave up their nocturnal habits. Food was easier to find in the sunlight, plus using their prehensile tails to see over the ever present ferns, they could keep an eye out for their only predator: feral cats. Eventually, they learned to walk upright, though it was more like skipping, and resembled the way the astronauts of Apollo 11 walked on the moon. Opossums had a jump on all other species when it came to evolution. They already had something like an opposable thumb and were quick to learn how use it. They had a remarkable immune system; they were less likely to succumb to snakebite than the mammals. They retained their acute sense of smell and their tails. Eventually they began to eat only insects and small mammals, they became strictly carnivores. Their brains grew because of their new high protein diet.
Marsupaloids began to hunt in groups and in time they started farming insects, and rodents. The earth was home to its second intelligent species. Eventually they developed a form of communication. A combination of scents, body language and tail gestures utilizing a form of mathematics more complicated than most humans were aware even existed. During the fourth ice age since the impact, they migrated across what was the Bering Strait, taking the same path that some early men had once taken, but going in the opposite direction. They learned to use some of the tools they had found from the time of the humans, and eventually, why homo sapiens went extinct. From the evidence found, it was believed their extinction was caused by an impact.
The fossil evidence was discovered just as it was in the time of man. Specialists in the field of paleontology and geology worked the areas where evidence of man’s past could still be found.
On a hot day, in what was the mid-eastern North American continent, an assistant to the head of paleontology slowly took the diamond artifact from the mummified remains of one of the last humans and slipped it into her pouch. Undiscovered, she continued her work. She then took the necklace from around the neck of the fossil; behind one of the vertebra laid a cross, similar to the hundreds of thousands of others found in the lower half of the continent. They knew this symbol was important to the humans, but still needed to learn more.
The Marsupaloids copied the technology of man and soon learned to harvest the same fossil fuels the humans did to power their earlier machines.
‘It’s not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.’ Charles Darwin
THE END
The Second Intelligent Species: The Cyclical Earth Page 21
