The Last of the Living

by Stephen Sipila

  "Yes, there is that."

  "Well there are plenty of rooms in the White House, pick anyone that you would like. Might I suggest the Lincoln bedroom?"

  "Sounds simply lovely, I guess I will see you in the morning for breakfast then?"

  "Sounds like a plan."

  "Do you want me to help you get to the bedroom or can you find your own way?"

  "I think I will be okay on my own, but thanks for offering."

  That was when suddenly outside the window bright lights went on.

  "What was that?" Amy asked.

  "Those are the lights going on. They are super high intensity in the ultraviolet range. It will keep the creatures away from the White House."

  "Are you sure we are completely safe here?"

  "I have been so far."

  "I hope I can get to sleep with the thought of those creatures outside."

  "If you want I can stand guard outside your room."

  "That won't be necessary; I think I would just like to go to bed now."

  "Good night then," David said.

  "Good night David," said Amy.

  Amy went down several hallways until she found the Lincoln bedroom. It was probably the nicest bedroom she had ever seen, but even so she didn't think she would be able to get to sleep with all the thoughts currently going through her head, but just like all the other time she thought she wouldn't be able to get to sleep, as soon as her head hit the pillow of the great emancipator's bed she was out like a light just the same.

  Chapter 17

  Amy woke up fairly late in the morning at 10:30 AM. Lincoln had a really comfortable bedroom she thought to herself as she woke up to see the sun streaming in through the windows.

  "Nice to see you are finally up sleepyhead," said David as she entered the dining room. "I was going to make you breakfast in bed but I thought it was better not to wake you as I know you are still suffering from that space fatigue or whatever it was."

  "I don't know if there is a technical term for it. But it is true that I have not fully readjusted to the Earth yet. Other times it had taken me a couple of weeks sometimes, but my fatigue was never this severe before. Again I am the record holder for longest time spent in space and I have no idea what that has done to my body. That is why I really wish that I could find a doctor of some kind."

  "I wish that I could help you with that but I'm afraid that as a janitor I am not qualified to be a doctor."

  "I know basic first aid and how to monitor my own vital functions as they taught me to do that on the space station to collect data, but anything more complicated than that and I am in trouble."

  "So I guess if either of us gets majorly ill we are in pretty big trouble. Luckily so far in the last two years I haven't had anything more than minor injuries that I could treat myself. And with all of my precautions about germs I haven't caught so much as a cold."

  "That is a good thing. Perhaps you have developed some type of immunity."

  "Well that and the fact that there aren't any people around that could possibly infect me with anything."

  "What about the creatures? Couldn't they potentially infect you with some type of disease?"

  "I don't intend to let them find out and I would sooner die than become one of those creatures."

  "Whatever turns people into the creatures; it seems like what initially was in the atmosphere killed everyone and spread the virus, but the fact that neither of us has contracted the virus nor become these creatures ourselves suggests that whatever was in the atmosphere was of limited duration and it is now safe."

  "Again, as far as we know, but I don't intend to take many chances, I'm not going to put you into quarantine or anything, but I don't want to breathe the same air too closely. I realize I am paranoid, but with your space fatigue who knows what type of bugs you might have brought back from space."

  "The space station was a completely sterile environment, so I did not get sick the entire time I was up there."

  "What about the other two astronauts with you?"

  "Anatoly died of a heart attack while outside of the space station. Maria died of appendicitis that we were unable to treat on the space station. So I guess my situation now isn't much different. If something had gone wrong on the space station I would pretty much be as good as dead. Down here with no doctors I suppose the same is true."

  "Maybe we are both just very lucky, although again I do think the paranoia tends to keep people alive."

  "I suppose it is somewhat lucky that you managed to secure the White House and its stock of supplies, so this is probably one of the safest places to be."

  David scratched his chin and nodded. "That's a good point. I really was in a very fortunate position. I guess a lot of the time what saves a person's life is pure dumb luck. And I count my blessings every day that I have found a safe place to live where I can hold off the creatures, one of the most iconic mansions in the world no less, not too shabby. I never in a million years would have guessed in all the time I was cleaning this place that someday I would be the owner."

  "And you have made no attempt to try and contact anyone else?"

  "I tried using some of the radios I found but I don't really know much about that type of stuff. But at any rate it has been two years since the pandemic and you were the first person I have seen that was human in all that time. Other than you the only people that I have seen are people who have turned into the creatures."

  "Have you learned anything more about the creatures?"

  "Just that they don't seem to like sunlight, ultraviolet light, heat or fire, and short of burning them they are pretty difficult to kill. Bullets only stun them unless you get a headshot. Luckily I was a big fan of watching zombie movies before all of this happened and I still am, it's a good place to get ideas on how to fight back. The White House has a pretty impressive DVD library and the Library of Congress also survived, which has preserved a large number of films. Plus I raided most of the DVD stores shortly after this. When you are the last person in the world you have a lot of time to catch up on your viewing habits."

  "I was never really a big fan of zombie movies and I never thought that I would be living in a zombie apocalypse scenario. I mean that was probably the last thing I ever expected when I went into space. I always considered the possibility that something weird could happen to me and that I would die up there, but I never thought that I would be the last woman on earth. Plus I was always more into vampires than zombies."

  "Well I guess they are kind of a little of both. I mean they drink blood but they also eat flesh and appear to be decomposing, but never seem to decompose completely, unfortunately. And they hate sunlight and heat. Maybe whoever created these creatures actually created them based on our own literature and cinema, sort of a biologically engineered horror creature to wipe us out with."

  "That's an interesting theory. One of the bad things about this enemy is that we know very little about them. We don't know who created these creatures or why or where they came from; all we know is that they apparently do not have our best interests at heart."

  "I guess it is like Stephen Hawking said that if there was intelligent life out there it might be in our best interest not to let them know we exist because they might not have positive intentions towards us. But there is one thing that we do know about these creatures."

  "What's that?"

  "Somebody out there has a much better space program than we do."

  "I actually had a bumper sticker on the space station that I brought back with me that said the dinosaurs didn't have a space program and look what happened to them. It seems like we didn't develop into space far enough before someone else came to colonize us. Who knows, maybe they do this to every planet they come across. It's not a very comforting thought to think of the possibility that there might be dozens of worlds overrun with rampaging zombie vampires, but as far as wiping out the human race goes, it's a pretty effective strategy."

  "Even if they don't follow up w
ith any more invasion I think the human race is effectively back to basics for a pretty long time. Even if we can rebuild civilization it doesn't look like we are going to be getting back into space anytime in the next millennium or two. You are probably the last astronaut, the last person to leave this earth for anytime in the next epoch of history."

  "There was another thing I had been meaning to ask you about."

  "What's that?"

  "The first time I ever saw any skeletons was floating in the reflecting pool. Were there any other survivors like that who lived to die after the bombardment?"

  "Those skeletons had actually been there for a while; I just never cleared them out. They must have died in the immediate aftermath of the bombardment. I would estimate almost everyone in the world probably died within a couple of hours of one another and then they woke up at around the same time. The creatures never seem to leave skeletons behind since every single person on the Earth turned into the creatures. I also think that these creatures tend to eat their dead as they are dissolving."

  "Eat their dead!"

  "And sometimes even other living members of their species."

  "So they cannibalize each other while they are still alive?"

  "Well I suppose it's arguable whether they are alive at all in the first place. I haven't exactly gotten to dissect any of them as it seems like their bodies dissolve once they are killed, another fairly efficient way of ensuring that the enemy learns nothing about your biology. But no matter how many of these creatures I kill they always come back."

  "But you said you try to keep the population down by burning them, do you not?"

  "Indeed I do, and that will probably answer your next question."

  "And what question is that?"

  "What do I do all day?"

  "That is a good question. What do you do all day?"

  "Why don't you come with me and find out?"

  Amy decided to take David up on his offer. After securing the White House they both armed themselves and began to go out on what David called patrol. Patrol consisted of them wandering around the nearby premises looking for any signs of the creatures so that they could kill them during the day while they were sleeping.

  "You can often tell where they have been by the trail of animals they leave behind," said David as he pointed to a couple of dead squirrels and chipmunks. "All you have to do is follow the breadcrumbs, so to speak, back to their sleeping quarters."

  The trail in question lead into a nearby library where David kicked in the door and Amy followed him in. She could see a small trail of blood stains on the carpeting of the floor.

  "Be very quiet in the library," said David.

  "I know, I used to work part-time in a library back in high school."

  "But I bet your high school library probably wasn't overrun with zombie vampires."

  "That's true; I can honestly say it wasn't."

  They found nothing on the first floor but they decided to go into the basement, which was a lot darker because there were only tiny windows. David flicked on the headlights on his hat which lit up the room brightly. As soon as they did that they heard a loud hissing noise and turned around. Facing them was a sight that they hadn't been expecting. It appeared to be one of the creatures, female, her breasts sort of decomposing off of her body, and suckling at her bosom appeared to be a decomposing baby.

  "It's breast-feeding!" Amy shouted, causing the creature to look over at them and begin baring its teeth and drooling.

  "Well there's something you don't see every day," David said as he laughed before taking out his flamethrower and lighting the mother and child on fire.

  "What the hell are you doing?!"

  "I am clearing the basement of hostile lifeforms."

  "But she was just breast-feeding."

  "She's a zombie or a vampire or whatever. If I didn't kill her she would have been eating us next and feeding us to her child."

  "Maybe we could have learned something about these creatures. Have you ever seen one with a baby like that before?"

  "I can't say I have, nor do I want to see it again. Now help me with this fire extinguisher so I can put the fire out before the entire library burns down."

  Amy took the fire extinguisher and began putting out the creatures that slowly began evaporating, leaving little sign that they ever existed in the first place.

  "Are you okay?" David asked her.

  "I am just a little shaken up is all, that was a shocking sight."

  "Indeed it was, but you have to be prepared for this type of thing. I guess I have just gotten used to these creatures by now, as crazy as that sounds. I guess in time you'll get used to them as well. Unfortunately this is the company we have to share the earth with now and they greatly outnumber us by hundreds of thousands of millions to one."

  "Maybe we should start heading back now."

  "Let's just finish checking the library and then we can go."

  The two of them went through the rest of the library and found no other signs of the creatures.

  "Let me just look at one last thing while we are here," said Amy as she ran over to the card catalogs and began looking through them. "This was so much easier when everything was computerized."

  "What are you looking for?" David asked.

  "Take a look for yourself," said Amy as she pulled up the card for vampires. "And I just have to look at the ones for zombies and I think I will be set to go."

  David began to laugh. "You are too much. I think I'm going to like having you around."

  Amy went to the library and gathered up some books and they began to head back to the White House with David laughing to himself the whole way.

  Chapter 18

  June 9, 2028

  Amy and David had grown together more closely over the last couple of weeks but still hadn't reached any level of real intimacy. David's germ phobia remained, although he didn't quite treat Amy like a contaminant or potential infector anymore, but he didn't want to get any closer than that and did not like being touched.

  Each day was fairly monotonous. They would eat, maybe watch some zombie and vampire movies together, and then they would go out on patrol before coming home and eating dinner and then turning in for the night. So far they had been completely protected from the creatures. The White House really was really well secured, so they probably could live out the remainder of their lives there if they wanted. Eventually supplies would probably run out, but for the near-term future it was a pretty good place to hold up.

  But Amy couldn't help wanting to find more survivors. She was glad for the companionship that David provided, but she didn't intend to just sit around doing nothing.

  "What are you doing so early in the morning," David said that morning as he found Amy tinkering with a communications device.

  "I am doing what I tried doing when I first came here. I want to find some way to contact any other potential survivors. I mean if the two of us survived there has to be others out there, simply has to be."

  "I've been waiting for two years Amy, two full years, and you are the first person who I ever came across here. And you were in outer space, so your situation was kind of special, as was mine. Even if there are other survivors out there they're probably so scattered and so far apart that our chances of finding them probably aren't that good, like looking for a needle in a haystack."

  "The chances that I would find you were pretty slim as well, yet it happened. There must have been others who were in shelters or who had some type of immunity to the virus. In every population there is a small percentage, even if it was only .000001% of the population that would still be enough for us to find each other and begin rebuilding."

  "I admire your optimism, but I do not share it. I really do feel that we might very well be the last two people left in the world and that civilization may very well end with us."

  "I can't simply give up that easily. Besides I made a promise to my friend that I would try to find her family in Los Angeles
."

  "Again I admire your optimism, but you know as well as I do that in all probability Los Angeles is a giant graveyard overrun with these creatures, just like everywhere else in the world. I don't say that to be depressing, I am just being realistic. And Los Angeles is really far away; we are perfectly safe here in the White House and probably will be indefinitely."

  "Well still, I have to keep trying." Amy began transmitting again before David put his hand down and turned off the communication device. "What are you doing?"

  "There is another thing. Once again I realize that I might tend to be the paranoid type, but if there are other people out there, do we really want them to know where we are?"

  "Of course we do!"

  "Once again with the optimism, I am certainly open to the possibility that there might be others out there, but we have no idea who survived or how."

  "What are you getting at?"

  "The aliens might not be the only one out there with malevolent intent towards us. Now maybe I have just watched too many monster movies, and that might not be the best way to base off a real life apocalyptic situation, but in times of chaos like this the humans tend to be the real monsters."

  "I can't believe that everyone out there is evil."

  "But we also can't afford to automatically trust everyone."

  "You trust me, don't you?"

  "You haven't given me any reason not to, but there could be a lot of ruthless people out there. And when they find out that we have control of the White House and a full stock of supplies, which could attract raiders. If there are other survivors out there they might not have any interest in rebuilding civilization and could just be looking for the best place to save themselves. We have a pretty good thing going here, I think you'll agree, and I don't want to jeopardize that. I probably have things better now than I did at any point in my life and I am perfectly comfortable with the current situation, I mean aside from the creatures."

  "I am fully grateful for your hospitality and allowing me to hold up here with you, but do you really intend to stay here for the rest of your natural life in this one small, okay, this one large house? I mean it is nice and all, but you can't live your whole life in a single building cowering in fear."