A mad rush came over him, and he decided to take some steps. He began to move carefully, willing one leg to land in front of the other, holding firmly to the cylinder.
So it went for two more hours. Another step. Two in succession. A step taken without holding on to the cylinder. Disaster averted by the barest margin when he stumbled and managed, by sacrificing the muscles in his arm, to snag a nearby post. That time, he was sure he felt something tear in his forearm. He progressed slowly and painfully. By the end of the afternoon, he was walking confidently, if sluggishly. He knew that what he’d accomplished should have been impossible, but he also knew that his only alternative was to lie down and die.
Unlike the process of learning to walk, the exploration of the facility took him comparatively little time. He began with the cylinders nearest to his. Both were occupied by bodies that lay peacefully within. If they’d had a pulse, Gabe would have sworn they were asleep. But they didn’t. He paused to steal a second robe from a body just about his size. It mitigated the cold only slightly.
Corpses occupied most of the other chambers and the rest were empty. Only a token few had managed to lift their arms or struggle with the lids before their hearts expired from the strain. Fewer still—Gabe saw two in this room – had actually managed to exit their cylinders and die on the concrete ground.
By the time Gabe had investigated a small fraction of the chamber, he was sick of it. There’s no one else alive in here, he thought. It was an irrational thought, and he knew it, but he couldn’t escape it.
Suddenly, the oppressive sensation of being locked inside a huge, dimly lit morgue became too much. What if the lights went out? A wave of claustrophobia washed over him, and he scanned the distance for some kind of exit.
One of the support columns held a door, near enough that he managed to reach it in a relatively short time. It had a large push handle that opened the door without protest at his first attempt.
Once his eyes had become accustomed to the bright light beyond, he saw a circular staircase that wound its way along the inside of the column’s walls. The lighting, which had seemed unbearable just a moment before, consisted of weak emergency lights as well—glaringly white in place of the red from the main chamber.
The stairs looked daunting; he made it to the top after only three rest stops. He counted himself fortunate that they only ascended one level before reaching a corridor.
To his right, the corridor buried itself in a never-ending line of lights. In the other direction, Gabe saw the unmistakable outline of a tunnel entrance, with daylight beyond. His heart leapt. There should be people out there. Someone who could help him, and maybe someone who could help anyone else that might still be alive down there.
On the other hand, he knew that the facility could very easily be miles from civilization. Going out might expose him to dangers he wasn’t in any condition to deal with, plus he’d have no idea which way to go.
He shrugged it off. He would just have to make the best decisions he could. He wouldn’t, in his condition, get too far from the entrance.
***
He was lost.
There was no doubt. After ranging a little beyond the valley where the tunnel opened up, he’d somehow gotten turned around among the trees. It galled him to realize that he had absolutely no sense of direction. He’d moved slowly, and had not gone too far—and yet he’d gone far enough that he didn’t know the way back.
He’d been walking for two hours. Judging by the temperature, it was late autumn, which was a dangerous time to be out and about in the Canadian wilderness. Low clouds formed a gray wall seemingly an arm’s length away from him. The first wet, large snowflakes of what promised to be a massive blizzard landed on the thin cotton of his double-layered robe. He was soaked through and shivering in ten minutes.
Nothing he’d ever known before had prepared him for this. He’d been just another office worker in just another high-rise office building. He lived in a safe, structured world in which no one ever went hungry and physical danger was unheard of.
Of course he had friends who liked to go out into the wilderness beyond the pseudo-city and perform feats of physical deprivation like camping out. They had no access to adequate heat sources for days. Gabe sneered at these empty shows of bravado. With the careful regulation of the cyberworld, what possible value could those activities have? They were empty pastimes at best.
Now he found himself wishing that he’d gone on at least one of these trips, or even listened at the office when his friends discussed the techniques. Any knowledge would have been infinitely better than the nothing he was currently armed with.
He needed no special knowledge to know if he didn’t find somewhere to get in out of the snow, and didn’t find it very soon, he would be dead before nightfall. It was as simple as that.
Gabe continued to put one foot in front of the other. Ahead of him, the afternoon was as dark as night. His hopes that this would allow him to spot some source of light, some beacon in the distance, shattered. All that lay in the darkness ahead were more trees, dimly visible triangular silhouettes.
He slipped and sprawled into the snow. Although he’d learned how to walk years ago, now that he was doing it outside, it seemed different somehow. Never in his life had his muscles felt so weak, never before had each movement produced indescribable pain. Yet he knew that he should be grateful. No one else he’d seen had the strength to make it out of their tube. He might be the last human being alive on the planet. He was almost certainly the last one left in Toronto.
Others, when the time had come to use their muscles, had found that the movements were alien to them, or that the muscles simply snapped when motion was attempted. Most, however, hadn’t even made it that far. Of every ten bodies Gabe had found, nine of them were still lying down. They lay precisely as they’d been before things changed, not a hair out of place. The shock had stopped their hearts instantly. Others had barely managed to lift an arm or a leg. The strongest lay dead outside their chambers.
Gabe felt like a superman among the others. He’d actually been able to stand and walk and keep it up for hours. One in a million. Actually, one in one-and-a-half million – he was the legendary “last man standing.”
The wind picked up, threw him to the ground and drove wet snow into his eyes. No matter his fortune or genetics he would join them in eternal rest very shortly if he didn’t get to work.
His legs wouldn’t keep him upright in the wind so he crawled on with throbbing knees. He trudged on only because he refused to give up, not out of some sense of purpose or direction Despite not even looking forward—he ran into the concrete structure. Sheer doggedness and blind luck led him to a building.
A wave of excitement powered him to the entrance. He collapsed onto the foul-smelling rubble on the floor, thankful to be out of the wind and snow. He lay there for an eternity, catching his breath, making small movements, trying, and failing, to get comfortable. The walk had cramped his muscles. It was a completely new sensation for him.
His stomach ached in a different way—a hollowness, not painful, but unpleasant and urgent. He lay there, wondering what it could be for a few minutes. He didn’t remember having hurt his stomach, and besides, this wasn’t the same kind of discomfort that was present in his legs. It was different, more as if his body needed something.
Hunger, he realized at last. This was his body’s way of telling him to eat. He’d been fasting since he awoke, he wasn’t in great shape, and he’d spent all day exerting himself harder than he’d ever done before. It was night time now, making it unsurprising that he felt a need for food the likes of which he’d never previously experienced. The sheer urgency of it reminded him that he’d never been hungry back in his previous world. No one was ever hungry there. But it was no use; there was no going back to that, ever.
A sound outside the concrete enclosure brought him back to reality. Something was making a high-pitched scratching sound near the door. He peered cautiously o
ut.
A darker shadow in the night seemed to be using some of its extremities to attack a tree. Some kind of animal scratching a mark into the trunk, he reasoned. Gabe watched, mesmerized. This was a real live animal doing something that only its instincts told it to do. Truly in the wild, and believing itself unobserved. How many of today’s humans could say that they’d ever witnessed such a thing?
Then Gabe remembered his hunger. If he could sneak up on the animal, he should be able to eat it, or at least find a source of food. Where there were animals, there had to be food. It didn’t look that large to him, and besides, he knew that following the population explosion of the nineteenth through twenty-first centuries, animals had come to fear humanity. So the animal would die or it would run.
Gabe crept confidently out of the building, and was unpleasantly surprised to encounter the whirlwind of teeth and claws that greeted him.
***
Sunset.
The irony wasn’t lost on him. He’d been the recipient of one of the best educations one could get on Earth. He could recite entire reams of Yeats. He could do differential equations in his head—all right, he couldn’t do differential equations in his head, but neither could anyone else. And none of that would get him anywhere, because he simply knew nothing about how to deal with a Canadian snowstorm or animal damage.
A rueful chuckle turned into a cough, a racking cough that lasted and lasted. On recovering, he was a lot less inclined to think it funny, and much more worried about the immediate future. He knew he was hurt. Whatever it was that had attacked him had smelled of wet hair. A wolf? No. It had to have been something bigger. A bear, perhaps, or some sort of land-bound whale.
Gabe smiled again, careful not to breathe too hard. He knew he was being unreasonable. If he’d been attacked by a bear, or even a wolf, he’d have a lot more to show for it than a few infected scratches. Or, more accurately, a lot less. His half-eaten carcass would be feeding whatever carrion-eaters inhabited the region.
The remains of his feeble attempt at building a fire lay on the ground beside him: a few moist twigs, a circle of stones, a shard of rock that he’d hoped would make a spark. Yeah, right.
But what else could he do? He’d been lucky to find shelter in what looked like the remains of an old one-story building of some sort. The door and windows were long gone. Vegetation covered the interior, and a tree had managed to break a hole in the roof but the concrete walls had survived the centuries well enough to offer shelter from the winter wind that seemed to blow right through him. It didn’t help that he wore nothing but a couple of flimsy birthing-chamber gowns—his own and that of one of the corpses he’d found inside.
He had no idea where he was, physically. His entire life had taken place in the city of Toronto. He assumed that he must be somewhere near the ancient city itself but couldn’t find more than this one battered structure. Everything else seemed to consist of wilderness. Small, grassy clearings and huge, forbidding forests.
There was nothing he could do to survive. Snow made tracking animals easy, but his physical condition made catching them a pipe dream. Even the ones that hadn’t fought back had loped contemptuously away. Maybe it was better that way—he didn’t relish the idea of having to eat something raw. The leaves in the shelter tasted terrible.
He sagged against the wall, feeling the bitter cold lance through him. He might not be exposed to the wind, but the nighttime temperatures were lower than he could survive on a long-term basis. He’d only lived through the previous night because he’d stayed awake and walked, but had paid a stiff penalty: he’d felt his almost never-used muscles flare with pain as he paced, and, every once in a while, a small cramp would send up a sudden jolt of pain. It had paid off, though. An eternity later, dawn and the glorious heat-giving sun had reddened the eastern horizon.
It was a pity he wouldn’t be able to find any other people. A pity that no one would ever know that there had been a survivor in Toronto.
He didn’t have the strength to pace tonight. And that meant that he’d die. He coughed a little.
Maybe that, too, was for the best.
Gabe laid his head on the ground for the final time in the barren, empty night.
***
Miles below Gabe’s stiffening body, in the bunker where the last working computer on Earth resided, activity flared. After more than four hundred years, the life support system that kept Toronto’s population fed and connected to their cyberworld had finally broken down completely. The dead still littered bunkers around the remains of the city. The mainframe that ran the simulation for them still functioned.
Suddenly faced with an excess of unused capacity, the computer considered its options. Even with its staggering processing power, this took quite some time to do. With computations complete, the artificial intelligence decided that life had to go on and began to work to reestablish things exactly at the time of failure.
As Gabe’s eyes closed for the final time, the world as he’d known it before resumed.
***
Gabe decided that he must have imagined the slight flicker. Camille looked at him.
“Taking sustenance with you on Friday night seems unnecessary. Avatars do not need to eat,” she said.
“That sounds logical,” he replied.
As Gabe returned to his own desk, he was accompanied by the satisfied sensation that logic had been restored.
So why did he feel that something was missing?
Death, Inc.
Lana Cooper
Editor: Has everything been spoiled by corporate greed?
DISCLAIMER
The views and opinions expressed in the following conversations are those of the individual persons, supernatural entities, and anthropomorphic manifestations of universal constructs interviewed here and do not necessarily reflect the official policies or positions of the New World Order Company (NewCo) or its parent company, Seven Deadly Sins Limited (7D Ltd.). These views and opinions are solely those of the interviewees, especially with regard to Pestilence, War, and Famine as individuals, collectively referred to as "The Horsemen," "The Three Horsemen," or "The Three Horsemen of the Apocalypse" (DBA Death, Inc.).
***
Kippie Daniels, NewCo PR Assistant and Personal Assistant to Pestilence, War, and Famine…in her own words on: The Three Horsemen
When I first found out I was going to be the personal assistant to the Horsemen and help with their PR operations, I couldn't believe it. Here I was: little old me, fresh off an internship with NewCo and they hired me outright to work personally with one of their top executive teams. I'd heard stories about the Horsemen since I was a little girl, but this was amazing!
It was even more amazing to be working with them. When you get to know the Horsemen, you can't help but want everyone else to get to know them the same way you do.
For starters, everyone thinks there are Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. There aren’t. War, Famine, Pestilence—they're just three different entities that make up one: Death.
First and foremost, Pestilence is a mother. Really. She is. Her children are (literally) diseases. And boy howdy, does she care for those diseases! Not so much for the people they infect, but the diseases themselves. Her desk has pictures of her kids all over it.
You might not know this, but Pestilence won back-to-back-to-back Mother of the Year Awards in the 1330s. She was so proud when little Bubonic Plague ran up and presented her with that trophy the first time! She won again in the ’80s when AIDS really came into her own.
Pestilence is close pals with War and Famine. War and Famine don’t really get along, but Pestilence is the buffer between the partners. She gets along with everyone! She is such a nurturer. There's not a mean bone in her body. The only person Pestilence holds a grudge against is Jesus. I know—just about everyone likes Jesus, but Pestilence took it really hard when He virtually eradicated her son Leprosy.
Other than that, Pestilence is super-sweet.
And Famine is
super nice, too! I know this is going to sound like such an ironic cliché, but Famine loves to cook. As far as Death, Inc. goes, Famine’s the easiest one to get along with. He doesn’t eat, but he loves to make yummy homemade meals for everyone.
Famine's probably the least talkative of the bunch, but when you do get him chatting, it feels like you've been best friends with him for years. He's really smart and he's really thoughtful.
It takes a while to warm up to War, but once you get to know her, you just want to give her big, squishy hugs. When we were first introduced at NewCo, she kept giving me these looks like she wanted to mount my head on her trophy wall.
Before I really understood War, I was terrified of her. She was always throwing fits around the office, clomping around and yelling a lot.
One day, War totally freaked out on me for stapling her daily briefing report instead of using a paperclip and hurled a stapler at me. War started screaming, "You like staples so much? Here's a whole bunch of ’em for ya, Kippie!"
Fortunately, I ducked and missed getting beaned in the noggin with a glittery pink Swingline. War got called into HR over the incident, but Famine saw me having a panic attack afterward in the breakroom. Famine came over and said to me, “Don’t take it personally. War is always suspicious of new people and has issues with pretty much everyone."
Then Famine told me that War doesn't have much of a non-job-related outlet for her aggression these days, so that's why she's such a B-I-T-C-H. Before the New World Order, her hobby used to be writing hurt/comfort genre slash fiction on Sci Fi geek message boards. Famine said, "With the Apocalypse on the horizon, War doesn't really have time to get all of her anger issues out writing weird crossover stories about Severus Snape making out with a wounded Mr. Spock. War's breathing down everyone's necks these days. She's pissy with everyone. But don't let her get to you.”
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