The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2020

by John Joseph Adams

  How long is it likely to take then? Six months? The better part of a decade?

  I stand on the roof deck of the Luxor casino parking garage, watching the lights that remain, and I wonder. I don’t even know enough to theorize, really.

  I’m not an engineer. I used to be a blackjack dealer.

  Now I am the only living human left on Earth.

  It’s not all bad. I don’t have to deal with:

  Death (except the possibility of my own, eventually).

  Taxes.

  Annoying holidays with my former extended family.

  Airplane lights crossing the desert sky.

  Chemtrails (okay, those were never real in the first place).

  Card counters.

  Maisie the pit boss. Thank God.

  My ex-husband. Double thank God.

  Well, of course I can’t know for sure that I’m the only living person. But for all practical purposes, I seem to be. Maybe Las Vegas is the only place that got wiped out. Maybe over the mountain, Pahrump is thriving.

  I don’t think so. I hear the abandoned dog packs howling in the night, and I’ve watched the lights go out, one by one by one.

  I feel so bad for those dogs. And even worse for all the ones trapped in houses when the end came. All the cats, guinea pigs, pet turtles. The horses and burros, at least, have a chance. Wild horses can survive in Nevada.

  There are so many of them. There’s nothing I can do.

  If there are any other humans surviving, they are far away from here, and I have no idea where to find them, or even how to begin looking. I have to get out of the desert, though, if I want to keep living. For oh, so many reasons.

  I can trust myself, at least. Trusting anybody else never got me where I wanted to be.

  Another thing I don’t know for sure, and can’t even guess at: Why.

  Not knowing why?

  That’s the real pisser.

  * * *

  Here is an incomplete list of things that do not exist anymore:

  Fresh-baked cookies (unless I find a propane oven and milk a cow and churn some butter and then bake them).

  Jesus freaks (I wonder how they felt when the Rapture happened and it turned out God was taking almost literally everybody? That had to be a little bit of a comedown).

  Domestic violence.

  Did I mention my ex-husband?

  There’s more than enough Twinkies just in the Las Vegas metro area to keep me in snack cakes until the saturated fat kills me. If I last long enough that that’s what gets me, I might even find out if they eventually go stale.

  * * *

  A problem with being in Las Vegas is getting back out of it again. Walking across a desert will kill me faster than snack cakes. And the highway is impassable with all the stopped and empty cars.

  Maybe I can find a monster truck and drive it over everything.

  More things that don’t exist anymore:

  Reckless driving.

  Speeding tickets.

  Points on your license.

  Worrying about fuel efficiency.

  Las Vegas Boulevard is dark and still. Nevertheless, I can’t make myself walk on the blacktop, even though the cars there are unmoving, bumper to bumper for all eternity. The Strip’s last traffic jam.

  There might be bodies in the cars. I don’t look.

  I don’t want to know.

  I don’t think there’s going to be anybody alive, but that might be worse. More dangerous, anyway.

  I mean, I think I’m the last. But I don’t know.

  That was also the reason I couldn’t make myself walk along the sidewalk. It was too exposed. The tall casinos were mostly designed so that their windows had views of something more interesting than hordes of pedestrians—hordes of pedestrians now long gone—but somebody might be up there, and somebody up there might spot me. A lone moving dot on a sea of silent asphalt.

  Lord, where have all the people gone?

  So I stick to the median. With its crape myrtle hedges and doomed palm trees already drooping in the failed irrigation to break up my outline. With the now pointless crowd control barriers to discourage jaywalkers from darting into traffic.

  Two more things:

  Traffic.

  Jaywalkers.

  Hey, and one more:

  Assholes.

  * * *

  I am half-hoping to find people. And I am 90 percent terrified of what they might do if I find them. Or if they find me first.

  I’m pretty sure this wasn’t actually the Rapture.

  Pretty sure.

  I keep trying to tell myself that there’s not a single damned person from the old world that I really miss. That it’s time I had some time alone, as the song used to go. It is nice not to be on anybody else’s schedule, or subject to anybody else’s expectations or demands. At least my ex-husband is almost certainly among the evaporated. That’s a load off my mind.

  I moved to Vegas, changed my name by sealed court order, abandoned a career I worked for ten years to get, and became a casino dealer in order to hide from him. Considering that, it’s not a surprise to find myself relieved that whatever ends up causing me to look over my shoulder from now on, it won’t be Paul.

  I got the cozy apocalypse that was supposed to be the best-case-apocalypse-scenario—wish fulfillment—complete with the feral dogs that howl in the night.

  But it doesn’t feel like wish fulfillment. It feels like . . . being alone on the beach in winter. I’m lonely, and I miss . . . well, I already left behind everybody I loved. But leaving somebody behind is not the same thing as knowing they are gone.

  There’s potential space, and there’s empty space.

  Maybe that’s why I’m still here. Nobody thought to tap me on the shoulder and say, “Hey, Izzy, let’s go,” because I’d already abandoned all of them to save my own life one time.

  Hah. There I go again. Making things about me that aren’t.

  I thought I was used to being lonely, but this is a whole new level of alone. I feel like I should be paralyzed by survivor guilt. But I am a rock. I am an island.

  Simon

  Garfunkel

  Lying to yourself is, however, still alive and well.

  * * *

  The gun is heavy. Cold, blue metal. It feels about twice its size.

  I find it under the seat of a cop car with the driver’s door left open. The keys are in the ignition. The dome light has long since burned out, and the open-door dinger has dinged itself into silence.

  It’s a handgun. A revolver. Old school. There is a holster to go with it, but no gunbelt. There are six bullets in the cylinder.

  The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department.

  Crooked cops.

  Throwaway guns.

  I unbuckle my belt, thread it through the loops on the holster, and hang it at my hip.

  There are plenty of rattlesnakes, still.

  Antivenin.

  Emergency rooms.

  There are plenty of antibiotics. And pain medication. And canned peaches.

  And a nice ten-speed mountain bike that I liberate from a sporting goods place, along with one of those trailers designed for pulling your kid or dog along. I’ve never been much of an urban biker, preferring trails, but it wasn’t like I would have to contend with traffic. And it seems like the right tool for weaving in and out of rows of abandoned cars.

  I pick up a book on bike repair too, and some tire patches and spare tubes and so on. Plus saddlebags and baskets. And a lot of water bottles.

  It turns out that one thing the zombie-apocalypse movies got really wrong was the abundance of stockpiled resources available after a population of more than seven billion people just . . . ceases to exist.

  There’s plenty of stuff to go around when there’s no “around” for it to go. Until the stuff goes bad, anyway.

  That’s the reason I want to get out of the desert before summer comes. Things will last longer in colder places, with less murderous UV.
>
  * * *

  Things that apparently do still exist: at least one other human being.

  And he is following me.

  He picks me up at a Vons. I’m in the pasta aisle. The rats have started gnawing into boxes, but the canned goods are relatively fine. And if you can ignore the silence of the gaming machines and the smell of fermenting fruit, rotten meat, and rodent urine, it’s not that different than if I were shopping at 2:00 a.m. in the old world.

  I’m crouched down, filling my backpack with Beefaroni and D batteries from the endcap, when I hear footsteps. It’s daylight outside, but it’s dark inside the store. I turn off my LED flashlight. My heart contracts inside me, shuddering jolts of blood through my arteries. The rush and thump fills my ears. I strain through them for the sounds that mean life or death: the scrape or squeak of boot sole on tile, the rattle of packages.

  My hands shake as I zip the backpack inch by silent inch. I stand. The straps creak. I can’t be sure if I have managed not to tremble the bag into a betraying clink. One step, then another. Sideways, slipping, setting each foot down carefully so it doesn’t make a sound.

  As I get closer to the front of the store (good) the ambiance grows brighter (bad). I hunker by the side of a dead slot machine, shivering. From where I crouch, I can peek around and see a clear path to the door.

  The whole way is silhouetted against the plate glass windows. The pack weighs on my shoulders. If I leave it, I’m not really leaving anything. I can get another, and all the Chef Boyardee I want. But it’s hard to abandon resources.

  And hey, the cans might stop a bullet.

  Don’t hyperventilate.

  Easier said than done.

  Sliding doors stopped working when the store lights did. Too late, I realize there’s probably a fire door in the back I could have slipped out of more easily. In the old world, that would have been alarmed . . . but would the alarm even work anymore?

  There is a panic bar on the front doors. I crane over my shoulder, straining for motion, color, any sign of the person I am certain I heard.

  Nothing.

  Maybe I’m hallucinating.

  Maybe he’s gone to the back of the store.

  I nerve myself and hit the door running. I got it open on the way in, so I know it isn’t locked. It flies away from the crash bar—no subtlety there—and I plunge through, sneakers slapping the pavement. The parking lot outside is flat and baking, even in September. The sun hits my ballcap like a slap. Rosebushes and trees scattered in the islands are already dead from lack of water. The rosemary bushes and crape myrtles look a little sad, but they are holding on.

  I sprint toward them. Now the pack makes noise, the cans within clanking and thumping on each other—and clanking and thumping against my ribs and spine. I’ll have a suite of bruises because of them. But I left my bike on the kickstand in the fire lane, and—wonder of wonders—it’s still there. I throw myself at it and swing a leg through, pushing off with my feet before I ever touch the pedals. I miss my first push and skin the back of my calf bloody on the serrated grip.

  I curse, not loud but on that hiss of breath you get with shock and pain. The second time, I manage to get my heel on the pedal. The bike jerks forward with each hard pump.

  I squirt between parked cars. As my heart slows, I let myself think I’ve imagined the whole thing. Until the supermarket doors crash open, and a male voice shrill with desperation yells, “Miss! Come back! Miss! Don’t run away from me! Please! I’m not going to hurt you!”

  And maybe he’s not. But I’m not inclined to trust. Trusting never did get me anywhere I wanted to be.

  I push down and pedal harder. I don’t coast.

  He only shouts after me. He doesn’t shoot. And I don’t look back.

  * * *

  Now that he knows I exist, he’s not going to stop looking.

  I know this the way I know my childhood street address.

  And why would he stop? People need people, or so we’re always told. Being alone—really alone, completely alone—is a form of torture.

  To be utterly truthful, there’s a part of me that wants to go looking for him. Part of me that doesn’t want to be alone anymore either.

  The question I have to ask myself is whether that lonely part of me is stronger than the feral, sensible part that cautions me to run away. To run, and keep running.

  Because it’s the apocalypse. And I’m not very big, or a trained fighter. And because of another thing that doesn’t exist anymore:

  Social controls.

  Dissociation, though—that I’ve got plenty of.

  * * *

  He is going to come looking for me. Because of course he will. I hear him calling after me for a long time as I ride away. And I know he tries to follow me because I follow him.

  We’re the last two people on Earth and how do you get more Meet Cute than that? We’ve all stayed up late watching B movies in the nosebleed section of the cable channels and we’ve all read TV Tropes and we all know how this story goes.

  But my name isn’t Eve. It’s Isabella. And I have an allergy to clichés.

  Dating websites.

  Restraining orders.

  Twitter block lists.

  Domestic violence shelters.

  I stalk him. I’ll call it what it is.

  It’s easy to find him again: he’s so confident and fearless that he’s still wandering around in the same neighborhood trying to get my attention.

  I mean, first I go back to my current lair and get ready to run.

  I load up the bike trailer with my food and gear, and flats and flats and flats of water. My sun layers and my hat go inside and I zip the whole thing up.

  Then I hide it, and I check again to be sure my gun is loaded.

  And then I go and stalk him.

  * * *

  He’s definitely a lot bigger than me. But he doesn’t look a damned thing like my ex, which is a point in his favor.

  And he isn’t trying in the least to be sneaky. He’s just walking down the sidewalk, swerving to miss the cars that rolled off the road when their drivers disappeared, pulling a kid’s little red wagon loaded with supplies. He’s armed with a pistol on his belt, but so am I. And at least he’s not strung all over with bandoliers and automatic weapons. Plus, there are enough of those hungry, terrified feral dog packs around that a weapon isn’t a bad idea.

  I wonder how long it will be before the cougars move back down from the mountains and start eating them all.

  The circle of life.

  Poor dogs.

  They were counting on us, and look where that got them.

  * * *

  The only other living human being (presumed) is wearing a dirty T-shirt (athletic gray), faded jeans, and a pair of high-top skull-pattern Chucks that I appreciate the irony of, even while knowing his feet must be roasting in them. I make him out to be about twenty-five. His hair is still pretty clean-cut under his mesh-sided brimmed hat, but he’s wearing about two weeks of untrimmed beard. Two weeks is about how long it’s been since the world ended.

  He calls out as he walks along. How can anyone be so unafraid to attract attention? So confident of taking up all that space in the world? Like he thinks he has a right to exist and nobody is going to come take it away from him.

  He’s so relaxed. It scares me just watching him.

  I do notice that he doesn’t seem threatening. There’s nothing sinister, calculated, or menacing about this guy. He keeps pushing his hat up to mop the sweat from under it with an old cotton bandanna. He doesn’t have a lot of situational awareness, either. Even with me orbiting him a couple of blocks off on the mountain bike, he doesn’t seem to notice me watching. I’m staying under cover, sure. But the bike isn’t silent. It has a chain and wheels and joints. It creaks and rattles and whizzes a little, like any bicycle.

  Blood has dried, itchy and tight-feeling, on the back of my calf. The edge of my sock is stiff. I drink some of the water in my bottle, though not a
s much as I want to.

  It’s getting on toward evening and he’s walking more directly now, in less of a searching wander, when I make up my mind. He seems to be taking a break from searching for me, at least for the time being. He’s stopped making forays into side streets, and he’s stopped calling out.

  I cycle hard on a parallel street to get in front of him, and from a block away I show myself.

  He stops in his tracks. His hands move away from his sides and he drops the little red wagon handle. My right hand stays on the butt of my holstered gun with the six bullets in it.

  “Hi,” he says, after an awkward pause. He pitches his voice to carry. “I’m Ben.”

  “Hi,” I call back. “I’m Isabella.”

  “You came back.”

  I nod. Never in my memory—probably in living memory—has it been quiet enough in this city that you could hear somebody clearly if they called to you from this far away. But it’s that quiet now. Honeybees buzz on the crape myrtles. I wonder if they’re Africanized.

  “Nice bike, Isabella.”

  “Thanks.” I let the smirk happen. “It’s new.”

  He laughs. Then he bends down and picks up the handle of his little red wagon. When he straightens, he lets his hands hang naturally. “Have you seen anybody else?”