My Time Alone

Along a dusty, old, deserted highway walked a man, completely alone. He looked to be mid-thirties, with rough, unkempt hair and a scraggly beard that hadn’t seen a shower or shave for a long time. His skin and hair were bleached by the stark radiation of the sun; on his back was slung a pack of supplies. Dwindling amounts of edible food and bottled water, A laptop and many, many scavenged battery packs, as well as a stuffed doll in the visage of a wolf with the tag still on, the name “C H L O E” scribbled on the tag in jet black marker and a small, battered pistol with a box of bullets.

The man spotted a city ahead of him, one he had travelled to only twice far back in his past, before the chaos had occurred. He didn’t bother to rush to the place, but instead kept up his natural pace and eventually staggered into an old, forgotten, cracked hotel building. He checked the place for power and when he found it had none, he grunted in dissatisfaction and found out how to get it back up and running. It may have taken him some time, but that was all he truly had now. Time, it seemed, had vanished from his life.

He returned to the lobby of the hotel, back to where he had left his laptop, knowing no-one would steal it. Who was there to steal it now? He started the laptop up, waited for it to load the correct program he wanted, and started to record a message, one he knew would send to the entire world.

’Entry 192

Name: Felix Chapman.

Date: 13th April, 4030.

Location: Sydney, Australia.

Is there anyone out there? I’m broadcasting this on every signal, in every language, to every country. If there is anyone out there, anyone at all. Please respond. I might be the last human left for all I know. I don’t want to believe that any longer. I want company, friendship, love, talk…. They say that people are meant to have companionship of some kind, or that we can’t survive as a species without it. For so long I thought that wasn’t true. The way the world seemed to be working. All our fights, all those wars, even our technology seemed to separate us from each other. But the truth is we do need each other. I see that now. My name is Felix Chapman, and I believe I am the only human left. If there is anyone out there, please… prove me wrong. Find me. Help me.’

The benighted Felix turned the program off and started looking for a relatively comfortable place to sleep. It was now well and truly dark and, while he knew he was alone and possibly the only human left on the planet, he still locked the front door to the room he had decided to sleep in for the night and made sure that any other entrances to the room at the old, wrecked hotel were actually covered or blocked. He was smart in this as there were wild creatures that lurked the night, ones that knew the human population was now incredibly vastly depleted. He heard the distinct howl of a hungry dingo somewhere in the distance and made sure his gun was close if he needed it. Soon he was sleeping, fitfully and unsure of what future there was for him now.

~5 YEARS, 40 DAYS AND 22 HOURS IN THE PAST. ~

Felix Chapman was graduating in the Australian army. He was, this year, turning twenty-nine years old and for the past two years had been training hard and smart with his army ‘brethren’ as part of a regime that would, hopefully, protect Australia from any armies around the world when the Australian army needed them. Felix was a strong, smart, quick, and almost entirely heroic individual, and the Australian recruitment center were very happy to see him graduate. He beamed with pride as a medal of honor was pinned to his breast. He and thirty others at exactly 5 pm on a Friday afternoon had graduated together honorably and with family and friends watching proudly.

That night as part of a celebration, the army allowed drinking and partying just in the dormitories. Everyone went as nuts as they could, considering they were, after all, in the Australian army. Some high ranking officials kept a strict eye on the celebration, of course, to make sure everything went alright and no-one got hurt. Felix’s friends poured sticky juice all over each other as a way of fooling around as the festivities continued through the night.

However, everything went south in the worst way come nine PM. Drunk off their collective asses, several of Felix’s friends decided, wouldn’t it be a lark to just lock Felix in the bomb shelter and make him believe everyone else was getting bombed to shit? Felix didn’t really know what was going on, and it didn’t help that he was drunk as a skunk either and had barely any clue where he was or even who he really was, as alcohol had that effect on some people. However when he heard the bomb siren sound and saw some men starting to panic and carry on, he knew something serious was going on. So he did the only thing his barely conscious mind knew what to do, he followed protocol and ran down to the bomb shelter. He tried to call out to his friends to do the same but, unfortunately, his yells only came out as unrecognizable slurs and eventually he found himself slumped on one of the many beds supplied in the bomb shelter along with a few empty bags. The world was spinning around him, and from all the noise above, it sounded like everything was going to Hell in a handbasket. Woozily, he wondered what he’d done to deserve this, before vomiting noisily and passing out.

No-one could have known what was going on outside during that time, or what exactly caused it to begin with, but over the course of the night the bomb shelter was bombarded with terrifying thuds, screams of orders coming from many different people, a few screams, the sounds of tires screeching and concrete breaking apart, until at exactly eight am the next morning everything became dead quiet. The door to the bomb shelter, although locked by Felix’s friends, had now been cracked open a bit and some sunlight now shone into the room.

Felix awoke that morning with a hell of a hangover and only a very woozy memory of last night, but once he’d become fully coherent, he instantly recalled the panic of the night. In a hysterical dash, he ran out of the bomb shelter, mind racing with plans to see if his friends had survived. “Abram! Oscar! John! Gerald! Sound off! What is your situation?!” He desperately shouted, trying to search for any sign of his friends. It was roughly than his now less woozy mind picked up on major details around him. Everything was in a complete mess. Trucks were smashed into walls, some tanks had collided with one another, blood was spattered around the place on cars, on windows, on poles. It was utterly devastated. Felix tried to push past some debris to get into the building he and his companions were only partying in the night before, thinking that maybe someone might be in there. However, the luck from whence his name sprang had run out: there was nobody alive within the compound. Everyone had become nothing but meat and blood, frozen in ghastly positions with faces twisted into eternal screams. At that moment it felt like an axe had split his heart apart, and Felix dropped to his knees on the cracked ground with an immense cry of anguish. He knew some of these men, he was friends with some and they all had family and friends outside of the army as well. How was he meant to tell anyone about what happened? There was no-one there to report to, no-one to ask for help from.

He recognized the badge of a general and choked to see what remained of that general. Barely any flesh seen, and what could be found remained around the facial area. “General Buckley… good god what the hell happened to everyone…” Felix managed a hoarse whisper.

All he could do for the next hour was scream incoherently, wailing with the anguish of every last dead man’s final moments. It took every ounce of his mind to keep him from going completely insane and possibly committing suicide as he thumped his fists against anything he saw around him. There was no-one around to inform him what happened or who was the enemy in this case. He searched the whole compound four times over to make sure he was right in assuming everyone was dead, and it was true. Not a single soul remained alive, except Felix. What could he do now? The first thought that came to his mind was that he would have to contact someone outside of the base for help or possibly an update on what was going on. He tried to get his mind clear, tried to tell himself to be brave and calm about it all, and managed to find his way to the radio office to contact someone, anyone, about the situation.

~ PRESENT DAY ~

Felix Chapman awoke to the sound of cracking glass and a galah calling on the ledge of the building he had slept inside. He brushed himself off, as he was covered in dust and a bit of debris, and he managed to push himself up from the ground so he was standing up normally, as sometimes he found himself contemplating whether he should even bother getting up at all. Isolation on earth is terrible and terrifying, and since Felix had found himself being the last human on earth, or at least he believed he was until there was proof otherwise, he was constantly getting bad thoughts that could lead him to suicide.

“Ah shit! Son of a bitch mozzies! Get the fuck off me!” He grouched, slapping at a few mosquitoes angrily as he tried to look through his pack to see if he had any food. A few bits of cereal in a wrecked cereal box would have to do, but he had no fresh milk or a bowl to put them in. That didn’t matter, he was going to eat something and survive somehow.

Felix’s mission now was pretty simple, however after 5 years of travelling across countries in any way he could, trying to survive any type of harsh scenarios the different countries had within them. Australia, for instance, had both harsh country with barely any water and a lot of sun AND also rainforests of unpredictable natures. Felix tried to be as prepared for all situations as he could, with collecting as much gear and being mentally prepared for risks that could claim his life, however there was still one main issue that made his mission seem impossible.

There was absolutely no sign of human life anywhere he had looked.

And although he had not been to all countries on Earth in his five years, the countries he went to he made absolutely certain he left messages pleading for any humans to make themselves known. Every message he left always being available in different languages, playing over and over, in the hopes of informing any living humans of his desperate need for companionship.

Felix finished eating his small handful of cereals and then munched on an apple for extra measure, and before he left the room he checked the room for any type of food or water that may be good to take with him. Not finding anything, he walked out of the room and locked the door behind him, giving it a marker to say to any possible humans that someone had been there, and to give hope to the next human that might come by.

When he arrived at the entrance to the dilapidated hotel, he gave a nod to a mannequin that he himself had set up, a while back now, that he pretended was the hotel staff. “Until next time, James! Keep my bed clean! And do try and do something about the blasted mosquitoes.”

He knew there would be no response. He wasn’t completely insane. The mannequins he had set up in different places around the world were a reminder to himself what it was like to actually converse. He had no emotional or sexual or physical attachment to the mannequins, but at the same time he would check up on them as often as he could to see if, possibly, someone had perhaps physically moved the mannequin somehow, in some way.

Felix made his way along the once packed streets of Sydney, pushing aside debris from the many wrecked cars and other transport vehicles left behind to decay. He didn’t think it was worth calling out for help, but he tried a few times just to break the silence. Still no response, as he suspected. He looked underneath some fallen debris from skyscrapers and checked in cars, wrecked or not, for any sign of humans, whether dead or not. Still nothing, just like the last time he had travelled through Sydney, seven months back.

Felix thumped his fist on top of the old Triton truck he was inspecting in frustration. How could there be LITERALLY no trace of human bodies ANYWHERE? It just didn’t make sense. He remembered back when he first came out of that bomb shelter and had seen many dead bodies around him, but after exploring around that area and the town nearby he was shocked to find that one day the bodies had just… vanished. Even blood was gone. The only human, Felix seemed to conclude, alive or dead left on Earth was him. But how?