The Waste

Alexe sat on the bench, and looked up at the trees in silence. Everything was done in silence these days; at first she'd taken some degree of pleasure in talking to herself, in singing loudly without fear of being heard. But soon she grew tired of the sound of her own voice.

The trees whispered their secrets to the wind, and Alexe felt a sense of privilege at being around to hear it.

She hadn't seen anyone else in The Time Since She Woke Up. She'd found a calendar, that day, in one of the shops that felt vaguely familiar. It had been 2 months since that day.

That was the weird thing - or one of the weird things - all the shops were unlocked. And the houses. Even though they were completely empty. Or at least Alexe felt that it must be weird; something about it felt wrong, although all of her memories since The Time She Woke Up seemed hazy and blurred, like a mirror all fogged up after a shower. Oh that was weird too - there was hot water in all the houses she'd been to. Even though there was no one to pay the - what was it? - the gas bill?

She tried not to dwell on not being able to remember much. The first few days had been a wreck of vomiting out of sheer terror, like some kind of sickness that seemed to poison her very veins. Every time she spent too long trying to remember what her mother looked like, or where she used to live, or even how old she was if it was a bad day, made her throat feel like it was closing. Alexe knew it wasn't right though; she wasn't supposed to be here, alone, the last human on earth.

When she had woken up that first time, she thought she was dead. She woke with tears in her eyes, like her body knew she was all alone before her eyes had told her. And she felt such an itch to move, to flee, the second her feet touched a floor, that she couldn't look back even once she'd left the house, wearing clothes that did not feel like her own.

So she kept moving, from town to town, walking. She couldn't remember exercising much before The Time She Woke Up, but her muscles quickly adapted to the long stretches between rest. She had camping equipment that she'd just breezed into some sports shop and taken, along with hiking shoes and a waterproof jacket. She'd had to learn pretty quickly not to feel guilty about taking what she needed. There was no one around to suffer, after all.

She'd lost track of where she'd been, and where she'd come from. Sometimes she'd leave the town and have no idea whether she was simply retracing her steps.

There didn't seem to be many animals anymore. She couldn't remember what certain animals looked like, only the distant shape her mouth made when she whispered their names. Every now and then she thought she saw a shadow of something moving, but she never seemed to stop running long enough to look.

"I thank you for the food I have. I thank you for the water. I thank you for this house. I thank you that I am alive," she said, or rather she thought (it was difficult to tell what was audible and what wasn't), as she lay down to sleep. She never slept on the beds, and she never slept in the same house twice, but the prayer remained the same. She did not believe in a god, but the idea that she was truly, completely, and utterly alone in the world was too terrifying to comprehend. Besides, she didn't want to seem entirely ungrateful, should anyone be listening.

They were too neat, the beds. She was yet to see any room where the covers were kicked off, or where there were clothes all over the floor, or where there was any sign of struggle at all. It all seemed planned. As though it were waiting for her.

She only stopped moving when she slept. Other than that, she always felt like she was running, or waiting for something, or hiding, all at once.

She would realise, soon enough, that what she was running to and what she was waiting for and what she would be hiding with would crash into her life in the form of Girly.

That night, though, where she sat on the bench amongst the trees and then lay on the floor of the room, was all peace and silence. The night before her life exploded into sound.

*

She left the shop, a pack of sanitary towels and a cluster of paracetamol tablets tucked under her arm. It had been a rough day already, and the sun was barely up. She had gathered some food for the journey; she was ready to leave this town by the forest; she'd seen something moving in there earlier, she wanted to be sure of it, though she knew that her eyes were not always reliable.

Supplies safely stowed in her bag, she sat down to eat a crust of bread with a scraping of peanut butter (for she didn't like to take more than she had to) which she was spreading with a knife far too sharp for her liking. And that's when the loudest sound cut through her ears; she had spent two months now used to the sounds that she herself made, with little foreign interruption. This sound seemed to be utterly alien, completely different to anything she'd ever heard, and yet at the same time it resonated with a note in her heart that suggested she knew what it was.

She wondered briefly whether some kind of space craft was slicing through the atmosphere ready to steal her away. But when she ran, blindly, on instinct, bag on her back like a fugitive, she came up to the road and she saw it. A car. It was blue - like something Alexe had forgotten.

It zipped past her, nearly blowing her in a full spin, and seemed all set to disappear. But Alexe shook her head, tried to gather her wits, and she ran after it, full pelt, screaming and shouting. Her voice crackled and hissed, and seemed to take on some language other than that which she was familiar with.

The car eventually trickled to a halt, as though it had run out of steam and was now sitting there, shame-faced. Alexe approached it, and didn't flinch when the door swung open.

A girl lurched out of the car; she looked about the same age as Alexe, and there was a fire and a fear in her eyes which Alexe recognised from the times when she had seen her own face in the mirror.

"You can take it," the girl said, and she might have been speaking in something other than English, but Alexe understood her somehow.

"Take what?"

"The car."

"Why would I want your car?"

"Take it. Don't kill me."

"I don't want to take it - I won't kill you, I'm not going to kill you."

The girl's eyes flicked down to Alexe's hand, and then she remembered the feeling of the weight of the knife still clutched in her hand.

"Oh," she said, "Oh."

"You're not going to kill me?"

"No."

"Then put that fucking knife away before you kill yourself."

Alexe, not knowing what else to do, knelt and placed the knife on the ground, though she did not take her eyes off of the girl. The girl was pretty, though pretty was really an afterthought in times like this. She had brown hair tied up in a headscarf which was grey and frayed at the ends, and her eyes seemed to glow a little more than was normal. Her skin was pale, compared to the partly sun-induced darkness of Alexe's; a few freckles dotted themselves defiantly across her cheeks.

"You're the first person I've seen," Alexe said, and she thought it might have been true for her whole life.

"Really? Where I've come from I've seen a fair few, and not all of them nice. That's why I came down here. It's mostly countryside, right? A few towns, like this. But mostly fields."

Now that she knew she wasn't going to be killed and her car wasn't about to be stolen, the girl seemed to relax. She leaned against the passenger side door, and considered Alexe, who said nothing.

"Well?" the girl said after a little while, "If you don't want to kill me and take the car, then what do you want?"

"Who are you?" Alexe asked.

"Who wants to know?"

"Me."

Alexe's bluntness seemed to grate on the girl's nerves, and her face screwed up a little bit.

"You're straight to the point, aren't you? What, you want my name? My national insurance number? Look, I don't know who I am. I've been Me since I woke up, and then the first guy I met called me "Girly" when he tried to corner me, so I guess that's what I'm calling myself now. So who are you?"

Girly stuck her chin out, and even though Alexe didn't think her question had been satisfied, she nodded once.

"My name's Alexe. I don't remember much about who I was before, either."

"No one does. I've met maybe ten, twenty people in the past two months and no one fuckin knows. We're all just wandering the earth. Everywhere's a ghost town. It's creepy and it's strange, and if I could just remember how things used to be then maybe I could work out why it's so weird."

"What is everyone else like?" Alexe said, and she felt suddenly hungry to be surrounded by people, loud and noisy and alive, to hear them all speak, to really listen to the sounds they make and to know that they are real and not imagined. It was a desperate kind of torture, to be so starved of humanity.

"I don't know. Scared, angry, cold, lonely, bored to the end of time. Everyone's different, right? Except... well. Everyone I met has been- How old are you?"

"Seventeen. 17. Or - or maybe eighteen."

"Right. I think I'm seventeen. And the last kid I met was sixteen, and the guy before her was eighteen, and the girl before him was seventeen, and... We're all those sorts of ages. I'm yet to meet an adult. Or a child. Or a fifteen year old, or a nineteen year old. What are the odds?"

"Is that what you do? Drive around the country and talk to people?"

"No. I drive around the country and try to ignore people, and fail. New car per new town - that's why I got so confused when you started brandishing a bloody knife in my face. There are so many cars everywhere, and none of them are locked - like all the houses, right, and the shops," perhaps Girly saw Alexe's surprise here, "What, you never thought to check the cars?"

"Well, I-"

"Whatever. But yeah. New town, new car. I like to leave 'em with empty tanks if I can. This one," she threw a thumb in the direction of the car, "Is on it's last ticks, I think."

"I can't drive."

Alexe hadn't really thought about it much; she did not remember learning to drive, but then she did not remember learning to walk or learning to eat. But she seemed to know somewhere in her brain that she could not drive, just like she could not fly or she could not shoot lasers out of her hands.

"Oh. Sucks to be you then, I guess. Did you just stay where you woke up?"

"No. Almost the second I woke up I started walking."

"Walking where?"

"Walking. Like you driving. Just moving, no real direction."

"No real direction. Huh. That's what I'm missing. I'd like to have a direction, one day. I think that's what left, really, with all the people; a sense of direction."

"Maybe that's why they left us behind. They stole our sense of direction to amplify their own."

Girly considered this for a moment, before shaking her head thoughtfully.

"No, I don't think they left us behind. Well, they did, but I'm glad they did."

"Why?" Alexe could not think of a reason to be grateful for this half-existence of waiting around to live.

"Because now we have the world to ourselves. We can do what we want. We're the chosen ones, Alexe, don't you see?"

Girly's eyes were suddenly bright; it was as though she had stumbled across an epiphany that had been huddled in her mind, growing, for some time, and now it shone into her face and curved her lips into a smile. It was as though she was starting to find a purpose again.

The sight of it shot Alexe's veins with a familiar kind of ancient warmth that she thought had died with everyone else, but she could not let herself get carried away with it.

"No," she said, gently, as though trying to spare her own feelings, "No. We're not the chosen ones. We're the ones they wanted to leave behind, the ones they didn't want to take. The waste products of some great exodus."

"You're wrong. The ones who left - they're the waste. We're the diamonds, the special ones who could be trusted. The young people. I don't remember anyone who left - do you? No parent, no sibling, no friend. Only me. I was chosen to stay behind without them, and so were you. The others - simple by-products. Not worth the time. The waste as a result of something good." Girly seemed satisfied with her own explanation, and moved to sit down on the floor. Alexe found herself following, so that they were sat opposite each other on the hard tarmac, the knife that seemed so distant now marking the halfway point between them. "That's it, isn't it? I'm right, and you know it. We were chosen because we could be trusted."

"So?" Alexe said, finally.

"So we have to do something. Have to find a direction."

"Do you say this to everyone you've tried to ignore?"

"No. Because not everyone threatens me with a knife and then puts the knife down at my feet as an afterthought. And not everyone wants to listen to me. And - today feels different. Like the start of something. Something bigger than anything else. You know?"

And Alexe did know, and for once she felt no shame in believing in something. It seemed the correct thing to do.

So when Girly eventually seemed ready to stand again, they climbed together into a car - a red one this time - and drove away without another word.