mass.
Janie stood up and watched it. I stood by her. We held each other as The Shape moved at The Medusa. I never loved her more than I did at that moment. I loved her so much it squeezed tears from eyes knowing that I had betrayed her in so many ways.
In my ear she said, “Our child can never be born, Rick. You know what it would become. What they all are.”
Then she kissed me and ran off down the hill.
I went after her, but not fast enough.
She dove right into that whirlwind of devastation, that thing born of breeder reactors and atomic cremators, that living chain reaction of thermonuclear waste.
I screamed when she came out the other end…smoking and sizzling and mutilated.
There was nothing I could do but dive in myself, but The Shape was moving too fast now, gaining speed for its collision with The Medusa. I scrambled back up the hill and ran as fast as I could, rolling down the other side and into a leaf-filled ditch.
I didn’t see The Shape collide with The Medusa, but I heard the explosion. The detonation of two fields of energy colliding. The world went up like an exploding sun, a blinding blue-white flash of light that blinded me and a thundering eruption that shook the earth, leveled the hill and nearly buried me alive in soil, rocks, and debris.
That was it.
When I dug myself free finally, there was no one and there was nothing. The world was a void of steam and smoke and gradually diminishing heat. As it cleared I saw the valley had become part of a greater pit that stretched for miles, blackened and smoldering. Every tree as far as I could see had been blasted to a stump. Hillsides were flattened. Like I said, a void.
I looked into my mind for that sphere of darkness but it was gone. Just gone.
I was alone.
Absolutely alone.
17
Back in high school, as you recall, I read a story in a science fiction anthology and the writer began it by relating the shortest horror story in the world:
The last man on earth sat alone in a room.
There was a knock at the door.
For two weeks now I’ve been thinking about that story as I sit alone in this room dictating the events that you have just heard on a digital voice recorder I swiped from the complex. For two weeks I’ve been here in this little house that sits on the edge of the abyss created by the collision of The Shape and The Medusa, which is the borderland between today and tomorrow and perhaps yesterday.
Everyone is dead.
I can’t know that for sure, of course, but in my heart I feel that it is true. There are still birds in the sky and things that scurry in the woods. Three nights ago I heard a wolf howl on around midnight and it was the most lonesome, haunting sound I have ever heard. So there is life out there, but none of it is human.
Writing this down has been a great joy for me, a greater horror, and the greatest pain I have ever known.
I’ve had to admit things about myself, look at my life from a bird’s eye view and what I saw has not been pleasant. I only relate what happened and now, as they say, my tale is told. Two days ago red spots started popping on my skin. I am weak. My joints ache. This morning my nose began to bleed.
Mickey has her revenge.
Her curse is complete.
It will be done in twenty-four hours, I think, as I can feel it escalating. Speech begins to get difficult. How I contracted Ebola-X two weeks after the last vectors were destroyed in that atomic firestorm of the collision, I do not know. My Geiger Counter told me that the area was saturated with radiation for three days before dropping back to the high end of near-normal. Radiation sickness I could understand…but this, well, it makes me believe in Karma, it makes me believe that I’m paying for the lives I took.
It makes me believe that Mickey’s curse was the real thing.
I’m ending this recording now. I doubt if anyone will ever listen to it because, let’s face it, there’s no one left to listen to it. I will lay down now in my deathbed and wait for it while I dream of my beautiful wife and remember my friends, remember Sean and Carl and Specs and Texas and Mickey. And particularly Janie and the love we shared, the child we made that was never to be born.
The last man on earth sat alone in a room.
There was a knock at the door.
It was Death…
