The Last Man on Earth

i



The human slid the needle under the skin in the patient’s hand. The body was out cold, and didn't flinch when the cannula hit the vein and the IV began to let the fluid fall into the drip chamber, which then made its way up the tube and into the patients hand. After the cannula was set, the human tore a a small amount of tape off with its teeth, and set it over the needle to keep it in place, and he then took off the blue plastic gloves and discarded them in a nearby bin.

‘It’s all done. He should be fine for a while. I will return in a a month to reset the IV and give him more fluid and medication.’

The other human behind him nodded, and paused, before murmuring: ‘Where will you stay?’

‘I have an idea of where.’ He knew not where he would stay, the thought in fact almost frightened him, but he hid this slight anxiety behind a mask of confidence, that the other did not sense, but should of.

‘You won’t be able to stay here long, the air is safe to breathe but not for an extended amount of time.’

The human didn’t say anything, just stood over the body, and looked at it.

‘I wonder who he is,’ the other pondered, not directly asking him but simply sharing his thoughts.

‘I do not know, but he was chosen for a reason and we can’t question that, but we must keep him alive as long as we can.’

‘Of course,’ the other replied, almost too quickly, as if embarrassed by its previous question.

He heard the other leave, and close the door behind him, but he stayed staring at the body on the hospital bed, and wondered the same thing himself. He was an Earthen, of course, he wasn’t like them. He knew nothing of the man, yet, and although the laws forbade the act of looking inside, he knew he would once they left, he would not be able to resist the curiosity.

He sat down on the chair that was situated between the two beds and rested his elbows on his knees, clasping his elongated hands together, lacing his fingers between each other. He sighed gently.

It was coming close to the end. His gaze drifted up to the window and outside, the sun was high in the sky, but a reddish brown haze hung in front of it like a blanket of smog, and he knew it was time for them to go.

Not him, however. He was left behind, just like the man on the bed, and he would know him, more than anyone could ever know someone, but the man would never know of the human’s existence. He thought that was not strange at all, but of course the Earthen would, and the Earthen would have terrible nightmares (that could not be helped) once he looked inside. What else could he do to pass the time? The five years in which he would wait appeared in front of him and its landscape was bleak, a monotonous desert with interesting happenings fair few between.

He almost hoped, later on, when the second year came around, that the Earthen would wake, but he knew that was beyond his power. His face, no matter how familiar, was human after all, they were both human, in the end, and a familiar face was always appreciated.

1



Jonathon Robertson awoke without opening his eyes. He resurfaced from a dream that he suddenly couldn't remember, like slowly gliding from underneath a deep sea to the surface, and taking a slow, gasping breath. He lay in a hospital bed in the West Wing of the Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago, Illinois, and although he wasn’t completely conscious, the memory of a thousand dreams swam like flittering fish through his mind, and there were images, lots of them! Snapshots of pictures from deep in his mind that he thought he could recognize but then, they were gone, and he forgot them. It was a relief, for him, that he could not remember the nightmares, but in some far corner of his subconscious, he would always. And they would always haunt him.

He couldn't properly formulate words in his mind, but the idea of words crowded and confused him.

where

The hospital bed sheet felt as rough and heavy as a feed sack, and the single pillow placed underneath his head was a rigid slate of stone.

my head’s a balloon

i can feel

oh

i can feel my brain so small inside of it, swimming and floating like a sinking boat in a rough sea

The image of a sinking boat, already rotten and clad with algae, bubbles trailing up above as it fell slowly towards the sea floor, scared him. Unbeknown to him, it was a second hand memory from a dream of a nightmare that he’d dreamt many times. Countless times. Maybe slightly different every time, but the theme never changed. It was deep rooted in his soul it seemed, and it played out millions of times in worlds he formed behind his eyelids.

where

mary

where are you mary

His wife’s face floated into his mind then, a soft, creamy complexion with a tumble of brown curls. He could hear a child laughing and he remembered his son. He was older now, but he remembered that laugh and could place it anywhere, anytime.

home

am i home

With the sheer hopefulness, the startling comfort of this thought, his eyes flickered open, they were dusty with time and nearly crusted shut. Light ran in jagged horizontal lines over the white of his lap (the sheets!) and in the room. His eyebrows pulled together as he tried to make sense of his surroundings. The world was hazy, when you wake from sleep your visions’s blurry and disorientating, the light hurts your eyes and makes your eyeballs feel heavy in their sockets. Jonathon squinted, and looked at his right hand. A cannula rested underneath the skin on the back of his right hand. He followed the tubes to find an empty IV, long gone of fluids and medicine. The machine which monitored your heart rate and oxygen levels should’ve been beeping, shouldn't it? It was sitting next to the IV machine with a blank screen and a coating of dust and grime.There were small round pads attached to wires which were tangled in a mess on the floor, and taped to the insides of his elbows and on his chest. He looked around with puzzlement, noticing, once he blinked five or six times to clear the sleep on the film his eyes, two deflated ‘Get Well Soon’ balloons tied to the end of the bed. The plastic stems had sagged and they were now leaning towards the bed, and the balloons themselves had been drained of their colors. On the table beside the bed to the right of him near the window sat a round vase filled with brown, murky water and the remains of what seemed like dead flowers on the tabletop. He looked back at the heart monitor. It should’ve been beeping!

Why had he heard his son’s laughing? He swore it was real, he swore it on his mothers grave and he truly believed it down to the core of his being, yet as the pale orange sunlight flooded the empty hospital room through the Venetian blinds and the silence grew louder around him, a shadow of a doubt crept in like vine, working its way inside him and growing. Growing ever so large that he suddenly became frightened.

He couldn't hear the loud happenings of the hospital outside the door, the usual voices, beeping and sound of doors opening and closing, slamming sometimes even, and the sound of ringing telephones. He could hear nothing but the sound of his breath in and out through his nose. Forced to pay attention to the sound of his increasingly ragged breathing, he noticed an oxygen tube attached to his nose and into his nostrils. He noticed something was wrong then, something was off. He remembered when he was younger, four years old, perhaps five, the details were not clear but the memory was still vaguely vivid, although he was strangely disorientated at the moment, this memory remained; he had had an asthma attack (he had got those quite frequently when he was little) and had to be rushed to hospital when the Ventolin puffer wouldn’t suffice. His face had gone a terrible pale with a blueish tinge, something his mother never got over, apparently, but once he’d passed out he’d awoken in a strange place, a hospital bed, with a nasal cannula with oxygen hissing through and he could feel it, he could feel the wind up his nose as if the tank was breathing into his nostrils. He’d scrunched up his nose, chuckled slightly because it was so strange to him, and then coughed and that was when his mother had woken up on the side of the bed, having fell asleep on her forearm and drooling.

He knew something was wrong because the oxygen tank wasn't hissing or breathing and there was no wind in his nostrils.

He was still groggy with sleep and confusion and disorientation, and so it didn't occur to him until later that perhaps there was a power outage and it troubled him later why he wouldn’t think of this at least as a possibility. It crossed his mind but it was a fleeting thought clouded with fright. He was frightened. He was alone. Where was everybody?

‘Mary?’ he croaked. His voice was thick and raspy with disuse and it barely came out a whisper. Distractedly, he fingered the hem of the blanket laid out on top of him as he peered around. He looked outside the window; the window itself was foggy with condensation and dust and appeared to have not been open in a long time. The room around him; well, that was enough to scare him alone. Spiders and their cobwebs crouched quietly in every corner of the room. Huge cobwebs! Bigger than anything he’d seen and once he’d noticed this the uneasy feeling, the vines of doubt, grew larger and tighter.

‘Mary?’ he wheezed again, another unsatisfyingly weak whisper escaped his lips. Despite how tiny his voice sounded, it echoed around the room and even a spider, the size of his hand (good lord!) scurried for a moment across the far wall and then stopped, not having heard a noise let alone a cry for help in all of its life. His heart was hammering inside his chest as he fiddled around and tried to find the button to call the Nurse. The big red button, that was it. He pushed it, with shaking fingers, and waited. He waited a god awful time, before he realized no one was there, and no nurse was coming to help him.

Jonathon cleared his throat, dry and stale as an old piece of bread, and let out another ‘Mary!’ this time louder and shook with the panic he was desperately trying to keep down, like a jack in a box that’s already sprung and impossible to put back in, and he was pushing that jack back into the box but the sonofabitch wouldn’t go, would he? The panic was out, and it coursed through his veins.

Pulling the nasal cannula out from under his nose and the needle in his hand almost simultaneously, and with all the strength he could muster he lifted the blanket off him to reveal two spindly, bony legs. They barely even looked like his. They looked like legs which had been photoshopped to attach onto his torso, somehow, in real life, from a cripple.

Oh god am I a cripple?! He panicked, which distracted him for a moment from the panic of being alone, but he wiggled his toes and breathed a sigh of relief. The relief didn't last long, in fact, the panic seemed to be bubbling over, and he kept swallowing it down, swallowing that panic down until he had it a bearable level, but it was always there, and he tried to keep calm but panic will do that to you. No matter how hard you try to not panic when you’re home alone and hear a noise, and almost convince yourself its just a bird! or its just an animal in the yard! on some deep level the fear of what you know it is, can’t let you accept what you’re trying to convince yourself of. You try not to let it get its horrible hands on you and let it choke you to death.

Jonathon slid off the bed with some difficulty. He was weak, weaker then he’d ever been in his life. How long had he been bed ridden, for Christ’s sake?! Evidence of bed sores were everywhere, on the soles of his feet, his heels, on the inside of his knees and most likely on his back too, it itched and hurt. He’d never been this week even when he’d had pneumonia when he was fourteen, he was bed ridden for a month, and when he’d gotten up to walk he’d almost fallen flat on his face if it weren't for the nurse to catch him mid-fall.

There wasn’t a nurse here, however, or anywhere, it seemed. Just him, the strange orange light, the spiders on the wall and the sound of his heart in chest like a hammer on cloth.

‘I haven't run a bloody marathon,’ he said to himself in the same, raspy, broken voice, and he sat on the edge of the bed with his feet dangling ( the bed was too high for his feet to touch the linoleum) for what seemed like a long time, with only his hands on the bed keeping him upright. He was so weak. He could picture the anatomy of his body if it were an x-ray, and saw his bones made of jelly, his muscles non-existent and his spine like a wobbling shaft of bath foam. Remembering the patches on his skin attached to the heart monitor he slowly peeled them off too, not with as much panache or urgency he had the IV cannulas. Instead he pulled them off gradually, one by one, and, instead of hurting like a bandaid that had been on for too long which stung like a goddam bee, they simply slid off his skin, having lost their stick over time. They fell onto the bed and onto the floor with a small noise, and one of the spiders scurried for a moment again, which Jonathon saw out of the corner of his eye, and jumped, jerking his head with a huge startled breath. He sighed when he realized it was just the spider, and even found it slightly comforting, in a strange, strange way.

He contemplated calling out ‘Nurse!’ but it suddenly frightened him that should he call out, louder than a hoarse whisper, that something else should come for him, not a lady or man in scrubs but someone else. The thought of that someone else made the jack in the box spring out again, jumping and dancing with that terrible smile on its face. He closed his eyes and shook his head slightly, as if to try and rid the idea from his mind.

its fine

everything is fine

With all the strength he could muster and let himself down onto the floor. Already the pale tint of orange light from the sunset was beginning to fade and the hospital room was becoming dimmer by the moment. When his feet touched the linoleum he wiggled his toes and pushed himself away from the bed, but still keeping a firm hand on the bed for support. Putting most of his fragile weight onto his feet, his legs buckled beneath him and he found himself crouching on the floor with one hand still on the bed and one on the floor to steady him.

‘Oh, God,’ he gasped. I’m never going to get up again. I’m done. The sun’s setting; I have no time, soon it will be dark, and if there’s no power, there’s no lights and if there’s no lights…

‘Shit,’ he murmured, taking his hand off the bed and placing it on the cold floor in front of him. He'd have to crawl, at least until he found some crutches, or a wheelchair, which would be heaven sent. Of course, he was in a hospital, he didn't know much but he knew that; he was sure of that, and wheelchairs and crutches were by the dozen in these establishments. He hoped. He managed to crawl, with shaking arms and legs, slowly but surely, towards a door which he hoped was the bathroom. Bathroom meant water, and with the thought of the deliciously cold and colorless, tasteless liquid, his throat burned and his mouth ached. For a taste of that water he’d crawl a thousand miles! He reached up for the knob, and turned it anti-clockwise, clicking it open and pulling it towards him, swinging it open. It was a bathroom, with a shower in the corner and by God, a vanity right close to the door.

thank the Lord

It was dark with no light, but Jonathon didn’t seem to notice. He grabbed a hold of the vanity with both hands and struggled to pull himself upwards. Arms shuddering, and with some help from his gaunt legs, he managed to see over the bowl of the sink and grab a hold of the cold water tap and spun as fast as he could.

Hoping, expecting to see a gush of beautiful cold water exploding from the faucet, he was monumentally disappointed to see 3 unfortunately small drops seeping from the spout.

Seizing the opportunity, however, he quickly pulled himself up and put his open mouth under the spout with such urgency and waited for more drops to fall in.

‘No,’ he whispered, as if in denial, turning the tap to full until it squeaked to a halt, and then turning the other one as well, with not so much as a gurgling from the pipes in the wall.

‘No, no NO!’ His voice got louder each time, and with each ‘No!’ he turned them off, and then on again, and hit the spout with the palm of his hand.

With a final, quiet, ‘no…’ he rested his head on the edge of the vanity and lay hanging off the sink. His mouth was dry as an empty well, and there was a pounding behind his eyes. He eventually lifted his head and pulled himself higher, somehow the fact the taps had failed him gave him some strength, as he knew lying on the floor of a bathroom in a hospital which seemed, he didn’t know for sure but it certainly seemed, was empty, or closed down, wasn’t going to get him far. He clambered to his feet, a mission, no doubt, and rested on the vanity with his hands. He peered into the small mirror in front of him with wandering eyes.

He looked like himself, that was for sure. But he looked different. It was the same man, Jonathon Martins, with a mop of inky black hair and a jawline as chiseled as angular as a knife’s edge. He was tall but not crooked or lanky, and although he was drawn and lean, a bag of bones, essentially, you could see the outline and formless shape of the man he was, a broad-shouldered, suit-wearing kind of man with a decent set of biceps that weren’t too small or too large, but now hung in flimsy drooping sacks underneath his arms. His knees were prominently popping out his legs, and his elbows like the sharp end of a toothpick, and until he cut the abominable mass of hair off the square of his chin, he didn’t see the hollow of his cheeks and the hollow of his eyes, sunken and scrawny with bags that hung underneath in miserable pouches. Behind the chocolate brown of his now-desperate, questioning eyes was a man removed from his bleary life in the suburbs and in the safety of an office with his drawing board and T-squares, and placed somewhere peculiar and frightening.

He wore a dirty-looking hospital gown, that smelt even worse than it looked,and with the shock came the widening of his deepset eyes and the quiet pop of his lips as they fell open.

A beard, thick and unruly with specks of grey, covered the majority of his face like a forest overgrowing a field of farmland, and the mustache that usually feathered his upper lip covered his mouth and fell down the sides, along the corners of his lips until he could no longer distinguish it from the beard. The beard itself, the mane, tangled and thick, cascaded down to his his breast plate, and the mop of pitch-black hair, as dark as night, usually shaven shorter than the length of his fingernail, parted in the middle and fell flat down the sides of his face, down past his shoulders. He almost looked like a Gandalf-type figure, a wise wizard or an alchemist, insane in his lab with test tubes of blue and red, pouring them together with that crazed grin, on the precipice of brilliance.

His scanty hair was streaked with strands of grey. Grey! At 31 years of age! He was sure he wouldn’t get those little tell-tale signs of the beginning of the end, the beginning of old age, until he was at least 50, like his father, no doubt. His father was black-haired just the same, but once he did start turning grey, by God did he go grey. He had a puff of whitish hair by the time he was eighty, and that same white flurry that likened itself to fairy floss, disappeared completely by the time he disappeared completely. Bless his poor soul.

Jonathon stared at himself in the mirror until the light in the room became too dark to see thoroughly, until his reflection became a dim outline and his eyes disappeared into the blackness of his face.

He stumbled out of the room, a newborn giraffe with trembling little limbs, and into the muted light of room with the beds, which were, hauntingly, made up with the usual hospital corners on the sheets and blanket laid out nice and neatly. His bed, in the far right corner was pulled to shreds and the blanket half on the floor.

He looked at the room he was standing in, with its dirty grimy walls smothered in insects and dusty old webs, a layer of filth which had settled over almost every object he could see and touch, and the magnetic woom-woom that his thoughts might sound like if they toppled out of his mind and into the quiet of the room.

With his hand against the wall to steady himself, he wobbled uncomfortably towards the door of the room. As he rested his quivering hand on the doorknob, he took a deep breath, feeling the world spin around him and the floor seesaw beneath him, and felt a pang on his left side.

I probably haven't taken a deep breath in a while

After that thought a chill fell over him like a scratchy, cold blanket, and tried to push the next coming thought from forming words inside his head, and it was like pushing cooking oil from one side of a pan to the other, no matter how many times you scraped it back, it would always come creeping forward. He wondered, subconsciously and he’d never allow himself to dwell on this thought, how long he’d been in lying in that god-awful bed for.

The thought of the grey hair

no!

He pushed it back, pushed it back to the far corners of mind

what if I'm old

and it folded itself neatly into a little box and he locked it, threw the key into the abyss of his consciousness, and closed his eyes to where it went.

Jonathon stared at the lasting orange glow on the doorknob from the setting sun blushing in from the window. The window that had not been open in a long time.

years maybe

He closed his eyes, and screwed them tight. He turned the knob, and it opened with a click which resonated, it seemed, out into the hall and like an echo in the room. It was so loud in the dead silence. And he opened his eyes.

The door was attached to a hinge that swung open on its own accord, and Jonathon moved out of the way to let it swing towards him. It opened slowly with a screeching creak, that echoed even louder out through the hall.

It then occurred to him that he should maybe call out, it was a hospital after all. Hospitals are caring, safe places. Aren't they?

He’d seen plenty of horror films in his time, however, situated in a hospital filled to the brim with ghosts and demons and psychopathic autopsy doctors. He decided to throw this thought in the box as well, though, just in case it scared him enough to seize the door and slam it behind him, lock it and push himself against it, chest heaving.

It was the first time in a long time he felt like a child, frightened to the very core of him. At the very heart of his panic that he was keeping locked inside of him, afraid of what would happen if he let it bubble over, the world in which he found himself in, had an air of illusory about it, one that you’d encounter for a slight moment in a dream, where you know, completely and fully, that you’re dreaming, which then proceeds to disappear. He touched the walls which were gritty with dust and flaking paint, and it was unreal to him. He breathed the air which was stale and rotten and thick, and I’m dead, he thought.

The hall was almost completely dark, but the windows on the north end were open and the light from the remainder of the day beamed through, and lit the tiled hall just enough for him to navigate. Yet it was dark enough for him to make out shadows out of the corner of his eyes, and instead of jumping, he turned the other cheek and pretended it wasn’t there, the way a child would see a limp arm from a coat on the chair and instead of screaming and running, pulls the blankets up over their head. Down the south end of the corridor, to his left, was a black hole. The pale orange gleam of the fading sunlight on the vinyl grew faint until it petered out completely, leaving seats and posters on the wall, reading ‘Don’t spread the flu!’ ‘Stop the spread of diseases!’ and information about the Legionairres’s outbreak, disappearing into blackness. Like any sane person, if he was sane, when the hair on the back of your neck and down your arms is standing on end like small soldiers and goosebumps washing over you like waves of a cold fever, you don’t go walking down the end of the corridor thats as black as the devil’s soul. You walk willingly toward the light, the bright, for the light is safe, and the blackness held monsters and fears that Jonathon could not face in his state of uncertainty and panic. He hobbled up the hallway with his hand on the wall to keep him upright. When the black hole was safely behind him, he turned the corner to be faced with a lift with its doors shut, and the door to the emergency stairs to the right. Taking the stairs would be a fatal mistake. His legs were weak, his stomach churned and ached with hunger and the thought of water made his head spin. He was already out of breath and his legs would almost certainly (he knew that, he could feel it) snap underneath him like soft twigs under pressure.

There was no power, obviously, the electricity in the hospital were hooked to a timer and as soon as 5 o'clock hit, they would come flickering on, and he didn't know much about knowing the time without clocks, but he sensed it was far past 5pm, yet he could be wrong. There was still sleep tucked in the corner of his eyes, his head still swum with the disorientation and his entire body was soft and weak. So goddamn weak.

Even though his mind was adrift in a sea of confusion, he was drowning in it, he went and pushed the button for the lift, and he almost had a reason to hope the elevator would ding! and the doors would open. But there was no ding! or a flash of light when he pressed that button, he surrendered his hopes and clambered towards the flight of stairs. He wondered how dark the flight of stairs might be, and while he was basked in the light streaming from the windows he felt the bittersweet pang of safety. He never looked outside the windows, however, that lined the whole wall from floor to ceiling, opposite the elevator doors, and that was why. Looking out of the window at that moment would of meant the death of his safety, no matter how false or desperate, and he might have never made it down the stairs. Call it what you would like, but that was fate, or destiny, in its most real and tangible form. A form in which is easy to see from the outside looking in, but never from the victim’s point of view. And the victim in this particular case was Jonathon Martins.



2



From a place unbeknown to Jonathon, or anyone, for that matter, sat the human, they called him Reiter, which meant knight, and he sat and he sensed his awakening, his weakened body, his attempt at escape and his need for answers. He ultimately sensed his disorientation and even felt a wave of it himself, the very last ripple of a stone in still water, and he waited.



3



By the time Jonathon had reached the end of the stair well, the ground floor of the hospital, the sun had disappeared behind the buildings of Chicago and slipped under the horizon. His legs quivered underneath him like a broken string on a guitar, and all he wanted was to collapse on the ground and lay there for a while.