Paul Hardy - The Last Man on Earth Club

“Are you sure?” he asked.

“This is the best thing we can think of at the moment.”

He took a breath, psyching himself up. “She was brave. She was brave.” His good hand flexed. “I can be brave.” He strode forward with purpose and the medics scrambled to follow us as the doorway opened on a perfect facsimile of the entrance hall of the Mutapan command bunker. Once the door closed behind us, the illusion was complete; our doorway vanished into the façade of massive blast doors.

The hall wasn’t so much a reception area as a defensive position. There was a desk where a guard might have sat in normal times, and loopholes on both sides that led to hidden guard posts and allowed them to fire upon any invader. The door leading into the main complex was heavy, made of steel. The fluorescent lighting had been carefully replicated and did the room no favours, tinge ing everything with a sickly green.

Kwame halted, all his momentum lost, eyes fixed on the inner door.

“Kwame? Are you still with us?” I asked.

He swallowed. “Yes. I was just… surprised for a moment.” He turned and looked about. “The work is excellent…” His eyes fell on the desk. “You even have the right passes.”

A row of laminated ID cards lay on the desk. Kwame picked one up. It had his picture on it, and his name in his own language. “Oh…”

He had to steady himself on the desk as the strength fled from his legs. The medics pushed forward, but he waved them away.

“It is nothing. I am just… I remember seeing this… I…”

“It’s okay, Kwame, you don’t need to push yourself. We can stop now if you like.”

“No. It is… working. How much of the bunker have you created?”

“As much as we could in the space we had. There’s the main level with offices, living spaces and so on, and you can go downstairs into the hibernation chambers as well, but we only had room for a few of those.”

“You used the entire centre…”

“All the parts that were shuttered, yes. They’re pretty much designed to let you do this kind of thing.”

“Can I go in… alone?”

“No. We need to keep the medical team nearby at all times.”

“It…” he looked around at them, waiting there with their medical bags. “It won’t be the same.”

“We can’t risk it.”

“And it does not smell… right.”

“How should it smell?”

“As though fifty people had been living here for a month.”

“I can arrange that.” I tapped some controls on my pad, and a subtle stench wafted through the room.

“And it’s too quiet. There should be air conditioning… we should hear people walking about… conversations…”

“We can do that as well. Do you want to go in further today?”

He paused a moment. He was still dreading it.

“May I continue alone?”

“The medics have to stay with you.”

“No, I mean…” He looked back at me; I was the one getting in the way. It wouldn’t matter. He knew full well we were recording everything.

“Of course,” I said. “You go right ahead. I’ll sort out those changes you wanted.”

He nodded, and I withdrew.

My mistake with Olivia was to let her know what I wanted to talk about.

I called her an hour before her next therapy session to make sure she knew it was happening, and she grudgingly admitted she hadn’t forgotten. I told her it was very important that she turn up on time, as I wanted to discuss the events of the last group therapy session, and what had happened with Katie.

She must have thought I meant the accusations Katie had made about the killing of revenant children, and she was right. While Katie had not suspected which revenant children were at the heart of the trauma, Olivia knew well enough and quickly understood what I would be expecting her to talk about.

So she made a break for it.

We didn’t notice until the time grew closer for the session, when I checked in with her again and found she was no longer in the centre. She was already beyond the inner perimeter, hiking over rough ground with the help of a stick. I pulled up a map on the wall and figured out where she was going.

There were cliffs in her path. Sheer and steep where a mountain stream had long ago carved a ravine, then frozen into a glacier and widened the gulf over a million years until the opposite edge of the valley was almost a kilometre away. The drop was three hundred metres at least, and ended on a slope of jagged boulders.

I ran out after her with medics trailing, but was only able to catch sight of her at the cliff’s edge as I scrambled across the uneven hillside. She stood at the lip, leaning a little on her stick; then straightened and tossed it over the edge. I heard a distant clatter as it tumbled down.

“Olivia!” I shouted at her. There was a slight motion of her head as she heard me and chose not to listen. I was still thirty metres away when she jumped.

There was no longer any point in running. She’d made her choice. I sighed and walked at a safer pace to the cliff’s edge, to be joined by the medical team. And just as we got there, Olivia was floated back up.

Maybe she’d hoped that by hiking such a distance, she’d find a cliff we hadn’t covered. But the gravity sleds were scattered far and wide, originally intended to save skiers if they took a wrong turn and found themselves flying into empty air. The top half of the sled inflated into a soft cushion that had caught Olivia as she fell, and she still lay face down and spreadeagled upon it.

“Olivia?” I asked. “Are you ready to talk to me now?”

She didn’t look at me as the sled placed her in the care of the medics.

“Yeh.”

“Would you like to come back to the centre?”

“No.”

I nodded and ordered some supplies.

A few minutes later, we had chairs, hot drinks and a portable heater, while Olivia stayed wrapped in the foil blanket the medics had given her. The sun was dropping low and filtering through gathering clouds, but there was no chance of rain; it was just another sign of winter coming soon.

“You really didn’t want to talk to me today, did you?” I asked.

“Give her a bloody medal, she’s perceptive, that one.”

“Did you think it would work?”

“Course not.”

“So why…?”

“Better than talking to you.”

“But you’re willing to talk now?”

She sighed. “Ask me what you’re going to ask me.”

“Okay. Katie asked you a question during the group session…”

Olivia slurped her drink and kept her eyes fixed ahead of her. “Yeh.”

“She asked you if you’d killed any revenants who happened to be children. It bothered you.”

“Yeh.”

“Can you talk about that?”

She paused for a long time, her eyes on her drink.

“Killed Tymothy when he revenned. Boy of six. Parents couldn’t do it. It was early on. Oh, and I’d put children down before, I told you about the temple schools in the first outbreak, that locked them all in with revenants? I put a lot of them down. You get used to it.

“Tymothy’s parents didn’t think the same. They were children in the first outbreak. Never had to put a revenant down themselves. So I had to do it for them. They ended up leaving before the others. Thought they could make it to a station on the coast but they never got there. So yeh. I’ve killed children. So what?”

“Is that what you were concerned about in the group session?”

She didn’t answer that one. Just looked down into her mug again.

“Is it something to do with your own children?’

She looked up at me sharply. “I didn’t eat them!” She held her gaze on me, defying me to make the accusation.