Paul Hardy - The Last Man on Earth Club

“I’m sorry, I didn’t see you there…”

“I require your assistance.”

“Okay. How can I help?”

“I am experiencing emotional disturbance.”

“Ah. I see…”

“I require the same assistance you provided previously.”

“I’ve been thinking about that.”

“Please explain.”

“I’m not sure it’s such a good idea.”

“You have stated your wish to help members of the group.”

“I have, yes, but… I’ve been thinking about Szilmar.”

“Your wife is dead.”

“No. She isn’t. She found a new life! She’s still out there, somewhere. I might see her again one day…”

“That is unlikely.”

“Do you have marriage, in your species?”

“No.”

“I swore to her that I would set aside all others and honour only her. Do you understand what I mean by that?”

She spoke forcefully. “I require your assistance!”

“Ask me anything else. Please.”

She grabbed for his arm, but he was too fast. “Don’t,” he said, retreating into a fighting stance, despite the robes that would have been all too easy to trip in.

“I need you!” She grabbed again and he stepped aside.

“I’m not yours to have.”

She ran at him, and this time she didn’t miss. His robe made it too easy for her to grab him. It ripped but held together enough for her to throw him across the corridor and pin him against a wall. She flipped him round and pulled an arm behind his back. He gasped at the pain as she yanked him away from the wall and pointed him in the direction of her room.

And then she let him go. He stumbled forwards into the carpet, scrambling away while he had the chance. But she wasn’t following. She wasn’t doing anything. She stood in the corridor, not seeing him at all. He stood back up, cautiously.

“Katie?”

She heard that. And saw him. She looked confused. “Ket’or Katie?” she said.

“I don’t understand.”

She twitched.

“Who’s Katie?”

She collapsed to the floor.

Katie stayed unconscious for several days, causing grave concern among the neurologists who came in to examine her. She was unresponsive to stimuli, and whole areas of her brain seemed to have shut down. All we could do was keep her under observation and hope she improved.

Therapy for the others had to continue. I saw to it that the first individual therapy session of the week would be for Liss. She hadn’t been willing, yet, to talk about what she’d experienced, or reveal any other secrets she might be keeping. She huddled in her chair with sweet tea for the first half hour of the session, and we spoke about the screenshows from her world. She showed some interest in those, and I kept her talking until we came to a very specific episode of Dates and Hates.

“I think it was called The Underdater . Do you remember that one, Liss?”

“No…”

“It’s the one where she goes on a lunch date and it turns out he’s taking her to a funeral? Remember? And she thinks it’s his mother’s funeral, but he just likes funerals.”

She looked up at me. “That one was about Ellera’s mom.”

“That’s it. The guy’s trying to impress her but she’s in the same graveyard her mother’s buried in so she has a big breakdown…”

“And she sees her mom’s ghost and all she does is ask her if she’s met a nice guy…”

“That’s right.”

“And her mom hates the guy she’s with because he keeps going to all the funerals with a different girl each time, and, and Ellera ends up telling her mom to shut up and goes back to the wake with him…”

“And that’s how she comes to terms with losing her mother.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Liss… what happened to your family?

She hid her face again and took a while to answer. “I buried them.”

“Your whole family?”

“My parents. They were at home when it happened. They were retired.”

“Can you tell me about them?”

She looked up from her tea, but not at me.

“They were great. They were… they were…” And back came the tears; I offered her the tenth tissue of the session.

“I’m sorry…” she said.

“They must have been good to you.”

“Oh, sure. The best.”

“So you buried them straight away?”

“Oh. Uh. Yeah. Well. Not right away. I, uh…” The tears welled up again. Tissue number eleven came out. “I don’t know what I did at first. You’ve got all these people that did so much, I must seem kinda pathetic.”

“Not at all. I expect you were in shock. Did you stay in the call centre for long?”

“No. I… I remember I saw a screen. There was a news channel on it but all the newspeople were gone. I guess I thought that if that was still going, everything else would come back, maybe if I closed my eyes…”

“And there was nothing on the screen about the event?”

“No. Nothing. Just money news on the scrolling thing.”

“And you saw no one else? No one at all?”

“No. It was just me. I don’t get it. I don’t…” She looked up at me. “Why do I have to be the one? Why couldn’t they pick someone who was supposed to survive, like one of the big heroes or someone in the government, or, or, someone who could do something?”

I thought for a moment. “Do you think someone actually picked you to survive?”

“I don’t know! I didn’t ask for it! I should be a pile of dust on the floor like everyone else…”

“I’m glad you’re not. I’m much happier to have you here.”

She half-smiled. “You’ve been really nice.”

“You’ve had a terrible experience. It’s natural to feel as though it should have been you who died, and wonder why it wasn’t…”

She sniffled on another tissue. “Was it like that when it happened to you?”

Telling my own story always leads to this kind of question. “Yes. I wondered for a long time. But eventually, I had to acknowledge that I was just lucky. And it was better to be alive than dead.”

“What happened to your mom and dad?”

“They died, Liss. I told you that.”

“No, I mean afterwards?”

“Oh. Uh, well, I was sent on to Hub and the, uh, the bodies had to stay because of the investigation.”

“Did you go to the funeral?”

“No. I was only seven. They couldn’t take me back. There wasn’t a funeral, as such. They went into a mass grave.”

“That’s terrible!”

“It’s just the way things were. Billions of people were dying, Liss. There wasn’t enough space on the planet for all the graves they would have had to dig.”

“Did you ever go back?”

“There’s nothing to go back to.”

“Huh.” She blew her nose.

“I don’t mind talking about myself, Liss, but this session is for you. So can I ask what happened after you stopped looking at the screen?”

“Oh… I just went out. I don’t know, I lost track of time. All the dust was blowing around. You’ve never seen that much dust in the air. It was horrible.”

“And all the things you spoke of before — calling the police and so on — did that happen?”

“Sure. I called the police. I called the PRG as well…”

“The PRG?”

“Oh, uh, Paranormal Response Group. The ones you call if something big happens, you know, like there’s all the services on the emergency line, Police, Ambulance, Fire, Paranormal Response, I tried them all, there was nothing, just voicemail.”

“Did you call your parents?”

“Yeah.”

“Is that when you decided to go there?

“…yeah. I walked. And then when I got there…”