Paul Hardy - The Last Man on Earth Club

Elsbet regained consciousness the day after, but she was no longer Elsbet. The electric shock from the suicide attempt had enough effect on the implants to ensure it was Katie who emerged from the coma, questioning the gap of time since she was last awake and asking why her shoulder socket was now so damaged that her arm could not be remounted.

The first permanent effect of the attack on the group was to bring forward the proposed move of the centre to a more secluded, and hopefully more secure location, across the continent and far away from any further violence. The site had been ready before the attack, and it was only the shortage of skilled pilots that meant we had to wait a few days.

Our bus cruised at what seemed like walking pace a few hundred metres over an empty savannah. “How long is this going to bloody take?” asked Olivia of the pilot, who was replacing our usual driver while he was trained up to the new standards.

“There’s a speed limit,” he said, almost grinding his teeth at what was the twelfth time she’d complained.

“Speed limit? Who are we going to hit out here? Do you see any trees?”

I answered before the pilot snapped back at her. “We’re already going faster than anyone ever did on your world, Olivia. And you know why there’s a speed limit.” I’d explained about the precautions: there were still occasional EMP bursts, so speeds were kept low enough for a human pilot to handle with ease in the event of trouble.

“Might as well be in a bloody balloon…” muttered Olivia as she retired back to the passenger seating. I apologised to the pilot and let him get on with his job before going back myself.

Liss had woken from her coma, and was in a stretcher locked to the side of the cabin, a nurse by her side to tend to the burns that were still wrapped in flexible polymer healing casts. Iokan was in a chair with oxygen infusers wrapped across his face, having exacerbated the injuries he suffered from smoke inhalation. Katie was still without her right arm. Olivia was badly bruised and carried an arm in a sling, but had escaped worse injury. Pew and Kwame were left unhurt, at least physically. Nobody looked particularly upbeat.

“How are you all doing?” I asked. It was the first time I’d been able to get them all into the same room for quite a while.

“I’ve been… better,” croaked Iokan.

“How do you feel, Liss?” I asked.

“Ow. Ow. Ow.”

I turned to the nurse. “Hasn’t she had anything for the pain?”

The nurse shook her head. “She won’t take analgesics.”

“Isn’t there anything we can do?” I asked Liss.

“No,” she said.

“You don’t have to… punish yourself,” said Iokan. “You can’t save… everyone. I think you said that… once.”

Liss laughed bitterly. “I remember.”

“But there’s no need to suffer…” I said.

“I don’t heal so well if I take painkillers. I can switch most of it off. It’s fine.”

I looked to the others “Does anyone else need anything?”

“When’s he being buried?” asked Olivia. She meant Veofol. I think she was surprised to find she missed him. The others felt the loss as well, and they looked to me.

“His remains are going back to his world. They’re not doing an evacuation like some species, so it won’t be for a couple of weeks, until there’s portal time available.”

“His family will take him?” asked Kwame.

“I think so,” I said. “I don’t know how they handle things on his world.”

“I do,” said Pew. “I looked it up.” He held up a pad he’d been working on. “They recycle. Because they live in orbital habitats, you know, they can’t afford to waste anything.”

“They eat their dead…?” said Kwame, ready to be appalled.

“Uh, no. More like take the organs for transplants, blood for transfusion, extract minerals. That kind of thing.”

“That is disgusting,” said Kwame.

“You do what you have to do,” muttered Olivia.

“They have a ceremony, it’s not like they dump him in a machine,” protested Pew. “They might cremate him, though, they get a lot of aid from the IU so they don’t need the recycling so much. And he’s sort of famous there apparently, so they might make the exception…”

Katie spoke up. “They will not require much fuel for cremation. He was extensively charred in the crash.”

“Oh, don’t tell me you’ve come back…” said Olivia. They knew Katie had returned, of course, but this was the first time she’d spoken.

“I have made no journey to return from.”

“Well you can bloody well give the man some respect!”

Katie reacted as if struck. She froze, twitched, and relaxed her face again. “I apologise,” she said. “His loss is regrettable. He will be missed.” A muscle at the side of her mouth quivered, then settled down.

“Can we… send someone?” wheezed Iokan.

“There’ll be a representative from the IU there,” I said.

“Is there anything we… can send? A… recording? Or a message?”

“I sent something to his family,” I said. “If the rest of you want to say a few words, I’ll see what I can arrange.”

The bus took us up into a mountain range, weaving through snowy peaks to the new centre: high on a bleak valley through which glaciers had run in colder millennia, with the treeline only a couple of hundred metres above. We arrived at the end of summer, with warnings we should prepare for snow. The centre was often used for alpine sports in the winter, and there were ski runs laid out nearby.

Kwame declared it reminded him of Bvumba, the military reserve on his world the bunkers had been built under. The familiarity of the landscape gave him no comfort and seemed to set him on edge. Olivia complained her garden was lost; it was far too late in the year to start another one and even if the timing had been right, the soil was a long way from what she wanted. The land was perfect for pasture, if there had been any animals on the planet that needed it. Other than that, you could grow a few small flowering plants, but that was it. The growing season was far too short for most crops. Olivia muttered and swore when she surveyed the ground, and said she might as well be back in Tringarrick, which, though hilly, was hardly the same kind of terrain. I let her order some seeds anyway, since the old garden had been so helpful in getting her to participate in therapy.

We were a long way from Hub Metro; two thousand kilometres distant and very dependent on a microwave link to a satellite for what little dataflow was available, along with regular supply runs that would become ever more important in the winter months. The buildings themselves were familiar, as they were of exactly the same design as the last centre. They were prefabricated and mass-produced so we could set up as many centres as we needed to cope with sudden influxes of survivors from dead worlds, and the common design made them very easy to work with. But this time, it was more than a little disturbing when you walked out a familiar door and were suddenly reminded of the chill you’d never felt at the old centre. All the rooms had been set up in an identical manner as before, so moving in proved to be fairly easy, though few of the group were in a fit state to do the work themselves.

I joined them. I would need to be there and on call all the time because we had no other therapists available to take Veofol’s place, what with all the chaos after the attack. So the centre would be my home for the time being. I didn’t mind; I had no real reason to stay in the city, and the only pang of discomfort came from the occasional impulse to call for Veofol to help with the group, and the sudden memory that he was gone.