Paul Hardy - The Last Man on Earth Club

“That does not help!”

“Let me finish. You’re in a strange land. Doesn’t it make sense to try and find a map to make sense of where you are?”

“And how should I do that?”

“I think you should make one.”

“How…?”

“You say you have all these memories that contradict each other. So perhaps it would be a good idea to make a list.”

“These ‘memories’ are not real. I will not dignify them by writing them down.”

“They’re not going to go away, Kwame.”

“They are not mine!”

“They may not be yours, but they’re in your head. And we can’t erase them. Isn’t it better to at least know what they are, to try and figure out what happened?” He didn’t answer. “I’ll start if you like.”

He still refused to comment.

“Well…” I rose and went to a wall, and set it up for text input. “You said you have memories of being in a street gang, as well as memories of being in private school. Let’s put both of those down…”

I drew a line down the wall, then wrote ‘Childhood: street gang’ on one side and ‘Childhood: private school’ on the other.

“Maybe what you can do is put all the memories into the two columns and see if you can work out a timeline for both sets of memories?”

He continued to ignore me.

“I’ll just leave this here and you can carry on whenever you want. I’ll save it so you don’t lose it…” I saved the file onto his home folder. “Don’t wait too long to get started.”

I left. Kwame stayed where he was, hunched into the corner of the room. Eventually, he looked up at the wall, and walked over to the screen.

He wiped it clean. All the words vanished. He called up his folder, and tried to erase the file. But an error message popped up: the file could not be erased without my permission. He tried to save the file as blank, with all the words deleted; he found he couldn’t do that either. He thumped a fist on the wall.

Then, after a while, he opened the file again.

Olivia decided to cook, but not for the group. I found her pounding seeds with a mortar and pestle (a difficult task with one arm still in a sling), and asked what it was she was making.

“Mustard,” she said, keeping on with her pounding.

“Oh, so you managed to harvest some seeds before you left?”

“No.”

“Then how…?”

“These are for the new garden.”

“But I thought you said the soil was wrong?”

“Yeh. It’s all wrong. Can’t grow anything up here.”

“So why…” And then I realised: I’d given her permission to order supplies for a new garden more suitable for the soil, and she’d used it. “You ordered new seeds and now you’re turning them into mustard.”

“That’s the sum of it.”

“Those seeds are very expensive, Olivia.”

“I haven’t used money in years. Can’t even remember how it works, much less this electric credit balance thing you have.”

“And the mustard itself is poisonous to some people.”

“Is it poisonous to you?”

“No, but…”

“Then make sure nobody else has any, then! Right…” She finished pounding the seeds. I sighed and decided I might as well try to use the moment for therapy.

“So you’ve turned it into powder. What’s next?”

“It’s not powder. It’s ground seed. Or flour, if you want to call it that. Here, sniff.”

She held the mortar under my nose. The stench blew me off my feet and left me coughing on the floor. “Good, isn’t it?” said Olivia.

“I think I need a medic…” I spluttered.

“Rubbish. Splash water on your face, you’ll be fine.” I dashed to the sink. The burning faded as I drenched myself.

“How can that possibly be food?”

“It’s not food, it’s what you have with food. Be a dear and get me some vinegar. Just the kind we have with dinner is fine.”

I took a vinegar bottle down from a cupboard and handed it over while wiping my eyes.

“Did everyone eat this on your world…?”

“Don’t be stupid. What do you think, we’re all the same as each other? This is just what I have. Goes with any kind of meat, even that muck you print here.”

“How did people discover this? Were they suicidal and hungry at the same time?”

“Hah! Didn’t you have mustard on your world?”

“I have absolutely no idea what they had on my world. We don’t have it here because it kills people.”

“Well you needed it where I come from. You try eating meat that’s been through the marinade, see how long you can stomach it. Bit of mustard makes anything edible.”

“This is the marinade you used to destroy the revenation bacteria?”

“That’s the one.”

“And mustard made it taste better? ”

“That’s it.” She poured the ground up seeds from the mortar into a bowl, then added water, a little sugar and salt.

“Did you grow this in the research station?”

“Tried to. Couldn’t get anything to come up. We had some in our supplies but that didn’t last…”

“How did you manage for food?”

She stirred the mustard paste. “I told you before.”

“I mean before you had to resort to—”

“Cannibalism.”

“If you want to call it that.”

“Might as well.”

“But before that?”

“We had enough supplies for three years. We planted what we could. There were plenty of vegetables you could grow if you put your mind to it. We couldn’t keep many animals. Couldn’t fence off enough pasture to let them graze. Then we started raiding the nearby villages.”

“What happened to the villagers?”

“Have a guess.”

It wasn’t difficult to imagine: villagers falling ill, dying one by one and revenning, their families unwilling to put them down. “Did you try to help any of them?”

“Of course not. Do you think I’m stupid? They had the flu! That’s what started the last outbreak. They were dropping like flies and getting up again ten minutes later. If I’d have let them in, we’d have all been dead.”

“Did the villagers ask to be let in?”

“You’re desperate to find something I feel guilty about, aren’t you? How about asking how I managed to get beaten up and nearly dead in a bus crash on this planet? And how come we’re all the way out here where it’s even more dangerous?”

“We’re as safe as we can be, Olivia, and I’m sorry you had to endure some injuries. But you’re avoiding the question.”

“Of course they tried to get in. Of course I stopped them. I had to.”

“How did it happen?”

She sighed as she stirred. “Keep an eye on that clock. Let me know when ten minutes have passed. I need to add the vinegar then. And yes, I’ll answer your damn question. They wanted us to let their children in but they were all wiping snot off their faces so I said no. They thought I’d go all mushy if they brought up the children. No idea of psychology. I had children on my side of the gate, which ones did they think I was going to protect?

“So they buggered off and came back with shotguns. I wasn’t having that. Our guards had rifles, good revenant hunting rifles. We shot them and shot them again when they revenned. Hah. If I’d known what was coming I’d have put them in the pens with the others.

“So the villagers died. I’m not ashamed of it. We would have all died if I hadn’t kept them out. That’s why I was in charge and not some laboratory man. They wanted someone who’d been in the first outbreak and wasn’t going to get everyone killed.”

“How long was it before you went back out?”

“Two and a half years. Once we saw no one was coming for us and we were going to have to find our own food. And that was a mess, going down to the village. No more than a mile and it looked empty but as soon as you opened a door the revenants came out. The first expedition lost two men, after that we did a full scale extermination, got a lot of them in the pens as well. Not so short sighted any more. Anyway we got all the food that was left in the village. Lot of tins. They hadn’t had time to eat much of it before they started dying. We lasted nearly a year on what we got from there. Ten minutes.”