Paul Hardy - The Last Man on Earth Club

“The mothers fell ill, because the babies weren’t human. They chewed through their own umbilical cords, and then they… they ate their way out of their mothers. They were homunculi, they came out the size of babies but with adult proportions. And they were hungry.”

Iokan drank again. The others looked horrified or disgusted, except Katie (who didn’t care), and myself, Veofol and Kwame (who knew better).

“Once they came out, they attacked everyone around them, and ate them too. Especially the livers. They couldn’t be stopped, if you shot them they just kept going and healed their wounds as they went. And they grew fast, they were human sized within days — something to do with the livers. Some people had their livers eaten while the homunculi were growing back the limbs they’d hacked off.”

Pew gasped. Olivia watched with a cruel smile.

“People fought back, but by then there were millions of homunculi all over the world, and the humans had to hide. Olivia led a group of survivors into a cave, but they only just made it — she says she killed one of the creatures by strangling it with its own guts…”

“Ew!” said Liss.

Olivia snickered. Iokan carried on, troubled. “And she says they lived underground for months, until they gave up hope because everyone else was dead. They went outside one by one to die…” Olivia chuckled to herself again. Iokan resumed. “…some of them would even cut themselves open to make it easier for the creatures to take their livers and get it over with quickly — it seems incredible that people could do that just out of fear…”

“It seems incredible because it does not make sense. It does not make sense because she made it up,” said Kwame.

“Olivia. Was that really necessary?” I asked.

“Well, he’s so trusting, isn’t he?” said Olivia. “He’ll believe any nonsense you give him.”

“You lied?” said Iokan.

She shrugged. “Probably happened to someone, somewhere. In some universe.”

“But not to you.”

“No. What happened to me was worse. It wasn’t so quick.”

“Ah. I see,” he nodded. “Then I’m sorry. You must have been through something terrible.”

“That’s right. It was terrible. It was worse than terrible. But we didn’t all give up one day and jump off a cliff like your lot, we bloody well hung on until there was only me left and then I hung on by myself. For two years. And do you think this lot did anything to help?”

“Olivia,” I said.

“What?”

“Can you stick to the facts, please?”

“I haven’t bloody started! Do you want to know what happened on my world? The dead got up and walked, that’s what happened! And you bloody lot, you and your Interversal Union—”

“Olivia, please, if you want to accuse us of something, you can do that another time. All we need at the moment is for you to introduce yourself—”

“I’m talking! I’ve got a right to talk, you said—”

“You had the chance and instead you chose to play a trick on a sick man—”

“Excuse me? I don’t mind listening,” said Iokan.

Olivia carried on. “If you lot have to know what happened to me then I’m going to tell it, I’m not letting someone else mess it up. And then all this lot will understand how you lot” — she jabbed a finger at me and Veofol — “keep buggering up and leaving us to die.”

And now everyone was looking at me. I was going to have to let her talk. “All right, Olivia. Go on.”

“D’you know what a revenant is? It’s someone who comes back. From the dead. It’s not magic, it’s not gods, it’s a disease that gets inside you. It’s bacteria . You get infected and it lives inside you and it waits until you die. And then it takes over. You get up again and you don’t remember who you are. You’re just hungry. So they die, get up, bite people and get them infected, and that’s how it survives. That’s its life cycle. Only we didn’t know it was there until we all had it, because some fool put it in animal feed. You know what they’d do? They ground up all the bits of animals they couldn’t sell to butchers and fed ’em back to more animals. One infected animal gets in and a few years later cows are getting up after they’re slaughtered. And then people are getting up again. And then we had the cholera, and people were dropping like flies and coming back half an hour later and then everyone thinks it’s the end of the world. Only it wasn’t the end, oh no. That time we beat them.

“We spent twenty years trying to cure it but we didn’t have everything you had. We didn’t figure out antibiotics until it was too late, and then it was the wrong kind. Next time it was the flu that started it off, and that time we didn’t win. Millions of people all died at once and got up again and came for us. We got stuck in castles and compounds and little stations out in the middle of nowhere but it was too late and after ten years of that, people just gave up. And you know what happened then?

“That’s when you lot” — another finger jab at me — “turned up and half your boys got eaten. And did they stay around? Did they check to see if anyone else was left? No! They buggered off and didn’t come back until they’d found a cure. Which was two years later. And by then there wasn’t anyone left — except me. Because they’d all given up. Killed themselves. Or gone off outside and didn’t get a mile down the road before the revenants got up out of the hedges and grabbed ’em.” She gave me a hard look. “How many people do you think died because you lot didn’t want to risk your own necks?”

And then a pause while everyone looked back at me. Until Liss, of all people, raised her voice.

“It’s not her fault,” she said. Everyone turned to her and suddenly she was uncomfortable. “I mean, you can’t save everyone, can you? That’s what they used to say on my world.”

“I agree,” said Kwame. “You cannot blame Dr. Singh and you cannot blame the IU.”

“I bloody can. They ran away and left us to die,” said Olivia.

Iokan looked at me. “So she wasn’t making that up?”

“No. I’m afraid she wasn’t,” I replied.

“Could nothing be done?”

They all looked to me. “As I understand it, the expedition was ambushed by revenants. Most of them were killed before they had a chance to escape. Some of them died from their injuries on the way back and they—”

“Revenned,” said Olivia.

“They came back. When the ship returned to Hub there were only two survivors. They had to lock themselves in the control room because the rest of the crew, the revenants, kept trying to attack them. We’d never seen anything like it. We didn’t go back until we were sure of what we were dealing with.”

“Ancients…” said Iokan. “I see now.”

Olivia scowled at him. “Oh, do you?”

“How did you survive?”

She smiled cruelly. “Well… we couldn’t grow much of anything, and what we had in tins didn’t last long. But there was plenty of food walking around, wasn’t there?”

“I’m sorry…?”

“The dead ones. Revenants. Only they weren’t dead, not really. The bacteria kept them going and the meat stayed fresh for years. Just got a bit stringy, that’s all.”

“Do you mean to say… you ate the dead?”

“I told you. They weren’t dead, not really.”

Iokan didn’t know what to say. Kwame did. “That is the most disgusting thing I have ever heard,” he said.

“You’re horrible!” said Liss.

Olivia snapped back at her. “Well you try living by yourself on a patch of ground where you can’t grow a damn thing! I survived the hard way, not like you with your electric and your supermarkets, you lazy cow!”