Paul Hardy - The Last Man on Earth Club

“What happened?”

He sighed, and went back to the screen. He dug through the files until he found a report with video. It showed multiple surveillance views of a sporting stadium shaped like a circle with a small playing field in the middle. Perhaps twenty or thirty thousand people were there — the stadium was half full.

“A lot of people were staying at home but normal life was still going on. Until this kind of thing started happening.”

A light illuminated the stadium. Cameras swung up to find the Antecessor: much brighter than any seen before. Other cameras showed the crowd, suddenly transfixed. The players in the field laid down their bats and took off their helmets. Everyone stared upwards.

More lights came from above. A starfield of Antecessors.

On the pitch, the slaughter began. Some of the players picked up their bats. One removed his helmet and bowed his head while another struck him on the skull. An Antecessor descended to him as he died, and two rose back up. The crowd queued up to be executed in an orderly fashion. When police arrived, they too saw the Antecessors and joined the queue — or else used their weapons to start a new queue.

“They didn’t scale it back, did they?” I said.

“No.”

“They found a way to make it happen faster. Working on crowds rather than one at a time.”

He nodded.

“They lied.”

He looked up at me, appalled. “They… you can’t judge them… they’re…” He looked back at the screen. People kept on dying.

His objection withered away, and he nodded. “They lied.”

“I’m glad you see that.”

“But they had reasons!”

“Perhaps. Do you still think they gave everyone a choice?”

He looked back at the screen. One of the players handed his bat over to a young woman, knelt down and had his own brains bashed out before a light descended and took him. Then she handed the bat to the next person, and was killed in turn. The queue stretched back to the stands.

“No,” said Iokan. He turned away from the screen. Tears were in his eyes. “Can you stop it? Please?”

I stopped the video from my pad and whisked it off the screen. Iokan leaned on the back of a chair. I got up and offered him a tissue. He wiped his eyes.

“Let’s go on,” he said.

“You don’t have to.”

He turned from me, went back to the screen and found more records. “We recalculated the graph. The time we had left came down to about six months, depending on whether the new ones could take people as well.” The lines shifted on the graph, showing mortality curves tightening.

“We fought back. But nothing worked…” He showed a quick series of videos of weapons tests: the first one showed a coherent energy beam hitting an Antecessor and bursting it into a shower of light; but the next one showed the Antecessor reforming afterwards, and further tests had little or no effect.

“The existential threat notice went out.” He brought up the document: an animated picture of an Antecessor in the corner of the page, and a warning to seek shelter unless the reader was able to fight back.

“We advised every government to get under cover. Then this started coming on every channel…” A brief video ran: an Antecessor glowed on the screen while an ethereal voice assured people the process was brief, and, once transformed, they too would be Antecessors. “They couldn’t touch people’s minds through the screen. The frame rate didn’t work. But that was when a lot of the public realised what they were. And we’d all been praying for deliverance for so many years, after so many attacks from the interversal powers…” He shook his head. “Can you understand that? Our gods came back. What would you do?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Once the church got hold of it they started broadcasting as well and told everyone it was the Antecessors, they could trust them, and…”

“And it sped up.”

“Yes. They couldn’t have done it so quickly if people hadn’t co-operated.” He pulled up the graph: it changed again. The mortality curves took an exponential dive. “Just a couple of weeks, in the end.”

His hand hovered over another file. “There’s more video of what happened in the churches…”

“It’s okay, Iokan. I’ve seen it.” I could understand why he didn’t want to play it: church officials handing out knives, final services before the altar that ended in wrist-slitting. Kindly nurses with anaesthetic cream for the children. I hadn’t slept after I watched that.

He pushed the video icon away. “Thank you.”

He brought up another file: a daily status report with estimated human population remaining. He spread out fifteen of them: fifteen days of the crisis, with every report progressively worse. “After a week, the only survivors were just the odd few hiding out. We lost touch with our own government after nine days. Then the only people left were under EM cages. They went dark one by one.”

He brought up the last report. “The day after this was when our own EM cage failed. That was the end.”

He stepped back, as though that was everything.

“But not for you,” I said.

He looked round helplessly. He was reaching the most painful memories.

“You survived longer. What happened to you, Iokan?”

He looked back at the screen just to keep from my gaze.

“I…”

He searched for words.

“I denied them.”

“ You denied them? Why?”

“They took my family.”

“Can you talk about it?”

“They took everyone. The cage failed. They came in and… that was it.”

“Just like that?”

“I tried to save them.”

“How?”

“I had a weapon. I modified it. I stayed with them. Tried to protect them. Szilmar was strapped down in a cell. Ghiorghiu was… sitting. Then it came. I never even had a chance to fire.”

“But you didn’t kill yourself?”

“They touched me. They… showed me heaven. I told them no.”

“You resisted?”

“I wasn’t the first. A few people were able to hold out. Training helped… but…”

A long, long pause. I waited.

“When I came back to myself, Szilmar and Ghiorghiu were dead. And everyone else was gone as well.” He turned back to me. “So I went outside.”

“Go on.”

“I don’t know. I don’t really remember what happened next. There wasn’t anyone else left. Just bodies. It could have been weeks. Days. I don’t know. But they stayed with me. They were patient. And in the end when I was dying… I opened my heart.” His expression recalled a joy from memory; a joy that was swiftly clouded. “And then you came. And then I was here.”

He sat down.

“Do you remember how you felt when you denied them?”

“I was angry.”

“How do you feel about them now?”

He thought about it.

“I don’t know.” He shook his head. “I just… I don’t know.”

I locked myself in my office for a while after letting Iokan go. I felt cruel and heartless for crushing his faith; it needed to be done, but it took its toll on him, and on me. I dimmed the lights and lay down, trying not to see the bodies of children piling up in the church, so similar to the corpse-piles my parents tried to hide from me.

But I could not. The image remained. And that nightmare from childhood, in the weeks before evacuation, when people were dying so swiftly they could not be buried or cremated or even named. The hospitals piled the human remains in the car park. When I fell ill and my parents panicked and took me there, they recoiled from the sight, realising the hospital had become a place for the dying and little else. They ignored government appeals to stay put, and made for the evacuation centre the next day. My fever put them and me on the priority list and gained us admittance to the refugee camp. But that ended in a pile of corpses, too.