The Only One Left Standing

The dead chickens in the coop should have been a sign. Gene could find no hole or crevice for a fox to have burrowed its way in, and no blood spotted the floor or the nests. It was as if someone had waved a hand over the animals and put them all to sleep.

Greta, Gene’s conspiracy-obsessed daughter, said it was an omen as she stood apart from the scene and kept locked into her Link to the grid.

What did Gene care for what flyaway words were being spread across Links to Feeds and to the greater Conscious? That was how Tessa, Gene’s ex-wife and Greta’s revered mother, had left to join a commune that was preparing for the End Times. They had the guns, supply stock, and the area of a small town set aside with underground bunkers.

Gene was just a simple farmer who liked his privacy. The wars, the bombings, the slowly unraveling threads of humanity—he existed in a world away from all that, no matter how Greta tried to reason with him that this was humanity’s last stand, surely, and they had to prepare for the Last Days.

Wealthy men touted their spaceships that would take flight in fleets for the stars. Politicians would argue their points even as their electorates became increasingly disillusioned and anti-government. Nobody even watched television anymore; all the attention was for the Feeds that joined ninety percent of minds together in a consortium known as the Conscious.

When Gene had been given his final notice to have a Link implanted free of charge, he had held the paper over a lit flame on his stove. By then, he had seen the effects from Tessa and Greta having joined with the Conscious. That was the true conspiracy, how he saw it.

The day after he had finished burying all his chickens, he awoke to find Greta was nowhere to be found. A stray note on the kitchen counter told him she had secured cryptofunds to join her mother at the commune. Also left behind was the heart-shaped locket he had bought her for her thirteenth birthday. His hands shook as he read the words, but was he surprised? Not a bit. None of this—the decline, the scattered pandemics, even the rise of the Conscious and its influence—was a surprise. There was always The Man trying to enact his will over the small populace. This was just another step in a series of warning signals that rang the final bell tolls of humanity.

In the tiny farmhouse, it was easy to imagine he was the last man left on earth. Before television had devolved into emergency alerts peppering public-funded reruns of shows from decades past, he had seen a movie once of a man who believed he was the sole survivor of humanity. He stayed behind gates and security in a house far nicer than the shambles Gene called home.

Maybe he should have gotten a dog for all the lonely days and nights. But a part of him was still spooked by what had befallen the chickens. At least the cows and sheep still seemed to be unaffected by the mystery illness that had taken down the whole coop.

On long nights while he sat in his lumpy armchair, he wondered if he was wrong. Should he have gotten the Link implanted after all? What was he missing out there in the Conscious? Would he still have his wife and daughter if he had just relented?

The thoughts were interrupted by a series of blasts—what sounded like far-off explosions. Gene ran out onto his porch to see the far-off horizon lit with what looked like dozens of consecutive lights flashing. Boom. Boom. Boom.

Endlessly, endlessly, the signals of surefire warfare illuminated the sky. The city in the distance—it was probably rubble within only spare moments, faster than smoking a pipe or lighting a series of matches.

Gene watched as supersonic jets flew overhead, fleeing the aftermath of their handiwork, and he felt a loss he couldn’t quite describe. He hadn’t left the farm in months, relying on the caravans that passed through every few weeks, but lately he had had to subsist on a diminished plate of offerings. But the people out there—they had been alive one moment, then gone like dust the next.

His heart sped in his chest like he was ready to have a heart attack.

If Greta were here, she would tell him what she saw in the Conscious.

If Tessa were here, she would tell him to go pack his bags and take his beat-up pickup truck to the nearest commune.

But Gene felt like the last man standing, watching a world that was beyond saving, and even saving his own skin seemed like a fruitless thing to do.

Maybe he would huddle with the cows and the sheep and tick down the minutes until the next jets did their fly-bys with renewed ammunition.

The only one left standing would have a sorry and lonely end indeed.