Ragnarok

It's been some time since I posted a story here. Life got in the way. I have a few more in the pipeline. Hope you enjoy them.

Many of us have said it, but what if ...

Ragnarök

By Judogeezer

Desolation everywhere...but not what he expected. Every end-of-the-world movie he'd ever seen had the same scenes; deserted streets with dust and scraps of paper blowing about, highways jammed with disabled and abandoned vehicles. Still others had crowds of panicked refugees running hither and yon trying to evade the unavoidable foe. Then there were the hordes of flesh eating zombies multiplying exponentially. He saw none of that. At least in Sycamore, Illinois, population formerly 18,000, the world had ended with a whimper, not a bang.

Anders Larsson stood in the intersection of State and Main Streets facing west. Ahead of him lay the business district. To his right was the county courthouse. Over his right shoulder was the public library and over his left was the post office. There was not a pedestrian in sight. Two cars and the fire chief's red SUV were parked in front of city hall. All the other parking spaces were empty.

After more than a week of searching, he finally had to accept that he was the only one alive in the city, maybe on the whole planet.

The streets were deserted. No scraps of paper or dust devils were blowing around. There were no wrecked vehicles or corpses scattered about. Anders did a 360. Nope, no zombies either. Downtown looked more like six a.m. on a typical Sunday morning. The only clue that this wasn't an ordinary day in mid-America was the miasma of death, the stench of rotting flesh that still hung over the city.

Anders glanced at his watch. It was actually 12:48 on a Thursday afternoon in May. A steady stream of traffic should have been moving through the intersection where he stood. Most of the parking spaces should have been occupied. People should have been trickling back to the courthouse from P.J.'s grill. Either downtown should be bustling or he should be dead.

When he stood in the same spot nearly two weeks earlier, he still held out hope. The sky was blue. Birds were chirping. The traffic signals cycled green, yellow, red, green, yellow, red in mindless conformity to rules no one would ever follow again. In a panic, he'd run through town like a mad man, yelling, begging someone to answer him. His voice echoed off the buildings, mocking him.

He went through most of the commercial buildings in a four block area and randomly checked homes around the city. He even visited several farms on the city's outskirts although there was one in particular he avoided. There was no point in checking the hospital. Anders found more bodies than a convention of morticians see in a lifetime. What really scared him was that not all of them were human.

Whatever Angel of Death had passed over, it didn't seem to discriminate between humans and other mammals; cats, dogs, pigs, sheep, cattle – all dead. Chickens, goldfish and the God damned cockroaches seemed to be doing fine, thank yeew. Most people had time to go to ground. What they didn't have was time to figure out what was killing everyone.

After his wife left him two years earlier, Anders buried himself in his ham radio hobby. With no wife or family to spend his money on, he'd built an amateur radio station that rivalled NASA mission control. It allowed him to monitor everything from commercial broadcasts to international shortwave stations to emergency services communication. He also talked to other hams around the world until one by one they went silent. It gave him a pretty complete picture of the pandemic.

One ham in Atlanta worked for the CDC. According to her, epidemiologists had brought back tissue samples from the initial outbreaks in Miami and Seattle. Within 48 hours, everyone who had contact with their colleagues or the samples was dead. Whatever it was, state of the art containment failed. Someone broke in to the QSO to report the same thing had happened at USAMRID in Frederick, Maryland.

Like a tidal wave, the pathogen swept up from Florida, in from both coasts and out from Atlanta to engulf the Northern Hemisphere within five days. It hit fast and it hit hard. Anders had seen it at work more than once. Someone would be perfectly fine. Suddenly, they'd start to sweat profusely followed by chills. Within two hours they'd spike a fever over 106 degrees. Convulsions were followed by coma. Within 24 hours of onset they were dead. No exceptions.

The medical community was wiped out right away. After all, where do you go when you get deathly ill? Doctors, nurses, P.A.s, paramedics, orderlies, candy stripers all gone in two days and a night.

His folks had grown up during the Cold War. He remembered them debating whether it would be better to go in the first strike or try to survive. His generation had the same, if entirely facetious, debate about the zombie apocalypse.

God or Fate apparently decided for him.

The best Anders could figure was that he was a genetic anomaly. Before the Internet shut down, he'd spent hours researching infectious diseases and epidemics. It seems there are always some humans who are naturally immune. Typhoid Mary had come to mind. Individuals had been found carrying the Ebola virus and HIV who never got sick. Half of Europeans survived the Black Death. When Columbus' sailors, carriers of plague, typhus, small pox and many other European diseases arrived in the New World, ninety percent of the native population was wiped out. Still, ten percent survived.

Whatever this was, the death rate was unprecedented. Anders spent the better part of two weeks, shut up in his ham shack. Everything he heard led him to believe that death rates were near 100%.

Commercial power went out on Monday night. Tuesday, he noticed the ever-present plumes of water vapor over the cooling towers at the Byron nuclear power plant had disappeared. Even from thirty plus miles away, the twin plumes were visible most days. Three different high tension lines serviced the city. There should have been power from the wind turbines scattered around the county. Anders' guess was that when Byron shut down, it caused a cascade of tripped circuit breakers throughout the power grid much like the great northeastern blackout in 1965.

Since his hair wasn't falling out and he wasn't throwing up, he assumed it wasn't a meltdown. Running for nearly a month unattended, there was probably some maintenance issue that triggered an automatic scram. He even drove out to the plant, but the place was locked down tight. All he could see were two armed men in full military bio-hazard gear dead at their posts by the main gate.

Now, he was back where he started, in the middle of the street, numb and at a loss for what to do. The birds still chirped but the traffic signals were no longer pointlessly cycling. He still tried to make sense of it all as images of death kept intruding into his thoughts.

Remembering those bodies restarted his inner debate – nature or manmade? Was Mother Earth cleansing herself of an annoying parasite or had some fool bioengineered a weapon that got out of control? Then his overwrought mind settled on the Native Americans. Maybe this was a prelude to extraterrestrial colonization? Like the European settlers who deliberately gave Amerinds smallpox infested blankets, maybe ET was eliminating the competition.

His pointless ruminating was interrupted by an anomaly on the horizon.

It was moving.

Like a fly in amber, this unimaginable catastrophe had left his emotions frozen in limbo. Now a surge of fear shot through him peaking near panic levels. Hope had been crushed out of his soul and he was afraid to let it back in. Was there another survivor? His heart pounded. His breath labored like a steam engine until he felt faint. The dot finally resolved itself into a vehicle.

He must have been spotted because it surged forward, speeding down the center of State Street straight for him.

As the vehicle got closer, he could see it was a sports car; a red sports car; a red Mazda Miata convertible. No. It couldn't be. When it was a block away, Anders let loose a barrage of profanity that could have blistered paint off a battleship. He was still cursing God for letting him live when it pulled to a stop and a woman stepped cautiously out of the car - a car he had paid for.

"Andy?"

She still looked beautiful, but then so did a coral snake. The woman shifted from one foot to the other looking apprehensive. Anders started gasping, trying to catch his breath. Staring slack jawed, trying to think of something to say, his mind was a complete blank. Never let it be said, however, that the last man on earth was anything less than a gentleman.

"Hello Maggie."

Taking that as a welcome, she raced forward. His outstretched palm halted her forward progress.

"What brings you to town?"

"What?" She gave him the what-a-stupid-thing-to-say look he knew all too well.

"I asked you why you are here?" There was more than one meaning phrasing it that way, but he didn't bother to share.

"I was all alone. I couldn't get anyone on the phone. The radio and TV stations all went off the air. Then the power went out. I ran out of food so I decided to take a chance on coming in to town."

What are the odds that the only other survivor he'd found in two weeks was his ex-wife. A shiver ran through him. Could one of them have passed on their immunity to the other? He almost started to laugh. After he discovered her affair, he worried about STDs. Maybe instead, one of them had given the other sexually transmitted immunity. Then his stomach clenched as it occurred to him who else might have benefitted.

"Where's Jed?"

Maggie blushed and wouldn't meet his eyes. Anders once thought Jed was a good guy- a friend. Jed and his wife, Joan, went to the same church as Anders and Maggie. Jed and Maggie sang in the church choir together. Apparently, when Joan became terminally ill, Maggie would stay after choir practice to "comfort" Jed. When Joan died, Maggie moved out to be with the love of her life.

His ex was shifting from foot to foot, looking like a teen caught smoking in the school restroom; a mixture of guilt, resentment and defiance.

"Did Jed die?"

Maggie looked up. Apparently guilt won as a tear trickled down her cheek.

"He..he," she hiccoughed, "he ran off and left me. I got hay fever. You know how I get in the Spring. I woke up one day with my eyes and nose red. I was sniffling. He shot out of bed and began throwing clothes in a suitcase. I tried to hug him and he yelled at me to stay away. He yelled at me."

Tears were streaming down her face and her breath was ragged.

"I was so shocked, I just stood there and watched as he packed and dragged his suitcases downstairs. I pleaded with him all the way downstairs and out the door begging him to tell me what was wrong. I tried to follow him to his car but he kept yelling at me to stay back. He pulled out and when he drove past me he rolled down his window. He said he was sorry, but he couldn't stand to watch another wife die."

"He probably went looking for someone to comfort him."

Maggie looked like he'd slapped her. It was a cheap shot, and for a moment he regretted it. The regret lasted just long enough for Anders to remember his wife's scorched earth exit from their marriage. Maybe now she would understand just how badly she'd wounded him.

"Andy, I'm so sorry. I..I guess I did say some pretty hurtful things when we broke up. I wasn't trying to hurt you."

"Really? What were you trying to do when you told me you never loved me? It never occurred to you how I would react to finding out my whole life with you was a lie; that I was living in an illusion; that every show of affection, every word of endearment was being stolen from me by a woman who saw me as a place holder until someone better came along?"

This was Anders' first opportunity since she left to tell Maggie how her actions had hurt him. He tried to tell her before she walked out, but she always got angry and cut him off at the knees. She even told him, rather belligerently, that she refused to feel guilty about what she was doing with Jed. Apparently, nothing much had changed.

"I didn't mean for you to take it that way. I was just so in love with Jed that it made every other relationship pale in comparison. You never made me feel that way. I really needed to feel appreciated. He was so attentive. He needed me."

Maggie continued with a litany of excuses and justifications. She was sorry he was hurt, but...but...but. Her voice became background noise as he tried to sort out his feelings.

He had heard it all before. It was all about what she felt and what she needed. What he never heard once was Maggie taking responsibility for deliberately and cold heartedly destroying his life.

She finally wound down and gave him a hopeful look.

"Maggie, do you remember our last conversation before you moved out, the one where you said you hoped we could remain friends?"

Maggie nodded meekly.

"Do you remember what I said?"

She nodded again. Anders said nothing more but stared expectantly at her. Another tear began to track down her cheek. Maggie finally broke.

"You...you said you wouldn't have anything to do with me if I was the last woman on Earth."

Without another word, Anders walked past her. His maniacal laughter echoed between the buildings as he strolled through the dead city into an uncertain future.