'The seventh year after it began, it came to England and
first began in the towns and ports joining on the seacoasts, in Dorsetshire,
where, as in other counties, it made the country quite void of inhabitants so
that there were almost none left alive.
Written at some point of time in
Europe between 1348 - 1350
No one could have
possibly known what date it was, but for sure it was the coldest and probably
the darkest hour of that night, certainly belonging to that date of which none
could have been certain except for a man, who was the last of his kind, on
earth. Yes, he had survived or maybe he just happened to outlive whatever had
brought the end of times, or so it was called by the believers of religion and
prophecies. I firmly am a non believer of both, for the reasons that I do not
deem necessary to disclose, for it is not my story that I intend to narrate but
that of the last man on earth. As of now let us just assume that to me all of
it sediments to chronological randomness of events, boasting of the outcomes
that are undetectable and inevitable, which unfortunately struck humanity hard
enough to perish all but one. It was the sort of end that the world saw 5 years
before that cold night and for all that time before it he had lived on
aimlessly, having no ends to meet, no cause to subsist except for his listless
pursuit for survival. You might now be harboring a will to ask me as to who he
was before the world ended and what was his name ? That I believe is the
temptation which the reader shall resist, for I see no good a cause as to why I
should disclose his identity. A name after all serves a purpose to distinct a
man from the crowds of many and the company of a few. Of all what was left of
the living was him alone, so let us just call him the Last Man.
But that night he sat, marred by
apprehension, by possibility of being found and by an intuition of finality or
whatever could have aptly accounted for his fear, that had been a terror to him
for those 5 dreadful years somewhere at the back of the mind. He had finished
that one packet of cigarettes he had for the night, it came to his mind only after
having put off his last smoke. For all those times, even before the end, he had
smoked out his fears, pains and agonies, day and night, but at that hour he ran
out of cigarettes, his only solace, if any. He did not dare to scavenge for a
packet of cigarettes in that dead world, lying outside the place he once called
home and in the attic of which he was bound to stay and conceal himself. The
windows of the attic were barricaded by strong wooden planks, a gap being left
in between them to allow him to peep out, which was just enough to keep a watch,
but on whom or what? The main door of his attic was blocked by a heavy and old
fashioned closet, once bought by his grandfather to whom the house belonged and
the closet which for long had remained disused was finally put to some better
purpose to serve, and so were those antique silver candlesticks, which were lit
more by necessity than by anything else. For the last man’s lantern had run out
of batteries, there had been no electricity at all ever since the end of days,
the grids of both far and near suffered a permanent break down. The
incandescent flame of those candles in that room were dim, feeble and weak;
strangely enough they were the only source of light in the entire world. The
room was still and dead silent, the last man could hear his own breathing, he
could hear the cold wind rustling through the woods outside, he was waiting to
pass the night silently and hoped not to hear those who he was blocking out
through his self imposed solitude in that room. He dare not peep out of the
window that night, he dare not leave the attic, he dare not make a sound. He
only sat still and alert on a chair in one of the darker corners of the attic,
where the light of candles could not reach. He firmly grappled an old crow bar
in his hands, as he sat, constantly beholding the closet. You might now ask me
as to what can be so horrific as to make a hopeless recluse out of a man? So,
frightful that he lives no more but barely survives like a vulnerable rat in
that narrow crevice on a dilapidated wall. His dread, his fear, was that of
those dead, who did not die but began to rot, until they were rendered
lifeless, but then they returned, roamed and hunted like the living, which they
were, before all of them other than the last man changed, for a fate worse than
death itself, when they succumbed to what was soon enough known as an
unstoppable scourge, a plague and an incurable infection, a global pandemic that spared none. He had known and
seen what that disease could do to a man and then to the entire mankind, Red
Eye Syndrome it was called. In the war of life and death fought miserably by
the humans, if anything that had won was the infection itself. A thousand
manifestations of which now strolled and walked the earth outside the last
man’s attic, as a grossly outnumbering and savage horde of the infected, the
undead, knowing no reason or meaning of any sort, but governed only by one
primal urge of inexhaustible hunger.
Nobody really knew as to what triggered the
Red Eye Syndrome and where did the disease start from, but when the initial
strain of infection hit the humanity, the weakest of the weak fell at first.
Those were the years when the Syndrome was nothing more than a modern day
conspiracy theory or a myth, allegedly devised to cause mass unrest and wage
war among the nations. Those who vouched for its truth and spoke of its
evidence were put to rest forever or were locked up by the disbelievers which
were many, to the misfortune of mankind. The last man had pondered a great deal
over the final days of humanity and the only conclusion he could ever reach was
that, that the ignorance and distrust amongst the people had a greater hand in
their own destruction rather than the infection. However the propensity and the
rate at which the Syndrome consumed the entire populace, any belief or
disbelief would not have made any substantial difference to our fate. Nothing
could have made it any clearer than the second strain of infection, which
followed an year later. A monumentally large part of the living population
died, only to walk the towns and cities again as the undead, and yet so much
more was the entire human population that half of us were still left to watch a
purgatory emanating from the world of men, only to fall later and become a part
of it. It took all of it to make us realize that the threat was real and that
it was coming for us too, that it can be ignored no further and that we must do
whatever ought to be done, if we wanted to live. By the end of the second
strain the last man had seen people resorting to prayers, more than they could
ever have, their faith and its patience had been tested for long. Now was the
time for their God to decide their fate, so that those who have led a life
sinful and astray from his path, his so called path of greater good, shall be
punished and left to no aid and those who have adored and feared him in their
actions shall be rewarded with peace, safety and renewal of their pious lives.
They awaited a judgment by the almighty himself, they expected the words of the
divine to guide them, all of it proved to be farce and yet was fed to
generations together, all meant to be laid to waste someday. Unfortunately God
did not come for any of us whether and neither did any of his direly awaited
messiahs or word bearers. Soon it came to us that we were alone, we always have
been, the very idea of God seemed no better than a crutch now. There wasn’t
anyone coming for us, there was no God and even if he was he had left us all
long before we could come to know of it.
The third and probably the final strain of
infection left only a few of us to see a devastated world. It was not that the
last man had never had any company. In his diary he once wrote:
23rd
February, 2021
Midnight
I
have limited resources and so do my fellow survivors, it is therefore
understandable that at times we resort to a fair barter of anything ranging
from the essentials like food, anti depressants, batteries to cigarettes,
caffine and some alcohol. We do not live at much distance from each other,
there is no reason why we should, for greater the distance we would be bound to
scale, stronger the incidence to encounter the undead gets. But we dare not
live together and to that there is one good reason. It cannot be said with any
relieving surety that we are immune to the infection, we aren’t certain of it
and also of the eventuality as to when we would become one of them. Even if we
do not, we might out of some misplaced sense of judgment or immense frustration
end up hunting each other one day, for whatever resources we are left with,
they aren’t much. Therefore I must live alone. There is nowhere to go.
A few of the survivors who were left post
third strain were bitten, either to be turned into the undead or to be driven
to commit suicide. The rest of them were marauded by the horde to which they
fell prey while venturing in the open, scavenging for food and other resources.
The last man however had remained unscathed, for long. But it did not seem to
him his good fate, he saw it as a punishment to see all of them die one by one
and then to wait and cerebrate, as to when and how would his end be like. Even
he had encountered and also hunted the undead, he had searched for food, water
and medicines, in empty stores and abandoned vehicles. His long and meaningless
survival had imparted him enough time to observe the nature of the undead. It
did not take him long to note from their behavior that the higher functions of
their brain, such as intellect had ceased to exist, the reasoning ability, if
any, had descended to the most basic need of food. He also observed that they
had completely lost their sense of personality, possibly owing to their death,
which also brought forth the rotting of their bodies. That was the only
possible explanation the last man could reach. For what were they if not
corpses? Yet it was as if something drove them, over the years he came to
understand that they were mere vessels, what lived in them now wasn’t them, but
the infection, controlling the flawed copies of the former selves of the dead.
The last man had at an unfortunate occasion stared right into the eyes of an
undead, they were nothing but stark crimson in their hue. Encapsulated by
blood, probably due to excessive clotting in the Iris, which according to him
was one of the symptoms of the Syndrome.
He had seen how they hunt the living, at first one of them appears, then
a few and within no time an entire swarm of them reaches and collects to maraud
the unfortunate man. They were growing aggressive year after year, their hunger
getting stronger than ever, for there wasn’t much for them to hunt, there
weren’t many survivors. He had noted this in the previous rains when one of his
fellow survivors fell into the hands of the horde.
The last man rose from the chair and
walked towards the table on which the silver candlesticks stood, leaving the
crowbar leaning against a leg of the chair. He beheld the reflection of the
flames in a photo frame on which rested unperturbed a thin film of dust, which
he wiped off gently with his palm and intently gazed the photograph positioned
in that frame. It was that of him and his wife, a beautiful woman. In that
picture they sat together wrapped in the affectionate arms of each other, on a
beach, looking at the endless ocean lying before them, with not a sign of hurry
on their content faces and with abundance of peace in their eyes. They seemed
to be complete with each other. The picture had broken and twisted him
innumerable times in those five years,
only when it would appear that the memories both worth cherishing and
painful about her have faded for the good, the photo alone would be able and
ruthless to bring back to him her loss
which he knew can never be made good. Just a picture, but definitely worth a
thousand heartbreaking words, told with the same cruelty, over and over again.
It seemed to have attained a character of its own like all those other
inanimate objects, same as that old ancestral cupboard or the silver
candlesticks or the dusty old chandelier lying with sheer indifference in one
of the corners of the attic. The glass of the frame developed a few cracks all
of a sudden, the last man realized that he had pressured the fragile glass a
little, with his thumb in the surge of emotions. So, he kept it back and went
on to stare at it with watery eyes. A tear probably left his eye, for a
faintest thud was heard on the table. He had tried to muster up the will to
throw that picture away, how hard could that have been? A determined motion of
wrists and its gone, but he had found it difficult, as always. Maybe that is why
for all those years that photo had held its place on the table.
.. to be continued
