The Last on Earth

The Last on Earth

By Dustin Shimoji

It’s finally happened. I have forgotten what another human looks like. The only humans I can remember are me and Jacob. Everyone else, my family, my friends, are all a blur in the back recesses of my mind. I never got any photos before abandoning my family home. All of Jacobs photos were on his phone, which was crushed shortly after he was taken from his house. It’s just been me and him for years now, and now he was the only other person I could picture clearly in my head.

I imagine that this isn’t exactly uncommon for people in our situation, we hadn’t kept track of small things that we used to hold dear. I couldn’t remember what a burger at McDonald’s tasted like, I couldn’t remember what anything tasted like that we didn’t make ourselves, or that wasn’t coming out of a can. It’s been years since we could recall which day of the week it was. We mainly just went by what the day felt like. If it was a particularly dull day, we called it a Wednesday, if the day was filled with minor annoyances we called it a Monday. It probably would have been more beneficial for us to keep track of how many days had gone by since they stopped producing calendars. All I can say for sure is that “today marks a long time since humanity died.”

Humanity didn’t go out in a big fight like the movies predicted. The dead didn’t rise, we didn’t destroy ourselves with huge bombs. We went with a whimper into the night. A disease had spread, fast. When the disease was discovered it was only a few short months before it took 75% of the United States population, the world was reeling even more. The 25% that remained were immune to the disease, something about our blood type.

I remember the day I was carted off to the few remaining research stations for experimentation. It was a cold night, and violence had taken the city. I got a loud knock at my door and a handful of armed men “politely” asked for me to come with them for examination. They escorted me to the back of an armored truck, with a dozen other men, women, and children. That’s where I met Jacob.  He was sitting between me and some woman making light of the situation, and joking with the guard that we had assigned to watch us, just in case someone tried for a daring escape. That’s the way he always was, light hearted even in the darkest of situations.

There was fighting, looting, and chaos everywhere. When the populace started dwindling most people took it upon themselves to live each day like it was there last, and apparently that meant a shit ton of violence. All around us in the armored caravan there were shots ringing off our rigs. Explosions in the distance. People yelling various obscenities. All the while, Jacob saying things like “so what brought you into this line of work? Is this one of those jobs that you need a boat load of experience for or can I start as grunt somewhere? It seems like you all have ample job security. Do you have an application on you?”

Jacob wasn’t anything special, his mouth was probably the most important resource he had available to him. He was skinny, wore dark, short hair, had brown eyes. We was attractive in a sort of mousy way, but he wasn’t a model by anyone’s measure. I wasn’t much more appealing I guess. I was also very skinny, had dark, longer hair and hazel eyes. In my circle of friends I was what some might call “a twink” Jacob would have also fit this category, but I doubt he had ever heard the term before. He was laying it on pretty thick to the women in our truck, despite the circumstances surrounding him.

As the caravan rolled along more shots rang off the side of the armor surrounding us until finally the truck we were in stopped. We thought we had reached wherever they had intended for us to go, but the guard in our truck reached to his earpiece and looked nervous.

“You all stay put, I’ll be right back.” The guard said with some fervor in his tone.

“Aww shucks. You guys going to get food and didn’t tell us?” Jacob said and the guard rolled his eyes.

The guard walked out of the back of our truck and was instantly shot in the throat. The people in our truck looked on awestruck then nervously decided to start walking out of the truck, this time everyone ducked a little bit lower than our now dead guard.

A few of us made it out of the back without being shot, I got winged in the shoulder, but was still fully functional. We knew about where the shots was coming from so we stayed with our heads down and walked as quickly as possible away from everything. It didn’t look like anyone in our remaining group had any sort of experience fighting so we just did the best we could to get somewhere safe, but it didn’t look like anywhere was safe. To this day I don’t remember how we got to a wood line, or who was guiding us to it. I just kept looking down at the sidewalk, praying that I wouldn’t get shot. I heard screams from all around me as our group kept dwindling more and more.

When we were safe we sat down and looked at each other. It was down to me, Jacob and the woman we were sitting next to in the truck. We were covered in a dozen other peoples blood, and exhausted from trying to get to safety. In a few days it would be down to me Jacob, we would find the woman hanging from a tree in our camp. Jacob was disappointed, I was shocked.

We stayed mobile for years. Not trusting anyone. We finally happened upon a remote cabin with a dead family inside. Some very scarce supplies, but it looked as though it hadn’t been discovered by anyone else. Probably due to it being hidden so deep in the woods. Jacob and I tried to piece together a story for the family that died here, saying they probably got sick on some family vacation, or they were a ring of murdering psychopaths that ended up killing each other. Regardless of why or how, this was our home now. A little piece of nothing, out in the middle of nowhere. We fortified it, and made supply runs to make sure we could stay here until the anarchy stopped.

We didn’t realize that when the anarchy stopped there would be nothing left.

. . .

I woke up just as I did every day, to the sound of silence, save for the shuffling from Jacob in the next room. I walked to the sink in my room and looked at the man staring back at me in the mirror. A was more grizzled now, a short beard with bags under my eyes. The brown hair I once fussed with in the mirror for hours on end was now a disheveled mess, with bits of gray scattered in. I walked out into the kitchen to see Jacob eating some of our rations for breakfast. He nodded to me and I smiled and nodded back to him. He was in the same messy state I was. Accept he kept his hair short, neither of us were barbers so it looked like a real nightmare, but it was a cute nightmare that I had grown to find attractive. We were both even skinnier than when we started out, it was an unhealthy type of skinny reserved for models that threw up after every meal.

“We’re running out.” He said tapping his can of beans. “I went out last time, you need to go.”

“Ok,” I said smiling to him. “Let me just grab a couple of things, and I’ll be on my way.”

I went back into my room and filled a backpack with bare essentials, flashlight, sleeping bag, a week’s worth of food, and our gun. A glock, with five round in the clip and one in the chamber. The few times we had to fire it were in self-defense, we never stayed back long enough to see if the shots hit anyone. After we fired we immediately left as the other party took cover. It helps me sleep better at night to think that those rounds ended up in a tree somewhere rather than an actual human body, regardless of their intentions toward us. Now it feels kind of silly to keep the gun on me at all, seeing our lack of company lately.

I came back out to find Jacob naked. I knew what this was. Our ritual before one of us left, knowing we wouldn’t have any actual physical contact for at least a week, maybe longer if we couldn’t find food. There was no love in it for Jacob. It took him months of not seeing another soul to even consider it. When we first had sex I knew this was a sign. It wasn’t any metaphorical sign, it was just a clear cut sign that Jacob had given up. He hadn’t fully given up, if that were the case I imagine I would have found his body with one of our limited amounts of bullets lodged in his brain. He no longer joked after that day, he very rarely smiled if at all. It may have worked out well for me, but the man I had first loved was no longer the man I knew. He never knew I was gay, or that I had feelings for him. I was able to conceal myself easily in society as “straight,” and even one on one for as long as we were together he never figured it our. As far as he was concerned I was just doing what he was, trying to find a release.

The first time we had sex I made a big show of objecting to be the one to receive (or ‘bottom’ as people in my community called it), even though I had no real objections to it since I had done it many times before. Now that’s all I did, every night before we went to our separate beds, and once in a random morning before we went on a run for supplies. I once tried to cuddle with him after, and he punched me in the ribs so hard I thought he fractured one. No, there was no affection for Jacob. This was and shall forever be a release. So he could keep himself sane. I was hoping one day he would want someone to help keep him warm during the colder nights, but it never came. In his mind he was still straight, and this was a hole he could stick his dick into. He didn’t care what gender was on the other side of the hole. He didn’t care who.

After we finished I wiped up and gave him a simple nod. He returned the nod, and went to his room, as he did I stepped out the door and prepared my legs for the long walk ahead.

. . .

I arrived in the third closest town to our little cottage in the woods a week and half later. The first two towns had been ransacked and we only recently finished picking the bones of what was left. This was the first time I had been in this town, it was small and quaint, the type of place you might picture in the 50’s (with sock-hops and people who pumped your gas, or delivered your milk). It was just as deserted as the surrounding, more populated areas. It was no surprise, if people were sick in this area they would have gone to the more advanced cities for treatment. The people that remained would have gone to look for help elsewhere.

As I walked I saw little houses lining the street, they all looked identical. Dead grass, missing paint from years of neglect, abandoned toys from small children, shell casings, scorch marks. It appeared even this isolated area wasn’t safe from the violence. I saw dead bodies in rocking chairs wearing blood splattered clothes. Families clutched together waiting for the inevitable. Even throughout all of this terror I couldn’t help but imagine Jacob and I in one of these little houses. Back when the grass was green, and before the carnage started. He and I walking out the front door grabbing the morning paper, waving to our neighbors as they grabbed their own paper or cut their grass. Only Jacob would still joke around too much. He would still smile.

I walked further and found the small shops dispersed in the center of the town. Pharmacies, gas stations, grocery stores. I figured I would roll the dice and check those places before I started picking scrapes of food from corpses. To my surprise there was still usable stuff in these areas. I brought a couple of spare bags in my backpack, each bag had enough space for about a week’s worth of food. So we shouldn’t have to go out again for a while. I started filling them; canned goods mainly, I didn’t bother with water, the little that was left was spilled all over the ground or had gone bad. Besides we had a nice little filtration system built at home that kept us stocked on water. As soon as I was almost done filling my bags I saw it. The holy grail. Mecca. A small pond in thousands of miles of desert. Alcohol. I hadn’t seen alcohol in so long I forgot what having a hangover felt like, I forgot the beautiful numb feeling it gave me after so many shots of whiskey. I didn’t want to take any space away from the food so I finished filling up my current bags, dropped them near the door of the grocery store, and searched the houses for another bag. Luckily I found a rolling suitcase at the third house I went to, perfect for packing in a fair amount of booze. I went back and loaded it with as much as it could handle, rum, Vodka, Wine, Whiskey, Bourbon, Scotch, Gin (I hated gin but you never know), tequila, I even got a couple of cigarette packs, these were equally rare, but it didn’t matter since neither I, nor Jacob smoked. I felt we deserved to have one of these small luxuries since we were most likely the last two people alive on earth.

I just found the last bit of booze that I could pack into the suitcase, a large bottle of champagne, when I kicked something. Under normal circumstances it wouldn’t matter, but this particular thing I kicked made a noise, more accurately it moaned. The noise startled me so badly that I nearly fell back and hit my head. The disembodied voice began to sit up, and it took the form of a woman. The woman looked even more disheveled than I did, almost like she had been going through the same thing I had but with a hangover the entire time. She was sickly skinny like me, and her hair was long and wild. She wore a dress that showed off a pair of hairy legs, and armpits. Her arms were pale, and all of her hair was red. She stretched and I backed up, knocking into a case of liquor. Her eyes darted towards me and we stood their motionless. Starring. We stared as only two people who hadn’t seen another human could stare, only her stare was more intense, like she had been alone for a good amount of time. I waved, and she returned the wave.

“Who-“ her voice scratched as if she hadn’t spoken in a while, she grabbed a container of liquid (most likely more booze), drank it, and coughed, “Who are you?”

“Kevin,” I said still in shock “you?”

“Yolinda” she said a bit more clearly. I raised an eyebrow at the name, she shrugged at me.

“How did you survive?” She eyed my pistol in a holster on my waist.

I shook my head to the question forming in her head, and responded, “we hid.”

“We?”

“Me and Jacob.”

“Oh” she stared off in the distance, as if calling upon a past memory.

“Have you been alone this whole time?” I said trying my best to sound concerned for her mental state.

“No just the past week. I was walking the entire time and found this place just yesterday. Decided to get drunk to drown my troubles.”

We regaled each other on our adventures. She told me her and her brother had made it out of a big city and never stopped moving. They had a car and kept syphoning gas until they got to a good, quiet spot. They used all of the resources in the town they stayed at, then went to the next. Mobility was how they survived. She said she hadn’t seen another soul for months besides her brother, then the worst happened. Her brother got sick. Not the sickness, but a high fever and a harsh cough that ended up killing him just last week. She didn’t think she would see another human being for the rest of her life, so she was very affectionate towards me. I told her of our little hut in the middle of nowhere, how we survived, and how we thought we were the last people alive. I skipped the bit about our more physical relationship. I offered to take her up, and she offered to drive until we got to the wood line. With her car it was only a day’s walk from the wood line.

During our walk I couldn’t help but stare at her and see my eventual demise. Not physical being, there was no need for violence from either of us. Every step she took was another step towards my lifestyle being changed forever. I hated her for this, I cursed myself for not being self-centered enough to kill her, or at least abandon her. Even though she was as unkempt as we were you could see some parts of real beauty hidden under the dirt and grime. I’m pretty sure she could have been completely hideous and it wouldn’t have mattered to Jacob. She was a woman, and everything he had been wishing for since we saw our last person.

We arrived to our cottage and I yelled out “I got booze!”

I heard running from inside the house and Jacob exploded from the doorway. After that display he stood there awestruck. It was like seeing cupid’s arrow strike a target as I saw him eye our new guest, and she gave him the same eyes back. He waved and she waved.

“Kevin, who’s that?” he said, his eyes not moving from her.

“That,” she broke in “Is Yolinda. You must be Jacob.”

“My reputation proceed me?” He joked and I saw him smile. The first smile I had seen from him in ages. It was refreshing. Jacob seemed like his old self.

“You have a reputation I should be worried about?” She smirked. I was surprised, the flirting didn’t take long. She hadn’t flirt with me the entire time, but I guess she was good at feeling out a person who wasn’t interested.

“I did. Long behind me now. Seems I’ve been waiting my entire life for the right person.”

“What, Chris not good enough for you?” They laughed and Jacob worriedly looked at me. I shook my head no. I may have hated what was coming, but I didn’t want to do anything to make Jacob upset. He looked relieved, and continued.

“Oh no Chris is all well and good, but lets just say he doesn’t have the anatomy for what I’m looking for.” They laughed again and I had never wished I had been born a woman more than this moment.

“So,” I interjected “we getting drunk or what?” They both gave a quick yell in approval, then we all cluttered back inside.

The night went on and we all got completely trashed. We told our stories, had some laughs, had some cries, and all the while I stayed in the background as Jacob and Yolinda got closer and closer. Jacob was at least respectful in the fact that I found her first. and offered me to have sex with her first. I declined. More than me being disinterested I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t appreciate being treated like a sex object even if she was the last woman on earth. Shortly after he offered she returned from the bathroom, and they started to make out on our couch. Shortly after their clothes started coming off they went to Jacob’s room.

It was a few minutes before the moaning started, and the bedframe started banging against the wall. It also only lasted a few minutes. I guess the pent up sexual aggression got the better of old Jacob, because the next sound I heard was two sets of snores. The moaning still continued in my head though. It rang through my head like a shitty song that just wouldn’t stop. I took the pistol out of it’s holster, and began to twirl it in my hands. I was useless. A gay man in a world with no people. The human race might be saved from this coupling in the style of Adam and Eve, but there was never a stupid useless friend that hung out with Adam waiting for him to get bored of Eve. The best thing I could hope for would be to get forced into a sexual situation with Yolinda, so we would have twice the opportunity of procreating, and that made me shudder. The more likely situation would be that I would end up as the world’s last living third wheel. These options didn’t satisfy me. I took the gun and put it in my mouth. My hand trembled and made the gun clatter against my teeth. I was useless, the life I knew was gone as soon as I accidently tripped over that girl. “Here lies Chris: The last gay man on the face of the Earth.” I started to squeeze the trigger, the sound of their moaning rolling though my head, the knocking of the bed frame serving as the last rhythmic beats I would hear before the bullet entered my brain. Tears streamed down my face as I prayed to god to be released. “Make me straight! Give me a vagina! Anything! Just make this pain go away. Just make him mine again.” I stopped pulling the trigger as the last line entered my head. Mine again. He was never mine to begin with. It was never the same for him as it was for me. I may have viewed the past with rose tinted glasses, but the thought of my own demise cleared my flowery thoughts. I remembered the punch to the ribs he gave me for trying to show affection. the lifeless look in his eyes as he fucked me from behind (probably trying to picture a woman in my place), I remembered everything.

I set the gun back down on the table, and went to Yolinda’s pants that she had dropped while they were fornicating. I grabbed the keys to her car, and started to pack. Only minimal this time. Enough for a day’s trip back into town. I didn’t want to rob them, I was leaving everything else, save a bottle of whiskey and three cans of beans. The car I considered payment for Yolinda robbing me of a man. They could stay here together like we did. They could repopulate the Earth. and I could go down to remain in a drunken stupor for the rest of my days. I slowly put the bag on my shoulder and walked out the door. I took one last look at the gun on the table and shut the door. Leaving it the past, like the house I had lived in for the past few years.

I was alone now, and nothing was going to change that.