THE LAST MAN ON EARTH
Fletcher Sinclair prepared to step out into the Southern California sun for the first time in months, knowing there was a pretty good chance it would kill him.
There was a pretty good chance he’d lose his mind, then control of his bowels and then his life. That’s how all the others had gone.
Fletcher didn’t exactly know how Delilah worked her way into her victims, but he was going to protect himself as best he could. He sat on the cool tiles of the kitchen floor, unspooling a Costco-sized roll of aluminum foil and meticulously covering every inch of himself—mummifying his skinny body in silver. He labored in dim light, the sun barely bleeding through the lining of beach towels and bedsheets he’d hung over the windows so long ago. The bulbs overhead were merely decoration since the power had gone out. Working it with his hands, Fletcher formed the aluminum to the bony contours of his joints, eliminating all menacing gaps, until finally he was confident in his coverage.
He stood and pulled a stretchy gaiter mask down over the bottom half of his face. Then he strapped his brother’s old ski goggles over his thick glasses. The rest of his head was already covered in a hood of foil, massaged to form-fit over his mop of hair. He looked like a deranged, low-budget robot, but to Fletcher he was his own knight in shining armor—the bravest knight in Rancho Bernardo.
While Delilah and death were likely waiting for him on his doorstep, Fletcher knew starvation was all that remained in his basement sanctuary.
He needed supplies. He needed food. He needed to leave.
So, he opened the door and stepped outside.
His aluminum suit crinkled and scratched, the only sounds in the dead summer morning. Fletcher closed his eyes, clenched his teeth and waited. A bubble formed in his stomach, followed by a foreboding gurgle. He was certain it was the harbinger of his doom.
But the bubble dissipated. He swallowed. He was still alive.
Fletcher opened his eyes to a tangerine world, tinted through his ski goggles. He hobbled down the front steps in his makeshift hazmat suit, lumbering like Frankenstein’s monster to the old Ford Explorer in the driveway. The gas tank was open—not a great sign. He climbed up, leaned across the driver’s seat and tried the ignition. Nothing. Fletcher didn’t know how one siphoned gas, but he was pretty sure someone had done it to the family car.
So, he would have to walk. The store was two miles away.
Fletcher hadn’t been a big fan of long walks in pre-Delilah times, so he wasn’t thrilled about it now that he was starving and steaming like a baked potato under fifty feet of Kirkland Signature foil and a 73-degree sun. He was sweating before he left the driveway.
As he shuffled his metallic legs in the direction of salvation, he saw no movement. The world had been abandoned. The air carried a silence that could break glass.
He knew it would be bad, but this—
Fletcher had grown up in this quaint San Diego suburb, but as he walked down the middle of the street, everything looked surreal, almost unrecognizable, an upside-down and inside-out version of itself. There was trash everywhere, piles and piles of it: in the streets, on the sidewalks, heaping in front yards like raked leaves. A strange amount of ash dusted everything gray. The windows of many houses were boarded up. Many others were shattered. Forgotten cars sat in driveways under layers of sooty filth. At the end of the street stood a tan stucco sign, once simply bearing the name of the community. Someone had spray-painted the word “here lies” above it.
Here lies Rancho Bernardo.
He turned onto another street. One house had burned down, leaving behind only a dark skeleton. The houses on both sides were licked black from the long tongues of the flames. While they had survived the threat, their doors now hung open and they were surely empty.
The first movement Fletcher saw was a pack of dogs: a pug, an English bulldog and a few lab-like mutts. The dogs looked as if they were strolling through an abandoned movie set. They wandered aimlessly, whipping their heads at random, like they were looking for their humans. When they saw Fletcher, they scurried off between two houses. Fletcher felt a pang of sadness for the animals.
Then he felt one for their humans, who were most certainly dead.
Fletcher turned left onto San Salvador Road. There was a home with black spray-painted writing on the side facing the street, five feet tall and taking up the width of the house. It read: “SAFETY HERE. FOOD & SHELTER.” The windows were smashed, and the front door was in splinters. Fletcher was pretty sure those words weren’t true anymore.
He walked on, and suddenly—
A person.
His heart clenched. There, in front of a house on the left, standing in the middle of a garden, was a real, live human being. Fletcher was paralyzed with simultaneous swells of relief and terror, and for the same reason: others were alive.
This human was the first Fletcher had seen in exactly thirty-three days, and the first non-Sinclair he had seen in months longer than that.
This human was, of course, a woman. The Delilah Virus only killed men. While the ensuing wars, riots and overall shittiness of the world killed without such prejudice, Delilah only ever had an appetite for Fletcher’s kind.
The woman was old and gray and wore old and gray clothes. She stood looking at Fletcher like a wax figure at Madame Tussauds. All that moved was her long, charcoal hair, waving in the gentle breeze like dying grass. Even her expression was still. It was the look of seeing a ghost and, to be fair, she wasn’t far off. The men of the world were dead, yet here one stood.
Or, what appeared to be a man. Covered in foil.
There was no wave, no nod, no acknowledgment between them.
Fletcher just kept walking, faster now, too terrified to do anything else. Fletcher had never cared much care for the unexpected—and the old lady had been horribly so.
* * *
When Fletcher arrived at the grocery store, he was relieved to find that the scary old lady had not followed him. And that the store was empty. Although … it had clearly been visited. The windows that faced the vacant parking lot were shattered, leaving jagged mouths of glass. Fletcher stepped through an opening, shards crunching under his sneakers.
The inside of the store was a war zone. Shelves lay on their sides, knocked over, their remaining contents spilled and scattered. The polished concrete was stained with strawberry ice cream, soda and wine, looking like the psycho butcher’s killing room floor in one of Fletcher’s old horror games. Cash registers were smashed open—not that money could be of much use to anyone now.
Fletcher grabbed a cart and stepped deeper into the store.
The produce section at the front offered him nothing. Anything left was gray, furry and deflated. Whatever. Fletcher hated vegetables anyway. More concerning was that the freezers and refrigerated shelves were worthless. The few chicken nuggets and mini burritos that remained were now floating in pools of water, inedible since the power had gone out.
The trip was far from fruitless, though. Fletcher rolled his cart around the toppled shelves, digging out packaged goods that had been unpicked by previous scavengers. He excavated bags of chips, Fig Newtons and beef jerky. He uncovered cans of peaches and soup. He found jars of pickles and applesauce. He threw in cans of green beans, too, figuring he could suffer through a vegetable if his life depended on it. Then, water: at first glance, the section seemed bare—the shelves just a pile of metal bones—but Fletcher dug desperately. In a stroke of luck, under a layer of smashed Styrofoam coolers, he found a collection of single-gallon jugs of water. The last thing Fletcher stacked onto his cart was a couple cases of Agent Orange, his beloved energy drink. It looked, to his wonder and good fortune, as if nobody else had taken even a single can. He cracked one right there in the back of the store, pairing it with a bag of crushed salt and vinegar chips.
The walk home was far worse than the one to the store. He had never noticed that the road was a hill. It was too subtle to feel in a car, but it was very, very clear while sweating under a second skin of aluminum foil and pushing an overflowing shopping cart.
Plus, he had to go a longer route to avoid the old woman.
“This will all be over soon, honey.” His mom’s words echoed in his head, as they so often did. She used to say that to Fletcher growing up, any time he got sick or upset, and it always made him feel better, like a warm blanket or homemade lasagna. It’s what she had said when the virus started taking people out, too.
This will all be over soon.
She had been right, in a way. Not long after she said those words, all the men Fletcher knew were gone and so was she, after the riots at the hospital where she worked.
Fletcher heard a door to one of the houses on the street slam shut. He quickened his pace. Then he thought he saw someone looking at him from a window of another home. Then a movement, or maybe not, but—
He suddenly felt very much on display, like a lizard in a terrarium. He felt very unprotected, too, like the terrarium was missing its lid and the cat had just noticed.
He was also exhausted, and his stomach was growling, and he was pretty sure his insides were beginning to boil. He tried to hurry his heavy legs, desperately wanting the shelter of his home, to get away from the prying eyes he now imagined in every window. Each of those imagined eyes fired brilliant beams of white-hot Delilah Virus straight at Fletcher, intent on bringing his foil-covered ass down for good.
By the time Fletcher got home, his armor wasn’t very armor-like. It had slid around from all the sweat and all the movement, revealing many open places that were perfect for viruses to creep into. He ignored this reality, too afraid to think about what it could mean.
Back in his fortress, Fletcher shed the foil like a molting snake and looked at his bounty of processed goods with pride. Fletcher Sinclair had successfully acquired food for survival.
He felt pretty accomplished. Pretty resourceful. Pretty damn heroic, even. He felt that way all night while he dined on the spoils of his bravery and sipped Agent Orange as if it were champagne.
Of course, when he woke up, he was still just a young man with no plan and death all around.
But he was still breathing.
So, he stayed the course, stayed inside, stayed alive. Sure, he made exactly zero progress toward any long-term solution, but that kind of problem-solving was above his paygrade anyway.
He remained in lockdown for three more weeks, until his food and water ran out again, at which point he got out the Kirkland Signature foil and stepped back out into the world that surely wanted to kill him.
He did this once a month, whenever his thirst and hunger grew louder than his fear of the outside. He visited all the stores in walking distance, some nearly five miles away. He briefly considered hijacking a neighbor’s car, but he now knew what the world looked like out there. He imagined all the horrible things people were capable of in a world like that, and he decided the last thing he should do was draw attention to himself. So, each mission was conducted by foot.
When he ran out of stores to go to, he started breaking into houses and ransacking kitchens and garages.
He got used to seeing dead bodies in those houses, each in their various stages of decomposition—sunken, empty sockets watching him from lonely faces on the couch, in bed, at the dinner table, in a pile of their own laundry, on a yoga mat surrounded by small rubber dumbbells. He saw occasional glimpses of what could have been living people, too—watching him from behind cars two blocks away, peering out from windows in houses down the street—and he wondered what evil they had done to survive this long. His own survival, he knew, was merely luck, but that couldn’t be the case for everyone.
This is how Fletcher lived for six months.
No people to talk to. No idea what was going on in the rest of the world. No real hope.
Just surviving. Just cold canned foods. Just reading his mom’s Reader’s Digests. Just periodic mental breakdowns.
This is how Fletcher lived for 191 days.
On Day 191, just two days after another valiant return with supplies from the houses of a cul-de-sac down the street, there was a knock on the door.
There wasn’t a valiant cell in his body as he tossed himself over the living room couch—hiding, frozen, cowering, vision blinded by a pulsing panic, awaiting the horrors these visitors brought.
