Serendipity

Serendipity

by Scott Speck

October, 2025

My death came suddenly. It happened one sunny, windy day in October while I whistled a merry tune and strode down Main Street. The air around me was filled with the delicious aromas of wood fires and fermenting apples. The sidewalks and streets were alive with the skitter of vividly colored leaves.

Then, ten feet in front of me, a man appeared from a doorway. He was short and thin and, most alarmingly, wore a black ski mask. I stopped dead in my tracks as he sprinted past me and was gone. Then a policeman in a black uniform with a polished brass shield on his chest emerged from that same doorway. I recalled him shouting something, I don’t remember what. And then some powerful force struck the back of my head.

Thus began my oblivion. I was dead.

July, 2330

Imagine being roused from an exceptionally deep slumber. First, there is nothing, and then there is a something. In my youth, this something was always an annoyance, occurring in successive, ever more disturbing waves. Now, over three centuries later, I experienced a different kind of awakening.

It began with a very loud noise. I likened it to a giant, malevolent ogre roaring inside a concrete-walled tunnel, the effect of which was an ear-shattering reverberation. Next came the shaking. Not that someone-shaking-your-shoulder-to-wake-you-up kind of shaking, but a vibration strong enough to split the bedrock of the earth, itself, as if it were nothing more than a thin, brittle water cracker.

I opened my eyes amidst a deafening, violent churn of earth and rock, joined soon thereafter by a searing wave of heat and a flash of radiance so brilliant that any mortal being would have evaporated in its glare. As my ability to reason rose from its own ashes, curiosity replaced my annoyance. Just what the hell was going on?

Perhaps my centuries-long oblivion was to blame, but it took me a while to become fully cognizant. By then, the roar had subsided, the ground had stopped cracking, tumbling, self-inverting, and restabilizing, and I found myself sitting on a bleak, scorched landscape. Above me, an ashen sky boiled with lightning-laced clouds, while fragments of charred wood smoldered about me – bits of my own shattered coffin, I surmised.

I stood up and assessed myself, dressed as I was in my usual jeans-and-t-shirt. I felt just as I had before I died, in my thirties and standing to lose twenty pounds. Recalling the sharp force that had struck my head, I touched the back of my skull and was relieved to find no holes. But something was definitely off, for I could plainly see my surroundings – things like trees and houses and clouds – through myself. That’s when it hit me. I was a ghost…

October 31, 2450 (Present Day)

It was dreadfully windy tonight, strong enough to pelt me with dirt and gravel, the bits penetrating halfway through me before slowing and falling to the ground. This phenomenon was due to what I termed my fractional solidity. I was neither fully solid, nor purely transparent. This fractional solidity was very important! It allowed me to walk on solid ground without falling through the earth, and to pick up small objects and move them about.

A full moon had risen – or as full a moon as it could ever be. Its face glowed behind a thin veil of clouds streaming overhead, its roundness forever marred by that huge, ugly chunk bitten out.

Given my knowledge of astronomy, I believed that missing chunk of the moon had caused the end of the world. Some immense asteroid must have slammed into the moon. The collision would have ejected enormous chunks of debris, many of which fell to Earth in a rain of unimaginable destruction. I’d gathered more direct evidence of this, over the past century, having found numerous bits of glassy, black obsidian lying about. Some were the size of pencil erasers, while others were as large as office buildings. Huge chunks of this material implied intense, explosive heat.

In all these years, I’d never found anyone to discuss my ideas with, and, for obvious reasons, nobody had written books or magazine articles about it after the fact. The key point of my statement is this – I’d never found anyone alive. No humans. No animals.

I'd walked thousands of miles in the first few years, searching for someone, anyone. I'd entered every building I found, shouted out to anyone who might be listening. The only replies were my own reverberant echoes. Near the end of year ten, I had despaired to the point of suicide, but I knew that was impossible. I'd only found skeletons scattered across hundreds of square miles of desolation. Imagine my state. The world had ended and everyone I’d ever known and loved was dead. Then my ultimate irony – that being dead and buried before the Apocalypse had quite literally saved my life!

This question remained – why had the end of the world awakened only me from death? I knew there might be others like me somewhere in the world, but, by this point, I doubted I’d ever find them.

Soon after the Apocalypse, once the rains of ash, the atmospheric firestorms, and the repeated pelting of the earth by smaller chunks of debris had subsided, the world grew quiet.

My piece of terra firma grew as cold as the arctic for thirty years, until the climate bounced back, glaciers retreated, and plants extended their first tender shoots toward the sun. Then, the land was green again! The first wildflower I found, in late 2372, I still have it!

After the nuclear winter, I discovered that where I’d been interred (in my coffin) was only forty or fifty miles from an immense impact crater, nearer to which everything had vaporized. So I set off in the opposite direction, toward what had been the city of Chicago, in the hopes of meeting others like myself. A few days later, I saw the Chicago skyline, and my heart sank. The Apocalypse had really done a number on the place. Gargantuan chunks of skyscrapers lay scattered about, while other structures had collapsed into neat piles of rubble. Some of the older stone and brick buildings, however, still stood intact.

Tonight, as the wind streamed in from Lake Michigan, I stood at the base of the clock tower of the old Wrigley building. The clock’s enormous black hands were silent and unmoving. Given my near-weightlessness, I climbed the stairs in several minutes and reached the clockworks chamber, hundreds of feet above street level. The clock’s big rusty gears, cams, and levers still mesmerized me, and, though a shockwave had blown in the west clock face, its black clock hands remained, though bent slightly inwards.

As chance would have it, a public building tour had been in progress when the Apocalypse struck, because dozens of skeletons were scattered about the clockworks, both youngsters and adults.

While the wind whistled through the immense round opening, I moved to a work bench where I’d assembled one of my favorite wind instruments. Gruesome as it sounds, human skulls, when placed at precise angles relative to the wind, can play a musical note, though the sound is quite faint and airy. It has something to do, I’m sure, with the size and shape of the cranial cavity, along with the small hole at the rear of each ocular orbit.

I stood at my line of skulls, twelve of them, ranging from child-size to “big guy size”, and began to turn them this way and that, in small increments, to catch the wind at just the right angle.

An hour later, eight of them were producing tones, together creating a haunting harmony that rose and fell with the wind. Next, I found two humerus bones and tapped away on another row of skulls – my xylophone. Given my partial translucency, lifting and moving the bones was slow, patient work. I wasn’t a musician when I was alive, so perhaps this was my new calling…

Later, when I grew bored, I moved to the precipice just inside the missing clock face and felt the wind in my hair. The wind and rain were all-important to me, of course, for they were my only ways of feeling touched, and times like these were my psychotherapy, my way of staying sane.

Then something caught my eye – a dark shape moving down Kinzie Street. I’d been fooled by blowing debris a thousand times before, but, when the shape made a left turn at an intersection, my heart skipped a beat. Who or what was this?

I trembled with excitement as I charged back down the steps, ran down Kinzie, and rounded the corner. There it was, just a block ahead of me. It moved slowly, as if hobbling along, so it was easy to catch up. It was definitely human, and, by its gait, I guessed it was a man, a bit shorter than me, but appearing solid, not translucent. A living man?

Just a few feet behind him, however, I noticed something strange. His right ear appeared to be canine, covered with long fur that shivered in the wind.

“Hello,” I said, though my ghost voice was quite faint. When the wind died down for a moment, I cleared my throat and shouted “Helloooo!”

He stopped, and my heart skipped a beat. He froze in place, and I drew up beside him.

“Are you real? Are you alive?” I asked, in as loud a voice as I could muster. His head jerked sharply toward me, his large dark eyes fixing upon mine. His shock was evident.

“Don't be afraid, I’m just a ghost,” I said.

When he finally spoke, his voice was guttural and reminiscent of a huge dog growling.

“Tonight is… transformation,” he said, then raised his head, closed his eyes, and howled at the moon. Oh, what a tragic, melancholic moan! I fought back my own tears. His face, I saw in the moonlight, wasn’t quite human. His jaw and nose were elongated, together forming a stubby, rounded muzzle. I waited for him to stop howling before speaking again, when a thought occurred to me.

“Are you a… werewolf?”

He nodded, his breathing labored. Then he began to speak, haltingly at first, about his curse, of being immortal, and of having to endure the agony of transforming from man to wolf on each full moon. The problem was that, after the Apocalypse, he’d never achieved the satisfaction of becoming fully wolf. This was because the moon’s face was never completely full anymore. With that big chunk missing, he could only transform halfway…

I felt terrible for him - alone, without a single living animal to chase down and feed upon - a torment for a wolf. What a horror, to undergo a monthly torture of cracking bones and stretching flesh and only get halfway there! In the lore of the past, werewolves were viewed as evil, demonic creatures, but he hadn’t chosen to become this way. Some other werewolf, centuries ago, had attacked him and brought this curse upon him. I was puzzled at his immortality, but he had no explanation for it.

After having pitied myself for the past century, a lump formed in my throat, for I could never imagine the suffering this man had endured.

He talked for an hour, followed by a period of intense pain in which he regained his human form, after which he continued. As dawn approached, we sat upon the collapsed ruins of a skyscraper, while I shared my own tale, of how I became a ghost after being shot dead and buried for three centuries. Unlikely as it was, we were born within a few years of each other!

Because he’d lived through the three centuries of my oblivion, he was able to recount the world’s history that I’d missed. At long last, my theory was confirmed. He described how, several months before the Apocalypse, astronomers had sighted an immense asteroid on a collision course with the moon. With tears in his eyes, he recounted how humanity had mounted every planetary defense imaginable, including nuclear missiles and immense ground-fired lasers, but nothing had so much as nudged that huge rock from its fated course. Within days of it smashing into the moon, the first chunks had rained down, some of them ten miles across.

After that we fell silent. We just sat together, both marveling at being able to converse with another living soul. Just before noon, he rose to his feet. I rose with him. When he began to walk, I remained instinctively at his side. Then he halted, his face pinching, and I saw tears on his cheeks.

“I’m a lone wolf,” he explained with grim resignation. “I must go on alone. But I will remember you forever – the only soul I’ve encountered since the world ended.”

We embraced, though he moved partway through my ectoplasmic body as we did so. We both wept, until he turned away and set off. I watched his shrinking form, until he rounded a corner and vanished behind the hulk of a ruined building. He never looked back

While I hiked to the lake shore, a newfound peace settled in my heart. I sat on the beach as the sun shone down and warmed my face. Then, for the first time since the Apocalypse, I lay down, closed my eyes, and felt the wind lulling me to sleep. My last thought before I slipped under was – “I never learned his name.”