Ending one:

It had been over forty years now since that first day. Twenty years or so since I lost it. Since I thought I heard my dead father speaking to me. I really don’t know what came over me. He was dead. Well, everyone was dead now, so maybe it wasn’t entirely as crazy as I thought?

That had been the turning point for me, though. All of those subjects that I never thought to study became mine, and I ground even more under the climb for the top. It had taken just under ten years by the time I had reached the first space station.

It was worse than I could have expected.

I had forgotten how horrible a corpse could smell, and especially a corpse in such a small isolated place. It nearly made me decide to give it all up, but only for a moment. And then I put my helmet back on, and cleaned it up. I harvested every scrap of anything I could find, and collected the remains that I could. And then I vented the leftover atmosphere a few times through before the smell was bearable.

It took me a few years more to bring all three space stations together. If I had others to help me, I could have done it quicker. Launches were difficult by yourself, and the amount I had to automate was beyond any level of acceptable safety in the times before all of this.

But I had a mission.

Over forty years later, and my bones hurt more and more every time I liftoff. But this would be the last one. The eighty-fourth liftoff, and the last time I would be on this graveworld.

It took me three years to crack faster than light travel. I still don’t even know exactly how I did it, or really how it worked. All I knew, though, is that every simulation I ran showed it worked. Better than just working, it violated the exact law of physics that I needed to violate. It was a causality violation of the first order.

Space and time are directly linked, you see. And there are strict limits to the speed you can go. Try to go faster, and it takes more energy and you experience time moving slower. And nothing with mass could go at the speed of causality, the ‘speed of light’.

I still really had no idea how I stumbled upon it. Perhaps it was a dream. Or a nightmare. But I woke up and spent three and a half days without stopping my typing, without taking a break from welding and soldering, without doing anything except crystalizing the madness that I found in my mind. And after a well deserved eighteen hour period of blissful unconsciousness, I awoke to see that I had invented a space-time machine.

Go faster than causality, and you outstrip it. Go fast enough, and you can return to a time where the past still was the present. Sort of, at least.

It was close enough for me.

Close enough.

Enough.

If I wasn’t worried that I wouldn’t be able to make too many more trips up before the cancer tore me apart, I’d have tested it. I should have spent the time to figure out how to make the radiation a non-issue, but I didn’t. I couldn’t stop.

After getting far enough away from the Earth’s gravity well, Luna well on the other side and Sol hidden behind both, I engaged the drive.

Nothing happened, of course.

Faster than light travel was just a fever dream. How would I be able to do something so impossible? It was already beyond the pale of believability that I was even up in space at all.

As I strongly considered just opening the airlock and ending it all, I gave the button another press. This time no longer a calm and collected press, but an emotional plea. Not for it to work, but for it to do something. Anything.

And it did do something. Anything. Everything.

I just wish it hadn’t. That every particle of my being didn’t suddenly feel like it no longer was in the same place but in all of the places.

Mass was not meant to go faster than causality.

There was so much wrong with it all, and yet it still worked.

Not exactly as expected, not sending the barely-a-ship forward through space, but backwards through time.

It should have ended with me disappearing into the void forever, the movement of the solar system, the galaxy, the galactic supercluster, even hubble expansion should have made this entirely impossible.

If I had more time to spend on it, I might have found out that the device would stay bound to a large enough gravitation field. That if I had ended up rotating the device ninety degrees it would have moved me forward in space. And it would never have occurred to me what the other direction would do, something that I wish I was still able to even think about now as I found myself crashing back down to the planet I thought I had left for good.

Into the middle of roughly nowhere, rural farmland as far as the eye can see.

It was astounding that my body survived all of that, and that I was still both alive and conscious when I heard someone hammering on the side of the ship.

But the shock of who I saw is what killed me. Like Mister Snuggleupagus, I died of fright. How fitting.

My last vision was filled with Barney Simons, someone entirely unknown to the world until he was the first.

“Hey, are you okay? Hey?”

The last voice I heard, over forty years since that day.

Patient zero.

Finally!

[removed]

no it means you have eternal life

I couldn’t tell you why I had decided to dial that number. He had been dead long before the world ended after all. The number had been lost before the first signs of things to come were known to only the few scientists that could stop it. His ashes had been long tossed into the winds, his memory caked in them for most even before patient zero was found. It would have been foolishness to even hope to hear a voicemail greeting that had been long lost to time.

Why I was even calling people’s voicemail was a bit beyond me. There had to have been better ways to keep myself sane. Mostly sane, at least. Sane enough to make sure the final days of humanity were not wasted in my pathetic crying. That no one would ever see what a ruined mess of a person when I watched my mother pass from this world. Her eyes, blood red. Overflowing, unseeing, the second to last symptom of the thing that removed us all from the world. Death being the last one, a painful horrible death.

I wish I had been strong enough then to do for her what I wish I was even stronger now to do for myself.

Such thoughts were dangerous, and so like usual they were bottled up. Stuffed down and away, covered with the same dirt that I covered my sisters and my mother. That I coated in my own blood in a moment of despair, wanting to not be alone any longer. Needing to not be the only one left. But fearing, and knowing that I was. Something told me that would be the case, that I could look and search as far and as wide as I wanted. But I? I was the last person left.

Was it a curse? Had I do something to deserve this fate? Sure, there were times when I did others harm, and I would be the first (and only, my brain told me unwillingly) to admit it. Not letting someone merge because they were a bit of a jerk. Frowning at an unkept man panhandling. And worse things, leaving my first boyfriend because I grew bored of him. A pet rabbit that died in my care as a child, careless that they could be frightened to death. But surely I must have done something even worse than cause Mister Snuggleupagus to go to the great carrot patch in the sky.

It didn’t matter, however. Nothing mattered when these thoughts came to me. When I felt the scars on my wrist burning, demanding I finish the job I started. How the tears that streaked down my face almost felt like they were carving canyons in my flesh because how they never ended.

And yet here I was still trying to find something. That’s why I was calling phones still. The reason that I had spent three years, after the day I came back from the dead and was reborn, studying. Well, near death, close enough that I wouldn’t have made it if not for a chance occurrence that kept me from bleeding out. Still not entirely alive, but close enough to have that drive.

I studied everything I could. People always said I was smart, but I proved it finally to the no one around me in those years. The basics of every form of technology I could find books about. Deeper understanding, learning not only how to survive but also how to keep a small part of the world from falling completely into chaos. If I had been more ambitious, I might have even considered going further than that, doing more than gloss over the basics of nuclear thermodynamics, rocketry, and the like.

No, such things weren’t beyond me, but I had no need for them. I wouldn’t find anyone alive in the space stations in orbit. There wouldn’t be anything for me on Luna’s surface. I deserved to live on this grave of a world, watching nature take back what we stole from it.

This was my home, and I had a mission of my own.

It took me almost two more years after that, five years since the start, when I was able to place the first call. Phones had stopped working in days after the first day, but now that was no longer the case. Even if the only person that could use it was me. But use it I did, testing between two handsets that were wired together. And then only wired to power, and after a bit entirely wireless and powered by the results of the fusion candle burning in the sky. The towers that connected the phone was more difficult to power, but scale fixed such issues and more solar collectors to power more turbines to charge more very crude lead acid batteries worked.

Well enough for my needs at least.

It was a surprise and a stroke of luck that I was able to find the facilities that handled the two biggest mobile providers so close. Only a few hundred kilometers away, not an ocean between us. An entire year was spent bridging that gap, setting up small camps with signal repeaters and amplifiers. Why didn’t I just move to the city where it was housed, I hear no one asking me? I couldn’t say. It was likely the madness that had taken me.

All of this though, and for what? So I could dial our emergency services number and hear it come back as busy? The first time I dialed an outside number and it just rang and rang and rang nearly broke me. It was almost too much, too obvious that no one would ever answer. Too painful. It set me back two weeks, first how I tore apart all of the equipment I had at hand, second that I needed to stitch most of my fingers up, but third and worst how it threw me into a darkness I had thought escaped years ago.

But I was no longer the same person as I was back on that first day, the last day of humanity. I was still weak, still a fool, but I was a fool with a mission. Perhaps the most dangerous of fool are those who have a task at hand, because I came back to it with a fervent passion. And the solution was fairly obvious in the afterglow of the corpse of hindsight burning away in my mind.

Voicemail.

If nothing else, I would hear another voice. Sure, I’d know it wasn’t actually a person. That was something that I could shove to the back of my brain with all of the rest of the debris piled up there. A suspension of disbelief that wouldn’t be all that hard to muster given the alternative was eternal singularity. I’d accept it until I figured out an alternative.

That lead me to this moment, however. I had been making call after call, day after day, sometimes to people I used to know but other times to numbers I recalled. Even random numbers, which took me a bit of work to make sure would go somewhere, but somewhere they did go. I never listened to the messages I left. I barely even remembered them after hanging up the phone, just feeling well-worn pain from my throat aching and the tears staining the side of my head. It broke up the mundaneness of surviving.

Twenty. Long. Years.

The atomic clocks that were surprisingly easy to maintain made sure that I knew that number. That it had been twenty years to the day since those last moments of humanity became the moment of just one person. The last of all who had come before. Sitting there, unable to speak. Hearing a voice on the other end. Not a recording, but a voice.

A screaming voice, a begging voice.

The words replay in my head, only a few seconds have gone by.

“Hello...hello? Oh my God hello!”

I couldn’t speak. Not after hearing that voice. A voice that I hadn’t heard for over twenty-five years. That I knew I’d never hear again, no voicemail ever to be found.

Why did I call this number? I knew it’d ring to the fallback system. I’d get a robotic voice telling me that the number was no longer in service.

I found my voice.

I spoke.

“Dad?”

20 years. I've been the only living soul on this floating rock for 20 years. 20 years ago, I had a wife. I had kids. Sure, I wasn't the smartest person in the world, but I was doing just fine. Now I am the smartest person in the world, but it's hardly a competition.

My previous life wasn't filled with grandeur by any means. I had a boring desk job at a dying company working under an idiotic CEO, but after my recent life experience, I'd give anything to go back.

Being the only person alive gets incredibly boring after a while. I don't know how I've made it this long, to be entirely honest. I get by on all the food I can find, but I try to ration myself in case this whole thing lasts for longer than I'd like.

Why me? That's the only thought that has been running through my head for these last 20 years. Surely there must be a reason, right? I must have been chosen for some specific reason. Or was I just the only person deemed not worthy of freezing in place? How does that even happen? I go to sleep one night a little earlier than usual and when I wake up, the entire human population is just...frozen.

Finding my wife frozen in the middle of brushing her teeth was unbearable. I didn't know what was going on, or why. I called my best friend, but I was just sent straight to his voice mail. "Hi, you reached Bob! Go ahead and leave a message after the beep!"

That's when I got the idea to start calling people and have their voicemails keep me company. Most days it's my wife. "Hi, this is Cindy! I'm not able to answer your call right now, but please leave a message and I'll get back to you as soon as I can!" Just hearing her voice makes my stomach twist in ways I previously didn't think possible. I really miss her.

Eventually, I started calling every single possible number in existence. The first time I heard someone respond to my call was 10 years ago. I dialed up the number and heard a voice on the other line. "Hello?"

I jumped up from my chair. "Hello? Hello?? Is someone there? Can you hear me-"

"I'm just kidding! This is my voicemail, silly! You know what to do at the beep!"

The second time was five minutes ago.

I put in a random number, like I always do. I hit call and listened to the ring. A voice came through the phone. "Hello?"

Oh great. Another one of these. My finger moved to hang up.

"Hello?" The voicemail said again. I was hovering above the red button. "Oh my God hello?!"

What.

I stared at my phone. The voicemail cried out again. "Hello? Is someone there? Please please please let there be someone there!" This wasn't a voicemail at all. This was a person. A real, actual person!

"Hello?" I said into my phone.

"Oh my God!!" The voice on the other side sounded excited to hear another person after so long. So was I.

"Who is this?" I asked.

"This is incredible!" The other person responded, ignoring my question. They had some kind of European accent and also sounded feminine and around the same age as me. Not that that's easily guessable by voice, but what else can I go off of right now?

"Who is this?" I repeated, more assertive this time.

"Oh of course! Where are my manners? My name is Rachel Brown. Wow. Haven't said that to anyone in a long time. May I ask who this is?"

I didn't respond. I didn't trust what I was hearing right now. 20 years with no one to talk to and now all of a sudden someone's just here? It seems too good to be true.

"Hello? Have you hung up? Please tell me you're still there!"

This time I did respond. Suspicious or not, this was a chance to at least talk to someone real. "Hi. Sorry. I was just taken aback a bit by the fact that I'm talking to an actual person. My name is Zeke Allen."

"I can't believe this is real right now!" Rachel squealed over the phone.

"Yeah, me neither." I responded with a more cautious tone.

Rachel then asked me about my life experiences and what I've been doing during The Freeze as she called it. Despite my skepticism of this whole situation, I told her my entire life story. After I was done, I asked her about herself and she talked for hours. She talked about being an only child with divorced parents and about her struggle with addiction in her teenage years. She then explained how she was only 25 when the world froze around her and how she hadn't had time to settle down the way I had. Apparently in her 20 years of this hellscape, she had been exploring the world, visiting all the places she never could all over the Eurasian continent. Between the two people left on Earth, only one of us has visited North Korea. Listening to her talk about all the incredible sights she'd seen made me realize that I never really moved around all that much other than to get more food when I had drained the nearby area. I mean the entire world has been frozen in time for 20 years and I never even thought to go to Canada or even the beach!

"...and then I got this phone call and now I've been talking to you for the last 5 hours. Man, it feels wonderful to be able to say all of this to someone."

"I know what you mean." I nodded in agreement, even though she couldn't see that.

I heard a snap from the other end of the call. "I have a wonderful idea!" Rachel exclaimed. "What if we meet up? That way we can at least have someone in this barren world."

I was still unsure about the whole situation, but I have to admit that seeing another person not frozen in place did sound like a wonderful idea. "That sounds great. One huge problem though. We live on separate continents and neither of us are pilots or sailors."

"How is that a problem?" Rachel asked with genuine confusion in her voice.

"Uhhh...I'm not sure if you're aware of this, but there's this giant thing called the ocean separating the two of us."

"Zeke. Everything is frozen in place. The ocean is included in that. You can literally walk on water."

Of course! Why didn't I think of that?

I agreed to walk across the ocean and meet Rachel in Portugal since I was currently in Virginia and Rachel was currently in eastern Kazakhstan. It was just about halfway for both of us. We agreed on meeting up the Sea You Surf Café and then we hung up and both started our treks. I got in my car and started driving.

I reached the coast in about an hour. I drove my car along the road and then took it onto the beach. Rachel was right. The ocean was entirely frozen in place. I don't know why that surprised me so much, but for some reason it did. It made me think that maybe...

Slowly, I inched my car closer to the ocean until I was right at the edge. With a deep breath, I started moving forward. My car reached the ocean and cut right through the water without creating so much as a ripple. No luck. Sighing, I got out of my car and grabbed a backpack of supplies out of the trunk.

Hoisting the bag onto my back, I took a deep breath and stood at the line between water and sand. The world must have frozen during low tide considering how far I was from the boardwalk. Before blindly trusting the water, I decided to take a test step. Carefully, I lowered my foot onto the surface of the salty blue. To my absolute surprise, the water held my weight. I was doing it. I was walking on water. I begun to run around like an absolute fool, but it didn't matter to me what I looked like. No one could see me anyway.

Then I calmed down and stopped running. With the biggest smile on my face, an upbeat attitude for the first time in a long time, and that undeniable feeling that something just didn't feel right, I turned to get one last good look at the only land I'd see for the next few days.

Then I faced the ocean. I thought of everything I was leaving behind here. Cindy. My kids. Everything I had ever known. But then a new thought came to my head. A potential future with the only other person left unfrozen on the planet. And maybe some day time will unfreeze itself again or maybe Rachel and I will be able to find a way to do so. Either way, I knew I was ready to start trying something.

With one final deep breath, I started walking.

“We have been trying to reach you about your car’s extended warranty”

Nice.

We were forced underground when they came. They can’t deal with the dark and deployed satellites to light up the night sky. It is bright as day all of the time now. We took to the sewers and subways to hide…. eking out a minimal survival in the wastes of our once beautiful cities.

We call the day they came, ‘the arrival’.

crack

I lit a green glow stick, it’s crack echoing down the subway tunnel.

“It is a waste of a glow stick. These are just graffiti. Ramblings of a nut job with a spray can.”, Andrew said. He thought following the tunnel was a waste of time.

“I am telling you, they mean something. We just have to put them all together.”, I said as I scanned the wall with the glow stick. “The last one was ten feet further in, so there should be one near here if the pattern holds.” Scanning the whole wall by the green light was slow going. “Here! Here it is!”

Every piece of graffiti was signed by ‘the prophet’ and dated. The dates went all the way back to 2010, but they all talk about the arrival, which didn’t happen until 2023. I think this ‘prophet’ person was an actual prophet. Andrew thinks the prophet is a nut job.

I read through the whole thing. “Write it down Andrew. I will read it off.”

They will come by night and bring the day. 
They will fear the night, we will fear the day. 
They will die by night, we will die by day. 
   - the prophet 2012

I was reading it over and over again. Checking to see if I missed any thing.

“The first line is clear enough.”, Andrew said.

“So is the second.”, I said, “ but the third line…. they will die by night, what does that me?”, I pondered out loud.

“Think that the dark actually kills them?”, Andrew asked

“How?”, I asked myself out loud, “the dark is the absence of light. It isn’t a thing all by it’s self.”

“Let’s see if we can find another one before the glow stick dies.”, Andrew said as he shook the stick.

We hurried down the subway tunnel, scanning the wall as we went.

“There it is!”, Andrew said excitedly.

“Give me the stick.”, I scanned the wall again, “This prophet repeats themselves. Write it down Andrew.”

Fear the day as they fear the night
Bring them the night as they brought the day
Bring them death as they brought death
    - the prophet 2018

“You got that?”, I asked.

“Yeah. I got it.”, Andrew said as he finished writing the last of it down. “Bring them death as they brought death…. It really sounds like the dark would kill them.”

“Come on. One more!”, I said as I shook the glow stick again.

“We are getting close to the opening. I can see a faint glow up there.”

“Don’t be a chicken. You know they don’t come where there is any darkness. Come on.”, I rushed ahead without waiting for him. “There is one right here. It is way too close. No way that was ten feet.”

“What does it say?”

Break the false suns and break their hold
Break the hold and reclaim the surface
Break the surface strongholds and live
   - the prophet - 2015

“The false suns are a satellites. The strongholds are the crazy hive thingies they live in.”, I said as I analyzed the text.

“We know this stuff. We have like 50 of these quotes written down. And they don’t tell us a damn thing we haven’t already guessed. So what if this prophet knew it years before everyone else? It doesn’t help us now.”, Andrew said in an exasperated tone. He was right. The prophet was just telling us things we already knew.

“Think there is another one?”, I could feel him rolling his eyes at me. I walked down the tunnel without waiting for an answer. “There totally is. They are getting closer together.”

Follow the path Jesse 
Ignore Andrew the dissenter
Find the past to save the future
   - the prophet - 2021

“Holy shit…..”, we were both stunned. “He wrote our names. Both our names”, I ran my hand over my name…. The rough bricks pulling at my fingers. “How did he know our names?”

“I am not a dissenter….. am I?”, Andrew questioned.

“You really haven’t been on board….”, I said, leaving the answer just kind hang there.

“We have to head back. The glow stick is dying.”

He was right. The glow sticks are closely rationed. We won’t get another one for weeks, and that is if we do every shitty job we can volunteer for.

sigh

“Fine. But we are coming back as soon as we can!”, we both put our hands to the wall and started walking back in the dark.

Just like everyday, i sleep at a bench inside a subway station. I've been homeless for 4 years now, the cause of it was my divorce. Since then ive been eating from trash and stuff 'ya know the ol' homeless persons buisness.

This morning particulary, i saw a graffiti artist drawing on another wall at subway. It was a normal occurance, so i paid no heed for about let's say 3 months since i really have no interests in it. but this one late night when i couldn't sleep, i had a strange urge to look at the graffiti and to my schock it wasn't art at all. It was words a whole paragraph, it details incoming events and disasters to name one "In november 13, 20XX 13:40. A solar flare no close than 4.5Milion meters shall be blasted towards the earth". And that was tomorrow.

I treated it was some nonsense, after that i tried and succesfully went to sleep. I wake up, i do my normal stuff like finding food out of trash, and scavenging for stuff that i can sell. Then it happend, The solar flare hit earth by 4.5 milion meters. i felt a burning sensation, like something was coming to me, i look up and see a bright light.

My eyes immediately reacted it felt like it was melting but it wasn't. I blink multiple times, and as i regain my vision i see something in the distance. It wasnt humane, cause i'm preety sure there isn't a human with Pointy ears. He becomes more clearer, he is holding a bow thats pointing at me. After i realise that i was the one being aimed at i immediately panicked. In my 43 years on earth, this the first time where i felt intense pressure and the reason to live. As i hide behind a large rock, i can hear that he's yelling, something along the lines of "Pig bastard, where are you?".

It can speak english, shockingly. as i hide i can hear him getting closer. I immediately look around, and see a sharp rock. I grab it hastily, i got a little cut in the process. But i wait for him, as he passes by, i slash his heel making him fall over. After a seemingly short victory dance, i run and run untill im out of breath. I see a empty village, i settle there. Now with my goals in mind, trying to find out where am i, and how i can get back, or maybe i was given a second chance. Whatever it may be, i'll accept it.

Love this. Genius.

As soon as I saw the prompt I knew what must be done

It whispered the sounds of silence

I want more. Do they try to find each other? How far away is the caller? How long until the generator dies? Do they even have enough time to be friends or is it all over with a silent -click- as the phone dies?

Everybody hates the rushing stampedes of people hopping between trains, but the opposite is even worse, when nobody is there. At the dead of night, there's little company. Don't worry, the flickering lights, the long stretches of pure black, and the metal beast that the rides through them will all keep you from feeling too lonely. Who knows? A fellow rider might join you while making sure to emphasize the "strange" in "stranger."

I used to hate it, at least a lot more than I do now, but you get exposed to the peculiar for so long and it becomes the familiar.

So here I am, waiting for those bright lights that pierce the void to take me back home. I can’t use my phone to pass the time, or else it might die on me. You only have so many hours to goof around when you don’t bring a charger, and I wasted them sitting behind a food stand.

Small bangs ring throughout the nearly hollow station as my feet hit the tiled floor. I’ve relied on this station fo years. As the years went by, the tiles followed. Suddenly, I can feel my body begin to tip. As my foot slides across a loose tile, it puts up no resistance. My feet travel one direction and my torso the other as I slam against the floor.

I turn back to asses the situation when something much stranger snatches my attention. A deep shining yellow, more vibrant than any light of the station, emanates from where the tile once laid. It would seem like simple sand, if not for that illumination. As I stare, it begins to defy gravity, raising up towards the roof before dissipating.

Adrenaline courses through my body. It’s as if it had forgotten that it was midnight, that it forgot any desire to return home. It had forgotten anything besides what I had just witnessed.

The train could arrive any moment, a time far too soon for me. I rush towards the adjacent tiles, ripping them off. Soon, the small speck of dust connects with its brothers. They appear to be forming something. A set of letters, perhaps?

They don’t resemble any alphabet or writing I’ve ever seen, but the alignment of several characters is unmistakable.

I rip off the final tile. The vibrant glow becomes a violent glow, exploding in a nearly blinding flash.

I can read the words. I don’t know the language, yet I still know the meaning as if somebody had told it right to me.

No matter how many times it is defeated, it will return stronger than before.

I can my heart twist, as if the speaker’s had reached into my chest and gripped it.

Still, there will always be a new generation to rise up and meet it, wiser than the last

I can’t tell what’s real anymore. If not for the pain surging through my veins, I would have assumed this was all a dream.

“Somebody in need of a ride?” The soft voice of a man thrusts me out of the paralyzing shock.

I twist my head. Where normally the train would wait, there was a chariot dressed in strange markings, driven by a cloaked figure much stranger. My head flings towards one direction, then the other, and back towards. It’s clear that he can be addressing nobody else. “No… not really”

“Well, that’s a shame, but we’re in need of a passenger for this wild ride.”

There it is. I was waiting for this one.

Perfect ending

I was 100% expecting this to end with someone asking about their car’s extended warranty.

[removed]

Pfft. This is amusing

I had just realized what today was.

My twenty year anniversary.

Oh, don’t worry, it’s not a wedding anniversary or anything, no one’s gonna be mad.

Oh no, today was the 20th anniversary of me being the last human on earth… or so I thought.

My day to day life was pretty boring, water my potatoes, make sure my car was running, check my food stick to make sure I didn’t have to go out and find a cow or something, the works.

But, once a day or every other day, I treated myself to listening to voicemails. Making idle conversation . “Hello. This is James. Unfortunately I can not make it to the phone right now-“ “Classic James. “ I say with a laugh, that has no real humor behind it. “If you would like to leave a message, please do so after the beep! beep “ the voicemail ended, like it always does.

I kept going.

“If your looking for Hailey you’ve reached the correct device, however I have not reached you-“

“Yeah, this is Whinston , if y’need something leave a message.” -that one was less friendly then the others .

The next one rang, like it always does, and then a voice, “hello-?”

Wait a second. That didn’t sound like a robot, it also sounded like a question.

“H-hello? Is anyone there?” I panicked, reaching for the phone that had been sitting in the counter, charging somehow with the tangle of wires I had put together. “Oh my god! Hello! Yeah! Someone is here! “

“No way! I’m dreaming! This can’t be real!” Came the voice on the other end:

“No, no. I’m as real as the Apocalypse! I though I was the last one on earth!”

The excitement was tangible, we had to meet each-other! Maybe find other survivors? If we were both alive it’s possible other people were too!

“Me too! Oh my gosh, what’s your name?!”

“Oh, I’m Wayne. What about you!”

“I’m Tyler!”

“Woah! Where are you located! “

“I’m in South Dakota, you?!”

“No way. “

“What?! What is it?” A little bit of suspense, but the good kind, because a few seconds later I blurted out “I’m in North Dakota!”

“Oh! Let’s meet! “

“Definitely! “

We met at the borders between states, staying on call the whole time.

When we finally saw each-other, we immediately hugged.

“Hey, man. Isn’t it crazy that all this happened on the Twentieth year anniversary ? “

Huh. He had a point.

“Yeah. I guess it is someone else’s anniversary too after all.”

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I just finished engineering school on the east coast and my family and friends families all wanted to come together and celebrate our graduations when we came home. Everyone chipped in for booze and pizza and for a solid hour everything was nice and calm until people started to get their drink on.

Liquid courage caused two divorces, multiple counts of felony property damage, a drunk car crash with both vehicles ending up vertical in a Gazebo, Arson, and one family being banned from Dave and Busters for life. Funnily enough most of the damage was caused by the parents except for the Dave and Busters thing, that was my fault. The very next day while I was recovering from my hangover my apparently sober dad took me out into the mountains “Just in case” he said.

My dad was a doomsday prepper, made sure all of the equipment was up to date and the shelter was stocked full of water and food. He taught me how to survive by myself from a young age and taught me to hunt and all that. I never would have thought I would ever use these skills. We laid low in the mountains for a few days enjoying the crisp air when my dad went out to a nearby town for some supplies.

I wandered around the shelter aimlessly for a while. Because my dad installed shock absorbers to the shelter if it wasn’t for the bang I wouldn’t even know bombs were being dropped. By the time I managed to look outside everything was burning and massive craters lined what little of the horizon I could see. My dads drilling kicked in and I shut the shelters doors. Twenty years later they’ve never been opened.

I’ve been breathing the same recycled air for the past twenty years, drinking the same recycled water, eating recycled food.For the first month I used the satellite phone to see if anyone was still alive but it quickly became a way to still hear my families voices again. You never really think about how if someone has been gone for long enough you forget what they sound like until you accidentally ring a friends voicemail that you forgot the number for.

Life for a while really sucked, especially when you ring someone and their voice mail is “Hello, Hello. This is Kate, how are you?” And it really brings you how that there’s someone out there and that you’re talking to a real life person until the automatic operator takes over. Those were the most devastating times of my life

For twenty years it was the same routine over and over again and ended up creating a small phone book of the numbers I managed to call up. I would write stories about how they would look and what their average day would be like. I kept the bad thoughts away and passed the time which is really all I could ask for.

As my day was winding down and I made my last call for the night I heard a ringtone that I had never heard before. After a moment of shock and sprinted over to the phone like my life depended on it but the call was dropped. “I need better signal, I need better signal” I looked towards the sealed door. The moment I unseal it there’s no going back, there’s no way of knowing what’s outside waiting for me, for all I know I’m just floating through space but this life isn’t worth living. If I don’t try now I may never get another chance, and if I die, then at least for the first time in two decades, I lived.

I walked over to the controls, only used once. I input the override code and placed my hand on the switch. I closed my eyes and whispered “This is it” and pulled the switch. The seals opened and the door slowly pulled itself up. Instantly the smell of fresh real air almost overpowered me, the sight of real green vegetation, and real sunlight almost blinded me. I had lived everyday in a concrete box with a single led light separating me from darkness and here everything was , waiting for me just like it was twenty years ago.

I stepped outside and the dew covered grass hugged my calloused feet and I will without shame in my heart admit I dropped down to the ground like a dog and rolled around in it crying. I had to steel myself, I raced up the mountain calling the number back over and over as I climbed higher and higher. As I hit the top of the mountain where the satellite antenna stuck out I got a clear enough signal. After a few seconds the other phone picked up and in a act desperation said “Hello?”.

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Lmao nooooo!!!