Everyone Else is Gone by William Dyson

I’m the last man on Earth; at least I think I am. I’m not really in the right mind to tell you otherwise, and if you don’t trust me, I don’t blame you. That would suppose that someone else is alive to read this unless it’s aliens from Planet Voltron in the year 3527.

I’ll try to be coherent, I really will, but I haven’t slept in 10 days. The last person fell asleep yesterday when I went to the store; by the time I came back, they were gone.

You die if you sleep more than thirty seconds. Why? Nobody knows, because when the first culling of humanity’s herd happened, nearly all of America was asleep. I used to work on Beijing time, so I was one of the few who was actually awake. Trading stocks at 2:30 in the morning while the rest of the normal world sleeps.

It’s why I’m alive to write this. Working at 2:30 in the morning isn’t conducive to a relationship, so I was all alone when the great culling happened. Thanks to the fact that it’s 2020, I didn’t go directly to sleep and join them. I got about 100 emergency alerts on my phone and Twitter was on fire with tweets about those who had seen it.

There were videos as well. Everyone these days has a camera on at sometime, and the first video I saw was a guy passed out a party. Someone had been recording themselves writing a smiley face in marker on him and when the guy started convulsing and bleeding from his ears and mouth. Then came the screaming.

It took about a minute for the spasming to stop and I watched the whole thing; I don’t know why, maybe I was hoping for a miracle, but within ten minutes, the video had a hundred thousand retweets.

The event happened at exactly 2:03 West Coast Time, an absolute disaster for the United States population. Too early for most people on the East Coast to be awake, too late for most people on the West Coast to still be up. There were no accurate estimates on the death count, it was impossible since most working professionals and the government died in that first wave, but at least 60% of the country was probably gone then.

Another 5-10% probably had no idea what was going on and went to bed. 70% of 330 million gone in an evening. The next morning on television was chaos.

There were screaming pundits, claiming it had been a terrorist attack on the United States. How anyone could have developed a weapon like that was beyond understanding, but even so, the terrorist attack angle was quickly put to bed (haha). There were videos of the same thing happening in China, in Europe, in Australia. It was much later in the day there, but it still happened.

Yet you had those who called it hoaxes. That it was all made up. A popular YouTuber claimed he could go to sleep with no problem and wake right back up. Five million people watched him die on his live stream, blood coming out of his eyes as he spasmed on his leather couch. His cat watched the whole thing from ten feet away, uncaring and unmotivated to do anything. I wonder how long it took for the thing to eat him.

The Internet died about twelve hours into the first day. I’m sure some people thought it was some government conspiracy, some terrorist plot, but I think it was just sheer old incompetence. The Internet providers couldn’t get people to come in and help and the servers shut down. You, future person, can probably tell me that those servers could run on their own with power for a month, but I don’t really care; it’s what I think and by the time you’re reading this, I’ll already be dead.

In a normal story, you’d hear about how I went outside and I united with a group of survivors, that we were trying to figure out a way to beat this. Maybe we encountered a scientist and we went to a lab and started to work on the cure.

None of that happened at the start. I sat locked in my apartment, eating Spaghetti-o’s and Gatorade. There were gunshots, there were screams outside for help; I felt bad not going out there, but I didn’t. I had no weapons to stop a gun and the only one-on-one combat I’d done was one karate lesson when I was 12. I got my ass kicked and never went back.

Something broke in me around day 3. Whether it was madness from not sleeping, from looking at the phone, I don’t know; ok, I do. You’ll think me a fool, but I heard a dog crying outside my window. It was a little beagle puppy and you know what, I went out to help him.

He was gone by the time I got out there, but there were three people in the park across the street. Two guys and a girl in their early 20’s. They had Red Bulls in holsters like pistols and they were so hopped up on caffeine pills I thought they might have a heart attack.

One of the guys died later that day and the girl was gone the next morning. Fell asleep even though we had shifts to keep each other up. I held her in my arms while she died my white shirt got covered in blood. I can’t even remember her name now.

Only Armand and I were left. Armand was a waiter from an Italian restaurant and had been in the cleanup shift when it all hit. His manager was dead on the bar, his face smashed open by a wine glass he’d collapsed into. Armand told me the guy’s eye got plucked out when he fell.

Armand was a good story teller; he kept people entertained in the city and it earned him good tips. There were times I wanted to fall asleep that he’d crank out a story and keep me going. I wish I had something to offer him, but he said just seeing a face kept him going. I’m not sure how my face kept him going, but I guess it did.

We sometimes had to slap each other awake by day 6. We ran into a couple other groups, but everyone was so tired and loopy to communicate well. One group claimed they had found a place in the mountains where no one would die, they just had to ride twenty miles to get there. A day later another group said the same thing about the beach. Humans are always making up shit to keep themselves going.

Armand and I left our packs behind on the 8th day; they were filled with all our supplies and we just got up and walked away from them. We didn’t notice until we were three miles away and by then we just gave up. Armand told me to go get Gatorade and even though he looked like he would fall asleep, I left him because I couldn’t argue.

I broke into a convenience store and got the Gatorade and came back to a dead man. I haven’t moved from Armand, I’ve just been sitting in a chair waiting this all out by the park. Maybe I should sleep, maybe I shouldn’t. I don’t really know what’s the point. All I know is-

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William Dyson is a writer whose work has been published in Beyond Imagination Literary Magazine, Betty Fedora and other collections. He is currently working on submitting his novel, a noir set in present day if prohibition hadn’t been repealed, to literary agents. His wordpress site can be found here (https://wdthewriter.wordpress.com)