Love Better Than Before

How it happened:

I remember before it happened, I can remember a time when planes filled the sky and the hum of electricity filled homes. There is none of that now, I don't see anything ahead of me anymore, it's dark, blank the future, life is a moment, a new challenge to face. We thought we had conquered our planet but we had it all wrong. Humanity didn't burn out in a nuclear war, didn't bake ourselves with global warming, didn't annihilate ourselves with a plague. No, the world ended quietly, in a way that no one expected well maybe some expected it, maybe politicians and doomsday preppers are hiding out somewhere in bunkers living it up like they're in places. They're going to die too though, everyone is, see humanity didn't burn out as everyone expected. We are still here, just guttering out like a candle. 

You may wonder what happened. How did the great colossus of human civilization stop? It's easy when you think about it. You look around the world a hundred years ago you could see the beginning of it, lower birth rates, slowly declining in most western countries. Everyone assumed that this was normal, birth rates fell when nations modernized. We failed to notice what was happening until maybe fifty years later, it was when towns started to feel emptier. Traffic less crowded, the sound of babies in the park fewer and fewer. Governments understood what was happening but could never understand why, maybe climate change, maybe pollution, maybe an undetected solar flare sterilized us, in the end why didn't matter. They tried to encourage families, propaganda at first then as things got desperate money, tax cuts, healthcare. Maybe this worked, maybe it bought us a couple of extra years that doesn't really matter to me. I'm the last generation so as far I’m concerned the world can go fuck itself.

I'm twenty-two and one of the last babies born on the North American continent, I was around twenty when everything went to shit. The government had told us new babies were being born but they and their families kept in special safe facilities to protect them. Conspiracies were abound that this was false, ranters on the news, you're usual. However, regular people were happy to stay blissfully ignorant. This changed with one man, some low-level government bureaucrat that got his job because he was just the right amount of subservient. Or so the idiots that hired him must have thought, one day he saw a computer left on with a tab open, and being a nosy little man he must have peaked in. He looked, he saw what we weren't meant to see, what the government had concealed for two decades. The last babies had been born, humanity was over. He did what any reasonable person who saw the end of humanity would do and took out his phone and started to live stream. 

The rest you can probably predict just as anyone who's seen any movie can, rioting and then looting came first. Then people just started quitting the only jobs that mattered anymore were dealers and cooks. With nothing left to live for, with no future in sight everyone turned to the things that they'd been told not to they're whole life. So the power is out, the water doesn't run, gas doesn't pump, the world is for all intents and purposes dead. But for some reason I decided to keep on living, my parents said I was stubborn maybe I just want to spite the world. 

What’s Next:

My life really didn't change that much when the riots started and it hasn't changed much now. I start my day around nine and don't get out of bed until about half an hour later. Bed in this case is wherever I've laid out my sleeping bag. I cook breakfast, usually, instant oatmeal with water boiled on a wood-fired camp stove. Then I do my morning exercise which consists of me packing up my bag and starting walking in the direction of north, roughly in the direction of New York. You're probably wondering why New York, and you'll probably laugh when I say it's because of a crush, a highschool crush. A girl, Miranda, I never really got over and I always told myself that if the world came to end I would go find her again. when I promised myself that I didn't really expect to have to follow through. Like I said though I'm stubborn. I knew she went to college in New York and from what I could tell she had been there when everything went down. So like a fool, I was trudging there, to try and live out the end of the world with the girl I had been in love with since the eighth grade. 

I walk the Appalachian trail most of the time, venturing down into towns when I have to get food, I try and stay away. Not because it's dangerous but dodging all the scagged up bodies, dead and alive, always depresses me. I started out somewhere in Georgia about a year ago and right now I think I'm about halfway through the journey. Yeah, I realize I'm making terrible time, but hey I was in terrible shape starting out, and recovering from a broken leg somewhere in Tennessee for six months really took a bite out of my time. It was her that kept me going, always an athlete. I could remember sitting on the bleachers of Miranda's games. I just remembered how she pushed herself, how she never gave up and I kept myself going. I pushed myself thinking of the smile on her face when she finally saw me, I did it for love.

I knew today was going to be one of the bad days before I even got out of my sleeping bag. It was rainy and the sky was that dismal gray that I had come to accept as part of fall. That wasn't why the day was bad. I was going to have to go into town, something I absolutely dreaded, but as I ate my last bag of instant oatmeal I knew it was a necessity. I made my way down into some small Appalachian town that looked like it came right out of some tourist guidebook except for all the drugged out bodies laying in moaning piles on seemingly every street corner. I knew it wasn't as many as that but still, the smell of it was enough to make me want to leave already. As soon as the apocalypse hit it seems like most people took up the needle or the pipe, some both. I guess I could have too but it just didn't appeal I guess.  

The bodies and the stink I was used to, what I didn't expect was the sound of a generator, I had heard it before and learned my lesson not to go check when I walked into a cookhouse. This was different though, was almost sure I could hear something deeper under the guttural tones of the generator, something thumping, and as I walked towards the sound as if possessed by something I started to notice all around me murals, unfinished stretching across the walls of old buildings and as I got closer and closer to the sound the murals became more and more complete. I looked at them in wonder, they were dark and beautiful, full of color depicting anything from a field of daisies to some sort of fantastical battle straight out of Narnia. My instincts had apparently been right as I got closer and closer I could hear what I realized I hadn't in maybe over a year, music. Something with heavy guitars and heavier bass, I couldn't help it when I got closer. I could smell the spray paint in the air. The music grew louder and louder. I turned a corner and what I saw took my breath away. There was a mural still dripping with paint, some sort of kaleidoscoping series of colors that seemed to wobble in front of my eyes. In front of it though was something far more unexpected than the mural. A girl, no, a woman no older than me, joint smoking in one hand the other holding a can of spray paint. she had her head cocked to one side looking up at the painting. Her short bob hair cut falling down covering her face slightly in faded pink dyed hair. I couldn't speak for what felt like an hour as I stood there listening to the music and staring. 

When the girl finally did notice me it wasn't even because I tried to get her attention, no instead the weed smoke drifted towards me and I started coughing at the smell. She turned quick pulling a pistol from a shoulder holster I hadn't noticed before. The gun looked laughably big in her small hands but she held it with confidence and I raised my hands up instantly. I tried to say something but my voice caught in my throat and I realized I hadn't spoken in maybe a month. I also didn't even know what I would say if I had been able to talk, I had never been the best at talking even back when the world had been normal. Now that I had a gun pulled on me my brain clicked into threat assessment and I looked her over for more weapons. She was wearing oversized denim overalls, a cropped black AC/DC shirt, and black leather boots, the laces barely tied. As she had turned one strap of the overalls had fallen off her shoulder revealing the black leather strap of the gun holster that led across her chest. I took this all in seconds and as I did she pulled something out of the breast pocket of her overalls. I tensed as she did but it just looked like a remote, or wait, a phone? She pressed a button on the touchscreen and music stopped so abruptly it felt like the rotation of the earth stopped. 

"I like your pai-" 

"You trying to mug me?" She asked plowing right through what I was trying to say and then stopping abruptly and looking at me quizzically.

Her voice was crackly from what I assumed was smoke and disuse but it wasn't as low as had expected for some reason, it was still a young woman's voice. 

"I like your paintings" I swallowed through the statement inwardly cringing at it and at the fact I had failed to answer the question asked by the woman with the gun. 

She didn't seem to mind as a smile spread across her face, looking away from me and up at the mural lowering the gun slightly. My body told me to run right then, I had a moment to get away but I didn't, for some reason, I stayed. She looked back at me quickly obviously realizing the same thing I had and seemed surprised to see me still standing there. I just shrugged at her tilted head and a sheepish smile spread across my mouth unsure of what to say next. She slowly lowered her gun stowing it in its holster, she moved smoothly, her tanned white skin rippling with ropey muscle hidden beneath the skin. When she was done I took a tentative step forward making sure to keep my hands up and eye contact. I lowered one hand slowly sticking it out in front of me like I was some sort of robot testing human interaction for the first time.

“Hi,” I croaked out, my voice deep and scratchy from disuse, “I’m James.”

“Hi,” She replied, her mouth quirking up into a half-smile half-smirk that I was coming to understand as her default expression. “I’m Sam.”

A Friend:

Sam, or as I later learned Samantha had the most typical story I had ever heard come from a person as untypical as her. She had grown up in Maryland and her family had gone up to a cabin here in the Appalachias when shit had hit the fan. I didn't press her about that family and I was thankful she didn't ask about mine. When she asked where I was going I told her New York. She brightened considerably telling me about how she had always wanted to go see MOMA. She didn't ask why I was going and I was glad of that too, telling her I was going because a highschool crush would have been beyond embarrassing. When Sam said she was interested, I started talking about all the supplies we’d need to gather she started to laugh. I was concerned at this reaction, a trip like this shouldn't be taken lightly, I had learned that the hard way. When I said this though, she only laughed harder and told me that my serious face needed work. We had been sitting on the pavement, both cross-legged, knees pressed together, closer than I had been to another person in probably over a year. It was nice to hear someone laugh and I was caught up in enjoying it even at my expense that I didn't notice her lifting her arm to point behind her with her thumb. When I did notice I realized that was where the sound of the generator was coming from, and I leaned to the left looking behind her to see what she was pointing at. 

The car was a sixty-two convertible corvette stingray which Sam told me was the best year proudly, I nodded dumbly never being much of a car guy. I stared at it dumbly not for the fact it was beautiful, which it was, but for the fact it was running. Looking from her back to the car, I was dumbfounded when the power had gone out the gas pumps had stopped working, and with its cars. She just grinned at me and then proceeded to explain how she had found some preppers house with gallons and gallons of gasoline saved. She explained how she had found the car at some rich collectors house who had outfitted it with the Bluetooth speakers she had been using earlier. I was beyond blown away, I had been so single-mindedly trudging to New York that I had never thought to check for anything like this, I had barely looked at the world around me. Sam explained that she had used up maybe a quarter of the gas she had found but guessed that if we packed the trunk full we could probably fit enough gas cans to get to New York. All I could do was laugh and in a moment of pure joy and probably idiocy I grabbed Sam in a hug. She stiffened as I lifted her off her feet as I cackled, she relaxed though and started to laugh too, saying she preferred this far more than my serious face. All I could think of was how I was so much closer to seeing Miranda than I ever had been and I couldn't keep the smile from my face. 

We loaded the car up with as much gas as could fit in the surprisingly large amount of trunk space and we set off for New York with the top down and our hair blowing in the wind. The drive was quiet at first, the initial burst of conversation when meeting had now subsided and it seemed like neither of us remembered how to talk to people. Sam unsurprisingly was the first one to start talking, and blessedly, it wasn't a question for me. She just started talking about art at first, how she had wanted to go to art school but her parents had refused to pay for it. How she spent about a year majoring in physics before the world came crashing down around her. It was so normal to talk to another person that I could just get lost in her words and forget. It was unlike anything I had ever experienced before, her eyes focused on the road I could just watch her as she spoke. Her pink choppy hair blowing in the wind, a small smile on her mouth as she went on and on about her life and art and any little thing she thought of. When she stopped to take a breath I found to my surprise that I heard my own voice, replying to hers. I cracked jokes like I haven't in years and she would howl at them, I talked and talked with us going back and forth telling stories and teasing one another. At night it continued, with me building fires, teaching her the best way to prepare tinned beans just like she was teaching me how to drive manual. It was one of those nights I made a joke that let slip my reason for going to New York. The silence that followed was deafening as I looked at her waiting for her to rib me about it. 

She didn't, she sat there silently and it was then right there, watching her sit there, I realized that I would do anything to make her laugh at that joke. That seeing her quiet and sad was like watching that last flame of humanity flicker out. I thought I had known what love was, I had walked halfway across the country for “love”. I realized then I had no clue what it meant to love until that moment, I would do whatever it took to keep that flame alive. I walked up next to Sam where she sat by the fire and sat down cross-legged, knees pressing together and looked at her. All I did was make a joke, one wisecrack hoping she knew what it meant, I’d tell you but that's for me and Sam, let’s just say she knew.