Asteroid Bailey

Breaking News

The direction of Asteroid Bailey has changed course dramatically, now predicted to land within the United States of America at 4:35 PM Monday October 23rd. 

I could still hear the news announcement replaying within my mind as if my TV wasn’t tragically demolished within my old home. I heard the words of the late night news reporter--terrified and serious, with an undertone of a millennial savior complex. A woman who undoubtedly believed she would survive the world-ending asteroid. 

As it turned out, nobody had survived. 

Aside from myself of course, which as time continued to pass without any social interactions, I began to question this very fact. Had I really survived? Was living in an empty, demolished, tragically alone world really surviving? Or had my existence shifted into something between life and death. Something unknown, something foreign. Something most definitely worse than what I’d always assumed life to be. 

I sat on top of one of the only buildings still intact in Boston, Massachusetts. The only one I’d found that still featured a functioning stairwell. I dangled my legs off into the dismal air below me, the foggy rather depressing empty air. I listened for sounds. Something as simple as the chirp of a bird would be enough to pull me away from my dissociation. To remind me that I was in fact alive--sort of. 

Boston rested silently. Dead. 

In the first few days after the apocalyptic asteroid, the city had been full of noise. Sounds of buildings crumbling to the ground, children screaming for their dead mothers, sirens in the very beginning. With each day the sounds faded, disappearing entirely around the two week mark. 

Now, it has been just short of four months since Asteroid Bailey wiped out every living creature. The birds being the last to go. 

I slid backwards off of my ledge and headed back to the stairwell. The sounds of my feet hitting the cement beneath me pounded through the world around me. Clunk clunk clunk. I wore my fathers heavy combat boots. 

I headed across the street from the building, slid through the crack between two adjacent doors that had popped off their hinges a few days earlier. The once flourishing grocery store rotted around me. I opened a can and pinto beans. Using two of my fingers I ate the can one bean at a time.

The lukewarm beans slid down my throat, one by one. Slowly filling me up. I savoured them as I only had two more cans of beans left. 

When only the slimy liquid of the beans remained I went back outside. I dumped the liquid beneath a stump of a dead dried brown tree. 

I looked up at the gray sky and whispered words of gratitude to God. “I don’t know why you chose me, but I will do my best to appease you. Thanks for the food.” I made a cross across my chest and kissed my fingers.

I’d waited four months to get a sign back from God. I didn’t know exactly what I was waiting for, but I figured when it happened I would just know. Some bird or some fox or something leading me towards where he wanted me to go. A leaf maybe. At this point, anything slightly abnormal I would leap to as a sign from my father in the sky. 

My stomach grumbled, irritated and still mildly hungry. I decided to take a stroll, usually I walked down the main road, past all of my favorite stores, past the skate park I grew up in, past my childhood home, and then back to The Tower--the building with the roof. Today, I decided to walk the other direction, away from the city center and towards what used to be known as the poorer side of Boston. Smaller houses, a mildewy wet rotting smell, big men with grim faces. 

Now, the hood resembled nothing different than the rest of the city. I found some sort of strange enjoyment in the fact that the richest houses had crumbled and collapsed the exact same as the poorest ones. That there was no neighborhood hierarchy anymore. 

Maybe that was my purpose. Maybe that was the reason I’d been pardoned by God. To reinstate equality in the world. To stop the rich from eating the poor. Though, I realized, there were no people in the world to make equality anyways. Everyone, everything, even the plants, were dead. Shriveled up plants and rotting skeletons. 

I zombied around, past the hood, past some especially horrible smelling graveyards, past my friend Joey's old house. I debated trying to get inside, it was one of the few houses in the whole city that had kept its frame. I kept walking. 

Recently I’d latched onto the idea that I had been pardoned to document the misery, the tragedy of the death of humans. To tell the story to the next inhabitants of earth. Though I believed in God with every fiber of my being, I wasn’t stupid. I understood evolution. Before humans there had been monkeys who ruled the animal kingdom, well aside from the lions of course. Then much earlier, the dinosaurs. The earth came with phases. Eras of certain creatures living out their stories. The era of the humans had ended, leaving the opportunity for a new species to take over the earth. A species, like the humans, would have to dig through artifacts and old pieces of the world to create some sort of understanding of the history before them. Humans had done it with the big bang and everything after that. Archeologists finding old fossils from millions of years past. 

Humans would have understood their history alot better had there been a messenger. A monkey or a dinosaur who had written out their story. Then maybe we wouldn’t have had such foolish people in the world. Flat earthers, or Mormons. 

This beckoned the question: Why in the world would God choose me to be a messenger?

I hadn’t even graduated from college. I barely made it through highschool. I didn’t have a serious job or a family. Out of anyone he could have chosen I seemed to be the worst option. I could barely spell the world “probably” for years. I thought it was “probally” until my ex-girlfriend asked me if I was spelling it wrong for irony. I’d lied and told her I had been. 

I could have died and nobody but the boss at my pizza restaurant serving job would have missed me. I had no friends, no girlfriend, my parents had both died when I was young, my sister never spoke to me. 

My life now, alone and depressing, wasn’t much different than how my life had been before. Now I just didn’t get any strange looks from people on the streets. Now I was safe from getting rejected in bars. Saved from paying for my rent or buying groceries. Now I could drink as much alcohol as I wanted, smoke weed, and steal mushrooms from my old dealer's house with no repercussions. 

For whatever reason, I decided I should write a letter to whoever or whatever occupied the world after me. Back inside the grocery store I found a section of school supplies. I took a notebook and a pen. 

Back upstairs in the tower, I dry swallowed some mushrooms, smoked a joint, and washed it all down with a shot of whiskey. It was time to give God what he wanted from me. 

To whom it may concern,

  I erased the line.

To whoever finds this letter,

I erased the line again. Tore out the sheet of paper and started over on the next.

I don’t care who you are or what you are or why you are reading this. My name is Joseph Cline and I am the last human on earth. 

Before you, there was me, or us. Humans I mean. We have two legs, two knees, strange feet with small toes, we are usually between 5 feet and 6 feet tall. Men are taller than women. We have been the ruling creatures of this earth for about 200,000 years. You are nothing in comparison to us. We made great strides in technology, we created robots and made cars that could drive themselves. We single handedly destroyed our own world with pollution and gas before the asteroid could do it for us. Had Asteroid Bailey not taken out our entire existence we would have done it ourselves within the next 50 years. There were 8 billion of us. Too many really. 

We were horrible to one another. Egotistical. Cruel. We didn’t allow humans from certain parts of the world to move to other parts of the world. We made everything too expensive and we relied on the working class but the rich government never gave them anything back for their hard work. 

In the end, the end of the humans was an inevitable thing. 

We had great education, but really it was only accessible if you were rich. Education was something to be bought, not achieved. That goes for a lot of things actually. With money, the whole world opened up to you, but without it, you would be swallowed alive. 

My life, as a human, was rather miserable. I did a lot of drugs. Drank a lot. Too much really. I never got that education, I was never in love, I never truly lived. Now, I am completely and utterly alone in a world of dead carcuses. I had a dog in the beginning, but the air here isn’t breathable. It kinda makes you go mad. It just smells like gas and black tar and rotting flesh. * billion people to bury and not enough ground to put them in. 

I praise god. I thank him for letting me see the world after the humans. Though, I don’t really want to meet whoever you are. Aliens probably. If I had to make an assumption, I would say that you are something without a nose. 

The mushrooms were starting to kick in now. I closed the notebook, figuring I would finish writing it later. 

I slid up into my ledge. Looking out across the demolished city once again. A city once full of beauty and wonder.

I thought of my parents, their smiling faces before their car crash and their distraught cut up ones after. I wondered what my life would have been if they hadn’t died. Maybe I wouldn’t have started drinking. Maybe I would have afforded school.

I stood up on the ledge. A light breeze brushed against me. 

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. Then for whatever reason, I felt the urge to begin walking on the ledge. I felt infinite. I felt immortal. If god had pardoned me once, why would he let me die now? 

I began to walk. 

The breeze picked up. I was flying. 

I stretched my arms into the air to allow the breeze to lift me into the clouds. 

I was flying.

My skin glowed. I was flying. 

Flying straight into the hard cement below me.