Cloud Cover

Today's short story is a sequel to The Doomsday Librarian. Take a peek back at the original post for a refresher before you dive in!

He had emerged after two weeks of observing no other living soul, and hearing no sound save the chirp of birds and squabble of squirrels. As he’d stepped cautiously out of the stale stillness of his apartment building, blinking against the bright summer sun and pocketing the penlight that had guided him down the darkened stairwell, he saw it there. A quarter, tails side up, the sunlight glinting off its shiny silver surface like a tiny beacon. He had picked it up, and pocketed it, running his thumbnail against the ridged edge. It was an impractical thing to do, he thought. He had struggled to maintain his balance with the load he was carrying as he stooped to pick it up. Then again, he had done several impractical things in the space of the morning; watering the solitary houseplant on the window ledge, and locking the apartment door despite the fact that he had no plans to return. The click of the deadbolt was the loudest sound in the dim hallway, and in the end he’d just left his keys there, a dangling preposition; an unfinished act. 

He had stood, taking in the eerie silence of the once-busy city, the quiet filling in the space between bird chirps and the rustle of the breeze through the trees. The backpack on his shoulders was heavy, but he’d chosen everything in it with care. He was sure he wanted to leave the city, sure that being further out where things were more green and less urban would relieve the dystopian anxiety that gnawed at him. Sure that being in a place where the absence of metropolitan bustle was unremarkable would put him more at ease. What was less certain for him, though, was his destination. 

This had all been ages ago. Almost a year, he figured, as the daylight hours stretched longer, and as the nighttime chill grew warmer. Of all the practical items he had carefully placed in the old hiking backpack he had unearthed from the back of his closet, a calendar had not been among them. This was due, in part, to the fact that he had never been particularly fond of analog systems, of the practice of putting pen to paper, preferring instead to rely on the stark squares on the calendar app housed in his phone. He had left it, bricklike and useless, along with almost everything else, in his apartment. Marking the passing of time felt less and less important as the days wore on. Time was a construct of The Before, and he felt no need to preserve it for his foray into The After. 

In the weeks before the Variant seemed to smother out most of human life, he had continued showing up to work, clinging to the normalcy of it, the only person in the newsroom maskless in front of the cameras, standing as he always did in front of the green screen, delivering his predictions for the weather in the hours and days ahead. On his last seemingly normal day at work, he had trained the network’s medical correspondent on the green screen, and stood behind the cameras watching as his meteorological predictions were replaced by outbreak maps. Color coded in alarming shades of red, yellow, and orange, they indicated hotbeds of viral outbreak that seemed to scorch fever-like from the major cities into more rural areas. Death counts flashed across the screen, and he’d stood aghast among his colleagues as the broadcast was interrupted with a bulletin out of their sister-station in San Francisco, the camera crew documenting distant blurry shapes falling into the depths below the Golden Gate. 

The following morning when his alarm blared on his night stand, he’d dismissed it, rubbing his eyes and looking out the window where the inky clouds on the horizon were choking out the sunrise. A storm was on its way, but nobody cared about the towering cumulonimbus clouds, crackling intermittently in the distance with flashes of summer lightning. The storm everyone cared about had been hovering overhead like a category four storm with no possibility of inland evacuation. No eerie yellow-lit eye of the storm to give anyone temporary reprieve. He had rolled over and gone back to sleep. 

The cicadas had been starting to chirp a week ago as he sat outside his tent on the overgrown sixteenth hole of the Pebblebrook Golf Course. It felt simultaneously like eight minutes ago, and eight years ago since he had meandered out of Atlanta with no particular destination in mind. The coin in his pocket had come in handy, and he’d taken to flipping it to decide his route when he approached a fork in the road, and a series of heads and tails had brought him on a circuitous route that landed him seventy miles southeast of the city. He had perused the wrinkled map laid out on the grass in front of him, his fork scraping against the bottom of the bean can, extracting the last bland mouthful. 

He couldn’t be sure he was the last person alive. The empirical evidence, the days that stretched end-to-end with no other living soul crossing his path, supported his theory, but it was an impossible hypothesis to test. For all he knew, there were others out there, and the fate of the quarter was taking him further and further away from human contact. His finger had traced the spiderweb of local roads and state routes that spread out around him, the names of small towns floating unremarkable under his gaze until he saw it. Warm Springs. 

He had flipped the coin. Heads for yes. Tails for no. Washington had stared up at him from the coin as it lay on the back of his hand, and the following morning he’d traipsed into Warm Springs. He had no idea where her mother’s house had been, and he scanned the landscape in search of the silver Civic he had watched disappear from sight when she’d left him, her backseat stacked with boxes of books, the engagement ring heavy in the palm of his hand. As he’d pillaged the shelves in the hardware store, he’d heard the distant crunch of car tires, peeking through the windows as she passed. She was, he assumed at first, a mirage. A hallucination. A byproduct of loneliness and wishful thinking. He had come here looking for her, little expecting to actually find her. He stared, giving himself a moment to realize she was real. The soft brown waves of her hair. The curve of her waist. The way she jingled her car keys as she disappeared into the Piggly Wiggly. Her name was on his tongue, like a pearl in the mouth of an oyster, unspoken as it had been the day he’d let her drive away. 

He had found her. He had called off the engagement, he had reminded himself in the days after she left, and every moment since he had regretted it. As she had hauled the last of her belongings into the trunk of her car, he had softened, his voice low as he asked her to stay. To let him explain. To slide the ring back on her finger. 

He had begged her to stay, but the last words she’d said to him were like a promise; the next challenge he faced now that he’d found her. 

“Not if you were the last man alive.”