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And Then There Were None
A Piece of Speculative Fiction
by Hugo Norman Tobias
A Piece of Speculative Fiction
by Hugo Norman Tobias
"DAMMIT!" His voice cut through the unnatural silence of the motorway. Dropping his duffel bag and quickly grasping a now quickly bleeding shin, Johnathan cursed again loudly the profanity echoing up and down the extensive concrete path. Formally an essential artery into and out the megacity of Lunden it was now choked with vehicles of every type. Some had crashed, some burned, mostly though they had simply run out of fuel stuck and been abandoned. Traffic jams city planners never planned for occurred as the masses panicked to escape the brightest jewels of the former kingdom, the cities. They had been of epic proportions, stretching for hundreds of kilometers in some cases, now they were reminders of a world that was no more.
A rusting protrusion of one of the automobiles had been in Johnathan's path, he had not realized this however until it had promptly sliced into leg. The pain was subsiding but still rather intense, he wrapped a spare bit of clothing around the wound and tightened it into a makeshift tourniquet. He had not examined the would closely, he suspected it might have been deep enough to reach his bone but was happier not knowing for sure. Hoisting his duffel bag back over his shoulder he gave the offending vehicle a venomous look, he had an urge to give it a kick but feared he might just further injure himself. He could still walk but went slowly not wanting the discomfort to get worse.
The roads were getting more and more congested as he approached the capital. He could see in the distance that the the roadway would soon lift from the ground and become a massive overpass as it got closer to the city. If the motorway continued to get any more crowded he knew it would be tough to maneuver further and, by then, he would be unable to easily descend back to ground level. Instead he shifted off the thoroughfare as soon as it began to rise, slightly frustrated as it was the most direct path to where he was headed. From his pocket he removed a small radio. It was of the type that could be wound to provide power so that no batteries were needed.
He twisted the small knob on the back several times and the device whirred to life as it began to play. He had found the signal days before, it was clearly a recording but someone must be broadcasting it. "Please attend carefully. This is Lieutenant Percival of His Majesty's Royal Marine Reserve. My platoon is currently provided relief and shelter to civilians in Lunden and its surrounding areas. Radiation levels are low and dissipating travel into the outskirts of the city is safe. We are located at RMR Reserve Depot #42 outside Lunden. The facility is at the intersections of Bow and Newton roughly one quarter of a klick...er...kilometer west of the Stine offramp from the M1A motorway and one block west and one block south of the subway access on Morningstar on the Portway Line. Coordinates are...." The message continued and then repeated. The radio died from his lackluster charging process and it was quickly tucked back into his pocket. He had found it off the side of the motorway many miles away closer to where he had worked.
Johnathan designed computer chips for a firm that built heads up display, or HUD, systems for the Defense Ministry, gaming companies, and some rather ambitious fashion designers. The circuits were made to integrate into helmet face plates and, in their most compact form, regular sized glasses or eye accessories. There fabrication plant was located a few dozen kilometers outside of Lunden and their main offices. If he had not been visiting the plant that day to check on the production of the latest chips he would have been at his office in the city and died like everyone else.
It had been on Thursday, not four days prior, that everything had still been normal. Everything had still been. He remembered how his father had told him about the years and decades after the Great War, the Age of the Bomb some called it. A man made terror that had been given birth in the icy and unforgiving lands of Kyiv spread, like a virus, from one nation to another. Every great power, Breotonia included, obediently followed the dictates of policy in a maddening game of escalation. Warhead by warhead, missile by missile, assembling and stockpiling the means to their own destruction. For decades the best and brightest of ever power on the globe was constructing a system which had the sole purpose of quickly, efficiently, and unfailingly wiping out the whole of the human race. The fear of the inevitable onslaught was pervasive in the public mind. They called it "growing up in the shadow of the mushroom cloud". Then, one day, it did not seem so imminent, it did not seem so likely.
Johnathan himself had never seriously considered, let alone feared, the risk of a nuclear catastrophe. The idea never even occurred to him. Which, only in retrospect, seemed odd. Nothing had truly changed. The bombs still existed and were growing in number daily, there had been no disarmament, the competing power blocs and superpowers still clung to their age old rivalries, the world was no closer to peace then it had been in his father's day or his grandfather's day. So why had the threat not been taken seriously? Why had it not even bee considered? Johnathan had pondered this question bitterly for days as he made his journey. Maybe his generation had simply been born into a world with nuclear weapons and they seemed normal, a fact of life, and that's why they were never given a second thought. Perhaps people had just grown complacent and apathetic. Maybe God had just wanted everyone dead.
The news had been normal in the preceding weeks. There was violence and death, governments acted in a heavy handed and militaristic manner, war seemed possible everywhere. Business as usual. Then things got heated, really heated, noticeably so. Tuesday morning there were reports that there was fighting on the Oikawan/Kyivian border. By lunchtime there was a war between the League of Free States and Kyiv. Neither side was shown to be the aggressor, perhaps if there had been more time more would have come to light. Johnathan suspected it had been the Commandry as it had started making demands for territorial concessions in return for a ceasefire. Naturally the Oikawans refused, promising to spill the blood of as many of their own young men as necessary and twice that of Kyiv.
This disaster had seemed enough by far. Johnathan's father had told him of the Great War and he would tell his children of the Second Great Eastern War. If only it had ended their but Europe is a bellicose place and nations and alliances could not stop themselves as they compulsively exercised their influence. Their perceived important and need to be listened to prevented them from exercising better judgement. Hours passed before the Northern Council enacted sanctions to curb the violence. Not heeding their own advice they mobilized their armies and began moving naval ships into the Implarian and the Vostock. The EDF, naturally the slowest but most deliberate of all the alliances stirred and began its own mobilizations. Naturally the sudden spike in naval activity set off the Breotish Admiralty and soon His Majesty's Fleets were swarming to areas of conflict to uphold the Mantle.
"The stupid God damned Mantle." Johnathan thought angrily, kicking a stray bit of rubbish from his path. He was now making the transition from the suburbs of the city into still following alongside the M1A motorway that rose above him more than thirty meters. He was glad he had chosen to abandon it for the ground. He could see in the distance, even with his vision obscured by collapsed and burning buildings, that the overpass had collapsed in many sections, ruining the structures below with rubble and cars. He went on, using the defunct highway as his guide.
The Mantle had been, by far, the most important component of Breotonia's foreign and defense policies for at least five hundred years. For centuries it had maintained the largest and most advanced fleet possible to ensure this objective with single mindedness and unquestioning devotion that bordered on religious fanaticism. Trade and commerce, Breotish ships of all varieties, in short the neutrality of the sea must be maintained at all times. For most of his life he, like practically every other citizen, had felt some basic approval of this policy. Of course, they thought, why should we not keep the seas safe? While he could see the in hindsight the obvious flaw of this plan he was surprised how oblivious he had been to it back then. What happened when the need to fulfill mandates of this Mantle conflicted with actions that would optimize the defense of Breotonia? What happened when Her honor would mean her Suicide?
Instead of answering the call of Wisdom and isolating itself from the growing catastrophe, Breotonia had cast its lot alongside the other mad men that ruled the world. Its fleets were deployed globally, save the Eastern Implarian, and threatened force against all those that would interfere with neutral sea traffic. At first this merely angered some nations. Then one stupid move was followed by another, the Northern Council announced that a blockade would be enacted in the East to pressure Oikawa and Kyiv into negotiating. Breotonia was had as much choice as does a machine, it performed its functions each cog and gear rotating into place and leading to an inevitable and inescapable outcome.
With Breotonia and the Northern Council now openly hostile and trading lives and ships across the planet's seas a Great War II seemed inevitable. Intense but speedy negotiations ensured that the EDF would side with Breotonia in this new war and, combined, it seemed that the Northern Council might be forced to surrender due to the severe outnumbering. Then, when hope had not yet been totally extinguished, the final straw came. Taking the opportunity of the mass confusion and the preoccupation of both Kyiv and the EDF, Międzymorze made a gambit in the north and tried to exact its particular brand of justice on the communists in Kryobaijan. The world had fallen completely apart by Wednesday evening, war was everywhere. Still, even then, the thought of global apocalypse had not entered Johnathan's mind.
He woke up on Thursday as usual, ate breakfast while watching Prime Minister Simm give a speech, and then he drove to the microchip fabrication building. On his way back, he left a little before noon and was driving along a stretch of road that would eventually connect him to the M1A when very suddenly he was aware of a bright flash and a sudden warmth coming from left where, several kilometers away, Lunden was all but incinerated. The flash and heat had only barely registered in his mind, he had only become slightly aware of something out of the ordinary, when his car was lifted, as if a toy, from the road and flipped violently in a horrifying wind and shockwave that sent it
tumbling to the ground far from the road. It rolled over several times before coming to a halt upside down. He had been surprisingly uninjured, though knocked unconscious, and did not awake until more than a day later hanging uncomfortably from his seatbelt. After tumbling out he began walking towards what had been civilization. It took him another day to make it to a residential area, the road he had been traveling as a service access to a few industrial facilities and there was little between them and the suburbs but open country.
He had found the radio, along with some supplies, alongside one of the larger roads leading to the highway. By then the roadway had devolved into the all too familiar collection of crashed or abandoned vehicles that had been trying to escape the city. A tent had been put up off the side of the road in a field. Johnathan had approached it slowly, announcing his presence with no reply, he finally unzipped the entrance to find an older heavyset bearded man and a young girl, probably his daughter, both dead. He stepped away quickly, vomiting into the grass. Outside the tent he found the duffel bag that he now carried, filled with some canned goods and water. He also found the radio. After that the sights only worsened, some of the cars were not abandoned, their owners had simply expired while inside. The closer he got to the city the more he found with burned occupants. On more than one occasion he found a body that had obviously been damaged by high doses of radiation. On the first day he had been nearly incapacitated by the horror, by the second merely nauseated when forced to confront it closeup, by now it was just another reality.
The radio broadcasts he pick up were fleeting. From them he could only piece together a very frustratingly small portion of the story. To him the Downfall of Man was an incomplete tale. He knew that the escalation from conventional to nuclear weapons had been fast. Kyiv and Oikawa apparently began incinerating each other's divisions with tactical nuclear weapons Wednesday night or Thursday morning. He knew that the Northern Council had used nuclear devices on Breotish and Frankish fleets to try and even out the lopsided odds of the naval exchanges. With the genie now free Międzymorze had probably felt that foreign nations could no longer chastise it for reducing Derjistie and every other Kryobaijani city to ruin.
Breotonia and Franken responded, like clockwork, by destroying fleets of the Northern Council. A second salvo was sent to Breotonia and the EDF which included the destruction of naval assets in harbor as well as naval bases. Thought not direct strikes, Johnathan gathered that it was heavily destructive to cities like Lunden, Porton, and Zeal. Breotonia probably escalated it by targeting the cities and military installations of the Northern Council. He had to guess at some of the gaps, by what he gathered from the radio he was sure that there was not a single nation left that had not been the subject of nuclear fire. By all accounts war had stopped globally as there were simply no longer soldiers or countries to fight them.
One of the worst stories he heard was a report from a former Breotish News Corporation international correspondent who had been in Wiese when the attack occurred. Apparently it's extensive system of shelters and bunkers had proved nothing better for its citizens then elaborate coffins. Apparently the structures were clogged with the dead and dying. The lucky occupants had been in the newest sections which were targeted disproportionately and those inside were allowed to expire almost instantaneously in initial blasts. Whether or not Johnathan was walking towards a shelter or a tomb of his own he did not yet know.
He had at first rejected the idea of approaching the city. He was no physicist and his knowledge of radiation was pathetic but, as he remembered from some college courses, radiation would linger after a blast. He concern had disappeared after Lieutenant Percival has assured his listeners otherwise. He did not know every street of the city, who could, but he knew the major streets and felt he was getting closer to his target. It was nearing dusk and he knew it was soon to get much colder then it already was, January in Breotonia was not pleasant. He had been sleeping in houses or anywhere else he could get into, maybe build a fire. He seemed too close to stop now though. It could only be a few more streets.
He walked on and on, for what seemed like hours but his watch confirmed had only been a little more than one. Just when he thought he would have to quit he saw, in the distance, a major intersection with street signs labeled clearly Stine Street. That meant that he was almost two hundred kilometers away! He picked up his pace, not too much to avoid aggravating the wound to his leg. He made it to Stine and then followed the radio directions to Bow and Newton where he found the Reserve Building. It was clearly of the administrative type, though apparently partially hardened as some of the buildings in the area had been pushed aside by the blast. The epicenter was likely within a few more kilometers deeper into the city. He could see that not that much further the building ruins abruptly stopped which meant they had been obliterated completely.
The building's entrance had been surrounded by sandbag lines and a single tank. There was nobody there, however. Johnathan walked cautiously forward. He yelled, "Hello!" but there was no response besides the lonely silence he had long become accustomed to. The entrance had formerly been comprised of glass doors but they had been shattered and, it seemed, quickly replaced by sheets of metal. He entered through the makeshift doorway and found the facility lit. Lights were on down the hallways and there was the hum of air coming through the heating vents. He was happy to feel the pleasant change in temperature. A large cardboard sign had been taped to the wall with directions and arrows scrawled on it. Medical was to the left, Mess/Cafeteria to the right, and straight ahead were barracks. He guessed that would be the best place to find somebody. Maybe not many refugees had made it here yet?
He walked down the corridors, not meeting a soul. A few times he shouted "Hello" but there was no callback. Finally he made it to an area that had apparently been made into an administrative area to process incoming people. Desks and office equipment had been haphazardly arranged outside several rooms labeled barracks. He was becoming concerned that there was nobody to greet him. He stood quietly, thinking over his options when he noticed that a hum was emanating from the behind the barrack doors. A generator perhaps? The thing powering the lights? He moved forward slowly and placed his hand on the door and then pushed it open. The hum intensified and became a buss and thousands of flies swarmed out the door and around him. The sight and stench nearly put him into shock. The room was filled with hundreds of bodies. Military and civilian. Men, women, and children. They were all dead. He drew back violently, letting the door fall shut behind him. He collapsed to his knees and vomited on the floor, still horrified by the visions that haunted his mind.
He fell back, breathing heavily, tears running down his face. "They're all gone! I'm all that's left! They're all gone." He sat. He sat and sat and sat. For hours he was there, not moving, not thinking for fear of what my befall his mind if he did. Finally the realization of his aloneness came down on him. He was in a City of the Dead. An empty metropolis, it's only citizen minus twelve million corpses. He was so bewildered and paralyzed by the thought he did not realize that his wound was bleeding again, rather profusely, even through the fabric. He slowly got up, bracing himself against the wall, and then slowly shuffling back towards the entrance so that he could get to the medical wing.
What have we done? He thought this to himself angrily. Is this the way the world ends? He scowled at the thought. Is this what all of history was for? We slowly evolve over billions of years. Our species finally arrives in its present form a hundred thousand years ago. We slowly build a civilization that spans the globe from east to west, north or south. The dominant species on the planet, the Crown of Creation. Further advancement, and refinement, and struggle bring us to the present day. We can put men in space, travel to any part of the globe no matter how far, or how high, or how deep. All of this work, all of this development. Nothing but a build up for this? Three billion years of evolution, a hundred thousand years of fighting tooth and claw to get to the top, ten thousand years of building a global civilization and this all culminates in the incineration of everything!? Our success is punctuated by the sudden and total destruction of everything!? Is this what we were working towards?
His rueful monologue ended as he entered the infirmary and found it occupied by the dead. He covered his mouth and nose with his arm, not wanting to inhale the stench of decaying flesh. He grabbed some nearby gauze and bandaging, most of the corpses were in bed but one, a doctor judging by the coat, was sprawled along the ground near the entrance. He looked as if he had collapsed and then expired. A book was in one of his hands. Johnathan didn't know what made him do it but he grabbed the book as well before he excited the room. He waited until he had gotten a good distance down the hall before finally leaning against the wall and sliding to the floor. He bandaged his leg as well as he could, the bleeding was intense, despite the pressure he had constantly applied, and he was already feeling too dizzy. Once finished he reached for the book at his side, examining it closely. It had no title or print except to say that it belonged to Dr. Gregory Brandt. He opened and found it to be a journal, nearly all the pages were blank. It seems that Gregory had only begun keeping it following the cataclysm.
He had worked as an internist at a local hospital, not in the city but one in the periphery that tended to serve the suburban clients. The Royal Marine Reserve had asked for medical help in the city and he responded. He seemed surprised to find that no evacuation measures were being undertaken and, in fact, a broadcast was drawing people to the base. He had complained.
Brandt's Journal
January 14
MADNESS! Lt. Percival will not listen to reason. I've explained to him that radiation levels in the city will not be safe for months, maybe years. Everybody in this building must evacuate now. By my calculations doses are already far past lethal levels for people that were in the city during the attack. Those that have come from further away might survive in the longterm with medical help if we leave now. Percy won't entertain the idea. There is no transportation, the roads are clogged, much of the subway is collapsed. He is convinced that the best option is to remain here and wait for help. Adamant Mountain is broadcasting stay orders for military formations that have not been obliterated. I can't believe's he's listening. If we stay here we will die. He won't listen to reason! He's a Weekend Warrior, a reservist with no comprehension of what the situation calls for. I tell him that if we do not move now all the refugees and the reserve troops will die from high dose radiation poisoning in hours or days. He tells me that if I am so concerned then I can leave.
I would, but I have sworn an oath. I must help those here. Even if it makes no difference. Even if it costs me my own life.
The journal ended there. Not six pages from beginning to end. Johnathan had trouble not again throwing up with the sudden and startling realization that the Lieutenant had been lying about the radiation. Was the nausea from the horror of learning that he might be poisoned or was it from the poisoning. He mentally kicked himself for not going with his first instinct to move away from the city. He staggered up, again using the wall for support and then all at once vomited and lost control of his bowels. He stood there, in his own filth, for several minutes, confused. He was dizzy and disoriented, it seemed obvious, he was dying. His mind was caught between a state of intense self-pity and searing anger. While lost in his sadness and rage he once again vomited. He came to terms with the process that he was about to undergo and, while not a doctor, he knew enough to know that it was going to be slow and painful. He had feared everyone around him had died, it was even worse, he was to die slowly as well. "It is not the end. It is worse. It is the beginning."
He became determined to not let a slow an agonizing death claim him. He attempted to lift himself from the floor. He collapsed, realizing how fatigued he was becoming. He overcame this, slowly but deliberately crawling along the floor. After what seemed like ages he had made it to the barracks once more, he once again placed an arm across his faith to spare his nostrils the onslaught of the dead. With his free hand he pushed the door open and crawled into the room filled with the decaying survivors. He flopped across the floor, the smell overwhelming him despite his precautions. Tears forming in his eyes due to the stench, he fought the urge to vomit from what must be an empty stomach. He found the body of a guard, someone from the Royal Marine Reserve. He had died near the door, perhaps he had been posted there. His eyes still wide with shock and terror at his fate. Johnathan made his way towards him and reached for the private's waist. He removed the sidearm from his holster. He knew little about weapons but knew enough to check the safety. It was off.
He placed the cold metal to his forehead, reminding himself of the fate that awaited him should he not do what needed to be done. He closed his eyes, thinking of happier times. He squeezed the trigger. He was released to nothingness. Joining the hundreds of millions of wretched souls that had also departed to the howling void of nonexistence in the wake of Man's Final Error.
The city laid empty. Twelve million souls reduced to a single man for a time. And then there were none.