Eager Eucalyptus #6

It was over.

All of it. Not just the good times or the bad times. Not just the laughter and not just the tears. Absolutely everything had finally, at last, once and for all, ended.

It was hard to know how it had begun. There were the usual suspects: war. Famine. Plague. Death. All of them played their role, but the story is hardly worth retelling now. The only thing left for me to wonder was: why not me?

I'd been spared. Didn't fight in the war; had plenty to eat; didn't get sick. Still alive. The last man in Oklahoma, and so far as I knew, the last man in the world. The radios stopped working months ago; electricity doesn't run and all the water mains have burst. Animals have started to inhabit all of the houses here, and so now it's my turn to leave.

Where am I going? No idea. The compasses don't work, the maps are all gone. Besides, who cares? I can see the world--but there's nothing more to see. Not even bodies. The bodies are all gone, and it's like humans never existed, but for the empty, magnificently irrelevant cities we left behind, all decaying now. 

I'm checking for others, I suppose. I have no real hope anyone else survived. But if my chances of survival were one in a million, then there should be... well, thousands left. If it was one in a billion? I've got five friends out there somewhere.

Are they dead? Are they looking for me? Are they hungry? Did they get killed by a bear? Did they give up and kill themselves?

Don't know. But as I leave town, the memories of my friends, my family, all the people I'll never see again, nip at the edges of my vision. I can almost see them there in the shadows. Almost, but not really. I'll never see them--or Oklahoma--again.