Last Woman On Earth (A Short Story)

Last Woman On Earth

  By C.V. Hunt

  Copyright 2013 C.V. Hunt

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental unless specified in acknowledgements.

  Copyright 2013 C.V. Hunt

  All rights reserved.

  https://www.authorcvhunt.com

  Other books by C.V. Hunt

  Zombieville

  How To Kill Yourself

  Phantom

  Legacy

  Endlessly

  The noose is placed on the left side of the neck, just below the jaw. Ideally, you want a long enough drop to produce between 1000 to 1200 foot pounds of torque on the neck. This should effectively dislocate or break the axis bone and sever the spinal cord. This stunt can be pulled off with a drop between five and nine feet. It’s called the short drop.

  Blood pressure drops, the subject is rendered unconscious, and brain death should occur within several minutes. Complete death can take up to twenty and the human pendulum most likely doesn’t feel any of it.

  Most likely.

  No one knows for sure.

  I’m counting on the most likely.

  Five-hundred and twenty feet from the observation deck to the ground and I have forty feet of eleven millimeter rock climbing rope in the back seat of this piece of shit car. The rope has a UIAA fall rating of sixteen falls… It only needs to withstand one.

  Even if the rope doesn’t do its job, the fall will. I’m still betting the rope will hold, effectively giving me an eternal view of the Puget Sound.

  There is one positive thing I can point out about myself; I can be one hell of a researcher. I spent hours in front of my laptop studying, researching, and double checking. Everything is calculated and planned, laid out on paper in full detail to make sure it goes flawlessly. An itinerary of Death.

  I hit the outskirts of Seattle hours before the sun rises. The plan is to spend one whole day in the Space Needle, just taking in the sun rise and set. Technically you can’t watch the sun rise over the Sound, because the sun rises in the east. The ocean lies to the west. Why is this an issue? I remember reading a story once about a kid watching the sun rise over the ocean horizon in California. Impossible.

  I’ve always been a stickler for details; the asshole that points out the inconsistencies in fiction.

  These are the things I think about the day I die.

  One stupid fact after another and all of them worthless. I like to think that once I die, Death will be waiting for me at a bridge to the afterlife, like a troll. He’ll offer up some useless question for me to answer before I can pass from this world to the next. It would be Three Billy Goats Gruff. I’m pretty confident I’ll have the answer.

  My life has been full of useless things.

  The streets are empty and dark. I wonder how long this area has been without power. Seattle is dead. The world is dead. Grass grows tall through the cracks in the pavement, moss covers houses and store fronts. Mother Nature taking back the land she has been raped of – she serves her revenge cold.

  Along my trek from the Midwest, I only encountered one other survivor. Once I realized it was a man, waving his arms franticly as I passed, it made my destination all that more desirable.

  I heard stories growing up. People believed the world would end in some great catastrophe. Some deity would send his son to collect his followers and the rest of the world would go fuck themselves. Then there was some great quote about the world ending in a whimper… that’s pretty much how it went toward the end.

  When I was in eighth grade, my science teacher, Mr. Mill, told the class: “If man needed a third arm, he would grow one.”

  Women pumped their bodies full of contraceptives for hundreds of years, then scientists couldn’t understand what happened when women were born sterile. Mr. Mill would have called it evolution. Our bodies finally adapted to the restraint we exercised daily… don’t procreate. We’d officially reprogrammed the human body - evolved.

  We had plenty of eggs sitting around in labs and lots of time to correct what we had done. I remember television commercials asking people to donate to help save a species and, suddenly, we were the endangered ones.

  Men thought it was their patriotic duty to screw as many women as they could. Males weren’t curing anything; they were spreading disease, fetishes, rape, and incest. It was a license for them to fulfill their sexual perversions and no one stopped them.

  Women became the hunted. Kidnapped and trapped; used and abused. If not by men, then by doctors. Animal instinct is flight or fight, but when you’re backed into a corner there is nowhere to go.

  It’s all useless information now, along with the age suppressant drugs. If we can’t procreate, then longevity was the next target. Over three hundred years old, and I don’t look a day over forty. Looks don’t mean shit when the world is dead.

  The world is one giant ghost town.

  I stop in the middle of the dark street and rummage around for the paper maps. After examining the street names again, I know I’m headed in the right direction. It’s a shame the power doesn’t work here. It’s going to be a long trip to the top. There are 848 stairs from the ground to the observation deck and it’s rumored to be a very narrow staircase.

  No grand view of the beautiful Sound as I ascend at ten mph in a glass elevator. I’ll have to take it all in once at the top.

  I find the silent monster looming in the dark.

  I retrieve my crank powered flashlight and proceed to check my pack. It doesn’t contain much. The rope, some food, water, bolt-cutters, my notebook, an MP3 player, my favorite book, binoculars, and a small solar panel to keep my MP3 player charged.

  The rushing sound of the ocean in the distance drives me forward; my reward waits at the top of the tower. As I approach the Needle, I notice the long decayed and almost obliterated corpses on the ground. I crane my head up to look at the deck, greeted with darkness threatening to swallow me whole.

  I have to admit, as I inspect the other bodies, my plan is not completely original, but it’s sentimental to me. This is the one place I had been the happiest. In a time when none of this existed, before we found out we were becoming extinct, I had stood on the deck in another life, looked out at the sea, and found the true feeling of acceptance.

  This is my home. This is where my heart longed to be. But then life happened. There were bills to pay, a job to go to, a husband with his own dreams… we’ll wait until we retire… and then the world crashed and burned. Suddenly, everything I wanted wasn’t important anymore.

  I make my way through the looted gift shop in the dim beam of the flashlight and find the door to the access stairs open. Taking a deep breath, I start the laborious climb to the top. I stop every so often to get a drink of water or to crank the handle on the flashlight again when the beam goes too dim. It doesn’t hold a charge like it used to.

  After what feels like half a day, short of breath and thighs burning, I come to a door reading ‘SkyCity’. I know the deck is only another twenty feet up. Sweaty and nearly exhausted, I continue up the steps, my calves protesting. My beam crosses a door labeled ‘O Deck’ and I shove it open. A cool ocean breeze blasts me. I pan the light around. Nearly all of the windows are smashed.

  Vandalized.

  The Needle was built to withstand 200 mile an hour winds and earthquakes with a 9.1 magnitude. It was a tried and true symbol of strength standing proudly within a city that existed lifetimes ago and would still possibly be standing centuries after I am gone.

/>   The sky lightens outside the gaping holes. I walk out onto the deck and take in the dark silhouettes of the dead city. Someone has already beaten me to removing the safety cables running around the deck. I don’t need the bolt-cutters after all.

  The cool ocean air washes over me and for hours I stand there as the sky continues to lighten and the sun rises. I take in the hazy form of Mt. Rainier as it sneakily appears through the haze and think my heart will explode with pride. This must have been what a mother felt for her child.

  Five hundred thousand years-old and fourteen thousand four hundred and ten feet above sea level, the mountain could tell some great stories about this land. I wonder what it would have to say. Would it hate us, love us? Is the mountain glad Mother Nature is devouring Seattle? Rainier will outlast the Space Needle, there’s no argument about that. Maybe it will belch its acid stomach all over the world and burn it all down soon. I know I would.

  I sit down my heavy pack and pull out my itinerary, flipping through it until I find the booklet about tying knots. I remember watching an old man with knobby arthritic fingers tying knots on a vacation when I was a kid.

  “It’s a hobby,” the old sailor had rasped. He showed me a glass case where he displayed all of his pride and joys. “Some people try for years to accomplish one perfect knot.”

  There are five different noose knots: the simple noose, the strangle-snare, the gallows knot, the reverse-eight noose, and the hangman’s knot. The one I will use is the one meant for the short drop – the hangman’s knot. The others merely strangle the victim, but the hangman’s is bigger, believed to break the neck more easily – a more merciful death than being strangled.

  I pull out the bright yellow climbing rope and take my time, following the diagram exactly, and tie my savior. I choose a heaving line knot to attach the rope to the railing of the deck. It’s almost a varying version of the hangman’s knot, used for pulling heavy loads. I make sure I have about ten feet in between for the short drop. I’m not a large woman, but better safe than sorry.

  The stage is set for the final scene.

  I pull out a container from my pack containing some cooked rabbit meat. A human cannot survive on rabbit meat alone. It’s too lean; your body would starve to death without the essential fats and nutrients.

  I could just as easily end my life with the .22 I shot the rabbit with, but it just seems too empty and easy. As I eat the clouds disappear. The sun sparks off the ocean like a million faceted diamond and I smile. This is why I came here.

  The gulls call off in the distance and I wish I could watch all the tiny sail boats on the water like I had a lifetime ago. I pull my book from my pack and randomly open it.

  My husband had asked me how I could stand to read the same book over and over. I wondered how a person could stand to watch the same movie over and over.

  The sun slipped across the sky quickly and colors shifted from light crystal blue, darkening, and on the horizon the sun blazes in a rainbow of red and orange. Tiny slivers of green touch in between the scorching sun and the all-consuming night sky.

  This is the beginning of the final act.

  I pull the noose over my neck and pull it tight, easing over the railing and holding tight. I don’t want to fall prematurely. The noose has to be on the left side of my neck, and I’m not sure what would happen if it wasn’t. I’m sure I would die, but I don’t know if it would be quick.

  The overhang serves as a type of roof for the restaurant below and a restraint for jumpers. I sit down on it and scoot over to the edge. My heart pounds and my hands are sweaty with the fear of falling.

  Funny how I am seconds away from death but am terrified of falling over five hundred feet. The wind picks up. I look out at the angry sun as it extinguishes itself in the vast waters of the unknown. This is the last thing I want to see. I stand on the edge with trembling legs, hold the noose under the left side of my jaw, and look at the angry sun. I feel a chill run through my body as I step over the edge.