The Last, Tyler Jones

I sat there in the basement of our home, in the last bastion of our humanity. It has been two years since the evacuation of Earth due to the growing depletion of livable gasses on the planet and the melting of all the glaciers on Earth. My wife’s health has been deteriorating because I am no doctor, and neither is she. She suffers from COPD because she is one of the strongest smokers in the history of champion smokers. We have had to ration the oxygen from the tanks we stole from the defunct chemical plants a few towns over. My wife has started to cough off blood and wane in and out of my life for the last week. Her voice sounds like Darth Vader if Darth Vader was a woman and had blood filling his lungs. I remember watching the last shuttle leave knowing we could not possibly make it to the takeoff location. My wife could not be moved from the basement. The long silences and coughs as wet as the overflowing oceans showed us, we could not force her to the landing strip in her condition. We were down to our last tank of oxygen. I yelled across the room to her ailing half-alive-half-dead corpse:

“Hey love, how are you feeling?” I asked.

“…Fucging terrifble” was all she could mutter.

I grabbed the oxygen mask and breathed in deep, feeling a rush not unlike the one a drug addict feels when they get a good hit after a long withdrawal. I could hear her gurgling like a babbling brook wishing we were not the last of humanity on this Earth turned gas giant. I had never been a smoker and I had always forced her to smoke outside so the house wouldn’t smell like a restaurant in the 1970s. I also did not want our possessions to be damaged and I did not want our children to be exposed to second-hand smoke. Thankfully our children made it onto an evacuation ship because they were out at a friend’s house. Hopefully they didn’t miss us too much. We certainly missed them, but I certainly didn’t miss the imagined fantasy diorama I turned over in my head. Of them dying due as the Earth finally gave out. Dying instead of living among their friends and growing to old age. Not dying in a basement. I yelled across the room again to my wife:

“Babe, how are you feeling? How do you think the weather is out there?”

I heard low, almost indistinguishably human, but alien noises crawl across the room into my ears.

“The weathefjrrrr mu be fin.”

I think I got that. How was she feeling though?

I yelled across the room again, “I love you Gaia!”.

“….”, the emptiness of the sound waves echoed in the hollow stone basement.

I was now the last person on Earth. In the last inhabitable basement, thinking the last thoughts of our Earthen existence. I was going to die alone with my wife’s dead body across the room. I never planned to die alone. I am so glad I didn’t hear the sounds of suffering from across the room anymore. My oxygen could last a little bit longer now thanks to my wife’s noble sacrifice. There was an air of nobility in being the last two people on Earth.

I had one oxygen tank left at this point. I could hear the howling of the winds outside. What was left outside? Was anything alive out there? Should I be glad I hadn’t drowned in the coastal towns after the levees were broken by the death of the last few glaciers? I knew I would eventually run out of breathable air and die alone. My wife was crumpled in the corner like a dead human pretzel. I think she would fit in my gym bag in the corner because she was probably quite foldable. I limped across the cold stone floor aching with bed sores from rarely getting up. I brought my large gym bag that was never to be used again in a gym. It would smell like COPD, sweat and my lovely dead wife. She had evacuated her bowels. She took the last shit on Earth. The smell was quite neutral because the potatoes and cans of fruit did not lend themselves to a disgusting fecal exit. I loaded my wife into the gym bag and zipped it up tight. I placed her down and walked across the basement to grab my gas mask. I was able to hook up the last oxygen tank to a backpack and sling it over my back. I placed the gas mask on my face. It was hard to see out of the gas mask, but it wasn’t the gas mask’s fault. It was because of the fragility of human emotion.

I didn’t need to pack up any food because I would not live much longer. I left the basement with my gym-bag-dead-wife and walked out of the basement. I was on the last hero’s journey ever to be conceived on Earth. I was on my own odyssey, but no one was going to write about it. As I ascended the stairs, I felt the burning of the failing atmosphere and the weight of the deadly gasses floating around me. Trying to choke me to death. Earth was a bit of a kinky grim reaper. I could barely see into the distance. I saw what looked like a tree. It still had bountiful leaves and life. It was the biggest tree I had ever seen and probably the last tree left on Earth. I carried my wife through the wispy air wondering if I was going to be attacked by mutated animals from a deadly movie I probably watched when I was a teenager. I was the last animal on the planet. This swirly gas concoction was not the work of radiation from exploding nuclear plants. This was from the loss of trees. Nothing could live on this planet anymore. This tree was the last of its kind just like me. It was purifying the air around it, but of course it eventually would not be able to keep up. It would die from the plant version of COPD. If that existed. I laughed. The last laugh on the planet.

As I walked, I was surely running out of oxygen. I started hearing voices and started seeing hallucinations. I thought I saw Gaia, but she was dead. I took a deep breath of oxygen and depleted my oxygen reserves down to 25%. I was about halfway to the tree by now. I wish I had got to live a longer life. I wish my wife was not dead in my gym bag. These were some of the last wishes on the planet. I don’t think trees think. Do you think trees think? I think they scream, but we just never hear them. I think we all scream, but sometimes people just never hear us. I started to hallucinate again. I saw Gaia and the kids enjoying themselves while I grilled in the backyard. Everyone looked so happy and not dead. I hope my kids aren’t dead. I know they didn’t have grass on Mars yet. They probably didn’t have any cookouts. These hallucinations brought me to tears. I wish I had done acid while there were still people alive to do acid with. I wish I could have imagined such a happy life.

I had to bring myself back to the realm of living. I took in another bump of oxygen which brought my reserves down to 15%. The tree was only about a mile away. I hope it looked forward to seeing me. I had a dead body in my gym bad, but I doubt it knew that. Trees did not know things. They helped us live and we always helped them die. I’m glad this tree was never chopped down. It looked like Yggdrasil up there on the hill. It was the only thing giving me life. The leaves looked like what Earth must have felt like before we killed everything for malls and houses. I was walking across a desert made on the corpses of dreams and trees. The dirt swirled in circles of dust, and I could barely see. I needed to keep walking. If I kept walking in that direction, I would eventually make it to the tree. It was north of me.

I finally arrived at the base of the hill and took my last good gulp of that heavenly oxygen. I was depleted. I left my shovel back in the basement and I doubt I could have carried it with my dead wife and this oxygen tank. Using my shoes and some nearby rocks and branches I dug out a hole as deep as I could. I took my pretzel wife out of the duffel bag. I buried her at the base of the tree. I was starting to hallucinate again, and I wouldn’t make it back before death. I checked my bag for a Sharpie marker and approached the tree.

“We’re the last of our kinds. I hope you get to die without too much internal screaming”, I said.

“I’m glad I get to see the last of my killers’ kind, being so kind”, is what I liked to imagine the tree said.

I was high on hallucinating, and it seemed to be saying such a nice philosophical thing. I grasped my Sharpie like the first lumberjack grasped his axe and wrote upon the tree’s bark:

“I am glad to be the last human alive with such a loving last tree.”