The Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF - Mike Ashley [235]
One morning I woke up and nobody answered the signal to come to my cell, no matter how many times I pushed the button. I tried to force the door open, or a window, but the security thingies kept stopping me same as ever. The automatic voice kept warning me not to try again.
After a long time, the lights went out and the air cycle stopped. I kept trying the door but just getting the warning. I screamed for somebody, anybody. Finally, the automatic voice stopped. After another long time, I tried the door and it opened.
It took me a while and more aggro to get out of the lab, but I did.
Everybody was dead. I could see the big piles of snot and clothes where some people had been lately, and inside the buildings some little piles of dust where the snot had dried up.
Most of the animals were dead too. Plenty of trees and plants, though. And insects. There were birds for a few weeks, then they all started dying.
I found a car that worked without the security link to its owner's ID chip. I'd never twigged how to drive properly, but when you're the only driver on the road it's easy-peasy. I got out of London and I headed for the
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in the motorboat I'd found to get to France. I went along the coast till the boat needed a recharge and I couldn't keep it going. Then I found another car I could start, and for a couple of years I just
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and wouldn't you bloody well know it that whatever killed everything else won't kill the insects, and there's more of them all the time! Ugh! Flies and beetles and nasties, and there seem to be more every day. And I'm seeing new sorts of insects now: flies all glittery like red metal, and beetles with big yellow eyes, and I'm sure there weren't any of those before the snot-rot killed off all the people. At least the rats mostly
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Once in a long while I find an old stash of food in plasti-clings so it never went off nor got mouldy, and sometimes I'll eat something just to remember what food tastes like. Sometimes the wrap is broken and the food's gone off, but I'll eat it anyway. Not as if it will kill me ha ha. Once I ate some cheese that had gone all mouldy, just for the new experien
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and I came running up shouting at them to take me along, take me with them back to wherever they bloody came from. I know they saw me. I'm sure they heard me. Two of them looked at me with I guess those were eyes. But the bug-men just went back into their big metal ball. It made a humming noise and then it glowed and then it just wasn't there anymore. It didn't go up to the sky or like that. It just went.
I waited a while for the bug-men to come back, or anyone else to show up, but finally I knew they would never
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About every ten or twelve years I'd try to kill myself again, but of course it never worked and I stopped hurting myself. That bastard who stole my death, you'd think he'd of fixed it so I could never feel pain, neither. Every time I tried to kill myself the cut would bleed and hurt like flipping hell but it always healed back.
The first few years weren't so bad cus I found a stash of 3-Vs and a viewer and some power packs, so at least I could still watch holovids and that. I watched all the discs with stories on them, over and over, till I knew them all off by heart. Then I finally got so bored I started watching the educational discs too, and I learnt some physics stuff and that. Things got worse when I couldn't find more batteries that worked and I couldn't recharge the dead ones.
It's so bloody not fair. Batteries get to die but I don't.
I was never much for reading, but when I couldn't watch any more 3-Vs, I found a library that had thousands of textdisks. I tried to read one, but the viewers wouldn't go. Then in the cellar I found hundreds of those old books and