Population One
Author’s Note: I wrote this short story as a submission to a collection of short stories called “Stories for Sendai,” a charity fundraising effort supporting those affected by the Fukushima disaster. When I wrote it, my sense was that the world had already tired of stories that focused on apocalypse and collapse, and I instead wanted to write something about the door opening to whatever comes next. That’s the thing— we love to talk about collapse, the Maya, Easter Island, etc. — but I believe the most interesting stories are those that come after. Those that unfold as people rethink, re-imagine, and rebuild. Because in the horrific deconstruction that disaster brings are also seeds of transformation. Not “silver linings”, but futures that, if we don’t design for ourselves, others will design for us.
Prologue
Steven stopped walking in the middle of the intersection and shrugged his backpack off his left shoulder. It crashed to the ground with a bit more umph than he had intended. Fortunately, it no longer held anything fragile. He had eaten the last egg for breakfast, cooked on the coals of the previous night’s fire. All that remained in the pack was a box of baking chocolate, three cans of green beans, “French Style”, twelve safety matches, a bottle of iodine pills, a tin pie plate, and a towel. Absentmindedly, he rubbed his left shoulder where the strap had been, though it wasn’t sore. He had been carrying the pack for so long that it felt strange to not have the weight of it there. Shielding his eyes with his hand, he turned, and scanned the road in the direction from which he had come, but saw no one. The light was different here, whiter. It made the landscape look painted and beautiful, but it also made it harder for him to notice movement. A week prior he had lost half of his supplies to a lone wolf for that very reason.
He shifted his gaze to the cross street and adjacent hay field. The narrower cross street jogged to the left just before it disappeared into the white horizon. West, he thought, but the fact was in this part of the world, you could only head north, or south. He was heading north.
The hay field was long grown over, and he saw only a rusting pivot irrigator, and more ravens. He had seen so many ravens, large ones, always conspiring. One month ago he had started counting them as a way to pass the time. He reached thirty-five by the end of the first day, and passed one hundred the following afternoon. He stopped counting at 277, feeling a little outnumbered.
Leaving his backpack where it was, Steven kicked around some in the ditches alongside the two intersecting roads. Intersections were good places to find things, and not just the odd tennis shoe. People lost, or threw, all manner of items from their cars at intersections — jackets, screwdrivers, lighters, hundred dollar bills. Fast food bags were common, too, and they often still had food left inside, that is, if an animal hadn’t found them first. Here, he found only a rusted “Matchbox,” a white Formula One racing car with a single red pinstripe down the nose. It was missing its rear axle. It made him crave a big glass of milk. He kept the car for no reason he could identify other than that he liked the feel of it in his hand.
Steven then turned back to the northbound shoulder of the main road and inspected the white sign that had interrupted his long walk. “Oleson City, Pop. 1.” Way to advertise that you live alone, he thought. The corner of the sign bore a cluster of bullet holes, scars of the customary late night joy rides that were as common here, apparently, as they were in his hometown of Rehobeth, Alabama. He had done the shooting himself once or twice in high school, from the bed of his brother’s pickup truck, with a can of Stroh’s in one hand and a ten gauge in the other. Bets were made about who could hit the cow silhouette square in the head at thirty miles per hour. Here the crossing signs showed pictures of moose, not cows, but the goal of the game appeared unchanged.
On this side of the main road, the cross street was more of a pull off, continuing past the sign for a brief ten meters, where it dead-ended at a small barn and a copse of birch trees. Were it not for the tall trees and hilly terrain, Steven through that “Oleson City” looked rather like something you would find in the Midwest, perhaps pictured on one of those disingenuous postcards that sold as bucolic the relics of pain and suffering left by the Great Depression. Steven imagined tourists carefully appraising the picture from among a selection of other postcards — of jackalopes, UFOs, bikini-clad farm girls, and other figments of the collective American imagination. “Only thirty-five cents each, or three for a dollar!”
Steven looked at the barn, nervous, but resolute to explore what lay beyond. He was hungry. These situations always made him nervous. He didn’t have any way to protect himself, another reason that he lost half of his supplies to the wolf. Still, he knew that the likelihood was slim that he would encounter anyone here that could do him harm. Nevertheless, Steven found scavenging through other people’s homes and belongings a distasteful task. The first time, he selected a house at random. Inside he found the bodies of two women, perhaps partners, lying in an embrace on the living room floor. They seemed frozen in time, not bloated or discolored like the dead should look after so long, but like the perfectly crafted wax statues that his brother used to take him to see at Max Maximillian’s House of Wonders, in Dothan, the county seat. All of the dead looked this way, excepting for their ashen eyes. The sight of these two lovers in particular struck Steven hard; few people had known in advance that the sickness was coming, and those that did only had moments before death was upon them. This fact made their intimate posture all the more difficult for Steven to accept, and ignore, while he skulked through their home for food, tools, and a better backpack.
Most people had died outside, standing on their front porch or in a driveway, frozen, with their necks craned back from having looked to the sky just before their bodies seized up. They all did this. Even the heads of the two women he found lying on the floor were cocked toward the ceiling. He often wondered whether it was something about the sickness, or something about human nature, that made people in their very last moments want to step outside and look to the heavens.
The dead bodies became less of a problem for him when he reached the Alaska Highway. He told himself that this was out of necessity, not callousness. As he walked north, he also found that the number of bodies became fewer, and the selection of supplies thinned out too. Fresh foods disappeared almost entirely by the time he reached Hope, British Columbia, which looked to him about as tired and abandoned as it had in the final scenes of the film First Blood. He got a new backpack at the very same hardware store, but left the guns alone. He was spending more time each day hungry, but he was no survivalist. At first he chalked the fewer bodies up to lower population, and the lack of food, he figured, was because of remoteness. Years ago, he had visited a Native village in Alaska, flown in a small plane from Fairbanks to “see” the Arctic Circle with his wife Teresa and their son, Oscar. They had not been impressed by the hand-painted sign that read “Lat. 66.564N” in blue latex paint, but he was impressed by the extremely limited selection of food in the local supermarket. He had wondered, at the time, how long their food would last if the supplies stopped coming.
As he made his way up Western Canada, the shelves and pantries became even emptier, and the bodies too sparse to explain away. He was soon convinced that it wasn’t just the remoteness; that something else had happened in this part of the world. Maybe the sickness started in the North, he mused. Maybe it killed people more slowly at first. But these curiosities were not enough to assuage his inexplicable desire to continue north, and he did, inevitably, find more bodies arranged just like all the others, askew on their front porches like fallen bowling pins, heads cocked back and eyes the color of spent coal.
So, Steven hesitated only for a moment before setting toward the barn and the homestead that he assumed lay beyond. Maybe they have a can opener.
The barn was a matter-of-fact structure, a shelter for stacking hay bales and nothing more. It was built with much attention, but little embellishment. Whoever had built it had used nice wood, two-by-ten center match, and it didn’t look industrially milled. The barn was empty, save some scraps of orange twine piled in the corner and a credit union calendar from 1972 hanging on the far wall. He took the twine and put it in the front pocket of his pack. The calendar showed August. His birthday was in August. He thought that this barn would make a fine place to sleep for the night. It had a soft floor and dark corners that were well shaded from a sun that seemed never to go down, but paused only for a moment in a dream-crossed twilight between night and morning. It was still early in the afternoon, however, and he knew that he could make another ten to fifteen miles before he needed to sleep.
Behind the barn started a footpath that led into the copse of trees. Unlike the hay fields, the path was recently worn. Steven followed it casually, with the backpack once again slung over his left shoulder, and enjoyed the wild roses that obviously had once been encouraged to grow along both sides. The path was longer than he expected, and he found his mind drifting as he made his way farther from the road. He thought about staying in Oleson City. He didn’t care for the name, and it was hardly a city, but he thought the count on the sign was appropriate. Having come so far, he didn’t know what he would do when he stopped walking, if he even could stop walking. For the last four months his subsistence had depended on moving from place to place, scavenging. Like the ravens. He made a clucking sound in the back of his throat, mimicking the ravens’ chatter. He knew that he would eventually have to stop, stop going north, anyway, at Prudhoe Bay. Unless I wait for winter, and the ice.
It wasn’t the house, when he came upon it that surprised him, but the large solar panel and satellite dish that were perched on its roof. That’s a whole lot of connectivity for a city of one, he thought. He noticed other signs of modern technology scattered across the property, interspersed with multiple outbuildings and two outhouses. The house itself was an old log structure, constructed with the same care and attention as the hay barn. Perhaps even by the same hand. All of the outbuildings, on the other hand, were of a newer, pre-engineered metal construction. At the left corner of the house was a large Honda generator, and an even larger propane tank. Behind the generator stood four tall yellow tripods fitted with heavy-duty floodlights, of the type often used for night roadwork. To the right of the house, was a plywood doghouse, the type built for sled dogs that Steven had seen many times since reaching Alaska. At some houses he had counted ten to twelve at a time. Here there was only one, painted blue. In front of it, there was a well-worn circle in the dirt around the tie-out.
A sign on the railing of the house’s expansive front porch read “Cape Creek LTER.” LTER? It was one of many questions he had about the compound, and his growing curiosity squelched the nervousness he had felt earlier. There weren’t any dead bodies in sight, and that helped too. Above the oversized front door was mounted a large rack of moose antlers. To the left, a large double window gleamed in the white sun, beneath which sat a long wooden bench and two Adirondack chairs, also painted blue. Through the window he could see an ample great room furnished comfortably around a large wood stove. At the foot of the front door was a brush for cleaning mud off of one’s boots, in the shape of a porcupine, and bearing the legend “Wipe Your Paws.” He obliged, and then reached for the door.
Much to his surprise, the door was unlocked. There was no actual knob on this door, just a large wooden handle, above which was fitted a silver latch for a padlock. The fact that it was unlocked wasn’t very surprising, actually; most of the homes that he had entered were unlocked. Yet, the official look of this place made Steven think he was going to have to break a window to get inside. He was glad to not have to spoil the handsome façade.
He thought about the latch and the padlock. The lock was missing, but the catch was turned. An act of habit, by a person who was not in a hurry? Like the well-worn footpath and the lack of dead bodies, this was a clue that nagged at his curiosity about the place. He had trespassed in many empty and abandoned homes during his trek, thirty-seven to be exact, but this one didn’t feel empty or abandoned. It felt used. He called out a cautious “hello,” something he hadn’t done since Reno, but received no response.
The door was heavy, made of wooden beams nearly eight inches thick, but it swung easily on its hinges when he pulled it open. The main room was sunny and vaulted, with an open loft that took up the rear two-thirds of the second story. On the wall to his left he saw a cluster of plasma displays, and a black and white poster of an Eskimo boy being tossed into the air by a group of people holding a large blanket-like trampoline. The right wall was lined with bookcases, each crammed with books and cheaply bound technical reports. He could also see what looked like desks with computer workstations in the loft. Moving to the shelves, he scanned some of the titles. “Proceedings of the 9th Annual International Permafrost Conference.” “Alaska’s Changing Boreal Forest — DRAFT.” “Nutrient Transport in Riverine Food Webs.” This was clearly some kind of science station.
Thinking of business first, he walked to the kitchen area, which was separated from the great room by a long bar and five high-back stools. He paused first by the wood stove, but found no matches or lighter. Checking the kitchen drawers next, he didn’t find a can opener, but he did find a church key with the silverware, and he slid this into his back pocket, next to his spoon. On the countertop was a birch bark basket that held, among other things, a padlock. He assumed this was for the front door. In the basket were also a number of keys, presumably to the various outbuildings. Each key bore a round paper tag, held by thin wire, and labeled by hand in blue ink. He read a few: “Root cellar,” “Gennie,” “Wetlab,” and “Sauna.”
In the pantry he found only a smattering of dry goods — instant potatoes, tea bags, small packets of pepper flakes and Parmesan cheese, and a bag of dry pinto beans. He checked the faucet, and found it working. Then he tested the gas range, and found it working as well. So he filled a kettle and set it to boil for tea. He had learned early on not to bother with refrigerators — they were often ripe with mold and stench — but he had a feeling that this one ran on propane, so he gave it a look. It was not running, but was still cold. Unlike the cupboards, it held a variety of items, though few were of use to Steven. Among the condiments and baking soda were several plastic bags full of soil and glass jars holding dirty-looking water. Each of these was labeled with what he assumed was some kind of accession number written in permanent marker. There were also two bottles of beer in the crisper. He set one of the beers on the counter next to the fridge and turned off the tea water.
In the freezer he found a jar of shelled walnuts, and he stuffed these into his backpack. He also found a black 35mm film canister that held a small portion of marijuana, which he also put in his backpack.
Steven thought about the refrigerator. On propane it could have kept running for a long time after the power went out. Maybe it just gave out a few days ago. But, if that was the case, then why did the range still work? It was another piece of a puzzle that he had been mulling since Canada. He told himself (again) that he was seeing patterns where there were none. Pareidolia, he thought. “And the blind eye creates empty forms between the ivory gates.” But part of him couldn’t let go of the possibility, the hope, that there was more to it than that.
Suddenly, Steven realized that he very badly needed to relieve himself. He found the washroom between two bedrooms, each of which held two sets of bunk beds. To his dismay, the washroom consisted only of an open shower and vanity, with a drain in the middle of the tiled floor. He remembered the outhouses, and figured that the house must be plumbed with only a gray water system that emptied somewhere outside.
He thought about urinating in the drain, but instead he hastened through the back door, which was locked, and peed off of the back porch. He saw more equipment, as well as a barbecue, fire pit, and picnic table. A raven watched him from the picnic table. When he was finished, he retrieved the basket from the kitchen, and spent the next two hours exploring the back yard. The outbuildings offered few surprises. He took a box of strike-anywhere matches and a plastic bottle of isopropyl alcohol from the wet lab. The sauna was a disappointment, however. He had been thinking about how nice a hot sauna would feel. But there had been a fire. The stovepipe had been removed and the ceiling was covered in black ash. He shivered at how closely the color matched that of the eyes of the dead.
As he returned to the kitchen, something about the place’s energy made him call out a second time. There was still no reply. His business was essentially done; he had found food, a number of supplies, and the marijuana, which would be a fine painkiller if he ever needed one. Yet, he wasn’t ready to leave. He took the beer into the living room, popped off the top with his new church key, and then used the other end of the key to open a can of beans, which he ate cold with his spoon. He grabbed a book from the closest shelf, “Hydrology of the Arctic: Present and Future,” and flipped through it while eating. According to the editor’s introduction, the North was going to experience increased precipitation as a result of climate change, but it was also going to get drier. That would only make sense to a scientist, he chuckled. He had a PhD himself, but it was in psychology. He allowed himself to get comfortable, and enjoyed the many colorful diagrams and cartoons in the book, of river catchments, soil profiles, water tracks, and the like. I wonder if they have a book on ravens, he thought, and he considered spending the night in Oleson City after all.
Halfway into the second beer, Steven noticed a leather-bound journal on the side table that bore the word “Register” in gold lettering. He opened it to the first page. It was a guest book, full of names, dates, and short reflections written in a variety of hands and colors. He learned from the first page that LTER stood for “Long Term Ecological Research.” The earliest entries were dated to 1987:
-Dominick Nikoloutsos, 1987. Here’s to a long and fruitful future for ecological research in Alaska.
-Ann Marie Mack, 1988. The snowshoe hares are delicious!
-Albert Hudson, 1988. If the lab is out of silver nitrate blame Ann Marie!
-Joshua Udall, 1990. Someone tell maintenance that the men’s outhouse needs a new hole.
-Mr. and Mrs. Albert and Ann Marie Mack-Hudson, married here June 27th, 1994.”
This last one made him smile. He decided to leave a note of his own, even if only for himself to read on his way back through. He reached for the pen he had seen on the end table, and he opened the book to the point of the silk bookmark, which he assumed held the place of the last entry. The final entry, written at the very top of a new page, was longer than the others. He dropped the pen as he read it:
-If you are reading this, then that means that we are not the only survivors, and neither are you. We are twenty-three strong, twenty-four if you count Henry. We are heading north, originally from Whitehorse. Two days before the power went out we received a transmission on an old 40 MHz, sent from another group of survivors in Barrow. We don’t know how they got there, or how we will, for that matter, but we are going to try. We will wait for a few days in Prudhoe Bay. Good luck. And don’t lose hope.
Steven felt heady, and wiped a hand across the page as if making sure that the words were not a figment of his imagination. He realized that he was holding his breath, and when he exhaled it came out as a sob, full of both emotion and exhaustion. Ironically, he hadn’t felt lonely until this very moment. Scared? Yes. Bored? Of course. But never lonely. 281 days of walking across America had made him certain that he was the only survivor, at least on this continent, and for some reason that made loneliness irrelevant. Knowing now that there were others, on the other hand, made his heart ache, and tears fell from his eyes as he stared at the last sentence. Don’t lose hope.
Have I? Steven had kept up hope that he would encounter survivors for a long time. When he first started the walk, finding survivors had been his only goal. But as time passed, and certainty set in that there were no other survivors, the North became the goal. His path, which had started like a great serpent across southern Alabama and Mississippi, took on a clinical efficiency. Hope, like the loneliness, he admitted to himself now, had become irrelevant. The only thing was to keep moving. But something of it had endured, enough anyway, to make him wonder about the fewer people, and the ravens. Enough to make him search this compound a little more extensively, and to listen for voices a little more closely. The weakened spirit that quickens to rebel, quickens to recover.
No longer. With a deep breath and renewed purpose, he wiped his eyes, drank the last swig of beer, and then picked up the ballpoint pen from where it had fallen on the rug by his feet. He wrote the following in the journal:
-Steven St. James. No Date. I’m coming.
Steven then gathered his things, determined to walk through the night. On his way out of the cabin, he was sure to latch the large door in the same fashion as he had found it. An act of hope, he realized, by someone who planned to return some day.
