Survivor

ALONE Series by James Phelan

 

KENSINGTON PUBLISHING CORP.

All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

Table of Contents

 

—from “Alone” by Edgar Allan Poe

M
y name is Felicity,
she said.
I am recording this from my family home . . .

She looked like she was about eighteen or nineteen. Blond hair, pretty face, kind of how I'd expected an attractive American girl to look. But these were the words this girl spoke into her camera every day:
Death. Screaming. Silence. Gunfire.
How our world had so quickly changed.

I'd found the camera on top of the TV and had been sitting on her couch, watching the footage for the past half-hour. Scattered around the living room were photos of a happy-looking middle-aged couple and the girl, Felicity.

“How many of you are left?” I asked aloud. Maybe she was now part of an endangered species. Maybe that's why she was keeping some kind of video diary, so she wouldn't be lost forever like everyone else.

I remembered the vacant forms of Dave and Anna and Mini as they lay there together: lost, silent, still.

My broken friends.

Back at 30 Rock, I'd ruffled their beds and served them food and pretended not to notice when I scraped it away, like I pretended not to notice so much else. I sat there on the observation decks and took it in shifts by myself. I was the one who broke through the locked door in 59C and used the typewriter in the study. I was the one who had shot a man dead in the street and watched him fall like a tree. My friends had been with me the whole time, but only I had seen them after that first day.

I'd met no other survivors since. I thought it was just me and the Chasers and the hint of those I'd seen from afar. But Felicity was
real
. Part of me burned to find her, to know that she was okay, a signal fire in my chest.

“Where are you now?” My voice was a whisper, as useful as a single clap in a crowd of applause. My breath fogged but it felt warm in here.

I fast-forwarded to her latest entry:

“But have you seen them?” I asked the screen. “Have you seen what they do?”

I remembered the first time I saw the Chasers. Among the group of people drinking rain and slush was another, smaller group, hunched over the dead bodies in the street. Like animals. In horror, I realized that their mouths were closed over the bare flesh of those bodies. They were
drinking
from them. They were drinking everything. Anything.

Felicity continued speaking.
Crazed people. They dip their mouths into pools of water as easy as they drink from the dying, from the dead.

“You've seen them!” I wanted to punch the air in recognition. Felicity had seen them too. “You must be real. You must be okay.”

Now I knew there really was hope, there really was a world out there, one with survivors like me. I could again let myself wonder what my friends were doing back home in Australia; school would be starting any day, our final year at high school. They'd have so many stories to tell of summer holidays. I'd give it all and then some to hear my dad's voice, to hear him tell me everything was okay there and that help was on its way—that it would be all right and that they all missed me, that I'd be home soon.

Even the thought of seeing my dragon of a stepmother seemed bearable. And maybe it was time to track down my real mum, if I could just . . .

Felicity turned her head to the side and listened to something off-screen. From the background, I could tell that she'd filmed herself with the camera perched on the coffee table. She was sitting on the leather couch I was sitting on now. She remained quiet, facing left, and I looked in that direction too—towards the door of the apartment. There was a banging noise coming through the camera's little speaker and it startled me and I saw that she'd also jumped at the sound. She slid down from the couch and sat on the floor, close to the camera, but kept her face pointed towards the front door. I glanced at it again; I'd dead bolted it the previous night as soon as I'd come in.

I paused the video and listened. There it was again; a noise outside. I went to the window and peered through the curtains. No movement out there in the breaking dawn. Silence. A dead streetscape. That hadn't changed. My breath fogged against the glass as I waited, wrapped in a quilt, watching, searching, imagining.

I pressed play on the camera, just to hear her voice, worried that she would disappear as unexpectedly as she had arrived.

I paused the tape again. Twelve days? Is that how long I'd been checking the phones and televisions and radios, wanting to hear the sound of anyone's voice other than my own?

Twelve days ago, I'd taken that subway ride from the UN Secretariat Building towards Lower Manhattan, a trip that saved my life and changed my world.

“I'd been on a leadership camp for senior students,” I told her. “It was meant to teach us about how the world really worked. Some education.”

I waited for her response. Of course it didn't come. But she was still more alive than the friends I'd had to let go. She was still real to me, so I continued talking to the screen.

“There was a bang and our train carriage rolled and it had been hot and then black and an hour or so later I had come to and by dim flashlight I'd found my way to street level to find the power out and the phones dead. And that was the best of it.”

I remembered seeing that unexploded missile in the street on the first day. All those craters around town, the buildings that had been reduced to rubble. It seemed too big an attack for terrorists. Far too big. Citywide, at least. What with all the radio and TV stations being out, the total lack of response from authorities. This had to be nationwide . . .

The little camera's battery light was flashing red, reminding me that I could lose Felicity at any moment. I had to be sure what she had said.

Was today day twelve? Or was that yesterday? Was she counting from the day after? Was it twelve nights that had passed? I started to feel uneasy about how carelessly I'd been marking time.

I pressed play again. There was silence on the camera too. I watched Felicity and she stared back at me. She spoke softer, quieter, closer to the camera:

She shifted position, sitting up a little straighter and redirecting the camera's lens so that it didn't crop off the top half of her face.

She looked down at her lap. Perhaps she was flexing and cracking her knuckles with anxiety like I was doing now.

She was still and watched the camera lens and I felt as though she was staring right at me. She wiped away a tear.
I'm sick of being alone.
She took a deep breath and let it out, her bottom lip quivering.

I had to meet her! A survivor, like me, someone unafraid to get out there on the streets and try to make something better.

She reached forward and turned off the camera and before me the tiny screen went blue. I switched it off, the screen went black. It was time to go.

I moved fast. I wrote a hope note, the kind of thing I'd seen stuck to buildings around town and flittering through the air and sodden on the ground. The kind of thing you'd do for a missing cat, only these were for people, for loved ones. I scrawled on a piece of paper a few lines describing who I was and explaining that I'd be outside 30 Rock's entrance at the ice rink at ten o'clock every morning, and to please come and meet me. I left it next to the camera on the table and considered adding my own message on film, but I felt like it might taint what she'd done. Besides, I've never really liked myself on camera—my voice comes across all squeaky and strange, not my own.

I took some clean stuff from Felicity's dad's wardrobe—socks and underwear, a T-shirt, a flannel shirt—and got dressed. I pulled my jeans on, they still felt a little cold and damp but they'd do, found a knit cap in Felicity's room, put on my trainers which had dried out overnight and laced them up tight. I re-bandaged my grazed hands, put on a black puffer jacket and zipped it up to my neck. I'd come here with nothing but the clothes on my back and my stupid little flashlight and I would leave with the same but at least feeling fresher.

I stood at the locked apartment door and pressed my ear against it. Silence. I listened for about five minutes. When I was as sure as I could be there was no one beyond the door, I unlocked it and went outside, with something like hope burning a hole in my chest.