His Last Song, Played Twice

The tune slipped through the empty streets. It wasn’t loud, but it wasn’t contested. The only other sound for miles was the rubber of two gas masks against each other, and both had the same source. Two lovers, their faces pressed together as they sat on a small and unkempt hill in a small forgotten park, her arms wrapped around his neck as he played his tune. It was clear that the guitar was sitting at the wrong angle to accommodate the additional arms across his chest, but the tune was perfect and sweet all the same. He knew that while no one listened but them, it would ruin the magic of his last song to stop and start again.

Her arms hugged tightly, her breath shuddering in her chest. The sound of crying from behind a gas mask was all too familiar to him, though today he held the tears back. He did not want her last vision of him to be one of a runny nose and wet eyes. He wanted his face to take her back to when the world had not been so silent and remind her of when they’d sit in the park to escape the hustle and bustle of other people – such a foreign concept when their last few weeks had been spent trying to find any remnants of it.

While his practiced fingers danced along the neck of his guitar, hers trembled up his neck under the edge of his gas mask, and began to pull. The scrape of rubber on skin was quickly replaced by the feeling of warm hands against his cheek, of her hair brushing his shoulder, of the cold of her golden heart locket pressing into his neck as she leant in harder to remove the mask. The unfiltered air made him gasp and he smiled as the breeze that lifted his notes so softly rushed into his lungs, forgetting for a moment that a tune was not all this wind carried.

Her mask came off easier than his, and her breath caught as she dropped the gas masks into the grass. Newscaster’s voices flickered through their heads, about the different strains and the way it got to women first, echoing from days when they still thought there was a solution, when there was a plan, and a roadmap to safety. Back when there was still room in the mass graves and the rich thought if their doors were bolted tight enough they were safe.

“Do you think anyone will find us?” she whispered to him.

“I’ve given up thinking about anyone else,” he said, not skipping a beat. “I just want this moment with you.”

He began to sing. The words were not important; they were just a poem from a long time ago set to chords he’d learnt as a boy. They would never be recorded, written down or passed on from him. They beamed out into the world with no agenda, no goal, no ally or enemy. It shared this with the virus, but it carried brightness instead of demise, and like the virus, it's creator would not survive to see it end.

“Every day we drank those rations, every day we checked the radio, every day we searched for others, I think all I really wanted to find was a place where I could kiss you again” she said, and now those tears sprung to his eyes for he heard the rasp in the words as her throat began to close.

He looked up and pressed his lips on hers, dropping the guitar alongside the gas masks as he held her against him. The ringing of the last song they ever heard hung around them and they both collapsed, their hearts as still as the one on the locket around her neck. It would not be long until they were just as cold.

Their eyes stared up at the sky, reflecting the tree branches swaying and the birds soaring high above, yet they could not see them. The air was still and the city was quiet again.

The roar of jet engines was faint at first, but like the song it built and was uncontested. The shadow of the plane fell across the two lovers and then flew on, falling on the grass, on the roads, on the bodies in varying states of decay littered along the streets. The pilot looked at them all unflinchingly, searching for movement, the radio scanner listening for sound.

“Echo-Six-One this is Sunray-Two-Nine; have you found what you were looking for?”

The radio crackled in his ear and he tutted in frustration – he had only just got here.

“Sunray-Two-Nine this is Echo-Six-One; still searching; nothing seen yet” he replied, trying to hide the curtness of his tone by keeping the radio communication abrupt.

“Echo-Six-One I need to remind you that you are using valuable fuel resources in this search of a long confirmed dead city” said the commander, making no effort at all to disguise his unimpressed tone.

“You most likely picked up some old radio waves, return to base immediately.”

The pilot ripped off his mask and turned the radio volume on his headset down. He took some long, deep breaths in his little glass bubble, whipping the plane around and returning over the city.

The music had sounded so real, he thought. Those improvisations only a person could create…how could it be old radio waves?

In his heart, he could not believe it, but he had no answer for it.

“Echo-Six-One; do you copy?” barked the radio.

The pilot shook his head. He knew the dismissiveness was not personal, to lead the survival movement his commander could not operate out of emotion, but he didn’t want to give up. They couldn’t run a camp on hope, but they couldn’t lose all hope either.

“Sunray-Two-Nine this is Echo-Six-One, returning to base,” he said into the microphone, strapping his headset and mask back on. “ETA Two-One minutes”.

He looked down again at the streets, at the bodies lying strewn throughout it, his eyes catching on a small patch of green with a man and woman holding each other, and he thought for a moment they were looking at him. Then they were gone. He looked back towards the horizon and started tapping on his control screen.

He rewound the scanners and, through the static and muffled drone of his engines, listened to the tune again as he returned to base alone.