The Last Act

Nobody knew what the Fire had been or where it had come from. The survivors he had encountered all had their theories. The government, aliens, terrorists. The Fire had terrified and taken indiscriminately. Two men might have been walking down the street and one of them would have disappeared in flames while the other was unscathed. None of it mattered, what did matter was that those that survived kept on living. He had been traveling for eight months now.

The day after the fire he had set out for Orlando from Santa Monica. He had been in Santa Monica on a business retreat and had been enjoying some drinks at a beachside bar he had since forgotten the name of. The patrons of this bar had randomly begun to spontaneously combust. Panicked customers began to flee as most of them also began to combust. Over several minutes only three people were left in what had been a packed bar and the flames were consuming everything in sight.

The rest of the night was a blur as Santa Monica burned to the ground. He awoke the next morning on the beach feeling the sun on his face and his mouth dry. The beach was full of other survivors all trying their cell phones to reach loved ones. If he had to guess he would guess most of the cell towers had burned to the ground. The world had been reduced to ash.

The man reached into his pocket and took out a shiny gold heart-shaped locket and opened it. There were smiling pictures of his wife and daughter. They had been hit and killed by a drunk driver two months before the night the Fire came. The locket had been in his wife’s family for generations. He suspected now this was the only thing he had left of her and his daughter. Tears rolled down his face as he felt fresh pain remembering their loss.

It was then that he decided he wanted to return the locket to their graves. He could have stayed where he was and foraged some kind of life with the other survivors, but that had no meaning for him. With humanity on the brink of extinction, all that mattered to him was returning the heart-shaped locket to his beloved wife.

He left that moment not taking any time to try and outfit himself. He felt like this was the last act of his life, the last thing he would do that would have any meaning, and he would trust the higher powers to provide for him. The world was mostly empty now and if he could not provide for himself along the way, he was not fit to survive.

The next eight months of travel were spent mostly in silence. He met small camps of people along the way who were always eager to share and ask him his opinion about the fire. Was it God or UFOs? The government or terrorists? These people always looked shocked when he told them he did not care why it had happened. They would still offer him food and shelter for a night, but they would keep their distance. They would wish him well the next morning and see him off, but he knew in his heart they were glad to see him go.

He fell asleep every night staring at the pictures in the heart-shaped locket. He had once woken to find an elderly man trying to pry it out of his hands in one settlement. He had brained the man with the Ruger pistol he kept concealed and then went on his way.

He had been unable to find any remaining maps and was forced to rely solely on the sun's direction to guide him. His path had taken him across the Mojave Desert where he had almost died of thirst. He had come out of the desert nearly glare blind, raving about his lost wife and daughter, and had by sheer luck come across a small stream. He drank until he could drink no more and made his camp there where he spent three days drinking and regaining his strength.

His next life or death battle had come while crossing the Rocky Mountains. It was perhaps early November when he had gotten there, and he had not anticipated how chilly it would be in the mountains. He had no idea which road he was following, only that it headed east. It ascended quickly and the temperature dropped. That night he sat shivering under a rock outcropping as the temperature plummeted. He tried to hold the locket to keep the images of his wife and daughter in front of him, but his fingers were too numb. He spent three days on the mountain. Just when he thought the cold would take him after all, he began to descend into warmer temperatures. That night it was warm enough to hold the locket again. It had begun to look dingy and dented from the journey, but it brought him some measure of peace to be able to hold it again.

He came out of the mountains and adjusted his course to the southeast and had only one more major incident between Texas and Florida. He was awakened in the middle of the night while sleeping in a still-standing shed outside of Jackson, Mississippi. He heard strange discordant singing getting louder. His eyes snapped open, and he found himself surrounded by a group of figures in masks. The masks were almost tribal-looking. They were singing in a language that could not be English. It seemed to have no key. He pulled his now well-traveled Ruger and aimed for the closest figure. They sang louder, the discordant tone reaching a frenzy. He pulled the trigger putting a bullet hole directly between the eyes of the mask the figure wore. The figure combusted into flames and to his surprise and horror, the rest of the group cheered in a sick ecstasy.

They began to circle him and that was when the fear left him. He did not know what they were, or if they were even people, but he intuited that they were souls stuck here after the fire. Souls that had been shattered and unable to move on. They had somehow sensed him and came to him, sure that he would be able to move them on. He freed the souls one at a time, the report from his Ruger echoing in the deep night. After the last soul was freed, he knew he would get no more sleep that night and got on his way.

He spent the next several weeks thinking about the lost souls he had freed. He believed the souls had been trapped here as a purgatory of some sort. The more he thought about it, the more he thought that true of everyone who survived the Fire. Maybe they were all stuck here just waiting for heaven or hell to claim their souls. Maybe there was no rebuilding, just a winding down of humanity.

It was a relief when he crossed into Florida, and an even a greater sense of relief three weeks later when he arrived in Orlando. Even though much of Orlando had been razed to the ground in the Fire, he found his way to the small cemetery where his family was buried. This reminiscing brought him to the now, where he stood looking at the cemetery gates.

It had been a long journey and he did not know what was next in life for him. He took the battered heart-shaped locket out of his pocket for the millionth time and opened it. His wife and daughter smiled at him as he smiled a crooked, weary grin looking at their pictures. He gripped the locket tightly as he walked through the gates. He had no problem finding the gravestones, the cemetery had been untouched by the Fire.

He knelt in front of their graves. Tears ran freely down his face. He felt the Florida sun beating down on his neck and back. The heat seemed much more intense than it had only moments ago. He opened the locket for the last time and looked once more at his wife and daughter, burning their images into his eyes for eternity. He placed the locket in front of his wife’s tombstone, tears running down his face.

“I love you both so much,” he said in a ragged, unsteady voice. The heat in his back intensified and he realized it was painful. And the man burst into flames, igniting the cemetery around him.

THE END