Turn Out The Lights

She stared at the words scratched into the dirt.

She had written them there the night before, scraping with a stick at the soil until they read how she wanted them, the same message she left outside every camp she made just in case. Her name.

That she meant no harm.

That she had no supplies to trade.

As with every night, something had washed it away; sometimes it was a storm, arriving thick with acid rain, sometimes the wind obliterated them. The only words left legible were the first three.

"My name is".

She considered scratching her name back into the dirt again as if to leave behind proof she had existed, at least until the elements ruined it again. She hesitated, then kicked dirt over the words, reducing them to nothing but dust and ash once more, before shouldering her pack and continuing her journey again.

What's the use of a name in a world with no one to speak it?

The only names left are the ones written indelibly, on street signs and buildings, rusting into nothing; in the few tattered books that still rest on shelves and haven't been used as fuel; in tattoos inked on the bodies in the streets that hadn't yet been picked clean by scavengers, both animal and human. Others had left their mark on the world before they vanished, every wall and sign and window bursting with graffiti. Most of it was in the form of a tag or a name, an unspoken wish that someone - anyone - would remember that they had once been here, had fought, cried, laughed, lived before the end of the world. Even more was in the form of messages and questions;

What did we do to deserve this?

Repent while you can.

Call this number for a good time—

She began to document these messages in photos on her phone, finding some use for it now that the cell towers and satellites had broken down. They intrigued her, these things left by those who had come this way before her, the things they decreed worthy of inscribing for someone to read after they were long gone. After all, it was one of these that set her on her path in the first place.

It had been weeks since she had seen another human being by that point, and the ones she had seen were destitute, dying, and dead; corpses collapsed around burnt-out campfires, people starving in the streets. The calamity had stripped society to its bones and then scattered the bones to the winds, leaving what was left of humanity to pick themselves up and carry on as best they could. She had to hand it to them, they were an adaptable bunch.

She found herself alone, standing in the desolate bathroom of what was once a gas station, picked clean of all that could be useful, even down to the pipes as she discovered to her chagrin. She had struck out at the flimsy mirror over the sink in frustration as the taps didn't yield a single drop of water, and when the mirror swung down, dangling from one rusted screw, she spotted the graffiti above it.

Last one alive, turn out the lights.

Simple. Derivative. Sarcastic, almost. And yet, a direction.

She had been lost even before the calamity, bereft of family, of her partner, of friends, even of her job; unmoored and floating out to sea in her own mind, the end of the world had seemed almost a welcome break in a sick sort of way, but afterwards when she had survived against all the odds she was back to square one. She looked up at the writing again, thick and black and bold against the grimy gas station tile.

Last one alive, turn out the lights.

It was something. A beginning of sorts.

She started with the blinking neon sign in the gas station itself, the one that proclaimed the derelict building OPEN despite the obvious. She flicked it off and its insistent, droning hum stopped, leaving her in a silence so complete and abrupt that her own footsteps felt deafening. She didn't linger long.

She searched for lights everywhere she went. Most light bulbs had burned out or been smashed, and the majority of places she ventured into were nothing interesting; old office blocks where fluorescents hummed overhead, shops littered with trash with neon signs still proclaiming that they were open, a few houses with lamps and sconces still burning over the detritus of a life. She got in, flicked switches or turned dials, and left, looking for the next light, the next switch, blindly following the orders of a piece of bathroom graffiti without thinking about how little sense that made, if any. Her journey was caught in the snapshots she took along the way, flicking through her photos as she settled down to sleep each night as if retracing her footsteps through the broken city;

June 6th

A bruised purple sky brindled with brownish clouds, its wide openness pierced by what remained of the Palace of Westminster, its black, sharp shapes stark against the sky. Elizabeth Tower seemed sheared almost perfectly in half, and if she squinted she could see the remnants of it poking out of the Thames below, like the claw of some ancient monster rising from the depths, reaching towards the riverbank with an intent that seemed almost sinister.

June 10th

A wall littered with graffiti of every kind, from portraits so bright they seem to be painted in neon, to illegible scrawl sent streaming towards the pavement from the rain. The photo is shaky, as if taken while moving, the gnarled old trees poking over the top of the wall smeared into a single brown mass. Amongst the brightly coloured paint one message stands out in yellowed white, ringed with blue; WHAT COMES NEXT? A streetlamp still glared next to the art in the photo, but she had thrown chunks of rubble at the yellow glowing bulb until it smashed and the world faded back to grey.

June 15th

Two corpses, mostly skeletonised. One seems to have been a woman from the tattered blue dress that still hangs from her body. Her bony arms are stretching and reaching towards a cradle that has collapsed sideways, away from her, the other corpse contained within, tiny and almost invisible under the blankets that remain; they are mostly stained and ripped, but they could have been blue once, a round cartoon rabbit emblazoned on the corner of one. There is a glint at what was once the woman’s throat, and the next picture shows it clearer; a heart-shaped locket, gold and gleaming beneath its layer of dirt. In the foreground the fat, greasy body of a rat lurks. She hadn’t stayed long after taking that photo, only long enough to turn out a lamp, still casting its warm golden light over the grisly scene.

June 21st

An off-license, the lights already switched off as far as anyone can tell through the windows, which are covered in signs so tightly packed that they block out all view of the inside. Some are the usual fare one would expect in the windows of such a shop, advertisements and lost cats and job listings. Most appear to be prayers, to as many gods as there are signs, in more languages than she has ever seen in one place, and all - as far as she can tell - are begging for salvation.

July 1st

A tree, bereft of leaves and yet alight with sound and movement, a rare video, as she tried to conserve memory and battery. The tree’s bare branches glitter all over with tokens hung and left by hundreds if not thousands of people; jewellery bumps against itself in the breeze, the clinks of metal on metal creating a high harmony that rings across the scrub grass of the park like silver bells. Shoes are hung by their tied laces from some branches, the way they would have hung from telephone wires before. Near the lowest branches, a pair of sneakers are stained red, as if filled with blood at some point. Tokens and trinkets of every kind wave in the breeze and, as she steps closer, initials and names carved into the trunk become visible, pale white scars in the dark bark, as if the tree is tattooed with initialled hearts, vulgar drawings, names and nicknames. A hand appears in the frame, her hand, as she hangs the heart-shaped locket from a branch, the hinges open to show the lock of hair pinned inside; it is pale blonde and curled, delicate and incongruous amidst the grief evident on this tree of mementoes. The light catches an engraving on the inside of the lid - ad aeternam.

A long night and a longer day followed one after another, marching onwards, only broken up by forays into buildings, searching for the light. By what her phone told her was the middle of July she’d reached a park she recognised from her youth, the ground sloping sharply upwards to a peak; what had once been a rolling, grassy hill was now thickly covered in dust and mud, the earth turned up on itself as though churned by a great blade, the once smooth ascent turned rocky and treacherous as any mountain. She scrambled upward regardless, needing to turn and see the city in blackness, to see the fruits of her labour and, she realised, to try and understand why she followed the directions in the first place.

Gasping, out of breath and with sweat standing out on her face in beads, she turned to look, sitting down amidst the mud and the ruins, gazing out at a sea of black. The moon shone pale, inconstant light across the city, paused every now and then by scudding clouds that passed its surface with the smooth sailing of ships, the soft glow picking out the shapes of buildings, the jagged edges of roofs. At the feel of wetness on her cheeks she looked up, startled, ready to run for cover to avoid the acid rain, but was surprised to find that they were tears though she couldn’t say what for - grief for the world, resignation at her fate, a strange pang of loss that flooded her chest, not of things and people, but of purpose. She breathed a little heavily in an attempt to calm herself, each breath a labour after her climb; her phone lit up in her hand as she squeezed it, the brightness incongruous in the new, crushing dark, and she found herself seeking out the first graffiti she had photographed.

Last one alive, turn out the lights.

She gazed at the thick black writing until it blurred, tears quivering on her lashes, and her phone beeped and shut down, chiming its low battery warning before it went dark, leaving her in the pitch darkness once more. Against her better judgement, she smiled; even her phone, inanimate and insentient, called out to the void before it went, as a warning, for attention. She placed it on the ground beside her and gazed out over the city, the breeze lifting her hair, the seven words that set her on her way playing over and over in her mind like a broken record.

Last one alive, turn out the lights.

And as she watched, out in the city, a light flickered on.