The end III - The station

You can stop biting you fingernails. Here it is, part three!
BTW, if you don't like the clumsy blog format, I've started Scribd-ing "The end".

Go on : http://www.scribd.com/doc/51880020/The-end
to read it in its non-memento-ized form.

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It had been more than twenty years since the accident. Ever since then, I have been getting these hallucinations on nights such as this.

I was standing in front of the narrow mirror in the small room I had at the station. I took off my pants and saw that I was bleeding. Just some scratches, but one had to be careful now that no doctors were around. Must have gotten them when I fell down.

Funny that I should still hallucinate about cars. I hadn’t seen one in years, at least an operational one.

I reached for the bottle of antiseptic on the cluttered table behind me, knocking over a few other things in the process.

I dabbed some of the solution on the wound. The sting made me suck in air through my teeth. My eyes went automatically to the scars as I looked at myself in the mirror. I ran a hand over them. Hardened pits and lumps of mauled skin ran vertically over my abdomen, straight down my side till my knees. They had told me I was lucky. I looked at the cavity on my right leg, where my quadriceps used to be. Parts of my body had been ripped out and scattered on the road, most of which were put back during surgery. But not this. My right leg had been crushed under the wheel of the car and some of it stayed there, condemning me to a life with a walking stick.

I was, of course, unconscious the entire time and woke up several days later in a hospital bed. My mother, whom I hadn’t seen for years, was crying profusely over my disfigured body. I had tried to tell her that I was OK but I guess she couldn’t hear me. The recovery was tough. My right leg debilitated, walking was a task with execution burdened solely on the other leg. Slowly I healed. The muscles never grew back but my left leg got stronger and eventually I was able to discard that awkward four-legged walker in favor of a walking stick. I was anointed a hero for surviving such a horrible, unfortunate accident but life got back to normal pretty quickly and soon I was the freak with a hole in his leg.

The last freak with a hole in his leg. I put the antiseptic back on the table and grabbed a bottle of whiskey on from the table. That was the only thing now that was not hard to come by, alcohol. Liquor shops and drug stores were in abundance and conveniently devoid of their owners. Towards the end, everyone was doing them, drugs, anyways. We humans weren’t evolved to deal with the stresses of a near apocalyptic world. The government wanted to make sure that people were too high to realize how fucked up the world around them really was. So they legalized it. Flooded the streets with easy to use pills, syringes, drops, whatever your preferred mode of ecstasy. In the process, they created a gold mine to fund their perpetual wars. It was a win-win situation. That’s two wins for them. I took a swig of the warm liquid and pulled up my pants. It was really silent. I did not like silence.

I touched a paned to my left and switched off the mirror. This was one of the new age toys that I really enjoyed. We had invented this way before the energy wars. Four strategically placed cameras, a computer, a holographic lens and you had yourself a 3D mirror. Sometimes it felt strange to see another one of me standing around, but flat mirrors must have been annoying as hell. I walked around the clutter to the door to the monitoring room, the largest room in the station. This I kept clean. Very clean.

It didn’t contain much except for the large array of display panels on the far wall and the thick glass slab in front of it. I had dragged in a sofa and put it in place of the chair that used to be in front of the screens. I liked to lie down when I worked.

“Lights,” I said, taking another swig from the bottle and the fluorescent tubes slowly blinked into existence. I walked up to the slab and held my palm to its surface. A green glow around my hand told me that it had accepted my hand print.

“Everything all right then computer?” I said as the panels all lit up with status reports from checkpoints in the mile range.

“Yeah, everything’s great except that there’s no one fucking here,” I replied back in a squeaky robotic voice of movies from the 20th century. A lame joke. To break the silence. I pulled back a virtual dial that was projected up from the slab in blue to increase the range of the monitors.

There. Checkpoints within 500 miles, all green. Like always. I let out a long breath. I hated these status checks. I hated that you had to zoom out and hope that none of the soothing green lights were blinking red. When you are the last person in the world, you don’t want to see blinking red lights. I sank into the sofa and fiddled with the controls of one of the cameras, brought its display to center-screen and aimed it at the night sky. The moon had come out from behind the clouds. I watched it drift across the sky for a while; its light bright, then diffused as a cloud came in front of it, then bright again. I didn’t notice when I fell asleep.

I awoke with a start. Bad dream. Something about explosions in the sky and the night turning to day. Dreams were common too nowadays. I looked at the clock on the top right corner of the large display panel. Three A.M. Three hours since I had dozed off. The moon was still full and bright, no clouds nearby now. I realized that I was still holding the bottle of whiskey, cradling it to my stomach. I looked at it for a second, thought about it, and then took long drink. As I was bringing it down, I saw a blurred line of smoke go across the moon’s image. I choked and bolted up from the chair. Coughing and gasping for breath, I couldn’t take my eyes off the monitor. There, again. Something fast went right across the image of the moon and left another smoke trail.

I had to get up there.

I limped to the stairs. I realized I didn’t have my walking stick with me, but I couldn’t waste time now. I opened the heavy pressure door, leaning on the wall beside it. These doors were designed to seal off, maintaining positive pressure, at the time of an emergency. I took the steps two at a time and was exhausted by the time I reached the top of the stairs. I pushed against the door but it was too heavy.

What the hell was that thing?

I took a deep breath, steadied myself on my strong leg and pushed again. This time the door slowly opened. I wedged through as soon as there was enough space. I looked towards the sky and gasped. I leaned against the now closed door and wondered if I was hallucinating again. It was not just the moon. The whole sky was filled with countless objects, burning as they hurtled downwards from the sky, leaving large, white smoke trails behind them. I slowly slid to the ground, my mouth still open in amazement. This was no hallucination.

Suddenly the air filled with the howling of the dogs. They were near the station. And there were a lot of them. I had to get down and make sure the perimeter was intact. I couldn’t take my eyes off the sky though. The dogs started barking, excitedly, like they had found something. I had to get down.

“Help!” The shriek pierced through the howling and barking of the dogs. I jumped to my feet, immediately regretting it, clutching my thigh as the pain shot up from it.

This couldn’t be. Someone was out there!

I limped to the edge of the roof, still holding my thigh.

“Help me please!” My blood chilled at hearing the voice of another human. Not digitally recorded years ago and played back to me by the computer, but the voice of a real human. I leaned over and peered across the electrified fence that contained the station.

Another human! But it was not allowed!

I looked up to the sky once more. There were only a few falling objects now, but the sky was filled with smoke trails.

“Help!”

I turned and hurried towards the pressure door.