The One and Only

The one and only…1

‘This is a story about a planet, not unlike ours in many ways, light years apart but only the thickness of a shadow apart. 2

The year is 1984 in the midst of a nuclear war. Brave battle hardened warriors charge at the enemy across a landscape of death. 3

They fight in a desert for some forgotten reason. In this war they had fought because the enemy fought back; that was how it had been for fifty years.4

Across the battleground machine guns blazing, blood soaking the ground. Helmets rattle as they fall with wearer. Grenades hurled over trenches, tanks ploughing through the dead only to add to them. 5

The camera of observation freezes and swivels round, zooming in on one man, struggling for survival in the combat with no hope of escape.6

This is General Ardona. Face scarred from numerous near death experiences, he is in reality a tactician, not cut out for this line of work. A bazooka sell whizzes past his ear and explodes in a sandbank behind him. He ducks and rolls to the head of his squad. He opens fire.7

Click! Click! Click! Crunch! ‘Damn it! Motors cracked.’ Ardona complained, ‘Johnny’ No reply, ‘Johnny?’8

‘He’s dead Sarge’ replied a junior officer, ‘Blown clean away. Sorry.’9

‘OK. Take over the squad Jimmy.’ Commanded Ardona.10

‘Right, sarge. Move out!’11

Ardona fell back to the armoury and pulled out the so-called “portable” mortar artillery, although many soldiers new that was a dead lie, after hauling it across miles of desert. The mark nine. That was a new for the army commanders. New weaponry.12

He started launching heavy-duty explosives at the approaching wave of the enemy. 13

It was too late.14

He heard the nuclear cruise missile screaming overhead. He ordered the men to retreat.15

Ardona had three, maybe four seconds left. The world went into treacle slowness as he watched the warhead impact on the ground. He watched the explosion and shockwave as it approached.16

This was it. Last ditch attempt. He knelt down on one knee, shut his eyes and whispered a silent prayer. He felt the shockwave ripple through him. The world went white. Now, he thought, I’m going on to the next world. Goodbye.17

The world was shaken to the core as numerous simultaneous explosions hit its surface. All designed to destroy a large area but only biological things. 18

Ardona was not the only one affected by the blast. Along with him were another 2.7 billion people. Everyone on the planet dead or dying. Every plant, animal and fish, gone with wind. There one second and disappeared in the same time. A bio-nuclear bomb. Everything and everyone disintegrated. Evaporating into a puff of o-zone and carbon dioxide. 19

He opened his eyes. This alone was enough to surprise him as he thought they had been disintegrated along with the rest of him. 20

He felt around in the darkness. This too was a surprise to him, as he didn’t expect to be able to feel. He reached into his pocket and fired up a flare stick. The place lit up brightly, blinding him temporarily then died down to a comfortable level.21

He appeared to be in so sort of large metal box. This wasn’t what he expected from the afterlife. Maybe he had gone to hell, but where were all the flames and jets of fire?22

He decided to look around his prison. Something damp and soggy patted him on the shoulder. 23

He spun round. Nothing there. He looked at his shoulder and there was a small lump of soil there. He looked up and saw an ex-hole because mud and earth had filled it in. He took a closer look at the room. Most of it was filled with scientific equipment and in one corner there was a rack of body suits with the enemy insignia on each one along with the words, “”ANTI-RADIATION” printed on their backs. 24

The place appeared to be a science lab of sorts. It was furnished with a few rotten away chairs, a desk with browning papers on it, a number of test tubes and a lot of materials. Other than the suits there wasn’t much of use except the anti-radiation suits. He took one from a coat hanger that looked about his size, went behind a desk and changed into it. Ardona stared at himself in the mirror. 25

‘I look like a right plonker in this!’ he grumbled ‘Oh well. I need some sort of way to get out of here.’ He glanced around the lab. He noticed a stepladder in one corner. He extracted it from the cobwebs and dust, and then put it up under the hole. 26

He climbed up and out to survey the damage. There was very little left. All that marked the deaths were a few scattered bones and the weapons they had been carrying. The ground was glowing a disconcerting green. A few of his fallen comrades were groaning. There was nothing he could do to help them except end it for them. He took out a handful of grenades and threw them. A man near him thanked him then hit his deadline. 27

Through the darkness he thought he saw a ghostly apparition, a tall figure of bones clothed in a black robe and silver scythe. It was death, the grim reaper, the collector of souls, call him what you will. It is the same thing. The figure said, as if a whisper on a breeze, yet as audible as 10,000 enraged children in a desert using a mile high and kilometre wide speaker on full blast, announced in a voice like the dropping of tombstones,28

‘Yes, It’s me’ then faded away into the mist.29

Ardona trudged on through the night towards the jeep. He stumbled through corpses and debris from the war.30

He reached for his G.P.S. link to see if this had happened anywhere else. No living person was hooked up to one online. That meant the whole army was out of commission. He hacked into the enemy G.P.S. system. The words on the display came up with; ‘SEARCHING FOR ACTIVE FREQUENCY MATCH…’ he had previously commandeered an enemy G.P.S. unit and took down their frequencies. There was a bleep alerting him to the fact that there were, ‘NO MATCHES FOUND’ the enemy were out as well.31

He had reached the jeep and jumped in. This meant both armies had been simultaneously been removed from the terrain of the living. General Ardona drove on to the base camp where they had a missile tracking system. Overall he was surprised to find the jeep intact. He thought to himself, ‘It must have been a low yield, high area job.’ Harder to track and left bodies and radiation as the only clues that anything had happened.32

The base camp was still standing, along with the data storage and the commander’s corpses. 33

He opened up the tracking replay for the past six hours. He watched the reel at fifteen-minute intervals for a minute at a time until he reached three hours. He saw the red X flash up on the world map. A red X meant neutral missile. They where detonated to cause everywhere on the planet to be damaged. 34

Everyone was dead. 35

He was the only one. 36

The sole survivor of the planet earth.37

What the brave hero will do next, no one knows, not even the writer. He vacated the tent and made his way to the jeep. Then returned to pack up with provisions, and rolled five barrels of oil over to and into the vehicle and drove off into the burning hell.38

The barren wasteland of desert that used to be somewhere in Texas. But that name meant nothing now as it was just a desert punctuated by the odd remains of a cactus, dishevelled vehicle or the carcass of a deceased tank.39

The desert stretching out in front, he had been going for three weeks, the sun evaporating his water supply as rapidly as his sanity. Food stores running low, his body withering away with the last hope for humanity. 40

The dust bowl expanding as he traversed further out. 41

As he went over another sand dune the engine started to whine and crunch. Then expired coming to a shuddering stop.42

‘Whoops!’ he exclaimed eccentrically, ‘Damn! Got --- To --- Get --- A --- Grip’ Ardona grunted then burst out, ‘Dang and blast!’ He yelled at everyone in the world and they all heard. ‘Just typical, five hundred miles away from the nearest petrol station and you run out of petrol and, yes! Just as I had thought. No water!’ 43

Ardona opened the door then fell out into the hot sun-heated sand and into the unwelcoming cushion of unconsciousness. 44

He awoke with what could be considered a stop. Dragged himself up onto the bumper and collapsed into the car and packed up his bag and ate what little he couldn’t carry and left the rest and trudged on through the desert.45

After a few hours in the sun without shade his imagination and mind started to wander off. All he didn’t need now was to stumble into a cactus and fall onto it. 46

As it happens this is what happened. 47

‘Ouch!’ Ardona rolled off the cactus, decided to die and fell into a sand dune, rolled into a tree, got up, tripped over another cactus careering into a waterhole. He drank the water greedily gulping handful after handful and filled up on water. He plucked up a few eatable mushrooms, fungus and other assorted food. 48

When he was finished he dragged himself up on brute strength, reaching blindly for a handhold to pull him out and grasped a fistful of cactus, falling back down howling in pain. Once he recovered fully from this onslaught he wore a pair of steel gauntlets and dragged himself up the vertical shaft. He thrust one hand after the other into the slightly damp soil dragging him up, inch by inch. At the top he pulled himself up using the cactus, then took out his bayonet and sliced it up then rout the “helpless” thing into a paste and left. 49

Ardona sat down in a small clump of grass then ate lunch, didn’t have enough and ate the grass. He carried on down the metaphorical road towards the nearest city. On his way there he led a series of unwieldy adventures that no one has yet managed to coherently explain. Whatever happened he still arrived in the next city. 50

This city had a major army lab in it and Ardona made his way there and searched it for anything he could use.51

He looked around and found a control room of some form, littered with the dead but was still operational and he scoured the room for anything he could make use of and inadvertently hit the lab lockdown button almost instantly locking off every door and exit route in the building. 52

He was locked in with no hope of escape and through his madness he dimly knew this and fell to the floor crying. He thought about his family and other people he knew like his friends and work comrades. 53

All dead.54

Nothing he could do to bring them back. All he could possibly do would be to avenge them, as the only ones to have survived, if any, would be those who committed the atrocity. So logically he thought that if the earth went down, they’d go down with it. As it happened this lab had been used to research into the causes of supernovas and how to cause a star to implode or explode.55

The scientists had constructed an energy weapon that had the potential to destabilize a star and had tested it on an artificial mini-star. 56

Ardona also knew this.57

He reached the button to aim it at the sun and hit it.58

He then hit the button to activate it.59

It was all over in three minutes. The sun shrank for a few seconds, and then exploded in dazzling array of light. It enveloped the planet and Ardona gratefully fried into a whiff of oxygen and carbon dioxide. 60

His story was over along with the rest of the solar system, he died without purpose or meaning. 61

It was over.62

Now remember, if some one destroys everyone else, please don’t go and blow them up.’63

‘Now on to exhibit number two hundred and sixty four.’ The guide led the tourists on to the next one, an: asteroid.64

That was earth’s legacy, or at least one of many. In another universe, they might be watching you…65

The camera zooms out of the building and up through the clouds and into the atmosphere. It passes a satellite, then the moon and soon you can see the solar system in all it’s glory, then further out and you can see the whole galaxy. It’s eternal spiral, then slightly further out to a small, unremarkable asteroid where a man sits waiting for the right moment.66

He presses the button, and then the Milky Way winks out of existence.67

‘And next is exhibit two hundred and sixty five; any questions?’…68