The Last Humans

The Last Humans

They were the last two humans left alive, as well as a couple of the very last vertebrates. On the other hand, other types of life on Earth, such as plants and insects, were flourishing. Insects were growing as big as the larger of the two humans, and plants were developing their own type of intelligence, although none of the type that the humans could relate to in any meaningful way.
The two humans consisted of one average adult female of reasonable self-esteem and one deceptively normal-seeming adult male. Before they discovered each other, the female’s desperate loneliness was becoming unbearable.

The male was better able to cope with loneliness, although this may not necessarily have been an indication of strength on his part, but rather that he had never been good at relating with other people, even when there were other people on the planet. The sudden lack of people, therefore, did not have as big an impact on his emotional needs as it did for the female. Even so, before the two humans found each other, he did admit to himself that there were some things about other people that he missed.

After the fall of the rest of humanity, they had both began to rely on their primitive instincts that had been programmed into their DNA since the rise of their species. And so the woman would gather plants and fruit and she discovered that she was good at working out their properties, whether they were safe to eat and if they had any medicinal value. She barely survived the giant bugs and the creeping vines of the carnivorous plants, however, and had many close scrapes.
The man, on the other hand, was an adept hunter and not only was able to protect himself, but could hunt down the larger insects for meat. When he got sick, however, he was at nature’s mercy.
That is how they first found each other. When the roots of a tree had grabbed the woman’s foot and was pulling her under the dirt to be absorbed, the man came rushing in, chopping roots and vines with his long knife until he was able to grab her and pull her to safety. Once in a safe area, he fainted from a fever he had been nursing for days.
The female, knowing exactly what plants would help him get better and having had collected them the day previous, nursed him for another few days, her heart full of exaltation that she had found another human. And when he woke up from his fever, the two of them made plans to build a fortress against the wilderness.

The following mornings, the man went out to fight the trees for their wood and the woman collected large rocks, and in the afternoons they would spend together building their fortress. Life was falling into a pattern and the woman took some comfort in that.
The nights, however, she dreaded.

That first day of health, the man had seemed so charming and she was just so relieved to find another human. Had she waited much longer, she believed that she would have gone insane and become nothing more than an animal. But once the sun went down and the moon and stars came out, he turned into something else. He pinned her down to the ground and tore her pants off. She struggled against him but he was too strong. He hit her face with the hilt of his knife so that her eye was swollen and her nose was bleeding. He became one of the violent plants and not a human at all as her forced himself onto her. After he finished he pressed the edge of his knife against her throat and was ready to slit her throat open, when she yelled out,
‘We’re the only two left!’
Those words saved her life and he withdrew. Perhaps they made him realise that after he killed her, he’d have no other woman to rape; perhaps he realised that there was no police for her to run to, no court left to sentence him; or perhaps her plea somehow reminded him that even he needed other human contact. Maybe it was a mixture of all three. But he withdrew and took a walk, and fell asleep a fair distance away from her.
And most nights since that night was like that. During the day he might seem embarrassed or apologetic about what happened the night before, but they would not speak of it. At the night the animal would come out of him and he would force her down and take her. Occasionally he would almost kill her, and she would have to yell out and remind him that they were the only ones left. She feared the day when her cry would not get to him and he would kill her, anyway.

After a month, she ran away.
Occasionally she would find signs of him, and when she did she would imagine that he was someone else. That they were still with each other, just that he had gone out hunting for the time being, and that he didn’t beat and rape her every night.
By herself again, the desperation of loneliness came back to her. She searched for other humans; if she found him then maybe she could find someone else, but her search would always fail because there were no other humans other than him. She thought, if she still had her dog she could handle the loneliness, but the warm-blooded animals, as well as most of the reptiles and amphibians, disappeared along with the humans. She tried befriending one of the giant bug larvae, but found no comfort in that company. The insects had no intelligence or emotion, but were only a casing of nerve-endings. There was nothing there for her to relate to.
Some of the plant life was intelligent and so she found one of the more harmless plants, but their intelligence was so completely foreign to human intelligence that there was no communication or understanding there.
It was more than just needing someone to meet her emotional needs, too. With civilisation dead she found herself in a state from a time when the gender roles were more distinguished and a person’s survival was more dependent on those roles.
To be alone was to die. And she almost did die so many times, that she was forced to find her way back to a man she hated. But this time, she had a plan.
She found him asleep at night in the unfinished fortress that he seemed to have neglected after she left. She stole his knife and then waited until the morning before approaching him. She noticed that in the light of day he seemed almost ashamed of his actions the night before, and so might listen to her at this time.
She said she would spend the day with him building the fortress and have sex with him before the sun went down, but before it got dark, she would go somewhere else, safe from him. Otherwise, she would kill him when he slept.
He was still violent during sex, even during the day, but at least he was less likely to kill her. The sex was an important part of her plan. She realised that if she needed human company to survive, and he was the only other human around, then she would make her own human. The moment she was sure she was pregnant, she decided, she would leave again and make a new life for herself and her child.
Months passed and she was still not pregnant. Not only that, but his violence was escalating, even during the day. She abandoned her plan of getting pregnant, anyway. It was a stupid idea. She couldn’t even look after herself in the wild without going back to him, how would she also look after a baby?
They had finished their fortress and found it to be most effective, which meant he spend less time gathering wood and had more time to himself. It didn’t need to be dark for him to almost kill her, and when it was dark, he had resorted to hunting her down when she left. She was able to keep away much of the time, but only if she gave up her sleep for the night.
It was during one of these chases that she tripped and her head fell on a rock, knocking her unconscious. A nearby plant went to spread its vines to absorb her but he fought the tree off and took her back to the fortress. He managed to keep his lust in check for the next few days as he tended to her wound. When he saw her head hit that rock, he felt fear of what he would do if she died. She was the only woman left and he had almost killed her several times.
A few days later she came back into consciousness and he was sitting with his back to her, and his knife laid next to her. He spoke to her.
‘Before everyone disappeared, I was in prison to be sentenced to death. In fact, my execution was scheduled the same day everyone disappeared. I thought I was dead before I met you.’
‘Why are you telling me this?’ the woman asked.
‘I want you to execute me,’ the man said. ‘I should be dead, anyway. You know I deserve it.’
‘Why? So you don’t have to live with yourself? With the knowledge of who you are? What about me? What would I do when you’re gone?’
‘You’d be better off without me.’
‘You’re probably right, but I’m still not going to execute you,’ she said. And she decided that she would look one last time for the other humans.
She still hadn’t recovered from the bump on her head. She fainted during her walk.
The man was still in the fortress, with the knife against his throat, ready to execute himself.
The vines and roots of the trees took the woman up gently as if they were cradling a baby. A couple of the vines got under her skin and drank the sustenance from her while she was still alive. The tree placed her body at its roots to feed from. It was a long process, but her soul was taken into the trees and the earth and she could feel the world breathing. There, she found all the lost people and animals, they were all taken up by the trees and their souls became part of the earth, their souls as one, and never lonely.
The man’s body lay in his fortress, his soul trapped in there, too. The trees would not take him in, the earth didn’t want him.