The Last Man on Earth prolog
He had spent hours crafting an image, in all the movies he’d seen there was the spunky outspoken boy who survives. He could do that. Hell he knew how to be loud and wild. It was his best feature. All his features were unbecomingly good but his talent for disturbing the peace was truly a shot out of the park. Lucky for him the brain-eating-dickbags or BEDs, were seeming deaf. Discovered after many nights of screaming.
Tommy was tall, growth spurts had pushed him out of old tee shirts and fall had convinced him to try sweaters, I mean what’s he got to lose. No ones alive to tease him about the colorful flowers of the cashmere cardigan. The loss of people had made him turn to books and books had given him papercuts, so they’re not quite his favorites. Too tight green bandaids on too thin fingers. Tommy was finally what he wanted to be, too bad everyone had to die for him to finally have the courage to be himself.
Don’t get him wrong he had friends, the mannequin on fourth street and the atomtronic dog were very happy to converse with him. But you cannot consider these things friends, because they are in fact things. Once Tommy had human friends, a few of them, Tubbo and Ranboo, the greatest big men he had ever met. He had not heard from them in months. Safier to assume their dead then hold out hope. Hope gets you killed.
Tommy had rules, No hope, No friends, No possessions he couldn't carry. It was simple and it would keep him alive. Time could be his friend, it would pass, as it always does and Tommy has no intention to fight that. Because if there was one thing the end of the world had taught him was that time takes its gifts. Without remorse the present gets taken, and Tommy couldn't wait for today to be gone. He was in fact the last man on the earth.
With nowhere to go he had taken housing at a small apartment with a fire escape on the third floor, high enough to jump, low enough to live. The apartment was the farthest to the front, with no sea view. The person who originally lived here must've hated it because of the constant traffic noise. For the end of the world/zombie apologies it was prime seating.
There Tommy sat, long thin legs slotted through the rusted poles of the fire escape. Face pushed onto one of the bars, it mauled his cheek and forced him to squint his left eye. It didn't matter that the text of his book wasn’t large enough he could read it with one eye. The book itself sat on his knees held open by one hand at the bottom of the spine. If someone had taken a picture right then and there, it would have been perhaps pretty.
Maybe he'd dropped on purpose, maybe it really was the wind, but the book fell from his hand down, down down. Right into a horde of BEDs, in fact in quite a comical way it got one in the back of the neck. In the other uncomical way they now knew where he was, and even if they weren’t looking directly at the fallen book. He knew if he didnt move within the next moments they would spot him, alive and brain non eaten. He would not survive the night if he did not move.
Then one reached down, straight into a squat, gloved hands picked the book up, letting it fall back into the correct form of a book. It was like a little ripple in the water without the ripple itself. Either the BEDs didn’t care that they’re was a situation arising, or they didn’t know. Tommy was no scientist, no chemist with answers to the important questions. He was a poet, a friend, a librarian on occasion. So he chose to ignore it, everything it was in total. Dissection had kept him alive and it would too now. The BED looked at the title and let out a laugh. Tommy had never seen one laugh, let alone move or look the way it had, and when it turned its head inclining to look at tommy. He realized this BED was alive. The man clad in a dark brown ankle length jacket raised the book and gestured to him. As if asking if the book was his. Tommy had no intention of giving the man an answer, but the opportunity for something he had not done in so long had fallen so perfectly into his lap.
The man laughed again and dropped the outstretched arm that held his book. “I know”
“Then why didn't you say something?”
“I didn't know if you knew”
“Why the fuck wouldnt I know” This man was getting on his nerves, he deserved a good sock to the face. “I just spoke to you, how would I not know that the yanks are deaf.”
“I don't know, I don't speak like a child.”
Tommy was not a child, until a few seconds ago he was the last man on earth. This was no longer deemed a repulatple response in Tommy’s eyes.So, the silence sat for a little too long for a normal conversation to be comfortable. The man seemed to be trying to think of a response, the obvious lack of social interaction evident to both of them now.
“ I don't know, can you?”
“Oh I'm sorry I didn't know that grammar was important in the zombie apocalypse. May I come up, your highness?”
The man made no move to pull the ladder, he just stood book in hand waiting for Tommy to go let the ladder down. Like the last form of permission, he knew they both knew he could pull the ladder down with ease, but he didn’t. After a huff and a puff from Tommy, he moved to let the ladder down. He’d make sure to secure it back into place after the man was up.
Then the jacket clad man moved, wading through the stream of BEDs like the wind through his hair. He stood under the ladder slightly out of line with the group of disembodied zombies. He turned his head sky high and reached his long arm and hand out and clasped the lowest ring. Tommy realized he was taller than the boy himself. Only by a few inches so it seemed so had to be the shoes, no one was taller than tommy. It was definitely the shoes. He watched the grown man haul himself up and clasp the rung with another hand, he seemed to be doing it gracefully and yet struggling at the same time. However once he aligned himself fully with the ladder, it was clear that it was all struggle, no grace. This made Tommy let out a big bright laugh, one that might have once lit a room up.
They stood together now, as the man had pulled himself up all the way and was now looking down in slight scorn, surprise and adoration. He held that look as Tommy hauled the ladder all the way up, not at the half latch it usually sat, can't be too careful with the incident he just had. Tommy took one last look around, as the sun began to set, this world had made him cautious, then he turned on the move to go one more floor up, back to his apartment.
“Wilbur, my name is Wilbur, I'm just now realizing that I never told you my name.’
“Okay, William, I'll take my book and you can go.”
The two ducked into the window and the small apartment registered to their eyes. A cinnamon apple candle came into view along with piles of books, and a small hammock. The books learned from the odyssey to jane austin, to captain underpants. It was not clear how long Tommy had lived here but it was clear it had been a while. WIlbur laughed, just like he had outside, it was the first time Tommy had heard someone other than himself laugh in months.
Willbur had seen this room before, the stacks of literature and the loss of interest in anything else, the boy he realized would have a lot in common with his brother. The clothes thrown haphazardly all along the floor differed the boys, Will's room never seeing the floor, wardrobe never in use, the blonde seemed to be something of a mix. None of this particularly mattered to Will, because clasped in his hand was the call of the wild, A horrendous book that he intended to burn before he saw that it had a particular owner. That last sentence might have misled you, the thing that was found so curious about the blonde, long enough to risk being caught to have one more second with the kid, was the eyes. Bright and blue, lost and found, they seemed to scream, every letter and wail every note Will have ever heard. This child was going to be heard, was going to be something. Will realized he might happen to want to be a part of that.
“You should come with me, I'm going to find my brother and father, you're obviously bored, it's perfect.” he said with a tune, and Tommy could have seen his future with that sentence, a singer, a guitarist, a star. Now that all sat 6 feet under with the dreams Tommy himself had. The dreams which reminded him how he was still alive. Kill your hope. Kill your dreams. Live.
“You trusted me enough to let me up here.”
“You held my child hostage”
“No, I kindly asked if you wanted your book back, this is not a child.”
“It is to me, and you are its captor as of this moment.”
“Then allow me to return it.” With that he reached slowly as if Tommy was a wild animal, and he was the zookeeper meant to soothe it. He returned the hardback book to the closest pile to himself. His fingers lingering upon the top like the book still had a secret to tell him, a whisper to return. He stood tense, shoulders tight, neck in need of a good crack, and straight not sulking at his height, not hiding rather trying to show he was the taller male. While Tommy was a pure dialect in of itself, Will was a one way one road..
They stood, a little tense and a little uncomfortable. They shared a moment, something neither was truly sure they would get again, a moment of silence with another person. All human and flesh in this moment, a difference in the sound, the evidence was the sounds of their breathing, collecting and releasing. Tommy watched as Will looked around the room, as if he could find out everything he needed to know just by looking at the room, tommys room. He felt insecure for a second, as if he didn't want his heart splayed out in front of another person, with little regard to regulation.
They met eyes again, and Will seemed to have gathered everything he needed to know about the one bedroom, one bathroom, boy. They met a middle piece of their souls, recognizing that they had something in common, more than the fact they were alive. They met eyes, and realized that they shared something, something small and hidden, concealed and lost. They had a piece of themselves in the other, Tommy could see in this moment that he would have followed Will into war had there been another life, another way he would have been his vice president, but Tommy had just met this man. Lost was that trust in others that would have allowed Tommy to be more than a stranger's face, to this stranger's face.
The sun had reached a golden color before it was set, to set. Farming the older man in a sort of halo, casting a dark shadow in the room of glowing golden light. Tommy realized he stood foot and head in this man's shadow, his presence already looming over Tommys day. They stood in the room filled with Tommy's favorite color, and the younger boy sidestepped out of the man's shadow and into the light that sometimes kept Tommy sane. The light had been Tommy’s only friend given the circumstances. This light and goodness was the only friend Tommy had decided he wanted or needed. So with a little too much to venom to be friendly, he spat.
“It's going to get dark soon and either you need to leave now or plan to stay the night. I would choose the former because youve came up here to do what you needed to do, and you did it, now you get the fuck out of my house, bitch.”
Despite the vigor that the sentence was said all it seemed to do was cause the older man to let out the biggest laugh, resting a hand on his stomach and the other stretching under his glasses to wipe his eyes, the man had become his laugh. It made Tommy want to laugh as well. Will was contagious, he realized, like a flu in highschool. You would be affected by him.
“You sound like a middle schooler who just learned to cuss.”
Where Will had once been doubled over in laughter, he now stood hand aligned next to a stack of books, on Tommy’s tan beat up coffee table, in an effort to stabilize himself. Wills hand splayed out amongst all the wild colored coffee cups empty from one once filled with a medley of teas. (only losers drank coffee in his correct opinion.) Yet neither made a move to force the other to leave. They held a small staring contest before Tommy snatched his leather clad copy of Emma, and hosted himself into his hammock. Without another look to Wilbur who stood in the same place as he once did.
“If you're intent on staying you’ll have to sleep on the floor.” Tommy couldn’t fight a smile, He wore emotions on his shirt sleeve, like it would keep him warm. Even in the zombie apocalypse you could trust Tommy to somehow find a person worth befriending. Tommy could make a friend out of a tree if he ever saw one again. So the man that stood in the middle of his sanctuary, who had just invited himself into his home, and insulted his precious book, would be his new friend. “Something I’m sure you’re used to”
“I’m sure there’s enough clothes on the floor, it’s like a personal mattress.”
“I hate you” Tommy did not hate Willbur.
“Back at you kid.” Willbur did not hate Tommy.
“Alright Tommy no last name, Wilbur Soot, happy to sleep on your floor.”
So he did, plopping so hard onto his back, the blonde heard a small crack and a grunt.
The two boys shared a look and they knew, in the morning Tommy’s bag would be packed, by nightfall the next day they would be heading somewhere not yet seen by the blonde himself.
