[WP] Waking up as the last man on the planet isn't really scary; waking up as the first is.

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When I was young, I often feared the metallic moans the Arc made at night. The old ship groaned under the new stresses we made it carry each day, but it was only at night when the sounds could truly be heard, echoing through its hollow body. I would lay awake, still with the fear that it would be our section damaged this time. Still with the fear that my mother and I would suffocate in our beds while the engineers closed the airlocks.

It was those nights my mother told me stories of the last men of earth. The ones who made the brave sacrifice and stayed on the fading world. I think she was trying to teach me to face my fears. She was also telling me that if we did die we wouldn’t be forgotten. My great grandfather was one of those who remained; he gave everything to get my grandma on the Arc. She was pregnant at the time, five or six months. He refused to bring another child into that world. I don’t remember much of my great grandma. She was a bitter, shriveled woman. I don’t think it was her youth on earth that made her that way.

When I was older, I realized the truth to my mother’s stories about the brave men on earth. They were more hopeless than brave; more accepting than defiant. There was nothing left on earth, and nothing left to fear. That was only my guess, the Arc stopped receiving transmissions a month after departure. Maybe they lay awake in fear every night too. All my life I imagined what the last man on earth must have felt like, what must have run through his head every morning when he woke up.

What I imagined was never quite as horrible as this.

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I woke up, for the first time in my life, to a still world. Slowly, the pain in my body came back to me. The sound of my own pulse drilled into my head, echoing in my helmet. My nose throbbed and running down from it blood had dried over the dried canyons in my lips. I was lucky I had landed face down; it pooled in my helmet and not in my throat. My sandpaper tongue ran over a chip in my front tooth. I hit my radio on with my left arm. My right hurt too much to move.

“Raven-2 checking in.”

I was greeted with static.

“Raven-2, I repeat, checking in. Requesting immediate medical assistance.”

Still no response. The ache in my head only grew. I twisted the radio dial from intra-team back to the main Arc.

“Raven Scouts requesting immediate assistance. Mission failed.”

There wasn’t even static anymore.

“Help. Oh god. Someone please. I,” a sob caught in my throat, “We… we crashed. My team- they’re gone.” Someone hear this “I’m dying out here.”

It’s strange, sometimes, the places our minds go. Dying, facedown in the dirt on an uninhabited (and potentially uninhabitable) planet, and all I couldn’t stop thinking about how I was still the scared boy who used to lay awake as the Arc broke down around me. My mother used to tell me stories of the last men on earth. They were for her sake as much as they were for mine. The noises kept her up too.

The last men were brave, to get up every day. To get up, each morning, knowing they were doomed.

I’m not doomed.

There’s still world ahead of me.

Fire shot through my body as I rolled to my left. My right arm hung too low. My ribs rustled and protested every breath. I dusted off the outside of my helmet, clearing the dirt so I could see the new planet.

Earth died. The Arc was dying. The world around me lived.