Short Stories

Meltdown

I sat in the train, looking out of the broken window as the landscape flew by. I saw abandoned town squares, livestock grazing everywhere, nowhere a sign of human life. The only sign was this train, still going on, still travelling between cities, empty, except for me. It was about two hours before it would hit its end station, stopping nowhere in between because there was nobody that wanted to get out of the train. It would stay in that city, Krashnov, for about half an hour, then it would travel back to Livoth. And that pattern would continue as long as the train had fuel, as long as there was one last sign of human life on this planet: the electricity that was still working. But someday, that would stop, too. There would be a problem, whatever it was, that would slowly stop electricity from working. I had no idea how it would happen; in my life, I'd never interested myself in electricity. We didn't even have electricity in our home. But then, my family had been the exception to the rule. My father was related to the Amish, a folk that lived in the twenty-first century and that had refused the technological revolution the world had had, and instead, lived like they had the centuries before that. They travelled with horses; they had no mobile phones and no internet. My father had liked the idea after the global Meltdown, when all electrical devices, whether it be pacemakers or phones, had stopped for an hour. The Earth had fallen into immense chaos. An hour later, everything was working like it had always been, and there was no evidence as to what had happened.

It was the perfect opportunity for those people that always had expected the world to end, to step up and say that we should abandon electricity, and go back to the ways people lived even before the Industrial Revolution. They said that our ancestors had survived; that meant, we could too. My father was one of them. I still don't understand how that happened. I was only a baby when it happened, I hadn't even had my first birthday. My mom had always had a bad heart, and when the Meltdown came, her pacemaker stopped. Of course, that wouldn't have been a problem, if her heart, just for one hour, had kept going on itself. But it didn't. Her heart stopped, a few minutes before that the Meltdown was over. She died, and ever since, my father refused technology. Him, my brother and me, we moved to a forest in Europia. The continent had been nearly abandoned for decades, since everybody had moved to either America, or the upcoming Asia. We had a peaceful life there, no sign of technology whatsoever. I was raised on goat milk, and my elderly brother always joked that that was the reason I would sound like one. I didn't, of course; but he had a hard time adapting to his life without virtual reality, and took it often out on me. I didn't really mind, it had always been my life.

In the end, it turned out that my father was right, along with all the other Doomsday people. I had no idea what happened, none of us did. But one day, after my father had died, my brother and I, we left the forest. We left our wooden hut that had taken us about a year to build. We left the weapons we used to kill animals, we left our fireplace, we left the lake where we swam, washed and drank. We left everything, to explore the wide world.

The wide world was dead. At first, there was no sign of human life at all. We entered small villages first, villages where once, some people had lived. There were dogs and cats, cows and horses, but no people. We took the horses and travelled, to the east. We stayed a far distance from cities, not because of their size, or their technology, but because of their stench. You could smell dead people rotting from a long distance. We travelled, through Eurasia, onto Asia, but everywhere, people were dead. Once, we thought we saw a few, perhaps people like ourselves, but they ran, and we never saw them again.

By now, all human life has gone from this earth. There are no more humans, their buildings have fallen. Some electricity remains; it's what pushing this train. It's the only sign of human existence on this planet. After all, I'm just a ghost, sitting in a train, too.