The Last 100 – Ch.2

I ran over perfectly manicured lawns, leaving lone footprints in the fields of uniformly cut grass. I ran through sprinklers, my shirt soaked with both water and sweat. I ran through the gate of my house, throwing it open and vaulting up the stairs to the patio and tugging franticly on the locked door of my house. Fuck. I ran back into the yard and ripped a pleasantly smiling garden gnome guard from his post and plundered his treasure, a small brass key.

I collapsed against the door as I unlocked it, stumbling through the threshold and shouldering my way into the closed room of my mother, knocking the lock off the frame. The door swung open to reveal her bed, the sheets were still immaculately made, as if she had never returned home from her shift at the hospital, she was a nurse. It was as if she had just disappeared into thin air. I checked the garage and found that her car wasn’t there.

I was close to running all the way to the hospital in the next town over in which she worked to find her there when a I felt something rub against my leg. I looked down, it was my dog. He stared up at me with his massive, perpetual smile, his eyes held within them such depths of sympathy. I fell to my knees and pet his fur sedately.

There were no tears in this moment, not because I wasn’t sad nor was I particularly strong. It was just that there are some emotions that tears cannot properly express, such depths of sadness and despair that no physical action could ever hope to quantify. So, I sat and passively stroked the fur of my dog as he lay down next to me and went to sleep.

She had been my entire world, nothing, no worldly desire of passing crush could make me forget my mother. My dad had left when I was young, I could barely remember him, it was only her, only the tow of us… I choked up and hugged my dog tightly.

We stayed there together for a long while, the sun was setting when I finally had an idea. I croaked out a word with off handed curiosity, they had said it was like RPG’s after all.

“Status” My throat was hoarse with thirst as the words came out, rasping against my mouth like sand paper, but out they did come and with them another screen.

Name: Jack Casser

Age: 17

Gender: Male

Level: 1

Specialisation: Points Available = 5

Stats:

Strength – How much physical strength you have - 8

Agility – How fast, dextrous and mobile you are - 9

Perception – How astute your senses are - 12

Intelligence – How quick your mind is at processing, interpreting and retaining information - 13

Constitution – How able you are to recover from illness and damage - 8

Charisma – How adept you are in social interactions - 5

Endurance – How tough you are and your ability to take damage - 11

Will – How tough your mind is and its ability to endure strife - 10

No hp bar, no mana bar? What a bad game. I laughed to myself at the horrific absurdity of this whole thing. Why me, Jesus Christ. I’m not the best person sure but did I deserve this, hell no. I closed the status window and looked at the top left of my screen, only to be greeted by not one number, but three.

One was the casual countdown with which I had become accustomed over today it currently read 32:51:03. The other was directly to the right of it and read 98/100 beside that was an exclamation mark with a small number 2 next to it. I found myself looking at the second number for a long time. 100 what’s?! What the fuck do you want from me. 100 people, I thought with a moment of morbid realisation, two people had died already. Well besides the other seven billion I thought grimly. I think this was what finally put it into perspective. Humanity was at the lowest point that it had ever been in conceivable history, there was only 98 people left alive on this earth. The species could well go extinct.

It was a weird thought and it made a man think. I had always thought of mankind an unshakable bridle upon the planet, a burden it was forced to bear that it couldn’t shake no matter how hard it tried. We stayed on this earth through fire and fury, through lightning and rain we endured. But we had only called this planet home for an objectively short amount of time, and the planet was here long before us and would be here long after.

I closed my eyes as the thoughts kept coming. Until one cut through the void. Why not let them die? Sure, giving up would mean my own death but did I really care. My whole family and everyone I knew was already gone and chances are I was going to die anyway. I sat on my knees my hands idling in my lap and watched the number of seconds on the timer slowly tick down. And those are my odds without the introduction of these so called ‘Hostile Entities’ so why not give up?

Wilhelm sauntered his way back into the room in which I sat. He had earned his name because of the fact he was a Rottweiler, a German breed. He approached me and rested his head upon my lap and I felt the grumbling of his hungry stomach. I supposed that not everything here for me on this world was dead. And in the moment, I thought about all the reasons to stay alive. For myself, for the 98 other people in the world who were probably feeling the same way as me right now, alone and scared. And for Wilhelm I looked into his eyes and saw how they lit up as he recognised me, how they burned with pure joy at the sight of his family. I couldn’t leave him, nor would I have the courage to kill myself. And for now, those reasons were enough. I let out a sigh, my voice quavering as I did so.

“Alright boy, let’s get us some food.” I said wearily as I stood up, my knees popping due to my recent inactivity.

“After that me and you will deal with these pop-ups and decide our next move.” I scratched the top of his head in an absent-minded manner as I spoke. We meandered toward the kitchen, On the bright side, at least tomorrow can’t be any worse than today. I thought.