The Last 100 – Ch.5

One more nail, one more strike. My hammer hit iron which in turn bit deep into the wood of the plank, spearing through it and pinning the board to the grey door frame of the observatory. I looked at the top left of my vision 02:21:09, I looked around franticly at the room I was in, three more doors to go. I can do this.

The good thing about the observatory was that it was relatively defensible, being located on a cliff and all. It had five different doors that opened into it from the front and two more escape doors. How did I know this? Floor plans I had found at the front desk. Another reason the observatory was a good pick was the fact that when the people “Left” it was during the hours of the night guards, as such the security cameras were still on, powered by a generator hidden deep within the bowls of the hill on which the observatory stood. The place was a fortress. Something which made me question the motives of the otherwise kindly director of the facility.

My heart panged with sorrow when I thought of him, I remembered tugging on his coat as a small child as he toured me around this building, holding me up so I could look through the telescopes. He had been a father to me and friend to my mother when that was what we both needed most. I hit the next nail with more force than the last, rattling the door in its frame.

One more nail, one more strike. I had adopted the mantra after having finished with the windows. I had very nearly despaired. The windows were done but the doors weren’t even started upon, the thought of breaking the monotony into simple, achievable goals made the whole seem more achievable. One more nail, one more strike.

It was times like these that I found myself thinking more existentially, a train of thought that often led to self-destructive and counterproductive outcomes, it was times like these that made me think of what would happen even if I survived. What came after, I would still be alone, there would still be no observatory, no home to go back to. One more nail, one more strike.

I mean, how would I contact the other 94 people left in the world. More were dying everyday and the ominously named “Hostile Entities” hadn’t even spawned yet. What would become of both me and Wilhelm and this observatory that we had made our Alamo? One more nail, one more strike.

I had just picked up my hammer and hoisted the remaining planks under my arm to go and reinforce the remaining two doors, (the security doors) when something pooped into my vision that forced me to drop them out of shock. It was a notification that read, chat. The little speech bubble shaped notification had a small number ‘one’ next to it.

I tentatively focused my attention on the notification and it opened into a greater screen that read above it, world chat. That wasn’t what caught my eye however, what did was the fact that a message from someone named, Jamila Deanglisa.

Jamila Deanglisa: Hello?

Under the message was an absolute storm of ellipses, it showed the two people with names of Asian origin and 87 others were typing. I was one of them, spamming away on a small keyboard that had appeared under the chat box. What followed was an eruption of text in an equally large amount of different languages. I saw characters from and east Asian language, I saw Arabic. Something that may have been either French, Spanish of Italian and a fuck ton of others. My message was a simple. “Fuck Me! Help.” I believed it fully encapsulated the emotions I was and still am feeling.

Next, I saw the chats at the top gradually multiply from the singular world chat to a chat group, the name of which written in Chinese, then one in Arabic, the other European language whose origin I couldn’t place was next and then finally English. The chat group was called. English Speakers.

By this point, as I focused on this chat group I had dropped to the floor, sitting cross legged and with Wilhelm dancing around me madly. He seemed to have picked up on my enthusiasm.

There were fourteen of us in the group and everyone was talking over everyone else. There was Jamila, who, after little interrogation confessed that she had discovered the chat feature after trying it out, she had said chat. According to her, her thought process was that if status would work then so could chat. And so, it did.

What really confused me was the amount of people, even from the western speaking countries who hadn’t learnt about the status yet. People like Jamila and I were in the minority and there were only 3 others who had tried it out. What came next was a slew of messages of people asking if anyone else resided in their country. There were four American’s and of the people that were speaking and not just observing like myself they were the only country to have more than one person. As I expected no one stated that they were Australian. I hadn’t spoken yet, I was too choked up with raw emotion to see people speaking my language, to have a dialogue with people again, I never knew how much the act of talking to people. Something I had before detested so much would now bring me such joy. They were all so alive and passionate.

They were so much of both that it made me ashamed for thinking of giving up, here were these people, clinging to each other with such desperation and zealous fanaticism that leaving them seemed a crime. They needed each other. They needed each other to be alive with them, because living and surviving are different and while a person can survive alone they can only live with people.

A beeping caught my attention, it reminded me of my alarm I looked to the top left corner of my vision as I had so many times today. 00:00:00, I paled and a voice in the back of my head that had made itself known in my worst moments reappeared. They were all so alive, we shall see if they stay that way, because now hell opened its gates.

So it did. I thought morosely.