Inhumanity
A Short Story
You’ll never understand just how loud the world is until it stops.
All the background noise that drills its way into our senses every single day — the distant hums of struggling cars, the chatter of strangers on the street, even the beat of your own heart against your ribs — nobody ever recognizes just how much passive noise lingers unnoticed in the air around us.
Despite everything that they’ll tell you about the end of the world, they’ll never prepare you for just how quiet it is. There was no cataclysmic event like those ancient civilizations predicted, no worldwide panic that sent humanity into a homicidal spiral. The end came completely unnoticed, cloaked under the guise of normality and working its way through the world like a nasty virus that just kept growing bigger and bigger. And soon it was too late — the way you don’t realize you’ve lost a puzzle piece until you’re moments away from finishing it.
We’re still not totally sure when it started, but looking back on the stats, it seems that most places lost three or four people on that first day — not unprecedented, but definitely a little unusual. Just enough to slip past the news channels. The next day it was fifteen, maybe even thirty in the big cities. And the day after that, it doubled again. By the end of the week, almost 500,000 people had disappeared from the face of the planet without a single trace.
Despite everybody’s best efforts, nobody could draw a correlation between those first victims. Half a million people proportionately spread across the planet, as if the universe had simply rolled its dice and chosen its victims accordingly. But once the numbers started getting larger (just three days after that, almost 15 million were gone), we started losing entire cities overnight. Moscow was the first to go — every single soul within those city walls was present at dusk and gone by dawn. Buenos Aires was next. Mumbai followed. Only the biggest cities were specifically targeted, like some twisted cosmic taunt. We’ll take you all, but you’ll wait for it.
Europe fell after three weeks. It was only a couple more days until we started to lose track — news networks shut down across the world, with most reporters agreeing that their final days would be better spent in the arms of their wives, husbands, or children rather than under the bright spotlight of a TV studio. We stopped counting casualties when the scientists and first responders reached the same verdict; these were humanity’s final days, and we weren’t going to spend them counting how many were left.
There were some that tried to keep up, of course — those with nothing better to do with their fleeting time than scour the internet and build a database of the disappearances, desperately searching without result for a method behind the madness. Their findings were mostly useless, but if they’re to be believed, it seemed that 85% of the world’s population had vanished just two months after the collapse began. The few cities that still breathed only had a fraction of their original population, most of whom learned to band together and spend their final days in a hedonistic blaze of glory. Others merely sunk into the shadows and waited for the night that would inevitably see them torn from existence.
Even those rogue data collectors gave up after a few weeks (presuming they were still around), but it’s pretty safe to assume that humanity didn’t last much longer. The world’s communications totally collapsed — with nobody left to control the flow of information, we were completely cut off from all corners of the planet. Nobody knew which cities remained standing and which had fallen, which made travel practically impossible. Food supplies had been used up weeks ago, and setting out cross-country was a suicide mission without knowing where to find the right people. All we had left to do was wait around for our time.
That’s how I know I got lucky. And I mean really lucky. It was early into the end times when Chicago fell — at least, early enough that I remember planes in the sky and speeding cars on the highway. The golden shimmer of streetlamps as the city went to sleep, soothed by the distant sounds of the night coming to life.
That was all gone the next day. Waking up to silence wasn’t something I was used to, especially not in my apartment complex. It was almost deafening. That’s something you never really notice about silence — just how loud it can be. The burning ruins of overturned vehicles lined the streets, the fossilized remains of those who’d thought a quick drive would stop them from the oncoming storm. Chicago had never really stayed quiet long enough for me to hear the birds before, but that morning, I could almost tell what they were saying.
I saw four other people that day. We searched desperately for the others, breaking into homes and scouring endlessly for just the slightest trace of where they could have gone. Beds were left slept-in, dishes were piled up in the basins. It was all obscenely wrong.
It was one of the other survivors that first asked the question that we’d all been thinking about, whether we’d recognized that or not. What would we do the next day, assuming we’d made it through the night? We’d need food — and lots of it. We’d need a safe water supply. We’d need some kind of transport (as great as Chicago is, it’s probably not the place you’d want to spend the end of the world in). We made our way to a luxury hotel and began to draw up the plans.
They were all gone the next day.
It didn’t take me long to realize that I wasn’t a survivalist.
I had food, sure, but if that’s all I’d needed I would’ve spent the rest of my days camped in the back room of a Burger King. Chicago soon lost its gas, water, and electricity — those were the real kickers. An entire city to myself and I had no way of keeping myself alive long enough to see it.
So I left. I packed a school bus full of all the tinned meals I could find (I’d later grow to be incredibly fond of spaghetti hoops), a few tankers of fresh water, and set course for the nearest sign of civilization. Every night that I survived was a blessing. Knowing that every second the moon climbed into the sky could’ve been my last was a form of torture that humanity just wasn’t built for. My days were spent lusting over the life I’d winged so incessantly about just a few days earlier, watching the life force of my own species weaken night by night.
I never spent too long with the same people — although there were several places I could’ve happily bunkered up and spent the rest of my days. Small communities throughout the Midwest had miraculously stuck together and bunkered through the many weeks since humanity’s lights started going out. Maybe they’d lost a member or two, but these towns were so small that probability was simply on their side when that cosmic hatred was deciding its victims for that night. They’d hidden in the shadows, and they kept me alive whilst the rest of the world continued to sleep itself into oblivion.
Never more than two or three days in each town. I’d take whatever food or resources they offered, share a few of my own (though probably not as generously as I ought to have done), and follow their directions to the next place where I could do the same all over again. It was a steady way of life, but the world had other plans. The vanishings got more and more frequent, and that meant even more of these small communities were fading away into the night. Stumbling across life became more of a miracle than a convenience. I’d follow their directions (last I heard, the guys from Des Moines moved out West — here, do you have a map?), but by the time I reached my destination, they’d be gone. I’d take whatever food, water, and gas they’d left behind and keep driving until I stumbled across the next survivors.
And still, every day remained an invaluable gift whose graciousness was never lost on me.
It was in these days, aimlessly driving around the tranquil sights of the Midwest, that I began to realize just how much had actually changed in those several months since the vanishings had begun. The roads had grown empty, the sky was growing clearer by the day, and background noise was becoming nothing more than a fond memory. I trawled the backroads of Illinois, which soon morphed into Iowa, which in turn became Nebraska, and with every passing hour, I became increasingly more aware of the quiet that had swept over the country like a virus.
After a few more weeks, I noticed just how lustfully the Earth was reclaiming its own land. Roads were lined with abandoned houses that had been swamped by their own decorative plant life — with vines hugging the walls and tall grass caging in the brick buildings. Where there had previously been life there was nothing more than moss and fungus, covering the remains of humanity more absolutely each day.
The houses were little more than echoes, the persevering memory of a people whose command of their surroundings had crumbled mere months after their end. We’d owned the Earth for long enough, and our absent graves were barely cold before it was taken back from us.
One day, with my stocks of fuel and food running dangerously low, I stumbled across a dilapidated barnyard that stood (at least partly) in a narrow valley off Route 50 in Utah. I’d hesitate to call the land a farm — it certainly had been once, but with the livestock occupying the entire surrounding area with complete freedom, it seems wrong to suggest they were under any kind of control. I pulled my makeshift school bus into the driveway, making sure to avoid the loose herds of cattle and sheep, and knocked swiftly twice on the barn door.
No response. The grand wooden doors gave way after a gentle push (one of the few advantages of the termites that had settled comfortably in the country’s excess of empty infrastructure), and I stepped hesitantly into the barn.
It turned out the termites hadn’t stopped at the door. The entire wooden flooring had been consumed and replaced by overgrown weeds and sod, in which now lived a countless swarm of vermin and insects. What remained of the walls had been painted with the sullen green of dense moss, and if it weren’t for the fresh air that swept in through the many holes in the building’s exoskeleton, the smell of thick rot probably would’ve knocked me sick where I stood.
The gross sight gave me pause, but as I stood in the fallen ruins of this once-flourished demonstration of humanity, I felt overcome with a deep and profound respect for the hidden world that had so quickly and confidently reclaimed its presence. Those creatures that had been so effortlessly quashed by humans for longer than any of us could remember, the ecosystems we had tried so desperately to bend for our own benefit — they were all that remained. Humans were disappearing in their thousands every night, and the rest of the world was just waking up.
In spite of the overwhelming fear and discomfort that this realization instilled in me, I managed to traverse the barn and eventually found a decaying ladder that led me down into the building’s basement. After tracing my fingers blindly across the walls for what felt like several minutes, they finally stumbled across a switch that drowned the room in iridescent light and illuminated shelves upon shelves of canned food and fresh bottled water. The view was so overwhelming, so unbelievably true to everything I could’ve hoped to find, that it took several moments for my eyes to even fall upon the man slumped against the far wall of the pantry.
His eyes stared straight ahead, but it didn’t take long to realize there wasn’t so much as a glimmer of life behind them. A deep, rich river of blood ran all the way from the man’s severed neck to the stained butcher’s knife that lay just inches from his open hands by his side. Whatever euphoria had initially been sparked by the discovery of this jackpot stock room was immediately quenched, and I felt a burning sensation rise in the back of my throat that I tried desperately to push back.
I’d seen plenty of tragedies since setting out on the road three months prior, but nothing had filled me with such raw, visceral horror as the sight ahead of me. My first thought, perhaps just my human programming, was to find help — but it wasn’t long before I realized how futile that would have been. My second thought, as morbidly curious as it may seem, was that this man, in all his lifeless slumber, was the last person I’d seen for almost a month. I felt an overwhelming compulsion to know him, to understand his story — though part of me felt that I already did.
He wouldn’t be denied the dignity of death like the millions of others who had been erased from their lives without warning or excuse. In the face of complete inhumanity, he’d done the most human thing possible and taken control of the terms of his life.
That was the last person I ever saw again. After loading his entire pantry into my commandeered school bus and setting off west once more, my sights returned to the overgrown fields of the Midwest with their newly found occupants — all kinds of beautiful wildlife had emerged into the pastures since the farm workers had disappeared, having evidently escaped from their enclosures and found a new life in the open. As much as their free existence was an undeniable reminder of my own people’s eradication, there was something sublimely peaceful about seeing the world return to those it had belonged to long before we’d made it our home.
The supplies kept me going for just over 6 months. I didn’t really need the bus anymore (at least not until I was running low), so I parked up somewhere in southern California and spent my days documenting everything I’d seen. I wrote about the animals I’d watched reclaim their homes, the way the sky had become such a uniquely beautiful portrait of yellows and oranges each night, the way the ocean shone so vividly and calmly after going untouched for almost a year — even the man I’d seen sacrifice his own life in favor of dignity and freedom all those months ago. I wrote about everything, and I didn’t spare a single detail. Not because it would change anything (because I’d given up my unfounded hopes of finding others long ago), but because it was right — and because maybe there’s a beauty to be found in the echoes of tragedy.
I wrote about those faraway communities I’d spent the early days with, who’d banded together and shared everything they had in the ultimate display of solidarity. I wrote about the men I’d seen on my last day in Chicago, and the day we’d spent so hopelessly searching for just one other soul in the city. I wrote about those unknown scientists who dedicated their final days to collecting data and trying fruitlessly to find a solution.
And now, as I sit on the rooftop of the yellow school bus that took me around the country and allowed me to watch the world transform into something new and beautiful, I find myself overwhelmingly sure that I am truly the last human being on planet Earth. It’s an impossible thought to grapple with, and one whose certainty is impossible to prove, but one that I’m completely convinced of regardless.
It may seem daunting, perhaps even the kind of thing that would send a person mad, but there’s something cosmically calming about the understanding that my existence isn’t guaranteed, perhaps not even deserved. The knowledge that every time I close my eyes, everything I’ve seen could just become memories, locked away in a place that not even I would be able to access anymore.
Perhaps I’ll wake up tomorrow and hear the sound of an old engine revving in the distance, or the muffled chatter of others on the street. Maybe there’s a reason I’ve survived so long — maybe I’m not the last of humanity, but rather the beginning of a second chance. After all, only he who has seen the world collapse can fully understand where the cracks began to form; maybe that’s what it takes to fix them.
Or maybe I’m just here because I’ve outrun fate for too long. Maybe every night, when I’ve closed my eyes to the sound of complete silence in every direction, I’ve rolled a double six and earned myself one more day to walk among the ruins of everything that we’ve already lost.
All I know for sure, all I can be truly certain of, is that if I happen to wake up tomorrow, I’ll want to remember this. I’ll want to be familiar with every moment, every tragedy I’ve seen along the way, and every lesson there is to be learned.
So I close my eyes, safe in the knowledge that in the absence of humanity, the world became a little bit more humane.
Jack Walters 2023
