THE LAST MAN: Part Thirty-seven

There is nothing to do but cover Desiree with my own body. It is a feeble gesture, given the magnitude of the disaster, but I would wish for her to survive if there had to be a choice. This moment of uncertainty, this is the moment in which the miniscule nature of human existence is suddenly laid bare. It is at this moment, when I am prepared to sacrifice everything for another soul, that I feel more human than ever before.

The street buckles violently beside us, the ground and pavement are suddenly uprooted and twists towards the building and the doorway. For its part the ground beneath the building collapses. With a grunting, leveling sound the sudden shock resonates through the building. For now the structure holds as Desiree and I find ourselves in something of a protected little pocket. It leans so precariously, however, that I have little faith it will last much longer. When the worst is over I push myself from Desiree.

“Are you all right?” I ask. As I stand dust and rock cascades from my shoulders and hair.

“I think so.” Desiree looks past me towards the Reclamation Center. What she sees fills her face with a sort of disbelieving horror. She rises slowly, keeping her back to the wall. I turn as the dust and smoke clears.

My eyes go quite out of habit to the place the smoke stacks have occupied my whole life. But there is nothing there any longer, but a ghostly pillar of steadily shrinking black smoke. It is as if the pillars were pulled from around that smoke, and now unconstrained it drifts free. The Reclamation Center has been obliterated, replaced by a mammoth smoldering heat. It rises to an uneven peak from the center of a huge crater a hundred feet deep. I climb up to the street and go to the crater’s edge. I am taken aback by a powerful and pervasive silence.

Desiree joins me a moment later, pressing herself to my shoulder. A lingering glance betrays something far beyond the limits of language. Thousands are dead within that wreckage, but the magnitude is impossible to fathom. It becomes a very personal thing for that simple fact of the limits of human comprehension, fully skewing any true and just comprehension.

There I a sound behind us. The sound of many hurried footsteps tears Desiree and I from the remains of the Reclamation Center. We turn, suddenly confronted by a dozen or more Section Twenty-one troopers. They are as stoic as ever, as if this disaster bears no greater significance than their regular tasks. One of them steps forward. I recognize him instantly.