“Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can, and don’t have any kids yourself.” -Count Olaf, Primary Antagonist, A Series of Unfortunate Events
This is a constrained writing prompt but I won’t put it in my “series” of constrained writing as this post will be entirely made of this one prompt. I hope you enjoy as it was really fun to do.
At first, it was weird, I had no one to call, internet forums like Reddit and news sites stopped changing, there was no more interaction. Before the exodus, I would wake up and check the internet, WhatsApp etc and then I would go to the gym or run and work, now I don’t know what to do really. Catholic summer camps always worried me about what would happen, I thought it would be all the good people would be taken to heaven and just leave the bad people and it would be chaos but this is clearly something different. Doubt creeps into my mind at night that maybe that is what happened, maybe all the good people were taken and there are just only a few, really bad people left and I am one of them. Everything is completely abandoned, cars, trains, buses, stores, offices, there is no sign that anyone planned to leave, things are just dropped like people were bored of them and moved on to something else. Few people remaining would make sense but I haven’t found any sign that there is even one person left here beside me. Going to the gym is something I continue to do, God only knows why, I wake up, get in the tram I have left at the station near my apartment, drive it down to the gym, work out, then tram back home. Home is different now, I just take whatever I want from stores and bring them home so now I have some really nice furniture and things to play with. I have found that driving trains are actually a lot of fun, one of the first things I did was break into the administration offices at the train station to find information about how to operate a train and to move the trains on the railways out of the way. Just yesterday, I spent all day going relatively slow, hooking up a locomotive to some trains that were left on the tracks and either pushing or pulling them to stations to clear the main lines around my city. Kids’ playgrounds might be the creepiest things out of it all, them always being empty, being overgrown by taller grass and random papers that blow around just feels wrong. Life here feels empty, it’s been fun but I have been spending so much time trying to figure out what I can do and how to do it that I haven’t spent time doing many fun things. My plan tomorrow though it to change this, I will be taking a train to the capital and see if someone is around there. No trains are on the rails between me and the capital, they had newer trains with remote controlling capabilities so I was able to move them to other tracks or park them in the nearest train yards I could find.
Often I find myself worried about what could happen when I do something new but that isn’t the case today. Previously, I always woke up early but now it doesn’t matter so I usually don’t anymore but today I did. Questioning why I woke up so early, I ate some food, threw my packed bags in the tram, locked my apartment, just in case someone is still around and made my way to the train station. Resisting the temptation of the open road, or I guess tracks, I started the train slow and didn’t really punch it with any extreme speed, not because I was worried about crashing and harming people but more because if I wrecked the train and lived, I would have destroyed a train and more than likely the rails I would hope to use more in the future. Speeding up, but keeping the train under the recommended speed for the railway, I am able to make a great time. Trains for cross-country travel are usually incredibly long but I disconnected all the wagons from the locomotive except one first class sleeping car and the restaurant, worst case scenario, I am bringing my own little apartment with me. Unabated by the rain that I have rolled into, I find myself speeding the train up a little to make a bit better time and partly because blistering through the rain is just exhilarating. Varying the speed as I get into tighter turns near the capital, I get an odd sensation of excitement and worry because I’ve been here before but what if there are other people or things are completely destroyed? Zealously, after stopping the train three-quarters of the way down Platform 9, I shut down the engine, don my backpack and hop off the train to figure out if I really am alone. All over the place were papers and personal items littering the ground, from the biggest train station in the country to the most popular tourism areas there was not a single sign of humanity. Besides the rustling of things being blown around, the only sounds you could hear were the birds in the trees dividing the streets.
Cruising in the only automatic car I found with keys in it, I race through the streets to the Bundestag. Destroying the biggest window on the main floor was the only entry option I had as all the doors were locked. Everything was relatively orderly inside the building, it makes sense because they all disappeared on a Sunday. Flipping through papers and rifling through desks provided me nothing in the vein of a computer password, all I could find was useless notes and boring governmental paperwork that I couldn’t begin to understand. Government buildings like this were surely going to be my easiest route to figuring out what happened if anybody knew but I couldn’t find anything of any use. However, I did find one thing that caught my eye, EMM, but I never saw it written out. It was only written on a few whiteboards, then there was a digital clock in the middle of a large room that read: EMM: 00:00:00:00
but no matter how many papers and desks I went through, there was no explanation of EMM. Jigsaw puzzles were occasionally fun but this was so much less fun than any table puzzle. Knowing that I had no other option, I had to make it to the state radio/tv tower to find any information. Lazily, I tossed my bag into the car and made my way to the tower.
My previous record of four breaking and entering crimes in a day was clearly not going to survive past today as I again had to break in but this was much harder as there weren’t floor windows. Nothing stands up to brute force forever and finally, the doorknob broke off and I was able to get to the locking mechanism to force it unlocked. Opening the door, there was a pull of air as it was well sealed and unopened for some time. Preparing for a long walk upstairs, I pulled out my water bottle, drank a good quarter of the water remaining and made my way up the flight of stairs. Questioning why I am even wasting my time doing this I finally get to a control room. Radio Deutschland it read, I put my shoulder into the door and it swung open. Sitting down at what clearly was the producer’s chair, I started flipping switches until something starts making noise. The televisions in the control room were all off but with a few button presses they switched on to nothing but static. Unfortunately, I sat at the desk for almost 30 minutes intermittently tuning to different frequencies and then waiting for a little bit of time, hoping to hear anything besides static. Virtually at the exact moment I decided to give up and press the master power button, a voice called out.
“We didn’t leave, we are still here, we chose to not be used for populating humanities new planet against our will but we will need to prepare for our journey,” a woman’s voice read out over the radio. “Xenophobia, Racism, Sexism and any other kind of hatred or unkindness will not be tolerated, if you agree to these simple rules, please join us, continue to listen and we will project our coordinates.”
Prompt:
Everyone in the world disappears at the exact same time, you are the last man on Earth. The constraint for this short story prompt is that I must start the first sentence with the letter A, then the second with B, third with C.. and so on until Z. and if you hit Z, the 27th sentence will start with A and repeat.
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