Surviving the End of the World

By John Moss

Possibly the last person on Earth, a disabled young woman struggles to endure while she’s relating the story of her survival at fifteen, lost and presumed dead in the wilderness.

Angel Harris is on a quest to find a fellow human being after most animal forms on the planet have perished. Born without the use of her legs, she crawls through mud, over rocks, along pavement, and travels from Paris by wheelchair and skateboard, borrowed cars and a yacht, to the south coast of England before setting sail in a small boat by herself across the Atlantic Ocean to the United States. Her heroic account is told against the background story of her fifteen-year-old self as she describes the terrors, the mysteries, and the unexpected rewards of a plane crash in the northern bushland. Late for her own funeral, she becomes an anthropologist determined to survive the end of the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: World Castle Publishing, LLC
• Release date: Jul 8, 2019
• ISBN: 9781950890279

Book preview

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Surviving the End of the World

A Silver Medallion Novella

by

John Moss

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locations, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

WCP Logo 7

World Castle Publishing, LLC

Pensacola, Florida

Copyright © John Moss 2019

Smashwords Edition

Paperback ISBN: 9781950890262

eBook ISBN: 9781950890279

First Edition World Castle Publishing, LLC, July 8, 2019

http://www.worldcastlepublishing.com

Smashwords Licensing Notes

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in articles and reviews.

Cover: Karen Fuller

Editor: Maxine Bringenberg

Chapter 1

Angel Harris sat in the most exclusive restaurant in Paris, chewing on a peanut butter sandwich and sipping champagne. She had found the peanut butter in an American drug store on the Avenue des Champs-Élysées. She found unleavened bread in a shop in the Jewish Quarter of the city known as le Marais. In a cold locker in the back of the restaurant kitchen, she’d found a wine cellar that was so well insulated the wines were still cool seven days after the end of the world.

She had pulled a bottle of Dom Pérignon 1961 from the rack, a special champagne celebrating the year of Princess Diana’s birth. She took it to her table by the window in full view of the Eiffel Tower, which gleamed in the moonlight like a stretched spider-web against the starless sky. Except for an eerie sheen cast by the moon shimmering through an overcast sky, The City of Lights was in darkness. There was no evidence of human activity. In the most romantic city in the world, there were no other humans at all. As far as Angel knew, there were no humans anywhere else in Europe. There might be a solitary young man still alive in the States. If there was, she would find him.

She lit candles, and their glare made everything outside disappear. After she had put together the peanut butter sandwich, she tasted it. The insides of her cheeks stuck to her teeth. Desperately needing something to drink, she scratched at the lead-foil wrapped around the neck of the champagne bottle, tugged at the wire net that prevented the oversized cork from shooting free, slowly twisted the cork, and finally popped open the bottle of Dom Pérignon. She had never had Dom before and rarely drank champagne, but this was supposed to be the best fizzy drink ever made. Certainly it was the most expensive. She could think of no reason not to enjoy as much as she wanted while she contemplated the absence of all animal life on the planet.

Manipulating the controls of her electric wheelchair and leaving her sandwich half-eaten, Angel backed away from the table and took a tour around the dining room. When she lit candles on every table, the grande chambre came to life. It was luxurious, with huge chandeliers hanging from a soaring ceiling supported by stately columns. It was also disturbing. Plates with dried-out food were on every table. The food wasn’t putrid—there was no bacteria in the air to make it go bad. Crumpled piles of clothing, a scattering of earrings and necklaces, and wrist watches showed where other diners had been. There were ridges of dusty ash to mark their passing. Uniforms on the floor in the shape of the humans who’d worn them indicated where serving staff had been standing or moving about. Angel had to guide her wheelchair carefully to avoid getting snagged in their clothing—and to avoid running through human remains.

Back at her table, she surveyed the scene. The champagne had dulled her sorrow. She was sad, but not weepy. If she were the last point of self-consciousness in the entire world, she did not want to destroy that privilege by crying, nor honor that curse with tears. All her life, indomitable pride, not despair, had allowed her to endure, even to prevail. She had excelled in her studies, and while still very young she had become an anthropologist, committed to exploring the origins of human behavior.

Archaeologists studied ancient architecture. She studied what it was like to be human, thousands of years before buildings were raised. Her work was based on what people left behind, whether their own fossilized bones or scratchings on rock in the depths of the earth.

She was more skilled than most at exploring hidden places. Born without the use of her legs, her arms were extraordinarily strong. She could haul herself through tunnels into hidden caverns. A week ago, she had discovered a secret chamber deep in a rocky hillside in southern France. Its walls were painted with awesome images that made Angel tremble as she remembered their beauty.

Hurtling towards her, running in front of her, aurochs and mammoths and saber-toothed cats, antelopes and bison, hippos and horses, raced over the contours of rock at dazzling speed. Their soft colors, their powerful lines, shimmered in the flickering light of her headlamp. Directly across from her a bison shuddered. When she looked closely, the bison was still. She looked away—it shuddered again. Its muscles tightened, preparing for flight. From the shadows, the cat caught by the artist, leaping to attack, screamed with excitement. The mammoth, the auroch, a horse, and a flock of birds snorted, whinnied, and murmured in a riot of noises. Yet the cavern was filled with silence, and she was the only living thing in it.

Angel figured the genius who had created this magical place was a girl two thousand generations in the past. Apart from her cathedral of images, the only real evidence the girl had ever existed was a jewel in a heap of dust on the floor. It was an amber disc that had once been sap from a tree, and had turned into a fossil long before humans became human. Angel had snapped the amber into a niche in her silver medallion. It fit perfectly. Now she held it away from her breast and admired how candlelight made the amber appear to be flowing honey, and the silver a halo of moonlight.

When she had emerged from the cave, there were no other animals alive in the world; not bats or bugs or even bacteria, and definitely not humans. Angel had survived because the tunnel leading away from the hidden chamber had collapsed, sealing her into a rocky grave. Horrible as it was, her entrapment had saved her.

In a house down the hillside, after she escaped her tomb, she’d turned on a television powered by a generator. CNN, an American-based international news channel, flickered to black when its own generator failed, but not before she caught fleeting sight of a bewildered young man staring into the camera. It was as if they made eye contact, yet his