Last Survivor: Mike Norman's Mission

Ashes of a Broken World

The air tasted like metal and burnt hair. Mike Norman woke with his throat raw, the world around him full of dust motes that glittered against a light he didn't trust. He blinked with his good eye, wincing as a shard of memory-orange sky, a sound like the end of the world-banged against the walls of his head. The living room ceiling hung open in a jagged smile. Wallpaper peeled like dead skin. A photograph of Ashton on the mantle lay face down, glass spidered into nothing. Somewhere beneath the ruins, the furnace coughed and died.

Mike wanted to move. He wanted to run to the kitchen, to the back porch where he and Ashton had once watched fireworks and traded stupid dares. He wanted to shout until someone answered. For a breath he imagined voices-his mother calling, his father swearing, his sister laughing at some cruel joke they always saved for him-and his chest tightened because none of that came. The house gave a soft, hungry creak, and for a moment he thought the floor would fold and swallow him whole.

He pushed himself up on unsteady hands. One hand felt wrong. Where fingers should have closed, there was the odd, familiar tug at the edge of his palm-his extra finger, small and stubborn, curled under his thumb. It had always felt like proof he didn’t belong, another reason his family kept him at arm’s length. Now it felt like a homegrown compass pointing him toward something he didn't want to face.

Sunlight poured through the hole where the window had been, making the ash look holy. He coughed, a dry sound that scraped the inside of his chest. He called, because it was the only thing he could think to do. “Mom? Dad? Ashton?” The syllables fell into the open house and came back thin and cold.

Silence answered.

He checked the rest of the rooms with the slow, careful moves of someone who expected traps or ghosts. The kitchen table still held a mug with a lipstick rim he knew belonged to his mother, stained forever with coffee that would not be finished. The hallway walls were marked where family pictures had hung: frames empty, people erased. In the bedroom, a shirt he had refused to mend lay balled on the floor. He had been seventeen the last time he remembered folding it.

Two months. The number floated up from somewhere and hit him like a stone. Two months since the world had split. Two months since a day like any other had gone nuclear. Mike pressed his back against the cracked plaster and let his breath out in a long, ragged hiss. Memory had a way of moving like lightning in his head-images, sounds, a smell-that weren't chronological but perfect in their cruelty.

He remembered Ashton’s laugh the week before. How they had climbed the water tower because no one checked the tower on the edge of town, how Ashton had dangled his legs and called Mike a coward when he hesitated. He remembered the way Ashton-bright, quick-could make Mike forget the look his parents sometimes gave him, the small, disappointed tilt of their mouths whenever his extra finger was mentioned. Ashton had been the one person who treated him like a person before the world had ended. The one person who said, "You're not broken, Mike," and meant it.

Then the orange sky. He could still feel the pressure of it in his teeth. The thunder that wasn't thunder, closer than a flag snapping. He had run to the back door because instinct told him to run and because he didn't trust his parents' voices to save them. Outside, the horizon had been a monster. The mushroom cloud had unfurled like a grotesque blossom, half beautiful and half a slap to the face. Heat had hit him like a physical thing, pushing him into the gravel, into the dirt. For a second-only a second-he swore he saw Ashton's face in the blaze, eyes wide and bright with the kind of stupid courage that had always make Mike think they could beat anything.

Then there was black.

Now, waking up in the wreckage of everything he had ever known, the black had left a ringing that would not stop. He tried the phone; the screen was a spiderweb of fractures. No signal. He tried the radio in the hall closet for old habits, for some crackling voice telling him where to go. Static. Somewhere outside, a dog barked once and then went silent. The world sounded like it had been hit by a hand and then forgotten.

He wanted to cry, to let the grief swallow him. He wanted to scream until his throat gave out. But grief could wait; survival had a louder voice in the back of his skull. He forced his legs to work. He packed without thinking-water from the sink dipped into a bottle, a backpack slung over a shoulder, a pocketknife jammed into his palm where it felt like an apology. He found Ashton's photograph under a beam and flipped it over. Ashton’s grin was crooked as ever; there was dirt on his cheek. Mike folded the photo into the inside of his jacket, close to his heart, then felt the weight of what that would mean.

...