When a pandemic decimates the Earth and turns the dead into ravenous zombies. The only hope for mankind lies in the newly formed colony on Mars. However, unbeknownst to the settlers, the terrible virus has followed humans from the blue world to the red planet. The survival of the human race rests in the hands of a man who is exhausted and on the edge of insanity. But what can one man do against and endless army of the dead on an already lifeless world where death is forever a constant?

————

Layne Trilling finished digging the grave for his deceased best friend, Dave Drake, put aside the shovel he had been using and stuck it into the ground. Layne stretched. He heard and felt his spine pop in three different places and then cracked his neck, by moving it side-to-side. The canteen secured to at his belt was calling his name. Not for the first time since he had started this long and arduous process, had Layne wished that he had brought along something stronger. His mouth felt and tasted like somebody had taken a big, steaming pile of shit in it. His throat was as dry as the Martian landscape that lay beyond the atmospheric processors. Water would do for now, but when he got back to his digs, he had a half a bottle of Scotch waiting for him there. Layne had every intention of getting falling down drunk. It was okay. The dead heads could not get inside. Layne, Dave and a few of their fellow flat mates had saw to that a long time ago. When they had first moved to the red planet, the friends had grumbled about being stuck in a domicile that had only one window that looked out on a vast plain of exactly nothing. When the dead started rising in alarming rates, they were thankful for that particular faux pas by the higher ups who had designed most of these dwellings for practical use by the first wave of Martian engineers that had arrived from Earth to begin the process. It was an easy task to shore up that one window and reinforce it with steel sheet metal screwed firmly into the wall. This was a working facility, not a Mediterranean vacation resort. Get used to it or take a long hike back to the hellish planet from which they had all come. It was a long walk and, oh! You might want to dress warmly. Space was a mite chilly year around.

Layne took a swallow or two of water to wet his dry throat. He swished the water around in his mouth and spit it out. That took away some of the bad taste. Layne took another drink to satisfy his dry throat for all the salt sweat work he had just finished putting in. The job was only half done. He still had to bury the late Dave Drake. He was thankful to have known of a spot where the dead never came, or at least rarely found their way there, to bury Dave. Since he had begun his task, he had not seen a single one. But he was not going to tempt fate by lingering around twiddling his thumbs. His break was over. It was time to get back to it. Layne tipped the canteen towards the dead man wrapped in sheets, lying a few feet from his grave in a salute. “Here’s to us, Dave. We have been through everything together, thick-and thin. I always thought it would be me who bought it first, you know, with my leap before you look ways? Who knew? Who knew these sons of bitches would follow us from that pesthole, Earth? Nobody. Contaminated food. Not even something a little more dignified like a plague rat. Food! Jesus H. Christ!” Layne said with a shake of his towards the body of his friend.

What Layne was grousing about was exactly how it all went down. However, it wasn’t as simplistic an explanation as all that. It only scratched the surface of the sinister underlying of the true depths of how low the human race will sink in desperate times when it comes to their fellow man. The so-called powers-that-be on Earth, decided when they sent off colonizers to Mars, they would not be taking food stuffs that were one hundred percent one thing or the other. In other words, meat like beef and especially, pork items, were a precious commodity at the time and really could not be spared for a bunch of colonists and terraformers who were almost certainly never going to return back to their planet of origin. No, food stuffs would be substituted with like tasting items and with the right preservatives and seasonings, no one would be the wiser, especially if it were fresh and hadn’t been allowed to re-animate. For a while, it worked—that is, until the first person on the red planet died and “came back,” ravenously hungry, mere moments later to attack and slaughter an entire operating room full of doctors and nurses. Those that were killed, likewise, followed suit and did the same to others that crossed their path, and so on. It was later alarmingly discovered that the bureaucrats and all the others in the know on Earth had slipped the new Martians one of the biggest Mickey Finns in all history by spiking their meat sources with actual human flesh. By the time it was determined what had happened, the pandemic was raging out of control. The dead were coming back to life and seeking human flesh like they had on Earth. The hungry corpses did not want a mixture no more than humans did. Sadly, nobody on the home planet realized that the disease was encoded in every human’s DNA since the first time a case of it reared its ugly head in a wet market, grown in a secret lab by a foreign entity. They say ignorance is bliss, but in this case, it wasn’t. Not even close. When the survival of the human race hangs in balance, not knowing what the consequences of one’s actions are going to be to untold billions is not something to gamble with.

It would not have mattered to the world governments had they known. It was nothing new. Just a different set of circumstances that would eventually “be taken care of.” And if it reached a level beyond their capabilities to deal with, they would just go underground. There was always a backup plan in place for the elites like political figures, certain celebrities, business moguls and others of the super-rich. The less fortunate could have the world above ground until the dead virus had passed at last. The so-called common man were expendable. This would not be the first, nor apparently the last time (The latest being the disaster on Mars) they would resorted to screwing over people not in their class. They had been fucking their constituents in the ass for centuries, what harm was one more incident going to be?

But Dave Drake had not bought it from the eventual consumption of government rations or being taken off guard by one of the reanimated. No, he was the victim of clumsiness and a stupid accident. A couple of days earlier, he and Layne been drinking beer and both men had gotten pissing drunk and Dave had gotten too close to the edge of the roof where he and Layne would target practice on the walking deceased. There was nothing else really left to do. Their jobs had involuntarily closed their doors permanently. All the bars were likewise closed and their other friends were either dead or one of the other—things. Watching movies or playing video games got old and boring after a while and a man had to amuse himself through some other activity. Women were also among the aforementioned states of death or “undeath” so dipping one’s wick in some strange was also out of the question. It was not too long after any other means of entertainment were becoming less so that they discovered the fun of shooting some real moving targets was much more fun than watching it on films, or on games. It had been a day when they made a beer run to one of the now unoccupied stores and had to beat feet back to their place and shoot their way to safety like a couple of cowboys through a horde of the rotting monsters. They made it back to their crash pad and grinned at each other knowing how close they had come to death and how they avoided it as such. It was then they devised a new form of entertainment that would last up until the day of Dave’s death.

It was during one of these “shoot ‘em ups,” that Dave went to reload his AR with a box of .223 ammo and had dropped the box, spilling its contents. The rounds for the rifle went rolling all over the roof, some of them spilling off the edge. Dave stumbled to collect as many of them as he could and before Layne could tell him to sit his stupid ass down before he fell off the roof. Dave stumbled and went off the side that was thankfully, almost devoid of the zombies. There were enough of them, however, that had begun to feast on Dave before Layne could get downstairs and out the door and begin capping the monsters with his 9 mm Beretta. Dave, mercifully, never felt the ghastly teeth of the shambling cadavers tearing his bloody flesh from the bone. Layne had to use almost two full mags, but he dropped the zombies with pinpoint accuracy with ammo to spare. He used one of the last rounds to put in Dave’s brain just as he was starting to rise from the ground to begin his new life seeking human sustenance.

Layne shook away this last terrible memory and decided to concentrate on the task at hand. He got down into the hole and grabbed the rope that bound the late Dave Drake in his makeshift burial shroud made out of the dirty sheets from the dead man’s bed and lowered his friend’s body as gently as he could into the grave he had made for him. Layne was not a religious man by any stretch. The circumstances being what they were, it had often crossed his mind in the past few weeks if he should become one. Maybe this was the bearded guy’s way of doling out punishment to sinners like himself that had broken many holy dictates in their lifetime. He bowed his head in honor of his friend and mumbled a short prayer to God. It seemed like the right thing to do. He finished and began to fill in the hole. Half an hour later, Layne walked away from the grave and went to go plug some dead assholes. Deep down, Layne hated that he had become an unofficial Angel of Death for a planet that was now just as dead as it had been long before the first humans had ever set foot upon it. But he was the only one left alive and it was something that had to be done. Making a game out of it was the only real way to escape slipping into the dark realm of insanity. His path was a long and lonely one. The dead were supposed to lie still in wormy ground (Were there even worms on Mars?) where they would rot away and bring forth new life in the way of various flora, not getting up and with a terrible hunger. Layne had enough weaponry stashed away in his domicile to take on a small army and he was a dead shot with most of it and what he wasn’t, he would learn. He had to. This plague visited upon an alien world had to be brought to heel before any others would be making their way to settle on Mars. If there was anyone left. There were only a handful of communications from Earth after the food debacle—and then unnerving silence. That did not bode well for any future missions.

Could he truly be the only human left on either planet? Layne felt any resolve he had left for the future at hand slipping. It would be just so easy to let one of those fucking things bite him and once again be the part of the greater whole. It wasn’t the most desirable of recourses, but it was an existence that beat the alternative. A life of nothing but sheer loneliness and eventual insanity brought about by pure isolation, until he did perish and become part of the massive horde that had taken over two worlds, or he considered the alternative and put a bullet in his brain.

Decisions, decisions, as the saying goes.

No. the other was just defeatist attitude and if anything, Layne had never chickened out and given up. To hell with all of that. He was determined to see this thing through until the bitter end.

When Layne finally got home, he gathered up as many weapons and ammo as he could carry in one trip and went up to the roof of his place. He looked over the red terrain stretched out before him.

The dead milled about around the places they once lived and their regular haunts where they enjoyed a vast variety of activities, from shopping, to eating at fancy restaurants, attending the theater and winning fortunes at the casinos. Beyond those places, situated at the space port, were ten spaceships, any of which would get him back to Earth, or even the moon base—provided any of the lunar settlements were still operational. The dead could have damaged the star craft beyond repair in their search for flesh. It was possible. But the planetary atmospheric processors, the radiation and electromagnetic shields were still operational, so should at least a few, if not all the ships. Layne was determined would try each of the space transports until he was able to find one that would get him off Mars no matter what it took. If none of them flew, then he was stuck. Layne could fly readily enough, but he was no mechanic. He would be shit-out-of-luck. Alive. Marooned on a necrotic planet that would eventually be returned to state that it once was millions of years ago when the last inhabitants of the planet had been eradicated by some unknown chaotic event. The archeologist and scientist had no time to find out what that situation had been before the base was overrun with the teeming dead.

Layne mulled over all this as he sat down in his lawn chair on top of the roof and started picking targets to bring down. When he shot the first zombie, using Dave’s AR in the man’s honor, the others spotted him and began moaning, roaring and screaming, upon sighting their quarry. They had, of course, knew he was somewhere, but settled down eventually (What was settling down for them. It was the same thing as when they were agitated, only not so animated). No use expending energy on something when you could not speed up the end result in any way.

It was a total waste of time. Even the walking maggot pies knew that. Maggot pies. That’s what Dave used to call them when he was alive. It was almost a term of endearment to him and it never failed to bring a big, shit eating grin to his face when he said it out loud to Layne.

Layne allowed himself a sad smile when the memory flashed through his mind. He shot another one, blowing the entire upper half of its head away in a noxious vapor, dropping it in mid-scream. Then another went down in the same way. Then another. Then another. He bagged a full one hundred and thirteen before he decided to call it a day and go inside to eat dinner, shower and pass out. That was all he could do these days. Tomorrow would be a repeat of the same. At least he wouldn’t have to bury another friend. That was something.

The living dead held sway over Mars for the time being, but their time was done. They just didn’t know it yet. Only one species was going to be the winner take all: Humans, or Once humans. It wasn’t going to be the latter. Layne stood firm and resolute in that.

For he was the last man on Mars.

By Ken King

From: United States

Facebook URL: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000281030420