I couldn’t tell you why I had decided to dial that number. He had been dead long before the world ended after all. The number had been lost before the first signs of things to come were known to only the few scientists that could stop it. His ashes had been long tossed into the winds, his memory caked in them for most even before patient zero was found. It would have been foolishness to even hope to hear a voicemail greeting that had been long lost to time.

Why I was even calling people’s voicemail was a bit beyond me. There had to have been better ways to keep myself sane. Mostly sane, at least. Sane enough to make sure the final days of humanity were not wasted in my pathetic crying. That no one would ever see what a ruined mess of a person when I watched my mother pass from this world. Her eyes, blood red. Overflowing, unseeing, the second to last symptom of the thing that removed us all from the world. Death being the last one, a painful horrible death.

I wish I had been strong enough then to do for her what I wish I was even stronger now to do for myself.

Such thoughts were dangerous, and so like usual they were bottled up. Stuffed down and away, covered with the same dirt that I covered my sisters and my mother. That I coated in my own blood in a moment of despair, wanting to not be alone any longer. Needing to not be the only one left. But fearing, and knowing that I was. Something told me that would be the case, that I could look and search as far and as wide as I wanted. But I? I was the last person left.

Was it a curse? Had I do something to deserve this fate? Sure, there were times when I did others harm, and I would be the first (and only, my brain told me unwillingly) to admit it. Not letting someone merge because they were a bit of a jerk. Frowning at an unkept man panhandling. And worse things, leaving my first boyfriend because I grew bored of him. A pet rabbit that died in my care as a child, careless that they could be frightened to death. But surely I must have done something even worse than cause Mister Snuggleupagus to go to the great carrot patch in the sky.

It didn’t matter, however. Nothing mattered when these thoughts came to me. When I felt the scars on my wrist burning, demanding I finish the job I started. How the tears that streaked down my face almost felt like they were carving canyons in my flesh because how they never ended.

And yet here I was still trying to find something. That’s why I was calling phones still. The reason that I had spent three years, after the day I came back from the dead and was reborn, studying. Well, near death, close enough that I wouldn’t have made it if not for a chance occurrence that kept me from bleeding out. Still not entirely alive, but close enough to have that drive.

I studied everything I could. People always said I was smart, but I proved it finally to the no one around me in those years. The basics of every form of technology I could find books about. Deeper understanding, learning not only how to survive but also how to keep a small part of the world from falling completely into chaos. If I had been more ambitious, I might have even considered going further than that, doing more than gloss over the basics of nuclear thermodynamics, rocketry, and the like.

No, such things weren’t beyond me, but I had no need for them. I wouldn’t find anyone alive in the space stations in orbit. There wouldn’t be anything for me on Luna’s surface. I deserved to live on this grave of a world, watching nature take back what we stole from it.

This was my home, and I had a mission of my own.

It took me almost two more years after that, five years since the start, when I was able to place the first call. Phones had stopped working in days after the first day, but now that was no longer the case. Even if the only person that could use it was me. But use it I did, testing between two handsets that were wired together. And then only wired to power, and after a bit entirely wireless and powered by the results of the fusion candle burning in the sky. The towers that connected the phone was more difficult to power, but scale fixed such issues and more solar collectors to power more turbines to charge more very crude lead acid batteries worked.

Well enough for my needs at least.

It was a surprise and a stroke of luck that I was able to find the facilities that handled the two biggest mobile providers so close. Only a few hundred kilometers away, not an ocean between us. An entire year was spent bridging that gap, setting up small camps with signal repeaters and amplifiers. Why didn’t I just move to the city where it was housed, I hear no one asking me? I couldn’t say. It was likely the madness that had taken me.

All of this though, and for what? So I could dial our emergency services number and hear it come back as busy? The first time I dialed an outside number and it just rang and rang and rang nearly broke me. It was almost too much, too obvious that no one would ever answer. Too painful. It set me back two weeks, first how I tore apart all of the equipment I had at hand, second that I needed to stitch most of my fingers up, but third and worst how it threw me into a darkness I had thought escaped years ago.

But I was no longer the same person as I was back on that first day, the last day of humanity. I was still weak, still a fool, but I was a fool with a mission. Perhaps the most dangerous of fool are those who have a task at hand, because I came back to it with a fervent passion. And the solution was fairly obvious in the afterglow of the corpse of hindsight burning away in my mind.

Voicemail.

If nothing else, I would hear another voice. Sure, I’d know it wasn’t actually a person. That was something that I could shove to the back of my brain with all of the rest of the debris piled up there. A suspension of disbelief that wouldn’t be all that hard to muster given the alternative was eternal singularity. I’d accept it until I figured out an alternative.

That lead me to this moment, however. I had been making call after call, day after day, sometimes to people I used to know but other times to numbers I recalled. Even random numbers, which took me a bit of work to make sure would go somewhere, but somewhere they did go. I never listened to the messages I left. I barely even remembered them after hanging up the phone, just feeling well-worn pain from my throat aching and the tears staining the side of my head. It broke up the mundaneness of surviving.

Twenty. Long. Years.

The atomic clocks that were surprisingly easy to maintain made sure that I knew that number. That it had been twenty years to the day since those last moments of humanity became the moment of just one person. The last of all who had come before. Sitting there, unable to speak. Hearing a voice on the other end. Not a recording, but a voice.

A screaming voice, a begging voice.

The words replay in my head, only a few seconds have gone by.

“Hello...hello? Oh my God hello!”

I couldn’t speak. Not after hearing that voice. A voice that I hadn’t heard for over twenty-five years. That I knew I’d never hear again, no voicemail ever to be found.

Why did I call this number? I knew it’d ring to the fallback system. I’d get a robotic voice telling me that the number was no longer in service.

I found my voice.

I spoke.

“Dad?”