Alone on the Beach

“I quit!” snapped Fred Bitterman having stomped into his supervisor’s office, throwing a sheet of paper containing his resignation onto his desk that was still warm from the company laser printer. He stood there and proudly explained, “That old hag finally kicked the bucket and the family inheritance is finally mine.”

“Congratulations, Fred,” his boss remarked with a genuine smile. “We’ll be sorry to see you go.”

“I bet,” Fred barked.

“What are your plans?”

“To get as far away from here as I can. I’ve brought myself a house, tended to my affairs, and will retire from the work force and the human race if I may be so lucky,” he said, pointing the house key at his boss. “I’m going to buy a beer, a chair, and put it on the beach to watch the sunrise every day. And when people show up, leave for home and solve crossword puzzles until it’s time to sleep.”

“Sounds like as good of a retirement plan as any, we all know how you love your crossword puzzles,” his manager remarked. “Will you be putting in two weeks’ notice?”

“Hell no,” Fred grumbled. “My plane leaves in three hours.”

“Well that’s unfortunate,” his boss remarked. “I’d have liked to have treated you and the team to a farewell lunch.”

“Why does everyone want to socialize with me and keep asking me to lunch?” he moaned. As he stomped out of the office, the old curmudgeon could still be heard complaining, “I don’t need any of you, and I never did.”

***

The last leg of his journey to his new home irritated him, having been delayed several times due to strange weather. When it finally landed at Dare County Regional Airport, it was already dark and still windy. The sky was lit up with strange dark green clouds, but he didn’t notice this because he didn’t much care for looking up into the sky when he had someplace to go. He stepped into the back of a cab with one small suitcase and slammed the door shut.

“Do you think you can manage to find South Old Inlet Road?” Fred asked.

“Yes sir,” the cab driver coughed.

“Are you sick?” Fred objected.

“Seems that I am getting that way.”

“Well let’s get going,” Fred demanded. “I’ve had a long flight.”

***

Fred slept on the bed of his furnished home with the drapes open. He wanted to be woken up by the morning light of the day before sunrise. He walked out onto the deserted beach and pulled out his beach chair from a canvas tube and set it up, placing a cold can of beer into the armrest’s cup holder.
When he saw the first slivers of the rising sun appearing over the ocean horizon, he popped the tab open and took a drink.

“Ah,” he said, relishing the emptiness of the early morning beach and a cheap beer. “Finally some solitude.”

He watched the sun rise and drank his beer, discarding the can onto the beach. He pulled out a folded up newspaper and began to pencil in letters into the crossword puzzle. He took his time and hours later when he finally finished, he was surprised to see no one had joined him on the beach. No fishermen or old men with metal detectors or tourists or couples or families with small children. This place was better than he had expected.

He folded up his chair and returned to his house, and explored the neighborhood of beach houses and wandered into town looking for a store or a place to eat. The entire town was deserted.
Fred stepped into a small store and picked up more cans of beer, bread, lunch meat, and a few cans of beans. He brought the items up to the counter, but no one was there. He looked around for anyone and grumbled. He pulled a few bills out of his wallet and placed them under a stapler next to the cash register and left.

The following day he watched the sunrise but still hasn’t seen anyone. He was beginning to find this strange, and walked around town again finding no one. He never heard a machine running, or saw an airplane fly overhead, or even a sailboat in the seas. The lighthouses were unoccupied, as well as the tourist traps.

On the fifth morning, the pile of discarded beer cans next to his chair was starting to bother him, as the offshore wind smoothed the sand so only his footprint remained. He collected up all the cans and put them in a blue recycle bin next to his garage. The recycle truck never came to collect them.

On the seventh morning he watched the sun rise and he had had enough. He stood up and bellyached, “I got my wish to be alone, but this is not what I signed up for!” He had been mumbling to himself all week more and more, just to hear something. “WHERE IS EVERYONE?!!” he shouted.

The palm trees on an outcropping of sand rustled and he looked over, happy and smiling to see some people emerge from the foliage. They staggered towards him moaning and he did not like the look of this. “Who are you people?” he yelled. His shouts only seemed to make them stumble towards him faster.

He looked down the beach and ran from the strange crowd, only to see another pack of zombies coming at him from the other direction. They closed in on from all directions when he looked to the sea for an escape. He shook his head in disbelief as he saw a flying saucer zip across the horizon and change direction and charge right towards him. “Oh this couldn’t get any better,” he moaned as the ship crashed around him in an explosion of sand splattering into his face and burying him. He spit sand out of his mouth in the darkness and started to feel woozy for a few moments as he started to float.

A red light lit up the chamber and blue lines crossed his from every angle. He could see the sand floating around him and he pushed bits of it away and they floated off like dust in a sunbeam. He and the sand suddenly fell to the floor as a small robot entered the chamber and lifted him up by the shoulders to face a small window. Fred couldn’t make out what was in the window, but he knew it wasn’t human.

“Are you hurt?” an amplified voice asked him.

Fred did not respond.

“Can you speak?” the voice asked with some urgency.

“Yeah, I can speak,” Fred barked. “What the hell is going on?”

”You are indeed uninfected so there is still yet hope,” the alien responded. “We have been neutralizing the death clouds as we find them, but the smaller ones have been difficult to find. We detected the cloud that engulfed your planet too late to neutralize it. We have been scouring the globe for a survivor so we may synthesize an antidote.”

“What the hell?” is all Fred could manage to say.

“There was an interstellar war where the enemy unleashed a cloud of disease that transform its victims into mindless zombies,” the alien explained. “They managed to wipe themselves out first but this plague threatened thousands of other worlds. It first attacks the most evolved life forms which attack the survivors and turns them into zombies. When there are none left, they turn on the lower animals until there are none, then the vegetation and oceans until the entire planet is a diseased wasteland that can never recover. We can synthesize an antidote cloud but it must be done before the first stage of the disease has taken hold. But we require an uninfected sample of the species core genetic code, which is why we have scooped you up from that beach. Are you willing to provide some of your genetic material to save your people?”

Fred looked over at the robot, who suddenly snapped out a needle from its hand-like appendage. “You have me under your control!” Fred growled. “Why don’t you just take what you need?”

“We cannot compel you to do this, that is not our way,” the alien said. “You must consent to the genetic extraction.”

“I get it,” Fred said. “I won’t survive the procedure. Is that it?”

“Our medical technology is sufficiently advanced where it does not require your life,” the alien responded. “If you do not wish to save your species and world, we can plant you back on the safest place we can find. You may well live many revolutions and expire naturally before the plague reaches you. The choice is yours, and yours alone. But be expedient because the disease is progressing quickly down below on your world.”

It did not take him long to come to a decision. Fred wanted to be left alone, but not be completely alone. “I consent,” he said. “Whatever it takes,” he said.