Volume I - Episode 6 Where: Melbourne, Australia When: E-Day, 10:00 - 11:00 am Suddenly I felt very cooped-up. I had to get outside. I had to go see what was going on out there. I had a quick shower (which for me translates to 30 minutes spent rocking back-and-forth under the hot water), threw on some clothes, and went for a drive. My first destination was the fire I'd watched from my street. I hung a left-hand turn and headed towards the plume of smoke. The roads were empty. No Friday morning traffic. No sign of life anywhere. I passed a couple of crashed cars outside Safeway, the local grocery store, but they had been abandoned. It didn't take long to reach the source of the smoke. About two kilometres from my home, one of the service stations on Dover Road was ablaze. I sat and watched it for a while. The heat was intense; even sitting inside my car a few hundred metres from the fire, I could feel the heat on my skin. I couldn't believe there were no fire engines. Actually no, that's a lie. I was beginning to feel less and less surprised by the lack of people around. I was beginning to realise this was not a typical day. I did a U-turn (an illegal U-turn I might add) and started the 20 kilometre drive into the heart of the city. I figured if people were going to be found anywhere, they'd be there. The Freeway into the city was similarly devoid of life, but it was almost choked with car wrecks. I passed at least a hundred crashed cars, trucks and motorcycles. I even passed a police booze bus that had rolled onto its side, spilling breathalyser kits all over the road. I stopped and checked the first four or five wrecks, but they were all empty. No bodies, not even any blood. Just debris and broken glass. And, bizarrely, personal belongings: handbags, mobile phones, GPS navigation systems, and even the occasional shopping bag. The sort of things people didn't normally just leave behind, not even in an emergency. For some reason, seeing all those abandoned belongings really brought it home to me. Everybody was gone. They hadn't just evacuated. They were GONE. I started to panic. I reached the city about twenty minutes later. It was empty, of course. Melbourne's central business district at 10:30am on a Friday, and it was deserted. I parked the car and walked down Bourke Street Mall in a daze. The city was usually bustling with people by this time, the streets echoing with the rumble of trams. But it was silent. Empty. Lifeless. My panic turned into terror. I fell onto the pavement, barely able to breathe. It was all too much. "I'm alone," I said, flinching at the sound of my voice piercing all that silence. "Everybody's gone." The realisation hit me hard: "I'm the last person alive." First published: Sunday, 2 May 2010 Credits: Rodan by Jepe Clothes from DAZ3D Character rendered in Poser Pro Fire and car accident photos sourced from the Internet Background photography by me Composited and postwork in Photoshop CS5 Extended