The First Man

The snow hasn’t melted for six years now. Until one recent morning, I hadn’t seen any sign of another living soul in months.

It was a gangly looking figure, struggling through the snowdrifts. I wouldn’t have even seen it had I not gone up to dig out the second bunker for supplies. Making sure I could find my way back with the radio positioner, I decided to follow it. The last time I had met someone out here, I’d had a lover for several days. Perhaps I would be so fortunate again.

On skis I quickly caught up to the walker. She was in her forties, with the thousand-yard-stare of a permanent wanderer looking out from her balaclava. I asked her to come to my bunker for a while.

“I can’t. Not without him.” She pointed ahead.

Once again, in flurrying snow was a human form, trudging along, obviously wearing snowshoes. So I sped along to this person, my heart bouncing around in my chest. Two people! Two people in one day! I thought of the great meals we would have together, and the old movies they could watch with me. New friends—perhaps a new family.

The man who I met next, in his late twenties and bearded, refused to join me as well. He said he was following another. And so I charged on. It seemed as though I had found a procession.

When the third, seemingly genderless person covered from head to toe told me they were following the fourth, my hope shriveled up, decayed and died in an instant.

“How many of you are there?”

“What do you mean?”

I told the traveler about its followers. It had no idea; none of the three I had met, and presumably no one else along the line, was aware of those behind them. I might have found an entire city on the move, more people than I had encountered since the day the last nuclear furnace died and we were left to face the glaciers on our own.

But they weren’t going to turn back until the leader was found and brought to them. I checked to make sure my batteries were charged and I had replacements; the last thing I wanted was to be trapped in a featureless landscape without my positioner. Then I set out to find the first man.

I can’t truthfully say how many people I passed. They were all within the line of sight of one more, and they all moved as though in a trance, slowly dying from exhaustion and cold and not even aware of it. They were happy to freeze to death in their dream state.

At long last I had her. She was a little younger than me, her face frostbitten and her eyelashes flicking ice off them every time she blinked. I demanded to know where she was going.

“After him.” She pointed into the storm. I saw nothing.

“There’s no one there. Come with me, turn around. Before you freeze to death!”

“Look again. Look just right.”

Pushing along on my skis, keeping pace with the woman, I squinted and stared and looked up and down and across. Nothing. Just wall after wall of powder stirred up by the wind, and of course the constant dizzying flurry from the sky.

“There’s no one—”

There it was.

It didn’t look right. The shape tottered and limped along as though it had been wounded, it was gaunt and black and it didn’t seem human. It didn’t seem possible. In and out it faded, a wraith in the ice.

I wanted to turn back, I really did. Whatever that thing was, it had put a procession of dozens of the last people on this part of the world in a fatal trance. But I had to know. I had to know what it was.

The sun has gone down and come up more than once. The storm has abated and when it does, the shape seems far off. When it returns the shambling figure is much nearer. I think I’m getting closer, though.

I wonder how long those batteries will last. I keep forgetting to check my positioner.

I’m almost there.