JR Mercier

I Was Immortal When The World Ended by JR Mercier.

The first time she tried to kill herself, she slit her throat.
It was a huge mess. Movies always made it look so easy. A nice, quick death with just the right amount of drama. Exactly what she wanted. Except it took a lot longer to bleed out than she expected and the feel of the knife-edge dragging across her throat, how it tugged on her skin and glided… She shuddered. Never again.
The second time, she opted for a bullet to the brain.
It scared her a lot more than the throat slitting because a friend once told her a story of a horse that’s leg was shattered. It was sad but the only humane thing to do was put it out of its misery. He was young and new to the farm and it was his first time putting down a big animal.
The horse was calm when he lifted the gun. He put the barrel to its head and pulled the trigger. Bang!
Only it didn’t die. Instead, the horse just struggled, and thrashed and whinnied like crazy. He freaked out and shot it again and again. But it still carried on. It then proceeded to bleed to death, its head nothing but raw meat.
It was only later that somebody thought to tell him that a horse’s brain is quite small and sits high up and that he’d really just been blowing the horse’s face apart.
She didn’t know much about guns and had to figure out how to use one, which gave her a smoking hole in her foot. When she finally managed to put the barrel against her head, she couldn’t decide whether it should be in her mouth, behind her ear, or on her forehead. She settled on her forehead, awkwardly placed the cold barrel against her skin, closed her eyes, and pulled the trigger. There was an impression of huge pressure and then nothing.
It was the longest she ever stayed down but it sure as shit wasn’t worth the headache that followed when she woke up. With her healing, the meds she took were more like candy with little bursts of goodness.
Still, she dug holes through her meds and threaded a bunch of the good shit onto a necklace. It looked quite cute with all the pastel colours. She’d chew on them while hobbling around on her busted foot and rummaging for food.
After the gun fiasco, she tried a big office building. It stood proud, a massive glass and steel middle finger in the centre of a dead city with a 30-floor drop to a concrete bed below.
Standing on top of it felt epic. The wind whipped through past her, hugging her body with awesome force. The sunset in the distance looked like every travel blogger photo ever, the ones that only seem to happen for beautiful people.
It was great until she stepped off the edge.
She, of course, hit the ground with a dull thud and popped like a water balloon. There wasn’t as much blood as there were just bits of her body, all cooling on the cement. Consciousness came back surprisingly fast which led to the freakish experience of watching her body parts crawl across the cement and slowly re-assembled. Sunset seemed like a good time to say bye-bye and take the plunge. She regretted it when she had to spend the night slowly growing a body on a deserted street, in the middle of a dead city, with nothing moving in the darkness, without being able to move, and no way to scream and no one-.
If she was being honest, that one did some damage. Just a little.
When she was fully healed, she couldn’t muster the courage to stand up straight. Her body was fine but every time she’d get too far from the ground or looked at the sky, everything started spinning and the sky looked untethered. She’d end up hugging the ground, bloody nails dug into the ground, and keening like an abused animal.
But she didn’t give up. It took a few days of crawling on bloody hands and feet, but she finally moved on to her other attempted suicides.
Next was drowning. Walking into the ocean with the express purpose to kill yourself required a lot of determination. Every time she made it below, she’d float to the surface, ass first.
Frustrated, she managed to stay under when she weighed herself down with a rock and a huge wedding dress. Except she’d die and then come back to life which left her stuck with saltwater in her eyes and mouth and nose. In between deaths, she’d chew through the rope until she finally drifted to the top only to witness a ship wreck itself on the beach while she bobbed quietly in the water.
Hanging; she should have learned from the drawing. Unfortunately, she’d come back to life, flail around for an embarrassingly long time, and then die again.
Starvation; definitely the hardest one. She actually never managed to succeed in this one.
She banged her head open, didn’t drink water for weeks, and wrecked herself in a car crash – nothing could kill her and keep her dead.
Which led her to the present – chewing on a stale chocolate bar, her dirty feet gripping the hot tar road that would only lead to another ghost town.
It took her 3 days of stumbling through quiet woods to find the main road of the new town. Cars and corpses littered the road. She paused, resting her chocolate-covered hand on her bare belly, chewing with her mouth open. Should she say a prayer? Who would she pray to? Maybe these people weren’t religious and her praying would somehow make a mess of their afterlife. A few minutes of thinking later, she continued, weaving through the wrecks, eyes steadily ahead while she chewed on her chocolate bar.
It’s funny. She’d become immortal just in time for the world to end.
She wasn’t a believer in any type of higher force but she had to admit there was a certain amount of irony to having everything die not long after the first immortal was created. Instant karma.
Imagine her shock when she left Eternal Life Industries – a big company with big dreams of, as the name suggests, eternal life – only to find that everything had gone to shit in the 10 seconds it took her to sign out at the reception desk and exit the big glass doors of the high rise.
There was no warning. People and animals just dropped like puppets with their strings cut. Nothing left but slack jaws and shit and piss.
She didn’t remember much of those first few days, to be honest. She finally ‘woke up’ in a small flat where she was painting her body with hot pink paint. Dazed, she’d cleaned up the strange place, apologised to the stiff older lady in the recliner for getting paint on the carpet, took a shower, and left.

Her mission wasn’t always to kill herself. At first, she looked for other survivors. She travelled, by car or foot, looking for anybody alive.
She paused in front of a clothing store, her naked visage reflected in the window. Her reflection took off a backpack, took out a new chocolate bar and stuffed the old wrapper in with the rest. The bag crinkled as she slid it onto her back.
She stopped wearing clothes at some point, opting instead to go naked. She had a pink poncho for when it got cold. She cuddled under it at night, usually in some store or hotel. The houses were too creepy. She gave one last look at her reflection, posed, nodded, and moved on.
The world ending had its blessings. Global warming might not be a thing anymore. There were no more food shortages. No fighting or racism or hatred. No animals were being abused. She had no tan lines.
She dumped the trash from her backpack into the recycle bin and scanned the town around her. Lots of UFO and spaceship posters. There was even a big UFO above a cute diner, the reflective surface blinding under the noonday sun. Two little green aliens stood on the edge, both holding a peace sign and tipping little cowboy hats. The town really stuck to an aesthetic.
She was tearing open another chocolate bar when it hit her.
There might not be any life left on Earth. She took a big bite, chewing slowly. But there could be somewhere else.
She could get on a spaceship, one of those new easy ones that were always in the news for heralding the start of commercial space exploration. Her chewing sped up as her thoughts raced. She could take one and look for other living beings.
She inhaled around the chocolate, eyes wide.
She was made for space exploration. She was sociable and could easily make new friends. She could try strange new foods and maybe even have a scandalous affair. There might be planets with cats – or something similar. It wouldn’t bother her if the creatures looked strange. Her mother raised her right and for all she knew, they could think she was the nasty-looking one. But she could win them over. Her sense of humour was universal. She was a nail tech, dammit! She could talk to anyone. She was pretty sure the biggest trouble for humans and space travel was time – something she now had a lot of.
The idea lasted a full 5 minutes before fizzling to death.
She could probably find the spaceships but she doubted flying them would be as easy as pressing ‘ON’ and putting it into first gear. And that didn’t even start on the issue of navigation and fuel.
She stopped, rolling her calloused foot on a piece of gravel. Or bone.
She loved art and making people feel good in their own skin. She knew how to get oil from mechanics’ hands without stripping the skin dry and could make a stiletto nail sharp enough to cut steak with. She knew where her talent lay and it wasn’t in a control room with buttons that read three or four different languages.
But her eyes were glued to the library in the centre of the town. It was ridiculous. Completely insane.
It didn’t stop her from entering the library and finding the educational section. She grabbed a couple of books and settled down. Even if it was a foolish hope, it was still hope.

The library became her sanctuary. Books on aviation, physics, time and space travel surrounded her like towers. Between them were notebooks – pages and pages scribbled with everything she could figure out, which was almost nothing.
She tossed her notebook into a tower of books she didn’t understand, stormed outside, drew a massive breath and screamed at the top of her lungs.
Panting, she listened to it echo into the night. Nothing stirred.
She looked back to the towers of books. She had no idea what most of them were talking about. There were theories and principles that required years of experience and training. Trying to figure it out was physically hurting her brain. She wouldn’t be surprised if these theories were the thing that finally got her to die and stay dead.
She sighed. She needed to get back to the basics. And she needed some erotica.
She went to the nearest primary school and found whatever she could. Introduction books on maths and science. No smut here, except one battered Mills and Boons book in a teacher’s drawer.
It wasn’t her usual type. She flipped through the pages, glimpsed the word ‘shaft’ and stuffed it into her new Barbie backpack.
She didn’t look around too much.
After that, she raided the high school for any science and maths textbooks.
Her last stop was the big town university, a place that specialised in all the sciences. There were so many bodies.
“I’m sorry!” She hissed as she jerked a book loose from a very dead student’s hand. With a crack, the book and hand broke off the student’s prone body.
She let out a soft scream before throwing the book and hand away.
She spent her days reading everything she could get her hands on and doing sums she never in a million years thought she would be able to do. It didn’t come easy. Most nights she’d start crying before taking a designated screaming session, where she walked and screamed and crawled and bawled. But she always came back.
When it was time for a break, she’d curl up with a good adventure or romance novel. It became a sort of ritual, reading and crying while inhaling whatever chocolate she could find.
The need for physical touch became almost painful.
Once, while gathering canned food in a convenience store, she’d head a shuffle behind her. She’d stopped and looked at the body behind her with wide eyes.
“Hello.” She whispered to the body. Nothing.
She moved closer, ignoring the exposed flesh as she knelt next to what looked to have been an old woman.
“You don’t have to be scared of me.” She put a hand on the woman’s forehead and watched with horror as the skin sloughed off.
It wasn’t the last time she’d talk to the dead.

Time was strange when it no longer mattered. After about 1000 sunsets, she finally gathered up the courage to fly a small plane. Not surprisingly, she crashed spectacularly and discovered a new type of hell – burns.
The burns hurt more every day and oozed pus and clear liquid. All. The. Fucking. Time. When she walked, she had to waddle while keeping her arms and legs spread like some kind of roasted penguin. It took almost two weeks to heal. Two weeks in which she refused to fly and accepted her fate as a lone woman.
She crashed the second, third and fourth time too.
She explored other towns, all offering their own information – especially about where those commercial ‘Ships to Space’ were.
It was at one of those towns that she found a truck the size of a small house. She loaded it with all the snacks and food she could find, threw on a hot pink poncho for the cold and ploughed through the clogged streets and off-roaded whenever necessary. The corpses were mostly bone at this point, which made it easier to drive over them.
Green showed up all over, breaking through concrete and buildings. She knew enough about biology to know that because all animal life had died out, planet Earth was in for a very wild ride. She didn’t know what stage this was. Was all like, including bacteria, gone? What did that mean for the planet? How were things still growing or was everything running on borrowed time?
The truck bounced along as she gazed around, her homemade bejewelled pilot’s licence hanging swinging from the rear-view mirror.
And then the airstrip was in front of her.
She’d given up on Earth so quickly, without really giving it much thought. There were other continents with billions of other people. There might be a reason as to why the rest of the world hadn’t come here to see what the hell was going on and to check what survived, if anything.
She couldn’t leave without making sure she was alone.
Before she move on, she’d give herself the time to explore Earth. And when she found others, she’d decide what to do then. If there really was no one left…
Then she’d leave.

“Houston, we have a problem.” She called over the intercom. She giggled in excitement before adjusting her newly cut hair. She checked herself in the mirror, repeated the words again, and nodded. Perfect.
She adjusted her spacesuit and stomped her big white boots. The shoes were covered in flowers, hearts and stars.
“Are you ready?” Calicifer called over the speakers.
“Coming.” She yelled, checking everything for the last time.
Calcifer’s voice was still too robotic but she couldn’t figure out how to get the speech to smooth out.
She stopped by the threshold and looked back at the office that has been her home for the last 30 years. The 60 or so before that was filled with countless expeditions and even more mental breakdowns. She flicked her braid over her shoulder, shut the door, and moved on.
Calcifer called out all the technical jargon that she now handled with ease. She moved through the motions, putting away everything she needed and double-checking everything else. She’d studied as much as she could and crash landed countless times and rehearsed take-off thousands of times. She was as prepared as she possibly could be.
Strapped down, she shrugged her shoulders, trying to get comfortable.
“Let’s do this!” She sang and Calcifer laughed. Her whole body was trembling with excitement. She took a deep breath as the tremors started below her feet and then moved to everything around her.
Her exile would end today.
She secured her headpiece and distantly heard Calcifer moving down a checklist, reporting that everything was good.
She could hear her heartbeat in her ears.
Hopefully, there are cats on other planets.
She held on with clenched hands as the energy built around her.
And some good food.
She took a deep breath.
Maybe she’d make friends.
She closed her eyes.
And find some love.
“Blast off!” Calcifer called.
And they did.

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