They were the last two, Rod and his girl, dying of the illness as if they were carrying cancer as their long lasting companion.

They had dropped the Anthrax a week before, as if the world had gone mad with mass psychosis. He buried her on the beach and erected a black stone over her pitiful remains, black on the gleaming white sand, like two contrasting alien funeral symbols.

He trudged slowly over the to the chalet and stepped in a rock pool, jumping back, jack in the box like, as his boot squashed a mass of writhing something, worm-like, but as a scientist, he knew they were not worms. He stamped down on them hard with his radiation boots, a jack boot smashing down with lightning speed on a new mutant face. Wearily, somnambulistically he desisted; maybe in time this gruesome form of life would achive a survival that we had never had.

Rod entered the door and looked werily with the furtive eyes of a weasel round his hideaway, everything was intact. He skimmed through his library but could find no comfort in the lifeless tomes.

He knew, like Lucifer, that nothing was left but agony, no hope as even the wandering Jew had hope. As a professional, he knew that he still had his duty to preform, although there was no reason for duty any more.

Feet leaving imprints in the sand like man friday he controls on automatic and watch the vessel shoot like a bullet out too the horizon. A bonfire shower of sparks from the speck in the distance, a mushroom cloud, and he re-entered his hideaway, alone, fatalistically to await the end.

Frank Duncan