Not a Creature Was Stirring

The gold mine was supposed to be temporary. Three weeks underground, then back to town. But Tom Gannett stayed, the way hermits stay, because something in him preferred the weight of rock to the weight of other people. When he finally surfaces, the world has ended. The desert is silent. The towns are empty. Purple snow falls endlessly, the residue of a war that incinerated everyone he ever knew. Now Gannett walks through the corpse of civilization, searching for survivors who do not exist, confronting the terrible arithmetic of being the last man alive. Evans wrote this in 1951, when the atomic bomb was barely a decade old and the Cold War had everyone wondering if tomorrow would come. What makes the story endure is not its science fiction trappings but its raw, unflinching portrait of a man who escaped humanity only to discover that humanity has escaped itself. It is bleak, spare, and unforgettable: a nightmare in sixteen pages.