Free Extract: The Last One at the Party by Bethany Clift

THE END OF EVERYTHING WAS HER BEGINNING

It’s December 2023 and the world as we know it has ended.

The human race has been wiped out by a virus called 6DM (‘Six Days Maximum’ – the longest you’ve got before your body destroys itself).

But somehow, in London, one woman is still alive. A woman who has spent her whole life compromising what she wants, hiding how she feels and desperately trying to fit in. A woman who is entirely unprepared to face a future on her own.

Now, with only an abandoned golden retriever for company, she must travel through burning cities, avoiding rotting corpses and ravenous rats on a final journey to discover if she really is the last surviving person on earth.

And with no one else to live for, who will she become now that she’s completely alone?

Read the beginning of Last One at the Party below:

February 8th 2024

‘Fuck You!’
Those are the very last words that I spoke to another living person.
If I had known that they would be my last, I would have chosen them a bit more carefully.
Something erudite, with a bit more wit.
‘Fuck you’ is coarse and rude and far from the sparkling repartee I have always hoped I was capable of.
But unfortunately there is no changing it.
The last person I ever physically spoke to thinks I am the sort of woman who phones them, yells abuse down the line, and then screams ‘Fuck You!’ before hanging up.
There were extreme circumstances that led to my outburst – their absolute refusal to bury my recently dead husband for a start – but that is probably still no excuse.
So, I am sorry Tom Forrest, Funeral Director at the Co-Op. That phone call was not indicative of who I am or, rather, who I was.
Not that it matters any more of course.
Because by now Tom Forrest is dead and what he thinks of me is of no consequence whatsoever.
I can’t decide whether I am writing a diary or a journal.
I’m not really sure of the difference, or if there even is one, and I can’t google it any more. The internet no longer exists.
Either way, I am writing this because there are things I think should be recorded somewhere, and I am, or was, a writer and journalist, so it feels like it is my duty to do it.
Plus, I am the only person here who can.
Because I am the only person here.
In this country.
Potentially, in the world.

I need to go back to the beginning.

October 23rd 2023

They named the virus 6DM and it began, not in China or some tiny African village, but almost exactly in the middle of the USA.
In Andover, Kansas: a small suburb of Wichita, population about 12,000.
Nobody I knew had ever heard of Andover in September 2023, but by the end of October I didn’t know a single person who couldn’t place it on a map and tell you about its rapidly decreasing population.
There is no record of the first infection, no official patient zero, because 6DM mutated and spread too fast for anyone to track it. But it is generally agreed that the first patients were recorded on October 23rd 2023 and by Halloween (that’s irony for you my American friends) all of Andover’s 12,000 citizens were either dead or dying – painfully but swiftly.
The virus having originated in such a white, suburban neighbourhood you’d have thought it would be impossible for the right-wing press to try to link it back to immigrants or a foreign country, but they did. They speculated that patient zero was likely a local high school student who’d volunteered in West Africa and returned to the town carrying 6DM with her.
Of course, by the time the article emerged the high school student was far too dead to either corroborate or deny the story, but they printed it nonetheless.
It didn’t matter anyway – people were too busy being terrified to have the time to blame or hate each other any more.

To their credit the American government acted swiftly and decisively to stop the crisis.
No one wanted to make any of the mistakes that happened in 2020.
This time they were ready.
Andover was quarantined within five days of the first death, and scientists immediately began work to discover what the virus was and develop the inevitable cure or vaccination against it.
But they were already fighting a losing battle.
By the time Andover was quarantined, cases had been reported in New York and San Francisco, both over 1,300 miles away.
The scientific community never got the opportunity to study 6DM properly, so to this day I have no idea where it actually originated or how it is spread.
The US government instigated Martial Law, closed their airports and banned international travel in or out of the country on November 2nd – less than two weeks after the first reported case.
There was mass panic and hysteria. People across the United States completely disregarded the president’s plea for calm, and rioted for food, water, transport and whatever drugs they could lay their hands on, not knowing whether they would help or not.
This was not the regulated response they had had to Covid-19, this was chaos and madness.
By November 14th, America was a wasteland in the making. The few remaining international journalists reported horrific images of cities deserted, whole towns on fire, and mass graves with hundreds of bodies thrown in.
Newspapers reported the death of the president on November 18th and the collapse of the federal government on the 23rd, exactly one month after the first reported case of 6DM.
The last report on November 24th said that, with few to no government officials left, citizens were now on their own.
There have been no verifiable reports from America since then.

November 3rd 2023

By the time America was burning itself to the ground the UK government was taking 6DM incredibly fucking seriously.
We may not have known much about the virus, but what we did know was terrifying.
No one knew what the incubation period was, but it started as a head cold, then fever, vomiting, diarrhoea. Within 72 hours your vital organs started to disintegrate. Not degrade or even fail: DISINTEGRATE. If you were lucky your heart or brain went first, and you died of a massive heart attack or a stroke. Unlucky, and it was your lungs – so you drowned. Really unlucky, and your stomach lining rotted and you were essentially eaten by your own stomach acid.
There was nothing gentle or noble about dying from 6DM; it was a juggernaut of pain and suffering. Most people died in agony, begging to be put out of their misery.

Six Days Maximum. That was the number of days you could expect to survive after the first signs of infection and where the nickname originated: 6DM.

The death toll was staggering.
The virus moved so fast and was so deadly that it was impossible to keep accurate figures, but there were no reports of any one surviving it so the mortality rate was reported to be one hundred percent.
Entire populations were wiped out. In America there were approximately 200 million dead, Japan lost nearly 70 million in just three weeks, Russia’s last toll was around 110 million.
For hugely populated countries such as China and India the figure was estimated at around one billion each, before the news bulletins stopped.
Densely populated areas fared worse. Delhi’s 25 million population was reportedly wiped out in just nineteen days.
For the sparsely populated and more remote countries (New Zealand, Australia, parts of Canada) things seemed more positive. Reports came in that the virus had yet to reach them or was being successfully contained.
Of course, as soon as people read this, they found whatever means of transport they had and headed straight for the ‘safe zones’.
And they took 6DM with them.
The safe zones tried to repel outsiders, but were mostly ill-equipped to fight off large mobs. Have you ever heard of Canada’s army? Neither have the Canadians. Australia was worst hit. Such a massive country, so much shoreline, so many flat areas to illegally land a plane. Australia went from doing quite well to obliterated in little over a month.

For us, the UK, things were different. We were almost specifically designed to survive this thing. Small, containable, manageable population, good infrastructure, good history in manufacturing and food production, strong armed forces, good healthcare. And, since the debacle of Brexit, fewer ‘friends’ to have to care about.
Plus our government had learnt extremely valuable lessons from 2020’s disaster.
Theoretically we could close our borders, repel refugees – who were now almost exclusively upper class, rich, and trying to land their superyachts on our shore – and survive on our own indefinitely.
On November 3rd 2023, anyone living within a 100-mile radius of Dover was awoken at 2 a.m. by a massive explosion. Without consulting anyone outside the cabinet office, the prime minister had taken the decision to collapse the UK end of the Channel Tunnel.
The PM made a statement on the steps of Number 10 at 9 a.m. and every television channel broadcast it live.
Our borders were closed, armed police would patrol with a shoot-to-kill order for anyone trying to enter or leave the country.
If you were abroad when it happened, then tough, you should have come back sooner.
Schools and all businesses closed immediately, and a 7 p.m. to 6 a.m. curfew was imposed. We were ordered to stay home. NHS staff would be taken to work by the police. The military would staff all food shops and ensure that food distribution was fair. Police would patrol to make sure ‘everyone was safe’.
They said there was no need to panic.
There was little to no protest or complaint. No one cared about freedom and foreign nationals when there was a very real chance they might have to watch their five-year-old die in agony.
And they needn’t have bothered with the military or police. No one wanted to go out. No one wanted to leave the safety of their home.
People stayed in, hugged loved ones close, and watched horrific images on the TV while thanking God for our tiny little island.

The government was quick to take control of the new, restricted world that we found ourselves in.
They had announced that they would continue to control food distribution for the time being and were working on plans to increase production and provide citizens with the opportunity to be self-sufficient. They hadn’t yet expanded on what that meant. All online shopping was closed – no Amazon, eBay or supermarket deliveries. There were rumours that armed soldiers guarded some of the bigger distribution warehouses.
All commercial TV channels had ceased to broadcast (understandably) and the government was now running BBC1 and BBC2, the only channels still broadcasting. Normal programming had been abandoned, and the channels now ran government-approved factual and news programming combined with endless nature programmes and sitcom repeats – nothing like the calming tones of David Attenborough or a few episodes of The Vicar of Dibley to help you forget your impending doom.
The internet was still working, albeit slowly. Twitter had stalled on the day the Channel Tunnel was destroyed. We were assured this was just coincidence. Those posting negative or ‘controversial’ opinions and stories on Facebook or even their own websites found that their profiles and pages disappeared without warning.
People feared it was just a taster of the restrictive world to come.
Of course, that turned out to be the least of our worries.

Fourteen days after we were shut off from the world there was still no registered case of 6DM in the UK, and employers were getting restless about continuing to pay for employees who were sitting at home wondering when, and how, they could start stockpiling food.
The government had announced no interim payment process and, as money still held value, employers, employees and certain cabinet members were keen for everyone to get back to work.
Tentatively, a semblance of normality returned. Shops reopened (albeit with purchasing restrictions in place – no one would get to stockpile toilet roll this time), transport was up and running again, and most people went back to work.
People quickly returned to their pandemic routines – face masks and social distancing became the norm without any government instruction or guidelines.

It soon became pretty clear that we were going to see some major lifestyle changes now that we were literally cut off from the rest of the world.
For starters, we could only eat what we grew and manufactured. So, bread, milk, meats, root vegetables and eggs were easy to find, but sugar, fruits, salads and spices immediately rocketed in price.
There was a rumbling of major civil unrest when the public learnt there was currently only one tea plantation in the whole of the UK, but the government were quick to quell the riots by reassuring us there were enough stockpiles to last until we planted and harvested more.
For the record, even without the buying restrictions in place, I don’t think there would have ever been any food, water, or even toilet roll shortages.
6DM kills your appetite immediately and then kills you pretty soon after, so there was no need for prolonged sustenance of the population by the beginning of December.

I went back to work on November 19th.
I knew during my first hour back in the office that I would be looking for another job within a couple of weeks, and that my new job would be blue collar, much harder work, and much lower paid.
The economy might not have been completely dead yet, but most of the industries that currently supported it soon would have been.
I worked in a re-insurance company in the New Business Team. Our company insured other insurance companies, specifically those that insured big ships: transportation ships, ferries, or cruise liners. All of which now sat in docks either empty or full of dead people.
I walked back into my office and was greeted by a room full of people staring at their computer screens with absolutely nothing to do.
I turned my computer on and accessed my emails to find . . . nothing. No out-of-office replies to messages sent two weeks ago, no one chasing late work, not even pleas for help or support. Not one of our international clients was answering the phone. Our UK clients were bluntly honest; no one is insuring anything when money might not even exist this time next week.
One of the company directors gave a consolatory speech to the Senior Management Team: ‘Just a blip, we can ride it out, concentrate on our domestic clients, pharmaceutical industry will need us when the cure is launched, back to normal in a few weeks.’
Office-speak rubbish.

After three days of clearing my inbox, tidying my desk, and ‘riding it out’, I went for a (now very expensive) lunch with Ginny – one of my best friends.
Ginny was the strongest and most self-confident person I knew. She had started at my work on the same pay, at the same time as me, and was now chief of staff at a bigger and more prestigious firm; a position that she had achieved and maintained while having a child, creating her own networking group for black women in banking and running a successful mentoring programme.
She bowed down to no one and was scared of nothing.
Until now.
Normally my lunches with Ginny are full of laughter, bitching about mutual colleagues, and her showing me a thousand new photos of her six-month-old daughter, Radley.
Not that day.
Ginny was breastfeeding, so I hadn’t seen her have a drink for over a year. That day, she ordered the two most expensive bottles of wine on the menu and downed four large glasses during our ninety-minute lunch.
Ginny was scared.
She didn’t want to discuss work or jobs. She said I’d have my current job for another week, if I was lucky. I already knew that, so wasn’t surprised. She said there would be no government bailout. She doubted there would be a government a few months from now – at least not one that we recognised.
But she didn’t stop there.
She started asking me questions about my survival plans. Did I have any idea how unsuitable I was for how life would become? Could I grow my own food? Make my own bread? Did I own chickens? Could I milk a cow? Did I know how to make my own clothes? Did I have any transferrable skills?
Obviously, the answer to all of these was no.
My husband, James, and I lived in a flat in central London with a ‘no pet’ clause, so the chickens and cows were definitely out of the question. We had no garden, just a window ledge with a dying pot plant and a herb pot on it; so, unless this counted as growing food, we were also out of luck there. As for the rest I, like millions of others, was cash rich and time poor, so sourced my food, clothes and anything else I needed from those with far less money than me.
Ginny said that money would soon be worthless. That we would live in a world of survival of the fittest – provide what you could for you and yours and then beg, steal and borrow what you couldn’t.
Ginny said I should get a gun. I laughed.
Ginny didn’t.
She poured the leftover wine into a plastic water bottle and told me she had been stockpiling food, water and medicines since the day after the first case of 6DM had been discovered in Andover. Her husband, Alex, had family in the middle of nowhere up in Yorkshire and they were leaving to go there in three days.
They’d bought two guns to take with them.

When I told James about lunch that night he laughed and said Ginny would never survive that far from Selfridges. James promised that we would be fine, he would take care of us, like he always did.
But later, I saw him looking at our flat with fresh eyes, in the same way I had been doing since I got home, and when I looked at his phone later he had been googling ‘easy vegetable growing’.
In the end, of course, Ginny’s dire prediction didn’t have time to come true. There was no time for the economy to fail completely, no government collapse, no time to start growing our own food, and no need to buy a gun.
Ginny and her family are some of the hundreds of people about whose fate I know nothing.
I like to think that she made it to her Yorkshire wilderness. But I’m pretty certain that she didn’t.

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Publishing in Hardback, eBook and Audio on February 4th 2021