Part 3
_Gloomy place here_, he thought. _Better get back to the house._
He groped slowly out of the yard, toward the road. The stars were out now. Kormt looked up and thought he had never seen them so bright. Too bright; he didn't like it.
_Go away, stars_, he thought. _You took my people, but I'm staying here. This is my land._ He reached down to touch it, but the grass was cold and wet under his palm.
The gravel scrunched loudly as he walked, and the wind mumbled in the hedges, but there was no other sound. Not a voice called; not an engine turned; not a dog barked. No, he hadn't thought it would be so quiet.
And dark. No lights. Have to tend the street lamps himself--it was no fun, not being able to see the town from here, not being able to see anything except the stars. Should have remembered to bring a flashlight, but he was old and absentminded, and there was no one to remind him. When he died, there would be no one to hold his hands; no one to close his eyes and lay him in the earth--and the forests would grow in over the land and wild beasts would nuzzle his bones.
_But I knew that. What of it? I'm tough enough to take it._
The stars flashed and flashed above him. Looking up, against his own will, Kormt saw how bright they were, how bright and quiet. And how very far away! He was seeing light that had left its home before he was born.
He stopped, sucking in his breath between his teeth. "No," he whispered.
This was his land. This was Earth, the home of man; it was his and he was its. This was the _land_, and not a single dust-mote, crazily reeling and spinning through an endlessness of dark and silence, cold and immensity. Earth could not be so alone!
_The last man alive. The last man in all the world!_
He screamed, then, and began to run. His feet clattered loud on the road; the small sound was quickly swallowed by silence, and he covered his face against the relentless blaze of the stars. But there was no place to run to, no place at all.
End of Project Gutenberg's The Chapter Ends, by Poul William Anderson