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Third Metacarpal – Right Hand
Day 1

 The sun hung low, just floating above a sea that looked like chocolate syrup.

 “This isn’t necessary, Rick.”

 I moved slowly cautiously, sliding one foot forward at a time, working my way across a greasy plank.  Winter storms had transformed the Santa Monica pier into a pile of splintered wood and twisted steel girders that now tumbled into the dark water.  I sat down on the sheared end of rusted steel beam and let my soot-caked boots dangle out over the dead sea.

 “You don’t have to do this.  You don’t owe me a thing.”

 Hovering above my head in the warm breeze, sludge-stained gulls cried, searching for fish, but not willing to get near the water.  They were survivors, smart enough not to join the other rotting corpses that were being battered about in the dark frothy surf.

 I popped the straps of my backpack, and then hung the bundle from a bent rod that protruded from a shard of concrete.  The pack felt far too light, but then I reminded myself that Nicky had only been twelve and, of course, small for his age.

 “Just throw the whole pack in, Rick.”

 A distorted red sun, flecked black by passing clouds, now rested on the dark Pacific.  Not a single ship was out there.  Not a single white sail appeared from over the horizon – and none was likely to.  Peeling back velcro straps, I reached into the backpack and pulled out Nicky’s list.  Like everything else in the world, it was coated with ash.

 “Santa Monica pier, California” I read aloud.

 “Just forget me, Rick.”

 It was Nicky’s last list.  He had updated it almost daily: adding, changing, deleting.  Twelve pages long, and with more than a thousand entries, it listed all the places he’d go, all the things he’d see.  Nicky had wanted to stand atop the Eiffel Tower, tough the weather-roughened front paw of the Sphinx, read the original Constitution, cross the Australian outback to reach Ayers Rock, drift down the Ganges in a rainbow-colored barge, and even watch the Earth spin by as he floated in the Hilton lobby of the Low Earth One.  And I had promised to take him.  I had made that promise almost as often as he had updated his list.  And Nicky, always smiling, his eyes always trusting, would just rock back and forth in his wheelchair and dream of the day we’d visit all those places.  For him, it was his only reason for being, while for me, it was a game, a game I played with a sick little brother who I knew could barely survive a drive to the corner vid store.  I played the game until the day he died; until the day they all died.

 “We’ve finally started,” I said, and pulling out a stub of pencil from my shirt pocket, I crossed out the entry for the Santa Monica Pier.  Refolding the list carefully, I stuffed it back into the pack.  But before I removed my hand, I grabbed onto something hard, something that felt gritty and chalk-like.  When I pulled that something out, I found myself holding a third metacarpal from the right hand.  In bright red paint, Nicky’s name was written across it.

 “I’m not going to hold you to the promise you make, Rick.  Not now.”

 I ran the length of bone between my thumb and index finger, able to feel the warpage, then closed my hand around it.  Trapped in an almost useless body, Nicky’s world had been one of picture books, vids, faraway places, and, of course, the promise I’d made.

 “I’m holding myself to it,” I answered.

 Reaching out toward the sinking sun, into a world tinted pumpkin orange by the afternoon light, I opened my fist, uncurling one finger at a time.  The bone slipped from my open hand, and twirling end over end, like some gold-medal caliber Olympic diver, it hit the oily water without making even the slightest splash.  It would sink deep into the muck,, beyond the reach of anything.  A part of Nicky would always be at the Santa Monica pier.  Closing the pack, and picking it up, I reslung it across my back.

 “Don’t do this, Rick,” said Nicky, his voice slightly muffled, since it now came from somewhere deep within the pack.  “It’s doing bad things to you.  It’s why you see the Alines.”

 I slowly stood, and shuffled my way across creaking timbers.  Nicky thought I had gone insane, and that the Aliens were all in my mind.  He was wrong.  When you’re the last man in the world your very actions define sanity.  I suddenly glanced up, having sensed it, and looked back toward the shore.

 “You can’t ignore it.  It’s a symptom, just like my twisted bones were.  It’s a sign that’s telling you that you don’t have to keep your promise to me.”

 As I watched, the Alien quickly moved away, skimming over the black sand and darting between timbers and beached ships.  It was a loner, its bone bag empty.  After months of their scavenging, there wasn’t a bone left in the entire city.  But back on that first morning, there had been a world full of bones.  That morning had been so quiet, far too quiet.  The night before I had just finished a thirty-hour shift of heart attacks, car accidents and gunshot wounds at the UCLA Med Center Emergency Room, and nothing short of nuclear explosion should have been capable of waking me.  But the quiet woke me.  The sun was just coming up, my room still filled with gray shadows, but I staggered out of bed, knowing that I had to go to Nicky’s room.  He was already up, in his wheelchair, and looking out his window.  With his back to me, he sat unmoving.  His list lay on the floor, just out of reach of his black, skeletal hand.  I knew he was dead.  I had known he was dead before I had even walked into his room.  The quiet had told me that.  I stood next to him.  With empty eyes, he stared through his bedroom window, probably seeing all those faraway places that he’d never been able to visit.  But when I looked through that window, trying to see even one of those distant places, all that I saw was his ghost-like reflection superimposed over something that hovered on the other side of the glass.

 The thing was crystalline, about the size and shape of a basketball, and colored blood red.  It looked at me through the thousand facets of a single rust-red eye that hung suspended from a gossamer-thin stalk.  A single arm, almost glass transparent, jutted out from beneath it.  In its three-fingered hand it clutched a black bag.  When I blinked, it vanished, and I tried to convince myself that I hadn’t actually seen it.

 By nightfall, Nicky was nothing more than bones and black dust.  By the next morning, the sky was filled with Aliens, their bags stuffed with what I knew were the bones of the dead.

 “You won’t get my brother!” I screamed toward the beach.

 The Alien sped over the black sand, darting around a tugboat that was almost smokestack-deep in oily seaweed, then disappeared in a flash of red light.  It must have been the smell of death that had attracted them, tugging at them from light years away.  I wondered if any of them had been able to detect that telltale scent two months earlier, when it had first washed up on the Southern California coast.  It had been on a Sunday morning when, suddenly, every emergency room from San Diego to Santa Barbara had been inundated with people exhibiting identical symptoms: high fever, abdominal cramping, and diarrhea.  Within twenty-four hours, fatalities had topped ninety-eight percent, but amazingly, after that, no new cases were reported.  Immunology took almost three days to find the culprit: E. coli.  The bacterium resided in the gut of nearly every man, woman and child on the planet.  Normally, it was an innocuous enough little bug, but this strain had been changed – one of its genes had been scrambled and sliced.  Immunology described it as a clocked bacterium.  Highly contagious, it harmlessly hid in the gut, doing no real damage, until something happened to it on that particular Sunday morning.  A few snips of unattached DNA, sleeping within one of its genes, woke up that morning, inserted itself   into just the right location, and transformed harmless E. coli into a killer.  Twenty-four hours later, that same gene clocked again, and E. coli  reverted back to its original, harmless form.  More than ten thousand people had died.  Two weeks later, an insignificant island off the southern tip of Oman was atomically erased in a joint US/Soviet naval exercise.  It was rumored that a gene-splicing lab had been located there.  I knew right then and there that some other mystery bacterium might be sleeping inside of me, ticking like a bomb.  Ten thousand dead had just been a preview of things to come.  Six weeks later, I woke up in a shadow-filled room, startled by the quiet.

 I slipped my thumbs between the backpack straps and my shoulders and, balancing on a steel girder, walked toward the beach.  Nicky’s rattling bones, and the crying gulls, were the only sounds I heard.

Fourth Flange – Left Foot
Day 37

 Nicky had a one-eyes jack showing.

 “I’ll hold,” he said.

 I was dealer, and with the queen of diamonds and four of clubs showing, I had to take another hit.  The deck felt greasy in my hands.  I peeled off the top card – eight of hearts.

 “Busted.”

 Reaching across the felt table, I flipped Nicky’s face down card over – ace of hearts.

 “Blackjack,” he said quietly.

 Nicky had won every hand.  His luck was unbelievable.  I started to reach for a new deck.

 “Why?” asked Nicky in a whisper.

 I pretended that I hadn’t heard him, and started shuffling the new deck.  I’d gone through at least a hundred decks of cards since we had arrived in Las Vegas.  One hand – one deck.  It might have seemed a bit extravagant, but this was an extravagant place, and these were undeniably extravagant times.

 “Why?” he asked again, this time with more force.  The bones in the backpack rattled.

 “Why what?” I knew what he wanted to know.  I knew.

 “Why are you scattering my bones?  Why not just toss them all away, and stop torturing yourself?”

 I dropped the deck of cards, letting them flutter to the casino floor.  There were an infinite number of answers to that question, but only two that were really important: the lie I would tell Nicky, and the lie I’d been telling myself.

 “It’s like a memorial, Nicky.  When I leave a piece of you at these places, you become a part of all the things you wanted to see.  It’s my gift to you.”

 Nicky said nothing.

 An invisible knife made of finely tempered steel twisted in my gut.

 Even though he was dead, I still played games with him.  I wasn’t doing this for him, but for me.  Every bone I left behind, whether buried beneath the plaster-of-Paris snow that covered the Matterhorn at Disneyland, or lying in a shallow pool of brine at the Badwater Basin in Death Valley, removed some of the guilt.  I hadn’t been a practicing Catholic in over ten years, but the concepts of guilt and salvation had been beat into me young, when I was unquestioning and willing to believe.

 A promise had been broken, and this was my penance.  That was the lie I told myself, knowing it was a lie, but not willing to look any deeper for the truth.  If the lie was this painful, I knew that the truth would be unbearable.

 “Rick.”

 I turned, but not toward Nicky’s backpack.  I felt them behind me.  Turning quickly, and pulling out the pistol that I had found in a cop car in San Bernardino, I held it in a two-fisted grasp.

 There were three of them, their empty black bone bags lying across a small sand dune that had crept through the casino’s shattered front window.

 “No bones for you today, boys!”

 I squeezed the trigger.

 Bang!

 Glass shattered somewhere across the Strip.  They were gone, alost as if they had never been there.

 I stuffed the pistol back into my waistband, enjoying the stinging pain as the hot barrel singed me, then walked over to the backpack.  I reached in and pulled out a fourth flange from the left foot.  Waling over to the nearest roulette wheel, I gave it a jerk, sending it spinning, and tossed the bone onto the wheel.  With a handful of hundred-dollar chips, I covered the double zero.  It was a long shot, a sucker bet.  It was the only kind of bet worth making.

 I went back to the blackjack table and reslung the pack across my back.  The chattering toe bone suddenly went quiet.  On my way of the casino, without even bothering to stop, I glanced at the slowly turning roulette wheel.

 “You can’t lose, Nicky.”

 He didn’t answer.

Scapula – Left Shoulder
Day 195

 It was midwinter, and unless I kept blinking, my eyeballs iced over.  Steam drifted into a painfully blue sky, while deep beneath the snow, the Earth rumbled.  The place smelled of sulfur and wet buffalo.  Icicles hung from my beard, and my ears were numb.

 “Old Faithful,” came Nicky’s muffled voice from deep within the backpack.

 Yellowstone was on the third line of the first page of his list.  I would have crossed it off, but my fingers were so stiff and wind-burned that I never could have held a pencil.  Besides, my hands were full with one of Nicky’s shoulder blades.

 Ice crunched beneath my snowshoes as I maneuvered between Old Faithful and a half dozen buffaloes that were scavenging beneath the snow, using their big shaggy heads as snowplows.  They weren’t about to get out of my way.  This land was theirs once again, and they knew it.  An old bull, his coat shaggy and mange-ridden, pulled his gray-streaked head up from out of the snow and looked at me for only a second, as if he saw a ghost.  He snorted steaming breath through his nostrils, then quickly plunged his head back into the snow.

 I stepped from the snow and up onto the edge of the mist-covered ground that surrounded Old Faithful.  Warmth flowed up through my boots, filling my feet with pins and needles.

 Old Faithful had not erupted for at least an hour, and was due to let go any minute.  A face full of scalding steam would be as fatal as a bullet in the head, but I had nothing to worry about.  I couldn’t die.  I was the last man, condemned to wander the world alone, as punishment for breaking my promise to Nicky.  I’d come to realize that it was God’s will that I wander the world alone, a sort of walking memorial to what once was.  But I’d fooled God.  As long as Nicky was with me, I’d never be alone.  I knew that God would never catch on to my little deception.  He’d certainly never noticed Nicky when the world was alive, so I saw no reason why He’d start noticing him now.  God was more than just a fool, He was an arrogant fool.

 I moved slowly, like an old man with brittle bones, across the rainbow-colored mound that surrounded Old Faithful’s geyser hole.  Steaming water trickled over my boots, and the stench of rotten eggs burned the roof of my mouth.

 “You’ll be warm in there,” I said, and threw Nicky’s shoulder blade into the throat of the geyser.  It bounced against steaming rock, hit the boiling water, then sank.

 A gust of wind suddenly crashed against my back, and I turned, facing it, feeling it bite into my face.  They hovered at the edge of the geyser basin, just before the treeline – hundreds of them.  No longer carrying their black bone bags, they looked like rubies, shimmering in the bright sunlight.

 “What do they want?” asked Nicky.

 Tears ran from the corners of my eyes, quickly freezing before they could even roll down my cheeks.  At first I had thought it was Nicky’s bones they were after, but it wasn’t that.  Nicky was just one of the billions that had died.  They wanted something special, something rare.  They wanted the bones of the last man on Earth.

 “Never!” I screamed into the wind, my chapped lips cracking and my clogged ears popping.

 Old Faithful exploded behind me, the heat beating at my back.  But the wind continued to blow, pushing the steam and boiling water away from me.  It was the wind that saved me from the geyser, and the wind was God’s doing.

 “Never,” I whispered.

Femur – Left Leg
Day 352
 
 The garage smelled musty and feral.  Judging by the droppings and debris, I could tell that rats, rabbits, and at least several cats had made this place their home in the past year.

 “I’m surprised this made your list, Nicky,”

 Nicky said nothing.  The backpack was perched against the garage wall, nestled between shovels and pruning shears.  I knew he was listening, though – I could hear his bones rattle.  He hadn’t spoken to me for days, not since we had crossed the Mississippi at Hannibal, Missouri, where we’d visited Mark Twain’s home.  He was mad about something.

 I sat cross-legged on the warm concrete floor, munching a Rome Beauty, and trying to ignore him.

 “The largest ball of yarn in Illinois,” I read aloud as I crossed the entry off.

 It sat in the far corner of the garage next to a pile of paint cans.  Made up mostly of yellow and green strands, it couldn’t have been over four feet in diameter.  It was no longer quite round, but had sagged, probably after having been rained and snowed on.  There was a fist-sized hole in the garage roof directly above it.  Glancing up through that hole, I could see neither blue sky nor white clouds.  The world was red, the sunlight being filtered through the countless Aliens that hovered over Barry, Illinois.

 I started to stand.

 “We’re leaving.”

 “Haven’t you forgotten something?”

 I jumped inside, but stood slowly and smoothly.  I wasn’t about to give Nicky the satisfaction.

 “I haven’t forgotten a thing.”

 I walked across the garage, giving a plastic sack of fertilizer a hard kick.  I damn near broke my toe, but kept walking.  Suddenly bones rattled, and I heard something snap.

 “What are you doing, Nicky?” I asked, trying to sound calm.

 My hand hovered over the pack, but I was afraid to touch it.  The garage filled with the sounds of crunching bones.

 “Nicky!”

 “You have to leave a bone here.”

 Crackling sounds continued to come from the pack.

 “Not here,” I said.  “This place isn’t good enough.”  There were less than fifty bones left.  I wasn’t about to waste one on a four-foot ball of yarn.  Nicky deserved better.

 “And the other places.  Why weren’t they good enough?”

 I tried to make a grab for the pack, but something within it shattered, sounding like breaking glass.

 “The Sears Tower?  Mt. Rushmore?  Mark Twain’s home?”

 I said nothing.  There was nothing I could say.

 “You started this, and you’re going to finish it.  You’re not backing out on this promise.”

 “You don’t understand, Nicky.”

 The pack was silent for several seconds.  Nicky was thinking.  I could feel him think.  “What happens to you, Rick, when the last bone is gone?”

 He knew.  He could read my mind.  When the last of Nicky was gone, I’d be alone in a world filled with a billion aliens.  And God wouldn’t even let me die.  We both knew the truth now.

 “You promised.”

 I could hear bones grind together, knowing that they were being reduced to dust.  It was blackmail.  If I didn’t leave a piece of him behind, Nicky’d destroy himself, and I’d be alone all that much sooner.

 “Nicky?”

 The snap of bones was his only answer.

 I yanked at the pack’s straps and, reaching in, pulled out the largest bone I could grab – a femur from his left leg.  I hurled it at the ball of yarn, where it ricocheted off, then landed in the pile of paint cans.  A rat squealed.

 “Satisfied?”

 He didn’t answer.  I grabbed the pack and, yanking back the flap, looked in.  Not a single bone was splintered, not even cracked.  He had tricked me.

 I walked outside.  Barry, Illinois, was tinted blood red.

Skull
Day 539

 Tears had etched black trenches down Abraham Lincoln’s cheeks.  He sat silently, motionlessly, staring at me from invisible eyes that were hidden within dark sockets.

 “Cross it off the list, Rick.”

 Lincoln’s left hand was gone.  His shattered fingers lay strewn across the marble floor.

 “Cross it off the list, and move on, Rick.”

 But he wasn’t alone any longer.  Nicky’s skull sat nestled in his lap.  Lincoln would never be alone.  He was the lucky one.
 “We’re done at the Lincoln Memorial, Rick.”

 I looked down at the list, and then felt it drop from my hand.  There was no reason to pick it up.  When you’re on the pathway to Hell, you don’t need a list.

 I looked one last time at Lincoln.  “Why’s he so sad, Nicky?”

 “He’s not sad, Rick.  He’s just so very tired.”

 I nodded.  I understood.

 Turning, I walked down the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and onto the street that led to the Arlington Memorial Bridge.  The path was chosen for me.  God had seen to that.  A deal had been struck.  When the last of Nicky was gone, and God was done with my punishment, He would give me up to the Aliens.  And after the Aliens had taken my bones, they would deliver me to Hell.

 The Aliens lined the street, over a hundred deep, and rose high above me so that only a narrow gray ribbon of sky was visible.  I walked down a bloodstained canyon, out over the Potomac, heading for the entrance to Hell.

 “It’s almost over now, Rick.”

 Nicky was right.  There were only five bones left in the backpack.  I was only five bones away from Hell.

Second Lumbar Vertebra
Day 712

 It wasn’t the river Styx, and Cerberus, the three-headed do that guarded the gates, was nowhere to be seen, but there was no doubt in my mind.  I had arrived.

 Nicky was little more than a distant whisper now, a stubby piece of backbone in the front pocket of my frayed blue jeans.  This would be the last spot, and my last day on Earth.  Tomorrow I would wake in Hell.  I welcomed it.

 For over a month now, I had walked in a red tunnel formed by the bodies of a trillion Aliens.  The sun had been little more than a diffuse amber glow, barely visible through their crystalline bodies.  But this morning the tunnel had opened.  That’s how I knew that I had arrived at the gates of Hell.

 Still standing at the exit of the crystal tunnel, I could smell salt water.  A cool breeze whipped at my shoulder-length hair.  Years ago, I had once stood on this very spot.  The huge span, the cables, and the brick towers were all so familiar.  But the roadbed of the Brooklyn Bridge was no longer paved with pothole-riddled cracked asphalt.  The final pathway that would take me to Hell was paved with bones.

 Stepping forward, I looked out across the East River.  The stone canyons of Manhattan were gone.  New York City had vanished, and in its place was a lone white pillar, dazzling white in reflected sunlight, reaching up into the sky.  It was a tombstone for the world.  This was where the Aliens had brought the bones of five billion dead.

 “You must go to the top, Rick,” Nicky whispered from my pants pocket.

 I had known that, the instant I had seen the pillar.  Before the Aliens would send me to Hell, they would first take my bones while I stood atop the dead world.

 “Now, Rick.”

 I stepped onto the bone-paved bridge.  The dead reached up for me, sucking the warmth from my body, and would have happily ripped out my soul had I still owned it.  I walked forward.

      #

 My hand shook, but I was able to touch the pillar.  Beneath a thin veneer of cold crystal were stacked the bones of a dead world.  It was perhaps a hundred feet in diameter, but even by craning my neck back, and peering up into the sky, I couldn’t tell how tall it was.  The pillar didn’t so much end, as simply blur and fade away.

 “Enter.”

 The voice was cold and emotionless.  It had not sounded like a voice that belonged to the dead, but more like the voice of something that had never lived.

 A panel of bone opened, revealing a tunnel that was bathed in chalk-white light.

 “Enter.”

 I didn’t look back.

 It was warm inside.  The air tasted dry and antiseptic.  I walked slowly, softly, running my hands along the sides of the tunnel, feeling the roughness of the walls that conformally covered the bones beneath.  The tunnel quickly ended at a small raised pedestal of red crystal.

 “Enter.”

 “I’m scared, Rick,” whispered Nicky.

 I stepped up onto the pedestal.  Above me, bored through this pillar of bone, was a shaft that rose into the milky-white light.
 “Hold.”

 From between my feet, a filament of red crystal extended itself, the slender stalk rising up to my waist, bisecting itself, then sprouting two hand-sized grips.  I grabbed hold.

 My stomach dropped, and my vision momentarily tunneled.  The bone wall of shaft sped by, rapidly transforming itself into a featureless sheet of white nothingness.

      #

 “Exit.”

 I stepped from the pedestal.  Bone reflected incandescent white in the stark sunlight.  Unflickering stars filled a black sky.
 “Where are we, Rick?”

 I walked forward to the edge of the pillar.  A nearly translucent crystal barrier that probably held in air and heat kept me from walking to the very edge and stepping off into the dark void.

 The Earth curved beneath me.  Blues, greens and whites ran to the distant horizon.  We were in space, perhaps a hundred miles up, standing on the bones of five billion people.  And as I watched the world below me, there was movement.  Like fireflies, but pulsing blood red, the Aliens swarmed upward.

 “You are the last.”

 I turned.

 Hovering before me was an Alien.  No different from any of the others, it gently bobbed and floated on invisible air currents.  Its rust-red eye, fully extended on its gossamer stalk, strained towards me.

 “You are the last,” it said again in the same cold and mechanical voice that had first told me to enter the pillar.

 I reached into my pocket, and pulled out Nicky’s second lumbar vertebra.  I offered the Alien my open hand.  Nicky’s last bone rested on my flat palm.

 “Take the bones from both of us, then send me to Hell,” I said.  I wanted it over.

 The Alien floated near, reached out its crystalline fingers for the piece of Nicky’s backbone, but then pulled its hand away.

 “We know nothing of Hell,” it said.

 The world turned crimson as Aliens swarmed around and over the tip of the pillar.

 “You made a deal with God.  In exchange for my bones, you’ll send me to Hell.”  It couldn’t possibly deny that.

 “We know nothing of God,” it said.

 My knees gave way, and I fell to the hard and knobby bone platform.  “Send me to Hell!”  I had to go.  In Hell there’d be others.  Nicky was leaving me, and God wouldn’t let me die.  If the Aliens didn’t send me to Hell, I’d be left here alone.  Alone forever.

 “There’s much work for you to do.”

 I was hearing the words, but there seemed to be no meaning associated with them.  “Work?”

 The Alien waved its stubby fingers, and a delicate crystalline tube grew from out of the platform’s surface.

 “Look,” it said.

 I stood, my knees still shaky, but managed to walk.  The crystalline tube looked like a telescope, and was aimed down toward the Earth, pointing somewhere eastward.  I peered into the eyepiece.

 There were fields of green and gold, white-watered rivers, and, almost hidden beneath autumn-colored trees, a small town.  And as I watched, the magnification of the telescope increased.  Smoke drifted up from the chimneys.  Cows grazed, and a flock of frightened sheep, kicking up a cloud of dust, darted across a dirt road.

 People filled the town square.

 People.

 Magnification again increased.  They wore bib overalls, turbans, flowing white robes, and some even rainbow-colored loincloths.  A pack of children, their skin color covering the spectrum from the palest of whites to the most ebony black, chased a mongrel-looking dog around a haystack.

 “Survivors,” I whispered.  I turned back to face the Alien.

 “You won’t be alone,” said Nicky, his voice sounding distant, but coming from the palm of my hand.  “God never intended that you should be alone.”

 “You are the last,” said the Alien.

 “How did they get there?” I asked.  I’d wandered the world for almost two years, certain that I was the only one left, the only one that had survived, with only Nicky for company.

 “Days after the human population was nearly destroyed, when we were certain that the few survivors would not continue to live unless they were gathered together, we made ourselves known, and brought the survivors to that village.”

 “Why didn’t you bring me?”  I asked, feeling the weight of the last two years pressing me into the bone beneath my feet.

 It hovered silently for several seconds, its stalk eye staring up, seeming to look past the trillions of crystalline bodies.  “Because you know,” it said, now looking back down at me.  “You know what it is to keep a promise to the dead.”  It reached out toward me with a closed fist.  “Just as we know hoe to keep a promise.”  It opened its hand, exposing a shard of rose-colored glass.  “Before your distant ancestors dropped down from the trees and walked across the savannas, we had almost destroyed ourselves.  Our world was different from yours, a place of ammonia seas and ice glaciers.  But, just like you, we had devised an almost infinite number of ways to annihilate ourselves.  We eventually used one of them.  The few survivors would have perished, but they were gathered up by an ancient race that had been watching over us, knowing that someday we might stumble and fall.  They gathered the crystalline husks of our dead, and assembled them into a pillar that reached toward the stars.  Living in the shadow of our bones, we never forgot the debt we owned that ancient race, or how someday, when we were able, we would pay them back.”

 “How?” I asked needlessly, certain that I already knew the answer.  I looked at the red-tinted glass in its hand.

 “Just before they left, they gave us a single bone.  It came from their own pillar, assembled for them, by an even more ancient race that had once saved them just as they had saved us.  They told us that their debt would be paid only when the last bone of their pillar was gone.  We understood, and knew what was required of us to pay our own debt.”  It held the rose-colored shard toward me.  “This is a husk splinter from our own pillar.”  Reaching forward, it dropped the shard into the palm of my hand, where it rested next to Nicky’s vertebra.  “Your debt will be repaid when this pillar no longer exists.”

 I looked down at my feet.  I stood on the remains of five billion people, which contained a trillion bones.

 “You know what it is to pay debts, to keep a promise to the dead.  That is why you are the one we’ve told this to.”

 “Can I ask you a favor?” I said.

 “Yes,” it answered.

 Placing the crystal husk in my pocket, I then held Nicky’s vertebra out toward the Alien.

 “Nicky?” I said quietly.

 He didn’t answer.

 “Nicky, you’ll see places that not even you dreamed of seeing.  Will you go with them?”

 “Thank you for keeping your promise,” whispered Nicky in a voice so faint that I could barely hear it.

 “Would you please take this with you?” I asked, offering Nicky’s second lumbar vertebra to the Alien.  It hovered near, and reaching down, plucked the bone from my hand.  It then floated upward, passing through the crystalline shield, and merged into the red whirlwind that spun around the tip of the pillar.

 “Good-bye, Nicky.”

 There was no answer.  Only the hard pinpricks of starlight shone down on me.  I walked back to the pedestal, knowing that it would take me back to the base of the pillar, and knowing that from there I would find that town that lay somewhere to the east.  As I took those few steps, two years of insanity, God and Hell, and even talking bones, seemed to evaporate like mist before the rising sun.

 Our pillar was built from a trillion bones.  The universe would be long dead and cold before we could save a trillion races.  But of course the Aliens knew that.  The debt could never by fully repaid.  Just like them, we would forever be in the shadow of bones.

 “Good-bye, Rick.”