Weekly Short Story: They Don't Make Life Like They Used To by Alfred Bester

Back in October I discussed a short story of Alfred Bester titled Time is the Traitor...click on the title link to read it.  He also wrote a remarkable tale in 1963, They Don't Make Life Like They Used To, which appeared in the anthology Isaac Asimov Presents the Great SF Stories 25 (1963) (DAW Books)...

From 1963's vantage point it is eighteen years into the future, way off there in 1981.  The location is Midtown Manhattan, more on the East Side and Central Park area...but that's where any sense of reality quickly departs.  A young woman lives there and has been convinced for the last five years...following the worldwide nuclear holocaust...that she is the only remaining human alive.  She makes use of all the stores around and always leaves IOU notes whenever she takes something.  In spite of her isolation she seems to have survival down to an art...that is, until one day she runs into a man.  The two of them, both likeable folks, engage in a lot of sidebar banter that reminded me of Bogart and Hepburn in the movie The African Queen and is equally endearing.  In the background they hear buildings collapsing from time to time, and the birds seems to be mimicking in their songs something harsh and metallic sounding.  What this means comes down on them in a terrifying ending...one that might cause nightmares for the squeamish...

When I was a little kid I always equated science fiction with "scary movies"...yet I rarely come across a short story or novel from this genre that inspires any degree of fright.  Not so with They Don't Make Life Like They Used To: it jolted me, to say the least.  Oh, one other thing about this and many other apocalyptic stories from this time: there is a tendency, when people are wandering around in isolation like in this tale of Alfred Bester or in that Twilight Zone episode when Burgess Meredith stumbles around the ruins of the big city, to never run across any of the myriad dead bodies that in a real apocalypse would be lying around all over the place. It's as if in dying in such a catastrophe, your body simply vanishes...well, in a direct nuclear hit, it just might...

I looked around the Internet and couldn't find any public domain access to this story...but if you have the chance to read it, by all means do so.  Unless, that is, you're prone to nightmares...