I can’t think of where this came from, but I know that I first imagined the situation a long time ago(at least 12 years ago.) and I have a sneaking suspicion that my own imagination isn’t the orginal source. Is it from a story/tv show/movie, that I watched or read then mostly forgot about? If not, I have an idea for a short story…but I’d hate to find out that I was just further remembering something!
There’s a Choose Your Own Adventure book that has this as the premise. I don’t recall the title, but the idea was that you wake up and go outside and everyone else in the world was just…gone. No magical bathtub was involved, though, as I recall.
The being in the bath tub, at the end of humanity, is the thing I’m specifically wondering about. There are lots of stories about just being the last one alive, but…bathtubs are key. The choose your own adventure book is a good suggestion, but that wasn’t it, since I only read 4 in my childhood, and all of them involved being girls from sword and socery type fantasy lands…
I don’t know if it’s real or not, but if it isn’t, I think you should write it. Man, that would be a cool, if trippy, story. Hehe, magical bathtubs. I’m serious, here, I’d buy it if you had it published!
don’t know, but if you think it’s a kids’ book you should definitely check the “stumpers” section of http://www.logan.com/loganberry You can also post it if it’s not on there—I’ve solved many a crisis this way!
There’s a classic Twilight Zone or Outer Limits where a teller in a bank is eating his lunch in the bank vault when a nuclear war hits. He survives because he’s in the vault, but everybody else is gone. Not lying around dead, gone.
Then there’s the Classic Trek episode where Kirk finds himself on a replica of the Enterprise with the fairy princess from a world where they have no diseases left to keep the population down.
The bath-tub key doesn’t sound familiar. But it would make a good story. Go for it.
The story similar to that which has always stuck out in my mind is an old TV-movie with Peter Graves called “Where Have All the People Gone?” He was digging around in a cave with his kids, there was a solar pulse of some kind and when they came out everyone had been turned to dust. Except for a few survivors they found here and there who had also been protected.
One of the characters from The Quiet Earth was in the process of being drowned when the guy holding him under the water disappeared along with almost everyone else on earth. He wasn’t the main character, but that may be what you were remember. I can’t recall if the drowning was in a bathtub or something else.
Let me recommend the movie, by the way. Very freaky premise, and good suprise ending. Strange to watch, sort of like Castaway, in that there are large parts without any of the sounds that usually populate the world.
There was another Twilight Zone episode like that.
A guy just finds himself walking down a road, with no memory of where he is or even who he is. He stops at a diner to find it empty- But there’s stuff frying on the stove, a jukebox playing, as if they had just disappeared. Later, he ventures down the road more, still not knowing who he is, to find himself in a completely abandoned town. Eventually, he starts to flip out, and it turns out he’s hallucinating- In actuallity, he’s locked inside some box as part of a military experiment to prepare him for lonliness on the moon. Pretty funky.
That was the pilot episode of Twilight Zone. But you forgot the ultimate kicker at the end…the twist that makes it truly Twilight Zone.
While he’s in the abandoned town, he goes to the movie theater and looks around. At the box office, there’s a ticket sticking out of the machine, so he takes it and puts it in his pocket.
Of course, ultimately the NASA types realize that the isolation experiment has made him go bonkers, and they open up the isolation chamber and drag him out to the Funny Farm. Everything he “experienced” was just his overactive imagination reacting to the sensory deprivation, you see.
But as he’s being taken away, he reaches into his pocket…and there’s the movie ticket stub!
I’m pretty sure there was a sit-com of all things based on this idea on British TV somewhere between 10 and 15 years ago but I can’t remember its name, or who was in it. I think the main character was saved from the calamity that befell just about everyone else by being completely submerged in water for the second or so it took to do its deadly work, having just dived into a swimming pool.
Only other shower/bath link I can think of is that the cyrogenic freezing booths in Red Dwarf looked kinda like shower cubicles, and the time frame would be about right.
There’s also the book Earth Abides, in which a fatal disease wipes out (nearly) everyone, except one man who was away in his mountain cabin when the disease struck.
