Rot. Rot is all you can smell. Decay crawls the walls of your house, death where once was life. Red taints your hands, yours or theirs or projected by the tormented mind. Your flesh is a furrowed soil on the arms where your nails have dug like a plough, but pain is a memory as distant as that of a human’s touch. You wonder how it came to this. You could have never foreseen yourself yearning to hear that damned knock on your door once more. Yet here you are, in the rotten cage of your own shelter in the midst of the scorched earth, deserted as you had always desired and sick out of your mind with exhaustion, infection or isolation.

You lift yourself from your bed. The hollow shell of your body sways gently on long legs that don’t feel like your own as they drag you through the house. No grisly vision or ghastly apparition can peer at you from behind the boarded-up doors of the empty rooms or the closed blinds of the hallway windows, but your mind remembers, stores them all in a neat compartment, forever at your undesired disposal. You try not to ponder them too much. No recollection should bring the dead back to life, you reckon, and in your heart you hope and despair it all the same.

Enveloped in a haze, you vaguely register your own movements, your thoughts, a tangled mess of emotions you cannot pinpoint, let alone give a name to, all muffled and distorted like sound traveling underwater. Whatever’s happening to you is slow and painless, yet part of your soul dreads it still. You never were particularly fond of change, no matter how welcome it could appear in this newfound stagnation of the end of the world.

You find yourself facing the main door, which had never seemed to you as large as it does at this moment. Somewhere along the way you must have shed your clothes, or perhaps you’ve already given them up at a point in time way past your recollection—a fitting state of indecency for what’s become of you. Your sledgehammer heart pumps heavy in your chest, crashing against your ribcage with a force so severe it threatens to break it out of its prison of flesh and bone. It terrifies you, what you’re about to do, yet in a way you have found that once anything else ceases to exist, the unthinkable suddenly becomes the only thing left for you to crave, be it in search of solace, closure or retribution.

Your fingers brush and wrap around the doorknob, their grip hesitant. A trembling breath escapes from between your chapped lips. For the last time you look over your shoulder at the dusty hallway of what was once home to you. Despite everything—all the pain and bitterness festering within you that he failed to take with him the day of his departure—this place held you well, and you thank it for that, and hope that once it burns it may burn quick, taking with it the sins that weigh you down as you twist your hand and step out into the outside world.

Stiffly and slowly you step with bare feet over your doorstep and down the path. Hot dried earth and gravel split your skin, your soles leaving bloody prints from your house all the way over to the field. Thick night air smells of ashes and sulphur, so heavy and stifling it is. The trees and the oceans can only withstand the heat waves for so long, you think, and thus so does your kind. As your time slowly runs out, you can only pray to whomever may listen that you are not the last one left, for that burden feels too much for your already heavy heart to carry.

You inspect with your restless eyes the barren wasteland of your surroundings. Black incinerated skeletons of buildings have shed their wooden and brick and concrete walls in the fire of the scorching daylight or this of the human wrath, and remain haunting like some grotesque crops of this new hellish soil, sprouting from among the dry yellow grass and hovering forlorn on the horizon. Far and wide as your eye can see it is only this that remains of any human settlement. Your area had never been lively populated and you liked that about it, yet even so this sad mockery of its previous form stirs within you a vague sense of what you hesitantly recognize as grief. All in all, your house somehow held out well amongst the otherwise all-consuming mayhem and destruction, and you cannot help but ask yourself if it is merely by a stroke of luck or had there been some other forces at play, beyond your painfully narrow scope of comprehension.

You press on deeper into the field, letting yourself be steadily overtaken by a gentle feeling of strange serenity, unexpected as it may be in your predicament; and as the path ahead narrows and the withered and dried brown crops grow thicker around you, there you see it. Standing tall, lanky and pale as death, the intruder appears to have been expecting you, skinny arms open as if in invitation, its twisted visage wearing that same lopsided smile it always put on first at your door. You halt your steps and let yourself be seen, and it lets you see itself in return, and so you stand there like motionless reflections on either side of an invisible mirror, both still and bare and out of place in the world which for all you know might by now only be housing the two of you.

“Alone at last”, the pale visitor cocks its head and hums. “Came to reap what you sow?” 

“Have you been waiting long?” You hardly recognize your voice as the words flow out of you, smooth despite your vocal cords’ prior prolonged idleness. A realization dawns on you and you feel a primal pull in the pit of your stomach, yet your outer shell remains unmoved.

“Not us, no. But you? Look what became of you. Seems that whatever you’ve been hiding under that cold skin of yours finally crawled its way out.”

In your head you seek words to answer it, but find yourself at a loss. It does not wait to hear you either. It closes in on you and you hear its bones cracking, you see the folds in its skin shifting as it tries to slip off of whatever grotesque form it’s concealing. The creature’s body arches over yours, drowning you in its shadow, and as you look into its eyes you can see they’re black and lifeless. Its bony hands cup your face—you wonder if this is how they held the soldier’s head before it was lopped off—firm and bruising, its fingers worming their way across your skin, pushing up your cheeks and underneath the lines of your lower eyelids and along the sides of your nose, exploring and attempting to mold you to their liking.

“Teeell me. What goes through your head? Are you scared? Hopeless? It’s quite a display of madness, you know, coming out here. Or did that empty house become too stifling?”

“Why haven’t you come?” Your mind reaches back to its nightly visits, its countenance stretched unnaturally as you watched it through the peephole, the ominous threats and promises it planted in your head on every occasion, intrusive thoughts that crawled within your brain ever since its first “You alone?”. Patiently it awaited a moment of your weakness, stalking outside your window night by night. For some time you believed it the only constant in your new excuse of a life; until it stopped, leaving you with a lingering sense of dread, of knowing it is still out there, painfully absent yet always a threat looming just beyond your field of view, or so you thought.

“You know”, it leans in close and smiles and you take it in, the ghostly white of its teeth and the bloodshot red of its eyes—irregularly patterned veins split and sprawl across the spherical surface, wriggling like the maggots and other fruit of rot overgrown inside the fortress of your skull—and its phosphorescent skin—it quivers faintly, restless in anticipation, and you recognize its longing, for it pulses the same within you—and its breath creeping across your skin, “We wanted to see. How far you’d go. How long until you caved in. I’ve enjoyed you.”

“Why?”

“You know this too. You feeeel it, don’t you?”

Long fingers lock around your wrist and pull it up, thumb dipping into the curve of your inner palm. It traces every bloodstain on your skin, those you can see and those you can’t, its pale white upon your ashen red, and you feel its gaze bore into you still as it prods at your brain, teasing around all the memories you’d fought so hard to push down. Suddenly you are aware of the sharp sting behind your eyes and the quiet ringing in your ears, the goosebumps on your arms and the dryness in your mouth, of the grime beneath your ragged fingernails and the dull ache in your chest.

“Your kind is not for this world. Not any more than mine. You’ve a void in you where your nightmares come from, and you let it consume everything you touch.”

You twitch and immediately its hand is back on your face, holding it in place as it speaks into your mouth, eyes peering into yours from beneath drooping eyelids.

“The void in me knows the void in you. You called out to us, and we answered.”

“I’ve not called for anybody. Just… wanted all of it, all of you to go away.”

“I know. And yet here you are. Funny, isn’t it? The moment I failed to come to you, you have come to me. I wonder.”

Its other hand brushes against your chest and you expect your body to recoil, just as it did countless times before from touches like this, but something deep within soothes you. You don’t want it, you think, but you feel that thought slipping away as you fight to hold onto it, and this struggle within your mind takes all strength from the body you inhabit. An echo of the intruder’s touch travels down your torso until its hand rests flat on your stomach, gentle but threatening.

“It’s all been coming down to this”, you hear it say, its voice trickling down your throat. “So what are you here for? To face me, or yourself?”

“I’m not like you.”

“And whose blood is that on your hands? How much of it have you shed within those four walls of yours? How many lives lost to your whims?”

Its grin widens and it croaks out a thing beyond description with any words you have come to know in your life. Fingers which previously kept their tight grip on your face now crawl through your hair. And as it whispers,

“Some human you are”,

a cold wave washes over you, bubbles up your throat and you realize through the pain that you’re smiling, and that whatever sound or word just spilled out of you in return was heard, for the pale face tilts curiously, its eyes still empty but different somehow; and looking back at it now you feel nothing but acceptance, ice cold but welcoming in the heat.

For the last time you look to the skies, and it allows you to—its singular act of kindness towards any living creature, you realize—cradling the back of your head as it falls back like one would a newborn’s. It lowers itself and its teeth graze your neck, but instead of the pain of a deadly bite you feel its face press into the space between your chin and the line of your collarbones, somehow fitting within it perfectly. Something rips and searing pain blossoms down in your stomach as it forces its way inside you, long digits pushing their way up through your insides, and you writhe and grab onto whatever’s within your reach, clinging to the creature’s skinny shoulders as you unravel. Agony clouds your vision but still you can see, and as you gaze off into the distance, your mouth falls agape and releases a sigh soaked in pain and awe.

In the distance a pale line rises up on the horizon, a soft glow pulsating below like incoming rapture, rising slowly until first deadly rays swoop over the land, their brightness blinding you as warmth spills from your eyes—and for a moment your heart beats faster again in elation, until a large cold hand closes around it and squeezes.