My knocks were unanswered, hollow reverberation signals my arrival. I open the door slowly, fearful to see what is beyond the threshold of the small house. I walk in to see him on his gray couch, reflecting his skin, stark and cold. He is slowly drawing from a large cigar, quiet, almost stoic in appearance. He doesn’t say a word, only drags on his cigar, looking distantly at the wall in front of him. The room oppresses me, I don’t know what it is but I almost physically hurt from the pressure of the silence. He never looks at me, just sits quietly. I see a bottle of scotch, half empty, and a glass sitting on the table. He is pale, his eyes drawn almost into the back of his skull; he is wearing a dirty white tank top, stained with yellow sweat in the pits, his black hair recklessly drawn across his forehead.
“Dean! Where is Sherrie?” I ask, wrecking the disturbing silence that filled the room. No answer.
“Dean, hey man, are you okay?” Again, no answer.
Then, suddenly, I hear it. The wretched snarls of something otherworldly. Something angry and deadly. The pounding on the walls, the pictures of Dean and his wife Sherrie jump off the wall, as if possessed by some unknown demon.
Suddenly a blood freezing scream erupts from the room, bubbling almost, roiling from the door of the master bedroom. Dean raises his glass to his mouth, says nothing, he just drinks while staring at the wall.
Again a scream rips through the small house. I look to Dean. This time his face twists into a horrendous mix of sadness and anger. He stands, reaches into his waistband and retrieves a small revolver, and succinctly shatters my fragile grasp on my composure with five haunting words.
“Oh God, please forgive me…”
He walks to the door, slowly opens it, and immediately a wretched, deformed version of Sherrie bursts out. Seething with blood lust and a fervent need for flesh, she ripped at his neck, biting and clawing. He pushes her back, his eyes full of tears, his face red with sorrow, and puts his gun to her head.
Nearly inaudibly he whispers, “I love you.” Then he pulls the trigger. The bullet rips through her forehead immediately stopping her attacks. Her body drops to the floor lifelessly. His wife of two months dies in front of him, a shell of her former self, and the life inside of her is pulled away with the hollow point slug as it creates a path through the walls of the house.
He turns and looks at me and asks the one question I have no answer to. “What’s life worth if I’ve lost her?” He then raises the gun, closes his eyes, and fires a single shot through his temple.
A shattered world that I am merely a fragment in I stand rocked to the foundation. I look upon the lifeless bodies of my two best friends, reeling with the agonizing realization of the uselessness of our resistance to this unrelenting apocalyptic force of death and disparity to mankind.
Broken I turn and walk out the front door, I look to the blinding sun, I feel the breeze, I smell the warm fragrance of the decaying autumn leaves. I look upon the dying world and feel its putrid breath gust against my skin. I reach to my hip and find comfort in my own pistols grip. I walk out into the dead world beyond and defy death at its own door. This rotten putrid world greets me with is malevolent hatred for hope, and my resistance teases it’s unrelenting evil born of hell itself. I step into the unknown, ready for anything, hoping for nothing.
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