Twas A Good Day To Die
by: Jonathan Antony Strickland
A roaring fire crackles and cackles as the wood is consumed within the flames contained within the old brick fireplace. The fires purpose is a simple one, to heat the small candlelit room that houses it, the candlelight illuminating all that the fires light does not touch. The windows have been boarded up with thick sturdy planks of wood so no natural light can enter. The room itself is fairly sparse, the odd painting of hills and fields placed here and there add a slight homely look that of late has been missing. Around each picture silver and gold tinsel hangs and various other small Christmas decorations shine and sparkle on the large wooden mantelpiece that stands in the middle of the room. Just in front of the fire an old green leather chair has been placed, and upon it a middle aged man sits alone.
He’s dressed in an old blue suit that twenty years before he’d worn to his wedding. A few years ago he would have no doubt not been able to squeeze himself into the suit, but of late, these last three years, he has lost quite a considerable amount of weight.
He looks up at the single photograph of his wife he keeps on the mantelpiece and gives a sigh. Although he misses her and would do anything to get her back, he knows deep down that it is better she is dead. At least her death had been fast, and she’d only witnessed the horrors for the first year.
In his lap he holds two half’s of a yellow and pink Christmas-cracker, the smell of its powder still filling his nostrils. He’d meant to give it to the girl before her bedtime, but the stress of it all had made him forget.
The contents of the cracker remain inside the cheap cardboard tubing. Reaching down to examine this contents he finds a red paper party hat and a small piece of paper with a joke written upon it. He places the party hat on his head and reads the joke inside the cracker that he'd just seconds before pulled by himself. Like with all jokes contained within Christmas crackers, it was but a simple pun, but it still brought a smile to his face.
He then reaches down to his right and fumbles about on the floor until his fingers tenderly search out a large glass of sherry he placed there ten minutes earlier. He sloshes the sherry around inside of the glass, observing closely as tiny specs of white dissolve into the liquid. Once he is satisfied, he raises the glass of sherry to his lips and downs it in one. The taste is a lot bitterer than normal, but that's only to be expected. Still, the pill would have tasted a lot worse had he just taken it straight with a glass of water.
As he lays his weary head back onto the cool leather, he hears them. The moans and scratching outside are getting louder now. He pours himself another glass of sherry, only this time he adds no suicide pill into it. It tastes a lot better!
They'll be through no doubt very soon, but it doesn't matter. The defences that for the last three years he'd repaired constantly have now been left these last few days to the hundreds of clawed hands and rotten flesh tearing teeth.
He gives a disdainful look to the door that the things will no doubt break through. Then he looks to the door that leads off to the bedrooms. The door to were the child lays. A deep sadness grips him as his mind races over yet again what he has planned these last few days leading up to Christmas. Ever since that day when the world changed and the nightmares descended upon civilization, the struggle to survive had been nigh on impossible, and perhaps even pointless. After all, what was the point of living when you spent every day hiding, searching for food or fighting with other survivors over it as the horrors grew in number and humanity dwindled until the last few remaining had committed crimes so horrible against each other that they were now less than human themselves. Perhaps even less than animals, though he at least had not sunk so low.
At least that is for now. He dreaded to think what might happen if he was to continue on. Surely with all he'd been through something would give eventually and then insanity would take him.
He had coped better in the beginning, being one of the lucky ones, surviving the first few weeks without too much distress, managing to protect himself and his wife from the mutilation and death that the hordes of filth dealt out as they spread like a plague over the world.
But one day, over a year after that fateful day, after finding a building that could house the pair of them comfortably, a year of setting up defences to hold back the things, a year of surviving times of almost starving to death, escaping the claws and fangs, overcoming colds and disease, keeping each other sane, and at times even happy. After over a year of struggle she had died.
He wasn't sure how exactly it happened. They had been on a hunt for food together, and while exploring a building he had fallen through an old wooden floor that had rotted and collapsed beneath his weight. He had had been knocked unconscious and all he remembered as he regained his senses was seeing her rushing over to him covered in blood, holding her neck and stomach, trying to stem the flow of her blood as it pumped out from two large wounds. There was no doubt that she had been caught by one of the creatures that must have been hidden in the house, and as he caught her in his arms her last words as she died where for him not to worry as she'd slain the horrid thing.
For the next year and a half he survived by himself. It was a hard thing indeed being alone for so long, missing her every moment. Even with the world in the state it was he always felt that as long as they had each other then some form of life could be lived. Christmas time was the worst for him, for it was on a Christmas day, twenty two years before, that the two had first met. Because of this it had always been an extra special time for them, and the two would always spend it together, curled up on a couch in their home, watching modern films, old films, comedy specials, and even old re-runs of comedy shows. Laughing together, drinking wines and spirits, and being very much in love.
God he missed her laugh!
It was that first Christmas without her that he really gave serious thought to ending his life. It was an easy thing for him to make the suicide pill, making it potent, deadly and painless. For before the world had turned to horror, he had been a chemist. All it took was for him to find the right chemical ingredients from the deserted buildings from which he scavenged, one of which had been the very chemists he had worked in before this new lifestyle was forced upon him.
It was however that while on his macabre task to end his own life in this painless way, and hopefully not get caught by the things and be ripped limb from limb while doing so, that he found the girl.
In the beginning, the time when the hoards had first appeared seemingly out of nowhere, descending on the world, killing all before them, it had been the young and the old who had suffered worse. The old too feeble to fight or hide away, and children, even the ones that still had their parents to protect them proved easy targets. You had to be quiet you see, though certain noises seemed to attract the terrors more readily than others. A child crying in the night seemed to drive the things into a manic blood lust, drawing them to the spot in terrible numbers. And once the things had gathered into a crowd, with a scent to track, then it became almost impossible to keep them out. And of course once they had broken in then there was very little you could do except fight for your life and pray that death came quickly.
So when he had first come across the girl, curled up in dirty rags and covered in the blood of her dead mother and father, her eyes wide and her body shaking, whimpering and teary faced, he was ashamed to admit that his first thought was to leave her to her fate. No doubt if he had, then one of the creatures would eventually find her and kill her. He'd even found himself trying to reason with himself that perhaps it would be for the best, after all it was pretty obvious that her two parents had died protecting her, their slashed and ripped bodies lying not far from her, proving that a
creature or creatures had been here earlier, and he'd assumed she must have ran as the terrible slaughter had occurred, only returning once the things had moved on.
But in the end his conscience had kicked in and he'd taken the girl with him.
It was several hours before the girl spoke to him and told him of her parent’s deaths. He'd been surprised at how the girl dealt with the whole horrible situation, talking in a "matter of fact" kind of way without any sadness in her voice. A hardness in one so young seemed odd to him, but no doubt it had been brought on by nearly a quarter of a life spent running from nightmares. He learned from her that he had been wrong about her parent’s deaths, and it had not been the monsters that had killed them. The truth was much worse for it had been a gang of seven men out scavenging who had happened upon the three. They had demanded all that they had from her mother and father, and when presented with the first form of opposition from her father, had callously murdered him, hacking him to death. Her mother had screamed at her to run as the men closed on the pair. She heard her mother's screams behind her, mixed with the men's laughter and lewd comments, but she never looked back.
She'd hid away for several hours, returning only when she felt it was safe to do so. And that was when she found the bodies.
In the next few weeks together he cared for her, fed her, clothed her and gave her her own room in his house that he'd turned into a fortress on the outside to keep the bad things out. They slowly got to know each other, and no doubt now, after one and a half years of living with him, she saw him not as a replacement parent, but a guardian and a friend. And it was because of this that he felt that what he'd done was all the more worse.
Even as the pill began to take effect and his fingers and toes grew numb, he had to reassure himself again and again that what he had done was for the best. He could not do it you see, not face another Christmas, that time of year when before the nightmare, people were at their happiest. He'd been at his happiest, with his wife by his side. Even having the responsibility of the child, which at first had put off his own suicide, was now no longer bearable. So he had decided that this Christmas would be his last.
But there was of course one problem. The girl! Even though safe now, and that tough attitude of hers showed her to be far stronger of will than a child of her age should be, the little girl still screamed for her mother every night in her sleep.
He could not just leave her to the things outside and so had taken the decision that on this night before sending her to bed with a glass of powdered warm milk mixed with water, as he did every night, this night he would add one of his deadly pills into her drink.
His arms and legs now were numb as tears filled his eyes. Half an hour ago he had crept up to her bedroom and peeped inside. The silence inside the room as he listened was the worst feeling he had ever experienced, but perhaps she just breathed quietly, so he had gone over to where she lay. He knew then that the drug had worked, the bed-sheets lay still, no breathing beneath, and as he inched closer he caught a glimpse of her face, cold and lifeless. He turned quickly and left, that brief glimpse had shattered his very soul as questions flooded his brain as to what he had done.
After that there had been no going back. For how could he live with himself?
As the final stages of the drug took effect and his life began to leave him, he wondered what price he would pay for committing such a heinous act. For most of his life, when things had been normal, he had been a believer in God. Though he did not tie himself down to any particular faith, he believed that an all knowing force existed. Once however the invasion of the horrors destroyed all of civilisation, and the way his wife had been so cruelly taken from him, he had questioned his original beliefs, how could an all seeing, all knowing God, let such monstrous events happen.
His penultimate thought as he died was one of anger. If he'd originally had been right and a greater power of good and evil did indeed exist, then he would not fear to stand trial for his crime. In fact he would take great pleasure in looking those two divine deities squarely in the eye. For if any shame was to be attached to what he'd been forced to do, then it was the "all seeing" and "all knowing ones" who would have to answer to him.
And if he was not happy with their explanations then he would grab one by his big long gray beard, the other by his snaking serpent tail and tie an unbreakable knot with the two, for those two swine's where no doubt one and the same and deserved each other.
Still, it didn't matter now, for once the barricades were down, the horrors would enter. But at least they would find no fresh flesh within.
And with that last thought, the man died.
THE END