The Last Day of A Dead Man.
It was late October, three hundred and something days into the apocalypse, I’d lost count. I stumbled home as usual, my one arm outstretched, groaning, drooling, and blood dripping from somewhere? I wasn’t entirely sure where at this point. When I entered through the frame of what had been the, now overgrown, coffee shops glass door. Instinct failed me as I no longer felt the typical sensations of being watched. No hairs standing on end, no chill up my back. A chill would have been a lovely change of pace from constant crippling starvation, anything would be a nice change for my rotting remains. No, instead I continued blundering about with what little control I had left of my body until I collapsed on one of the peeling leather couches, proceeding to gnaw at some poor sod’s rib that I found lying nearby. The grinding sound went through me, but it made for a good toothpick. Of course, this wasn’t really home. There was no son to throw himself at me as I come through the door, no wife to kiss me and say, “welcome home honey”. I could hardly remember that home anymore, it was long dead.
I was interrupted from my absent-minded daydreaming by the crack of boots on skeletal remains. I rolled my head from its usual resting place on my shoulder and my jaw dropped as I turned to find the black chasm of a shotgun barrel. It literally dropped; it had been broken for a while. The poor lad behind the barrel was trembling, could’ve been the cold, could’ve been fear but his face wasn’t showing it. He was all skin and bone and almost as pale as me. His eyes were sunken and dark. He mustn’t have slept in a week. He had a gash in his side and a bite on his arm and his shoulder length blond hair was matted with blood. He didn’t have long left before he turned, he already looked like one of us. I think he looked a lot like how my son would have looked if he had survived. I couldn’t remember exactly what he had looked like before, but I did remember his death. I remembered ripping my son’s throat out after I turned. Throwing my wife aside as she shielded him with her body. Blood everywhere, pure deranged hunger. I was trapped, just watching helpless in my own body as I killed my family. There wasn’t enough of either of them left for them to turn. I was helpless now too. So I just stared. Doomed to watch as I either I killed this kid or he killed me. Even with his hands shaking like the branches of the trees outside that little red shotgun shell was going straight in my cranium. To him I was a threat. I stared at this kid who could so easily have been mine and all I had was one thought. Lunch.
About the Piece
The last day of a dead man was a piece I wrote as a challenge in my first year of university. We were tasked with writing a short story in 500 words and I chose to write of the last moments of a dead man. I wanted to ask the readers who is the dead man? the zombie or the boy? I wanted the voice of the piece to be the zombie, again building on my experience writing from the perspective of the villain as I had in other pieces. However, with such a small word limit there was little world building to be done so I took a lot of tweaking and editing, and has become a piece I would like to revisit in the future because of how much I had to cut out to meet the challenge requirements.