Total destruction incarnate.
Short Story: THE LAST SERMON
Welcome to all new subscribers. Each month, I drop a short piece here—flash fiction, part of something longer. These stories stand alone, for the most part. But together they build into something else. A longer narrative about what's left when everything changes.
START
They were all pretty bad but Melvin was the worst. He wasn’t brainless like Rader, or angry like Wiley Oaks, and he wasn’t cold and clear-eyed like Janice. No, he had what they all had except he had it worse. He had devolved into something else. Melvin was philosophical about it, the elder statesmen of killing things.
He had his uses. In Dead Flag, he found a home: he could fight for hours outside the fence, methodically running those things down, skewering them, shooting and maiming and burning. We’d seen him drenched head to toe in blood, somehow immune from infection. We’d seen him carry bodies to the bonfire, what looked like people, corpses and amputated parts. He seemed to glide through it. Afterwards, he’d smoke cigarettes and sit with everyone. He wasn’t known to run his mouth, but when he did talk, it was always too much.
For example: ‘I’ve seen all sorts of things,’ he said one night, after some idiot asked. ‘I’ve seen enough to know. Those things don’t respond to anything except dying. They just stop. They’re worse than animals. They don’t know if they’re coming or going from this world. And they can destroy anything. They’ll destroy all this one day, all of us. Or they’ll force us to destroy it. I’ve seen it. I was up north for a while and I saw all sorts of…I saw infected folk locked in cages for months without food with no change. I guarded a place that was trying to fix them and nothing works. One time, I worked around a farm this fool had. He had dozens of them chained up, bits in their mouths like cattle, and he was using them to run a plough up and down a cornfield. But sooner or later every one of those places got fucked up because sooner or later those things bite or scratch something somewhere and that’s that. They’re just…destruction. Total destruction incarnate. You can’t outgun that. You can never be bigger than it.’
‘So why fucking bother then?’ said one of the men.
Melvin shrugged, took another pull on his drink.
End of sermon.
As pessimistic as he was, Melvin stayed busy. When Rader killed a woman in the camp, Melvin dragged him outside and knifed him. When a horde raided the west gate, he hacked at them, one at a time as they scrambled over, heading them off. He was a help until the day Mona admitted she could feel him coming, could feel his presence with the same touch she had for the infected.
Melvin knew what it meant.
That afternoon, he took himself outside to the pyre and laid himself out with a single shot.
END
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