Being God -- just 2400 words! Hurray!

[Moraven]

Darrent sat in the shade of the young oak, eating an apple and wondering when he would have to kill Sarah. Grass stretched before him like a green blanket, shot through with clusters of wildflowers and raspberry bushes. The pond--the reason they’d stopped their cross-country trek in the middle of what used to be Michigan--sat off to his left. A soft breeze rippled the surface, splashing waves over Sarah’s face as she swam.

Grinning, Darrent tucked his hands behind his head and watched. Sarah’s powerful strokes propelled her naked body through the water with an ease that he envied--despite that she couldn’t kick with her legs. Darrent had grown up in Chicago, back when Chicago was still a city full of people, not a graveyard full of corpses. He’d learned how to live life on the streets, but missed out on the rural life that Sarah had enjoyed. He could swim, of course; it was just ugly.

His grin wasn’t for the fact that Sarah was naked. He’d seen her enough times that it no longer held that immediate thrill. No, his grin was because she suspected nothing, and that would make his job all the easier.

Christina sat down next to him, holding two more apples, and brushed her blonde hair out of her eyes. “Well, you look like you’re enjoying yourself.”

Darrent laughed. He reached over and plucked a second apple from Christina’s hand. “I am. This is a beautiful world we’ve got. How could I be doing anything but enjoying myself?”

“You’ve got me there.” Christina bit into the apple with a soft crunch. “Judging by the orchard behind us, and how clean that water looks, we could stay here for a long time. We’d have to build a shelter of some sort, but that wouldn’t be too hard. That storm two days ago knocked down a lot of trees. Should be easy enough to build a cabin out of them.”

Darrent snorted. “Listen to you. You act like building a house is no big deal.”

“Is it?”

“I was a clerk, Chrissie, at Seven-Eleven. Not a construction worker.” Darrent stood and twisted his arms around to stretch his back. “I say we keep moving, find some place where they’ve already got houses. Then we just move on in, take the place over, and don’t have to do anything ourselves.”

Christina frowned. “Any place like that could be contaminated, Darrent. If not with chemical weapons, then with radiation poisoning. Plus disease from the bodies. We can’t take that chance.”

Darrent watched as Sarah wadded out of the water, limping on her right leg, sunlight glinting off her skin. She smiled up at him and began to towel dry. Darrent clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. “We’ll go near the outskirts of a city and find some little farming town that was abandoned. The armies will have ignored it, so we don’t have to worry about that, and there shouldn’t be many bodies if the people cleared out.”

“Which city?”

“I don’t know. Somewhere south.” Darrent shrugged. “I figure we could make for Atlanta, or maybe even head west toward Phoenix. If we can find a car it won’t even take long to get there. Then we don’t have to deal with the elements while we get things going again.”

Christina laughed. “By things, you mean people.”

“Of course.” After the war, after the bombs and missiles and envelopes full of one powder or another, everyone thought the world would die. The last few weeks of fighting had been bleak, dark, as everyone expected that this time it had just been too much--Earth couldn’t sustain itself with the damage Man had inflicted. And, in a way, that had been true. But it turned out that the Earth could keep on going just fine; it was Man who couldn’t sustain himself.

Darrent had left Chicago long before things got as hot and heavy as they did in late May. He’d seen it coming and figured he had nothing to lose. His uncle had taken him in near the Michigan state line, and they’d waited it out. Waited for the armies to reduce themselves to nothing and the air to grow quiet again. It had, around Christmas of that year, just before Darrent’s uncle had developed an infection from a cut on his hand. He’d spent a month growing delirious and wallowing in fever, then finally succumbed.

It hadn’t taken Darrent long to fall in with Christina and Sarah; they’d come to his door, staggering down the interstate, and practically mobbed him when they’d found him alive. They’d waited out the winter playing cards and having sex--getting ready to repopulate the world, Darrent told them--and recently set out to see if anyone else had made it.

“So we keep going west?” Christina asked as Sarah walked up, jarring Darrent from his reverie.

Darrent nodded, smiling a greeting to Sarah. Her dark hair plastered against her skull with the weight of the water. He let his gaze drift down to her right leg, eyeing the swelling, and he decided it would have to be soon, perhaps even tonight, that he killed her. “Yeah. We’ll hook south as much as we can and keep our eyes open for a car. The armies blew up a lot of them, but there are bound to be some left.” He touched Sarah’s shoulder. “How was the water?”

She leaned in a kissed him lightly; she always had been more attached than Chrissie. “Great. You should have come.”

“I hate swimming.” He nodded at her shoes, sitting next to the oak. “Get ready. We’ve still got a few hours before nightfall, and I’d like to make as much distance as possible.”

They began walking, not saying much, marching a slow but steady beat along the center of the highway. Darrent still felt strange--somehow powerful--walking down the centerline. As if thumbing his nose at civilization’s ideals and laws. All the sheets of paper left in Washington meant about as much now as the speed limit signs still posted along the road. He and Christina stopped occasionally to wait for Sarah; even with a walking stick, her pace had been slowing with every mile.

The land rose and fell slightly as they walked, but hardly enough to notice unless Darrent looked at the horizon. Trees lined the fields, leaves and grass still flourishing. Flora had been wiped out near the population centers, where the fighting had been the most intense, but out here it ran on even more vibrantly without the hazards of carbon monoxide or discarded bags of garbage. Human life had been holding nature back, but in the months since humanity had all but ceased to exist, the earth had roared back with a flourish. The sun dropped steadily, washing amber and orange over the horizon.

Sarah raised a hand and pointed. “This looks good, doesn’t it?” She looked at Darrent immediately, eyes hoping for approval. The small house at the end of her finger stared back with dark windows.

“Sure, hon. As long as old man Thompson didn’t stick around to die in the back room.”
Sarah’s face screwed up in a grimace. “You think he may have?”

“We can’t know ‘til we check.” The biological warfare had spread disease on an untold scale, worse even than the Black Death, and left almost no one untouched. Darrent hadn’t seen another person alive--save for Chrissie and Sarah--since leaving his uncle’s.

As it turned out, the house had been abandoned. It was a one-story deal with two bedrooms in the back, a kitchen in the east, and a compound living room and dining room in the west. They scouted it out thoroughly, wearing gas masks they’d lifted from dead soldiers, before declaring it safe.

Darrent did a bit of foraging and planning while Chrissie and Sarah looked for clean sheets for one of the beds. The foraging was for food; the planning was for murder.

Boxes lined the far wall of the basement, and Darrent began sorting through them, telling himself it was for Sarah’s own good. And humanity’s. Ever since she’d twisted her ankle stepping over a rock wall, she hadn’t been able to keep up. Darrent figured it had to be broken, though Sarah did put a little weight on it. She was holding them back, when speed was what they needed more than anything.

“We’ll have a chance down south,” Darrent muttered to himself. “But at this rate, we won’t make it before the next winter. Then we’re all dead for sure.”

That was what it came down to, Darrent decided as he finished looking in the boxes. There was no way Sarah could make it to Atlanta or Phoenix, and she would take him and Chrissie down with her if she didn’t. They’d have no food, no heat, and they’d never make it to spring. For all his talk of finding a car, Darrent knew it was hopeless. The armies had literally demolished all of them as they moved across the country, crippling potential resistance cells. He and Chrissie could ride bikes--those littered the small towns like fallen leaves in autumn, their previous owners long-since dead. Sarah, however, couldn’t even manage that.

Darrent pulled his uncle’s hunting knife from his pocket, watching the dim light of the overhead bulb flicker off the blade. If he was going to have any chance to reestablish the human race, he had to get Chrissie to the south as fast as possible. He kept her and Sarah on birth control so far, despite his talk of repopulation, but that would change as soon as they didn’t have to worry about walking so much. He could probably have a dozen kids if he tried hard enough, Darrent guessed; hadn’t the original settlers to the Americas had even more than that on a regular basis? He brought the knife up to his lips and kissed it. The sooner Sarah was out of the picture, the better.

The next few hours passed slowly. Sarah made dinner from canned fruit and soup she found in the kitchen. Chrissie and Darrent read through a stack of magazines. Darrent couldn’t help but feel the weight of the knife against his side, tucked under his belt. It scared him a little, but excited him as well. He fought to keep the grin off his face. Society couldn’t keep him from walking down the centerline of the highway, and they couldn’t keep him from taking a life if he deemed it necessary. The sense of power was elating. He would miss her at times--it had been nice being able to pick between Chrissie and Sarah--but he would trade that luxury for the sheer feeling of dominance any day.

As the shadows darkened into full night, broken only by the lone gas lantern in the corner, Chrissie pushed herself out of her chair. She shot a mischievous smile at Darrent, eyes full of intent. “I think I’m going to bed. We walked a lot today, and I’m beat.”

Darrent let his eyes pass over her body as he looked up. “Sounds good. I’ll be in pretty soon.”

As Chrissie stepped out of the room, Sarah cleared her throat. “Don’t make me feel left out, Dar.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it.” Darrent felt his heartbeat quicken as he walked across the room and sat next to her on the worn couch that adorned the west wall. He slipped an arm around Sarah’s shoulders. “Is that really how you feel?”

Sarah shrugged, but smiled. “It’s pretty obvious that Chrissie wants to be with you tonight.”

“The joys of being the only man left in the world.”

“Looks like it.” Sarah laughed. She nestled in closer to him, her breath hot on his neck. “Well, how about you wait a little while before turning in? Would that be all right?”

“I think I could handle it.” Darrent shifted sideways, and his stomach lurched into his throat as the knife pressed along Sarah’s waist. But she didn’t notice, or didn’t give any sign of it. Darrent bent down and covered her mouth with his, feeling her arms slip around his neck. She was warm and soft and he had to fight back the desire to let her live. For a moment he almost slipped, almost gave in, but then he remembered that he still had Chrissie waiting in the other room, Chrissie who would help him recreate the race of Man.

His hand dropped toward the knife. He let his fingers touch her as he moved, and she kissed him harder. He slipped his hand away from her leg, to his own belt, and slid the knife free.

Now that the moment was on him, Darrent froze. He had never killed anyone before, despite the hardships of the war, and he felt strangely like he had the first time he’d had sex in the back of his parents’ Buick. Not sure what to do, or what he wanted, but wanting it all the same. His grip on the knife tightened. He thought of Chrissie again, and plunged his hand forward.

The blade slid up under Sarah’s ribs, scrapping against the bone. He could feel the serrated back edge jolting along even as Sarah screamed against his mouth. She tried to pull back, ripping her face away from his with terror pulling her eyes wide, but he held her close. He pulled the knife back out--it came with a wet sucking sound--and jammed it in again, higher. It passed between her ribs, puncturing her lung, and her scream turned ragged.

Darrent kept Sarah in his arms as blood and froth formed on her lips. She struggled, trying to hit him, to wrench from his grasp, but he locked one leg over hers and pinned her down. Chrissie didn’t come out to see what had happened--Darrent thought she’d suspected this turn of events for a while now.

Sarah kept screaming, but grew weaker as blood and strength flowed from her body. Her breathing became shallow, laborious. As the lids began to lower over her eyes, Darrent leaned down and kissed her forehead. “It’s for the best, my dear. It’s for the best.”

###

The ending isn't just for the creepy, horror effect--there's a theme I'm trying to play with, with Darrent's personality. Hopefully I've done it. If not, feel free to yell.

[ysabara]

“It’s for the best, my dear. It’s for the best.”

This was a terrific story Moraven. The last line, however, didn't gel for me. "My dear" just doesn't sound like something Darrent would say (you see, I know him so well already).

"It's for the best, baby. It's for the best"

Great characterisation and a well paced, interesting yarn. Looking forward to more...

[Moraven]

Hey, thanks! Glad you liked it. And, looking back, I think you're for sure right. Darrent is not the kind of guy to say that at all. Probably I just got excited with how the story ended and dropped out of his character in my hurry to write. Great catch. I'll make the change.

[timelord4]

Does have the end of the earth feel to it Moraven.

I liked the opening sentence. Got me thinking straight away about why does this bloke want to kill Sarah, while he casually eats his apple. Perhaps if you weened off letting us know how much Darrent wants to kill Sarah, throughout the passage (subtle hints perhaps) then he does it, and suddenly we all remember.

Personally, one guy enjoying two women, he's nuts to kill one. Unless he is a nut!

Saying that, bring the nut back, I love it.