The End

 

            I awoke at midnight to the sounds of bombs going off. This was it, this was the end of the world. I sat in bed as the explosions filled the night and the lights danced along the sky. At that moment sitting in my bed alone, I felt absolutely no emotion. For some reason it just didn’t feel like the end to me.

            A few hours earlier my long time girlfriend decided to end our relationship because she had met someone new. She claimed that she would always love me. I cried myself to sleep not knowing that the entire world would soon awaken to bombs exploding and nukes wiping out what we all knew of earth. Sitting there contemplating all that was going on with my life I was alerted by a sound coming from the other room. I didn’t move and listened as some intruder made their way through my home, eventually breaking down my bedroom door. I saw that he was armed and looked him in the eyes as he pointed his gun at my face.

            What happened next is still unbelievable to me. I rose from my bed and made my way over to the gunman calm as can be, he on the other hand was violently shaking. Did he believe I had fled as the bombs had gone off? Did he pick my home at random? What did he expect to steal that could possibly help him if the end was indeed here? All these different questions ran through my mind as I approached him and put my forehead to the muzzle of his gun.

            “Do it,” I told him. He continued shaking. Clearly he had no intention of being a murderer.

            “What does it matter?” I asked him. “We’re all dead anyway. Why don’t you just save me the time and effort of having to survive in the hell that is sure to be out there?”

            No reaction.

            “Do it!” I commanded him. He finally seemed to get the nerve to do what I was asking him to do as he slowly started to squeeze the trigger. He just didn’t do it fast enough. At the moment he was about to blow my brains out all over the wall, the basic defense system in my body took effect and what seemed like an impossible thing, I ducked under the gun just as it went off. I could feel the heat go over the top of my head. I then grabbed his wrist and shoved it upwards and pulled some fighting move I’d seen on television but never attempted in my life as I swept his legs out and brought him crashing down on his back. I then began to rain blows down upon him with unbridled fury.

            Minutes later I was sitting in a chair and looking over the corpse that was lying on my floor. There was blood all over my hands, clothes and face. I had never killed a man before and my mind was still in shock from what I had done. What happened? I asked myself. I didn’t understand how I could have done such a thing. My phone started ringing before I could really begin to think anymore about it.

            “Hello?” I answered, not even bothering to check the call ID.

            “Hey are you okay?” my clearly shaken ex-girlfriend was asking on the other line.

            “Yeah, yeah I’m okay,” I said somehow sincerely.

            “Oh my god, do you have any idea what happened?”

            “No, I really haven’t checked anything since the explosions started.”

            “God, I was so frightened. I had no idea if we were going to get bombed or not. I guess we just have to consider ourselves lucky, huh?”

            “Yeah I guess so. Are you okay?”

            “I-I’m fine, just really shaken, you know?”

            “Yeah I guess so.”

            “Are you sure you’re okay?”

            Silence.

            “You there?” Panic in her voice.

            “A man broke in earlier. He had a gun. I confronted him. I put my head up to the gun and told him to pull the trigger. I had to convince him to do it. When he finally was about to, I attacked him and…I killed him.”

            Silence and then, “Are you serious?”

            “I am.”

            “How did you kill him? How could you kill a person? Why did you want him to kill you? Was it because of us?” She asks all this in one long breath.

            “I don’t know if it really was because of us, but more because of us and then what happened next. I thought it wasn’t worth living anymore. I guess my mind and body had different ideas though cause the next thing I know I’m beating the hell out of this guy. I don’t know what happened to me. Something just took over, some animal instinct. Does any of that make any bit of sense?”

            “I guess so,” she said tentatively. “Do you want me to come over?”

            “Sure, if you want to.”

            “I’ll be over there soon.”

            She hung up and I sat there sitting in my bloody clothes and looked over at the corpse on my floor.

            “God, you don’t even have a face anymore,” I said and broke down and cried. My ex-girlfriend found me crying over the body of the man I had murdered only an hour before.

            I repeated over and over, “You don’t have a face and you don’t have a name.”

            This became a mantra of sorts and made me bawl even more. I think it got to me because what I saw on my floor was being seen times a billion all over the world. I had done to this one man what all those bombs had done to all the people around the world. It struck me that even if the world was over, there were survivors and what happened to me would happen to countless others. Maybe some people would do like me and defend themselves to the last breath and maybe some would suffer the fate I had begged for.

            So the world ended. What really changed?