3:09 PM

A Story by Cassick Dame

My watch stopped at 3:09 PM, Eastern Standard Time. It had been three days since the world had ended in a deadly fire, washing the world away, flushing it in nuclear radiation. Few had been given the chance of survival, and even fewer would live beyond that.

You see, my watch was a wind up watch. It had to be wound up every three days, or else it would stop in time. The watchmaker who gave it to me had told me this, and thank heavens, it was 3:09 PM, a time in which I would, most likely, be doing nothing, or at least, a simple thing. Simple enough that I could quickly wind up the watch and not fall behind by too many seconds of the other watches in the world. It seems that everything had to be on a certain time back then.

The Town Hall fire had gone out around the time that time stopped. I was in the courthouse, overlooking it, and the last flames of the building became embers. The fires had began when the looting began, and the looting began after the bombs had fallen. Those had fallen at around 9:00 AM.

For a while the local police force kept order. As it is with all humans though, they left their posts (and took with them their guns) and went to protect their families from the growing threats of the new world. The radiation, the rain, the chaos. We all had to come to the fact that food was no longer at the store. Every man had either gone for himself or for his family. As is with all humans.

I worked in the office that day. When they fell, I fell in my chair, on my back, and was knocked cold for several hours. When I had awoken, the sky was a deep grey, and there were orange lights flickering from the lands close and not close to the town. Some were giant pillars of crimson and others were lights glowing in the darkened, ending, world. I stood for a time and looked at it all, and I did not ask anything. There was not a person to talk to, I suspected.

After two days of being in the courthouse and scavenging off of things in the building, realizing that they had all already been taken by raiders, and of hearing the echoing screams of those far less fortunate (or stupid) I chose to leave the place.

For the whole third day after the end, I walked the streets. I did not find anyone who was a threat to me, all of them had been dead, were dying, or where someplace else that they could not kill me. I didn't really try to keep low, for all I cared there was not a reason to live in this world anymore.

And so, I walked the streets and I took the food and I drank the water. I was not going to give death onto myself, rather, death was going to give himself unto me. I was asking for Death to take me into his arms and to welcome me to whatever awaited. I did not want to be dead by my own doing. That was a weak ending, but I did want to die. The masses of the dead filled my nose and my sight, entrapping their image in my mind. The dead were everywhere and the living were nowhere to be seen and there was a peace unknown to civilization.

The days kept marching on, and so did I. Time was lost and nothing would be kept in record ever again, for there was not a single student of the future to educate. Human intellect had led to thoughts beyond past imagination and crept to unknown magic It was, to me, the same intellect that had ended the world. The creation and it's damned creators shall be destroyed, in the end.