Best Tales of the Apocalypse by D. L. Snell

Author:D. L. Snell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: zombies, apocalypse, survival, armageddon, dystopian, post apocalyptic fiction
Publisher: Permuted Press

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I found a bed and breakfast cottage, and it was intact. No one was home. No one was coming back. The property was on the edge of another bush heartland, so it was just like home.

Solar power gave me light, and gas bottles gave me a stove. I made myself a fine dinner, a roast with potatoes and greens. I opened a ‘78 Shiraz, which I’d found in the well-stocked cellar, and treated myself to a meal fit for kings. Norbert joined me. He told me he wasn’t hungry, but that he would stay with me until the end. I told him to stop being morose, and to liven our spirits I sought music.

The previous owners had jazz records, not CDs, so I started up the turntable and we listened to the soulful tunes, a replacement to the absent cicadas and bats.

After dinner I smoked a cigar on the veranda, with Norbert for company. I coughed as I enjoyed the unusual texture. It was dark outside, except for the tiny circle of stars; the alien world was closing in on us fast, claiming the sky. Until it did, we would have our moment of peace.

While I poured the last of the Shiraz, the best wine I will ever taste in my life, I thought back to the wasp that had stung Nikki. That had been my last normal event. Those wasps had no idea what we humans would do to them, not realizing that they had encroached too closely upon our territory. We poisoned them, destroyed their home and brought death to their entire colony. Was it sad that they didn’t even know it was us humans who had killed them, or that they could never possibly understand why we did so?

In turn, what had we humans done to offend these grey thorny aliens in their subtle invasion, with their ugly growths determined to replace everything that had once been our world? How had we strayed too closely to their territory? Was it the testing of too many nuclear weapons? Did we peer too closely into the many secrets of the cosmos and the quantum universe? Had we split too many atoms in our particle accelerators, and thus somehow caused them pain in those unseen dimensions from where they must surely observe us now? In their eyes, something about us had changed, something that no longer classified us as a harmless species, but as a bothersome pest intruding upon their home.

What had we done?

Norbert didn’t know, and neither did I. We would never know the answer. Worse, we would never know the love of Nikki or Kathy ever again.

Later, when I finished the Shiraz and smoked the last of the cigar, I looked out upon the tiny circle of night sky one last time.

When I’m done, I will go and find that revolver. Like I said earlier; two bullets was enough.

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