Terminus: A Novella of the Apocalypse Read Online Free Page A

massive doors and disappear into the gloomy evening of a dying city.
    For several long minutes, I linger over my dispatched foe, sweat dripping off my brow and chin to splatter his lifeless face, and I ponder the flat emptiness of The Priest’s glazed, dead eyes.  Though all appearance of animation has expired within them, I think they continue to see somehow.  Perhaps better than before.  Those dulled orbs fix, unfocused, on something poised high over my head, something I cannot see.  Something of endless interest and unshakeable importance.  I stare down at him staring up past my head, and I wonder what they see, for it is the same absent stare I have seen so many times in the past.  It is the same vacant interest I have witnessed in the eyes of countless dead… the same mortally expired certainty I once recognized in the lifeless observation of my three beloved children and my once cherished wife.
    What did they see up there?  Hopelessly, I tilt my torso backward, rotate my neck to its reverse, lift my chin and tip my head to fix my eyes on the cathedral’s artfully decorated ceiling, finding nothing there of genuine interest.
    Softly, my head upturned this way and my eyes searching the unseen heavens, I whisper, “Where were you?”
    As ever, no answer to this forlorn inquiry returns to me.  Never has.  Never will.
    Suddenly angry once more, I lower my gaze, retract my right foot, and savagely kick The Priest in his ribs.  “Fool!” I hiss.
    Then I turn to climb out of the cage, find my clothing, and leave that hateful, lie-filled place.  Once dressed and returned to the street, I stop at the curb to examine that sprawling structure with its gilt signage, concrete buttresses, stained-glass windows, and intricately carved wordwork.  I think it should not stand so high after the world has fallen so low.  No monument to such heinous deception and undeliverable promises should.
    According to my venomous thoughts, then, and spurred by an unreasoning loathing festering deep inside my guts, I seek fuel among the debris and abandoned structures crowded along both sides of the dead suburban street that hosts that blighted building.  Through the following hours of night, I pile this fuel high within and without The Priest’s fallacious home until I have gathered sufficient material to thoroughly finish the job.
    Then I ignite it all.  Returning across the street, I sit in a comfortable chair I retrieve from a nearby home, and from that vantage I watch the cathedral burn, taking great delight when its roof buckles and caves, hooting with joy when its buttresses groan and then collapse, and chuckling with maddened glee when its walls topple ponderously inward to send a geyser of glowing cinders and sparkling ash billowing high into the pitch night sky!
     

 
     
     
     
     
     
    THE GIRL
     
     
    Sometime after the conflagration settles into a low simmer but before the sun rises, I fall asleep.  The massive pile of embers keeps me warm despite the drear chill of an autumnal dawn, which rises overcast and gloomy to fit my mood of the previous evening.
    Unseen for a thick cloud cover, the sun has climbed high overhead before I stir again.  As ever post-Terminus, I snap abruptly awake, half-formed mumbles fresh on my leather tongue, so I know I have been talking in my sleep.  My bones are stiff from the fight and my flesh aches everywhere.  Sharper pains sing to me of The Priest’s powerful contacts and I know many days will pass before I move with fluid precision again.
    When I lean forward to rise, something encumbers my feet.  For a panic-stricken moment, I fear I have been bound by one of the roving Clans of Terminals that still plague the Earth.  Terrified, I kick outward with both feet as I stand to confront the nihilist bastards who have captured me.  Instead, a teenage girl rolls off the sidewalk, down the curb, and into the street.  She squeals painfully, but instantly jumps up with a heavy blade