Chapter 5: Death

My death comes to me.

The pack of giant radscorpions gather around me, claws clicking, teeth chittering, and I collapse from exhaustion that I had put off for too long.

My death did not come.

I wait. Still, I do not feel my flesh tearing, my body burning from their poison. I wait.

Finally I open my eyes. A stinger hovers above my face, and a drop of poison hangs glistening in the moonlight, an offer of quick death. Noble death.

I look at the scorpion in front of me. It's small black eyes twinkle and the mouthpeices vibrate, making that awful sound. The claws open and close. Open and close. It is the sound of death.

I open my mouth and lift my head with my last strength and drink the poison.

I burn. I burn and I burn but I do not die. My vision turns black. The sounds of claws and teeth disappear.

I see a place, green, full of life. Deer and dragonflies and palm trees.

Flying above, I look down over the verdant hills. The vision disappears.

I am scorching. I scratch madly at my skin, I scratch and I writhe an agony.

All I can see is her eyes. Dark black marbles set in the face of an angel of death.

I lay there in pain and wonder when death would come. I look up at the moon, a sliver smiling down at me.

The scorpions turn in unison, their legs tapping at the scorched earth, their great bodies rotating until all but one faced away from me.

Are they like wasps? Would they drag me back to the nest, implant me with eggs? Had I been saved from one fate, only to come upon one worse than being flayed alive?

Or did they sense something in the darkness?

I look up at the stars, the beings that guided me on so many trips into the wasteland.

How long would it take for the poison to kill me?

I feel stronger, wide awake.

and I want another draught of their liquid death. To finish me. To end the life of countless days, wandering, starving, thirsty, an eternity of choosing between bad and worse. Fuck this planet.

"Finish me!" I scream at them, on my feet shouting, but they do not move.

One of them still looks at me with beady eyes.

Why did they wait?

"Kill me you goddamn bugs!"

But she turns away.

I pound on her chitin with my bare fists but she merely closes her eyes.

I clamber over her and fall on my face beyond the circle of guardians.

I make haste and soon they are distant, and the crickets fill my ears with song.

I feel more alive than ever.

Alive. I am alive and I have no thirst, no hunger. Would they hunt me in the morning? Were they just ripening the kill? Sweetening the meat?

My body tingles, as if it is finding new life, and the familiar feelings of sore feet and back are gone.

What have I become?

I look into a mirror as it lay there in the broken remains of a concrete road.

In the pale light I could make out my face.

And I wonder. Am I broken? Dreaming? Have I finally lost what sanity I had scraped and saved all these years?

And I slowly realize, I am not broken.

It is only the mirror.

Welcome to the wasteland.