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The ghoul-dog wheezed, its bloody ribs pressing against, and in places piercing right through, what was left of its rotting skin. With slow, stalking steps, I came upon the beast pinched between the iron jaws of my bear trap. My heart raced. There was still a chance, I thought, that the leg might come free or that it would think to gnaw its own hind quarter off. Even hobbled, that monster could make a quick end of me; just one bite.

I came round, facing the eyeless skull, and it snapped its jaw, sending a splattering of its thick, bloody saliva at my feet. I swung my hammer and ended the thing forever. A moment over the dead body, waiting, fearing, lest it was cunning enough to play possum. The sounds of wheezing were gone though, and its innards were oozing out of its perforated sides.

The rest of the work was done with slow care. Removing and burning the body, resetting the trap, and that’s when it snuck up on me, as I was depressing the spring, a sort of joy in that autumnal morning.

The smell of pinewood and a cooling breeze, the diffused light of a grey sky, the crackling of a distant fire and the silence of the meadow. There would be more, of course, corrupted monsters that were once men or beasts still hiding away in the shadows, and again tonight I’d know the strange, unearthly bellowing of the undead. For now, though, peace.

Emotion took me, and I gasped. Rising, I left my little grove and strode down toward the valley. White cliffs rose with shear, bold faces on either side of a narrow path. Patches of long, dark grass, almost blue, waved. Something inside me, some longing more satisfying in its desire than any meal or fulfilled pleasure I could name, demanded I go for a walk, and so I sauntered down that uneven lane hoping for something I couldn’t name.

I met no one, not that there were many left on this isolated little inlet, but it seemed I expected to meet…who? Who was it? A friend, I think. I heard the ocean then, and the subtle strains of a siren’s call; many leagues lay between, and the song was lost and diffused.

And the waves’ white peaks, and the darkness of the sea, and the old pier forgotten.

Dangerous, I knew, and for what reason I exposed myself to such terrible chance…some hope He would perhaps be there, I walked upon those damp, rotting boards and toward a little building, some neglected offices, whose windows still held its broken shards like unmelting icicles. I gazed into the dusty room, my eyes slowly adjusting to the darkness therein.

I knew the place in memory, memories. Another life before the dead had come to trouble us. Here paperwork was signed, and coffee from an old percolator was occasionally shared with gossip and other stories. Fishermen’s tall tales and white lies. Here it was, I think, old Jonny first warned me about what would happen.

Old Jonny believed everything the newspapers and television denied and so was only slightly less credulous than those who didn’t even know they believed, who never heard what they heard, who spoke other people’s words of comforting lies which proved no comfort for anyone in the end.

Jonny told me what would happen. He had told me many things that would happen which didn’t, but he was the first to tell me of the coming plague. As I stared into the shadows of that abandoned office, I missed my loony friend. A thought, though, and I smiled, that of all those whom I had lost contact with over these long decades, he was the most likely to be alive somewhere safe with enough rations to last him another hundred years. I prayed that Jonny would be fine.

Old Jonny. He was old when this started, and I was young.

There was a faint grizzled reflection in one of the shards. I was a boy, I thought, seventeen, when last I saw myself; I don’t know how many years ago that was. This ghostly face is a stranger to me. His beard is white, his face a mass of wrinkles. Ghosts of the future now ghosts of the present, and the past is only a memory.

I know now what that calling is in my heart, alone and forgotten on this little inlet, what it is burning in my chest. It is time to rest.

I spend the day on the beach, fishing and barbequing and feeling very tired. There was a sign somewhere, faded and fallen, unreadable from time’s weathering, which warned me not to fish or start any fires or, if memory serves, for whatever it said I recall only from memory, it forbade a man to drink. That rule, though, I couldn’t break. There was no beer anywhere to be found.

Everyone was dead, I knew, or worse, a thing wandering in the night. Everyone, save me. I sighed, enjoying the cool breeze from the azure sea, and tasted the coming night in the air. Glancing at the sun, I saw he was shortly to die.

And I too was old, living in a world that was harsh to the young. The light shortly would fade, but the light kept me from turning back home. Would He come tonight? If I stayed? If I waited? If I were a fool?

And the light does fade, a brilliant display, the sun falling into the sea. I lay by my fire, driftwood at my back, as the lapping waves sing me to sleep. I know I will not wake, but I pray, even if it is only a dream, He who sits upon the sea will come and take me home.