Worlds End

The last embers of light flickered across the barren hills, cracked and blasted, lined with dead trees that crumbled and decaying bushes that were scorched with blistering heat and deathly cold. A last burst of defiance, a great conflagration of light burst from the sun, before it vanished behind the dead hills; great, gaping jaws that swallowed the day into oblivion. Darkness descended on the landscape, and with it came a biting wind, so chilling that it froze what little foliage was left, creating brown icicles that glinted in the pale moonlight. There was no sound but the howling wind; cascading through the hills, a river of sound that pounded against the earth, obliterating silence in it's wake. No creatures stirred in the wilderness.

Beneath the screaming wind there was a feeble crunching sound, itself swallowed by the wind. A figure walked through the hills, clothed in a tatty coat that billowed out behind it, shredded edges blowing in the wind. A thick, deep red scarf covered his mouth, and a bloodied and torn shirt covered his torso. his trousers were ripped in several places, and below his right knee were entirely ripped away. He walked barefoot, bleeding a dark, congealed blood from walking on dead earth.

A sudden, powerful gust of wind buffeted him, a raging beast striking out in deranged blood-lust at the living, and he fell to the ground, coughing and spluttering. His arms, slowed and numbed by the wind and days of hunger, did not react in time and he fell face first into the ground. Raising his head, he tried to bring himself up onto his haunches, but fell again into the element beaten ground, groaning in pain. More dark blood seeped from a wound over his left eye, even his blood seeming to have lost the strength to flow.

"Help" he muttered into the earth, the act of speech itself painful, and he was taken aback by the hoarseness of his own voice. It had been so long since he had heard it, too long since his last contact with another creature. Contact that would never come again; they were all gone now, every creature, every human, every vampire. He would never again hear the sound of his loves voice, feel her touch on his skin, her breath on his face; he would never taste blood again, never experience the exhilaration of the hunt.

To stand on the brink of destruction, the last vampire in existence, and know that it was themselves who had caused it created a quiver of disgust in him. Their emergence had been glorious at first; whole hordes of humans falling to their night-time forages, swaths of humanity succumbing to the life of the vampire. Blood had been plentiful then. His people had descended on entire cities and watched the human society crumble as countries became lawless, nations collapsed in on themselves.

But there were only so many humans in the world, so many people for the hungering maw of the vampire to close it's jaws around. It took fifty years; fifty years of plentiful pillaging, of ascension and command over the night, but eventually the humans began to die. Like every great race of beasts before them, humans became extinct, the great asteroid of the vampire colliding with their world and obliterating their dinosaur race. And with them, the planet had begun to die; terrible storms enveloped entire continents, whole countries turned to desert and ash. Each night there were fewer humans to find, fewer humans to fee the ranks of the vampire, swelled to bursting by over-indulgence and their insatiable appetite for blood.

With the death of the humans, the vampires had turned on each other in the hopes of sustaining their lives on the blood of other vampires. A once flourishing race of creatures turned on each other in madness and civil war. Millions were killed in the search for an alternative source of sustenance, in petty feuds and bitter fighting. Soon, the once strong race of the vampire lay scattered, a dead flower, it's petals lost to the wind. Stranded, cut off from a source of food and a bond of fellowship, like the humans, the vampire had begun to die.

He lay there now, the last of the vampires, simply thinking. I am the last creature in existence, he thought, his body completely still. The wind whipped his coat around him, and scattered loose earth over his body, but he did not care. He simply lay and wondered: why am I still alive? I could have ended my suffering a long time ago. Am I clinging to some false sense of hope, that I may one day find another before my death, a companion who has cheated death as well; or am I simply too scared, or too stupid, to take my own life?

The wind died around him. Sensing a change in the air, he brought his head up from the ground. In a sudden startling moment, he realised that it was becoming warmer. He did not know how long he had lain here, deep in thought, but morning had arrived. He raised his head, and looked up towards the hills to see them shining. A warm, golden light caressed the edges of the hills, and very slowly the sun appeared, as if from below the earth. His saviour, risen to take him on.

A beam of light stretched across the ground and bathed him a yellow light. He looked into this beam, his salvation, and smiled.