I am Henry Jones

I don’t know what I expected, but I didn’t think I would be left to die with the Earth.

I drag my hand through the dirt and try to push myself up.

My fingers don’t feel like fingers anymore.

Claws, hard and sharp is what they are.

For a second, I just stare at them, like I’m in a trance.

Then I force myself up anyway.

My feet gave way. Pain shot through his my leg. Among the trash, a lamp caught my eye. I used it as a crutch and forced myself onto my good foot.

Through nearly swollen eyes, I watched the ship fade into the distance, smoke and clouds curling around it until it disappeared.

I couldn’t move. My throat was dry. I wanted to scream. I wanted to run after it. I wanted them to stop.

What ever happened to “no man left behind?”

I fought to hold back my tears. Angry ones. Not sad. I had hoped at the last moment they would have done something for me, or taken me.

I have been mutating for the past six months. My wife saw the changes before I did. She knew me so well. It started in my face. What doctors we could find said it was nothing. Then as it became worse they said it was nothing they had ever seen.

The medical supplies were short. And they said there was nothing to be done.

So I watched myself change slowly at first and then my wife left me. Taking the kids with her. I think losing them aggravated this disease. I don’t recognize myself any more and friends and the survivors have driven me away.

With the ship out of sight, I turned to go back to my cave, but my good foot landed in a pothole, and I fell. My body hurt all over. I didn’t try to move. Maybe this was the end.

Maybe every life comes to this point. Life, human life, inanimate life, we all must die. Most try to hold it at arms length but it doesn’t matter. We are going to die and we might as well accept it.

I am so ugly, I deserve it anyway.

If I die now, I won’t live to be thirty-seven. Two weeks from now.

I’ll just die here. Bloody. Barely able to see.

Not that there’s much left to see.

Grass used to grow here. Now there are lava streams.

This used to be New York.

Now it’s just rubble and dust and memories.

Memories I want to remember and forget. I probably don’t have long left to forget all.

I sighed, praying it was his last. But my chest refilled, sore all over from the sticks and stones and rubbish that had struck him from the people boarding the ship.

Even my daughter attacked. Struck me and screamed for me to leave. My wife stood back watching. The crowd yelled expletives and said there was no place on board for a ‘monster’ like me.

Deep inside me (deep in my core or his soul) I was filled with a flood of rage at what I was, at how the apocalypse had affected me and only me. The apocalypse that had ruined everything and everyone. I saw my reflection and knew that I would have done anything to save the world, to save my family, to save myself. But everything was so unreal. So unbelievable and it all happened so fast. I thought my mind was slipping. I knew it when the hallucinations began.

The ship was returning. I saw it erupt through the haze of smoke and clouds and land where it had just left. It took a minute, but the doors finally opened and people jumped out to save him. My daughter was there, tears running down her cheeks and diving off her chin. Her eyes red.

“Mary,” I groaned.

I took her hand gently in my claws.

Suddenly her face changed and she said:

“Daddy, dear daddy, we haven’t come to save you. We’ve come to kill you. To end this monstrosity that you’ve become.”

She uttered some weird little laugh and I felt the sticks and clubs striking me again.

At first, they didn’t really hurt—the blows, that is. I mean, they had already beaten me black and blue and blood red like a crab apple Lamborghini. Where is death? Where its sting?

I don’t really know how long they beat me. Maybe a minute, or an hour but nothing like a stick will kill a monster. It only annoys and aggravates it and in that frustration I suddenly found enough energy and fury to fight to my feet. To lash out with my claws bashing some, while others retreated to a safe distance. But my legs gave out from under me and I fell into perfect darkness and the silence and hush that fell around me was so confusing.

I was face first in the dirt. I peeled my face free but there was darkness everywhere and the only thing I knew was the pain pulsing through me.

I stretched out my hand. Nothing. Nothing. Something.

I grasped it.

Now I was sitting on the beach on a towel, my wife next to me. She looked so lovely with the wind in her hair and a little bit of sunscreen not fully rubbed in on her left cheek. She was saying something about her mother. The wond was strong and I could barely make out what she was saying.

Everything went dark again. I was still lying on the ground. I barely moved, but saw that I was in my cave, and the light from the mouth was fading fast into the night.

I thought about Mary, and remembered her swaddled in a hospital blanket in his arms. I remember the vow I made to her then. That I would be the best father ever. That I would be there for her. That I would demonstrate the kind of man she would want to marry. And that I would be there to walk her down the aisle.

But that was a perfect world. A world that died six months ago.

I felt life fading away.

I wonder how I came to this end? What could I have done differently? Still no one knows what caused this metamorphosis. And why didn’t it happen to at least one other person? Not that I would wish it on someone else either. It’s bad enough it happened to me.

I see my wedding day playing out. The large crowd, the banquet, the orchestra. I see the ring on her finger. The most expensive thing I had ever bought. And my wife. She is laughing, talking with her aunt, and our arms are locked together.

Is the love we had for each other then, worth nothing now?

Does becoming a monster erase everything that came before?

Am I not the same person you married on the inside?

If the roles were reversed I wouldn’t have treated you this way.

Would I?

After what I have experienced, I wouldn’t. But before?

I say I wouldn’t.

Yet can I be sure?

A single choice that is a grass blade in the lawn of our lives, but can lead to entirely experiences.

I hope that I would never leave you to suffer on your own. And if you tried to leave me I would make you stay or we would leave together.

I didn’t choose to be a monster anymore than people would choose to have cancer or get mugged and left for dead. It just happens and you should be able to hope that the ones you love, your wife and your daughter would stand with you and not be willing to leave you to turn more and more into a monster, on a world that is disintegrating away.

I doubt these words will ever be read. I will never know.

Maybe the world will be saved by some miracle. Maybe my words will reach someone before the lava burns everything up.

I will die a monster, but at heart a man.

I don’t understand why this has happened to me.

I don’t understand why my once loving family has left me for dead.

Or why humanity didn’t win the day and I am left to live out my last moments alone, with the lava and my memories as my only companions.

I am Henry Jones.