The Last Rider

Parental Advisory: This story is PG-13. It contains some "cartoon violence" and a few swear words. Very brief alcohol use (for comedic effect). A thinly veiled but mostly harmless penis joke. And one really badass handlebar mustache. Oh, and the main character is the thing that inspired the legend of Cthulu, among other horrible stories of the like.

It feels like I’m just biding my time, waiting for something to happen.  Why do I feel that way?  I love this, the celebratory quiet after finishing a job.  Knowing there is nothing else on my calendar for the next… well, ever.  So I’m not actually waiting for something to happen, because nothing is going to happen.  Time isn’t ticking down towards something.  Everything is over. There is nothing after this.  There are no people to see, places to go, or things to do anymore, and I mean that literally.  Eternity itself has already come and gone.  So why do I feel so anxious and restless?  Time doesn’t even exist.  It was always just an imaginary construct that people used as a framework to organize their lives from start to finish.  But now it REALLY doesn’t exist.  Because I destroyed it as I killed everyone who believed in it. 

Well, to be fair, I didn’t kill ALL of them, they weren’t ALL my fault.  Some of them killed each other.  Some of them killed themselves.  A few of them died from old age or other natural causes.  Most of them fell to some accidental mishap or other – and while I do enjoy getting creative in my work and have staged some “accidental” deaths, honestly I can't even take credit for all of those.  But the rest of them, yeah that was me, I killed them. That is my job, after all.  And my job performance reviews have always been fantastic.  At least the ones from my employer have been.  Customer reviews from the peanut gallery… not so much.  Apparently I frighten people.  They don’t like my face, or they think I smell terrible, or the tentacles drive them insane and then melt their minds or whatever.  They hate me so much they even like to come up with scary names for me:  The Destroyer, Scourge of Worlds, Leviathan, Jőrmongandr, The Great Wyrm, Níđhőgger, The Pale Rider, Kali, The Eldritch Horror, The Ever Death, and others.  But my real name is Dave.  Not “Dave the Decapitator” or “Dave, Dark Lord of the Seven Rings of Eternal Pain,” though I have been called those and worse before.  Just Dave.  And apocalyptic destruction is my business, literally.  I take this shit seriously, and I do it right.

Whether you’re cleaning house to start fresh, vengefully destroying your creations because they didn’t worship you enough, or just mildly bored of looking at the same old things all the time… your reason for it doesn’t matter to me, I don’t ask why.  I never ask why, it’s part of the contract. But if you want your whole world ended, for whatever reason, then I’m the guy you call.  There is nobody else who does it better.  And that is the honest truth.  I mean, look around… there is NO COMPETITION in this business.  I ended everyone and everything.  They’re all gone.  It’s all gone.  The people, the places, the gods, the demons, my competitors… all gone.  Yes, sir, I am the best in the business.  Because I take pride in my work.

In this case, the ones who hired me for the job paid up front.  And I destroyed them and their payment, too.  (It’s what I do.)  I don’t do this for the money.  I have no need of it.  When I got the call for this one, they told me basically what to expect, said it would be a big project since this universe has over 2,694,721,477,180 galaxies.  I told them, “That’s nothing. My last job had 50 times that many.”  And then they said that was only an estimate, the real number might be significantly more, because they were not the original designer here. They merely inherited this universe, and it didn’t come with any sort of plans or blueprints, it simply fell into their lap as-is, so to speak.  And now their probate period was over, they just wanted to be rid of it all.  So that’s where I came in. 

And here we are.  Or, at least, here I am.  You’re not here, you can’t be here, because there is no more “here” anymore.  I made sure of that.  So, who am I even talking to right now?  Myself? The void?  I don’t even know.  I don’t even care.  But I do know that this is my favorite part.  The absolute darkness and complete emptiness after a job.  It just makes me feel so… fulfilled, in a way that nothing else can.  I would say something like “Ah, breathe it all in.”  But there is literally nothing left to breathe.  And I mean that in both senses of the phrase.

So then why in the neverloving FUCK do I still feel like time is marching on, the clock hands still spinning?  This has never happened after a job before.  Not once in all the eternities that I have ended.  As such, I find it very strange, and rather disturbing.  I don’t like it, this feeling.  It prevents me from properly enjoying the absence of any fruits after my labor.  I don’t like this at all.

Wait… wait, wait, wait… what the hell is THAT?  I hear something.  Like a buzzing sound in my brain.  There should be NOTHING, and yet I hear SOMETHING.  That’s not how this is supposed to go.  I sense… a presence.  And it’s moving closer.  But… nothing – and ONLY NOTHING – should be able to exist in this place-time.  And yet…

AUUUUUUUUUUUGHHHH… BLLLLLLLLEEEEEEEEEAAARRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!

*Cough*  Oooowwww….  That hurts. What?  How?  No? No.  No! It’s not supposed to end like this.  And I should know, since I AM THE END OF ALL THINGS. This is… not… *cough* … not right.  I am the TRUE immortal; I am beyond eternal.  I am invincible.  I am inevitable.  So… how… what… oooohhhh, sweet darkness, embrace me… uuuhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh *cough* ooohhh, oh, that… that is… so beautiful... 

And thus were spoken the final words of Dave, The Ender of All That Is, who never even saw the foe that ended its existence with a single strike.  Because it had already extinguished all light from the universe, the very act of seeing was rendered impossible. 

But if Dave hadn’t already blacked out the skies and deleted physics itself, he would have seen a tiny and seemingly insignificant green humanoid, maybe four feet tall but also four feet wide at the shoulders, built like a brick shithouse with daddy issues, with hair nearly as dark as Dave’s great abyss hanging down almost to his ass, and equally dark hair shaped into a badass handlebar mustache and killer mutton-chops on his face.  This… creature... was wearing blue leather boots – not dyed blue but naturally blue taken from the hide of some blue alien creature – over violently purple socks, a rather large and VERY pink hat done in the style of the Earth-American southwestern “cowboys" but fuzzy, an overhyped and overpriced pair of designer sunglasses with the price-tag still attached, and NOTHING else.  Had he looked closely, Dave might have also noticed that the green was not his actual skin color, but some sort of goop that had rubbed off from something else (probably a female something).  Not that it mattered much to Dave, who was a genderless eldritch horror that defied such definitions, but this man – being mostly naked it was VERY obviously a male – this man’s skin was actually chalk white.  And Dave would have also noticed this little greened man was riding upon a mechanical silver steed, moving at roughly 90% this universe’s speed of light (which for Dave would still seem very slow indeed), heavily armored and armed to the teeth with an array of parts that were bought, borrowed, or stolen (probably stolen) from a wide variety of cultures all once upon a time known far and wide for their proficiency at making war.  And after felling the greatest and most terrible monstrosity ever birthed from the bowels of hell, this little warrior dismounted from his steed, kicked Dave’s massive corpse in what he assumed was roughly the genitalia region, produced a rather large and oddly-shaped red glass bottle filled with a brown liquid of questionable origin from his saddlebags, and took a long swig straight from the bottle, downing half the bottle in one go.  Then he belched.  Loudly. Or at least it would have been loud if there were still any molecules in existence to transmit sound vibrations.  After that, he scratched his backside for a moment, seemingly lost in thought, before mounting his silver steed again, shaking his fist and shouting something incomprehensible into the void (and I do NOT mean it was only incomprehensible because there was no air to carry the sound, I mean he was VERY inebriated and his speech was VERY slurred), before slowly riding off into what probably should have been the sunset but definitely wasn’t the sunset because, as previously mentioned, Dave had already obliterated all of the suns from this universe.