The air of the sand swirled with the heat radiating off of it. In the deserted ruins of the city there were not a lot of options for comfort. The buildings reduced to dust, the metal rusting and misshapen from untold years of decay, the glass windows bare on what little structure remained. The entire atmosphere had a sort of post-apocalyptic atmosphere about it. It was fitting.
There was a sharp sound as he staggered forward, his foot coming down on the rust-red point of what was once a long nail, blood sizzling on the sand as it leaked from the wound. He staggered on, the nail sliding out with the next step. He didn’t even feel it anymore. He couldn’t feel much of anything anymore. Not that it mattered. Hell, he’d experienced it all. Unfortunately that was literally.
The sun beat down on his naked body. He had figured out that there was no longer a need for decency. It sort of felt like his apartment again. When alone, you couldn’t exactly offend anyone with a lack of shame.
He heard movement to his right and stopped, turning to look. The sound came in the form of a quiet squeak in the shade of a deteriorated wall. He stiffened, crouching close to the ground, his entire body tense and ready for anything. There shouldn’t have been anything left, but he’d found unaffected areas in the past and regardless of it being in the air he still would not have been shocked to find one or two more things. Even a companion would have been nice at this point. The squeaking suggested a small mammal. A mouse would be a miracle in this dirty wasteland.
The squeaking started up again, rising above the literal sizzle of his wound cauterizing on the scorched surface of earth he crouched on. He began to creep slowly towards it. The wind rose up, blinding him momentarily with sand. He let it fly into his eyes. No point in stopping it, he would regain his vision once his eyes stopped tearing up. He wondered how long it would take his body to stop producing tears.
The wind clearly agitated whatever hid in the shadow, as it started squeaking in earnest. He crept forward slightly faster, not wanting to lose his chance to capture whatever hid there. If he couldn’t keep it alive as a companion, it might at least make a decent meal. He hadn’t eaten in over a decade at the least, and while he no longer felt hunger physically his mind knew he could still feel better if he got a little sustenance now and again. He reached the far side of the wall and leapt over, ready to throw his entire weight at whatever creature waited on the other side.
In midair he realized his mistake. It was not a creature at all, but a wheel halfway down a spike being propelled by the wind. He cursed under his breath, as even though he was impervious to most pain this was definitely going to hurt.
He landed in the sand, the spike entering his throat. He didn’t even bother trying to block it with his hands, as he’d need them to bind himself. The blood began to sizzle on the ground. He knew if he didn’t move he’s pass out. He had a lot of experience with it. He could also feel his lungs filling with fluid. He needed to find a place to lay flat on his face to let it drain, or else he would awake again with his lungs still full and he would have to go through the pain of draining it.
He hated this kind of damage. Pushing himself up through the pain, he lifted off the spike and over far enough to lie on his face. He could feel the blood going into his lungs, and it hurt to breathe, but he knew he would soon fall into the black and when he awoke it would just be another scar. The stars began to dance before his eyes. This part he’d always found kind of fun, that floating feeling right before the unconsciousness.

-_-_-_-

He sat against the wall. It had been several weeks since he had severed his throat, and it had finally healed enough for him to sit up and be awake during the day. At night he slept without a stir, and he was fairly certain it was for days at a time, but no matter. It wasn’t like he had anywhere to be.
The injury had damaged him, but he could speak again. He could make noises and swear just like he always could. It was relieving, but not shocking. He had to admit that the spike had caused less damage than the fire or bullets he’d had injure his throat. Those had taken a lot longer to heal, whereas this had just gone straight through and therefore caused less damage. At least that was his reasoning. He couldn’t be sure since he’d had no way to measure how long he’d been unconscious.
The shimmering above the sand stirred. This time he didn’t even bother looking. Unlike the squeaking that got his hopes up, this was something he’d come to understand was different. For one thing, it was the sound of footsteps.
The man approaching was the same as he always was. Black and white robes, hair and beard that were so long that they were indistinguishable from one another, and for some reason a portable music device. He hadn’t exactly pictured that when he had first learned of this man, but the universe was a funny place and he had to admit that it wasn’t the weirdest thing he’d ever seen. Let the old man have is electronic media, there was no one left to be disillusioned by the image.
He approached with a friendly smile, his white eyes sparkling. He sat next to the injured nomad, awaiting him to speak first.
“Hello Larry,” the nomad offered. He hated the conversations. “Larry? Last time it was Scott. Make up your mind kid,” the old man replied. “Piss off, I’m not in the mood for you right now,” the nomad demanded, his words filled with a sickening gurgle from the blood that still infiltrated his throat and lungs. “No, I’m not going anywhere. I’m here because of you, it isn’t like I can just ditch these little sessions you know.”
The angry, injured man sighed and leaned away to vomit blood on the sand. His lungs were filling more slowly now, but he still had to purge once in a while to be able to continue breathing. The old man chuckled to himself as he watched the blood boil on the ground. “It sounds like you’re making scrambled eggs. Nice job on this one, it looks to be one of your least damaging injuries.” Unable to reply through the blood, he merely waved the remark off with his hand.
It took a few moments, but he was once again able to speak. “Listen Damien, I don’t need this right now. As you can see I’m a little under the weather. Why don’t you come back on my birthday? It can be a gift to me.” The old man smiled slightly. “It is your birthday,” he replied, “and I’m not going anywhere. And stop with the different names. It has gotten old.” “What do I call you then,” the man replied through his gritted teeth. “Most men used to call me God, Jacob,” the old man said, a sad look in his eyes.
Jacob looked up at his companion. The sadness that had leapt to the old deity’s eyes held no sway over him any longer. He stared back into the sadness with the bloodshot yellow eyes that had marked him in his new life. He looked angry, diseased, and he was both of these things and neither of these things. He should not have to put up with this kind of thing.
“I,” he hissed, “am NOT most men.”

The sunrise threw a spray of light over the landscape and sent the shadows flowing slowly away as fluidly as water through rocks. The space between night and day blurred in that early morning hour as the dark relinquished its hold on the world. Birds were singing softly over the sound of the wind rushing through the trees, clashing with the rustling to create a symphony of awakening as his eyes gazed at the browned grass around him. He hadn’t slept.
The pull of the night had been too strong for him, and he had indulged in excessive amounts of alcohol and pushed his inhibition aside as he wrought destruction everywhere his drunken company had danced around him, watching as he poured tequila on the bar and lit it on fire or singing old classics aloud as he desecrated tombstones in the empty graveyard. As he stood on the side of an overturned van he preached his message of chaos and isolation, of watching the world burn around them merely to see the flames. The congregation swayed to his rhythms and embodied his words, and his message became an army. The army became the medium. The medium became the end.
He had relieved this moment every day for the last few millennia, his mind wandering back to when he was young. When the world was only middle aged, and when humanity finally reached the peak of its existence and would go no further. He relived the way they died. He poured over his mental database, analyzing every piece of history since the occurrence. He desperately ripped his mind apart, working through any way that could possibly be used to bring them back. His loneliness had grown disproportionate to his hatred for humanity, and he ached to have them back. To hear people protesting things they didn’t understand, to have people desperately throw their opinions at one another to meet the opposition, to hear a baby cry on an airplane as he tried to sleep. At this point in time he would have let a cat bite him if it meant seeing another living organism. But nothing else existed anymore. Even the plant life had died out. He was truly alone.
The dark reaches and recesses of his mind hid the reality of the people he saw around him. He kept the truth from himself because he could not acknowledge how truly mad he was. He would be lost if he let on that he knew. He had to keep it from himself, hide his schizophrenic tendencies and call them survivors. But deep inside and all the way in the back of his cognitive functions he knew: he was truly alone.
The crisp blur of the morning around him shattered with thunder. His eyes snapped open glancing to the left as the radio tower from the building across the street crashed to the ground. All around him civilization was crumbling. Mankind had driven itself to the edge of what they could have achieved, and he had been alive long enough to watch their works crumble. The rusted street sign had long ago been stripped of paint but his warped mind still saw the sharp green 5th Avenue sign. New York was as empty as the rest of the world, and now even the Empire State Building was crumbling. He’d been waiting a long time for that.
His attempts at death had long since surpassed the need to keep count. This would probably fail just like the rest, but he had no other way to pass the time anymore. Humanity used to strive to live forever – how ironic that the last man could only strive to finally die.
He had tried several things, with some being crudely executed and some being epic and grandiose in nature. His favorite had been floating down the Ganges after rigging a nuclear device to home in on his location. That one had hurt more than he could describe, but it hadn’t taken him more than a couple of years to regrow his body that time. His skeleton and some of his skin had been intact, and it had been enough to cause him to grow back. He had long ago discovered that his bones could withstand far more punishment than the rest of him, and this was particularly difficult on his brain. The rest of humanity was lucky. They were dead. They would never understand how much it hurt to regrow nerves, arteries, or veins. And the heart regenerating was like a sustained heart attack, the ventricles barely functional each time until months, even years after each attempt at suicide. He knew this would fail, but he just wanted to be part of the experience – he would ride the roof of the Empire State Building to the ground.
He ascended the stairs and began to wait for the implosion. It took three more days on top of the tower, but his patience was rewarded. In the evening he heard a loud cracking sound. The sound ripped through his eardrums, shattering them, leaving him broken in the grey of the evening. The tower was one of the only buildings left standing in the city, and it would be a great ride down. He stood in the center, deaf from the ruptures, and raised his eyes to the sky. He wanted the pink and yellow sunset to be the final thing he saw before yet another death. He always tried to take beauty with him as the world fell away beneath him or burned away.
As he felt the earth move beneath him he let out a scream, blowing all the air from his lungs and allowing his voice to become one with the monstrous roar of the steel as it bent and snapped, twisting and crumbling. The building was falling.
The building was falling. He snapped his attention back to reality. The building wasn’t imploding, it was falling forward. Too late he dove for the railing to hold on, missing by mere centimeters, and tumbled to the buildings other edge. His back struck the rusted railing and he went straight through the ancient metal, toppling over the edge before his reflexes could kick in and grab hold of the side. He fell, faster than the monstrous structure he had stood upon. He hit the street with enough impact to shatter almost every bone in his body.
As he lay there, he wondered if God himself would reappear to him after he died. He usually did, his empty rhymes and soliloquy driving the last human even closer to full insanity. He was still wondering this when the building landed on him and he ceased to think at all.