Charlie sat up in bed and looked at the clock at his side. It wasn't ticking, modern clocks didn't tick. However... that didn't change the fact that he heard ticking.

"One more day." He said to himself, and touched his forehead. There wasn't any sweat yet, but there would be. He lay limp, like the freshly dead.

"How much time is left? A day, a week, an hour, a month?" He asked the empty room, the four walls surrounded him. They were naked, like his body, and they said nothing, offering no answer. He found no answer in himself anymore than he found his answer anywhere else.

"Tick."

"Tock."

"Tick."

"Tock."

The clock continued the countdown, not to the weekend, not to a holiday or birthday. It counted down to the end of the world.

"It's all my fault." He muttered as he slid his legs over the side of the bed and set his feet down on the cool wooden floor. ‘How many times have I thought those exact words for the last few days?’

He didn’t really have an answer, he could have counted the days, every morning since the first day after… and that would have been only a fraction of the total times that he’d rightly blamed himself for the coming doom.

He trudged across the floor, kicking aside the scattered clothing, empty cans of soda, plastic containers with dried food still stuck to the inside, and made his way to the fridge. His path was cleared by bare feet that hadn’t really been washed in days. Cans rattled as they clattered over the floor, and clinked off a glass bottle that rolled to a stop at the far wall.

He flung open the fridge and searched for something. Condiments, old mustard. A ketchup bottle upside down for easy pouring, traces of ketchup on the mostly empty sides, that one was running low. Mayonnaise, he reached for that and opened it up, then took a sniff. The foul odor hit him all at once. ‘That’s no good.’ He thought, then put the cap back on with a slow twisting motion and put it back into the fridge. He searched further, a few bits of rotted fruit, some grapes were rapidly turning into raisins in the crisper.

He slammed it shut and held it there, ‘I like raisins anyway.’ He told himself, and kept hunting, the light inside flickered on and off, and the refrigerator wasn’t as cold as it should have been anymore. A blue bowl caught his eye, a silver spoon sticking out of it, he reached up and brought it down below eye level. Soggy cereal with milk that demanded that he eat it before it became yogurt, stared back up at him.

“Fine. You’ll do.” He said as if the food would talk back to him.

He set it on the counter and took out a two liter of Sunny Dew that hadn’t been opened yet. The yellow carbonated liquid sloshed around near the top of the cap and caught a glimmer of light from the sun outside, it flashed brightly for a moment before a cloud passed by and the sound of thunder rolled in.

“I wouldn’t go out today even if there were a point to it.” He muttered and slammed the fridge shut. He snatched up the cereal, sloshing some stale milk onto the floor and putting his back to it all a moment later.

He trudged toward the room with his bed and television and flopped down. A little more of the not quite cold enough milk splashed onto his bare arm. He licked the unwashed arm to clear the milk, and set the soda down to reach for the remote.

The television came off of the power save mode from whenever he fell asleep watching, and he guided it to his Netflix account. [Please enter payment information, your bill is past due] He sighed and turned to his laptop. He went online and applied for another credit card. [Approved] He saw a moment later. The card number and expiration date came up and he plugged those into the screen, his bill paid, Netflix’s telltale red screen came up the way it should.

His thumb moved mindlessly over the choices he wasn’t really paying attention to. He hit the button on the little black remote and set it to something that had ‘continue watching’ under it.

‘Only slightly lesser known is this! Never make a bet with a Sicilian when ‘death’ is on the line!’ And the cackling laughter of one of the early villains of the movie, ‘The Princess Bride’ hit his ears at the same moment he began to slurp from the bowl.

Bits of cereal caught in his unshaven beard, and the bowl was empty otherwise. None of it tasted any different than ashes, nothing had any flavor at all. He dropped the bowl on the bed and continued to watch without paying much attention.

His hand wrapped around the two liter of soda, the hiss and pop of the bottle was the only sound other than the movie, then the sound was gone, and was replaced by a steady, constant gulp.

Charlie held the two liter in one hand and just kept drinking.

The bowl began to slip toward the edge of the bed, drawn toward the edge by the weight of his body on the mattress that created a slope, he paid no real attention to it. He just kept his head craned back and continued to pour the cheap eighty-nine cent knockoff brand soda down his throat. He squeezed the bottle, crackling the plastic bottle in on itself as the contents slowly drained into his belly.

The sweet, sugary flavor was so overpowering that even he couldn’t help but notice it, but it meant nothing, it brought no pleasure. In under a minute it was drained, a few drops caught in his beard, he tossed the bottle down on the floor, it bounced away into the path he’d cleared only a few minutes before, and Charlie didn’t notice.

The bowl gave way to gravity and tumbled off the bed, it happened so quickly that all he could do was watch as gravity took it to its logical conclusion. It fell to the floor and shattered into seven pieces which scattered over the floor in an instant, faster and farther than his bleary, weary eyes could follow. Even so, it might not have been a problem, but they slid under the mounds of trash that scattered over the floor like a thick carpet.

“That was my last bowl.” He mumbled, and picked up one piece of glass that stayed where it had struck the ground and held it up, he stared at the little blue fragment that was roughly the length of one finger and the width of two.

The calculation was done in an instant, ‘Based on the angle struck and the manner in which it broke, there should be seven pieces like this scattered around…’ His mind rushed to the conclusion… then stopped.

“It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters.” He said, and dropped the piece on the floor, it didn’t break, it just lay there wobbling back and forth on its curve. ‘Eight wobbles before the momentum gives out and it stops.’

He unconsciously counted the wobble cycles, and as he usually was in such things, he was right.

It stopped.

But he wasn’t watching any longer.

He slowly lay himself back down to sink into the mattress and turned his head toward the television.

Occasionally he looked at the clock at his bedside and wondered why he bothered. ‘The whole damn world is going to end… what does it matter what bloody time it is?’ he didn’t really have the energy to care, the trip to the refrigerator and back again took what little he had for the day.

So the minutes drifted past, Wesley kissed the girl on screen, the music began to play.

‘What next?’ Charlie asked and scratched an itch on his growing belly.

He hadn’t really caught much of anything from the film, and choosing something else? ‘So hard… no… just again.’ He moved his hand with the speed of molasses and took up the sticky black remote and hit the back button. 

Everything rewound. Turning the story from an adventure in which a young man became the hero that saved his beloved, into the story of a hero who became an angry bitch’s house servant.

He then took his hand off the button and began to play the movie again. He saw little, he heard less, it was just ‘there’ in the background.

The screen flickered on, and on, and on.

The credits rolled again.

He hit the back button, the story was told in reverse again as it rewound.

‘I should pay my light bill… I have a new credit card.’

‘I should take a shower, I haven’t bathed in at least two weeks.’

‘I should go get food…’

The many ‘I shoulds’ ran through Charlie’s mind like wild horses, but they ran away from him, and he felt no energy or will.

His hand worked well enough, he reached for the remote, and rewound the movie again while rain began to pour down outside.

Thunder rumbled, and the sound of rain began to beat against his window, the light that streamed into his apartment began to fade away, day was slowly turning into night again.

‘Did I eat anything else today?’ He suddenly wondered, there was no appetite, but he did feel the urge to piss.

He slung his leg over the side and set his feet down, a sharp pain suddenly lanced through his foot, he lifted it and reached down to find that the triangular glass piece from that morning had stabbed his heel.

He pried it out with a wind and trudged to the kitchen, he turned on the sink, hung his dick over the rim, and let loose into the noisy stream watching it wash down the drain. ‘Unclog the toilet’ was added to Charlie’s list of ‘I shoulds’ that he didn’t do.

He grunted when he finished, and set the bloody tipped glass triangle down on the counter.

He grabbed a paper towel, wet it under the faucet, and wiped the bottom of his heel, then trudged back to his bed, kicking the plastic bottle of Sunny Dew out of his way to land somewhere in the carpet of trash that covered up his wood floor.

‘Will it be over tomorrow?’ Charlie wondered when he lay back down on the bed again. The credits to ‘The Princess Bride’ were playing again, he rewound it and rested his head on the warm unwashed pillow.

He stared up at the white ceiling, his eyes seeing none of it really as the darkness set in and left only the movie to light the room.

‘What do I say to everyone… do I tell them? How do you tell people you killed them all, that you are the one to end the world… and even if you do, what then? Ask for forgiveness? Even if they believe you, what about it? Yes, they’re free to live however they like in the last days, but then they have to live with the same horror you do? Ignorance is the only kindness I can offer. But still… maybe I should tell them all…’ Charlie had the argument with himself.

But Charlie said nothing.

Charlie did nothing.

Charlie let the movie play on, and on, and on, and was asleep before the credits rolled, while the rain continued to pour down on the doomed world outside, and Charlie’s clock ticked off another minute in time, and kept doing so in the darkness long after the television shut itself off in a pointless effort to save power.

But he saw none of it, and had no will to feel any way about it even if he were awake.

Alone in the darkness, the man to end the world, began to snore.