Simple choices.
This is just a little something, a writing exercise per-say. Please forgive it's shortness, but that's how it is meant to be, short, and very, very dark. Please leave a comment or review.
You know when you're going to die. It's just instinct. It's a sudden rush a fear that flows through the body like a lighting bolt. It's cold, and you begin to shiver in your state of helplessness. But it is when you are coldest that you are at the most calm. The molecules are slowing, the energy dies, and for a single solitary moment of absolute zero, you are truly at peace.
The liquid-hydrogen lighting bolt struck Sherman with such a force that his knees buckled underneath him. He fell to them, eyes locked upon the lupine form that stood less than one hundred feet away. He was a statue, frozen in place. The dead flashlight hanging down in his left hand, and his Colt in his right.
The lupine just stood there, staring back at him, poised. In a sudden rush of understanding, Sherman knew that it was giving him a choice. What ever was left of a human being in that thing, was giving him a choice; he could resist, and suffer through an dishonorable death, or he could go quietly and enter the... the...
Unknown.
Well, Unknown to you and me, but not so to Sherman. The fate of that of a monster was one that he had excepted long ago. It was a painful fate of paranoia, loneliness, and pure unrivaled instinct.
Sherman took his eyes off the monster for a brief moment and looked down on the pistol. The old, rusty Colt that had been with him for so very long. Through two tours with the Marines, through so many fire-fights, through so many causalities and so very, very, much death.
It had been with him even after the war. He remembered the little girl whose life it had taken. He remembered how she had been wearing the same dress as the little girl that had killed his best friend
during the war, he remembered his friend calling out to him, bagging for redemption.
He remembered the people that had come to take him away afterward. He remembered how they had insulted him with words like "damaged" and "dangerous." He had to make them pay to.
He remembered all of the people that had to pay.
And now, twelve years after the war, after so many years of the devils debt collection, he came to the realization that he had already been a monster the whole time.
But, in that brief moment of cold, cold calm, he felt human again after so many, many years. He looked back at the lupine, and it's simple choices. In that brief moment of humanity, Sherman created his own choice.
He put his gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.