The Final Days

The sun was shining the day he decided to do it.

It had been a very long time coming, a very long time indeed, but he was all the better for that fact. There had been nights at school learning about the basics, about what to use, what was best, and what would work the fastest.

Even when that was complete, he still had to find the right people, still had to find the money to pay the right people. The only consistent factor in all of this - the life-force which had driven a road right through the middle of his life and his heart – was his hatred of them. Of all of them.

He had tried to fit in. He had tired of trying to fit in. At school, he was the kid who never got invited to parties. He threw his own but no one ever came.

He’d cried and fought within himself to try make sense of it all. What was wrong with him? Was he too easy to please? Probably – that was what they saw as a weakness. Them. Those who laughed at him, pushed his head down toilets and made him pull the flush himself.

Sometimes, he would catch the eye of one of the perpetrators and he could see the fear scratched across it. Rather you than me – it said. Rather you take the beating than they found out about me.
Bullying was easy. If it wasn’t, then it wouldn’t be so popular. He had more scars than he could carry but still he got up each day, and still he walked the road.

Selfishness was a virus now. He saw it everywhere. Self-obsessed little creatures in the middle of the city. Talking too loud – always talking too loud on their phones. People who treated staff in cafés and restaurants as if they were dirt. Well, he was doing it for them as well.

Money was always given to the wrong people. There were more shallow people with money than without. Money disguised their shallowness, or rather it brought all the little shits together.
It wasn’t jealously on his part – he had never had any money but he knew that he would have dealt with it much better than the ones who flashed it in his face.

Most of his life he had believed in a God, it’s what had stopped him from being a serial killer, but last year – last year when his best friend had spent the night with her boyfriend at his house. Well that was the night of the great storm – the night that the chimney at her boyfriend’s house had fallen through the roof. Just as her boyfriend had gone to the bathroom and left her in bed – right in the path of the falling chimney. That’s when he had stopped believing and now he was free to do what he wanted. And he was going to. And he was doing it for his dead best friend, too.

They should have been nicer, all of them. They shouldn’t have been so greedy. Greed was what would destroy the world in the end. The apes loved the smell of money.

He had chosen the capital city because that was where there would be the most impact. He had worked and saved for five years to get the cash to buy what he needed.

Now he was ready.

He had tried the virus on little pieces of paper. It had worked on the animal that lived next door. It was dead within five minutes.  The method of transport was easy – he had collected a few hundred copies of the free evening paper and had impregnated them with the virus. He left two copies on each train, bus and underground carriage he visited. Most of them never took the paper home, they were left where they had been read. Someone else would pick up the copy and read it – each of them condemned by their action.

By morning the epidemic would have begun.
Karma was having its day. They should have been nicer.


bobby stevenson 2016 

wee bobby