Grey clouds and putrid yellow skies were the polluted backdrop to my endless red and dusty desert. Choked grasses and sickly cacti broke the horizon, a contrast of browns and greens. Distant sloping walls could be seen, faded in the distance in every direction; Like the monolithic mountains on the border of salt flats.

	My burnt cabin was situated here near a lifeless and clear blue pond. Shrapnel glittered over the sands, pieces of metal and mortar. There was not a soul in sight, there never was, not in a somatic sense anyway. I killed the last one who came along and my hands were still stained from dragging him a mile away. It wasn't them I feared. I feared the metaphysical, everything I couldn't touch. Everything I couldn't physically harm with sharpened steel and gunshots. Those endless ghosts after an eternal and insatiable vengeance; They haunt the dry winds, howling in agony and whispering old prayers. I know they shake my windchimes and my bones every time there's a breeze to carry them. They play those panes of frail scratched glass that hang dejectedly from the corner of my roof, reflecting old times and lost lives. A memento mori and an anchor for too much freedom.

	I had not seen another person in what seemed like years, until this morning. Just after dawn I was visited by the most current cannibalistic rogue that came along, another sinner lost in his own apocalypse. I left him with a bullet in his diseased skull and took him out to the middle of nowhere. I doubt any animals would even be alive to make him disappear.

	Years of solitude and decades of decay, only broken by the occasional lunatic. This was how it was, and I thanked the crimson sandstone ground for masking the color of pestilent blood, for covering the bullets, for doing the burial for me. Sad wails in the breeze and prayers and all, the wind plays those translucent instruments of air and glass and creates as much of a funeral as one could hope for in the end of days. As much as one deserves.

	Yes, its audible, and Im sure it echoes over such an arid landscape. Yes, my home is indeed obviously visible to the wandering and desperate passerby. "How's the kuru, the shakes? How's your life in Hell- are you ready to die?" Id say, feeling like a Grim Reaper and the Devil as the words left my lips. Judgement was in my hands and I'd waste more bullets on futile protection, pointless self preservation. I'm doomed either way, we all are- correction, /were/. Damned has successfully crossed over Styx into Hell, and Charon was not there waiting for us. We fought to get through and sometimes I could swear that my very physical being and the place I inhabit is limbo or the underworld itself. Empty. Alone. A river of soft voices and soundless time that drowns those of us still fighting to make it across, or those of us waiting for the fires to die down. My victims dance on those fiery gales, joining the billions of others looking for a salvation that would never come. I fear they might come back for me to drag me with them. Despairing souls like to share their fury, this I know better than anyone possibly still alive. My mind is slipping, it has been and I can feel it melt, but we all knew infinite solitude would ruin you. Mindlessness breeds exponentially in the face of existential loneliness.

	The day was still and I knew the windy season was over. There was not a single sigh on the deathless, and lifeless, terrain. My sun was setting and I watched it cast a shadow of light along the horizon, red and pink, yellow and orange. Sanguine hues of fire. I tangled myself into my dusty grey sheets, wrapping my tired and damaged body and mind in it's suffocating embrace. The sky was dark and the atmosphere was painfully silent and still. I relied on the sound of barometric pressures to stay sane. Have you ever heard absolute silence? Have you ever been completely alone? Have you ever wondered what it feels like to be convinced you are the last conscious mind on Earth? These are the sounds of nightmares- the most torturous method of solemn suicide.

	I strained my ears for a sound, any stimulation outside of myself. I willed the winds to come back. I wished for the sound of crickets, for the croak of frogs, the hum of cars and screaming sirens. I sank into half-conscious slumber, dreaming of the hum of heated pipes and furnaces, of dogs barking and birds chirping before the sun rose. I dreamt longingly of idle chatter and television noise, static and nameless voices on the radio. It was during this hopeless fantasy that an odd sensation came over me, shivering down my spine. It felt like the bass of blasted music, tingling at my finger tips, electrifying my nerves. What was this? It seemed familiar, it felt welcome yet completely terrifying- like it wasn't supposed to be there. It had been too long since I last felt it. It should be extinct, extinct like everyone else, and I began to grow angry at this affront.

Then came the sound of my glass windchimes, tolling their delicate and breathless music. It responded to the nonexistent voice of something that shouldn't be there, speaking to me in the stillness of damnation, in the stillness of a static desert night.

"How's your life in Hell?" it said to me, in language of glass tones ,"Are you ready to die?"