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Charlie wasn’t going to make it out. He’d accepted it, now, holding the lever that would decide the world’s fate. A part of him had always known that, he supposed. After all, the goal had always been one hundred days. Grief pulled at his heart as he thought of the friends he was leaving behind, but it was drowned out by the flood of unexpected joy that welled up inside of him as he realized that the world could still be saved. He could end the flood of undead, give the world a chance to rebuild.
He pulled the lever.
Tommy’s scream pierced his ears as the world dissolved around him in a blaze of fiery white light. The smooth tile under his feet gave way to rough pebbles and dead grass, and the landscape rebuilt itself before his very eyes. Glowing lakes of lava surrounded him, crumbling ruins visible on nearby islands and zombies shambling in every direction.
The battle with Tommy was short and poetically anti-climactic. One shove, and he was over the edge, tumbling toward the deadly embrace of the heat and light below. For a moment, Charlie saw the person Tommy had once been, scared and hurting and overwhelmed with a power that had consumed him from the inside out. Then he was gone, and they were, at last, at peace.
This dark world was once beautiful. He knew it in his soul, the knowledge as inexplicable as it was undeniable. One last gift from the twisted god of deals, he supposed. The lava lakes had once been filled with turquoise water, the buildings tall and proud. These zombies had been people. This would have happened to his world, had he not made his sacrifice.
He dropped to his knees, overcome with an exhausting amalgamation of sadness and joy and relief. His sword thudded to the ground, and for the first time in days his fingers relinquished their death grip on the hilt. He dug his fingers into the dry remains of the yellow grass and wept for what he had lost, for the life he’d fought so desperately to build for himself only to leave it all behind yet again. Living had been so hard, and now he was left at the end of it all, with nowhere left to go and the easy embrace of death before him.
“I guess that’s it, huh?” he asked, knowing the twisted god would hear him. “I guess, I uh… survived one hundred days.”
It had always been one hundred days. He’d been a fool to think otherwise. He dragged himself to his feet and turned around, watching impassively as the zombies nearest to him realized their food source wasn’t completely extinct. They growled and groaned and soon the whole horde was stumbling toward him, reaching out with putrid arms and screaming with rotten tongues.
For a single, fleeting moment, he wanted to pick up his sword. His last spark of hope leaped inside him and attempted to grow, trying to claw its way out of the suffocating apathy that was rapidly overwhelming him. He sighed, and let it die.
“Yeah, uh. That’s too many. And I don’t have to fight them anymore.” He turned back towards the lava and unslung the bow from his back and unhooked the mace from his belt, casting them into the fire below. He kicked his sword over the edge. He was going out on his own terms.
“Come and get me!” he screamed, spreading his arms wide as he faced death unafraid. Unbearable sadness squeezed his heart in its cold, wet fist, but he did not regret his life. He had only been allowed one hundred days, but what a hell of a journey it had been.
“I made it,” he proclaimed. “I did it.” Tears streamed freely down his face. “Sure doesn’t feel like it, but I won.”
He turned his face toward the sky, ready to rejoin the universe. He saw the twisted god above him, face inscrutable and, for once, silent.
“I won,” he whispered, for the god alone.
Then he was gone.