-=ConUtopiaN=- the MichiganFandom zine: Victim - fiction by David M. Crampton

"I don't want to die."

"What's that?" The old man, wrinkled, grizzled, and spotted with age, leaned close to the younger man, straining to hear.

The younger man coughed, trying to clear the wetness from this throat. "I don't want to die." His voice broke; it was more of a plea than a statement.

"Oh, ho, you ungrateful bastard. What I wouldn't give to be dying right now." He jabbed the younger man, lying broken and bleeding, with the end of his cane. The younger man screamed and trees shook. Leaves fell to the ground. "That's right! Feel that pain, compressed into these few moments!" A sneer spread across the old man's toothless maw. "Stretch that hell over decades, and that's my due. You don't want that, do ya, boy!"

The young man felt something wet on his face. Was he bleeding or
crying? "I don't..." A fit of coughing overwhelmed him, and the pain
threatened to make him pass out. He fought for consciousness, spending his precious strength of will to fight the ornery geriatric. "I don't want to die."

The old man cleared the phlegm out of his throat and spat it onto the
ground next to the young man. "You don't have a choice, you ungrateful prat. It's happening, and you ain't going to stop it this time." He waved his cane over the young man's chest again, threatening more pain. "Just accept it."

"I don't..." The cane came down again, and it felt like a cinder block.
This time, the pain won, and the young man passed out.

"God, I hate you." The old man walked away from the broken form,
limping through the rain of leaves falling from the tree branches.

The doctor pushed up her sleeve and checked her watch. "I'm calling it. Time of death is 3:28 am." She pulled the sheet up over the young man's face, and sighed.