Welcome to my third Flash Fiction Friday! This story was inspired by an old episode of The Twilight Zone. Let me know what you think of it in the comments! Hope you enjoy it!

A Little More Time – by Adam Wright

In the aftermath of the bomb the world was silent. The loudest sound was the crack of his lenses as his heel stepped on his glasses. He could only make out the world in blurs of different shapes and colors.

He had crushed his only reason for living. The books remained stacked on the library steps unread and innumerable. Even so, he kept on living for no other reason than he had nothing else to do. 

Days were spent foraging for food. It wasn’t really foraging. There was plenty of food to be found in local markets, neighbor’s houses, restaurants, almost anywhere. The foraging was guessing what it was he was about to eat. A blur of yellow in a can might be peaches or pineapples. Brown was likely beans. He was never sure until he opened the can. What he didn’t want he left out for the animals. They were few and far between. He supposed there were still plenty of insects but he couldn’t see them.

Days turned into weeks. Then months. Years maybe? He marked them off with chalk in huge hash marks on a blackboard in an empty school. He soon ran out of space but there were still more classrooms. He tried remembering the stories he loved and writing them out on the chalkboard. He was never sure if he got it quite right. They were all a jumble in his head and he would think to check in a book to see if it matched and then remember. He couldn’t read them anymore. Shakespear would have to die along with him.

One evening he watched as a blur moved toward him. It had the vague outline of a man but it didn’t walk like one. It moved faster. The sun was setting so he guessed it was a trick of the light, something playing out on the horizon with his eyesight. Or, more likely, he was finally driven mad from the isolation and boredom.

The next night he saw it again. Closer this time. He walked toward it, hope sparking once again in his heart. If there was another person, maybe they knew some stories. Or a way he could find a new pair of glasses. He could have them guide him all over the city until they found a suitable approximation of his lenses. 

Just as he was about to approach the shape, he felt a pair of hands wrap around him. There was a piercing pain in his neck, like two sharp needles. The hands let go as he turned around. Whoever grabbed him was already gone. He felt dizzy and sank to his knees. The world went dark.

He didn’t know how long he slept but when he woke it was still dark. And he could see! He could read the signs on the store in front of him. He could make out the headlines on the newspaper stand thirty feet away. He could read again. 

He soon learned that the sun burned but the night cooled. He slept while it was bright out and discovered to his amazement that he could read any book he wanted to, as long as it was night. He went through them methodically, one at a time, separated by genre, relishing in the words, loving the way it took his mind to different worlds and places. While he read he could forget almost everything else. He could forget the world was a dead place. He could forget the strange changes to his body, the fangs that now protruded from his mouth that he could see in the mirror. 

It was obvious what he was. He read about it in a book written long ago by Brahm Stoker. Even reading that kept his mind off the one other constant he now had. He had all the time he needed to read but he was going to waste away soon. 

There was a gnawing, constant hunger in his stomach. The cans of food no longer appealed to him. He tried to eat the food anyway but it just made him sick. He spent hours looking for something to eat. Something living with blood pumping through its veins. He couldn’t even find a squirrel or rabbit. 

He had all the books he could ever hope to read and the time to read them. Shakespear was going to die with him anyway. There was no food left, all the humans with their pumping blood had been destroyed in the bomb.