by Haruki Matsumoto
Translated by: Miya Ota
He had a name once. Not even him remembered it anymore; he was too young, still a child back then. After his parents died, and his siblings died, and everyone he knew died, they called him as "boy", and that what he was. Only a boy.
The couple that rescued him were awful, monstrous people. They taught him that you have to be cruel if you want to survive. A lesson that he quickly learned.
He broke the old man skull with a fire axe, and slit the old woman throat with a sharp butcher knife while she slept.
They were his first kills. The first of many after.
He never had any remorse. For that, you have to have moral values and be imbued with the notion of sin. The boy had none of them. He could barely distinguish between good and evil; in fact, he didn't even know if death wasn't a lesser evil at those times.
For a short while, he moved from shelter to shelter, from walled town to walled town, joining gangs of thugs assaulting travelers, going from places to places in an endless search for a meaning.
That's when he met the Collector's Guild, in the ruins of what used to be the city of Vienna, and they presented him with an offer he could not refuse.
"We want you to keep the memories of our society alive." They said.
And that made sense to him, a boy with so few memories of his own.
On that day, he became the Postman.
YOU ARE READING
Notes from the End of the World
HorrorThe Collectors Guild hired him to be the Postman, to gather the notes that will help the humankind to have a deeper understanding on how and why the world ended. Nobody knows anything for sure; the only certainty is that it's really dangerous out th...
