The Last Day Of Your Life
SPACE This is the last day of your life.
SPACE The words are written in neat handwriting on a piece of card and the man reading them stares at them unblinking. He appears to be stuck mid-bend from picking up the letters and cards from the floor beneath the hole in his door marked 'Post'.
SPACE "Huh," he says, rising up to stand fully straight, still looking intently at the card, as though maybe it has more to offer.
SPACE It doesn't, and eventually he shuffles it together with the rest of the post and walks through his ornately decorated living room (with the fancy rugs and gilded lamps and expensive television set and such like) and into his kitchen.
SPACE Where his living room is opulent, expansive, over-the-top baroque meets yuppie-glamour, his kitchen is not. His kitchen contains a beat-up scratch-ridden old slab of a table, perhaps given to him as a thank you present from some friend belonging to a long line of bespoke butchers, perhaps pulled from a skip in Insley, who knows. Around the table are arranged four uncomfortable-looking-but-actually-rather-comfortable chairs, the paint on them faded sky-blue and cracked. His kitchen also contains the sort of heavy duty cupboards you might find in an industrial setting such as a nuclear power plant or some kind of torture factory. The cupboards are all locked with large rust-coloured padlocks. None of the locks use the same key. The last feature of this vaguely-scary kitchen (apart from the single light bulb hanging on a long wire from the tall ceiling) is the large, bath-sized sink, white, scratched. Maybe there is a bullet hole somewhere scarring the recently-painted surface, maybe there isn't.
SPACE Oh wait, there's a fridge as well -- one of those large metal ones you find in pub kitchens. I think that's it.
SPACE He walks into the kitchen, chucks the post on the table absent-mindedly and goes to the fridge, opening it and pulling out a bottle of vodka.
SPACE It is precisely 8:19 in the morning, and this will be his fourth drink of the day.
SPACE He takes the bottle to the table and pours an inch or two into a mug, puts the top back onto the bottle and takes a deep, appreciative swig from the mug.

SPACE The man's name is Nicodemus Fist. As a baby he was sold to the Russian military and subjected to mind-altering drugs and years of training of the most vile sort, the sort which only the words 'Black Ops' gets anywhere near to describing. Then, during a secret mission to wipe out the population of a small island somewhere near New Zealand, he was shot in the head three times by some pissed off American Special Forces types and taken to the United States. He was then 'adopted' by the war-criminal scientist Dr Fenk Zeitmann, who replaced parts of his brain with some kind of strange supercomputer (nobody is quite sure what exactly it is that he rammed into Fist's head), and attempted to deprogram him.
SPACE Needless to say, when Fist woke up, he was slightly perturbed.
SPACE And by perturbed I mean he pulled out Zeitmann's spine and strangled him with it, before escaping the facility and making his way to England, where he now resides. The point, I'm sure, somewhere in all this, is: don't piss off an insane super soldier with a quantum computer in his brain, or at least stand out of arms reach while he wakes up and until he has calmed down. It's just common sense really, isn't it?

SPACE Anyway, you don't really need to know all that, but it does perhaps explain the strange decor in his house, and his tendency towards alcohol-based breakfasts. Actually though I think he turned out all right, all things considered. He hasn't murdered anyone in over a week, and even then the little brute deserved it -- he called Fist a 'massive twat' for starters. And Fist had only been in the pub to have a quiet pint; he wasn't looking for trouble. What can I say, somewhat of a shit-magnet is Fist, as evidenced by the piece of card on his beat-up slab of a table stating: This is the last day of your life.

SPACE He looks at it warily. This is not the first time he's had threats through the post. Nor indeed the first time he's seen this particular brand of handwriting. Thing is -- this is Dr Fenk Zeitmann's handwriting. Which means of course one of two scenarios: either Zeitmann is alive and has managed to track down Fist, or, that somebody has copied Zeitmann's handwriting in order to elicit some kind of panicked response in the mega-brain of this most drunken of horrible bastards. Actually Fist isn't that horrible -- I was just getting carried away with the sentence. He rescued a puppy, once. Ate it, mind, but still. Shit!, actually there are possibly more than just two scenarios -- I mean let's not rule out some kind of thing where Zeitmann time travels and sets up a body double to have his spine ripped out, or a scenario where the US Secret Military build Zeitmann a robot killing body or whatever. And so on and blehh. I'm ruling them out. Executive Decision. While fun, these scenarios will inevitably run on longer than I can be arsed with.

SPACE At this point I should probably describe Nicodemus Fist. Ok: he's tall, like really tall, and muscled like those superhero bodysuits you sometimes see at fancy dress parties. Also he has short black hair, starting to go grey. And he's got these piercing blue eyes that just scream 'don't shit me, son' when you look at them. His smile can be kind but mostly it's the predatory one he uses. The one that, if you see it, says you're probably going to be very dead very soon.
SPACE Ok, brilliant! Let's get back to the story.

SPACE So we're in Fist's kitchen watching him open his post. There are more cards than usual, because it turns out today is Fist's birthday, or rather, the day that was chosen for him to celebrate his birthday, because, let's face it, people are crap at keeping track of birthdays at the best of times, but with the whole 'being sold to Russians' thing his actual birthday was mysteriously not written down. He whistles tunelessly while he opens his cards, which he arranges one by one in a semi-circle on the table. (During this time he polishes off the rest of the bottle of vodka and goes to the fridge for another. When he opens the fridge we can clearly see that the fridge actually contains nothing but vodka.)

SPACE At last he comes to the card with the thing written on it. He holds it up at the end of the row of cards and looks at it, sipping from the mug, frowning. At this point there is a flash of light outside, a sort of ears-popping implosion sound, and then, from the garden outside the kitchen comes the sound of a man. The man quietly says "Fuck!".
SPACE Fist lets the card drop and stands, picking up his mug and going to the window, which he looks out of and then grunts softly.
SPACE He opens the back door and stands there, sipping his vodka and looking at the thing sticking out of his garden.
SPACE The thing, by the way, is a man's head, connected to what looks like the top of some kind of tank. Obviously the rest of the tank is stuck in the garden. The man's head is greying and mostly bald, and twisting from side to side as he strains to pull himself free of the ground.

SPACE "Fist!" the man screams at Nicodemus Fist, his eyes bulging and wild. "Get me out of here you idiot! Can't you see I'm trapped?"
SPACE Nicodemus Fist looks at the head connected to the tank stuck in his garden. He sips from his mug and appears to think for a while. "Fuck no," he replies.

SPACE At this point I'd just like to apologise and say I got it completely wrong before: turns out the US Secret Military cryogenically froze Dr Fenk Zeitmann's body and, at some point far in the future, restarted his brain and gave him a giant tank-like robotic killing-machine body, which they then sent back in time in order to destroy Nicodemus Fist, while somehow allowing him to write and send a postcard before he arrived. So you see, I was wrong. I apologise. Blah fucking blah.
SPACE (It also turns out they got the co-ordinates slightly wrong, hence: killing machine stuck in garden scenario. Haha!)

SPACE Either Nicodemus Fist deduces this using his vast infra-brain, or he just doesn't care. Probably the latter as the man is quite drunk by now and it's not even 10am. Needless to say, he acts composed and some would say even charming, and is beginning to grin as the situation develops. (I think you know which grin it will be.)

SPACE As he is standing there watching Zeitmann struggle and deciding which of the many killing techniques he will use there is a shout from the garden gate and a woman walks through it and into the garden. "WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON HERE?!" is what she shouts. She, of course, being Karen Hellinger -- Fist's girlfriend.
SPACE Karen Hellinger storms across the garden towards the head, which, attached to the tank-like body, has slightly crushed some of her prize roses.
SPACE "WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU AND WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO MY ROSES?" she screams at Dr Zeitmann, who, by now, is seriously regretting the gung-ho attitude he displayed when given the chance to come back in time to kill Fist. He should have stayed in the future. Perhaps he is thinking he might cry. We don't care.
SPACE"Ask him what he's doing here," Fist slurs, winking at Zeitmann.
SPACE "Fuck that," Karen says, aiming a swift kick at Zeitmann's head which kills him instantly (a single tear slipping from his eye).
SPACE "Here," she says, thrusting a carrier-bag into his hands, "Happy Birthday. Now get me a fucking vodka, I'm parched." She pushes past him and into the kitchen.
SPACE Fist pulls a bottle of vodka from the carrier bag and chuckles. "You know I've got a fridge full of this stuff..." he says.
SPACE "Shut it," Karen replies.


THE END

by Kuke