Failsafe of the Street Soldier

Chapter Four - The Final Hopeless Battle on the Cliff of Desolation

John did not remember all of the biographical information for his wife.

John Daring was not pleased with his hair-care situation. He had lost nearly half of the hair on his head and nearly half of the teeth in his mouth. His gums had turned sort of a tar-color, you might call it black but my creative writing teacher told me to be as evocative as possible in my writing. He gave me a C minus on my poem for the Tactile assignment that I wrote about sand. I said it smelled like "the burrows of a gopher on a beach" and he said that gophers don't live on beaches because of high tide. Well I'm fucking sorry professor meteorology; I'll try harder not to fuck up the life-cycle of a gopher next time in my bullshit assignment where I describe sand. Ahem, anyway, Daring was not happy with his hair-care dilemma. Combing over the bald spots worked at first to hide the effects of radiation, but he kept losing more and more and that Hair Club For Men stuff he looted from the futuristic gang who worshipped the dud missile in the silo nearby just was not cutting it.

He exited the bathroom and walked into the main area of the cellar where his wife sat playing in a puddle of her own filth. She wasn't so beautiful anymore with all of the teeth rotted from her skull and only a few patches of her blond hair remaining.

"Do you think I should just start wearing a hat or something?" John Daring asked, putting on his Raccon City Nemesis baseball hat.

"Mmmmmphhh," replied his wife as one of her fingernails fell off and she picked it up and put it in her mouth.

"Remember what I said about putting stuff in your mouth?" John slapped her wrist and pried the fingernail and pieces of her rotten gums from between her cracked lips.

The next day things had not improved. His hair was still falling out, he lost another tooth, and during the night at some point his wife choked to death on a mixture of vomit and blood. He buried her in a shallow grave next to his two children and by noon he had carved a headstone and lost most of the rest of his hair. He defiantly wiggled one of his five remaining teeth and shook his fist at the heavens, cursing God for allowing this to happen to his carefully groomed hair.

He looked at the headstone for his wife. He had forgotten her name, in fact he never actually knew it, and he had no idea when she was born so he just put question marks for her birth year. As if to emphasize how crappy he had things John managed to stub his toe really painfully when he was putting the spade away in the cellar.