Read The Last Time I Saw Her for Free Online

state to find anything amusing, he would have had to at least crack a smile at the idea that he’d wound up on the afterlife’s version of death row.
    The more things change…
    Too bad he was way past finding any of this funny.
    He didn’t know how long he’d been here. Longer than any of the others. The drill was: souls arrived, something was done to them that made them shriek like they’d been doused with gasoline and set on fire, and then they turned into what looked like a pillar of ash and vanished, blown away by the frigid, unceasing wind, to exist no more.
    He watched it happening around him, again and again and again, terrible, ruthless exterminations carried out with pitiless precision, the details imperfectly concealed by gloom. Sooner or later, it was going to happen to him.
    Sometimes he almost thought it would be a relief.
    Just get it over with. Boom. Done.
    But then he suspected that thoughts like those were part of the process of wearing him down. The monsters’ whispers lodging wormlike inside his consciousness.
    The searing pain that felt like it was devouring him from the inside out was excruciating. Indescribable. Never-ending. Worse than anything he had ever experienced in life, or afterward. It would have had him screaming for mercy to the heavens if he’d had a voice left with which to scream. But his outer voice was gone now, stripped away by overuse within either moments or centuries or eons (he could no longer accurately judge time) of his arrival in this place.
    We can end your torment. We can make the pain stop. Your suffering is needless.
    He heard the monsters talking in his head. They spoke to him constantly, in deceptively soft, gentle voices, coaxing him to give in to the inevitable, to let them wipe out his agony by ending his existence.
    When he’d been alive, he would have sworn that there was nothing left in heaven or hell that could scare him. But that was before he knew that there really was a heaven and a hell, and there were things betwixt and between that could make dying seem like a day at the beach.
    The thought of ceasing to exist—of having his consciousness obliterated—had disturbed him once upon a time. It still did on some level, but he rarely connected with that level of himself anymore. He recognized that the brutishness building up inside him was part of what was happening to him, was a function of this place. The knowledge didn’t make him feel any less savage. If anything, it made the savagery worse, because it fed his anger exponentially. It felt like the basest, most beastly and damnable part of himself was growing like a cancer, swallowing up the last shreds of his humanity, eating away at any small pockets of decency that remained to him.
    It had gradually dawned on him that the reason the monsters had not yet terminated him was because they couldn’t.
    The whisper that had followed him here was the constant to which he clung. It was his shield, his lifeline. The words—he had to force them into his consciousness now through the rising tide of ferocity that was slowly blocking them out—burned inside him, keeping the hellish cold from freezing him through. One day, he thought, he would no longer be able to remember the words, and that would be the day that it ended. That
he
ended.
    I love you.
    She’d said that to him. Charlie.
    Those words were what held him to an existence.
She
was what held him to an existence. He wasn’t ready to let go of them, of her, of what was between them.
    What he had done while he was alive might have damned him to hell for all eternity. He might even be carrying so much darkness inside him that he deserved to cease to exist. He wouldn’t argue with that. But he wasn’t ready to go.
    He couldn’t leave her. He didn’t want to leave her.
    Not yet.
Somewhere along the way, he’d lost the ability to pray, but that was the plea that beat fiercely inside him.
I need a little more time.
    Part of the torture he suffered was