The Old Man with Skeleton chain

The Old Man with a Skeleton Chain

(This is the first paragraphs of the sci fi apocalyptic story that I started writing today... please comment on the start and wait for more ...)

I could see the fire in his eyes, fire of hatred and contempt even when he was approaching his imminent death.. He had the look of a person dying with the satisfaction of a secret of a treasure that will be buried forever after his death. The old man with white hair, log beard and a skeleton of a hand tied on his neck, was staring with the same expression when I, the Sheriff, was putting him to death with my bare hands suffocating him as a punishment for killing my assistant Rusty in cold blood and disrupting the peace of my settlement. The only reason the old man survived this long here was my longing to know something from him about my past and how me and my fellow dwellers ended up in this creepy desert, years before... surviving a long journey through wrecks of civilization, debris and blood thirsty mobsters, killing and getting killed...

Sheriff is not my real name. I don't remember what was it. Along with lot of other trivia my name is also buried somewhere in the dark corners of my memory. Sheriff is the name given to me by my compatriots, the good people who believed me and thought that I can be a leader to them protecting them from all evils... and there WAS a hell a lot of evil at that time, around 50 years back... when darkness struck all of us who were living petty comfortable luxurious lives, forcing all evil to break loose and us to move out and search a new dwelling.

I was a small kid then. A teenager, 16 years old, leading a life like any other teen ager. Those times darkness was never known to us. Life was always filled with light... nights were never dark, always floodlit and joyous and then... one day darkness struck... That night no lights burned, nothing worked, all our lives came to a stand still. And that continued, no lights, no transport, no machines and our civilization that was totally dependent on power was defeated...