When I was little, I owned this book about stars and constellations. I can't count how many times I read through that whole thing, front to back. I don't know why it was so impactful, why I yearned to see the stars in person. I would slide myself out of bed after my parents had said goodnight and I thought I was being sneaky. I'd tip-toe over to the window, move the curtains and slide open the screen.

I'd do this every night for maybe a month, hoping I might see a constellation for myself. Every once in a while I'd hear a little creak, the floor teasing me about my routine, and of course I’d freeze up. I'd do it every night. I'd lie there pretending I'm sleeping, you know as you do when you're a mischievous ten year old. Slide, tip-toe, freeze up and then open the window.

I never saw the stars, but it didn't stop me from trying, every night like clockwork. I think I was convinced that with just enough patience I'd finally catch them on a good night. Bargaining with myself, with this idea of what seeing the lights in the sky would mean.

So one night, I guess Mom came back in to check on me, she didn't announce it or anything. Instead, she walked up and got down on her knees beside me and we just stared out the window together.

"Looking for the stars?" She asked while she smiled at me from the side. With a little crick in my neck I responded, "Yeah."

"Do you know why you haven't seen them?" Her hand now placed on my back, running her fingers gently back and forth.

"No." This time I look over at her, she's still smiling but she doesn't turn her head away from the view.

"You can't see them from here. They're up there, but we just can't see them."

"Why?"

"There are too many lights coming from this island, from the whole city. They say this is the city where dreams come true, because we make our own lights here," she said it with a beautiful smile.

A beautiful smile, I looked for it in the smoke. The dripping exhaust created a horrifying rhythm.

You still can't see the stars, and the lights are barely running anymore.

I guess the dream is dead.

~

"Marcus."

I had dozed off. Let my mind slip into a spell, replaying everything up to this point. If it weren't for the constant reminders otherwise, this could have been a dream.

A delicate nightmare.

"Marcus."

His voice got closer. I could see the shadow taking shape in my peripheral. I was facing the entrance of the town. A barricade of broken cars attached to a makeshift gate, that functioned using a pulley.

We lived on the Island of Manhattan.

Everything on the inside of the perimeter we named Fort Washington. The name of the city housing projects in what was once known as Washington Heights. We requisitioned the project buildings, claimed it as our own. Housing those who needed protection, people who couldn't fight, who still had a chance but no longer had the strength or will.

He was in front of me now.

His eyes were always the first thing to grab my attention, like small jewels of jade popping out at me. He had his long brown hair tied up neatly in a knot.

It was Allen.

His arm extended out to me, with a pistol in his hand.

"You ready?" He smirked. Behind him I could see a group waving us over. I grab the gun.

"Come on, they're waiting," he said before we started walking.

"Hey!" Another voice called out from the distance, this time a girl.

She ran up beside us as we walked toward the group.

"Hey, Kel." Allen leaned over to greet her.

Kelly was a real pain about going on runs with me. I was seeing her older sister Rachel. We all grew up together. We lived in an orphanage, before the planes started dropping. One of the many creative ways people decided to die. Working together to make plane rides into a vehicle for their collective deaths. The close proximity to both LaGuardia & JFK made both Queens and Brooklyn easy targets, with most of Queens left devastated by the number of plane crashes. We were fortunate enough to make it across the bridge into Manhattan before the planes started falling out of the sky.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

"Hey. I'm going right?" Her question was aimed at me.

"Your sister would kill me if I let you."

"Bullshit. What was the point of learning how to use a gun then?" Kelly and I stop, while Allen continues toward the group. Scowling, she raises her voice, "Come on, all that training will go to waste if I can't put any of it to use."

"The gun, the training, that was all for protection."

"Exactly!" She smiles, thinking she caught me off guard. I point to the row of project buildings behind her.

"There are people in those buildings that depend on us, for food, for shelter. That's what I meant. The training's not for you, it's for them," I say this as I approach the group, who have all started loading the transport van with supplies for the run. Kelly stood there, reeling from my response. Her face flush with embarrassment, before she sparked, yelling out, "You're so full of shit, you know that? You're trying to guilt me so I'll leave you alone."

I enter the van and roll the window most of the way up.

"It almost worked." I couldn't help but smirk. I look back to see her running toward the car.

"Hey! Hey!" she yells as she bangs on the window. "You can't keep me from going!"

I could see Allen's knowing smile as we all began to laugh.

"Alright guys, let's head out."

"How many has it been?" Quincy asked as he casually checked the rearview mirror.

"Anna from the Phoenix house said she hasn't seen her sister in three days," Lauren responded. Her eyes glued to the window.

"You think they knew the safeguards wouldn't work?" Lauren asked, her head now tilted as to see the roofs of the buildings we drove by. Lauren was referring to the safeguard rails the city officials had installed on the city's roofs, around the same time it became terribly clear that the suicides were an epidemic; they were contagious.

"I think you have to know. At least on some level. If people want to die, they'll find a way to do it. The safeguards were a sign of denial, hoping that people were falling and not jumping," Quincy answered. His eyes now avoiding any contact through the rearview mirror.

Quincy used to be a cop in the Bronx during the worst of it. A single dad raising a teenage girl. He came home one night after talking someone off a ledge, to find that his daughter and her friends decided to ‘bite the apple’ together. He found them passed out on her bedroom floor beside an empty bottle of pills.

I can't imagine how much it takes for him to keep going.

"So how many does that make it now? Seven?" Allen responded, breaking through the silence.

"Yeah, I'd say seven sounds right. What do you think happened to them?" Lauren asked still glued to the window.

We drove through Times Square. The sidewalks littered with corpses now.

There were too many bodies to dispose of. With no more city officials, we had to dispose of them ourselves. Dragging them by their limbs, and pushing them out to the water. We burned the ones we left behind in piles. A dreadful affair; it took days to rid ourselves of the stench. The bodies we missed but could still smell rotting away somewhere close, hidden. You can't begin to imagine the places we've found bodies.

We passed by the giant screen hanging from the middle of Times Square. The number of dead frozen on the screen.

Three-quarters of the entire human population have died in a decade. Eight billion out of the twelve, had ‘bitten the apple’.

The number hasn't changed in over six months, but I'm sure it's much worse now. It’s only a matter of time before there aren’t enough people to keep the world running.

So we stopped trying, most of use have given up, resigned ourselves to whatever garbage we can take to distract us from the truth.

Those that didn't jump, or shoot, or gas themselves, died anyway. Left to lead a coward's life; to hide in the filth, to lack ambition, or drive, or fight.

If they didn't die in these ways, they created a spectacle, usually some kind of explosion.

Cowards with bombs who made that choice for strangers. Kids, babies, the elderly. Those who didn't have the capacity to understand those choices, let alone make them for themselves. They deprived them of that opportunity, because of fear.

What are we so afraid of?

"What do you think Marcus?" Allen asked as he turned his body around to make eye contact.

"I don't know. If they were dead, we would have found a body by now."

Lauren jumped in, "There are some back home that think they were abducted. Some patrols might have caught them too far south and delivered them to the Architects."

"To do what? Play house?" Quincy replied as he glanced repeatedly at the rearview window.

There was no ruling government. Businesses had the ruling power.

Forcing goods and services to be bought and purchased with dead currency. They controlled the market, patrolled the streets.

Those who thrived lived in the high-rises lived on the southern part of the island.

We were separated by our wealth and status. Everything in between was split up by the different factions that rose up out of the chaos.

"I don't know Q, maybe they're making them slaves, human trafficking. Who knows?" Lauren replied, as she pulled out a small photo of a little girl and stared at it intently.

Lauren was never a mother, at least not in the old world. She always tells it the same way. She was on the verge, found herself at the edge of the roof of her building, contemplating the jump. The building across from her was on fire. Through the bathroom mirror of one of the apartments she saw a little girl. The little girl formed a ball and sat in the hallway surrounded by the fire.

'Something clicked in me,' is what Lauren would say as she ran down the stairs and across the street and flew up the staircase of the burning building. She said it was instinct that directed her to check if the doorknob was hot, before ramming her body up against the door. Managing to break the lock, Lauren burst in to find the little girl crying in a corner, her parents in the bedroom, consumed by the flames. Lauren ran through the fire and extended her hand out. The little girl paralyzed with fear and hysterically crying could only yell out, "My parents! My parents!" hoping Lauren could save them still.

The little girl was completely unaware that she had watched her parents die. Lauren ran up to the little girl, realizing how little time they had said the only words she knew might save them both. "Listen to me! We can't save them honey, we can only save ourselves."

The little girl looked back at the burning heap that was once her parents and slowly nodded her head. As Lauren tells it, "I grabbed her little hand and got down so she could climb up my back. We stared down at the growing fire and I told her to scream with every ounce she had, because it would be better than to sit there in fear. We pushed through, step by step, through the black smoke that circled around us, making it harder to breathe.”

“I can still remember what it felt like to make it out, the first breath of fresh air I've had in awhile. It felt like relief."