I knew something was wrong even before I saw the sky. I was critically hung-over - last night my girlfriend, Sarah, and I had gotten too drunk at a work party and wound up arguing about how much energy a lightsaber would use. Such are the drunk arguments of engineers. It was serious enough that Sarah didn’t sleep at my place, and, because of that, she wasn’t in Chicago when the bomb hit.

I stumbled out of bed and slid into the dirty blue jeans I’d worn the night before. The apartment was cold and dark, and the lightswitch wasn’t working. Gray light filtered through the window, but that wasn’t unusual for February in Chicago. I stumbled into the kitchen for some water, but the tap wasn’t working. No power, no water, and a huge hangover are recipes for a bad mood. Luckily the gas stove was working, so I was able to heat water for coffee, otherwise I would have given up on the day completely and gone back to bed.

Instead I sat on the couch with coffee and checked my phone. There was only one message, a public service alert, received almost three hours ago:

NUCLEAR MISSILE APPROACHING CHICAGO. ETA 30 MINUTES. EVACUATE CITY IMMEDIATELY.

I stared dumbly at my phone. The message was from three hours ago. Fear seized me, and I had to talk myself down. Clearly, Chicago had not been hit by a nuclear bomb. If it had, I would have been vaporized in my bed, and would never have lived to know the terror I was feeling. No. There was no bomb. It was clearly a prank - Sarah must have programmed it into my phone while we were drunk.

I typed in my passcode and called her, ready to laugh it off. But in addition to not having WiFi, I also had zero bars of cell service. My reception in the apartment was usually crystal clear - a side effect of having thin walls - but just to make sure I moved to the window.

The sky was a special sort of gray.

No clouds; no sun. Not a shadow or a shade or a plane. Pure nothingness, like the porcelain gray of a rotting tooth. I had never seen a sky like that before.

Besides that, the outside world seemed normal, peaceful, even. A normal city day, except for one detail: there were no people. Not a soul in sight. The streets were eerily quiet, almost forlorn. Pigeons cawed and fought over scraps of meals abandoned mid-bite. Cars and taxi cabs sat abandoned, their doors left open as they decided to make the rest of the journey on foot.

My heart stopped. My mouth went dry.

I grabbed my winter coat and threw my apartment door open. I ran, frantically trying to call Sarah, weaving past doors left open by fleeing people. I started to panic; maybe the bomb was still coming. Maybe, somehow, the timing was just off.

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

I ran out of the lightless, empty lobby of my building and into the street. The air was cold - colder than usual, even for February. I calculated. If there was a blast - a real, nuclear blast - somewhere nearby, shouldn't it have been hot? But that was ridiculous. If there was a nuclear blast nearby, I would be dead, not hot. I’d be so crispy you could crumble my skin like a burnt marshmallow.

I couldn't help it. I started running. I sprinted through the street, hoping that I could make it out of the city in time, in case the missile was somehow late. I turned the corner onto Fullerton, past the Nature Museum, towards Lake Michigan. My feet pounded against the pavement; my breath heaved, cold air stinging my lungs.

I crossed under the bridge, ran up onto the beach.

I looked out at the lake - or where the lake usually was. But there was no lake.

Beyond the shoreline of Chicago was a gray mass of nothingness as far as I could see. I stood on the end of a rocky cliff, as though Chicago was floating, dangling in a grey void on a chunk of cement, suspended in a limitless fog.

Chicago was nowhere.

I stared out at the abyss for what felt like a lifetime. Then, blooming in a flash of fiery, nuclear light, another city materialized in the Void.

It sat on a chunk of rock hanging in nothingness, just like Chicago did. It sprouted onion-shaped towers alongside skyscrapers and brutal, concrete buildings. I recognized it, though I couldn’t register what I was seeing.

Moscow.

And the truth fell into place: a bomb had hit Chicago, and instead of being destroyed, we came here, to this… Void. Another bomb had just hit Moscow.

A day passed; I saw no one. I foraged food, looted convenience stores for water, and holed up in my apartment even though the building's heat had shut down and it was frigid. Wherever Chicago was, there was no sunlight, only an impermeable gray that covered everything with chill.

The next morning I knew I would have to find other people, if there were other people in the city. It seemed unlikely that I was the only person who missed the evacuation message. I packed my warmest clothes, set up my backpack with as much gear as I could carry, and closed my apartment for the last time.

I walked to the edge of the Void and looked at Moscow; it floated in the same place, a few miles away across the gray fog. There seemed to be more activity there than in Chicago; I could see the lights of fires, occasionally hear the sound of people screaming. Maybe they'd been taken by surprise and fewer people had gotten out before the bomb hit.

I made my way out of Lincoln Park, on foot, because the roads were too crammed with abandoned cars to navigate, even if people left their keys in the ignition. I stopped in a CVS and snacked on junk food, flipped through a shitty Sci-Fi novel, and even had a beer to calm my nerves. The beer, at least, was cold.

By mid-afternoon - at least, I thought it was mid-afternoon, because the sky never got fully dark in the Void - I could see the skyscrapers of the Loop looming over the rest of the city. And in the gray, there was a single point of glorious, shining electric light.

The Sears Tower. A black sentinel over the gray city. And in the black matrix of iron, a word spelled out with illuminated office windows:

"A L I V E"