We turned down a final alleyway and the woman parked her motorbike behind a dumpster. She threw a tarp and some full garbage bags over it as a kind of urban camouflage and gestured for me to follow her.

We hurried into the basement of a half-ruined building and she unlocked an iron door, gesturing me inside.

We walked into a space that looked like an ordinary basement, except that half of the room was covered in tarps; they hung from the ceiling, protecting every surface. For a minute I was worried I walked into a crime scene.

"Relax," the woman said. "It's for the ash. It's radioactive and I don't want to track it inside. Strip down. We'll get you new clothes."

The woman was already removing her dense overcoat and ash-cloaked layers. She laid them out on the floor, and then hung her gas mask and goggles on a hook on the wall. She stood in her underclothes and assessed the damage to her arm; it wasn't as bad as I'd thought. The bullet had barely nicked her, but she would need stitches. She grimaced as she touched the wound.

Now that I could see her face I saw she must have once been pretty. But now, like Jonas, she was gaunt, starved out. Her skin was as white as ash.

"Your shoulder, how is it?" she asked.

"I think it's dislocated," I said. The pain had lessened to a dull throb.

"Let me see," she said. She moved towards me, made me expose the shoulder, and then made me bite down on the sleeve of my coat. She put her thin hands on my back and, painfully, snapped my shoulder back into the socket. I screamed against the fabric of my coat, ashy in my mouth. A thin sheen of sweat covered my forehead.

"I'll be showering. Scrub down, and get everywhere. Under the nails, under the armpits, in your asscrack. No ash left on you, ja? Don't use too much water; this is all I've for cleaning."

I nodded and she left me in the the tarps. I heard water running and could see her silhouette moving like a wraith beyond the folds of plastic. I stripped down, laying out my clothes like she had.

The water stopped, and I heard her call: "I'm finished. I left a towel out here. Dry off and come through the door when you're done."

I heard a metal door open and then slam shut. I exited the tarps, stepping onto the cold concrete, and then found the makeshift "shower:" it was a bucket of filthy water on the floor, next to a rusty faucet. I scrubbed like she said, then dried off with the towel. But when I tried to open the door, it was locked. I knocked. "Hello?"

A small panel on the door slid open, revealing a pair of brown eyes. "What's the password?" she asked.

"My balls are freezing off," I said. My teeth chattered.

"First guess, not bad," she said. The door swung open.

The woman stood before me in a bar; it was a red-leather and dark-wood establishment seemingly out of the 1920's. I stepped in and she closed the door behind me, fastening a number of increasingly complex bolts and locks.

"It's an old... I forget the English word. A secret bar, for drinking?" she said. She moved over to the bar and began pouring something into a glass

"A speakeasy?" I said. I was still shivering.

"Yes, but - not quite. Men would come here, because it was illegal to..." she flicked her eyes to the wall. A picture of a muscular young man in a police officer's uniform sat above a booth, along with several other similar photos.

"It's a gay bar," I said.

"Yes! Exactly," the woman said. "Gay bar. It came with all the security I needed, and free porn and booze. Not a bad deal."

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

She poured herself a tall glass of brandy and took a swallow. Then she walked over to me and handed me a glass of clear liquid and a large, chalky pill. "Drink this with this," she said.

The pill looked harmless enough and the liquid in the glass was clear. I swallowed the pill and threw back the drink, expecting water. I choked.

"Vodka?" I asked, sputtering.

"And iodine. For radiation. Haven't you been taking them?" She looked confused. She had taken out a medical kit and was stitching up the wound on her arm.

"No - there's no radiation in Chicago," I said, grimacing.

She put her glass down. "Chicago was hit by a nuclear bomb two years ago. There is no Chicago."

"There is. It's right beneath you. Haven't you noticed the other cities? How do you think Berlin got here?"

"I tend to keep my head down and focus on finding food. I never really stopped to think about it. I just figured we were in Hell."

"I can see how you would think that. What happened here?" I asked.

She shrugged. "Same thing happened everywhere else. We got it bad though. Ashfalls killed all the crops and half the people. Russians came through and invaded about a year ago, after the U.S. bombed Moscow. Then one day, a flash of light, and the sky goes gray, and the rest of the world is gone. You can walk right off the edge of Berlin."

"But what happened... look, I need you to fill me in. For everyone in Chicago, you live two years in our future. We got bombed in 2020. We've been here since then, so we don't really know what happened to the world since we came to the Void."

"You've been here for two years?" she asked. She looked suspicious.

"No, no. We've only been here for two months. Time is different here," I said, "we think."

The woman stood up, turned her back to me, and swore in German. "So you missed everything. The Burning of Berlin, the Rape of Los Angeles. All the Ashfalls, all the famine. You missed it all," she said. She looked incredulous. "You were the lucky ones. All this time people mourned Chicago, London, Beijing, Moscow... when you just skipped the end of the world. You were here."

"It hasn't exactly been easy," I said, coldly. I thought of Brigg.

"Easier than I've had it. You came here with a fortune of food. I've been scraping by on Vodka and broth for weeks. Tell me, how did you get your hands on that? And how did you build a fucking hot-air balloon?"

I shifted uneasily. "I didn't exactly... build it. I got it working, but we found them in Chicago..."

The woman rolled her eyes. "You lied to me. Of course you fucking did, how could I expect anything otherwise!" She pulled a pistol from the top of the bar and pointed it at me. I threw my hands up.

"Give me one reason why I should keep you alive if you can't help me, huh? One good reason!" She cocked the gun.

"Woah, woah. Chicago-London has food and water - lots of it. Enough for everyone in Berlin,"

"I don't care about everyone in Berlin. I care about me, right now. What can you do for me right now?"

"I- I'm an engineer. I can build something, figure something out. Just give me time, and I can get both of us to London-Chicago. I promise."

She lowered the gun. "Good."

She walked towards me and leaned in to whisper in my ear: "And remember, if you feel like running. Those men who saw your balloon fall? They won't just frighten you. They'll kill you on sight. You're better off with the devil you know."

She smiled, and backed away. She extended a hand, and I shook it.

"What's your name?" she asked.

"I'm Peter. Peter King."

"I'm Hannah. German Special Forces. Welcome to Berlin, Mr. King."

She turned away and walked to pour another drink. I watched her, her slender figure moving gracefully in the shadowy bar.

For the first time in weeks, I thought of my girlfriend, Sarah. I let myself think of the smell of her hair, of the way her skin felt under my hands, of the happy, simple way she moved through the world.

She was dead, now. I knew it. My family, my mom, everyone I knew; they were all dead. The world of 2022 was a wasteland. Only about three or four miles of Chicago came to the Void. Even Anyone within ten miles of that was probably dead from radiation poisoning, and that's if the bomb was small. With almost no warning, how far could Sarah have run? My parents in the suburbs - could they have gotten out?

And even if they had gotten out of Chicago when the bomb hit, could they have survived the next two years? What about the second wave of bombs that brought Berlin to the Void? And what about the wave of bombs that destroyed dozens more cities?

The world I knew on Earth was gone. It didn't matter if you were in a city or not. Look at Berlin; it was a wasteland before the nuke even hit. Only people like Hannah, a German Special Forces operative, could survive in the new world.

And Sarah wasn't Hannah. Sarah was dead.

Now, there were dozens of cities in the Void. Every one of those bombs killed millions of people in the suburbs and sent poison ash into the atmosphere.

For the first time, I had to consider that there was no one left on Earth. The cities in the Void might be all that was left of humanity.