Lily had been doing some accounting. She was checking through the media she had collected to figure out what to get next. She had downloaded a large pack of TV shows. All sorts of them. She’d managed to grab all of her favorites, and some popular shows she’d never seen. A whopping 18 terabytes of nothing but TV shows and movies.

She’d also practically bought out Steam and downloaded a ton of games, and grabbed a staggering amount of music. Her entertainment needs ought to be met for a long time to come!

She made google maps download a map of most of the country, so that she wouldn’t need a connection to use her GPS anywhere. She had countless videos downloaded from youtube of the “How to X” variety.

She’d grabbed programs for art, music, programming, video editing, computer diagnostics, and more!

So, why was it that she was sitting here looking at her phone and thinking that she must have missed something important?

“Because I always miss something important. Clothes, medical supplies, and whatever else. But this time, I’m not going to be stupid. I’m going to think it through.”

Despite saying that… nothing came to mind. Oh sure, the downloads were still running. But she was just downloading more media. She was sure that there was a whole category of items she had missed, if she could just think of it. She couldn’t.

Lily shrugged. It wasn’t like she didn’t already have a lot. She did! More than she could consume in a year, much less with only a couple hours a day at night after all the work she had been doing. If this pattern kept up, she might be set for five or ten years.

But, there was definitely some information that would be useful that she just didn’t have. She just didn’t know what! Textbooks? She’d hit a college campus for those. Physics or engineering principles? They should be in the textbooks, but also it’s not like she knew enough to know what would be useful or not useful in content like that anyway.

She opened Google to do a search for “Surviving Alone Knowledge” when it happened. Google didn’t work.

“Huh?”

She checked her phone’s connection. Sure enough, she was connected to wi-fi. She flicked that off, and it didn’t want to connect to a cell tower. That was to be expected. So she went and grabbed her laptop.

Google would not open. Her downloads were… also stopped. The tracker she was using must have finally gone down.

“Oh.”

She had expected to feel something immediately. Some kind of gut punch. But it wasn’t really there. In some ways, it felt like taking off a noisy headset and hearing the silence around you. She was suddenly cut off. She stared at her phone, suddenly unsure of what to do. Some website still had to be working right?

Twitter? No. Yahoo? Nah. Facebook? Eww, but also no. Youtube? Of course not, it was Google related. Amazon? Nope. Twitch? … yes.

Twitch was still working. Lily perked up immediately. She’d never really cared that much for streaming content. It was too involved for what she usually wanted from media. But it was… something! She clicked around to find something to watch. Not really thinking about it, when suddenly something occurred to her.

There were probably archived streams from the night it all happened, right? So she went looking. It wasn’t too hard to find. She just looked at big creators until one had an archived stream from a few days ago that was way too long. She opened it up and started clicking around the timeline. And then–

Lily wasn’t sure what she had been expecting. She was bound to find footage of this sooner or later. If it wasn’t twitch, she had already been thinking of finding a place with security cameras and going through logs to see what happened. But, this was… well, somehow a let down.

It was so simple. One second the streamer on screen was talking with a silly voice to his audience and the next… he was just gone. Not a flash. Not a sound. No indication of anything. One frame he was there, the next he wasn’t. There was silence.

The video went on for over six more hours, and there was just… nothing. The repetitive music of the game he was playing kept going, even with nothing notably happening on screen. It could have been the same thirty second clip on repeat. Until it just sort of… ended.

That was it. They just… vanished. It was so anticlimactic. It was almost worse than a gory explosion, or a scream, or… or… something!

But, there was nothing. No answers to be had. Lily turned off her phone and lay back on the couch. She regretted looking for it. Let her last connection to how the world used to be something easier to handle, like downloading a poorly named collection of retro games.

She let out a sigh. She just wanted to go home. Back to the way things used to be. She was objectively better off now in a lot of ways. She’d made serious progress in just days of work! She was just sad. Lonely. Disconnected. She just wanted to not worry about anything for a little bit.

She wandered to the center of her living room and laid down for a while staring at the ceiling, and just let her mind wander for a while. Minutes passed. Then hours.

She had music playing on the TV, but had long since stopped paying attention to it. Bay was on the floor next to her, and Star was sleeping on the sofa. The sound of the somewhat melancholy rock was really setting the mood.

Gone. It was gone. The loss was visceral. Lily had known it was coming, but she didn’t expect it to affect her so badly. She didn’t want to move. She didn’t want to think. She felt more disconnected and alone than ever, despite her companions being right here.

She had an idea. A thought. A desire. She knew it would hurt, but some self destructive part of her wanted that right now.

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

“Hey Star.”

She spoke, not moving from laying across the floor. She heard him look up.

“Wanna go for a trip? I wanna go home.”

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It wasn’t a terribly long drive to Lily’s old apartment building. The hard part was doing it with one good hand, but that wasn’t impossible. She took it slow. Between her injuries and the energy it took to heal she was still feeling dead on her feet. But driving isn’t too tiring. Star was buckled carefully into the passenger seat.

Lily still wasn’t sure what she was expecting. After all, it was almost certainly burned to the ground. She was just feeling lost and emotional, and her instincts were telling her to just go back home.

She hoped when she saw it, her dumb emotional brain would finally understand that it wasn’t an option. Driving through a scorched wasteland for so long was really making her feel like she was in a post apocalyptic movie. After the bombs had dropped or something.

She pulled into the lot that used to be her home. It was ash. Of course it was. She hadn’t really expected anything else. She could make out the courtyard, and where the buildings had stood. Two huge piles of concrete and rebar were what was left. And of course the ashes.

She parked, got out, and left the door open for Star. There was nothing here. Obviously. So, why had she felt like she needed to be here? Closure?

“I used to live here, Star. Right up there.”

She pointed to roughly where her apartment had been.

“It’s all gone now though. All the people. All the stars. My whole life. Not that I really had one.”

She was in a dark mindset. What was she even doing here? She knew she was caught in a depressive spiral, but it didn’t matter anymore. She came to see this because she wanted to. Might as well see it.

So, she approached the rubble and looked for a way to climb up. It wasn’t that hard. Plenty of rebar for hand holds, and enough rubble that she never had to pull herself higher than waist height for the next bit. It had only been a three story building, and now it was pretty spread out. Star was barking up at her from the ground.

She knew this was a mistake. It was dangerous. But, she didn’t care right now. She was being destructive? Fine. Let’s be destructive. She just had to see it. What had become of her old life. She had never had a strong connection to the world, but this had been her one place, and feeling like she did, she just wanted it back.

She was being childish. But, it was too late to listen to the voice of reason. What if she died? What if she died? Star might be sad for a day or two. He’s a smart dog. He’d live. Probably. And if not, did that even matter? One more dead animal on a rotting world. Let it all decay.

Lily felt like her body was on autopilot. A part of her, the normal, reasonable part railed against this. This was stupid. It was childish. It was dangerous. It was self destructive. She wanted to scream and cry, but apart from that small piece of her, she felt calm. In the eye of her own personal storm of despair.

So, she climbed. It was hard with one hand, and a few times she had to use her bad hand despite its condition. After using both hands to pull herself up on a counter sized piece of concrete, she looked down and saw she’d left a small splotch of blood. But, it didn’t matter. It’d heal up, or it wouldn’t.

She had to snap out of this. But she didn’t have the energy to fight it anymore. She made it up the last bit. She had only climbed about twenty feet, and it hadn’t been that difficult. The building had really been flattened. Now that she was on top of the pile, she saw an uneven surface. A lot of concrete at all sorts of different angles, holes that she couldn’t tell the depth of. A twisted mess of rebar. Falling into a piece of that could kill her.

But also… it was wet? She looked around. Up ahead there was a spot where water was falling. Looking up, she couldn’t see a source. It was like a light rain, just in that spot. Not from a cloud or anything, just… rain. Out of nowhere. A spooky spot? She didn’t want to deal with this right now. Annoyance filled her. She just wanted to be self destructive in peace, but even that was apparently too much to ask.

She continued forward, deciding it was fine to get rained on. She just wanted to see if she could find something, anything of her old life. She knew she wouldn’t. She just wanted to crawl into the shell of what used to be her apartment and go to sleep for a very long time.

That was insane. The quiet part of her was screaming in her head. But it was too quiet to matter now. She approached the source of the water. It was falling from the sky, right into a hole that dropped about ten feet into the rubble. The sound of running water was all around her as it poured down onto the concrete and dripped down into the hollows that used to be people’s homes. Her home. She could just… jump in. She should just jump in.

Lily closed her eyes, and stood there for a very long time.

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The water was pouring down her. It was like standing in a shower, but not quite as intense. The water was cold, but it was refreshing. She could feel it hitting her face. She could feel her hair getting weighed down, and sticking to her face. She could hear the water flowing, and flowing. Has it been like this since the fire?

She took a deep breath in, and let it out. The water. She could feel it. The sensation of it soaking through her was grounding her. Yes, this was reality. She was here. She was alive. She existed.

She opened her eyes. The water was pouring down. It seemed like it had gotten stronger since she arrived. It was almost a storm now, despite the blue skies. It felt like the turmoil in her heart had poured out, and made the rain more intense.

Rain had always grounded her somewhat. And here it was, artificial or not. The water was beautiful, pouring into the gaping hole from all different angles. She sat down on the slab she was on. She was soaked through, but it didn’t matter.

She was herself again. Still hurting. Still feeling hollowed out on the inside. But, present. Grounded. The calmness that had just been her outer shell a few minutes ago was now truly in her heart.

She shivered. It was cold. But right now, the cold was bringing her back to reality. It felt real. It was helping her feel real too. She shouldn’t have come here. But, she was here now. She looked down. Her hand was bleeding again, but not too badly. She was feeling a little woozy again, and that wasn’t surprising. She shouldn’t have climbed up here. But she had been stuck in it. Drowning.

It was good to be free of that. She didn’t even have to explain her actions to anyone. Except maybe Star. She blinked. He was okay right? She’d lost track of how long she had been up here.

Rising, Lily turned to start heading back. She’d remember this spooky spot was here, and come investigate when she was healed. Honestly, she couldn’t believe how stupid she’d been to come here in the first place. It felt like she’d been in a trance! She stood carefully plotting her path back to the ledge where she could climb down, but the second she took a step–

She slipped. She hit the ground hard. The impact shifted the slab she’d been sitting on, tilting it slightly further towards the hole. The water was pouring into the hole, and she started sliding down the concrete towards it. She scrambled for a grip, but it was smooth concrete! She was going to go over the ledge!

At the last second, she saw a piece of rebar and grabbed it! Instinctually she used her dominant hand. Her bad hand. She caught on it for a second, screamed in pain and slipped again. For one terrible second, she saw the lip of the opening getting further away.

THUMP

Everything went black.