The night is dark, turning pitch black mist thanks to the smog-choked air. The city lights mark the ground in radiant colors, and buildings sing in hissing steam columns and buzzing neon signs. Vegetation doesn’t grow in the surrounding soil anymore, so the hills to the west are blank and gray, the color of static. Almost featureless, only contour lines shape them, burnt through by acid water from filthy rain showers. 

 The city is a mess of bridges, tall buildings, and shambled dwellings stacked on top of one another, all trying to reach higher into the sky than their counterparts like trees of the jungles found in old magazines. They’re all set to edge each other out and swallow that sweet sunlight even at the cost of others. The city is as vertical as it is wide. What came before is simply built over now, instead of toppled. Sometimes, old buildings are filled with cement to support new ones, burying any poor sap unlucky enough to squat inside. Other times, they are built around, encased in hardened steel and concrete like death cells for those forgotten and left behind.

 The streets are no better. Cracked and broken, hobbled together by insane engineers, they stretch for rows and rows into the distance in whatever direction you look. And when a new level of buildings is needed, the old roads are built over and turned into tunnels, their roofs the new streets. It’s the same beneath the city too; some streets sit empty and unused, while others still bustle as underpasses for the people living below the surface. It’s like this all the way down for who knows how deep; one giant car park, a living breathing city where the old are trampled and built over with asphalt, and the young reach for the skies. No one knows how far down the city goes. Maybe those distant sand hills used to be mountains…

 But that’s not all of it. In their greed, the corpo pigs did the impossible. The world was heating up. The skies were choked by smog. Animals and plants were dying in mass extinctions. People struggled in the streets while resources dwindled. Yet, profits steadily rose.

 All the signs pointed to collapse. The world should’ve ended, the profit margins dropping from plateau to nosedive, all the way down to zero… Then poof. We’re dead. Yet, here we all are.

 Somehow we survive, as if the wheels of industry simply will out our continued existence. I’d complain, but I’ve got nothing better to do.

 There’s chaos in the highstreets tonight. Sirens wail, and choppers fly overhead with white signal lights like pure circles searching the low city. Riots in the summer heat keep the police busy. Guns, firebombs, violence in the air... I can smell the blood. 

 Somewhere a bomb goes off, shaking building windows, kicking up dust and a great orange fireball rises over rooftops and disappears in an instant. Someone rushes through an alleyway, a man of forty-four years, with a woman in hand half his age. They knock over a trashcan in their hurry and step on a bum’s ankle by accident. He curses, but is too strung out to really believe it happened. 

 The pair comes out on a nearby street that's been emptied out. The power’s off here, so the streetlights don’t work. It’s hard to tell if it was supposed to be that way or not. In a moment a spotlight flashes down on them, but not from the police. These guys drive cars that are too nice for a cop. They pull out from the dark and surround the pair, but the two are already on the move. Sprinting, they race for an alleyway that leads to the next street over. Bad move.

 The ground beneath the man’s feet turns to clouds of dust, and he cringes as bullets tear into his trench coat. In the next moment, he is on the ground. The woman holds his bloody hand but he pushes her away. She rushes into the alley alone. 

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

 Assailants in black riot gear edge closer with cautious steps before wasting the dying man in a hail of gunfire. His body is hidden behind a cloud of smoke before a hot breeze blows it all away. A moment later, the man’s killers hoist the young woman out of the alley, dragging her into a nearby car, which drives away into the night. 

 Low town “low down” or Harmony as the suits call it. A place where the normals live. On the north, it's edged by a mountain of smokestacks, an industrial site. Two weeks out of the month they spew black smoke. The other two weeks giant fire columns twist and bend out of their tops, heating the city, and lighting it in a nasty dull orange glow. Many people have shades on their windows for that exact reason.

 To the west are the hills where beyond is no man’s land, a vast stretch of wastes no one’s gone into and come back out of alive. To the east beyond Lowdown, is Midcity, or Ambition if you're a midtowner, where the normals work, and some execs and low-rung suits live. It’s all boring financials, full of white-collar crime, corporate greed, and tall, tall office buildings. Research centers, and high government, real police… anything with real value lives here, but it’s only a boring middle ground, a gate between Lowdown and the real city.

 That place doesn’t have just one name like the others. Everyone calls it something different. For me, I call it the deepest layer of hell, but for some others I know, they’d call it heaven. Though, most everyone knows it as Gold City. For good reason.

 Buildings taller than any you’ve ever seen poke against the clouds. Entire districts, entire sections of the city live in their shadows. At night it shimmers gold. The aura can be seen from Lowdown, beyond the tallest buildings in Ambition. That place is beyond me. I've heard it's all backroom deals, hush money, corporate orgies, and gold-collar crimes. Bad things happen in the shadows if you know who to ask. Mass slave trading. Corporate murder. All manner of reviled perversions. 

 Doesn’t matter to me though. People like me don’t concern ourselves with that side of the world. We wouldn’t be caught dead there, either. They know people like us by name. 

 What’s beyond Gold City? I don’t know. Probably more of the same. Another midcity. Another Lowdown. Repeating and stretching forever, for all I know. To the south, midcity breaks into smaller residential areas, and poorer neighborhoods, before turning into a stretch of super highways that reach down the coast. I was born down that way, though I don’t remember where. I’ve lived here my whole life. 

 Not exactly in Lowdown though… No, past Lowdown to the southwest is a stretch of dilapidated city looking more like a bombsite than a place to live. Spires of stone poke up through the disease, remnants of old superbuildings that were much like current-day Gold City. The streets are ash, or rubble, and most buildings left standing have been abandoned or burned down. Gangs harass the weak and the destitute, and violently take what they want from those trying to make a living.

 Warzone, Wasteland, the Pits... Whatever shit name you want to give it I’m sure would fit. I call it Old City, or Old Town, but it used to be called Cherry Hill. If you've ever been to hell it would look like this. 

 Murder, slavery, perversion, drug trafficking… that’s just scraping the surface. I saw a man last week drug around the streets tied to the back of a motorcycle. And when his ride was over, they poured gasoline on him, burnt away what little life he had left. Why you ask? No reason. No goddamn reason at all. 

 Something happened here in Old Town, a long time ago, but nobody knows what. It used to be the city center, much like Gold City is today. At least that’s what they say. I don’t know if I believe any of that. To me, it’s always been nothing but a concrete jungle never kept up with, breaking down over time, and dying all on its own. There is no government, no rule or law. Only the strongest survive. It’s worse than the wild west. It’s post-apocalyptic here. And It’s where I was raised. It’s where I live on the days I can’t help it. 

 Here, it doesn’t look like something bad happened. It looks like it’s still happening. I see the same rot in the rest of the city too. Just, Old City is ahead of the curve. I suspect that one day the whole city will be like Old Town. Maybe that’s what it deserves. Shit. That’d be something to see, those corpo suit freaks scrounging in the dirt like the rest of us. That won’t matter to me though. I won’t be here to see it. 

I’m getting out of here. Just wait and see.