Three days and a bullet wound after the fall.

I followed my nameless savior along an endless number of streets and alleyways. This wasn’t my first time in New York, so I knew without a doubt that he was not, in fact, taking me to Central Park. I wasn’t exactly worried. My unfortunate condition meant that it really didn’t matter where he took me, I’d be fine in even the worst conditions. But… I also didn’t want to end up as the regenerating sex doll in some Mad Max style apocalypse.

“We seem to be taking an oddly long time to get to Central Park. Are you sure you know where you’re going?”

“Huh? Oh, yeah. Sorry buddy, but after the attacks, a whole bunch of streets were completely blocked. There’s no such thing as following a road anymore,” my guide said.

“Why don’t we just… you know… climb over the rubble?”

“We tried, and a few of us got crushed when it collapsed. Now, we just take the long way.”

Oh, yeah… Humans break. I forget that sometimes.

We finally broke through the concrete jungle and laid eyes on mankind’s last bastion of nature. It wasn’t close to the grandeur of the old days, but enough green remained to give testament to the skill of the park’s gardeners. But even though plants still lived there, the human element had long since taken its toll on this place. The once tall, powerful trees had become shadows of themselves. The lake, a once beautiful body of water hidden in the center of the most famous metropolitan in the United States, was a pit of garbage and ruin. Its waters were more like a toxic swamp than a lake, and the chances of safely drinking its waters were easily non-existent.

It was almost like mankind enjoyed wallowing in its own filth.

The survivors’ camp was along that desolate coastline. Tents made of whatever material they could find dotted the ground. In the center, something resembling a headquarters was bustling with people going about duties they hadn’t yet mastered.

“Yes, because if the end of the world wasn’t enough, we needed to add a shantytown to the survival game,” I said, trying to lighten the depressing view in front of me.

“Well, yeah, what did you expect? All the people in the buildings are dead. Why wouldn’t we pick the one place without bodies?”

“Because a roof is a terrible thing to waste?”

“Well then, you get out there and find us a place to live without piles of dead bodies littering the ground. I’ll wait,” he said, handing me a sausage and bottled water. “It’s only been a few days, but we’ve already lost power, water, hell… even the sewage stopped working.”

Apparently, all those union workers claiming that the great NYC would shut down without them were right. Who knew?

“You don’t have anyone that could figure it out? It can’t be that difficult.” I said, trying not to choke on the food. How the hell could someone ruin sausage that badly? I mean, really, you take the meat, grill the meat until it’s barely squishy, stop cooking the meat. It’s not that hard. This piece of shoe leather was an affront to every butcher that’s ever lived. Yeah… I’m judging the free food. What? You think it’s bad form to point out when a cook reduces something amazing into a dried-out monkey penis? I don’t.

“We haven’t been able to find any survivors with that skill set… unless?”

“Nope,” I said. “If you haven’t noticed, I’m standing here in a trash bag with nothing to my name but a severely overcooked sausage.”

“I’ll have you know, Johnny does his best.”

There I go again, pissing off people within minutes of meeting them. Will I ever learn to just keep my mouth shut? Probably not.

“I’m not saying that Johnny makes bad sausage, only that it takes a bit more chewing to make it to that nice firm center,” I said.

If the man caught the sarcasm, he didn’t react to it. Something told me the joke went over his head. Eh, live and let live, I guess. The guide eventually left me alone with my thoughts. Apparently, spending an evening with a man dressed in a trash bag wasn’t something he enjoyed. I was grateful he did, but considering he didn’t come back with pants, I was suspicious.

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

Nobody truly cared enough about people to pick them up off the street without at least one ulterior motive. That was true in Rome, and it’s true today. I still remember when Julius decided I was too beautiful to ignore and convinced me to dress as a woman for years. Not that Servilia isn’t a perfectly lovely name, but it’s hard to come up with children when you don’t have the plumbing. I still shudder when I think of the itchy pillow I had to wear under my toga while we were trying to kidnap Brutus. We had options that day, but Julius said he looked like the type of kid we could trust. When I think about it, I really shouldn’t have trusted Caesar. He wore entirely too much makeup.

After my meal of leather and chemical water, I walked around the camp and did the one thing I truly mastered in my lifetime—I listened. Three days ago, a midnight black rift opened in the sky and dumped wave after wave of enemy ships onto our world. Aliens with no true definable properties—apparently everyone saw something different—invaded our world and tore apart what few defenses we had. For every person they killed, they captured two more. In the blink of an eye, they’d enslaved two-thirds of our population, and left the few that remained barely clinging to life.

The UHR was always at war and believed that anonymity was the key to Earth’s continued existence. Right now, I truly wish I could force the senate to see this. Maybe then they would admit that isolation was not the key to survival. And this wasn’t survival. It was a faltering heartbeat, weakened by hubris, fed by the clogged arteries of ignorance and the decayed veins of complacency. Sure, the military eventually showed up to defend their ancestral homeland, but by that time, they had taken the kidnapped people to some unknown location we would probably never find.

“And where were you, Stranger?” The undisputed leader of the survivors, Chuck, said when he caught me listening in on conversations that were not my own.

“I uh… I don’t remember much. I remember trying to get out of my girlfriend's apartment when I saw one of those things turn the corner. If the building hadn’t collapsed from the artillery fire, I would be one of the Taken.”

Had I just come up with random bullshit on the spot? Yes. Was it necessary? I thought so. I mean seriously, would you believe me if I told you I was dead when the world ended? Or that I’d hidden under Madame de Popadour’s dress long enough to give her the chance of a lifetime with King Louis? Or that I taught Babe Ruth to swing by teaching him caveman tactics—which was a substantial improvement to the gave overall—and I didn’t even ask for credit? No. No, you wouldn’t.

The much safer option was to lie about my whereabouts and mortality status. If they ever asked how I managed to live through a building collapse, I would make something else up.

“How the hell did you survive that?”

Fuck.

“Ah… I’m not sure to tell you the truth. I hit my head when it started, and I blacked out. Next thing I knew, I was laying in rubble and could just barely make out the daylight.”

And saved.

Dodged that bullet. Sort of.

“You dug your own way out of the building? How did you not ruin your hands?”

God damned asshole. Would you just accept the lie for what it is and leave it alone? If I had my club…

“I tore up some cloth I found to make gloves. I got away Scot free, so I guess it worked.”

“That’s some incredible luck you have. Do you have a name, or should we just call you Lucky?”

And here we go: the number one issue I have with living in a society that cares about names and titles. In the old days, we could go weeks without even knowing what color eyes another caveman had. (Spoilers, they were brown. Always brown.) Today, everyone wanted your name, your picture, all the social media you could imagine, and any private information you wanted to keep secret. I hate it here.

“Vandre,” I said, picking a word from a long dead language, hoping nobody here was a scholar.

“Nice to meet you, Vandre. We are trying to rebuild, but it isn’t easy. Honestly, we could use your help getting back on our feet.” Chuck said, shaking my hand and offering me another serving of burned sausage, “Just… consider it please. Even if all you can do is search buildings for survivors and help us get rid of the bodies, it’s still help.”

Sigh… why does this always happen?

Humanity thinks it’s on the brink of collapse so they rope in everyone they can find under the guise of stopping more things from falling apart, and yeah, sometimes it works out, but most of the time, civilization ends up like the Akkadians.

Despite their inability to conjure water from thin air, their contributions enabled the development of art, literature, science, agriculture and religion. They grew even stronger when I took the throne as the magnificent Naram-Sin, growing our power more than anyone thought possible. Hell, we even came up with the first postal system. And before someone says it again, I didn’t cause the fall of Akkad. Climate change killed that empire. Using the seal of a god as a return address had nothing to do with it. If the gods didn’t like kings claiming divinity, then why did they give us such glorious looks? Again; climate change, not the curse of Agade. That piece of literature has caused me more trouble than it’s worth.

“Any chance I can get some clothes, or should I just keep rocking the trash bag?” I asked, deflecting the question to something I actually cared about.

“Not down here, you can’t. If you find something that fits while scavenging, you can have it. All the excess stock we find ends up as medical supplies and extra clothes for the elderly. Sorry.”

“So… I have to wear the trash bag for at least one whole night? Next, you’re going to tell me that blankets are in the same situation.”

His blank stare confirmed it. I would indeed play the role of graverobber tomorrow. If only because I didn’t want to continue walking around without pants.