> "How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people! How is she become as a widow!"

> -Lamentations of Jeremiah

The dusk brought a breeze that made the banners flutter merrily. The gay displays already had the pale moonlight reflecting off of them. Fires burned and embers swirled in the air.

All over were dead bodies of revelers. Many wore colorful costumes, now soaked in blood. Music played for the dead, festive and loud and profane in its hollow celebration. There had been no great gala, no fireworks and no cheering.

It had all ended in screams. Horrible, nightmare screams that drowned the souls of those that still hid, trembling, in torn dresses, bruised and shocked, but still alive.

"Come out and play. Oh, come out and play. Do come now, do come out. Won't you come out and play?" The lunatic voice of one man. While he was stepping over the dead, he was calling for victims. He was one of the stronger and faster males. All that mattered when every man on those streets had gone mad simultaneously.

They had all become violent after a few minutes of strange jerking convulsions. The first killing had been an off-duty policeman with a gun. He had snapped out of his convulsions and pulled out his concealed firearm and shot those nearest to him, starting with his family.

All of the men. All at once. Violent psychotic rage, like rabid maniacs. They just started attacking and killing everyone in sight, especially the women and children, but also each other. It had been a bloodbath.

"Oh, come play. Come out and play." The man was moving jerkily. He had a severed head by her long hair in one hand and a fire axe in the other hand.

Kira had his gun. The gun had a bullet. This man, the one walking nearer and nearer to her, had been the cop. He had lost his gun and later gotten a fire axe. He was soaked in blood, none of it his. He stepped over bodies, coming nearer. He stopped.

"Still breathing?" He had found a teenage girl who had only been knocked out. Kira knew her, by sheer coincidence the girl was from her same apartment building. She was sure her name was Ariel. A bookworm or something, a real smarty pants. Kira had never liked her, but she forgot that and risked her life anyway.

The girl was being forced up by her hair, tangled in the man's fingers. The man had raised the ax and was ready to decapitate her to replace the head he had tossed away.

Kira knew he wouldn't stop at the pointed gun. All of the men acted pretty much the same. They were not really responsive to threats. They all acted like killing machines with no real fear of death. Kira shot him in his Adam's apple and his head went back and he fell, dropping the ax as he died in spurts of blood. The sound of the gunshot made other men who were busy atop their victims look up and notice the two women.

The eyes of the men sparkled like the eyes of evil creatures in the fires and moonlight. The festive music that insisted on playing over loudspeakers added a dimension of the surreal and conflicted with the magnitude of vicious carnage all around.

"Run!" Kira screamed at the girl. Ariel was just standing there frozen after getting to her feet. Ariel started running down the street, surprised at how fast her feet could carry her over the strewn bodies and slippery gore.

Everywhere were faces frozen in pain and terror, dead eyes watching the living flee the liminal. Kira couldn't run like that. The gun clicked empty and then she threw it, and it struck her nearest attacker. She must have brained him pretty good because he spilled and split his face on the street, never to rise again.

Then another was upon her. He knocked her to the ground and began pummeling her with ferocious rage, his fists crashing into her until merciful unconsciousness took her.

It was late afternoon before Kira's eyes opened. One of her eyes anyway. She felt on her face where the other eye had been. It had been torn out, she noted in dry shock. She was able to sit up. All around the daylight shown with twinkling sunshine upon corpses as far as she could see with her left eye. She looked around on the ground near her and spotted the eyeball that had been ripped out of her. She nodded.

"Great." She decided, the shock making her accept it with little more than pity. She tried to get up and noticed her clothes were torn apart also. She checked herself and found that the savage mauling had been part of another primitive act. She wondered absently if it might have saved her life.

Ironically, she had been a counselor at a women's crisis center. Now that she was the victim of the most ruthless assault known to her, she herself needed all of the comfort she had recited to others.

"It is not your fault." She said without any meaning or emphasis, to herself. She forgot the rest, realizing she had been strangled and her voice was very hoarse. "How the fuck am I still alive?" She asked out-loud.

Kira had gotten to her feet and started walking around. Everywhere were bodies in broken heaps, strewn about like so many children's toys on the floor. The street had many decorations and food-trucks and all sorts of preparations for a very great celebration. It had never really kicked off.

Just the cataclysmic riot and all the killing.

She noticed the music had stopped. Her ears were fine, and she stood listening every few painful steps she took. It was very quiet. She could hear silence, a strange sound, almost like a kind of dismal moan.

The city sat in unbroken silence. Those who had survived were hiding or hunting. And the survivors were few in number. There were no cars or buses or airplanes. Nothing.

As she walked, she noticed the smell of blood and human insides. It was nauseating, like walking past a butchery on a hot day except so much more insistent and pervasive.

Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit.

Then certain sounds did mingle in her ears, in the dead calm and silence of the empty city. Flies.

It was interesting how few there were. It was almost as if the congealing and open bodies of all the dead outnumbered the flies. Kira realized that was going to change. Soon the flies would multiply. She nodded appreciatively at this. The natural order of flies, and the crows that sat looking at the feast with confusion, somehow reassured her.

Then one of the crows came and landed on one of the dead bodies and pecked nervously. It called down its friends, telling them that what they were looking at was for real. All the humans were dead. They started having their breakfast in an almost reverent silence. They too were surprised and shocked, mere animals, unable to comprehend what was before them, but grateful never-the-less. They ate in thanksgiving, an entire murder of crows. At first, they only fed on the one dead body, but soon they figured out they could each have their own, or their own pile even. The bodies outnumbered the crows.

Kira kept walking. Several times her hand explored the damage to her bruised parts, and she winced. She caught her image in some unbroken glass. Much of the glass had been broken. Destruction had begun after the killings. The men seemed to have no limit to their aggression. Some had attacked their own reflections and had died impaled by shards.

She eventually got clear of the worst of it. She began finding bodies that had been worked over more thoroughly by attackers who had hunted down and killed their victims with unlimited brutality. Back the way she had come, most victims had just been killed. Where she found them now, alone and ravaged, it was much worse.

After some point, she stopped looking at the mangled and ripped remains. Burning vehicles and whimpering dogs caught her attention. A very large housecat, genetically engineered to look like a tiger, watched her. It was the size of a dog and had some tiger DNA in it. Those pets had always creeped her out. It was hungry, but domesticated. It had watched the slaughter all night. Kira kinda wondered what it was thinking, probably wondering when it was going to get fed.

She continued down the rabbit hole until she reached the park. There was a robot walking along sweeping up some litter. The stupid thing just kept repeating its chores, oblivious to what had happened. She wondered what would happen when the robots scheduled to clean up the ruined party downtown arrived. What would they make of things?

Suddenly she started laughing crazily. The thought of the robots scratching their metal heads wondering what to do and asking each other for instructions was hilarious to her. She laughed until her injuries hurt and then some more, realizing that they would be stuck in a loop, standing there with their mock-human expressions of confusion. Just sitting there repeating themselves over and over, endlessly.

"Atomitronic." She addressed the mechanical man in front of her. "Go walk downtown and start cleaning. Tell the other atomitronics to do the same."

"Atomitronic designation verified. How may I be of assistance?" The mechanical man asked her. It was like a harmless grocery-cart boy. A shadow of a man in every way. She frowned at its gentle purpose.

"Atomitronic I am hurt. Help me." She told it.

It walked over to her and said: "You have sustained injuries. I will call for help. Wait here. Remain calm. I will call for help." It tried to reassure her.

Of course, it was not a medical contraption, just a janitor that swept trash in the park. It was a technological idiot. It could only repeat itself, doing the same thing over and over endlessly. That is what it meant, to be atomitronic. Compared to her, it was immortal. It would keep the park well swept of human debris forever. Perhaps it would malfunction or be cannibalized by a smarter machine. There were other atomitronics out there.

Kira shuddered. Without human intervention, she imagined the damn things blundering around without any sort of point. It irritated her and she left it there. The stupid robot was still talking. It just kept repeating itself until she couldn't hear it. She wondered if it was still going, like the energizer-bunny or something.

She heard some gunfire as she walked. It was sporadic. It occurred to Kira that a madman was firing a gun at people, but it was more likely female survivors, Kira told herself. She went towards the sound.

She rounded the corner and saw two women there with a little boy and an aged 'tween girl holding a baby. The two women were armed, both with shotguns. Nearby was a dead man that had been shot by shotgun blasts three times. He was quite dead.

"I need help." She told them. Then, as if her legs knew she had arrived at safety, they gave out from under her and she collapsed, first to her knees and then to the ground. Again, she lost consciousness.

When she woke up, she was in a car impound lot with a barbed wire fence around it. She was on a cot under an awning. The breeze smelled of fermenting death. There were now three women, in addition to the three children. One of them was Ariel.

"You saved my life." Ariel had walked over to Kira in a ghostly manner.

"I must look like Frankenstein." Kira had a hand to her face and found stitches.

"I am so sorry." Ariel was sobbing. The girl had obviously been crying before and hadn't had any sleep or rest. Kira had been in shock and her emotions had sorta gone numb and clinical. It had been like some kind of survival mechanism had just kicked in and made her walk out of ground-zero and escape.

"I think I am fine." Kira told Ariel. "Looks like you are hurting more than me."

"How could I hurt? I was barely touched. Look what they did to you." Ariel's eyes moved over the sheets covering Kira, with reluctance.

"I wasn't even awake for it. Don't remember any of it. I am just glad I am here." Kira watched Ariel crying pitifully. "Stop that. You have to be strong now. We don't get to be like that anymore."

"Yes. You are right." Ariel tried to calm down. Seeing how Kira was being so tough she felt like she had no choice but to have some courage. "I am scared. We have seen about a dozen of them roaming around. One of them tried to come at us...and they...those two...they shot him apart."

"It is self-defense. They aren't men anymore. I have a feeling that there aren't any men anymore. Just those...things." Kira stated sagely. "You get yourself a gun and do the same thing. Act as my proxy until I can get back on my feet. Take charge here. Make this a fortress, a safe haven where others can come."

"What? Act as your proxy? I can't shoot someone." Ariel said.

"You can and you will. Just pretend you are me when you are doing it. You are doing it for me and for all those who come next. I know that there will be others. There has to be." Kira told the girl.

"Take charge? How do I do that?" Ariel felt the tears coming back. It was all so horrible and crazy.

"You are very intelligent. They need your brains now more than extra ammo. You figure out how to make this place safe and get others here. Preserve them, keep the candle burning in the window as a beacon. You know - that sort of thing."

"I...guess I do know." Ariel confessed. She looked at the other two women. The two who had saved their kids and shot their men. There must be others. Kira was right. They had to stick together, protect one another. It was the only way. Ariel looked around at the meager defenses. She imagined those raving animals that had once been men could come over the barbed wire.

They needed more and she put aside the part of her that just wanted to cry and began to really apply her intellect. They would have to build some kind of compound, make fortifications. Gather supplies. She wasn't sure yet. But she had a spark of hope in her, and she planned to keep it. She looked again at Kira, but Kira had stopped breathing. Something inside her, some broken part, had waited to reveal its vitality, her mortality, and she was gone.

"Goodbye, my friend. I will keep that candle burning for you. Find your way home." Ariel promised. She shut the last of the eyes of the dead and opened her own and took upon herself a leader's countenance, that she wore from that moment onward.