And The Flags Are All Dead

Was tough getting all that dirt up twelve flights of stairs, but we pulled it off. We're completely self-sufficient up here. Yeah, quite the miracle, I know. Took some scavenging at the engineering and bio buildings, and I'm lucky the internet stayed up as long as it did. Otherwise I wouldn't know the first thing about distilling water. And alcohol, but that's another story.

So there's two buildings here, with a stairwell in between. We live down in there when the weather's cold, take our hammocks up to the roof in the summer. Nice view. Even saw the fires last year. When downtown burned. Beautiful, if you let yourself stop thinking about it for a while. And everybody was probably dead already. Hopefully.

We've got the lower floors blocked off pretty good, haven't been down there for a while, not since last time we needed to grab equipment. But nothing's come up, except you. Gave us a bit of a scare, you know. Thought you were one of them, until I saw you. Good thing I didn't listen to you, eh, Verne? Toldya there was a chance. Yeah, yeah, of course you weren't serious. Would you still say that if we'da killed him?

Anyway, back to your tour. Left half of the roof is the farm. Economic collapse was coming for a while, way I saw it. So I'd prepared. Non-hybrid seeds and everything. But it didn't go down like I worried it would, not at all. Not expensive oil, not climate change, not even war. Nope, good old human apocalypses are obsolete now.

Used to be a dozen of us up here. If you could ignore the shambling corpses down below, it was beautiful, the view, you know. Serene too, unless someone made a run for it. Poor fools. None of those after the first month, and gradually the zombies left, or fell over and stopped moving. But I still hear the screams when I'm trying to sleep. All of us do. Those who didn't jump, that is.

Not a day went by, back then, I didn't wish for a sniper rifle. Grenade launcher, maybe. Might as well've wished for a nuke, or a magic lamp. Now it's too late. Haven't seen a moving human, dead or otherwise, down there, more'n a year.

But their bones are still there. And I just can't bring myself to walk among them.