Through the eyes of the survivors.

The city is dying. The streets are filled with decay. Each day I find myself looking through my window, only to see the same scene: clouds the colour of the setting sun and streets that lay dead or dying. No one lives here, I have it all to myself and I’m lonely. So very lonely. I spend waste away in my home – which was once a majestic mansion – and stare out at the skies. The streets fill with the dead and dying, and it won’t be long before disease claims the lives of the survivors, assuming there are survivors other than me. It all happened at once. When they landed, their raw power wiped most of the landscape clear from the earth. The aftershock was small enough, but the aftermath was another story entirely.

The city is dying and its buildings are slowly emptying. Most people I know have either died from the machines, or have fled from the disease. They left me here alone, completely abandoned. I wasn’t always like this. There was a time when I had friends, family even. But now... well now times have changed. No one believed me when I told them they would come to us, and thanks to their scepticism everything is coming to an end. We can’t continue to live like this, there’s no way in hell we can sustain this lifestyle. After they hit, you see, they raided the cities. First they took the men. Where did they take them? I don’t know. Why did they leave me? I don’t know. After they were finished with the men, they took the women and children. For weeks, the city was empty. They left me here on my own, with nothing to listen to except for voices in my head.

The city is dying and the survivors are losing faith. After people lived through whatever it was that had happened to them, they distanced themselves from me. They began to stare at me, pass whispers to each other. The survivors were all jealous of me. They envied me. They wanted my innocence for themselves. They wanted my body, my soul. I had never killed a man, until one of the survivors confronted me. He claimed to be offering me assistance, as if I was the one who needed assistance. I pushed him away, and his skull split open on the pavement. It was one of the many, many lives that this city had taken in the aftermath of the abductions.

The city is dying and the world is dying with it. Each day the walls begin to close in around me. As the survivors grow more violent, I become increasingly afraid of the outside world. I’m sustaining myself on what food was left here before they landed. I find myself praying everyday to a God who doesn’t exist, praying that my food will last until I am the last one in the city. The survivors will either kill each other, or move on. They might even do both. Either way, it’s clear they’re not human anymore. Whatever happened to them changed them forever.

The city is dying, and I’m beginning to grow afraid. I can hear them knocking on my doors, and I’ve seen them in my windows. I’ve completely boarded myself in. Now, I fear that if when my food runs out will be the precursor of my life running out. I’m not afraid of death anymore, however. I’m afraid of those beasts outside: the survivors. They’re worse... twice as monstrous as their creators. The creators had left me alone, at least. They didn’t trouble me. The survivors, on the other hand, won’t leave me alone.

The city is dying and this feeling is growing worse day by day. They’re knocking on my door as I speak. They’ve come for me. They want me dead. They want to feel the life leave my body. I search for a weapon and find nothing. This feeling of dread is paralysing me. When they get through, they will pin me down. They will rape me, torture me and snap my spine. They’ll stab me, shoot me, eat me, disembowel me; they’ll do whatever they can to kill me. They’ll do whatever they can to get inside me. They’ll do whatever they can to get their hands on whatever it is I’ve got.

The city is dead. I’m in a white room. No one can hear me scream, but then again, not even I could hear myself screaming. All hope I had is gone.