She walks among the broken glass lining the shore. The hot wet sticky fluids cling to her bare feet. She no longer feels it. No longer feels anything. This blood is nothing new to her. This blood is nothing to the blood she has shed before, to the blood she has watched leave its host before.
Blood. There is nothing new to blood. In this whole damned world, it’s the only constant. Blood flows through the veins, never ceasing until the heart stops. Red blood cells flow through the veins, providing nourishment while the white blood cells stave off infections. Through everything that has happened to the outside of their bodies, her body, the blood has stayed the same. Never changing, always moving.
She wasn’t there when it began. No, only the good and the great were. That is, the rich and powerful. So rarely are the good or great. No, she was among the populace. She was one of the sufferers, the victims of others greed. It was the same old story, the rich wanting to become richer. Only this time, the world suffered. The world suffered and there was no going back. Not this time. Not with everyone dead and dying. This was the end of the world, and everyone knew it.
The day the world collapsed was just like any other day. The populace lived out their little lives. They drank their coffee, slept their sleep, watched their movies, loved, laughed, and cried. There was nothing special about that day. The populace didn’t know that the great and good had done the unthinkable. They had completely and utterly destroyed the world, without ever shedding a tear for the lives that would be lost by the morning. It wasn’t the calm before the storm, it was the storm. There just were no clouds in the sky.
By morning, the screams of pain and terror were so deafening that no one was sure if they were the one screaming. The flames licked your skin, the water stifled your breath, the air refused to fill your lungs. It was over. The ones who died that day, and there were many, they were the lucky ones. The populace shouted at their leaders for an answer, but no reply ever came.
You see, the great and good were gone. They had died. Either their own hand or another’s, they had been among the first death toll. Cowards. While the populace suffered, the great and good had escaped the worst of it. While millions died in agony, their deaths came by a signal bullet to the head or chest. The populace hoped they burned in Hell, but knew that was impossible. Hell was hunk of earth floating in space, slowly dying.
It would be an exaggeration to say the populace wasn’t prepared for the subsequent years after the collapse. In this wasteland, nothing got better. There were no leaders, no rules. Complete and total anarchy. Kill or be killed. Live or die. Those who chose to live found quickly that dying would have been a better choice. Some were just too stubborn to die, human instinct to survive and all that jazz.
The populace tried to recover. Small factions arose that tried to create some kind of structure amongst the chaos, but they were few and far between. Those factions could never last long before someone else decided that they’re way was the best way. The populace struggled to create a life similar to the one that had before the collapse, but it was always so far out of reach. The dog days would never be over.
She reaches down and pulls the piece of fabric from the skeleton’s hands. It is tattered and worn. Not an uncommon sight in this world. She wraps it around her head, covering the eyes. The eyes that have seen bodies lie in their own blood and waste, the eyes that have seen murder, rape. The eyes which have seen the horrors of humanity pushed to the brink are covered. The eyes that have seen so much pain and suffering refuse to see the world on its last hour. The eyes refuse to see as the brightest light that has ever touched the earth burns the crust of the planet and boils the core. They refuse to see, like the rest of the populace, the final sunrise.
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