The echo of the tunnels dwindled out behind him as his boots hit the asphalt of the street level. He did not pause to look around.
Standing there with this silence was like a target on a shooting range. This was exposure he couldn't afford.
The entrance to the station was just as it was before. There was the same damaged railing and the same crumbling concrete stairs. But there were no bodies. There was no blood. The area was bare of the violence that he remembered. It was an empty shell of a place that had seen too much to be this clean.
He made his way back in the direction of where he first woke up.
The street passed beneath his feet with rhythmic, perfect silence. This was no silent city holding its breath in fear. This was a silent city that did not need to decide anything.
Ash clung like thick, untouched drifts to the corners of houses. There was nothing that appeared fresh.
Nothing looked new.
But when he reached the structure that contained the storage room, he slowed down his pace.
The door was still there. The handle was still chipped. The edges of the metal casing were still scuffed. There was nothing to suggest that anyone else had passed that way since he'd gone.
He pushed on into the room. Nothing had changed there either. The shelves were still in their lines. The boxes still stood in their lopsided towers. The only noise was the faint hum of the strip light.
Stanley stood in the doorway for a long second. He watched the dust motes dancing in the weak light. He did not feel relieved to be back. He felt confirmed. The world was consistent, even if his memory of it was fractured.
He knelt down to pick the bag up off the ground.
Then his eyes landed on something… he focused his gaze.
It looked like a thread. A silver-white thread.
His stomach grown. He shrugged.
Food comes first.
Stanley parted company with the first shop he came across on the boulevard. There were open boxes on the floor, ripped open with surgical precision, not a sign of struggle or of destruction.
He didn't stay to search the corners.
The next store was smaller. It was a convenience store squeezed between two larger, closed-down stores. The lock on the door had been forced open.
Stanley went inside and quickly moved. His eyes continued scanning from left to right in search of the colors associated with packs that the last scavengers might have missed.
Most of the inventory had been depleted.
He stepped around the counter and located a flattened package of crackers between the cigarette box and the wall.
He stretched under the shelf, and his boot kicked a plastic bottle. It rattled across the floor.
He picked it up. It contained water. He inspected the seal once, then twice. The seal was unbroken. He stuffed the bottle into his duffel and then the crackers.
This was enough to make me stop trembling.
Outside, he ripped open the packet of food using his teeth. He continued to chew as he walked, trying to shove the dry, stale crackers down his throat.
They were as tasty as cardboard and salt. His body didn't need flavor to digest his food. The pain of his stomach still receded enough to let his mind work properly again.
Stanley went beyond the commercial center. He had not walked far when heard the shouting.
It was a man's voice, raw and desperate. In the empty silence of the city, it was an absolute scream.
'Help! Please! No
Stanley slowed down. He ducked around the battered back of a delivery truck parked on the street and pressed his back into the cold metal. He peered out from around the edge of the bumper.
In the center of the boulevard, there stood four men. Three of them carried metal bars. The men assembled around one of their own, who lay on the ground. He was covered from neck to toe in his own blood.
The three men moved their rods in a rhythmic and mechanical motion. Each blow had a dull and wet sound as it hit the man's ribs and limbs.
The fourth man was a few feet away. He did not have any weapon in his hand. He had slumped shoulders. He had twitching fingers at the sides. He observed the thrashing with wide-eyed nervousness.
But then, he stopped screaming. His cries broke up into a wheezing, bubbling sound. All three men stopped swinging. They stepped back, their chests still heaving with exertion.
"Now," said one of the men.
He looked at the one watching. "Do it," he said.
The nervous man flinched. He took a half-step back, his boots scraping grit. "Do I really have to?"
The leader of the group let his metal rod drop. It landed on the asphalt with a hard clang. The leader took a gradual step forward.
"This is the only way in. I'm telling you, we don't get opportunities like this. Now is the time."
The nervous man slowly nodded. He took a deep, shaking breath. He looked up and down the deserted street. His gaze swept past the truck where Stanley was hiding without seeing him. The man bent down to seize a large chunk of concrete debris. The chunk was the size of a human head.
The other two men moved to either side to make room. They stood watching, their faces blank and waiting.
The man on the ground managed to turn his head. He saw the man with the rock. He no longer had enough breath left in him to scream. All he could do was move his lips, whisper for mercy that wasn't going to come.
The man with the rock stepped forward. He heaved the concrete over his head, all fingers of both hands wrapped around it. His arms quivered with the strain. He stood over the dying man a heartbeat longer, then plunged the rock down with his full weight.
It sounded like the snap of a dry branch. The skull shattered immediately upon impact with the concrete. Gray and white matter spilled all over the dark asphalt, mingling with the blood and the dust. The body jerked one final, wrenching time, then lay perfectly still.
The incident was observed by Stanley, standing under the shadow of the truck.
A surge of the grimmest enraged anger never surged. He did not feel that he needed to rush out and help a man who was gone.
He stared at the grey matter spilled on the ground and had a chillingly clear mind; this was the due everybody owed.The world had survived the death of morality into a strong state of pure, blunt transaction.