Empty sidewalk, empty city, 3 P.M.
Abandoned. Desolate. Void.
A sidewalk stretches beneath your shoes and weeds peek, sallow and pale, from cracks and crevices. Overhead there is nothing but somber, rising monoliths, reaching for heaven just beyond the murk. Remnants of the ones who lived here&��of this silver city of glass and steel, now reflecting only gray.
A shred of newspaper whispers by your feet, filthy and torn, stained and forgotten, listing a time and date and place that no one remembers, an event that has long since past. You watch it somersault across the pavement, the crackle and crisp of paper telling news that once swung the pendulum of life and death, but now is irrelevant&��obsolete.
You glance over the stained, tattered words never to be read.
"&�&state of emergency&�&defcon six&�&military forces&�&quarantine&�&"
"&�&all civilian personal&�&highly contagious&�&"
"&�&violence&�&ration food and water&�&stay inside&�&arm yourself&�&"
The rest of the article is unreadable, far too deteriorated for anyone to make out.
You throw your gaze around once more, glancing at a telephone pole leaning against a building, the electric current long since dead. Lifeless wires are draped over the buildings, split and uncoiled, now rusting with age and wear.
You continue walking, feeling a cold wind rake the silence, howling forlornly in the distance. Candy wrappers litter the ground from a fallen trash can, clattering ominously in the wind&��echoes of the living. You can imagine the children that once ran through these streets, leaving them in their haste, seeing this as nothing more than a game. You can almost see them now, laughing, playing, shouting, not understanding and never wanting to understand. Simply filled with the joy of life, and thinking nothing more. Yet, you know that most of them would never reach their next birthday.
In an attempt to scatter the disconsolate thoughts, you cast your eyes to your surroundings. Some of the buildings sport gaping maws&��vacant, cavernous mouths with broken glass fangs, shattered and lying across the storefronts. Others have black, void eyes, reflecting nothing, and letting no light into their hollow shells, haunted and yet still empty. In all, they are broken&��food stolen by desperate survivors, cash swiped by mobs, raided and picked clean.
The silence around you is deafening. Loud hush, screaming in your ears, filling them with an unheard ringing, heavy, weighing you down. White noise they used to call it. A cigarette butt breaks the stillness, rolling down the sidewalk alongside you, running into another of its other scattered companions. You avoid a broken beer bottle, and sidestep over a once-popular magazine, wearing a face that you no longer recognize, speaking of people you no longer remember. All of these&��feeble attempts of memory, the last remnants of a dying race, of a long-lost cause, a forgotten panic, taken back by nature.
You almost grimace at the thought&��of all the glory of humanity, of all that we had done and conquered, all that remains now are cigarettes butts and hollow, metal shells. Decomposing, mortal, falling, collapsing, like dust in the wind, chaff in a storm.
Suddenly, you realize how small you are; how quickly history can die. How fast it can all change. How insignificant you are&��how unimportant your family, your people, your nation, you race, your species is in the big picture.
And in that moment, you feel very&�&small, very helpless.
For you see, you are the last of your kind. You are the survivor, the last witness of a society that fell without grace. And now, you are almost gone, a dying relic of an era long since passed.
And then, then you know. You know that you are nothing more than a leftover.
The last vestige of a race with no history.
And you know, you know there will be no future.
You know that none of this matters&��all our achievements, all our grandeur, all our fame and fortune are nothing. Nothing at all.
You are the last to view the fallen splendor of this era&��for, there will be no other to discover it.
You are our history.
You are our future.
You are the end&�&
On an empty sidewalk, in an empty city, at 3 P.M.
--Lord Hellyer