A new dawn awaits; I want to rise above it. Beyond death, life, old, new – beyond this doomed world and all that it ever was. The sun greets me at the apex of the tower. Here, a single glowing orb resting above the infinity below me illuminates everything, and for the first time I can see this entire world as it is. I am the last man. I stand above the apotheosis of human achievement, for I am all that remains.

I am the Omega.

Cold water splashes my face and I’m jarred back into consciousness.

Rain trickles in from a hole in the roof, everything now cold and damp. I patch it with some duct tape for the moment; I’ll weld a plate over it tomorrow. Outside, acid rain mixing with ash. Toxic black sludge. The Geiger counter clipped onto my coat reads nominal levels, and I breathe a sigh of relief.

In the morning, I scavenge some metal plates from a nearby building and spark up the welder that I rigged to a couple of car batteries and an old transformer from a microwave oven. The weld is crude, but effective, and the hole in the roof is no longer a problem.

Moving on now. The road before me is wrought with the suburban sprawl of the Midwest. Exploration serves more than the mere acquisition of supplies; with entertainment in such short supply, I look to my forays into abandoned buildings to keep me occupied.

I see the road sign to an old pharmacy and park a fair distance away. Before I leave my car, I check my weapon; squatters are common in areas such as these and I can expect resistance to my presence. I take my time getting up to the pharmacy, making sure I stay out of sight, and take a minute to examine the front door before entering. A few minutes of searching reveals a safety catch to a booby trap inside. I use it as I open the door, and follow the wire to a cinder block hanging overhead, my flashlight revealing the dried blood belonging to intruders far less cautious than myself.

In the storage area, the sight of pharmaceuticals reminds me of my days in medical school. Old medications, most expired. Pills of every size, shape, and color. A controlled substances cabinet broken open, long ransacked of the painkillers inside.

Shuffling behind me. Someone’s coming.

Most survivors headed south when the illusion of a governing body faded. We were told for months that help was on the way – first it was FEMA, then the Army Corps of Engineers, then the Red Cross. Nobody came. Help splintered off into self-interested enclaves. They’re still out there: raiding, pillaging. Every town I come across, I can feel them a step behind. Drawing nearer. Stalking.

The back door to the theater hangs on its hinge and I walk inside. Burnt aisles. That odor of molten plastic. Celluloid turned to ash. A pair of skeletons sit in the back row, their heads rolled back, laughing faces frozen in time. Little to take from the concession stand but some sealed bags of popcorn and a dusty box of candy. A lonely projectionist’s pornography collection survived the fire in a filing cabinet. As I thumb through it, a light bulb shatters on the floor behind me, nearly knocking me out of my seat as I twist around and fumble for my pistol…

But I look, and there is nothing. It’s only gravity. Perhaps it’s the building, long unseen by man, trying to say hello. Come inside. See the latest post-apocalyptic thriller. Marvel at its irony.

The past is written in the aisles. A man takes the girl he’s going to marry to a theater. They see a movie but don’t watch, focusing all their attention on each other. She goes down on him halfway through the trailers.

Concentrate. Try to remember her face. She wore a skirt, right? She smelled like…

Her name was…

No… Don’t let me forget. Take everything else, but not this…

I leave the theater and head back down the road towards my car. Little tread left on these boots now – steep curves carved into the heels. Leather patched with duct tape. Every corpse looted, every store pillaged. Somewhere, someone is hoarding shoes and leaving the entire world to walk on rags.

A cooler lies in the street ahead. I step closer, drawing my knife, kneeling down and gently pushing the blade between it and the ground. No traps underneath. I move to open the lid–

–The blow to my back rattles me. I’m doubled over on the ground before I can react to a kick to my stomach. My diaphragm spasms. I can’t draw in a breath. I look up and see the figure with a baseball bat about to strike again, so I throw up my arms right before it can connect with my skull. I gasp.

I can’t tell if it hurts. All I can do is throw my legs out and hope for the best. I feel my boot connect with something; in the brief period of clarity in what’s going on, I can see that it worked. The figure drops to the ground and I grab the pistol from my waistband and line up with whoever’s in front of me. One shot goes off and my ears ring from the weapon’s concussive blast.

Red droplets turn into cakes in the dust and the building behind my target is splattered with red and pink. The figure falls lifeless before me, one eye glazed over, the other missing. Wild, scraggly hair matted down with blood; a few heavy spurts from the gaping wound before the heart goes still.

I get up, scanning the area around me for anyone else. The pistol shakes in my hand. The hematoma forming on my arm. After the initial shock wears off, the pain seeps in. I crush a chemical cold pack from my first aid kit and hold it to my arm. No broken bones or ruptured skin, at least. I’ve had to stitch myself together with dental floss and a bent sewing needle. A little bump is nothing to complain about.

The gunshot will have alerted anyone else in the area, so I drag my attacker’s body into an alley and strip him bare. His clothes look worse off than mine, but the blanket he wore like a cloak is warm and inviting. I wrap it around myself and paw through the rest of his belongings – nothing but a knife, chipped along the edge.

Minutes pass. Nobody’s here. Back to the cooler. Nothing inside when I flip the lid open; traps like this are commonplace now. I need to stay more alert.

The cold pack numbs the pain in my arm to a dull ache but sucks the heat out of me, and I draw the dead man’s blanket tighter across my chest.

Now, we’re barely a step ahead of primitive man and information is life. The meek inherited a world that no longer coddled them, and it took them less than a year to begin eating each other. Men like that wretch back at the gas station? I see them everywhere I go: scared, starving…

Alone.

Evening approaches. One of my headlights is dead; I should change it the next time I find a spare bulb. There’s a condominium complex up ahead. I park outside the broken gate and reach into the back seat for my rifle.

It’s quiet. The deep purple glow of the sun through the clouds grows ever darker. I grab an empty backpack and head towards the first building I see. It’s locked; I work with my picks quickly before the light is completely gone.

It’s a haze inside. Nobody’s been in here for years. I shake my flashlight, giving it a charge before turning it on, the blue beam barely cutting through the cloud of dust.

The floor has a substrate of pest droppings and mold that skirts the edge of each wall. Each step crunches against peeling linoleum tile. Cabinets lay open, their interiors like twisted dioramas; a cluster of dead cockroaches, a tiny mouse skeleton pasted to a sprung mouse trap. Out of reflex I flip the switch on my Geiger counter, but the radiation has long dissipated. A can of kidney beans lays in one of the cabinets. I stuff it in my bag and open the refrigerator, and the sharp odor of rot hit his nostrils even through the particle mask.

I make my way through the condo. Other scavengers are a threat: starving, displaced wanderers willing to do anything to live for one more day. I rifle through the bedroom and the closet. Old clothes, moth-eaten and covered in rodent droppings; a few stale, dusty shirts. I could always use more shirts. A safe sits on the top shelf and takes me a while to crack, but when I do, there’s a pistol inside with two magazines filled with ammunition. Grimy dust sticks to the exposed bullets in the top of each magazine. The slide still works; maybe needs to be cleaned, but it’s in good condition. I tuck the weapon in my waistband and pull out the rest: a jewelry box containing what was once a small fortune in gold, several hundred dollars in cash, a bag of fossilized marijuana…

A couple in their thirties lived here. Professionals; mild-mannered, but indulgent upon small vices. There’s a certain intimacy here, things that weren’t spoken about outside of this house. I roll the bag of weed between my fingers and imagine what they must have been like…

It doesn’t matter. They’re dead. I’m like an archaeologist without a museum, collecting fragments of a world I’ll never see again, for no purpose other than refreshing what has become a vague and distant memory.

I pull out the wad of money and think to myself how people had once gone their entire lives seeking its acquisition: working for it, dying for it. They traded their bodies, their principles, their beliefs for it. It had once been the driving force for all of humanity. Now, as I light the fire for the evening, I watch the clumps of green, fibrous paper burn away. Their printed faces stare back at me in their final moments before becoming ash, filling me with a strange sense of dread.

It’s just paper now. Fuel for the fire.

In the firelight, the gun is cleaned. The can of beans is cooked. Urine is distilled into potable water. Daydreams of first dates, grasping for that levity. I look up at the ceiling and think back to the past. How much is memory and how much is imagination filling in the gaps? Did she have green eyes or blue? What was it you called her?

Across this plateau, the land is dead. Greenery reduced to small patches of weeds; even the hardiest of plants beginning to die from a world bathed in endless gloom. The trees stand lifeless, desiccated; their skeletal branches stretching towards the sky like some futile plea for salvation from above.

It’s difficult to tell whether the changes in the mirror are from my age, or the weathered effects of this blasted world. There is constant concern that I will succumb to scurvy, or rickets, or that the antibiotics in my kit are long past their use.

I stop briefly to eat, stepping out into the cold. It’s eerily quiet now; I can’t remember the last time I’ve heard the sound of birds. When the radiation swept across the world, they were the first to go. I remember seeing their rotten bodies littering the ground for miles.

There is only the sound of my chewing over the empty, blowing wind. I wonder if it’s like this everywhere, if places like the Amazon still exist or if the great kelp beds have been reduced to dead water. Perhaps somewhere, in some other part of the world, someone like me is asking these same questions.

The temperature begins to drop as midday passes. On the road again, I spot derelict cars, long stripped of anything of value, merely the frames left behind like giant steel skeletons. There’s an old gas station sticking out amidst the dreary landscape. I pull over a short distance away and step out of the car, and right away I catch the lingering scent of a recent fire. There are others here.

I reach in the back seat and pull out the rifle tucked under several blankets, carefully peel the protective tape from the breach and barrel, and wiggle the bolt back and forth to make sure dust hasn’t gotten into it. I load the weapon and approach the station slowly, creeping up to the employee’s entrance. The door is locked from the inside. It’s a typical five-pin deadbolt – easy enough to pick. A few minutes of work and I’m in.

It’s dark, but light shines faintly through the front portion of the station. To my left, a restroom; the toilet is dry, encrusted with old feces; the sink inoperable. A roll of toilet paper rests nearby, a gleaming white treasure amidst the refuse. I grab it and continue on to the front of the station, trying to remain silent. The floor crunches under my feet: dead leaves and broken glass. I can feel my heart begin to pound in my chest from the sound.

“Who’s there?!” The voice sends a jolt through my body, but I don’t panic. I stay silent, holding my breath, taking a step backwards with the rifle pointed out in front of me. A small, gaunt figure steps forward, leaning on some kind of stick. I catch a flash of him briefly in the light: sores on his face, patches of hair missing from his scalp and beard. He leans against the wall and waves the stick in the air. “Get out of my shop!”

I take another step back, my weapon steady in my hands. The figure lunges forward with the stick and smacks the wall with a clatter, and it rattles his frail arms. He tries to steady himself, but loses his footing under a piece of broken glass and stumbles backwards. Right then, I step forward and point my rifle at him and say, “Easy…”

The man looks up at me like a wild animal, fear and anger on his face in equal measure. He spits on the floor in contempt. “You people, you all the same!”

“I’m not here to hurt you.” I say.

He tries to get up, gripping at the wall but finding no means to steady himself. He slides back down, sobbing. “Oh god… just take it. Just end it here. Do it quick.”

I kneel down in front of him, setting my rifle aside, extending my hand to help him up, but he jerks his arm away and forces himself to his feet. Broken glass sticks in his hand but he appears not to notice. “They come… they come and take everything.”

”Who?” I ask.

“Men like you. They come and they take all my food.”

I try to reassure him that I’m not here to steal from him, but he ignores me. He grabs his stick and limps along, and I follow him to his makeshift living space behind the counter. A few bottles of stagnant water lay strewn about, their contents brown, obviously filled from puddles outside. The filthy pillow on the floor rust-colored from old blood. The sores on his face are like burns, his skin sloughing off in sheets. He is a man not long for the world and he knows it.

All I can do is leave him to his fate.