Free This Is the End by Eric Pollarine

it. I try to focus. My head feels like it’s full of oatmeal. The light outside is incredibly bright, like a blanket of grey. I look out towards the skyline. I force my eyes open and see the world for the first time since I woke up.
    Low-hanging cloud cover isn’t really cloud cover; the sky is blue above the haze. It’s smoke. Huge billows of black, white and grey smoke waft through the corridors of the city. Cars in the street crisscross lanes as if they were just left to crash. Doors hang open, bodies lay just outside them. Military vehicles are smashed and broken. There are several metal fences, crowd control barricades, scattered around, and some are overturned and left like skeletons. I see people walking, stumbling around. Some of them have arms and legs that look broken, crooked like the man in the lobby. Some of them look like they just woke up and went off to work, but there’s still something off about them.
    The streetlights are all out. Black and white bags line the sidewalks and streets; they’re bulky, lumpy. They have bodies in them. The dead are dumped and rotting. The sky is blue and the dead line the street and the cars are abandoned and the sky is on fire. The sun is dim and yellow; mixed into the haze of the smoke it looks evil. I focus in on some of the people in the street, walking, falling, searching, looking—their faces are wrong. The world is wrong. The world is burning.
    The familiar outline of both the Terminal Tower and Key Tower look like stubbed cigars, charred and brown. Public Square is full of broken, crooked, bloody, grey-skinned people. My city is burning; my city is dead.
    “What happened?” I ask, still staring out the window, still trying to understand what it is that I’m seeing.
    “You,” says the woman named Kel. She moves towards Skinny—Scott—whatever. They’re standing behind me now, holding each other. I can see the outline of their joined shape in the glass of the window. I look out and see the world, my world.
    “Let me go,” I say and Skinny laughs.
    “No way, asshole,” he says.
    “I need to know how this happened,” I say back, but I can’t stop looking out across the city, my city.
    “We just told you,” he says, then starts in on me with something else, I cut him off.
    “Do you want to eat hot food tonight?” I say but nobody answers back; I can feel the hesitation in the air. They’re considering it.
    “I can route the power from the solar panels to just this room. Right now it’s being used up by keeping the base systems on: lights, magnetic locks, et cetera . I can reroute it all to come in here and we can have hot water, hot food and internet.”
    Skinny laughs again. I haven’t heard from Kel yet. She’s thinking about it though. I can’t see her face, but I know she’s not that stupid.
    “There’s no more internet, dude,” says Skinny.
    I crane my head around to look back at him. “I am the fucking internet , dude . Every website, blog, micro blog, tweet, news site, feed, vid-feed, everything—it’s all cached on the main servers that are housed in the middle of this room. I have to know what happened. Untie me, please.”
    “What’s going to happen if those magnetic locks unlock and those things get in here, huh? Did you think about that?”
    “I can route enough power to keep those online,” I say.
    He starts to object again but Kel cuts him off and says, “Okay.”
    She moves to untie me. The knots around my hands loosen and I immediately feel better. I move to untie the ones at my feet and then stand up. Before I turn around I hear the gun. I turn around slowly and Kel is there. I stare at the gun again.
    “If you so much as move in a way that makes me think you’re fucking us over, I will shoot you. Do you understand?” she says.
    I nod and say, “Yes,” to make sure she knows that I understand, completely.
    “Good, now get to work.” She motions with the gun towards my desk then lets her arm come down; I nod