The sky had bled from azure to a sickly white, like bone scraped clean. Reddish clouds churned overhead, drifting from some unknowable horizon—a slow, silent march across the bleached expanse. The day was clear, brutally so. Yet for all its terrible beauty, not a single bird cut through the air. The plants had surrendered long ago, their withered husks clinging to cracked earth. The land itself seemed to gasp, fissures spreading like veins through parched soil. Stare long enough into those cracks and you could almost feel the molten rage beneath, a volcanic fury waiting to consume what little remained.
No humans wandered the streets. The sun was an executioner, methodical and merciless.
There had been no rainfall for weeks. Months. Two hundred years, if the records could be trusted. The area looked less deserted than abandoned by hope itself.
Was this still Earth, or had it become something else entirely? Hot air rolled through the emptiness like a phantom breeze, carrying with it the metallic taste of desperation. The temperature climbed exponentially, relentlessly. Heat shimmered upward in visible waves, distorting the horizon into a fever dream.
On the fifth floor, behind the third door, Delvin sat hunched on a metal stool, staring into the void of his future. His skin had gone pale and papery, his eyes sunken deep into their sockets like stones dropped into wells. His face flushed an angry red from the heat. He propped his chin on his right hand, the effort of holding his head upright almost too much. The veins along his forearm protruded grotesquely—green and dark, like roots breaking through dying soil. His skin had collapsed inward, creating deep wrinkles that mapped his suffering.
Dehydration and starvation had carved him hollow. He was twenty years old, but his body told the story of eighty brutal years. Bones pressed against skin, nearly visible. He was hanging on by a thread so thin it might snap with his next breath.
On a tiny table sat a 750-milliliter plastic bottle, barely a quarter full of water—liquid more precious than gold. An empty cup rested beside it, next to a spoon lying inside a translucent white lunch box. Beneath the table, a broken black basin held a white plate and a pan, its bottom edge coated with a thick crust of black residue from gas stove smoke. A fork lay beside an old silver knife. Ten inches away sat a 3.5-kilogram gas cylinder with a burner plate balanced on top, both long cold.
Delvin's body faced the window to his left, where a maroon curtain hung torn at the bottom right corner, fluttering weakly in the stagnant air. He appeared to be looking outside, but his gaze was turned inward, captured entirely by the dreadful reality closing around him. The room was clean, almost obsessively neat—but it lacked the only things that mattered: food and water. Behind him, a bed stretched horizontally against the wall, a filthy grayish pillow at its head. Brown bedding covered the thin mattress entirely. Opposite the bed, a line sagged under the weight of dirty clothes hanging like flags of surrender.
Delvin was burning from the inside out. He had grown sick and tired of suffering—so tired that death seemed less like an end and more like mercy. There was no point to living anymore. His world had become hell on earth, and the whole planet was doomed to crumble into dust. This extinction had blindsided everyone.
A vibrant, sequential knock resounded at the door. Delvin didn't hear it, though it was loud enough to wake the dead. An upgraded knock followed—stronger, more emphatic, heart-breaking in its urgency. The power of its vibration could have scooped anyone out of any trance.
Delvin jerked, distracted from his spiral of delusional thoughts. He knew who it was. There was only one person who still visited, his one and only friend: George.
Before his departure to whatever unknown place awaited the dead, at least the universe had offered him this—one last chance to see his friend. That wasn't such a bad thing for a dying man. Perhaps his final moments could be peaceful, with less anxiety, a free mind as he went to meet his maker. If he'd been a religious man, that might have mattered. But imagination was his only religion. It was the only realm where he wasn't limited, where he could roam aimlessly and become anything he wished or hoped for.
Delvin glanced at his watch—an unconscious habit. In a cracked, wrecked voice barely above a whisper, he rasped, "Come in."
The words cost him dearly, draining energy he'd been desperately trying to conserve. Though death was next on his agenda, some stubborn part of him still wanted to live a bit longer. Maybe he would yet behold the light of a better day. The world out there worked well for other people, after all.
Delvin had glimpsed their faces—people who wore glittering smiles, who ate three times a day, who had water and never lacked money. For him, everything was upside down. The universe wasn't fair at all. Equality was a myth. Even one meal was impossibly hard to find. He couldn't go outside; the sun would consume him in seconds, beheading any living thing that dared expose itself. Perhaps it was purging this cursed land of its moral sins.
What had he done to deserve these countless savage conditions? He hadn't chosen this life—he'd simply found himself trapped in it. Choice had been stolen from him at birth.
George pushed the door from outside. It opened with a prolonged squeak from the rusted hinges—a metallic shriek that spoke of neglect. The joints desperately needed oil, but who would care when Delvin couldn't even manage to feed himself? His impending death was proof enough. It didn't matter who would remember him. He was a puppet, a poor loser, a person with no family—a nobody. That was his core status: a weakling, a bastard.
George entered with surprising energy, his voice catching as he stammered, "Hello... Delvin?" He walked across the room with forced confidence and sat down heavily on the bed, the frame creaking under his weight.
Delvin didn't try to look at George. Life had already overwhelmed him with a thousand troubles. With immense difficulty, he gathered what remained of his strength to acknowledge the greeting from his dear, beloved friend. "Hello," he breathed.
He didn't even meet George's eyes.
The voice that reached George's ears was barely audible, utterly hopeless. It told him everything about the torment Delvin was drowning in. Something was terribly wrong with this man. George decided to push further, his concern deepening. "How are you?"
Delvin didn't respond right away. His eyes fell to the rough, broken floor—cloudy gray and pockmarked with holes, like the surface of a dying moon.
George's family was average, relatively comfortable—not wealthy, but not destitute either. His clothes were shabby compared to what they'd once worn, but still better than Delvin's rags. He couldn't possibly help Delvin financially, but perhaps he could offer words of comfort. Though looking at Delvin now, perched on the very edge of death, his outward appearance told the full extent of his suffering.
Delvin summoned what little courage remained. A broken voice, coupled with an angry, desperate rhythm, finally emerged. "Look at this room."
He stretched his arm from right to left in a sweeping gesture, then slowly turned to face George, the movement clearly painful. "I have no food. No water. No money. My V card has only two coins left." His voice cracked. "The next thing waiting for me is an honorable death."
He'd once wished to be the last survivor. Now death was coming sooner than expected.
V cards were the world's integrated form of payment, and water had become the most traded commodity—the most expensive thing on earth. If you controlled water, you controlled the world. The military held that power now, working hand-in-hand with Zoom Association Multi Corporation, abbreviated as ZamCorp. ZamCorp distributed water and most food supplies to the shops in the marketplace. One liter of water cost a hundred coins—the equivalent of one hundred US dollars from the twenty-first century, back when such currency still meant something.
George listened intently to the cries of his lost friend, his heart clenching. He couldn't begin to imagine what Delvin was enduring. Silence filled the stifling atmosphere as both men retreated into their separate thoughts. Something had to be done. George's mind ached with the effort of thinking, his heart bleeding for his friend.
He was emotionally shattered by Delvin's revelation—an orphan with no one to depend on but himself. What had happened to his family? He'd been dumped at Belgravia Orphanage at the age of four, growing up under the weight of ridicule as a person with no beginnings. He would probably die alone, unmourned.
The room he lived in now had been rented for him by the military when he'd attended Apex University—a small mercy that had long since expired.
A different thought suddenly dropped into George's mind like a stone into still water. "H-hold on,.. Delvin." His words came slowly, deliberately, weighted with possibility. "I-I might have a-a-a solution... for both of us."