Survival/Apocalypse20 min read
The Day the Mist Ate the City (and How We Kept Ourselves Alive)
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I am Lakelyn Abdullah.
“You awake?” Henri Calderon whispered.
“Barely,” I said, rubbing my eyes. Earl Chavez gurgled in his crib like the world was still safe.
“Don’t go near the windows,” Henri said, voice low but urgent.
“I won’t.” I could feel my heart trying to punch its way out of my chest. The living room windows looked like someone had smeared thick icing over the glass. Light collected and softened; I could not see the street. “It looks like fog,” I whispered.
“It’s not fog,” Henri answered. “Turn on the TV.”
We did. The usual morning shows were gone. A man in a plain suit and a flat face looked at the camera and said things that made the skin on my arms crawl.
“People are... attacking each other,” the man said. “Stay inside. Await instructions.”
“Is that an order?” my father, Findlay Courtney, asked, leaning on the back of the couch.
“It’s a warning,” the suit said. “Do not leave your homes. Isolate sick family members. Await military aid.”
“Military aid,” my mother, Katalina Boyd said. She folded her hands around her tea like it was a talisman. “They will come.”
“They might,” Henri said, “but don’t count on it.”
“Henri, don’t say that.” I turned away, because if I looked at his face too long I would watch hope leak out of him like steam.
“Okay,” he said. “But we need water.”
“Water?” I almost laughed. “We have two full fridges, three bags of rice, Dad’s crazy stash, and—”
“No bottled water,” he interrupted. “We drink boiled water from the tap. If the supply is compromised, we need bottles. There’s a supermarket below us. It’s open. We can go.”
My stomach was a small stone. “You want to go to the supermarket?”
Henri pulled me close. “We need baby formula. Earl’s milk lasts two days if he refuses solids. We can’t risk tap water if the reports are right.”
“You said we’ll be careful,” I said. “You said you’d watch me.”
“You know I will. We’ll be careful.” He kissed my temple. “Bring the big knife. Don’t be a hero.”
“And you?”
“Same rule,” he said.
We moved like a unit—the four of us: Henri, me, my parents, and the little fat boy who insisted he was a person of his own. We locked the inner door and the outer door. We pushed the couch against the stairwell to block the stair entry. We stuck the iron jar from my father where it creaked against the stair door.
“Do not open the outer gate for anyone,” I told my parents, my voice hard as a blade.
“We will not,” Findlay said.
We watched the courtyard below. People moved like dead things—slow, lurching, jerking. Some stumbled and fell into each other. A man who looked like a neighbor leaned on a lamppost and kept repeating the same name with no sense. When someone screamed, a cluster of the lurching ones surrounded them and the sound cut out.
Henri and I had watched those shows. We’d laughed at the unrealistic panic and the bullets that never ran out. We’d practiced simple moves on our mats—quick knife motions, a practiced smash to the head, the tip of the blade placed like promise.
“It’s them,” Henri said, voice empty. “They’re not people anymore.”
“Don’t say it like that.” My throat felt raw. “They are people.”
“They used to be,” he said. “Now they are trouble with teeth.”
We tried calling the police. 110 was busy. The line rang and rang like something in the next room waiting to be answered.
“Try the mayor’s hotline,” my mother said.
We tried the hotline. Busy. Then the message: “We are experiencing unusually high traffic. Please hold.”
“Great,” my father muttered. “Hold and die.”
Hours passed in a strange rhythm. Earl laughed, hiccuped, demanded a diaper change. The ritual of normalcy steadied me.
“I need to check downstairs,” Henri said finally. “If the parking area is still clear, I can get some bottles from the small supermarket. It’s closer.”
“You’re not doing this alone,” I grabbed his sleeve.
“You promised you wouldn’t be a hero, remember?” I leaned in and smiled, trying to make it sound like a joke.
He did that half-grin he makes when he wants me to know I’m ridiculous. “Okay, partner. Let’s go.”
We walked the stair, the elevator, the hallway: quiet. The second-floor door opened, and an old woman stood in the corridor with space in her eyes.
“Are you both right?” she asked.
“No,” Henri said. “We’re going to the market. We’ll be fast.”
She nodded like a person who had accepted a telegram. We held our breath when we heard a low moan. A slow woman in the stairwell turned like a wind-up doll. Henri took the long blade and moved like a shadow—practiced and swift.
“Drop it,” I said, in a calm voice that did not match the pounding in my chest.
The woman turned, unsteady, and Henri made one clean stroke. No blood spray; just a small silence and the hollow sound of an animal falling.
“He was home,” I said later, looking at the key in the old woman’s door.
“Take it,” Henri said, slipping it into his pocket like a talisman. “We’ll need it.”
Inside the supermarket the world became a different thing. Empty carts lay like shells. Water stacked in towers by the doors. A smell, like wet cloth and metal and something soft that belongs in the wrong place, floated through the air.
“Take the bottled water,” I said.
We moved as a team. Henri loaded the carts. I pushed. We filled at a speed that left me dizzy. We kept watch. Men with faces like mouths, women who once smiled, lurched out of the aisles like living shadows. We kept the carts between us and the dead.
“Leave the bread,” someone hissed. “We can come back.”
I remember the sound: a young man, twenty maybe, with a crooked mouth, who gave us a brief plan: three cars, two drivers, brave or foolish enough to go. We left with eight carts stacked like a wall of groceries and three cars roaring out the garage.
At the big chain store—Carrefour, the city’s main supply cavern—the scene turned dangerous and spectacular. We shoved, fought, and choked under the pressure. People died there in the aisles like fallen apples.
“We can’t hold them off forever!” someone shouted.
“Load the cars!” Henri yelled.
“I’m not leaving without Earl,” I said. “I’m not leaving without our family.”
“No one will,” he promised. “Hold the line.”
We were almost out. The carts were full. We had bottles, formula, candles, batteries, and tools that made Henri’s eyes shine like a man seeing hope. Then someone screamed.
“It’s them. They took Curie.”
“Who did?” I asked.
“Curie—one of the men guarding the doors.”
“You idiot!” Henri roared. He clenched his knife so hard his knuckles turned white.
We saw the opening of the store flood with bodies—people now monsters—coming in like tide. Panic gripped. We tried to hold the doors.
And then a sector of movement like a hurricane of steel: twenty young men came in with blades and long knives, shouting and carving a clean, efficient path. They pushed the horde back with terrifying speed. Their leader stepped forward—a boy with a sharp face wearing a leather jacket. He smiled like someone who had someone to be brave for. “Branch Dodson,” he said.
“You saved us,” I told him.
“We try,” Branch said. “We clear this place every other day. We take what we need. We leave the rest for people who can’t get here safely.”
“You’re like the cavalry,” Henri said, breath heavy. “Where do you sleep?”
“An old school,” Branch said. “The iron bars make a good wall. You’re welcome to join us if you want safety.”
“We can’t—our parents, our baby—” I said. “But thank you.”
Branch shrugged, polite and young. “Stay safe.”
We left with cars full and hearts heavy.
Back in the building, the small community rallied like beaten things rising. We divided the food. Young couples shared stories of not being brave until they had to be. A neighbor couple we had muddled on before—clumsy and rude—was gone. The door was locked. Their silence was a small relief.
“Better that they aren’t here,” I said to Henri. “If they were, we would have to—”
“You are thinking exactly like me,” he said. “We will not share if someone is a thief.”
Days passed like that: ration, protect, stand watch. We named our group: the 18th Tower survivors. We got help from Branch’s group sometimes. We traded water for patrol routes. It felt like an alliance forged out of necessity, and necessity is a chill glue.
“Do you ever think about the world before this?” I asked one night, watching Earl sleep like a round moon.
“All the time,” Henri said. “About cars, traffic, petty fights over nothing. Weird how small things used to feel.”
“Money feels useless now,” I said.
“It does,” he said. “But people don’t. People still matter.”
We were numb and furious and tired and kind. The days blurred. Then the line for supplies got stretched thin. People grew sharp in hunger. Some men took to trading courage for food; others traded faith for fear.
One evening, after a morning in which batteries ran out and the water cooler choked, a man named Clifford Corbett returned from a raid on the west wing of the building. He had been our neighbor once—an arrogant man who refused to say hi in the elevator. Now his stubble cut his face into a permanent grimace, and he arrived with a bag full of food and a strange brightness in his eyes.
“We took from the 17th,” Clifford said, chest heaving. “They aren’t using what they have. It’s wasted. We moved it. We ate. We saved it.”
“Clifford,” Henri said slowly. “You know 17th is empty. You know who it belongs to.”
“It belongs to us now,” Clifford said. “We put a few more locks. We cannot trust everyone.”
A murmur ran through the corridor. Some nodded, like men who had already decided to side with whoever was strongest. Some frowned.
“You stole from people,” I said. My voice trembled, the knife at my hip suddenly warm in my palm.
“They aren’t here,” Clifford said. “So what? Survival.”
“Survival isn’t theft in a vacuum,” Henri said. “We agreed—no stealing from those who cannot defend themselves. We share what we can—and we organize patrols.”
Clifford laughed. “Who made you judge? You eat food from the store like the rest of us. Who elected you?”
“Community elected us,” said Findlay gently. “If we are to live, we must keep a code.”
Clifford spat. “Your code will not feed my son.”
“You have no son here,” Katalina said, voice thin. “You have choices, Clifford.”
He left in a ricochet of threats and slammed doors. For a few days he hovered like a storm.
“Keep an eye on him,” Branch advised. Branch had been delivering ration once a week with his crew. “Rogue elements settle in.”
“He was arrogant before this,” I said. “Authority doesn’t make a thief.”
Weeks slipped. The snow came early and heavy. The city slowed to a grey crust. Eventually, water supply was patched through filters we learned to install. Branch’s team taught us to set up a simple rig using charcoal and spare tubing. We learned to purify water beyond boiling—filters that hummed like angels over the kitchen.
Then the thing that had been a whisper exploded into a fact: someone had been stealing from the common storeroom. Food disappeared in the night. Batteries vanished.
“People are starving,” said Jordan James, one of our neighbors. She was quiet, with hands that trembled like small birds. “People need small things. Maybe someone took something for a child.”
“What kind of person takes quietly?” Henri asked.
“It’s not a person,” someone muttered. “It’s Clifford.”
I watched Clifford carefully. He kept his head down, but at night he walked the hall with a swagger. He met Branch in the corridor once and spoke to him with surprising candor and charm, like a snake with a velvet tongue.
“Be careful,” Branch told me when I passed. “It’s always the quiet ones who surprise you.”
The thefts kept happening. We organized watches. We underscored the storeroom and kept logbooks. Whoever took things had a key. The next morning, someone found a bolt-saw blade in the trash room.
Clifford had been seen near the storeroom late at night.
“You have proof?” he demanded when confronted.
“Not yet,” I said. “But someone saw you.”
“I was getting air,” he said. “I have rights.”
“We all have rights,” Henri said. “Not to pillage.”
It escalated. The tension cracked like brittle glass. One night, Jordana and I were on watch when we heard glass scrape: the storeroom lock had been forced.
“Clifford,” Jordana hissed.
We moved as quietly as possible, shadow-scuffing down the corridor. Henri and I slid behind the door just in time to see a silhouette bending over cans—the gleam of a flashlight.
“We caught you,” Henri said.
Clifford turned. In the dying lamplight he looked almost childish and then ugly with rage. The hallway stared. Eyes of neighbors watched from behind curtains. That moment would bend the rest of Clifford’s fate.
“You can’t—” he spat. “You don’t understand.”
“I do,” Henri said. “You are stealing from people who cannot defend themselves.”
“You are one of those people!” Clifford screamed. “You front like you run this building! You act like a mini-mayor!” He grabbed a can and shoved it into a backpack. “I will feed my family.”
“No family,” I said. “You live alone. You never introduced a child. Where is your family?”
He swore, and his fingers worked at the backpack with a desperate desperation that looked like guilt wearing itself thin.
Then the crowd came out of doors. Small at first—Jordan James, Branch, Findlay, Katalina, quiet neighbors who had seen their ration shrink. They gathered like a slow wave. Some raised weapons. Some stood empty-handed but fierce.
“Put it down,” Branch said.
“No!” Clifford’s voice cracked. He was cornered, the way prey is cornered in a dream.
“You stole food,” Jordan said simply.
“You will give it back,” Henri ordered.
“Why should I?” he spat. “You have your rules. I survived before you ever came to save us.”
“You haven’t survived yet,” Findlay said. “Survival that takes food from others is not survival.”
A small crowd gathered in the stairwell and out into the corridor. Faces pressed to door frames. Pebble eyes. Branch made a decision. “We can’t let this become a lynch. We’re not them.”
“What are you saying?” Clifford asked, breathing fast.
“Public restitution,” Branch said. “You will return everything, unbolt the stolen locks, and you will be barred from our storeroom for six months. If any food is missing after that, we will force you to live on the roof alone. If you try to steal again, we will, as a group, remove you from this building physically.”
“You can’t—” Clifford began to cry.
“We can and we will,” I said.
Clifford’s betrayal did not end there. That night, an angry mob formed. People wanted spectacle, wanted punishment that satisfied the raw hurt. Branch raised his hands and locked the punishment into a ritual that would show everyone the price of stealing from the helpless without turning into monsters ourselves.
“You will stand in the main courtyard,” Branch said. “Everyone will watch. We will tell what happened. We will not rush to blood.”
The next morning the courtyard filled with neighbors, their faces a ledger of days gone wrong—faces with bruises from fights with monsters, faces with tears dried by cold wind. Branch stood on the stone planter. I stood with Henri and our small group. Clifford was brought out, hands bound with rope, a blanket on his shoulders to hide the dampness of last night.
“You stole food,” Branch said. He had the same cadence the suit on the television once used—an authority for a house that no longer had one. “You stole from elderly neighbors. You took from mothers.”
Clifford tried to speak. “I was hungry—”
“Speak your full name,” Branch demanded.
“Clifford Corbett,” he spat.
“You are a neighbor in the 18th Tower,” Branch said. “You have been seen prowling the corridors at night. You took food meant to be shared by everyone. You acted alone.”
Murmurs, sharp as teeth. Someone spat. Findlay’s face was stone.
“You will return every tin, every bottle, every battery,” Branch said. “You will clean the stairwells for a month. You will eat only what people give you. You will be made to stand at the base of this courtyard for three days and on each day tell, in public, why you took what you took, and apologize to everyone by name.”
Clifford laughed once. Then silence found him.
“Get him to speak,” someone called.
Clifford looked at the people. His bravado was gone. He stood like a small animal under a crate.
“I—I took food because I thought—” he started.
“You thought you had a right to steal?” Jordan’s voice was cold. “You thought your hunger mattered more than the woman with the broken knee on the fourth floor?”
“She—” Clifford stammered.
“You will say it,” Branch insisted. “Every day for three days. And you will give—” Branch looked at the gathered faces. “You will give back—not just what you took, but what you planned to take. You will leave the remainder of your private supplies in the common stashes for two months.”
Clifford’s face went from angry to flailing to small. “No one will watch? No one will listen?”
“We will watch,” Branch said. “We will listen.”
He was made to kneel at the planter. The crowd hurled its judgment like dry bread. Some people spat hoarse words. Some cried. Children stared, and some of the children learned what it felt like to see wrong made public.
The first day he apologized to Jordan: “I’m sorry I took from you. Your child matters more than my appetite.” Jordan’s jaw clenched but she nodded.
The second day he apologized to Findlay and Katalina and the old lady who had lost her husband months before. He choked on his words and the cold wind ate them.
The third day he apologized to Earl—he reached out, a shaking hand, to touch the sleeping child and then recoiled, full of shame.
Each day, neighbors came a little closer, some with eyes narrowed into a line that dissected mercy from punishment. They pointed their fingers like the world was dividing itself into the accountable and the accountable-less.
“You will scrub the stairwells until your hands bleed,” Branch had said. “You will carry water for the old. You will never touch the storeroom again.”
Clifford kept his promise, in part because the punishment was public and because once you rise up a reputation, there is nowhere left to hide. He swept steps until the cartilage in his fingers ached. He carried bottles up and down until his back bowed. He sat at the entrance to the building like an emblem of shame.
Then one night, one of the neighbors caught him reaching for a lock again—the old habit a sleepwalk of compulsion. We found him in the act. The crowd gathered. His face was wet.
“You lied,” Jordan said.
“He tried to steal again,” Branch said. “He breaks our trust.”
The punishment escalated. It had to.
This time the square was larger and colder. Branched members waited in the shadows. “We are not killers,” Branch said, telling us. “We must be fair. We must not become more monstrous than they are. But we cannot allow this to continue. We will remove him from the building and have him spend one week in solitary shelter on the roof with minimal rations. If he survives, he must return and work in the common kitchens for two months.”
There were yells, both for more brutal treatment and for mercy. I watched Clifford walk toward the steps to the roof like a criminal. He looked small and foolish and deadly in that way that men who have nothing left are deadly. He begged for a second chance with the sort of raw honesty that is too late to be useful.
The crowd watched as he was escorted up and the rooftop oven door closed behind him. Branch sealed the metal and set two young men to watch.
“I hate that we did this,” Jordan whispered to me. “But if we don’t set an example, people will starve each other in the name of the living.”
“It felt like public shaming,” I said. “But he did steal.”
“We are trying to be human,” Branch said to us later. “The world is making us cruel by degrees. We keep deciding a line.”
The punishment lasted as promised. Clifford survived the week. He returned a smaller man, with a different gait. He scrubbed and mended and spoke weak apologies. The building changed its rules after that—strict watches, shared inventories, names recorded, rationed distributions. The punishments had been public and harsh, but they worked. People felt safer. People felt the world had become a little more ordered.
Life, however, never returned to normal. A different cruelty surfaced: there were raiders, groups who roamed the city stealing cars, setting traps for the dead, and sometimes killing scavengers. Branch's crew clashed with them twice. The school fort became a fortress with more people, and Branch’s tone grew heavier and older.
One bright morning I took Earl to the rooftop garden. We had made a small greenhouse on the top of the building—a glass room where the sun was a god that still smiled. My father tended the sprouts. Henri showed Earl how to hold a piece of lettuce like a hard-won gold coin.
“You think it will ever go back?” I asked Henri, handing Earl a sun-warmed slice of banana.
“Which part?” he asked.
“The lives we had? The way we were?”
Henri blinked at the child, who bit a chunk cleanly and laughed. “We can’t go back. But we can be better.”
“Better how?”
“By choosing. Every day we choose to be wrong or right. We choose to give or to take. We choose to care.”
I was silent for a long time. People had been hard and beautiful in strange measures. Branch had saved us. Clifford had stolen. We had punished and forgiven in the same breath. The city had become a ledger.
Weeks melted into snow and then into a brittle slow spring. People learned to listen to Branch and to look for raiders like he taught us—no hero songs, only strategies and rehearsed movements. We traded with other towers. Branch’s crew became a force that did not take by default. They took to rotating watch duties and held ceremonies where new arrivals stood and spoke the name of someone they would defend.
Then the radio crackled one night—bursting static, then a voice. “This is the regional command—do not converge on the city. Do not leave your defenses—wait for orders. Evacuation routes are being assessed.”
We cheered shyly and then waited. Waiting taught us patience that tasted like ash.
One afternoon, a scout came with a message: a convoy would dispatch in three days from the east highway—military trucks to escort people out of the city.
“Leave?” Jordan asked. “Where to?”
“We don’t know,” Branch said. “But it is an option.”
The option made people make quick plans: who would go if the convoy could only take a few. Old faces looked younger in the light of a possible future. Parents clutched children like gold. Families argued, then made lists.
Henri and I debated it for hours. My parents looked at each other, weighing the years. Earl crawled between our knees and looked up as if he could decide for the whole world.
“If we go,” Henri said, “we can still go to Branch’s school if they allow us. We could leave the building in the hands of others.”
“If we stay,” I said, “we keep our home.”
Henri reached for my hand. “If we go, we go together.”
We agreed to pack. We would be ready in case the convoy came. We would not abandon the tower without trying.
On the morning the convoy was supposed to arrive, Branch’s crew climbed the roof and scanned the horizon. “They will be here,” Branch said, using a voice that did not belong entirely to a young man. It belonged to someone fifty years old in the way it lined itself with steel.
The sun dropped low and then two dust shapes appeared—trucks lined with soldiers, flags ripping, a promise in steel. People whooped, and then the radio died again. A low buzz of static swallowed words and then the trucks turned away—heard orders to regroup. The convoy left.
We cried quietly in our kitchens.
“You wait,” Branch said. “We will take what we can. We will watch each other.”
Months passed. The city learned to breathe in its own rhythm: small miracles of food grown in rooftop gardens, quiet joy when Earl said a new word, and the terrible low wails when someone did not come back from a run.
A messenger came one day, muddy and exhausted, with a warning. “Raiders are moving west,” he said. “They burned an entire block and took what they could.”
We fortified. Branch’s crew sharpened blades like prayers. People who never held a weapon learned to swing a baton. I practiced with my long blade in the greenhouse when the sun warmed the glass.
“You’re getting good,” Henri told me once.
“Only because I practiced,” I said.
“And because you do it for us.”
He smiled and kissed my hair. “We have to be ready,” he added. “For everything.”
We were ready, and yet nothing truly readies you for the sharp edge of cruelty.
One morning, a sound: metal clanged. A shout. A child's scream. We ran, cold fear going in our bones like a blade.
Earl had been playing in the living room while I re-stacked batteries. I heard a small sound in the hall that could have been a child slipping—then a terrible rustle, a hungry huff.
I rounded the corner and saw a figure—half-dead, half-human—on top of my son.
“No!” I screamed.
Henri was there in two steps. He shoved the creature off with the flat of his hand and drove the blade into the skull. The tooth-smell and the damp of the thing hit me like ocean water. I pulled Earl into my arms.
“Is he—?” Henri’s voice was small.
“Earl?” I whispered, fingernails digging into his back.
He screamed in pain—a sound that cut through the freeze of the building.
Blood soaked the clothes on his shoulder, bright and shocking. I tasted metal in the air like the world had been opened.
Earl looked at me with eyes so big and human and then seemed to go blank.
“No. No.” I held him and turned him to see the wound. It was jagged and wet. The bite had bruised the skin, two small teeth marks cup-shaped, cruel.
“You must get water,” Henri said, suddenly practical. “Wash it. Try to stop infection.”
“You think this is infection?” I spit. “This is—”
“Do it,” he insisted. “We can’t panic.”
We stripped Earl of his shirt, scrubbing water over the wound until it stung. He wailed and then went quiet. His body grew limp.
“He’s burning,” Katalina said. “He’s feverish.”
“I’ll check the archives,” Branch said, rushing into the corridor with a plastic bag of salts and a small first-aid kit he'd kept in his belt. “We have stuff.”
We used everything. The wound was cleaned. We bound it. We watched for the signs that the infected would show. Henri sang nonsense songs he used to sing when Earl was tiny, his voice shaky. I counted Earl’s breaths like a machine.
Night crawled in. Earl slept. His small chest rose and fell slowly. Henri slept with his hand on Earl for hours.
In the morning, Earl cried out and then reached for me. “Mama,” he said, the smallest sound I have ever cherished.
Henri exhaled a noise like a man freed from drowning. “He’s okay.”
“Is he?” I asked.
We watched him like priests watch a relic, vigilant and exhausted. The bite healed over. The fever dropped. We called it a miracle.
But the city had other plans. Two days later, Clifford—who had been punished and returned and worked at the kitchen—crossed a line none saw coming. He had been given a small privilege, helping distribute porridge one night. A mother had left a bottle of formula for a baby she thought she might not see. Clifford took it.
The crowd saw him. He tried to deny it. He lied with the old easy tongue he still had.
“You swore,” Jordan said. “You promised.”
“I was weak,” Clifford said. “I needed to feed a man who is dying.”
“We cannot do this,” Branch said. “You signed the code. You have one more chance.”
Clifford nearly wept. “I will return it,” he said.
We never let his betrayal be simple. The public punishment was not enough for everyone. Some wanted blood. Some wanted to forget how merciful they had been once.
“He took food,” Findlay said. “We will not be blind.”
This time, the punishment was another public act, but more severe: He was taken into the courtyard and told to recount his thefts and face the people he stole from. This time he begged, not for leniency but for the right to be human again.
“You will leave,” Branch said finally. “You will go to the west and you will not return for six months. If you attempt to come back, you will be exiled for life.”
“You cannot do that!” Clifford pleaded.
“Yes, we can,” Branch said.
Clifford was led away. The building did not clap. People felt complicated—hardened and also soft, like pulling gums when you smile. We had made rules and we had enforced them.
The following weeks were calmer. People worked. Branch’s crew scouted. A small convoy came again and this time holed up for two nights. They took a few people with them: old women with illnesses, a family with small children, and a few brave souls who wanted to try a life beyond the city.
We were not chosen.
Yet the sky changed. The mist occasionally rose in distant hills and died in fields. There were no more clear answers.
One evening months later, long after the courtyard punishments and the stolen formula, Branch returned from a run. He carried with him a limp figure—Clifford.
“He broke my rule,” Branch said. His voice was tired as a wound.
“What happened?” I demanded.
“He came back,” Branch said. “He said he had been left for dead by a gang of raiders. He walked two days and returned to beg for shelter. He had not begged for himself but for someone else—someone he had found and could not alone bring.”
Clifford was hollow-eyed and younger. He had shifted from an enemy to a penitent traveler.
I stepped forward. I do not remember why I did. Maybe it was the long heat of months saved in us. Maybe it was the fact that the man was human and small and unadorned by excuses.
“He came back,” I said to Branch. “We will not be perfect, but we cannot leave him to the wolves.”
Branch watched me. Something like a smile touched his face. “Fine,” he said. “But a watch on him and no more storeroom keys.”
And so Clifford stayed. He worked under two weeks of watch and long months of labor. The building, in its small, sheltered way, learned the difference between justice and hate. We were not saints; we were messy and real and human.
Earl grew. He learned to say Branch’s name and laugh at his jokes. He learned which sprouts on the roof were edible and which were for decoration. He learned, quickly, that the world is not safe—and that he had people who would be dangerous to defend him when needed.
One night I sat on the rooftop with Henri and watched the city breath. “We are lucky,” I said. “We have water. We have heat. We have each other.”
Henri turned his face toward me. “We are more than lucky. We chose to be people.”
I laughed, a brittle sound, then softer. Earl slept between the two of us like a small planet.
The city kept its rhythm: losses, lessons, new rules. The public punishments and the watchful eyes were part of how we created a fragile order. We made hard choices and we measured them against what we wanted from ourselves.
Months into this strange new life, a convoy finally came and took ten more people. Branch shook hands with each and told them to be fierce and kind. The convoy’s dust trail traced a possible future.
A year later the world was still not whole. People lived in towers, in schools, in the bones of supermarkets. But in our little greenhouse on top of the 18th Tower, Earl learned to pick a tomato, and I learned to breathe again.
A final thing to say—something that always lingers whenever I go to the greenhouse. Remember the old samurai sword we took from the old woman’s wall on the second floor? It hangs in our hallway now, dull and patient. When I look at it, I see hands—Henri’s strong hands, Branch’s quick ones, Findlay’s slow and careful ones—and under them all, little Earl’s small fingers. The sword is a tool. It cut us a path in the first days. It is not a trophy.
We still tell the story sometimes, in voices that try to be gentle: about the mist, the supermarket run, Branch and the school, the courtyard punishments, the nights we learned to share. We tell the story because stories keep us steady.
“You remember,” Henri whispers in Earl’s ear sometimes, “how we fought and what we did.”
“And what we built,” Earl will answer, his voice high and new. “We built safe.”
We did. And every night, when I tuck Earl under a blanket stiff from multiple washes, I whisper a promise. Not a promise that the world will go back. Not that it will be easy. But a promise that in the times we have left, we will try to be people worth living for.
The End
— Thank you for reading —