Prologue: The Man Left Behind

The man gazed out the window of his apartment onto the city-scape below. He could see everything about the building across, knew it like the back of his hand. He knew where all the pockmarks in the aging concrete were, knew which windows were broken and which were still standing.

He could see the smears on some of them, smears of long-dried blood and bile from people who were now long dead, who had clawed against the boundaries of their prisons as they slowly died.

The street below was filled with rusting vehicles, an old armored troop transport that bore the BioChemical sign on a sign attached to its roof, rotting animal carcasses, the skeletons of people picked clean to the bone. There was one particular spot that amused the man, a scene that was laid out on the top of a van for eternity for him to see with the skeletons of three of the dead arranged in morbidly comical poses - two of the skeletons were groping each other while the third looked like it was touching itself.

A clock somewhere deeper inside the apartment chirped that it was now twelve o'clock and so the man got up like he did every day and walked into his dark kitchen.

Cans and bottles and boxes of all sorts of food stood around on the floor and on the counter in precarious piles that looked like they were about to fall over, waiting for even the tiniest breath to set them loose even for a moment.

On the now-broken refrigerator were a set of dry-erase marker tied to magnets that stuck to the side like strange looking insects. Written next to them over and over in various fashions and colors were the words, 'Thomas Alderson, fourteen twenty-seven Birdcrest Avenue,' with a date next to the words.

The man stroked his weeks worth of stubble and then said to no body in particular, "I think today I'll choose a lovely green." And that's what he chose.

"Tho... mas... Al... der... son..." he said to himself as he wrote down the words. "Eleven... Slash... Eight... Slash... Thirty-three... There we go!"

Thomas laughed cheerfully to himself since he had nobody else to laugh with.

"And today I think that I will have myself a lovely can of... 'Chicken and Tomato soup', now with fifty percent less sodium... Sounds lovely to me!"

He grabbed the can and carried it back into his living room and sat down so as to look out the window again as he ate his lunch.

The sky outside was cold and cloudy, grey, not uncommon any time of the year in the dead city. Occasionally a bird, a jet-black raven, would fly by looking for something to eat, anything to eat.

Thomas laughed at them, silly things, not knowing where to look or how to manipulate a can-opener. Helpless without their hands...

An hour later the clock in the back of the apartment chirped at Thomas again and he got up, slowly, deliberately.

"I mustn't seem too eager to see her..." he told himself quietly. "Perhaps she'll say something to me today?"

Quietly, slowly, Thomas opened a door some five feet to his left and slowly entered, closing it with the utmost care behind himself. The room inside was dark, confining. It was also devoid of furniture except for a single small table that stood in the very middle bearing a electronic picture frame on its weathered shoulders. A thin cord snaked from behind the picture frame and made its way out of the room through a small hole in the roof, ending at a lone solar panel on the roof of the building.

"Hello, Emily, my deary, how are you today?" Thomas asked the picture frame.

The picture of his former wife only sat there, looking at an invisible point somewhere near Thomas' left foot.

"Come on, now, can't you smile for me, like you always do?" Thomas asked the picture frame a pleading voice. "I remember, before you left, always so happy..."

The electronic display slowly faded through to another picture, on of Thomas' Emily laughing with some friends as they relaxed in an undoubtedly long gone park.

"Oh, why did you go? You said you'd come back!" he yelled at the picture, spittle flying from his mouth. "Why, why didn't you come back, Emily, Emily..."

Thomas broke down into sobs, crying away as he hugged his knees in a corner of the room, watching pictures of Emily before she had gone cycle through on the frame. A picture of her shooting a rifle, a picture of her graduating, a picture of the two of them on their wedding day.

"Come, now, Emily, can't I hear one little word from you? Just one? Please, I always see you from the side lines, talking to your friends and living your life, but without me... You never say anything to me any more, Emily, why? Why not, Emily..."

He burst into tears again, the tears of a child, his body shaking as the salty droplets of water poured from his cheeks.

Somewhere in the back of the apartment a clock chirped. One thirty, it said in it's sing-song beeping voice.

"Goodbye, my sweet, sweet Emily. It is you I shall miss, and I would love to stay, but I can't take more than a half-hour of your cruelty, your punishment. Not only that, but I have a schedule to adhere to, right? Well, I'll talk to you later, then... Goodbye..." Thomas waited a moment to see if she would respond. She didn't, so he closed the door with the softest of clicks.

He didn't worry about her too much, though. He had a set time for that, and that was at one o' clock in the afternoon. He had other things to do now.

The clock chirped at him again, as if it knew he wasn't moving on.

"I'm coming, I'm coming..." Thomas muttered under his breath.

Just like every day. Day after day for nearly thirty years and his schedule never wavered, never changed. Just the same thing, day after day after day... The same walks past the same bleaching corpses, the same snide comments to the same imaginary figures, the same walks past the same landmarks and through the same buildings.

And of course, the same daily sorrows and pleading for his lost wife to please, oh please, speak to him.

(Well, if anyone isn't clear on this yet, this was the prologue to my up and coming story. The PROLOGUE. Yea, just thought I'd say that.)