It was a drunken summer night in my early 20s in a dirty rundown part of a dirty rundown city. Life was big and bad and beautiful and so was I. Or at least, I wanted to be.

After weeks of mounting tensions with a friend I adored, we finally revealed our feelings to each other. Or maybe the driving torrent of infatuation gushing from my loins forced open her dam of reciprocation. (Terrible analogy, I know. Brushing up on my descriptive skills would've helped my love life back then. Hindsight.)

The air was thick with promise and other people’s sweat. Bright young things and cockroaches were out in full force.

Tonight was the night my crush and I would cement our non-platonic status and have our first official date! If by "date", you meant showing up to the same party and hopefully leaving together. And arriving somewhere later again, together. Ah, to be young and nebulous.

I walk up to the porch steps around 9pm. Disgustingly early. I wanted to make sure the night (and our lithe bodies, raaawr) were still young.

I see her, curvy and lovely and smiling, at ME, on the porch.

"So-and-so! Whose name I cannot reveal for privacy and liability reasons!" I cried.

"What's-her-name! Whose actual name I shall not speak because it's her story and she doesn't want to reveal personal details!" she replied.

We hug. Hold hands. Run off into the virtual sunset.

Wait, it was already evening. So, maybe what I really saw were the blinding lights of the police barricades that had been set after the latest shooting. Or general blurriness of vision caused by seasonal allergies. Either way, it was BEAUTIFUL.

Other young people on the porch stop to stare at the breathtaking sight of two gender non-conforming exotics showering one another in affection. Me, dappled in contrast. She, painted by the sun.

We run down the steps, giggling like naughty school girls, embracing our futures and ourselves.

I lean in for a kiss, aware of the eyes still on us.

"Ha, we'll give them a show!" My self-satisfied baby dyke self thinks to herself, "Love is revolu--"

My thoughts are interrupted by a literal flash of lights and explosions in my head.

"Oh my god, is she okay??" I hear the peanut gallery twitter.

I've just smacked my head right into my date's. It was at this moment I discovered we were both literally hard-headed. I wake up with a knot on my forehead to remind me of that the next morning. Alone.

Needless to say, this did not bode well for our short-lived, non-relationship.

_____________________________________________________________________

Title: My Summer of Sewage and Romance

Genre: Women’s Literature/Mystery/LGBT/Comedy/Urban/Beach Read/New Adult

Age Range: Adult/New Adult

Word Count: 500

Author Name: Ginnett Moon

Why my project is a good fit: It’s a fun read with a distinct voice that makes the transition to different lifestyles and viewpoints entertainment. Hit shows like Master of None, Girls, and Insecure prove there is a wide market for fresh voices in urban settings. I’m a good fit because my lived experience lends truth. As an editor myself I’m easy to work with and open to revision.

The hook: What happens when you throw hormones and high ideals on top of a filled-in swamp? Now add a missing statue, a conspiracy, and a ton of hot girls who bat for another team.

Synopsis: A recent college grad in her early 20s celebrates freedom by moving to the nation’s capital for love and adventure (and cheap rent). Life is full of parties and hot girls until a first date goes terribly wrong and her crush is framed for theft at the Natural History Museum. So she stops her hard-partying, rainbow-flag waving ways and puts on her detective cap to find the real culprit. Liberating fun and games turn into humiliating encounters with police and other authorities who stonewall her (pun intended). At first her new friends are supportive but soon the trail leads to a famous figure in the GLBT community and she is labeled a sellout and shunned. She relentlessly tracks down leads and keeps finding herself steps away from being arrested or worse. To add insult to injury, she must go undercover to gain the confidence of suspects, even if it means pretending to be someone she hates. This definitely puts a damper on her social and love life. Along the way she sees glimpses of people’s humanity, the good and the bad, which challenge her preconceived notions and empowers her to be fully herself. This also improves relationships overall in her life. She finally unmasks the real culprit and reveals a vast conspiracy reaching the heights of Congress to the depths of the capital’s sanitation department (DC Department of Public Works). The seeker emerges a heroine. More importantly, she gains love in many forms: self-love, love of a worthy partner, love of true friends, and love of a fickle public.

Target Audience: Women/LGBT/New Adults

Bio: Ginnett Moon is a copywriter, reporter, and editor based in the bay area. As a world explorer and back yard investigator she’s pled her case on Capitol Hill and thrown up on girls in dive bars. Now she likes to write about it.

Platform: Help me build it and they will come. (Don’t worry I have experience with social media and content management.) I have built a personal network in LGBT and women's communities.

Education: B.A. in social sciences, minor in English from a top 20 U.S. liberal arts college. Additional training in screenwriting, playwriting, essay writing, and literary criticism.

Experience: Staff writer, copy editor, freelance reporter, English tutor, content manager, localization specialist. Published in print (newspaper) and online.

Personality/Writing style: Eclectic, observational, irreverent, versatile. I'm comfortable with different formats including stand-up and spoken word.

Likes/Hobbies: Dogs and dancing, but not dog dancing. I enjoy travel within the US and abroad, learning languages, and meeting people. I am a fan of most types of cuisine.

Hometown: Somewhere in Northern California

"I remember the sparks that soared with each hammer-stroke, flying like fireflies. They danced across the anvil and left the scattered straw on the forge floor singed. All I could think of was the tragedy to follow should one ignite. The real tragedy was far worse."

"What was it?" asked the man in the cell next to mine.

"The reason why I'm locked in here," I told him.

"Which is...?"

I sighed. "Well, it wouldn't be much of a bedtime story if I told you the end."

"True, true," he said, leaning back against the stone wall. "Carry on."

"That morning my father took me to the mines in West Landen. The great pits of avalanched rock piled in each and every direction. 'Best ore for miles,' he kept saying along the way. 'We'll make you a mighty sword today. You're going to need one if you've already stopped growing.'"

"He liked to tease me about my size," I continued. "He could tell already by that I wasn't going to get any bigger. My mom was small and he wasn't so big himself, though he made up for it in muscle. I didn't seem to get that trait."

The man in the other cell laughed. "Yeah, you're lucky you're in a cell and not in The Pit."

"Yes, lucky to be in prison."

"Oh God, I didn't mean it that way." He peaked his eyes open and looked at me. "So what? You steal some ore with your daddy and they caught you? You stabbed a guard and they locked you up?"

"No. Are you even listening? I said it was tragic."

"Go on then. Just waiting for this great tragedy," said the man, closing his eyes.

"It was the first time my father took me to the mines. The first time he ever involved me in anything in his work. I think he always wanted me to find some other interest so he wouldn't have to raise me to be a blacksmith. His door was always closed, but today it was open. I felt like his son."

"The mine was larger than I expected and people crowded the place like a city street. Some with pales of ore, some picking through and some commanding the slaves every which way. It was controlled chaos. Like what I imagine a battle to be."

"Well if there's enough piss, shit, blood and screaming then it might be compared a battle. If not, you better not ever see a real battle," said the man, keeping his eyes closed. "Fuck, now you got me thinking of that."

"I'm sorry."

"Just keep going. Don't reference battle until you've seen one..."

"Okay," I said and sat down on the cobblestone floor. "We bought a cart full of ore from a merchant there, a Turkish man dressed in a turban and robes. I don't know how he managed such spirit in that heat. It was as if he was enjoying a party on an early summer's day."

"'Come back today and have a second for 30 coins,' he told us between the commands he yelled to his slaves. 'And 10 coins for a third!' My father refused."

"'Oh, come now. That's another ore for a week!' But still, my father shook his head, wouldn't even say a word. So I tugged on his coat. It seemed like a great deal and my father always complained about the price of ore. He didn't say a word to me and smacked our horse on the rear, walking off. I thanked the merchant and apologized before chasing off after him."

"'He's a snake,' my father muttered when we got a bit further. 'Tries to squeeze all the coin he can out of you and when you go back, he's gone.'"

"'But surely you'd find him, the place wasn't that large,' I told him, trying to find reason in his. He just sighed and we continued on our way."

The man in the other cell yawned and laid down. "Smart man," he said.

"What?"

"Smart man. You give a merchant more than a fair amount of silver and they'll disappear for an age."

I walked over to the bars, just under the torchlight. "And what about his slaves? He just leaves them?"

"Merchants don't own slaves, the landowners do. The owners of the mines give the merchants slaves and the merchant sells the ore the slaves deliver. Before the merchant can leave he gives a share to the landlord." He laughed again. "I don't think you understand how lucky you are you're in here. But go on, your innocence is amusing."

I let out a grunt which the man either didn't hear or care he heard.

"When we arrive at the forge, he has me unload the cart while he builds the fire. I saw how the slaves looked. They were feeble and lugged the ore onto the cart like bundles of hay." I could see the smile forming on the man's lips. "I struggled with each and every clump. Thank God my father was busy when I lugged the small ones. When it came time for the large ones he told me that even he had trouble with them sometimes, so we moved them together."

I paused for a moment, trying to find the words to continue. From as long as I could remember, I felt better telling stories than pretending nothing ever happened in my life. It helped me know what happened was real, even when I didn't want it to be.

"The forge is blazing as I work the bellows. My father makes quick work of a large chunk of ore, fashioning a hilt on one end before working on the blade. The familiar ring of the hammer sounds much more powerful in the presence of the blacksmith. The raw power of each blow passing through my skin."

"'You want to give it a strike?' he asks me while I stare at the glowing blade."

"'But the bellows,' I say. He shakes his head and gestures his hand to come to him."

"With my father holding the sword, he tells me where to strike. I miss. 'It's okay,' he says, 'feel the heat of the blade, the weight of the hammer and strike with purpose. Strike!'"

"I miss again. The disappointment is raw on my father's face. He begins to move and I know he's going to take the hammer from me."

"'One more time,' I tell him and he readies the blade. I did what he said. The heat of the metal burned into my skin; the hammer felt like I was wielding the Earth in my hand; I struck that steel to show the world that I would be a mighty blacksmith one day."

My gut lurched. I gripped the bars of the cell and beat my head against the steel. In the silence, my teardrops echoed.

"And?" the man said, his voice much more hushed than before.

"Sparks... and fire. Metal... and death... The ste—the steel erupted. The forge exploded." I forced the mucous back. "And my father's dead face gazed up at the open sky."

The man said nothing but looked at me with stricken eyes. It wasn't until I collected myself that he asked, "so why'd they lock you up then? Sounds like an accident to me."

"Before the city guards came, I wept at my father's side. You do crazy things in moments like that. I tried patching his wounds with straw. I held his head and told him, 'sorry,' more times than I can count. What the guards saw when they arrived was me looking at the sword. I, in disbelief and anguish that my hand did such heinous work. They, a murderer who struck down his father."

"'It exploded?' they laughed as they slung me in shackles. 'What'd you do, cast a spell?' They wouldn't listen. They threw me in the cell so I wouldn't get the other crazies in The Pit worked up."

Just then, footsteps sounded in the corridor. Two men with torches and guardsmen armour approached the cell next to mine. One threw a scroll into the cell and the other approached the door.

"Hendle Bannark, you are being sentenced for: failure to follow your commander's order in battle. Such offense is on par with treason. How do you find yourself?"

"Have you ever seen bat—"

"Guilty it is," continued the guard. The other unlocked the door.

"This is treason!" the man yelled. "Treason to your citizens! Punishing the men who won't die for your kingdom!"

The guardsman approached the man, bringing down his torch across the man's face. It knocked him unconscious and left a small wound that bled onto the floor. The man was dragged out by the guard while the other guardsman approached me.

"Leon Hullow," he said.

I couldn't even look at him. "I find myself broken if it matters at all to you."

"Well, you should pick up the pieces. You're free to go."

"You believe my story?"

"No, but the warden is intrigued. You will be meeting with him before you depart, granted he still finds a reason to believe your story. Common, hurry up. He is not a patient man."

There are casualties in war.

But nobody ever mentioned anything about the survivors. They’re casualties too, in ways that the cold bodies buried in the ground could never understand. Samuel watches dead eyed survivors mill about, uncaring of what happens to them anymore. They’re all dead, some more literal than others.

The end of the world comes suddenly, and everything disappears as fast as it appeared, measured in milliseconds of time as the world burns.

In the end, they don’t even have enough time to put up a fight.

---

Samuel doesn’t dwell on His absence, because He is not gone, just temporarily…indisposed. MIA. Not KIA.

Samuel suspects that the thing he misses the second most is a blue sky, a hearty sun and an insistent salty breeze.

The heat in the bubble dome is moderated at exactly 72.3 degrees every day. No rain or shine, wind, sleet, or snow. Sometimes when Samuel tries to take a breath, he can’t.

In the absence of God, people look to the next closest things. Samuel almost refuses to be a part of the new world order, but with ten thousand eyes raised towards him, expectant, he can’t refuse. The last spec ops captain in the world, and he only got away with his life because he got lucky.

People don’t interact with Samuel much. He’s not sure if he likes it better this way or not, but either way, he deals with it like he deals with most things, and forcefully ejects it from his mind so he doesn’t have to think about it.

The lights go out around the encampment. People crawl back to their bunks to go huddle with whichever family members of theirs are left.

If Samuel closes his eyes, he can almost imagine himself back in the trenches, the same weightiness of living tugging at his chest as it used to during the war.

They have a clock tower in the middle of their encampment. It’s a little after two in the morning. Samuel cracks an eye open as whoever else is on night patrol duty walks past, their shadow growing and shrinking as they move slowly round and round.

In another hour, Samuel will have his chance.

---

“Penelope’s dead.”

There’s a hiss and a crackle over the comm, the static jumping in to interrupt the shocked silence that hangs in the air.

“Repeat?”

There’s no reply from the other side of the line. Then--

“Civilians safe. Hostiles neutralized, for the moment…She blew them up.”

The unspoken “and blew her herself” almost brings Samuel to his knees.

Samuel, covered in blood and still panting, looks to his side where Benjamin stands, eyes wide with shock and grief.

She was supposed to be invincible.

---

“Where the fuck do you think you’re going?”

Samuel raises a placating hand. “Luke. I’ve got clearance. Let me through.”

“I know you’re just pulling another one of your bullshit stunts, Sammy.”

“I’m not asking you to help. I just need to get through those doors.”

“Nice try, Sam. There are rules here, and you’re not fuckin’ entitled to do whatever the hell you want.”

Samuel sighs. He’s always hated dealing with the police.

---

There isn’t time for a funeral, but it feels wrong to just leave their bodies out in the open. There are no oceans to scatter their ashes into, no trees to make caskets, so they dig a large grave in the scorching earth and burn their comrade’s bodies one by one.

The ones who can still stand to be in the heat of the burning earth hold vigil.

Samuel wants to cry, thinks there’s something incredibly wrong with him because how can he be too tired to cry, how can he not shed a tear over these people that he’s fought with so long they’ve become family—

Benjamin’s hand grasps his, fingers forcefully prying Samuel’s clenched fist open and intertwining their fingers so that Samuel can bear down on Benjamin’s fingers instead of gouging crescent marks into his palms.

Benjamin squeezes Samuel’s fingers steadily. Samuel finds the courage to stay.

---

He’d expected the klaxons to go off right when the blast doors opened. What he doesn’t expect is the overwhelming, scorching heat wave that hits him like a freight train instantly after the metal doors open to the outside world.

He steps out.

Eight-foot tall clouds of dust swirl in miniature tornados over the cinder-ash ground—he can’t see two feet in front of himself.

Samuel activates the oxygen calorimeter in his suit as the blast doors grind to a shut behind him, and then he’s alone.

The silence is deafening.

Welcome, Samuel Roan.

The kind pleasant female voice chimes inside of the suit helmet, scrolling through a list of his personal body stats, as well as the readings from outside:

Body Temperature: 98.6 F

Body weight: 187 lbs

Blood-Sugar Level: 100 mg/dL

Outside Temperature: 453 F

Warning: Oxygen content in atmosphere is at 0.4%. Oxygen will be filtered from available source in suit. It is not advised to continue in these conditions. Radiation signature: unknown. Proceed?

Samuel sucks in two deep breaths and then turns the oxygen down low. He’s going to be out here for a while.

“Override safety protocols. Proceed.”

---

Samuel spits out the piece of gum he’s chewing and hands it over to Benjamin, who pops it into his mouth and starts chewing.

The gum is rock hard and not remotely minty now, but he chews without protest. It’s better than gnawing on your tongue, or the insides of your mouth, Samuel supposes. Benjamin has that habit worse than Samuel.

They’re going to run out of gum soon. It’s on a limited supply, treated like currency. Thirty sticks of gum for an MRE. Fifty sticks of gum for two bottles of water. There’s irony, Samuel thinks, that they always end up hungry no matter where they are.

Samuel ladles out the last bits of “soup” from the vat, scraping the bottom. The glorified hot water has a faint peppery taste to it.

This is purgatory, maybe, and everyone’s waiting for judgment day. If that’s true, Samuel thinks, then he’ll follow Benjamin wherever he goes. And if he has to pray his way to heaven, or fight his way to hell, he’ll do it.

The next time they’re allowed to have food, Benjamin hands all of his over to Samuel, who tries to do the same for him.

“Give it to the kids.”

“Benjamin, shut up and eat my food.”

Absently, when it’s Samuel turn to chew on tack again, he wonders how long sheer will power will be able to keep him going without him eating. He’d rather it be him than Benjamin.

---

It’s the silence that’s terrifying.

The absence of everything. No trees stand to block the great swirls of ash, and no creatures, human or not, make a sound. In the vacuum of his filtered space-like helmet, the only sound is his heartbeat thudding in his ears.

The air is as dead as the land, the uncanny quietness a rotting corpse.

The suit is heavy and clunky and bad at regulating heat. Or maybe there’s only so much it can do when it’s bordering on 500 degrees outside. Tal said it was just a trial suit, but they’ve run out of materials to build more.

Samuel takes a deep breath, just to make sure he can still breathe. It’s hard to tell when the heavy suit constricts his chest. He checks the readings at the corner of his vision: 25% oxygen in his tank. Too little. He needs to conserve, otherwise he’ll run out before he can make it back to base.

Samuel jumps at the low buzz in his ear.

Incoming from General Hansel. Shall I connect the call?

He takes a moment to answer.

“Samuel what the fuck do you think you’re doing,” General Maria Hansel barks in his ear, tense and strained. With reason to be, he supposes. This wasn’t a sanctioned mission.

“I’ll be back.”

He trudges on, grunts when he almost trips over something at his feet. He stares down and sucks in a startled breath. A dismembered head, entirely bone, grins back up at him.

“Samuel, return to base immediately. You’re not allowed to—“

He disconnects the comm, and keeps walking.

He’s reached the outskirts of what used to be the city. There’s nothing there except for more ash tornadoes and the cavernous ruins of skyscrapers tipped sideways on the ground.

Oxygen levels at 10%. Critical levels reached. You are currently 33.5 miles from base. It is strongly advised to find alternate sources of oxygen.

“C’mon…I know you’re out there,” Samuel whispers, his voice echoing in the fishbowl of the suit helmet.

He takes another deep breath, and tries to ignore the uncomfortable prickling feeling of his skin burning.

The grey sun fades below the horizon. Samuel turns around.

---

“What do you miss the most?”

Benjamin’s body behind his is an anchor, his chest a solid weight against Samuel’s back.

They’re leaning against each other, staring up through the transparency of the dome at the red night sky.

They don’t get too many quiet moments like these. Rescue missions are happening around the clock, while it’s still possible to go outside during the evenings. The afternoons peak at 150 degrees, but at night it’s a blissful 102. They find fewer and fewer survivors each day, and the ones that are found are immediately put to work helping build the dome. Most don’t survive for more than a few months.

Tal and Baron predict that if they don’t finish building a radiation-proof dome before the next month, all of the non-super-humans are probably going to get heavy radiation poisoning and die.

Disheartening doesn’t begin to cover it. But at least the fight is over. Now all they can do is try and survive.

Samuel’s not sure what he misses the most.

Maybe cold winters, although that’s probably not the answer Benjamin’s looking for.

“Dentist appointments,” Samuel smirks. It’s only half a joke--toothpaste is a commodity that isn’t around anymore. The grimy feeling’s stuck to his teeth for weeks.

“Asshole. You know what I mean.” Benjamin’s breath puffs warm against the back of Samuel’s neck. “What do you miss most about not-post-apocalyptic America?” Benjamin tries to keep it light, but he’s not fooling anyone. Samuel appreciates the effort.

Sometimes he’s too busy boosting everyone else’s morale to worry about his own deteriorating one.

“Hm…” Samuel forces his exhausted brain to think. To touch emotions that he’s worked hard to block for the last couple of weeks since the attack and destruction of earth.

“Good food. Food, in general.”

Samuel misses the porous tang of sourdough bread. What precious little bit of flour they had in the beginning has since been long gone, eaten within the first few weeks. They ran out of yeast before they ran out of bread—Samuel doesn’t know how the Egyptians survived.

“Mmm. Agreed.”

“Jogging in the park. Fresh air, instead of this recycled shit...”

Samuel’s closed all of these behind a tightly locked safe full of memories. He’s not sure if he can handle opening it tonight. Benjamin puts a hand on his chest and nudges him to turn over, so they’re lying face to face on the bed. Their noses brush. Samuel breathes proper.

“Grass. Trees.”

Benjamin hums in agreement.

Samuel thinks of the golden light streaming in through their curtains in the morning, reflecting off the calm blue walls of their living room. Being soaked up by Benjamin’s golden-brown skin. Watching the light play against the blue and flecks of green in his eyes.

“Our leaky kitchen faucet,” Benjamin adds.

“Our leaky kitchen faucet,” Samuel agrees. Their apartment had been great otherwise, except for that faucet. They were too busy to get it fixed.

Samuel sighs. Benjamin hums quietly.

“Our friends,” he says quietly. There’s a silence after that, only filled with the sounds of Benjamin’s even breaths.

Samuel closes his eyes, and suddenly his body aches all over, from the soles of his tired feet to the incredible weight that feels like it’s crushing his skull 24 hours a day.

Benjamin’s always had the key to unlock all of Samuel’s aches and pains, when even Samuel himself was blind to it.

Samuel doesn’t realize he’s crying until suddenly he’s choking with sobs, shaking apart, breaths hiccupping out of him and body shuddering like he’s going to break into a million pieces, a piece for all of the friends they’ve lost, for all of the pain and destruction they’ve seen. For the crunch of a dead child’s skull underneath his shoes as he fought to save its other siblings from the safe fate.

“Me too,” Benjamin whispers.“Me too.”

---

He sheds the suit in the decontamination room, gasping in oxygen as he hands the helmet piece to Hank apologetically. There’s 0.2% oxygen to which is probably cutting it a little close.

Hank checks the inside of the helmet and stares at Samuel like he’s insane. Samuel gives him a tight smile in return; poor Hank. He doesn’t deserve to be dealing with results of Samuel’s insolence, but he’s a more well mannered scientist among the bunch for doing so.

“Get any interesting samples for me?” Hank says sarcastically, holding on to the edge of the helmet with two pinched fingers like it’s poisonous. It probably is.

“Oh and by the way, Luke wanted me to pass a message along to you. He says ‘fuck you’.”

“Yeah, I deserve that one,” Samuel replies, carefully peeling himself out of the rest of the space-man like contraption. He does feel a bit better, now that he’s not carrying 75 pounds of the suit on his shoulders.

Back a year ago when everything had first been destroyed, it only ranged around 103 degrees outside, hot enough to be dangerous, but not hot enough to kill. Earlier versions of the suit had been used for rescue missions, and Rex and Tal affectionately dubbed the armor P.A.N.D.O.R.A, short for the Post-Apocalyptic Nuclear Detainment Outpost Rescue Armor. Samuel doesn’t care for the name, especially now that they don’t go on rescue missions anymore.

A bit of ash sticks to his arm, and burns where it does. He hadn’t noticed it before, but--

“Hey, how did you get these cuts on the suit?”

Hank holds up the arm joint where sure enough, tiny fissure cracks run all over the surface, like someone took a knife to the outside and slashed gashes through it. Except no one had, and the suit was made of a flexible lead alloy that was supposed to be able to handle the radiation.

Samuel stares down at his hands, which are both bright red.

He takes off the skin-tight lead-infused suit underneath his outside clothes.

No wonder he had been feeling weaker. He thought it’d been the lack of oxygen.

“Holy shit,” Hank hisses, the helmet between his hands dropping to the floor with a thud.

Samuel’s entire body is covered in deep red burns, some places bleeding sluggishly. He assumed the heat and burning sensation had been coming from wearing so many layers under the hot heat-containment suit, not from radiation.

“I’m okay,” Samuel insists, even as Hank himself puts on a lead robe before slinging Samuel’s arm around his shoulders.

“Hank I’m f-fine—“

Samuel’s world darkens.

---

“Heat signatures coming from this area are strong, but there aren’t many of them.”

Everyone squints at the monitor. All of their technology’s been wiped, so they’re using whatever archaic tools they still have to find survivors. It’s hard to read heat signature readings when everything in the atmosphere is infrared from radiation.

“How many?” Samuel’s voice breaks in between. He can’t muster up the energy to feel embarrassed about it.

“Looks like about 32. We think they came from the Toronto direction.”

Everyone is silent for a moment. 32 survivors are a tricky number. Not really worth the energy and resources to save, since the survivor rate tends to hover around 20%. It’s likely they’ll lose more lives on the rescue mission than they’ll gain. But at the same time, it’s too many people to leave to die. Samuel clenches his jaw, surprised at the ire of his own thoughts. There would have been a time when he refused to leave anyone to die.

What a life that must have been.

“There’s a kid in there,” Benjamin says, an untraceable note to his voice. Samuel looks over, to see a furrow in between his brows, one finger rubbing at his cracked and chapped lips. He’s concerned, Samuel realizes. He wears the same look a lot these days, around Samuel mostly.

All eyes on the room turn towards Benjamin first, then settle on Samuel. They always do. It’s a habit, maybe, that they still look to Samuel to come up with solutions to all their problems.

This isn’t something he was trained for. He never asked for this, to make calls on people’s lives and place worth on what’s more valuable.

He bites his lip, eyes catching Benjamin’s, whose own are clear and determined.

“We’ll go after them. Tomorrow, midnight when it’s coolest. Get some rest.” Samuel says.

There are some exhausted nods around the table, some shaking heads. Samuel knows, their supplies are fast dwindling. That 32 people aren’t enough to risk going out into the hell that has consumed earth.

Benjamin follows him out, hand brushing against Samuel’s as they walk down the hall back to their quarters. It’s an affirmation that he did the right thing.

Samuel’s not so sure.

---

Samuel doesn’t need to remind himself he’s breathing, because every breath he draws into his lungs feels like he’s slowly being set on fire from the inside out. It feels like drowning all over again, except this time it’s breathing in fire instead of ice.

Samuel gasps, his vision completely white, tunneled and hazy everywhere except for Hank’s glasses, bobbing and floating in and out of focus.

“Hold him down!” he hears someone say, and then there’s a scuffle somewhere off to his right, and his world darkens again.

---

“—suit’s wrecked—“

“…need to put him back under surveillance…”

“…could you let this happen?! You know how he was after the accident…”

“—valuable person in this base. Can’t let this happen again—“

“--found something. Not good, but it’ll be okay for now…”

“…can’t tell him. Just monitor the situation until…”

---

“—pocket of them! Our survivors aren’t gonna make it out of there alive, Samuel. We need to abort the mission.” There’s a groan, and then a smack, and then more fighting sounds.

“Hold steady!” Samuel shouts, though he can see that their situation is decidedly not good. He swings up his gun as another barrage of those things make their way towards him, spilling out of the hole in the earth like literal demons from hell.

At this rate, they’re all going to be dead before they can get to the 32 survivors still 10 miles down the road.

Next to him, Benjamin pulls out another set of handguns from his belt and fires, lobbing a grenade into the pit. Samuel grabs him by the collar and pulls him to ground, just in time to get blasted forward from the heat of the explosion.

Samuel’s ears are ringing when he feels Benjamin yank him to his feet and fling him—hard—through the air further from the explosion, where more of the creatures are spilling out to replace the ones that blew up.

“Go get the survivors, I’ll hold these things off!” Benjamin yells over his shoulder. Samuel shakes his head vehemently, angry that Benjamin would even consider that an option.

Benjamin’s got half a gun and two grenades left.

“You get them, I’ll hold!” Samuel says, and hears the satisfying crunch when he heaves a rebar into an oncoming hoard of the flying creatures.

Benjamin takes off running.

---

It feels like there are 20-pound weights pulling each of his eyelids down.

He opens his eyes to see a pair staring right back into his own.

“Oh. You’re up.”

Samuel twitches.

His vision is still a little hazy around the edges, but lessened enough from his drug-induced stupor where he can vaguely make out the shape of Annie’s messy brown mop of hair.

“Wat…ter?” Samuel croaks hopefully. Annie picks up the Styrofoam cup of water on the bedside table and raises it to Samuel’s lips, directing the straw into his mouth. Samuel has a brief moment to wonder how they can still have Styrofoam cups in the infirmary before he takes a few sips, half of it, embarrassingly, leaking out the corners of his lips.

“Welcome back, Sammy.”

Samuel thinks that he would have been used to hearing that sentiment, but by now it’s just a tiring routine and running joke.

“Thanks,” Samuel grunts. It comes out more like “thks” because even the small act of moving his lips hurts.

“You’re probably wondering what the hell happened,” Annie says, setting the cup of water back down. “You went outside, without telling anyone and—oh thanks for that by the way, now General Maria doesn’t trust any of us—and while you were out there, you picked up a ton of radiation and almost died.”

Samuel blinks. Well, radiation would explain the heat factor. But that still doesn’t explain why he didn’t die while he was outside, when he was exposed to the brunt of it, but instead started burning when he finally got back to base.

“Oh, and when I say a ton, I mean a ton. A literal, metric ton. There were enough uranium 435 particles on you to make a bomb and destroy the Florida Keys, if they still existed.” Annie says. “You’re lucky you didn’t die.”

“Though, the good thing is that it seems like you’ve helped Tal discover a new element. He said he was gonna name it Samthrium, in your honor if you died. But since you didn’t, I dunno what he’ll change it to.”

Samuel takes another sip of water. His brain feels incredibly sluggish, like it did that one time they put him on bovine tranquilizers so they could stitch his stomach back together with his lower intestine, after a particularly nasty alien had almost sliced clean through. That hadn’t been fun.

“Uranium 435, almost a third the half-life of a regular Uranium atom, because it reacts with three times as many nonmetallic elements as the regular Uranium does. Once it does, it goes at a 3rd order nuclear reaction and basically explodes all of the cells in your body. Long story short, you were legally dead for about three minutes while your heart stopped beating. We had to dump ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid into you, and even then it was touch and go until we could get Dr. Cramer to help.”

“But anyway, you’re alive, so it’s fine. Maria says she had some “strong words” for you, so I’d be careful.” Annie says, picking up the nurse’s button at Samuel’s bedside and carefully placing it within his reach.

“Urhg…” Samuel murmurs. Annie pats his hand sympathetically.

“Maybe she’ll take it easy on you, you know, what with the whole almost-dying-from-radiation thing.”

---

Samuel isn’t even out of the makeshift hospital yet before Maria storms her way into the ward, anger blazing in her blue eyes.

Samuel presses a button on his bed so that he can be upright when she’s yelling in his face. The least he can do is show a little respect, after he blatantly disrespected her rules.

“What the hell were you thinking,” is what she spits out first. Samuel does his best to look remorseful, even with radiation burns covering most of his everywhere. He probably doesn’t look too convincing.

“You don’t get to make a decision unless it goes through me first.”

“I’m sorry,” Samuel says, trying to keep any sort of waver out of his voice, “but I didn’t realize we were a dictatorship now.” The words fly out of his mouth, unbidden and unwarranted.

It’s a low blow, he knows. The rules of the base aren’t something that she mandated alone. They were agreed on by most of the survivors both super and not, though at the time, Samuel hadn’t been cognizant enough to agree or disagree to any of it.

He doesn’t remember much from the first few months after the ill-fated rescue mission.

“How dare you,” Maria seethes.

“Who do you think you are, Samuel? You think this is what I want? You think I, or any of us, want to live like this? Rationing food because we don’t know when we’re going to get more because things don’t grow anymore. Rationing water. You think it’s easy having to make these choices?” Maria says, voice escalating. “Step off your goddamn high horse and open your eyes. People are dying still, every day. And you went outside. You know better than any of us that there’s nothing left. There’s nothing out there, is there?” Maria demands, hands clenched tight around the rail of Samuel’s bed.

To that, he doesn’t say anything. She’s right, even if he doesn’t want to believe it. What he saw, first hand, will be imprinted onto the backs of his eyes for the rest of his life. Earth is a wasteland, anything that might have still been standing long burned to the ground, nothing left but smoldering bones and the melting carcasses of buildings.

“You know how much you put everyone at risk going outside? You could have detonated the whole damn base with the Uranium you carried back in your skin, and then we all would have been dead. Is that what you want? Because you might have a damn death wish, but the rest of us want to live.“

“I’m sorry,” Samuel says, because he’s not quite sure what she wants to hear from him. He’s not sure what he would say, in her position.

“Sorry? You’re sorry, Samuel? Because that’s not good enough. Running off with one of our best suits, a suit which we had to melt half the titanium in this whole encampment for, going outside unprotected, and then almost dying—“

“Look, I’m sorry, but—“

“NO, Samuel, don’t you try to explain yourself out of this mess. There are rules. You follow the rules, and I follow rules, because if no one does then NONE of us will survive this!” Maria yells.

Silence.

“And for what?” Samuel croaks. “For what, if we keep surviving? So that we can keep rationing 3 cups of water per person a day, so that when people try and have children, we tell them no?”

Samuel thinks maybe the ones who died in the fight are the lucky ones.

Samuel shuts down the train of thought promptly before it can barrel into painful memories.

“I don’t know,” Maria sighs, “but we can’t all afford to make the same bullheaded decisions that you do. This isn’t about you, this is about the ones who actually care about their lives. It’s about trying to survive, Samuel.”

For the first time, Samuel notices how drained she looks. Exhaustion rings around her eyes and her nest of uncombed, oily black hair make her look gaunt and overworked.

Radiation smells a lot like blood.

Maybe it’s just the byproduct of the 7.034 billion dead rotting bodies on earth.

“I’m sorry,” he says, like a broken record. It’s all he can offer now.

And just like that, all the residual fight goes out of her, and she slumps into the visitor’s seat next to his bed.

“I…we thought you were going to die. For real this time.”

Samuel has nothing to say to that. There’s a look in her eye that he’d rather not linger on, weighted down with years of history and words left unspoken between them.

“America doesn’t exist anymore, but that doesn’t mean people look up to you any less, Sam. You can’t just…just run off….we’ve all lost people we loved…”

Samuel almost bites through his own tongue.

“And just because you lost—“

“Don’t,” Samuel says sharply. “Please.”

Samuel grinds his teeth and tries not to be angry, tries not to tell her that he could care less about what she wants from him. That he never asked for this, for any of this. Never asked to have a few thousand slowly starving, radiation-burned survivors from all over the world depend on a handful of leftover leaders from the known world to singlehandedly save them from a planet that’s become a living inferno.

“I understand that…that maybe you need some time. I’m giving you a leave. You’re off duty for the next month.” Maria stands up, straightening the gun holster around her hips, and fixing Samuel with a steely glare. She still looks tired, but standing tall like this, Samuel can see why people choose to follow her. There’s hope, still, in the way she holds her head high, like maybe there’s still a whisper of chance that they’ll get out of this one okay.

Samuel’s not counting on it.

“Get it out of your system. Mourn however you need to. But stay out of the way. You might not care about your life, but other people do.”

Maria leaves. Samuel swallows and tries to ignore the burning feeling in his chest.

END CHAPTER 1.