Requiescat

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.