The explosion was deafening and left a column of black smoke in the sky. Another skirmish. Keith’s ears were still ringing as he stood on the apartment balcony, considering whether he should leave the city or stay put, and hope that he would be able to find food and water nearby. Scavengers would be raiding the buildings soon and he would have to defend himself eventually. There were several men down below, running through the streets with rifles, shouting and throwing up hand signals. They were scouts, probably sent this way to make sure there was an escape route available to the gang trapped in the battle happening a few blocks away, where the explosion happened.

Keith moved back inside through the window, his heart and mind were racing, trying to decide what to grab, what to leave behind, and how he would conceal his nine-year-old on the long journey out of the city. Amelia’s mother would have read him the riot act. “Do something other than nothing.” she had said to him many, many times before, and it had been the last thing she had ever said to him before she left for good. But when everything went to shit, when the asteroids were discovered, when the “deadline” clock was started, her mother was lost in the ensuing conflicts to get on the ships that were abandoning earth, the ships that were carrying the best and brightest, the scientists, the rich, the talented, and the creative thinkers, away from this godforsaken planet.

More explosions echoed in the distance, further away than the last one. Thank god, thought Keith. He was pacing around the apartment picking up loose clothing and either putting it into his backpack or adding to the squalidness that his apartment had become. If the scavengers and raiders were distracted that would give him and his daughter time to head south and into the subway system, away from the city. It wouldn’t save them from the end of the world but it would save them from the worst of humanity, from the violent predators that were headed their way.

Keith stopped pacing and stared at his dirt-covered daughter who was sitting on the recliner. She was sucking her thumb with a curious expression. “I told you to get ready. We’re leaving now.” said Keith, his eyes darting around, looking for something to hide her in. Then he remembered the breathable storage container that delivery bots used to transport food, the one he found while scavenging a few days ago. The container was small enough to carry on his back and just big enough for Amelia to fit inside. He told her to get inside and she looked confused. He then told her she could keep using her headphones and she reluctantly agreed, stepping inside and curling into a ball.

He put his own pair of headphones into his ear and grabbed the bag of clothes and canned food, throwing it around the container, the straps just long enough to get around his shoulders. Gun shots rang out outside the window and his daughter whined through the walkie-talkie function in his ear pieces. The shots got louder as he ran down the stairs and out of the building, onto the street, creeping and ducking behind cars and dead or picked-apart delivery bots as he went.

A woman was coming out of her apartment when Keith made it to 7th Street, where there was a subway entrance at the corner. She had heard the gunshots but didn’t seem too startled by it. Instead, her eyes were filled with smeared eye shadow, her arms with injection marks, and her clothes had been pulled off and were in tatters. Keith started walking faster and she pulled at his arms, trying to get her to come inside but he pulled away and started jogging. The world was failing, falling apart. Fighting against it was impossible. When the asteroids would hit earth and annihilate all life, nothing would ever matter again. The only thing that could be done, that anyone could do, was to find a quiet place to die in peace.

He never got to do everything he wanted and his daughter would never get to become who she really wanted to be. But he wasn’t going to give up and give in to the temptation of ending it himself, like the people that had leapt to their deaths from the buildings above. Their obliterated corpses lined the street to the subway entrance. He was glad Amelia had her headphones on when a man screamed to his death, having fallen from somewhere above, across the intersection, and smashed into the light pole, sending his legs in another direction from his body. What a terrible world this had become. He grimaced and choked back vomit when he made it to the stairwell of the subway and ran down with shaking legs.

There were bodies here too, overdosed junkies and murder victims. He covered his mouth to lessen the smell but it was impossible. Pools of blood splashed as he ran through the nightmarish corridors toward the tunnels.

“What is that? That’s gross.” Amelia was tussling around in the container.

“It’s nothing, just garbage. Go back to listening to your music. We’ll be safe soon.” Keith huffed as he sprinted over the bodies and abandoned tents, the further he went down the more the smell became unbearable. It started to burn his nostrils.

Most of the tents along the train tunnels and inside the train cars were deflated, as if they had been abandoned for some time which meant the bodies had been left here for some time. The subway had become a chamber of death, a tomb. No place for a child. No place for anyone. Keith jumped down into the tunnel railway and ran as hard as his weak legs could go.

Amelia was being jostled and complained, “Ow! Where are we going, daddy?”

“It’s okay, honey. Almost there. We have to hide from the bad people.” He neglected to mention that if the crazies down here saw him, they would kill him or take the container, take Amelia and do horrible things to her. The watch was counting down, the deadline running out. Only a few hours left. It would all be over soon.

“Why are they bad?” she said.

Keith bit his lip. He thought about all the terrible things he had seen over the last few days, the shootings, the stabbings, the drug use, people running around screaming, kids screaming…Even though he knew he didn’t have to tell her anything he felt that she deserved the truth, even with the little time they both had left. “They’re afraid, they’re afraid of the rocks that are falling from the sky. When people are afraid, they do scary things to pretend they’re not scared but they really are.”

Images flashed in his head again, of the teen boy whose leg had been broken by scavengers and his mother who left him there, of the parents selling their kids on the streets to the same scavengers for drugs, and the businessman who was being dragged by a gangbanger riding a motorcycle. All of them had smiles on their faces. When he was searching for food and water, he saw entire sections of the city covered in broken glass. People had raided any building that had ground floor windows but when the raiders armed themselves there were slaughterhouses everywhere. One storefront had thirty bodies lying in the front after an automatic weapon had been used to gun them down. He saw the rocket ships leaving earth again in his head, filled with the rich and powerful, the privileged, the intelligent, the scientists, the politicians, and the enlightened, leaving everyone else behind. He wished he would have cursed them, seeing the rockets trailing smoke behind them.

The images stopped when he heard his daughter’s voice. “Are you scared, daddy?”

He made a ball with his fist as he slowed his jogging, the darkness of the tunnel surrounding him, “No. Not scared. There’s nothing to be scared of anymore.”

There was a light at the end of the tunnel. Light meant people. People meant violence and cruelty. He ducked into a side closet, pulling hard on the rusty door handle, and closed it behind him. The smell of bleach was better than the smell of the dead. He opened the container and Amelia rubbed her eyes.

The deadline timer showed they only had an hour left. This was as good a place as any, he decided, and pulled out several cans of food. They spent the remaining time they had talking about the books she had read to her, to get her to sleep, and eating out of the can with their fingers. Keith couldn’t bear talking about the real world anymore. Fantasy was much more pleasant. When the countdown went down to two minutes, he took Amelia in her arms and held her close, hearing the guttural screams of the dying in his head, accompanied by gunshots. He cried and tilted his head so that his tears wouldn’t hit her head. Then his watch started beeping and the timer read: “00:00.” There were distant explosions over the next several minutes but nothing that sounded like a wave of destruction from a colossal asteroid hitting earth. He held her and waited, flinching at every sound and vibration.

Thirty minutes went by and nothing still. Amelia looked up with eager eyes. He picked her up and put her back in the container. She struggled but finally curled up. He left the closet and walked another half mile before he came to the light source. It was a hooded man, hunched over a fallen body, digging through the person’s clothes, presumably looking for food or…something worse. Keith lowered the container in a dark recess and picked up a metal bar. The man had a satchel of canned foods. The man was old, Keith could tell, and wouldn’t be needing it. Besides, the man was a scavenger and probably a murderer like the others.

Walking up slowly Keith swung the metal bar at the man’s head and sent a spray of blood into the air. When the man slumped over Keith sighed and felt that Amelia could get more nutrition out of the food then the old man. There was a loud click and Keith turned to face a rifle that was immediately fired into his stomach. He gasped and fell on his back, grinding his teeth from the agony, and reaching out for his daughter, trapped in the pain. There was a group of three people, maybe more, standing in front of them. From what he could see they were well armed and armored. The woman who shot him went over to check the container. Keith reached out, seeing Amelia’s head pop out, curious at the stranger. “No…” he tried to scream but only whispers came out.

“Did this man take you? You’re safe now. The bad man can’t hurt you now.” said the woman. “We’re part of a community. Everything they told us is a lie. There never was an asteroid. The world was never going to end. The chosen few that abandoned earth, in their ships, chose to run away instead of dealing with the poverty, mental illness, and violence. But we can start over, we can build each other up, we can survive this too.”

Keith watched as the woman took Amelia by the hand, and into the darkness. His blood spilled out onto the train tracks as his heart started to beat slower, and the pain in his stomach became numb, as well as the rest of his senses. The chosen few, as the woman called them, had tricked them, by lying about the impending asteroid, causing mankind to lose its collective shit, to fight each other, to lose their minds and their souls. The superior race was probably speeding into space, completely oblivious to the horrors they created when they left it all behind. They probably thought humanity would destroy itself and they probably would have, if not for the few good men and women who survived. Nature, in all its volatile glory, would always find a way to balance itself, to create peace and stability in a system of chaos. The chosen few, with their attempts at self-inflicted class genocide, had failed. He closed his eyes, feeling that peace overcome him with the final thought that a new world would rise from the ashes of the old.