One week and several issues of morality after the fall.

  We didn’t bother carrying food or water in our packs when scavenging. Why would we? It was much easier to take what we needed from the homes we were already looting. Anything we brought with us would only add to our burden and our exhaustion. Given the number of people our efforts supported, not being capable of carrying back enough food would mean someone went hungry.

  Food and water were necessary for humans. And while I don’t always consider myself to be human, I knew what it was like to starve. All those years trapped in Ceasars tomb… well, let’s just say that immortality does not remove the need to eat. The history books rarely talk about the mistress, Servilia. Sometimes they mention she was the mother of Brutus and concubine of Julius. But nobody seems to care about what happened to her after the assassination. Why would they? She was only a mistress, right?

  Wrong. She wasn’t she at all. I was Servilia, and I spent years pretending to be a woman, all so they would never find the great Julius Caesar to be anything but the image of perfection. Many believed Marcus was the bastard child of Julius, but that’s not true either. Marcus was a boy we stole from his mother while claiming it was the will of the gods. Let me tell you The first time Julius turned his back, he found a dagger lodged in his spine and he made me disappear from the history books.

  How did he make me disappear? He put me in Julius’ sarcophagus and waited for the screaming to stop. I didn’t see the light of day again until a Visigoth warrior broke open the tomb in search of riches, three hundred and fifty years later.

  When you’re hungry enough to eat your shoes, that’s when you think it’s all over, but I wasn’t allowed to die. Every time Death would come to taking my soul, my skin would glow and would return to relative health. I swear, if I ever get the chance to kill God for what he did to me… But that’s neither here nor there.

  Earlier that week, our scouts located another building that promised to have a significant amount of food. Sadly, that also meant it had a significant number of former inhabitants. As one of the few that didn’t choke around death, Chuck put me back on cleanup duty. Thanks, I love picking up half eaten, decomposing bodies and setting them on fire. No, really, I enjoy lifting bloated corpses and getting covered in flies. Asshole.

  “Jim, we have a problem with our current system of government,” I said to my partner as we each grabbed a corpse's arm and headed for the stairs.

  “It’s Ryan,” Jim said.

  “No, it’s Jim. We are working without a fairly placed democratic government. In times such as these, you need a strong, democratically elected leader to bring humanity back from the brink.”

  “But we elected Chuck democratically, and my name is Ryan.”

  “Well, I didn’t vote for him. I didn’t even get a vote.” I complained, “Jim, I think they should give all newcomers a chance to vote for our leader. That way, the vote stays fair.”

  “So you would rather live in daily chaos?” Jim asked.

  I have to say; I was proud of him. Not only did he understand what I was suggesting, but he also stopped trying to call himself Ryan. What makes the name his parents gave him better than the one I did?

  “Well, you see… Heh… I think once we choose the right leader, maybe the elections don’t need to continue.”

  “And who would be the right leader?” he asked with suspicion.

  “Me.”

  “Literally anyone else. I’m sorry, Vandre, but you can’t even get my name right. What makes you think you could rule as our president or whatever?”

  “Dammit Jim, I only messed up once. And I only called you Ryan this morning because you keep saying it over and over.”

  “My name is Ryan!”

  “No. No, I don’t think it is. Anyway, I think we should form a separate party with different core beliefs than Chuck and his cronies. Then we can demand a vote every time we find someone new in the park.” I said, carrying the corpse down the stairwell like an old couch.

  “I would support Chuck.”

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  “Good, good, keep up that misdirection. That’s the only way to truly turn the tables.”

  “No, really, he’s a good guy. He’s not cruel, he’s not demanding, he just wants to see us live.”

  I dropped my side of the corpse in shock. Was this man really defending his leader like he wasn’t a piece of shit? That… that never happened. Ever since the early two thousands, every elected official I’ve met was a steaming pile of crap with almost no redeeming qualities. A few liked dogs, but that was hardly a reason to put them in a place of power.

  Sometimes it was nice to see the way humanity grew. After the Kennedy assassination and the chaos it produced, I had withdrawn from society. It was only for a thousand years or so, but it seemed mankind had learned empathy in my time away. Sure, I had come back occasionally to see the latest big thing, but it always felt like mankind was more worried about the individual instead of the community. To find a person who cared about others, truly cared, was rare. “So, you’re saying that Chuck doesn’t use his place of power to gain anything?”

  “No, he uses it to help anyone that comes by.”

  Well shit. Maybe humanity progressed further in the last millennium than I thought.

  Strangely compelled to help my fellow man, I reached over and pulled the weight of the corpse from his shoulders.

  “What the hell, man?”

  “The guy was dead. Would you rather carry him down another eight floors, or grab the next body?”

  “I would rather not have a pile of rotten, exploded meat at the bottom of the stairs!”

  “It’s not that bad,” I said, shuffling to put myself between Jim and the view of the floor.

  The body had indeed exploded on impact.

  ~~**~~

  “Why is this garment so short?” I complained, trying to pull the back of my floral sundress under me. The rock I was sitting on was hot from the sun, and even a thin barrier between it and my skin was better than nothing.

  Even if I could heal the wound, being burned was never comfortable.

  “If you would wear pants instead, you might not have that problem,” Jim said around a mouthful of sandwich.

  After a long day of dragging bodies out of the building, we spent the afternoon eating sandwiches cobbled together from abandoned ingredients. As it turned out, Jim was a long-time resident of the city and knew the perfect place to get a sandwich. Unfortunately, the service was not what he remembered, and we had to make our own food. I guess I could forgive the owner’s absence. Especially considering all we found of him was a foot.

  “There was a time when it was perfectly acceptable for a man to wear a dress whenever the hell he pleased,” I defended.

  “Yes, I know about the early two-thousands,” Jim said with an eye roll. “Wasn’t there a lot of stupid arguing about personal identity back then?”

  “Yeah,” I mumbled around a mouthful of meat, “The Christians thought they were special and that laws should be based on their storybook.”

  “Well, that’s stupid. No government should be based on religion. Especially since the concept of God only exists to control the masses.”

  “I don’t know about that. The idea of an all powerful being that ‘knows your heart,’ makes it easier to excuse bad behavior. Even today, the belief in God is a personal choice. For some, it’s comforting to believe that someone is out there waiting to usher you into the beyond.”

  “But how much evil have they done in the name of God?” Jim asked, taking a sip of water.

  “How much good has been done?” I replied. I hated playing devil’s advocate for that guy, but the people who embraced God and his teachings weren’t always bad. Were many of them hypocrites? Yes, but that didn’t eliminate the massive amount of good that was done in his name. “I wasn’t talking about the early two-thousands, though. I was thinking back to the ancient Scottish and Romans. Pants were few, and only reserved for people who truly needed…”

  Our conversation was cut short as a group of air-cars flew into the square. These weren’t your normal run-of-the-mill air-cars. No. Apparently, whoever owned these beauties had watched every shitty apocalypse movie ever made and decided to cobble them together into one mess. Seriously, they’d made the worst attempt at being cool I’d ever seen. Then they topped it.

  Before the cars touched down, several men in tight pants and tighter leather harnesses jumped out. Landing with a thump, I winced in pain because I knew just how unpractical the maneuver was—and corny. A superhero landing? Seriously, when are these types going to realize that being tough isn’t worth it if your knees go to shit in your thirties?

  “Hey look, these street rats collected our food for us. Thanks,” a big guy in a clown mask with a metal ring around his eyes said, walking up to the pile of provisions the scavengers had gathered. “But it’s not enough. Where’s the booze?”

  “We don’t have any.” The lead scavenger said, “Get the fuck away from our food and go find your own.”

  “Why? We can just take what you have here. We ran out at the WalStore, we want more.”

  “You… ate everything at the WalStore?”

  “Yeah, what of it?” The tough guy said, signaling his men to take a box.

  “Do you know how much food is in one of those things?”

  “Yeah, we counted. It’s what accountants do. Last time we ran out, we had to eat a pretty little redhead that wandered through our territory.”

  They had to be joking. It had only been a week, and these idiots had already resorted to cannibalism? And here I was thinking humans could be decent.

  “Look, you gimp suit wearing, mushroom stamping, mountain of lard, get out of here and leave us alone.” Jim said, pointing at the man with his sandwich. “And what’s with the body oil? Dude, you’re wearing leather AND oil? Do you know how stupid you look?”

  “Take him.”

  Four leather bound accountants approached our rock with murder in their eyes. Jim, realizing his error, glanced at me in terror.

  I couldn’t do anything. I wouldn’t. If I fought here and got hurt, everyone would know what I was when the injury healed. I couldn’t let expose myself to help one person. Not again.

  Having collected their ‘Taxes,’ the accountants climbed into the cars with Jim strapped to the hood. They were going to treat him like meat, and I knew it. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t ok. But it reinforced something I’ve believed for a long time. Humans were just as awful today as they were at the dawn of civilization.