The ultimate test of survival is not about how long you can last, or who comes out on top. It's what you actually do once everything is really gone.
America was the first place to launch ships. Then Europe. Then us. They had found a planet that was ideal for relocation. The relaying of information was a year or so delayed, but they started a colony, and told us to follow. Most of us.
When the final fleet left Earth, carrying the last billion people or so and launching ships from all over the world, something went wrong with that model's ability to penetrate the atmosphere, someone had told me. They rapidly exploded across the sky, triggering each other like fireworks in a minefield. The rest of us, the ones they had chosen to leave behind, were showered with a permanent cloud of ash and debris.
The ash stopped falling years ago. Now it hangs in the air, lingering like it has overstayed its welcome but has no place else to go. A stillness so complete that it blankets the lower atmosphere in thick and heavy silence.
I have not seen another person in at least a year.
About ten yards ahead of me, I can just make out the shape of a rectangle. Too big to be a car, and too rigid to be something living. Shelter? As I get closer, I can see there's another rectangle on either side of it. Connected.
I wiped the ash from my goggles, and the grainy, filtered panorama of the formation in front of me sharpened into view.
The massive, rusting framework of old boxcars stood before me, stretching as far left as I could see, and stopped one car to the right, where the tracks were severed. As I cautiously stepped forward, the ash blanket grew deeper in the wake of the elevated tracks.
I tapped on the flaking iron rust of the first chamber, listening for an echo, or a response. After twenty seconds of silence, and little echo, which sounded promising, I climbed up onto the connector between the two cars, and broke out the only lock-picking kit you need for a train: an ax.
It took only three hacks before the handle of the door crumbled to dust, fading to become part of the air around it rather than falling to the ground. I slid the heavy door open as the aged and weathered metal grinded and shrieked with protest.
Rusted-out holes in the ceiling shone streams of polluted light down onto the littered interior, dimly illuminating a few basin sinks against one wall, in which persistent, ugly weeds had begun to grow from the drains. A metal-frame shelving unit had been tipped on its side, and spilling out from it a few cardboard boxes, whose walls had long-since given in to soggy, blackened craters, while the flaps of the boxes curled around water stains. The black and white tiled floor had cracks running from beneath my sneakers to the door on the far other side of the car, branching out in all directions.
Amazingly, one section of the ceiling still held up a suspended rack of pots and pans, eliciting a hauntingly familiar, light tinkering melody. They reminded me of the mobiles over a baby's crib, or of a rat trap, waiting for the right unfortunate sucker to walk underneath them.
Ancient and fading posters and signs for the most part still clung to the walls. Above the sinks,
EMP E S M ST WASH H NDS
But the rest of the signs were indiscernible. Other various papers littered the floor, and I poked around the shelves, too, but no food.
Then something caught my eye. Growing upside-down out of one of the sink nozzles was a small, delicate, yellow flower. I immediately recognized it to be a dandelion, a weed, but nonetheless, I hadn't seen a flower in what I could best judge to be many years. I was tempted to pick it, to carry it with me, but I decided to let it grow.
