Deep down, you’re really shallow Hard of hearts Strong of will What purpose do we serve? Yet still You build your wall Your call Stronger than any other, you’re sure Sat atop your hardest work The view from high, it’s greatest perk

Watch tall above the rest Their walls Their calls Smaller than your best Laugh and taunt at those below Are you really just that shallow?

It had happened, the unthinkable, the last straw. 2 of the biggest powers had just been wiped off the face of the planet within a short 30 minutes. Mutually assured death was of an era long forgotten, nobody was prepared for it, nobody expected that they needed to be. What would be known as the “red hour”: an emergency alert was sent everyone around the world, sirens that were to haunt your every night pierced across every signal. It showed on it an exclamation mark with the nuclear symbol over it, thick black writing read “seek cover immediately” before cycling different languages. That screen would be burned into the retinas for ever. To the shock of everyone around us, we could watch the rockets flying right over us. It had dawned on people, slowly, that they were not aimed us, but were being traded between the two great powers. 30 minutes exactly after the warning was first sent out, we saw the horizon go a deep red and orange. The explosion were so vast, and so many, that the sound of them could be heard for thousands of miles away. It sounded like a dormant demon growling with eminent power and anger. The vast display of explosions left behind great clouds, from a distance you could still see the heads of the mushrooms. Like a Goliath storm, you could see it begin the encroach and envelop the area. 1 hour and 16 minutes after the first siren, an emergency news broadcast courtesy of the BBC. It had stated that on that fateful evening, both Russia an America had both fired an estimated combination of around 4 thousands warheads at each other. From the little information available, it looked like almost half a billion of the Earth’s population had been wiped out. Nobody was sure for certain why it had happened, what was happening, or what was going to happen. Pretty much every country on Earth was going to be effected by the nuclear fallout, the Earth itself would be shook. At that point nobody was sure what would happen to the environment, many experts estimated that we would fall into a nuclear winter whilst some predicted sky rocketing temperatures as the atmosphere almost had a hole dug strait through it. To everyone who sat there wondering, it was obvious that their days were surely numbered.

The dead sector. A large quadrant of city scape wearing that name as literally as it was tragically. Thousands of miles of buildings and sky scrapers frozen in time, lifeless, crumbling. The road beneath my feet was hardly even recognizable from the dense grass and foliage enveloping it. It was like burial ground of architecture, signs of an age long fading away. The earth was taking back what had been ripped from it and there was no hiding it. This long hike was proving to be more of an ugly reminder that our time on Earth was over, something was to take our place. They might look back at these relics as we did dinosaurs. Few people were left, scattered far across the many lands. Soon any communication was no further than what was in direct view range. I couldn’t go back, not now. All I had to go off of was years old directions, it was any guess if my travels would lead me to safety or were snubbed out like the many thousands before them. Once the great cities fell, nobody inhabited them, it wielded to many dangers to them. So we all fled to the green sectors, areas of land much more rural. Many said that it should only serve as a brutal reminder from the horizon, and that it should be no closer than that. You could sit there and count as the skyline slowly thinned down, one crumbled building at a time. I was promised a family would take me in, but it was a 6 day hike. Entering the dead sector, I could half it. At this point of my travel I wasn’t even sure if there were any living people within a months walk around me...

Hunched over, my gaze froze burning holes through bitter words. One hand clenching the armrest whilst the other slowly crumpled up the small document. malicious and seething. Those were its purpose. Like a coiled spring I leaped out of my chair and punched the desk in front of me, dust falls around me as I shout profanities that no language could ever sympathize with. They were clever, clever enough to think they could just let me rot where I stood. So proud of their actions they thought they could just mock me where I couldn’t hit back. If they were to mockingly beckon me, then so hope me god I was going to do anything within my power to regret them ever crossing me. There I stood in an outpost fashioned to look as convincing as possible, I was sent here to recover key information left behind by this dead colony. It was a last ditch effort to gain any whips of hope in an ever ongoing war. It was a dangerous task and I very much knew the risks, we needed this more than anything so I knew that I would take as many risks to do my part. Of course this was never anything of substance, it was but all but a cruel way of knocking off key pawn in an inevitable defeat. It was obvious, deception and ploys were rumored back at high command but nobody could have predicted that it had injected itself so deep. Spies had clearly perpetrated the tightest of tanks and were pulling strings far greater than I could have ever imagined. I needed to get back to warn the high command, before they get into vital meetings and obtain crucial information that could end the war within days. I was left nothing, barely food and water for a couple days and was surrounded by the carcass Of a city. Perseverance for my people and a cold blooded anger for those who deceived me would push me more than anything before. I was left no choice as the very place I would call home would be no different to this dead landscape of concrete and steel.