East Wing, Part V

I’m alive.

I’m alive and though my head is pounding and my throat feels like I swallowed a mouthful of embers it doesn’t matter because I’m alive, I’m alive. I try to roll over and wince. I’m alive and I’m covered in burns.

My window has cracked from the heat and through it all I can see is gray. Ash and smoke smearing together and blurring earth and sky into a dense monochromatic fog. I can just make out the charred stumps of the WASHINGTON DC PENITENTIARY sign.

The window. Window cracked. Thoughts take a long time to assemble in my fire-ravaged brain. Window open.

Escape.

I haul myself up to the blackened ledge and bite my blistered lip as the concrete scrapes bloody tracks down my burned legs. Sweep the glass from the sill. Watch it fall to the ground with a gentle puff of ash. Lean forward. Let myself drop.

Fuck. The ground is hard. Legs hurt. Everything hurts. Fuck. Fuck.

I lie there for a long time as the ash settles around me. When the sun appears from the haze, blood-red and dipping towards the horizon, I stagger to my feet and lurch up the rise beyond the remains of the PENITENTIARY sign. I pause every few steps to rest and swear. Cough. Spit black on the burned earth.

When I reach the top, I can see the remains of a city.

Buildings with windows blown out. Isolated fires still flickering orange in the gray. Blackened cars choking the streets.

And just north of the very center, the shallow crater of a bomb.

I turn away. I’ve seen enough.

***

We hold a memorial for the people of the world, us prisoners. We stand in a small circle, burned hand clasping burned hand, and sing for their deaths. Our cracked voices are muffled by the ash. There’s no one to hear us anyway.

Everyone else is gone.

They isolated the scum of the country but they could not remove the corruption lurking in the psyche of humanity; the potential for destruction inside every human being. They could not sterilize the human race. They could not save a species perfectly designed for suicide. They could not stop entropy, only slow its progress momentarily.

But in the end, entropy always wins.

I kick at the stump of the sign and it crumbles into ash that blows away in a gray wisp against the sinking sun.

We survived the end of the world because of the walls of our prison. Our incarceration has become our salvation. We’re criminals, they said. A threat to humanity.

Humanity has destroyed itself without our help. Now, we’re all that remains.