It Was that Year

It was that year when the clock shattered against the bedrock and our dillusions of humanity ended for good. All of us left after that disaster had been reduced to beasts with only a passing resemblance to what we were before.

Everyone still alive has a story to tell from those days. Me and my father hid in the city for as long as we could, going from one looted and abandoned house to the next. Sometimes they had corpses, putrid and busted to bits and pieces strewn across the carpets, once red I imagined but since turned dirty brown as the blood had dried long before we arrived.

"This is a world of scavengers," my father told me as he threw more blankets over the corpse of a young girl lying face-up in bed, still clenching a stuffed bear between her arms as if it could've protected her from the bullets of killers. We had to chase their old dogs out of the house since they'd begun chewing on what was left of their former masters. We had too much mercy left in us to kill them outright, and we could understand why they did it. What's dead meat to a starving dog anyway?

If history's anything to go by, nothing at all.