Beneath Los Angeles

Beneath the ruins of Los Angeles, where glass towers once caught the morning light and freeway systems pulsed like arteries through the city, something still moved. Something still breathed.

The survivors.

They lived deep underground now—beneath the radiation, beneath the ash, beneath the memory of what once was. The subway tunnels and old sewer systems had become shelter. Cracked concrete bunkers, half-collapsed parking garages, abandoned metro stations—these were the cathedrals of the new dark ages.

Fires burned low in rusted barrels, the flames sputtering from scraps of plastic and chemically-soaked wood. The air was thick with smoke and memory. People huddled in threadbare blankets, eyes sunken, skin pallid and bruised by the cold. Silence reigned, broken only by coughing, the hiss of steam, or the soft sob of a child too young to remember the world before.

They called the place "The Below." No one remembered who first said it, but it stuck—just like everything else they couldn’t shake. They bartered in bottle caps, old batteries, anything with a spark of value. Food was scarce. Water was a miracle. Most days were spent scavenging—climbing through collapsed buildings, dodging feral dogs and desperate men who’d long since gone mad from the hunger or the fallout. The surface belonged to ghosts and death. The Below was all they had left.

Some still carried old radios, hoping to catch signals from the outside world. Static was all they ever heard. No rescue was coming. California was gone.

The new generation didn’t speak of cities, or smartphones, or stars. They were stories now, like dragons and flying ships. Myths from the Time Before. Some drew pictures on the walls with charred sticks—half-remembered shapes of trees, birds, skyscrapers. A child once asked what the ocean was. No one had the heart to answer.

Leaders emerged, not by election but by necessity. The strong, the clever, the ruthless. Alliances were fragile. Trust was rarer than canned food. And yet, there was something unkillable in the human spirit. They sang sometimes, in hushed tones, around the fires. Old songs. Ancient ones. Hope passed down in melody.

But even hope, here, was rationed.

These were the new dark ages. Civilization had imploded under the weight of its own arrogance. Its monuments were now rubble, its ideals buried under fallout and fear. And yet—somewhere in the dark, a spark remained.

For now, it was just about surviving the next hour. The next day. The next winter.

But some—just a few—still dreamed.

And dreaming, in a world like this, was the most dangerous act of all.