Meaning in the Ashes

He sat hunched beside a flickering barrel fire, his shadow dancing wildly across the cracked tile walls of the old metro station. They called him Rook—not his real name, just what stuck. No one used their real names anymore. The past was dead, and with it, everything they used to be.

Rook was wiry and hollow-eyed, wrapped in a threadbare military coat two sizes too big and boots with one sole half-gone. A crude rifle rested beside him, its parts scavenged from three different models, barely functional but enough to make someone think twice. His hands—scarred and blackened from fire, wire, and dirt—hovered near the flame, soaking in the fleeting warmth.

But his mind wasn’t in The Below tonight.

His eyes were fixed on the flame, but what he saw was Los Angeles, before the fall—rooftop protests, police lines, smoke columns stretching into the orange sky. He remembered the first time they opened fire. Not rubber bullets. Real ones. Blood spilled on the pavement while politicians stood in front of cameras calling it “restraint.” He remembered friends beside him in the crowd, chanting. Then running. Then screaming.

He had buried most of them.

The descent had been swift. Too swift. One week they were marching, the next week the sky turned black, and the buildings started to crumble. He’d seen the mushroom cloud rise beyond the hills like some wrathful god. That was the moment the old world died. In its place, only rot remained.

Rook clenched his jaw and looked around the station. Sleeping forms wrapped in torn blankets, curled like question marks. A baby whimpered in the dark. Somewhere, someone was boiling rat meat in a pot made from a traffic cone. This wasn’t life. It was survival masquerading as it.

They’d all been fools, he thought. Believing that things couldn’t break. That the systems built by corrupt hands could somehow withstand the firestorm of their own making. The mayor had lied. The governor had failed. And the people—they had waited too long to act. By the time the resistance formed, there was nothing left to resist for.

Still, he fought. Not for the past—but for tomorrow.

Rook reached into his coat and pulled out a folded map. Tattered, water-stained, nearly unreadable. But he knew every line of it. The tunnels, the access hatches, the forgotten maintenance shafts that led deeper into the bones of the city. Whispers said there were others out there—other pockets of survivors. Maybe even whole communities hidden in the ruins of what used to be Pasadena, Bakersfield, or farther north. Maybe.

He wasn’t foolish enough to hope. But he was angry enough to act.

As the fire burned low and the silence deepened, Rook stood and slung the rifle over his shoulder. Someone muttered in their sleep. Someone else coughed and curled tighter.

He walked away from the fire, into the deeper dark.

Tomorrow, he'd head to the surface again—past the poisoned streets and broken towers—to scavenge, scout, search. For food. For signs of life. For meaning in the ashes.

The old world was dead. But Rook wasn’t.

Not yet.