The City Unravels

he air above was alive with a low, droning hum—a sound that had become as familiar to survivors as the ragged rasp of their own breathing. Drones wheeled lazily overhead like mechanical carrion birds, their crimson scanning lights sweeping the streets below in steady arcs.

Where they found movement, the beams narrowed—sharpened—focusing like the unblinking eye of a predator about to strike. Somewhere in the distance, a sharp pop echoed as another desperate soul learned too late that staying above ground after curfew was suicide.

Beneath the steel skies and sulfur-stained air, the streets crawled with human shadows. Families bundled their meager belongings into packs and battered carts, dragging them through alleys thick with smoke. They avoided the main roads where enforcers patrolled with armored vehicles and spotlights.

Some carried children too weak to walk. Others clutched heirlooms, photographs, scraps of a life lost to fire and betrayal.

Their faces were hollow—gaunt from hunger, eyes darting constantly toward the heavens where the drones circled.

There was no clear destination. Just away. Away from the city’s heart where skyscrapers still burned like funeral pyres, where shattered windows reflected the orange glow of a world consuming itself.

Gunfire rattled sporadically in the distance—sometimes sharp and close, sometimes muffled by blocks of broken concrete. Rebel cells still fought back, ambushing supply convoys and sabotaging power grids. Their defiance had slowed the regime, but at a cost. Retaliation came swiftly—entire districts reduced to rubble by aerial bombardments, drone strikes leaving nothing but charred streets and silence.

Every corner of the city had become a battlefield.

And yet in all this chaos, small acts of courage bloomed. A woman in rags pulling a stranger’s child to safety. A group of young men forming a human chain to pass water to trapped survivors. These fleeting moments of humanity burned as brightly as the fires tearing through the skyline.

Above it all, the drones kept watching.

They were the perfect tools for a government that no longer needed to inspire trust—only fear.
They buzzed low over crowded streets, their red lights reflecting in puddles tainted with ash. Loudspeakers mounted beneath them droned the same cold commands over and over:

“CITIZENS: RETURN TO DESIGNATED SAFE ZONES. NONCOMPLIANCE WILL BE MET WITH FORCE.”

“LOOTING AND MIGRATION ARE PROHIBITED UNDER ARTICLE 47-B.”

“ORDER IS RESTORATION. RESTORATION IS UNITY.”

But no one believed them anymore.

As dusk settled into an eternal twilight of smoke and flame, small bands of refugees slipped quietly through sewer grates and hidden alleys, hoping to escape the city before the drones caught their heat signatures.

They moved like ghosts through a graveyard, their only prayer to find something—anything—beyond the crumbling perimeter.

Because they all knew:
This place was no longer a city.
It was a dying organism, and anyone left inside when it collapsed would be swallowed whole.