Written during the pandemic lockdowns, inspired by the unusual quiet I had observed where I was living at the time.
I've been doing just fine since the end of the modern age. I stayed right in the condos where I already lived. My neighborhood in my Massachusetts town is just the right elevation. When the seas stopped rising, most of my town was above water. The rest was now part of the Atlantic. I wish I could say it was teeming with beautiful fish, but it wasn't. Most of the fish were gone. Local fish from the freshwater reservoir died off when the saltwater came rushing into their homes. There weren't many fish left in the sea by the time the sea got here either. The summers are extremely hot, with violent storms, and the winters turn everything into an icy hellscape. It's been so many summers and winters since that time.
It had happened slow, like the boiling of the frog. The weather and the politics kept getting more extreme. The collapse of the government was slow and painful. It wasn't a glorious revolution, a dramatic death with roses, but a slow death as if by dementia and seziures. There were no heroes, no patriots. Nobody sang or waved a flag. Instead, the truth fell apart until nothing anybody said on TV made any sense anymore. Entertainment became less and less creative until it seemed like everything was made of the same propoganda slathered in the same saccharine sludge, but people stayed plugged in 'til the end anyways. Infrastructure collapse was gradual, water became unusably toxic or just stopped flowing. Power and internet became unreliable and then winked out altogether. That's when most people stopped showing up to work. Parts for generators and cars ran out quickly. No new gasoline was coming in on tanker trucks, and what was stored around went bad within a few years. With no infrastructure left, and no way to get supplies, disease and famine soon spread. People were desperate, and often resorted to violence to secure their livelihoods.
I stayed up in the condos. The buildings all looked the same, symmetrical and plain, and I often called the neighborhood "the labyrinth" back in the old days. It was easy for raiders to miss my place, hidden out of sight, in the back of the gaggle of buildings. Each building had four decks, one for each unit. I'd turned two into solar arrays and one into a rain collector. I busted down a couple of the walls inside to combine the four apartments, too. I kept enough food-bearing plants around in the sunny upper levels, and some hens in the garages for eggs. I didn't eat any meat. There was hardly any meat to eat. The squirrels, rabbits, and deer had been hunted to extinction long ago. My hens were probably the last "meat" around.
I hadn't seen another person in awhile but that was alright with me. There was still plenty to do. That's why I ran the solar arrays. Having power enabled me to scan the airwaves with my HAM radio equipment, monitor my territory with cameras and sensors, use lights for reading (I made a point of "borrowing" from, and "returning" books to, what remained of the local library), cook with electric implements, charge electric tools, listen to music, watch old TV and movies, and best of all, continue to use my computers. I surfed and archived what remained of the web, and interacted with other netizens who still had a PC and a connection. There were very few left. My connection was satellite-based, and would last for at least another ten years before the satellites de-orbited on their own. I was careful not to reveal my location. I'd had enough internet girlfriends in the old days to know what sharing too much information would get you if you got into a spat.
So where was everyone else? My town was rural about 30 years before the collapse of all, but had become metropolitan and rich in that time. There was a great disparity of the sizes of homes, and in general wealth, in the small town of 15,000 or so. Rich people lived in great big "McMansions" or in luxury apartments. Those people didn't spend any time or money in town, they worked and played in Boston or Cambridge. A few lived in the condos where I lived, but rarely stuck around once they had kids or made a bit more money. There weren't a lot of guns in town, even among the rich. That didn't stop it from becoming a bloodbath once the law didn't matter anymore. Most of those houses were gone now, torn down in anger at the rich for what late-stage capitalism had done. The condos in the back of my complex were mostly untouched, though. I had been lucky. Most people I had known before weren't lucky. When the anarchy broke out, many were lost to the widespread mindless violence. Many more were lost after to preventable disease and curable infection, or starvation, just because we lacked the resources. All my good friends were either lost then, or long gone in some far away place. I was not innocent, I had stolen resources, I had taken lives to defend what I claimed, and I had the unique macabre pleasure of braining a few of my childhood bullies.
So, I was alone, with my movies and books, hens and plants. Occasionally a sensor would beep and I'd go check the monitors, maybe even send out a camera drone. Some lone wanderer with a gun, following the smell of my homecooked food or perhaps the heat signature of my homestead. I'd pick him off with a sniper rifle stolen from the corpse of one of the previous lone wanderers. I never let them get close. The only friendlies in town were gone long ago. Nobody coming to my house could have been good news. I'd keep an eye on the body awhile to make sure they don't crawl off and that nobody comes looking for them. If anyone else came, they too would meet a supersonic slug. If they started to crawl off, I'd sneak out and finish them at close range with something else. Once that was done, I would take anything they had worth keeping, and drag the combatant-turned-mannequin into one of the other condos, out of sight. Barbaric but entirely necessary. Barbaric still, sometimes I would return to collect the bugs feasting on the corpse, to feed my hens.
There was no specific reason that I made it this far. I wasn't particularly smart, strong, skilled, hardy, or brave. I was pretty good with computers, but that was about it. I would even go as far as to say I was a bit physically challenged due to my size. I was just a scrawny, asthmatic tech support guy before all this went down. I just got lucky when all this began, multiple times. I had already boarded up my windows and hoarded a decent amount of supplies, and I managed to camp out until the crescendo of the violence had passed. One guy broke into my house and I caught him by surprise. Took his gun, that's how I got the first gun. Started expanding and fortifying after the visitors started becoming less frequent. Since then it's just been like a long, drawn-out game of Fortnite or PUBG, and I just camp in my little area, pick off and loot whoever comes by. It's not a proud life, but it's mine, and I like it more than my old one. It's a bit like everyone left is LARPing I Am Legend on their own little turf. I very seldom leave my little area, mostly because I have all the food, water, and power I need right here. I have a pretty good stash of medicine too. I even grow my own weed in the greenhouse next to the tomatoes. I do pretty well for myself here in the apocalypse. The only things I really ever worry about are raiders and bad weather. And I'm on high enough ground to deal with both.
Like I said though, I rarely saw people anymore. I purposely didn't count how many I had ended - and I avoided using words like "kill" or "murder" in my mind because it was painful. No matter how hard I tried to justify it to myself, to tell myself that I was just acting in self-defense, in self-preservation, it didn't work. I knew very well that there was no greed anymore, people did not have enough to be greedy. Everyone was taking theirs from someone else, it was necessary for survival. I took from passers-by their weapons and supplies. I liked to think that I was better because I didn't go and find people to raid, but I knew that it was because I was lucky. If I had not done as well at the beginning, I would have either died or become a raider too. I suppose, out of everyone that was left, for once, I was one of the lucky ones.