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The Only One Left Standing
Post-apocalyptic Fiction
The dead chickens in the coop should have been a sign. Gene could find no hole or crevice for a fox to have burrowed its way in, and no blood spotted the floor or the nests. It was as if someone had waved a hand over the animals and put them all to sleep.
Greta, Gene’s conspiracy-obsessed daughter, said it was an omen as she stood apart from the scene and kept locked into her Link to the grid.
What did Gene care for what flyaway words were being spread across Links to Feeds and to the greater Conscious? That was how Tessa, Gene’s ex-wife and Greta’s revered mother, had left to join a commune that was preparing for the End Times. They had the guns, supply stock, and the area of a small town set aside with underground bunkers.
Gene was just a simple farmer who liked his privacy. The wars, the bombings, the slowly unraveling threads of humanity — he existed in a world away from all that, no matter how Greta tried to reason with him that this was humanity’s last stand, surely, and they had to prepare for the Last Days.
Wealthy men touted their spaceships that would take flight in fleets for the stars. Politicians would argue their points even as their electorates became increasingly disillusioned and anti-government. Nobody even watched television anymore; all…
