They were fools. All those movies of easy, guilt-free gore… They had dove in the slaughter with gleeful abandon, reveling in the realization of the dream built by Hollywood.

By then it was too late. The flies lay eggs in the aimless rotten living dead. The mosquitos who struggled to draw the coagulation from beneath cold, rubbery flesh went in search for richer sources. The carrion creatures fell upon the decapitated bodies that littered the ruined cities. The diseased blood seeped into the earth to be drawn up by the flora. The rainwater inexorably swept the corruption towards the gulf.

For the last surviving bastions of humanity, death was a rude trick all around them. The water was undrinkable. The food they hunted turned on them. What little, strange smelling game they caught infected, as did the innocent looking berries and wild vegetables. The pests, mosquitos at dusk and the flies at all hours, left behind a sad, slow wasting away.

The fantasy fell apart like decaying flesh sloughing from bone. There was nothing left to do on a dying world but to walk the roads in the throes of terminal starvation.

Then they were none.

Around the star where a blue green jewel once orbited flew a malignant tumor, a grey graveyard filled with bleached bones.

At eight years old, he had ordered a Hollywood stage make-up kit. By the time he was fifteen he had a small empire.

He would pick pockets, take only the driver’s license, and return the wallets for the reward (sometimes cash, often more substantial than the amount stolen, and always, the satisfaction of a good deed done). An hour or two of his art, he would leave his room using a face his father would not have recognized, to purchase a massive amount of alcohol. He sold it to the party circles of his school and the students of a local college at a mark up of twenty percent. They didn’t mind; better someone else went through the hassle.

Such was his skill, that he was arrested one night for drunk driving, and walked home the next morning. He had been wearing the face of a grizzled old man, looking very much like a Santa Claus gone to seed. They held him in lock down until the morning. He stepped out into the bright sunlight at the precinct, feeling slightly sorry for the old gentleman whose identity he’d stolen; he would be receiving a court summons he didn’t deserve.

At fifteen he had been talented, but at twenty-two he was a soul chameleon. He was capable of mimicking a person’s body language after a short time within proximity, essentially also adopting the person’s personality.

Having long abandoned his original enterprise because it bored him, he courted the government. Its espionage department found him to their taste and put his skills to good use. He also moonlighted as a significant member of Team E.V.I.L. during his course in government intelligence, often wreaking havoc on his own projects. Other organizations, criminal and legit, also paid for his services.

Today, he has dissolved into the swarm of identities that make up our world, effortlessly stepping in and out of roles. His employers have lost track of him, but his projects somehow are completed. There is some speculation that he is also one of the head honchos running the show.

Once in a while a man will pause in the street, or at the office, in obvious confusion, his own identity thrown into doubt… then he will smile, and go on as sure as the sun shines.

She is a frail woman with a bird’s nest tufts of hair and a pair of glasses, beige and wide and horn-rimmed. She had fallen out of the seventies with a bad coke habit, despite starting the era with flower child sentiments. Today she drives a pale ivory Volkswagen Bug with a cheap, gaudy cloth lei slung around the rearview mirror. Her line of sight barely reaches over the steering wheel. She stops longer that usual at stop signs to smile–her pinched features abruptly sunny, the smile almost too wide–at babies and small children at play.

His favorite trick was: at a meeting, he would lean forward to make a point and slosh across the table, abruptly liquid, swirling and tumbling little men who would scattter and crawl along the ties of horrified businessmen and clamber up the power suits of shrieking women. Children, more often than not, found this delightful and played with his representations, letting them run circles on their palms or climb haltingly upon their fingers. Eventually he would come together, slowly coalescing into a doll-sized figure, growing larger as soon as his errant selves gathered.

On the night ocean it looked like one of these beasts in the deep dark that make their own light. A net of red, blue, and green, it rolled with the waves. Pontoon to barrels to patched lifeboats to packets of foam, an makeshift island constructed with the detritus of cities. Leathery soles pounded on planks of fuselages and billboards. Music pulsed, threading past shanties of corrugated plastic and pieces of garbage. Men and women, heavy with fermented grape, swayed under the vegetable garden trellis strung with fairy lights, their sun darkened fingertips brushing plump tomatoes and cucumbers. By the watermelon and grape vine wall played the band, an old rasta on guitar and vocals, a Slick Sid beatnik hooting the sax, Kid Awesome banging on the trash can drums, and Lady Shred riding bass. Behind the watermelon and grape vine wall volunteers pedaled furiously bicycles strung up to a generator, the island light waxing and waning with their effort. Children ran through the sweetsmelling ganja garden to fish alley and threw thin lines baited with fat buzzing insects into the gentle waves to occasionally pull in a silvery scalehound with squeals of delight. The moon painted its single sight on the starfish shape of humanity’s perseverance and watched families sling sleep sighing children into fish net hammocks and sink into a dream of wind before the bicycles whir into silence and the lights fade out in the sea salt air.

From the bones of the city they fled in an ancient gasoline vehicle. Its decals had rusted out and the engine howled something fearsome. Putrid smoke lingered in their wake.

Nimble fingered as ever, Gyre had lifted it from the man who held conversations with himself in the garden, Gimble scrambling into the passenger door as they rolled. The topic must have been arresting, the company delightful because the man continued gesturing and speaking even as the air filled with gunshot mingled backfires.

Gimble was the better driver. As soon as Gyre got it rattling across the shattered tarmac, Gimble slipped over his brother’s thin legs and teased it towards a speed long forgotten by its moaning transmission. They were fleeing the ancient but formidable constabulary. Lovingly maintained pistols filled their rheumatoid hands. A few used extreme terrain Segways to traverse the litter choked rubble that passed for roads in their city. The way they were pulling at the triggers suggested either senility or plentiful ammo. Gimble, whooping, figured it was both.

Gyre had pissed off the city Seward by breaking his old lady’s favorite vase. Gimble excaberated the situation by taking the virginity of the man’s only daughter. “It’s like eating a ripe fruit halfway to rot,” Gimble said. “For the love of Jah, she was 45!” Gyre shook his head and said, “Don’t you mean vintage wine? The older it is, the more pleasurable the moment? Have some class, brah!”

The car went off a small rise of ruptured concrete and its tyres tasted air. The landing rattled their teeth and bullet holes ventilated the rear window, too close for comfort. Gimble swerved and floored it. He said moodily, “It was nice. You know I was never good at analogies.”

X: I see you finally washed that goatee off
Y: What? Haha, no. I shaved it off like normal people do, you know X: Oh my God. I’m really sorry
Y: What?
X: I-I was just under the impression that-
Y: What!?
X: -that your goatee was just pubic hair glued on, and-
Y: What the fuck? Normal people don’t-
X: -everyone I spoke with thought the same thing-
Y: You talked to people about this!?
X: -but nobody had guts to bring it up to you, you being-
Y: This is bullshit!
X: -the assistant manager

She lit a cigarette. Mmm, now I know how Hiroshima felt, she said through a mouthful of smoke. She smiled at him.

Don’t you think that’s in bad taste? he rubbed his eyes. I’m Japanese, and grandmother…she was vaporized! You knew this!

You’re just being a pouty puppy, dearie, she said, dismissing his indignation with a flutter of her hand.

Fuck! He sprang from bed and pulled his pants on. The door slammed. She shrugged and blew a smoke ring.