The walk back to the train station took twice as long as the walk in. The trail had vanished. He navigated by the sun, by memory, by pure stubborn luck. When he finally reached the station, the building was gone. Not damaged gone. A crater smoldered where it had been.
The tracks were twisted metal ribbons.
Leo stood at the edge of the crater and felt something cold move through him. Not fear. Not yet. Something worse: the beginning of understanding.
He started walking. Toward the nearest town. Toward anything.
The town was a graveyard.
Buildings flattened. Cars crushed like tin cans. Bodies he stopped looking after the first few. They were everywhere, frozen in attitudes of surprise, of running, of trying to protect children who would never grow up. The meteorites had struck with surgical cruelty, targeting population centers. Or maybe it had been random. Maybe that was worse.
He found a bicycle leaning against a collapsed wall. The owner was gone. He took it. He rode south, toward the city, toward what had once been his home.
The journey took two days. He slept in ruins. He drank from streams. He ate from overturned vending machines and abandoned convenience stores, the food still fresh, the owners nowhere to be seen. He saw no one. He heard nothing except the wind and his own ragged breathing.
When he reached the city, he stopped.
London or what had been London was a skeleton. The skyline he'd known was gone. The Shard lay broken like a fallen giant. The Thames had flooded its banks, black and sluggish. Fires still burned in the distance, sending up columns of smoke that merged with the clouds. The streets were carpeted with debris and worse.
He cycled through the silence. Past empty buses. Past cars with their doors open. Past a playground where a swing still moved in the breeze, its occupant missing.
He found his neighborhood. His building.
The laundromat was a pile of bricks. The stairs to his room no longer existed. His room his cage, his prison, his home for a decade was gone. The computer that had consumed his life was buried somewhere under tons of rubble.
He stood in the street and laughed. It was an ugly sound, half-sob, half-cackle. He had spent ten years trying to escape that room, and now it was gone. He had spent ten years trying to make money online, and now money meant nothing. He had spent ten years afraid of his father's judgment, and his father was
He stopped. He didn't finish the thought.
He felt sad. Of course he felt sad. Everything he had ever known was destroyed. Everyone he had ever known was dead. The world was over, and he was a ghost walking through its corpse.
But beneath the sadness, something else moved. Something strange. Something he couldn't name.
He felt free.
The thought was terrible. He pushed it away. But it came back, again and again, as he cycled through the ruins. The pressure was gone. The expectations were gone. The endless, grinding, soul-killing need to succeed to prove himself, to make money, to be someone had vanished overnight. There was no one left to impress. No one left to fail.
He felt happy. Or something like happiness. A lightness in his chest that was almost painful.
He was alive. Against all odds, he was alive.