Wrote an intro for a male character in a setting that fits the one described above. It can work in the same or a different "universe."




"The truth isn't pretty.
I had a dream last night about the cat I used to own as a child. A silver Persian. In the dream, Robbie was there, as he often is. At first I was glad to see him, but then he got annoying. Just like in real life. Sometimes I'm ashamed when I wake up from a dream, in which I dreamt something I used to feel. As if I still feel something I shouldn't still feel. It's disloyal to be annoyed with Robbie, even in a dream, because he's probably dead.
But in the dream he was harassing the cat. Well, not harassing, but the cat thought so. Robbie kept picking the cat up and carrying him around. I kept rescuing the cat from him. This is all pretty true to life. I was the only one who that cat liked, because I was the only one who understood it.
I am sorry to say that I have mourned the loss of that cat. Even though everything that's happened is so much worse than losing a pet. He maybe got infected or more likely got eaten by a wild animal, or even a human, although there wasn't much of a difference between the two when things got bad, so I heard on the radio.
When I'm awake, logically, I know, it was just a cat.
I miss Robbie. I miss my parents. I don't know how to miss people who I know are dead. I especially don't know how to miss someone when I don't know if they're dead or not.
But when I dream, my dreams are selfish and petty, egocentric and childish. They get boiled down to the most basic emotional need I have. Which apparently is my need for my old cat.
I am ashamed to say that I cried for it this morning. Like when I woke up I was still emotionally 12 years old and just wanted Fluffy to snuggle with. Maybe I'm more ashamed of feeling young than I am about the wish, because even a hankering for Girl Scout cookies can make me legitimately teary eyed nowadays.
I hope whoever is reading this appreciates a sense of humor. It isn't easy to keep one.
So there you have it. That's the truth. I cried about a cat during the apocalypse."

Shit. His last pencil broke. He really did not want that to be the last thing he wrote about his life, the fate of the human race, or his cat, for that matter. Alfred chucked the broken bits of wood and lead across the bunker. They scattered against the side of the metal wall. He felt the world closing in myopically around him, a panic attack threatening to crush him. Alfred closed his eyes and pushed it off. It was just a pencil. He still had food. He still had water. He had plenty of supplies, should Robbie come back as he was supposed to. He would come home if he was alive. Where else would he go?

If he was alive, if he was alive, if he was al-- Alfred broke off those thoughts.

Because he had everything he could possibly need, besides other humans, or hope, or a pencil, he decided to go out for another pencil.

He left the bunker often. The only reason he stayed there was because it was his home now (he couldn't stomach the house), and it was on the edge of his family's property, and it was where Robbie would come back to, if he could.

Their little wilderness town was empty. It had never been very full to begin with, but the illness had well and truly cleared it out. Those that hadn't cleared out (where were they going?) had holed up in their houses with shotguns. That plan hadn't worked out very well, because they still got sick, or else they had raided the neighbors they'd known all their lives, and gotten shot. Or they survived and ended up getting bitten by some plague-carrying damn mosquito. Alfred didn't know, except that everyone he'd known his whole life had expired around him while he sat in a metal box like it was a freezer and he was a frozen dinner.

He didn't take much care as he walked along the dusty forest road toward the convenience store. He didn't even bring a weapon. People here had been so self-sufficient and well-stocked (read here, paranoid) that the convenience store had remained full. It was so out of the way, passing scavengers hadn't found it. Or if they had, they hadn't taken enough for it to make much of a dent.

Alfred walking along a forest road was a sight that looked like it could have taken place in a distant time in history. He wore his father's elbow-patched tweed coat, pale pink collared shirt, and plaid bowtie. His mother's floral scarf was folded up and put in the breast pocket of his coat like a pocket square. The cargo-style pockets on the sides of the coat made it look like a war relic, while the elbow patches were pure professor. His shoes were his father's, too: suede oxfords that had taken a beating, with red leather where the laces tied. These things had been retro when his father owned them.

Funnily, his brilliant parents hadn't thought to stock the bunker with clothes to accommodate his growing body. His father had been skinny, but taller than him, so these things all fit loosely. As Alfred's appetite had been in decline as of late, he could no longer cinch in father's slacks enough. He wore a pair of his younger brother's trousers, which fit him in the waist, but were too tight in the thighs and calves. They were made out of a stretchy denim-canvas though, seamed with patches that were oddly comfortable. He rolled the cuffs of the sand-colored pants, because they were already too short, and it was better to make them look short on purpose, he thought. (The reading material his mother had left were fashion magazines.)

On his left wrist he wore his mother's silver chain link bracelet, and the watch he'd given his dad on the last father's day his dad had been alive for. Alfred wondered if it had been re-gifting to take it back. He also wondered if he was starting to go crazy. Why did he still bother to get dressed up every day? Why did he bother to get dressed at all? There was no one around to see his naked body. Except himself, and he felt repulsed by his knobby, exposed bones and weak muscles. The bowties, though? Probably the beginning of the end for his sanity.

His hair was tousled and wavy, a little too long on top even though he used his mother's best sewing scissors to cut it, frequently. He also remained clean-shaven, because he couldn't stand the feel of hair on his face. Was being OCD about one's appearance a normal way to behave when you were possibly the last person left on earth? Alfred was pretty sure it wasn't.

He walked along the road, hands in his pockets, head bent down because there was nothing new to see, and he knew this route well. He had used it his whole life. As a child to wait for the bus, as a teen to run to the convenience store, as a young adult to get gas for his classic car, as an apocalypse survivor, to get meaningless spur-of-the moment objects like a pencil, or a slinky. It was the little things in life, right? Especially now. The little things were the only things that were left.


[I]"Through autumn leaves once..."[/I]

A line of poetry went through his head. He couldn't recall the rest of the poem, or what it had been about. Something lost. Something irretrievably lost. Not that it had anything to do with his situation or emotions. It was after all, autumn, and leaves were crunching underfoot. There was no bittersweet tang to the words, no ennui, Alfred lied to himself reassuringly. Through autumn leaves once...

Alfred wanted his brother. Did it make him a selfish bastard that he could do without everyone else? He could survive without the whole world, as long as Robbie was here beside him, catching falling leaves and scuffing through detritus like a damn faerie. Alfred didn't have any tears left, or he would have cried them. But he didn't pretend that his brother was beside him. He didn't have the strength for that.

He spent the majority of the walk with his hands in his pockets, watching his waterbird legs eating up pavement, enjoying the soothing reassurance of his bygone era footwear. When the road opened up beneath him toward the convenience store parking lot, he lifted his eyes. Soaring evergreen pines, deciduous trees, thick forest on every side. Kudzu creeping in malevolently, already having taken over the truck farthest back in the parking lot. Fine by him, as there was a corpse in that car. Alfred greeted this malevolence he detected from the kudzu like a trusted old friend. Death was a benevolent spirit.

He passed a couple of other cars, mercifully empty. There was gas still in the pumps, but what was the point? Where would he go? This was home. This was as close as he could get to his brother. If he had failed his one task in life, to keep his little brother safe, then he would wrap himself in the shadow of that failure and keep himself warm with his guilt. Tears, whenever they came, were a sweet taste on his lips.

He opened the cracked and fogged front door of the convenience store, peeling signs stuck to the glass that he had never bothered to read. Things about lottery tickets and ice sold by the bag, and which way the door opened, he thought. He couldn't make himself care enough to read the words. The bell overhead tinkled at his arrival. Of all the inane things.

Alfred felt, for a moment, a rush of familiarity. The shelves were still stocked, and the dim interior of the store gave off the impression that people stood in it. He half-expected to make uncomfortable eye contact with the worker behind the counter, who would hand him that ridiculously oversized wooden block attached to the bathroom key. He really wished he had asked the reason for that nonsense before all the people were dead and nobody worked here anymore.

As he stepped in deeper, he registered the foul smell of things rotting. The power had gone off in here awhile ago, none of the freezers worked. Ice cream had melted, and yes, shockingly, things packed with refined white sugar could go bad. Especially diary products. Alfred momentarily forgot why he was there as he considered checking to see if they had that cream soda that was his favorite. There was a certain horribly depressing feeling, however, to getting what you wanted, when you got it all by yourself.

He headed for the school supplies, and picked out a single package of number two pencils, with the righteous relief that comes from restraint and subsequent disappointment. He put it in his coat pocket; there was no paying for it, obviously.

[I]"You hold my hand through colors of orange and yellow swill."[/I]

He had remembered the next line. The mind was truly a wonderful thing, even when it was in the process of being lost.

[I]"If I'm worth it to you, you will."[/I]

What hidden treasures his brain had in store for him, even in what felt like the onset of amnesia. The outside of it might be rotting away like an onion, but it was peeling back to layers of subconscious memory he thought he'd lost forever.

To whom had his brother Robbie been writing these poems? Alfred might actually kill to get his hands on his brother's poetry book. The young boy had written about love, even though he had been too young for it, even though Alfred never saw him show interest in girls, despite the interest girls always seemed to show in him. (Girls didn't like Alfred much, to his eternal chagrin. They'd always loved his little brother, though. And what was not to love? Robbie was sad and sweet in that eternally perfect way, with pouty lips, dreamy sun-kissed curls, and a sweet way about him that marked him as utterly unconnected from the world.) Perhaps Robbie had just had an overactive imagination. Well, it was compelling stuff. It was keeping Alfred entertained even as he went mad from boredom. God bless poetry, even the emo juvenile kind, Alfred thought as he turned to go.