Elias Carter woke up to the sound of silence.
Not the peaceful kind. Not the absence of noise, but something heavier—denser. The kind of silence that pressed against his eardrums like a thick fog, suffocating and unnatural.
His brain booted up sluggishly, like an ancient operating system struggling to load. The first thing it registered was the cracked concrete ceiling above him, webbed with fractures like an old scar. The second was pain.
A deep, sharp ache bloomed in his ribs as he tried to move.
"Oh, great," he groaned, clutching his side. "Either I survived the apocalypse, or I got blackout drunk and fell down a flight of stairs. Jury's still out."
A violent cough racked his body, bringing with it the taste of metal and dust. His lungs burned, raw as if they'd been scraped clean with sandpaper. For a long moment, he just lay there, staring at the flickering glow of the emergency lights lining the walls.
This was a research facility. Underground. Sealed. Secure.
Correction: It had been secure.
Now, the place looked like a corpse—lifeless and abandoned.
Elias forced himself upright with a grunt, every muscle protesting like a disgruntled union worker. His jumpsuit, once crisp white, was stained with sweat, grime, and more than a little of his own blood. Around him, shattered screens blinked weakly, exposed wires hung from the ceiling like dead vines, and a chair lay overturned in the corner as if it had given up on life long before he had.
Not exactly the warm welcome he was hoping for.
He reached for his smartwatch—one of those high-end pre-war models with biometric scanners and emergency beacons. The cracked screen flickered to life. It took all of two seconds for it to deliver the worst news of his life:
Radiation Levels: High
Oxygen Filtration: 32% Functional
Life Expectancy Estimate: HAHA, YOU WISH.
Elias thunked his head back against the wall. "Okay. First order of business: don't die. Second order of business: figure out what the hell happened. Third order of business: optional crying session."
Priorities set, he groaned as he pushed himself to his feet, ignoring the fresh wave of dizziness. He needed answers. The last thing he remembered was working on Athena—the AI system designed to, ironically, prevent disasters like this.
He had been one of the programmers fine-tuning its decision-making protocols. Smart. Efficient. Incapable of making the same dumb mistakes humans did.
Yeah. That had worked out great.
His first few steps were clumsy, his legs still half-asleep. He reached out to steady himself against a metal cabinet—and yanked the door clean off its rusted hinges.
He blinked down at it.
"Huh. Either I got super strength overnight, or everything's falling apart faster than my last relationship."
A nervous laugh bubbled up in his chest. He swallowed it down. Now was not the time to go insane. Too many things to do first. Like, for example, figuring out if he was the last human left on Earth.
With a deep breath, Elias limped toward the corridor, stepping over debris. The hallway stretched ahead like the throat of some great decaying beast, its walls marred by scorch marks and peeling paint. Every so often, the flickering emergency lights cast twisting shadows, making the place feel less like a research facility and more like a haunted house.
"If some mutated horror jumps out at me," he muttered, "I'm clocking out early."
His voice echoed down the corridor. For a split second, he almost expected someone to respond.
No one did.
No one would.
Because, as far as Elias Carter knew, he was the last man on Earth.