After the Fallout

This audiobook is narrated by a digital voice. The world had been quiet for three months now. Elena pressed her face against the cracked window of what used to be the Riverside Community Center, watching the morning mist roll across the abandoned parking lot. The silence wasn't complete—there were still birds, still the whisper of wind through broken glass and twisted metal—but the absence of human sounds had become a weight that pressed down on everything. No car engines. No voices calling across distances. No children laughing in schoolyards that now lay buried under ash and debris. She pulled back from the window and surveyed the makeshift shelter she'd called home for the past two weeks. The community center had been built to withstand hurricanes, which made it one of the few structures still standing after the electromagnetic pulse had knocked out the power grid and the subsequent social collapse had torn apart what remained of civilization. The thick concrete walls had protected her from the worst of the fallout, both radioactive and social. Elena had been a structural engineer before the world ended. Now she was simply a survivor, though she was beginning to think those two roles might not be so different after all. The sound of footsteps on gravel made her freeze. In three months, she'd learned that unexpected sounds usually meant danger. She crept back to the window and peered out carefully. A figure was walking across the parking lot—a young man, maybe in his twenties, carrying a worn backpack and moving with the cautious gait of someone who'd learned to test every step. He kept looking over his shoulder, and Elena could see the fear in his posture even from this distance. She watched him approach the building, her hand instinctively moving to the knife at her belt. Trust had become a luxury the world could no longer afford, but isolation was slowly driving her toward madness.