Last week at this time, he'd been playing golf with Fred and Rodger. He huddles into his thin jacket and sniffs, feeling the beginning of a serious cold coming on. Fred and Rodger are dead now, and he wonders dismally who's better-off.
The view outside his private little overhang rivals his mood with a desolate scene of utter destruction. The world has become a vast grey wasteland of radioactive ash. He is one of the survivors, but he is waiting to die. He knows this.
Time has become his enemy.
Just last week he'd been looking forward to a promotion and some extra paid vacation. Now, here he sits, half hallucinating, hungry and sick, waiting for The End.
Occasionally, a straggler passes his hiding place, a devastated-looking refugee looking for shelter. He watches silently, remembering last week, and all of it's promises, cursing God when he should be cursing his fellow man. He no longer feels anything for the stragglers but contempt. Where do they think they're going, anyway? There is nowhere to run. Time will catch up to all of them, as it will him. The radiation will devour them as it devoured their world.
He realizes the futility of knowledge, of striving to reach for the sky, when the Earth was perfectly good enough. Now it's nothing but rubble and fallout.
Nuclear winter is coming, and suddenly Dave finds himself wishing for one last, juicy orange.
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