The succulent breeze came from nowhere, from everywhere. It had no source, or at least none that I could discern. It teasingly caressed my clammy brow and then was gone. Tiny drops of sweat rose through my oily skin. They were small but not too small to feel. Soon another built and rolled past my eyebrow to drip upon my cheek below.

I waited patiently for the next cool waft of air. It never came. This vicious heat served to remind me of where I was and who I was. Most of all, it reminded me of why I was. My eyelids met in a tight embrace, shutting out the world. The memories still seeped through.

Memories of stories told. Fantasies of what could have been. Dreams of a paradise I would never know.

}||”:::[O]

Everything had died.

All the Earth was silent. Silent in desolation.

The entire world was devoid of any living beasts, predator or prey. No rodents stirred in the shadows or otherwise. The bird’s wistful melodies were no longer sung; even the insects had been annihilated. Though the oceans still ebbed and flowed, beaches across the globe amassed with the bleached bones of carcasses long since washed up from the dead waters.

All this was man’s doing, but man had no place here either. The mind numbing chaos of the cities was no more and the endless highways lay silent, free of their burden. Vehicles to skyscrapers scattered across the toxic landscape, like so much forgotten debris.

The war . . . the nuclear holocaust. It quickened man’s slow, methodic demise. No pain. No suffering. Except for those who survived. They lived at the poles, momentarily spared, as nothing existed worth obliterating. These survivors lasted only until the toxic wind arrived and ate them away. With their final dying scream the cycle was complete and death ruled.

Beyond this was the silence and it reigned with death in unholy wedlock, save for the wind . . . and the wind raged.

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These thoughts smashed through my skull and soon the barrage tore through to the present . . . not to what I could see, but to what I knew. Each day was but a carbon copy of the former.

The Sun drifted west, seemingly unaffected by the wind’s fury, yet this was the spawning of tornadoes the likes of which man had never seen. So the wind played in its new found freedom, wiping clean that which remained. It played as if the whole world were a broken toy . . . and a broken toy it was.

This New Earth is far from hospitable, yet this Dead Zone became home to thousands. Mankind and Moonbase made this possible. Their combined efforts resulted in Bunker 87C, an underground research facility. Thirty years had passed since that fateful day. It was only logical to wait out the storm; to hope the world had begun to repair the damage done to it. The only problem being the healing was far from over. Now, yet another storm is brewing and perhaps the worst was yet to come.

}||”:::[O]

My eyes shot open, wide eyed and stunned by things that shouldn’t be, but still are. The dull gray ceiling returned my frenzied gaze as my hand blindly searched the equally gray floor for the recorder I knew, almost by instinct, would be there. I’d always kept it there for my memoirs . . . my audible diary. I raised the tiny device to my parched lips and hit the red button. Crazed as I was, I spoke the next couple of paragraphs with a manic cynicism I’d grown accustomed to. I spoke from my heart with a brazen, yet silent, disregard for the powers that be, which I no longer respected.

“My name is Charles Ariess, though my name means nothing as I mean nothing. For I am a clone. Beyond this I am the lesser of two . . . the imperfect clone or rather a ‘half-breed’ as I am called by those who hate me and my kind. I exist as living hardware and free labor. My labor, among other things, being to procreate; to repopulate the Earth and die.”

“Alone I am nothing, yet I am not alone. There are others, and if we are strong and stand together, one day mankind will reap what they have sown. For now this is my world; this is my life and for 21 years there has been no escape.”

“This is my story . . .”