I surveyed the crumpled city of Johannesburg from a deserted rooftop in Linden. Before the outbreak, I had frequented this street often, wiling away my afternoons at this or that coffee shop and talking about our existential crises with an assortment of intellectual friends. We ignored the poor for the most part, being more concerned with matters of self-actualisation and too busy or repulsed to reach out to those below us. We had brooded over change and lauded our contemporary revolutionaries, looked longingly after our own Arab Spring, but after the revolution we’d been bled dry of our notions of romance.

The city that lay stretched out before me was a wasteland. Almost everyone I had ever known was dead or worse. That my little sister and I had survived the fallout was an accident of birth. We were Dreamers, like the apocalyptic forerunners in Europe had been. When the wave of dreams that had been bolted down rose up to envelop the world, it had driven many people insane. Having been deprived of dreams for so long, the fragile minds of people everywhere buckled under the deluge. In a matter of days, the tenuous glue which had held the fabric of society together had been ripped apart.

I remembered a panicked news anchor explaining the contents of a leaked document and people raiding drugstores—trying to get their hands on as many antipsychotic drugs as they could before the wave hit. At first, we all imagined that the threat was due to a biological weapon that messed with one’s brain chemistry. It soon became evident that something else was at work, something the bounds of human learning were not able to explain. I wondered at the fact that our species placed so much faith in our ability to observe phenomena and deduce causality. We’d created such a dubious machine. It was laughable.

After a long while, I tore my eyes away from the skyline. I often came up here to think. Some friends had shared a flat in this apartment block when I was in school. We’d bunked many a school day to drink cheap wine and share in contraband dream-simulator drugs. We’d talked about dreams and we’d scoffed at the pill-popping masses. We’d raged at the system and hearkened after freer, more natural times. We’d been fools.

The friend that had owned the flat in this building had peeled the skin off both of his arms when the dreams broke the surface. Soon after that he’d jumped off the very roof I was standing on now. Maybe he had even jumped from this spot… Though the city had always felt like it was a big, dead animal to me—a semi-abandoned place populated with bogey men—it was really empty now. Johannesburg’s citizens had all met gruesome ends. The lucky ones had died during the wave. What had come after that had been far, far worse. The memory of the endless screaming still haunted me, but it had been better than the vast silence that followed it. The city was now made up of hollow concrete shells, haunted by ghosts.

A sharp wind whipped my coat about me and my hair lashed at my face. The city at sunset glowed like the dying embers of a fire. I settled in and made sure my aim was dead centre. I eased my finger onto the trigger and waited, continuing my musing.

The city burners had accomplished the foolish wishes my friends and I had shared. They had brought us back to a simpler life in which survival is the only concern and all things come after it. This is the way our species lived hundreds of thousands of years ago and this is the way it is again.

Is it better? I don’t know. In the way that it is meaner, maybe it is fairer. We don’t build walls to keep the starving out now, and we don’t live in fear of criminals coming into our yards. We live in fear of the monsters that come with the dark, and we hope our walls will keep them out. After this, our dearest wish is to be blessed with a swift death.

I’ve seen the world change, and I have learned to fear what I am.

The wildebeest looked up from its grazing and I could sense that it was about to bolt. I aimed, fired and took the beast out with one shot. I am loath to kill free creatures, but the city is a hunting ground as wild as any wilderness and I kill for our survival. If I’d spared it, another would have fed his family or his small community for a few nights. I hadn’t seen anyone else in a very, very long time but I had to keep believing others were still out there.

If we salted and dried the meat, Lara and I could subsist for weeks off this kill. I imagined the wildebeest wandering through the empty city and back into the wilderness on the other side. I shivered.

The dogs began quivering excitedly as I fastened their harnesses to the makeshift cart I’d made. I surveyed the street and detected no signs of movement, so I gave the command and the dogs followed me down the stairs and onto the street. The cart clanged noisily as we descended. Once outside, I walked over to where the dead wildebeest lay and began hacking it into smaller pieces that could be easily transported. I stopped every now and again and looked around me, making sure that there was nobody else about. It was probably unnecessary. I’d grown very lax. Our less-than-stealthy trip down the stairs was testimony to that. But another straggler would kill me for less than this treasure. The thought of Lara alone in the world prompted me to unholster my nine millimetre and cock it. I put it down on the ground nearby. A gut feeling made me untie the dogs from the cart too. Once free, they started snuffling about nearby.

***

Tell us: Do you think you could live in a world like this?