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Storms rumbled overhead, sending great gusts of wind through the streets of the city. Leaves danced about like fireflies in the sunshine, swirling in through the windows and bursting across the parlour. The air was heavy with the smell of smoke. He figured the fires must have spread to the fifth ward, which was just a few blocks away. He hoped that someone had put out the fire before it really got going.
The door from the door slid open. A woman in a dark cloak entered, and stared at him, almost as if she were looking at a ghost.
'Who are you? How did you get in here?'
The man shrugged. 'What I'm doing here is a mystery to me too. But you know what I do remember? I remember a controlled, organized city, where there were rules, and people didn't fight in the streets.'
'What are you talking about?' said the woman.
'I'm talking about the way things used to be, before this chaos erupted. Do you ever stop and wonder how we got here?'
'You're insane...this has to be a dream, a bumbling kind of dream, where nothing makes sense.'
'Maybe it is. Maybe it isn't. But you know what? You never seem to be scared of that possibility, the possibility that I'm not some delusion that one of your neighbors dreamed about. You just let this town devolve into chaos, creating a place where people are afraid to come out of their houses. You know what this means?
'What could possibly come out of this?'
'A new world order, some people like it, and individuals like me do not...sooner than later, the new world order - or something like it - will come.'
'You are crazy.'
'Yeah? And you are crazy. Nobody even puts their remains out to be picked up. You think that person is dead, and that it comes out of this moment and keeps going forever? No, silly. You don't always want to come back. You never rejoin the world that you started in.'
'You don't know what you're talking about.'
'That doesn't stop me from saying it. You don't know what a walker is. I may be dead, but I can still look down and see what's going on. Not too far from here, is a park. If you go look right over here, you can see a whole new city growing from it, all out of the skin of the trees.'
'It's a mirage. You're just trying to unnerve me. You think I believe your odd fantasy?'
'You don't. But if you worry about it, it could actually happen. You could already be a resident in that city. The place isn't what you think it is. Do you know what the city is?'
'You are crazy....'
'I am. But do you know what the city is? I will tell you, or at least as much as I know. Once in a long while, we get a new human to come in here, and you know what? There are these buildings that go up, and they have glass pyramids built in them at different places. You can go straight into the pyramids, and you're a part of the city. But you never are forced to leave. You can stay as long as you want, and the people who once took place in that glass all the time, they don't want to leave. Then they find somebody like you to come in. We're all willing to give up our freedom, just to pretend that it can never end, and we never had to face reality.'
'You got all that from me?'
'I didn't have to get your name, or look at your face, and remember what you look like. They want to believe it's real. But it's not. It isn't real. You couldn't tell the first thing about something that never happened. It's ridiculous to believe it's real. But that doesn't mean it's not out there, in your empty house, with all the people who never came back. If you leave, or you die, then you never will come back, never will come back to this moment. You are never going to wake up from a mistake.'
Maybe that's what happens. Maybe that's what you call real. Maybe that's what happens at the end of the day, when you're alone at the end of the day. You go through the motions, and you do the things that are expected of you. There's nothing to hold you here, in the world you know. You never get to look back, and never get to look forward, to see how it used to be. But sometimes, if you look at the world around you, it doesn't seem so false. It looks like a place that has been made for you. There are some things here that you know, that you know. There are things about you, about you and I, that we share. You're always haunted by the grief of somebody who died, and then you turn around and you look at your empty house, and you have to face the fact that this house and this world you knew is gone. We all have that fear in us, somewhere. Some of us just prefer to pretend we don't ever have to face it, that it never will happen to us. But damn it, life doesn't work that way. Life doesn't work in fantasy, life doesn't work if the only thing we have to go on is the story that we tell about the future. Sooner or later, they're going to figure out that the little town from their memories is just stories, and that they're just stories, and they'll put out the paper to be picked up. That's how it's always been. But the truth is...it's never going to go away.
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